Kitabı oku: «Agatha Christie: A Biography», sayfa 3
Agatha was, moreover, energetic and intelligent; she got hungry and bored, in spite of the games and stories she invented, and she remained a skinny child. Monty called her ‘the scrawny chicken’. Meals, punctually served, were benchmarks in the day and the ceremonies of presenting and consuming food were fascinating, especially since she was orderly and fond of ritual. Throughout her life she served formal meals as they were composed in her childhood, with silver and glasses correctly placed, flowers arranged, napkins folded, course succeeding course. A meal was a celebration.
Liking the way things were arranged, Agatha was also interested in the way people were ordered. She was to discover as she grew up the fine gradations of Torquay society but her first inkling of a hierarchy was in the household at Ashfield. With her sharp ear for words and phrases, she noticed forms of address: cooks were always ‘Mrs’, housemaids equipped with ‘suitable’ names (even if they did not arrive with them), like Susan, Edith, and so on, and parlourmaids, who ‘valeted the gentlemen and were knowledgeable about wine’, had names sounding vaguely like surnames – Froudie was one of the Millers’ parlourmaids – to go with their ‘faint flavour of masculinity’. Duties, too, were clearly allocated and, while there were few complications in Ashfield’s small household of three servants, from time to time Agatha would be aware of friction between the nursery and the kitchen. Nursie, however, was ‘a very peaceable person’.
As the servants deferred to Agatha’s parents (Jane, when asked to recommend a dish, would not dream of suggesting anything except, non-committally, ‘A nice stone pudding, Ma’am?’), so the lower servants genuflected to those in higher authority. Agatha was deeply impressed, as a child, by the reproof which Jane (addressed by the other servants as Mrs Rowe) administered to a young housemaid who rose from her chair prematurely: ‘I have not yet finished, Florence.’ A sensitive child, she could spot where power lay and, as children do, grew skilled at managing complex relations with a number of adults with whom she had understandings of varying degrees of complicity. Agatha knew about the servants’ world, not only because these were the adults with whom she spent a fair amount of time but also because she needed to keep her wits about her in order to avoid trouble and interference, obtain attention and titbits, and know what was going on.
Like most children, too, she was interested in the execution of practical tasks – the way pastry was made, ironing done, fires laid, boots blackened and, as Agatha observed, ‘glasses washed up very carefully … in a papier-mâché washing-up bowl’. She acquired a proper respect for the efficient exercise of these domestic skills, enhanced by Clara’s instilling into her that servants were highly trained professionals, versed not only in the intricacies of whichever part of the household they managed but also in the correct relations that should prevail between themselves and the people for whom they worked. Agatha emphasised this point in her Autobiography, since she was aware that the world before 1939 which she was describing was quite different from that of many of her readers, who might be baffled by the nuances of these domestic relationships.
To Agatha her mother was an extraordinary and magical being. Now in her late thirties, Clara supervised her household and her husband with natural authority, reinforced by experience. She knew and thought about her husband and children sufficiently keenly for them to believe that she had second sight (Madge once said to Agatha that she didn’t dare even to think when Clara was in the room), an impression that must have been fortified by her fickle but profound interest in various bizarre philosophies. She still wrote poetry; one of her stories, with Callis Miller as a pseudonym, survived among Agatha’s papers. The narrator of ‘Mrs Jordan’s Ghost’ was the unhappy spirit of a dead woman, manifesting itself whenever a particular piano was played. The preoccupations of this forlorn soul – rippling music, an ominous verse, guilt and purification, a vaguely apprehended unknown Power, ‘the unwritten laws of this mysterious universe’ – were exactly what one would expect in a story by Clara. An exotic figure, looking in her later photographs drawn and astonished, she seemed to Agatha a charming mixture of waywardness and dignity, certainty and vagueness.
Agatha saw her mother at special times: when she was ill or upset; when she needed permission to embark on some rare adventure or wished to report on one; and after tea, when, dressed in starched muslin, she would be sent to the drawing-room for play and one of Clara’s peculiar stories – about ‘Bright Eyes’, a memorable mouse, whose adventures suddenly petered out, or ‘Thumbs’, or ‘The Curious Candle’, which Agatha later dimly remembered as having had poison rubbed into it (this tale too, came to an abrupt stop). It was then that she could study her mother’s ribbons, artificial flowers and jewellery. Small girls (as she recalled in Cat Among the Pigeons) are not immune to the spell of jewels and those belonging to an older woman are especially magical, for they represent all sorts of mysteries and transformations. In her Autobiography Agatha described Clara’s ornaments, although her list is thin in comparison with the pile of jewellers’ accounts among Frederick’s bills: for lockets and stars, brooches and fans, buttons, rings, scent bottles and card cases, and two of the items Agatha remembered, a diamond crescent and a brooch of five small diamond fish, bought, endearingly, during the last weeks before Agatha’s birth.
In Nursie, Jane, Clara and Madge, Agatha was surrounded by strong and influential women. Her father, kindly and interested in his daughter’s progress, had his own detached way of life. In the morning after breakfast he would walk down to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, calling en route at an antique dealer’s, to see his friends, play whist, discuss the morning newspapers, drink a glass of sherry and walk home for luncheon. In the afternoon he would watch a cricket match, or go to the Club again and weigh himself (preserved among his papers is a sheet of Club writing paper, with such records of stones and ounces as: August 9th, p.m., blue suit, 14.0; September 13th, a.m., Pep. Salt., 14.0), before returning to Ashfield to dress for dinner. Frederick’s photographs show him stout and contemplative, and, in part because of his fashionable moustache and beard, he looked older than his years.
There were two other important and impressive women in Agatha’s childhood: her grandmothers Margaret and Mary Ann. Margaret, Clara’s aunt and Frederick’s step-mother, was known as Auntie-Grannie, while Mary Ann, Clara’s mother, was known as Grannie B. It was at Margaret’s house that the family gathered. After Nathaniel’s death she had moved from Cheshire to a large house in Ealing, filled with a great deal of mahogany furniture, including an enormous four-poster bed curtained with red damask, into which Agatha was allowed to climb, and a splendid lavatory seat on which she would sit, pretending to be a queen, ‘bowing, giving audience and extending my hand to be kissed’, with imaginary animal companions beside her. ‘Prince Goldie’, named after her canary, sat ‘on her right hand’ on the small circle enclosing the Wedgwood handle of the plug. On the wall, Agatha recalled, was an interesting map of New York City. Throughout her life Agatha maintained that a well-appointed and efficient lavatory, preferably of mahogany, was an essential feature of a house or an archaeological camp; she was delighted to discover in her house in Devon a room fitted with wooden furniture almost as magnificent as her grandmother’s.
Auntie-Grannie passed her days not in the drawing-room, ‘crowded to repletion with marquetry furniture and Dresden china’, nor in the morning-room, used by the sewing woman, but in the dining-room, its windows thickly draped with Nottingham lace, every surface covered with books. Here she would sit either in a huge leather-backed carver’s chair, drawn up to the mahogany table, or in a big velvet armchair by the fire. When Agatha was tired of the nursery and the garden, full of rose trees and with a table and chairs shrouded by a willow, she would come to find her grandmother, who would generally be writing long ‘scratchy-looking’ letters, the page turned so that she could save paper by writing across the lines she had just penned. Their favourite game was to truss Agatha up as a chicken from Mr Whiteley’s, poke her to see whether she was young and tender, skewer her, put her in the oven, prick her, dish her up – done to a turn – and, after vigorous sharpening of an invisible carving knife, discover the fowl was a squealing little girl.
This memory, like many of Agatha’s other recollections of her paternal grandmother’s house, was of fun and of eating. She described with great vividness each morning’s visit to the store cupboard; Margaret, like her stepson, was a collector but, as well as hoarding lengths of material, scraps of lace, boxes and trunks full of stuff, and surrounding herself with a profusion of furniture, she also assembled quantities of food: dried and preserved fruit, pounds of butter and sacks of sugar, tea and flour, and cherries, which she adored. (The ‘Confessions’ gives Margaret’s favourite food and drink as stewed cherries and cherry brandy and when she left Ealing thirty-six demijohns of home-made fruit liqueur were removed from her house.) She would dispense the day’s allocation to the cook, investigate any suspected waste, and dismiss Agatha with her hands full of treasure – crystallised fruit like jewels.
Mrs Boehmer, Grannie B., lived in Bayswater but made frequent visits to her sister at Ealing. Here Agatha saw her, and always on Sundays, when the family would assemble at Auntie-Grannie’s table for a large Victorian lunch: ‘an enormous joint, usually cherry tart and cream, a vast piece of cheese, and finally dessert’. Two of Clara’s brothers would be there, Harry, the Secretary of the Army and Navy Stores, and Ernest, who had hoped to become a doctor but, on discovering he could not stand the sight of blood, had gone instead into the Home Office. (Fred was with his regiment in India.) After lunch the uncles would pretend to be schoolmasters, firing questions at Agatha, while the others slept. Then there was tea with Madeira cake. On Sunday, too, the grandmothers would discuss and settle the week’s dealings at the Army and Navy Stores, where they had accounts and where, during the course of the week, Grannie B. would make small purchases and take repairs for Auntie-Grannie (who, Agatha suspected, discreetly added a small present of cash when reimbursing her sister). Agatha joined her grandmothers on some of these expeditions, which are recalled in her description of Miss Marple’s missions to the Army and Navy Stores in At Bertram’s Hotel.
Agatha’s Autobiography gives only the most general description of her grandmothers’ appearance. As widows usually did, they dressed in heavy black. Both seemed to Agatha extremely stout. Grannie B. in particular suffered from badly swollen feet and ankles, as Agatha was later to do, and her tight-buttoned boots were torture. In fact their photographs show that they were small women but to Agatha, a thin and bony child, they and the silky stuffs in which they were swathed must have appeared imposing. It was their conversation she remembered and recorded most clearly: good-natured bickering between the two sisters, each teasing the other over who had been more attractive as a girl – ‘Mary’ (or ‘Polly’, as Auntie-Grannie called Grannie B.) ‘had a pretty face, yes, but of course she hadn’t got the figure I had. Gentlemen like a figure.’ And Agatha drank in their gossip about friends who came to call: Mrs Barry, for instance, whom Agatha regarded with profound awe because she claimed to have been in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Though implausible, her story was so horrid that it fascinated the company.
These conversations were riveting to an imaginative child whose fancy careered ahead of her understanding and who was particularly susceptible to words. (On one occasion a farmer’s angry shout ‘I’ll boil you alive,’ when Agatha and Nursie wandered on to his land, struck her dumb with terror.) Especially interesting were the anecdotes of gallant colonels and captains, with whom Auntie-Grannie kept up ‘a brisk, experienced flirtation’, knitting them bed-socks and embroidering fancy waistcoats, and who made Agatha nervous with their heavy-handed archness and tobacco-laden breath. She remembered exceptionally clearly the remarks, deliberately made in her hearing, about the relationship between a retired Colonel in the Indian Army and the young wife of his best friend, who had retired to a lunatic asylum: ‘Of course, dear, it’s perfectly all right, you know. There is nothing at all questionable about it. I mean, her husband particularly asked him to look after her. They are very dear friends, nothing more. We all know that.’
Margaret seems to have been a more forthright and colourful character than her younger sister; certainly Agatha’s Autobiography contained many references to the opinions, precepts and warnings handed out by her Ealing grandmother, whereas she recalled little of the views of her quieter counterpart in Bayswater. But the serene and affectionate Mary Ann, who never remarried, busying herself with her needle and giving her attention to her three sons, and the more striking Margaret, with her pithy wit and scorn of humbug, thoroughly interested in what the world was thinking and doing, surrounded by cupboards and drawers full of bits and pieces, both provided models of what an old lady might be like. From their characters Agatha was later to draw much that was instructive and entertaining.
2 ‘… in private and in your own time’
Clara’s views on education were almost as inconsistent and ‘advanced’ as her religious opinions. Agatha was not only to be educated at home, unlike Madge, but Clara now maintained that no child should be allowed to read until it was eight years old, since delay was better for the eyes as well as the brain. This was too much to hope for in Agatha’s case. She was fascinated by words and phrases, lived among talkative adults who were natural storytellers and was surrounded by books, many of which had belonged to Madge and Monty: Walter Crane’s Panpipes, a wonderful book of songs like ‘Willow, O Willow’ and ‘Early One Morning’, with swirling art nouveau illustrations of elves, flowers and wreaths; fairy tales like The Giant’s Robe and Under the Water, the story of children who discovered an extraordinary world beneath a stream. One enduring memory was of reading The Adventures of Herr Baby while staying with Auntie-Grannie in Ealing. This book, written by Mrs Molesworth in 1881, had belonged to Madge; it is the tale of an irritatingly precocious four-year-old’s travels abroad with his family and how he is lost, found and restored to them. Mrs Molesworth’s children’s books were popular during Agatha’s childhood and she acquired them as soon as they were published: Christmas Tree Land, for instance, in 1897, and The Magic Nuts in 1898. At this time, too, Edith Nesbit was writing marvellous fantasies, all of which Agatha read: The Story of the Treasure Seekers, which came out in 1899, when she was nine, The Phoenix and the Carpet of 1903 and The Railway Children of 1906.
There was also the literature Clara had enjoyed as a child, exciting, simply written, illustrated books from New York, and the volumes she had been given later, like Louisa M. Alcott’s unfussy, family-centred Little Women, which appeared when Clara was fifteen, and Little Men, which came out three years afterwards. Some of Madge’s and Monty’s books had also come from America, including a series of startling thrillers: Mr Barnes of New York (first chapter entitled ‘A Vampire Brood’); Cynthia Wakeham’s Money; The Masked Venus; and Mr Potter of Texas (Chapter One, ‘The Deserted Hotel’: ‘Sir, I have something to tell you!’ – ‘My heavens! Is there a woman – an Englishwoman – in this accursed place tonight?’).
An increasingly wide range of literature became available for children at the end of the eighteen-nineties and in the early nineteen-hundreds. For small children there were ingenious ‘pop-up’ books (Madge had a collection) and vividly illustrated stories, like Punch and Judy, but until Beatrix Potter began to produce short books of simply worded tales with pretty drawings (The Tale of Benjamin Bunny appeared in 1904) there was little that children aged from four to seven could easily read for themselves. For older children, however, literature brightened up considerably, the work of Edith Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett, for example, being perfectly suited to someone of Agatha’s age and circumstances. The language is exact, the sentences uncluttered, and the ideas – missing fortunes from India, tyrannical schoolmistresses, adventurous children, secret gardens, magical cities, juggling with time – just the right mixture of the fantastic and the familiar. Agatha could look up strange words and puzzling references; the Millers’ house was well furnished with encyclopaedias, atlases and dictionaries. These late-Victorian and early-Edwardian children’s books were, too, full of complex and extraordinary fantasy, reflecting the hidden themes of ‘real life’ – quests, adventures, transformations, the wish to make order out of chaos or to obtain justice, the curious effects of money, death and love. Agatha was brought up on such reveries – the weird sketches and mad verse of Edward Lear and the remarkable worlds created by Lewis Carroll (Frederick had bought Through the Looking Glass in 1885, when Madge was six), not just those explored by Alice but also the more baffling, yet perfectly comfortable territory of Sylvie and Bruno. Like dreaming, reading mirrored and assuaged a child’s subconscious turmoil.
In spite of Clara’s notion that premature reading was injurious, Agatha received presents of books from an early age. In 1893 Madge gave her The Ballad of Beau Brocade, difficult for a three-year-old but with a jolly swing to the lines (‘Seventeen hundred and thirty-nine, that was the date of this tale of mine. First Great George was buried and gone, George the Second was plodding on …’). When she was eight Auntie-Grannie presented her with Robinson Crusoe and, two years later, with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s newly published book, Granny’s Wonderful Chair (‘Chair of my grandmother, tell me a story …’). Agatha’s family also encouraged her to read by sending her regular letters, short and easy, whenever they were parted. Frederick, whose own taste was for melancholy but uplifting American verse and for the jauntier Thackeray, sent particularly charming notes. In January 1896, when Agatha was five, her parents took Madge to America, and Frederick wrote from New York: ‘Tell Grannie it was three degrees below zero (thirty-five degrees of frost). You see all the people in the streets with fur around their throats and little covers for their ears so they don’t get frozen!’ Madge took trouble to print her letters to her ‘dear Pip’, decorating them with animals and palm trees, and during their absence Clara wrote often to ‘her sweet darling little girl’. Clara’s letters invariably bore only the vaguest of dates (Agatha inherited this habit) but postmarks on the envelopes show that when Agatha was seven she was receiving detailed instructions to help Nursie track down missing photographs and ensure that Grannie rested properly. By the time she was five, Agatha had taught herself to read by puzzling out a text that had often been told aloud to her, L.T. Meade’s The Angel of Love, a long book, full of interesting words like ‘monstrous’, ‘discomfited’ and ‘tirade’. She used a copy that Monty had given Madge for Christmas in 1885; its spine is broken and it falls open at the place where, taking pity on the little girl in the black and white illustration, whose sisters are saying, ‘We think her very ugly,’ Agatha or Madge has coloured her hair with purple crayon.
Frederick now declared that Agatha should also learn to write. She started with pencil and by the time she was seven graduated to ink and an italic nib, in which she wrote a large, legible hand, joining up some of the letters. She had mastered reading by matching meaning to the appearance of entire words, rather than single letters, and for a long time she had difficulty in distinguishing B from R. Her spelling was always of the hit and miss sort that characterises people who remember words by ear rather than by eye. Madge encouraged Agatha to practise her writing, ruling a copybook with pencilled lines and writing out sentences for her sister to follow. Each sentence featured a different letter of the alphabet and they all had Madge’s special touch: for J there was ‘Jealousy is a green-eyed monster,’ P was represented by ‘Pork pie is made of pig and paste’ and I had ‘I was an idler, who idolised play.’
Agatha liked arithmetic, which Frederick taught her every morning after breakfast. He soon moved her on to questions concerning the allocation of apples and pears and the diminution of bathsful of water, problems she enjoyed enormously. Like her father, Agatha had a tidy mind and was naturally quick at sums and tables; later, in her mid-twenties, when she qualified as a dispenser, she had no difficulty in mastering the basic principles of physics and chemistry or remembering the proportions of each substance required to compound a particular drug. Her natural grasp of such concepts as quantity, scale and proportion, together with the fact that she had an ear that was more discerning than her eye, also encouraged her aptitude for music. She learnt to play the mandolin and would practise on her grandmother’s piano in the unheated drawing-room at Ealing. Frederick was very musical and could play anything by ear; with her father’s help and that of a German music teacher, Fräulein Üder, and her successor, Mr Trotter, Agatha progressed from The Merry Peasant, by way of Czerny’s Exercises, to Schumann and Grieg.
Apart from her music teachers, Agatha had no professional tuition at home but her general education was every bit as good as, if not better than, that of her contemporaries who were formally taught. She read voraciously, devouring Jules Verne’s early science fiction and Henty’s adventure stories, and tasting the sets of bound volumes Frederick had accumulated: complete editions of George Eliot’s works, Mrs Henry Wood’s novels, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Byron and Kipling, sets of the Cornhill Magazine, the Art Journal, The Nineteenth Century and The Lady’s Magazine, novels by the Brontë sisters and Marion Crawford, Oscar Wilde’s poetry, the French classics, thirty volumes by British essayists, Pinero’s plays and every novel of Disraeli. All these, save for some racy plays in French, she was allowed to read.
There was, moreover, a great fashion for question and answer books, compendia of general knowledge and books of lists. Dr Brewer’s Child’s Guide to Knowledge was one, full of useful information on which a child could be tested, as in the games played by Agatha’s uncles. The Home Book of Pleasure and Instruction not only gave directions for such exercises as ‘How To Make A Rag Doll Which A Baby May Put Into Its Mouth Safely’, but also instructed the reader in ‘The Twenty-four Classes of Linnaeus’, ‘The Synopsis of Seaweed Tribes’, ‘Hints on Heraldry’, ‘The Principles of Photography’, ‘The Classification of Shells’, and so on. Such books also contained various games with words and numbers: acrostics, letter and figure charades (TELEGRAPH: I am a word of nine letters; my one to seven is a Chinese plant; my five, six, seven, one, two, is a fireside requisite; etc.), inversions, rebuses, enigmas, arithmorems, chronograms, cryptographs, and the like. These riddles provided amusement and trained the mind in what is now called lateral thinking. To her interest in order, hierarchy and proportion, Agatha added a liking for manipulating letters and numbers, interpreting codes, and playing with arrangements and sequences to hide or uncover other meanings.
Although Agatha was always defensive about the fact that she had neither gone to school nor had teachers at home, in many ways an education of this sort was as valuable as school lessons would have been, and it was undoubtedly instructive and memorable. She acquired a great deal of general information, learnt how to look things up for herself, and browsed over all manner of subjects. For a short time, when she was about thirteen, she attended classes for two days a week at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School in Torquay, where she studied algebra and sought to grasp the rules of grammar and spelling. But, perhaps because her early education had ranged about with such lack of discipline, she was intellectually wayward. She had not been trained to work at subjects that bored her, bother with fundamental rules of spelling and grammar, or follow an argument through logical steps to the end. In itself this was no hardship; there are many ways to be creative and to manage one’s life, and Agatha’s native wit, orderliness and common-sense served her well. Indeed, she managed so well that she was inclined to think ‘education’ greatly over-rated, a common view among highly intelligent, successful people whose formal education has been slender – particularly among women who, for reasons of health or because of their social class or sex, have been discouraged from taking much formal intellectual instruction. Pleasingly, it often goes hand in hand with a great admiration for people – generally men – who have achieved academic success. Agatha, for one, held these two views simultaneously.
She was also scathing towards those who observed, later in her life, that as a girl she had lacked the company of other children. From the age of five or six she was taken by Nursie to dancing classes, where marches, polkas and dances like Sir Roger de Coverley were taught and the children taken through Swedish exercises with silk and elastic chest-expanders. Later, there was Miss Guyer’s and, after that, when Agatha was fifteen, a succession of pensions at which she boarded in Paris. The first of these establishments was Mademoiselle Cabernet’s, where Madge had crashed among the tea-things and where Agatha now learnt the history and the provinces of France and failed lamentably at dictation, having learnt French, like her native tongue, largely by ear. She made friends among the girls – French, Spanish, Italian and American. She took drawing lessons, at which she was hopeless, and an effete gentleman called Mr Washington Lobb instructed her in dancing and deportment. From Mademoiselle Cabernet’s, which Clara judged unsatisfactory, Agatha moved briefly to Les Marroniers, a sound and ‘extremely English’ school at Auteuil, and from there to Miss Dryden’s, a small finishing school in Paris kept by the sister-in-law of Auntie-Grannie’s doctor. Here Agatha learnt and recited a great deal of French drama, worked seriously at singing and at the piano with an excellent Austrian teacher, Charles Fürster, and wrote essays on such themes as ‘Qu’est-ce que les affections corporatives?’, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’esprit de corps?’ and ‘Le sublime est-il la même chose que le beau?’ – the sort of philosophical questions, simultaneously sweeping and precise, that were (and still are) typical of French education, and to which Agatha provided typical French answers: full of subjunctive verbs, following a standard pattern and falling into three parts.
It is nonetheless true that Agatha spent much of her early childhood without the companionship and competition of other children. Madge and Monty were away at school, so that for most of the time she was the focus of her parents’ notice. She was devoted to her animals – her cat, her Yorkshire terrier, Toby, and Goldie, the canary – and it was with her pets and her imaginary companions – Mrs Benson and the Kittens, Dick and Dick’s mistress, and later, a school of invented girls and a dynasty of make-believe kings and queens – that she entertained herself in the schoolroom and the garden at Ashfield and Ealing. Though she did see other children at her dancing class and when they came to tea, there were none in the houses neighbouring Ashfield and in her first ten years or so none with whom she could regularly play and quarrel, or share adventures, books, toys, and the time and attention of adults.
When Agatha was five, she at last found some friends. Frederick, whose income was diminishing (it turned out that his business managers in America had made unfortunate investments and disbursements of the property that supported his father’s trust), decided to let Ashfield for the winter and take the family abroad, where the cost of living was lower. The practice of moving to France or Italy was not uncommon among English upper-class people who felt the need to economise in a good climate and there were certain towns in France and Italy where it was fashionable to stay. Pau, in South-West France, looking out from a crest to the Pyrenees, was one of these. It had crisp, clean air, which in the early nineteenth century had given it the reputation of being particularly healthy, and the proprietors of its large and ornate hotels were accustomed to taking English and American visitors for long stays. There were English bookshops and tearooms, and even an English hunt. It was, in fact, rather like Torquay, with French food and, to Agatha’s amazement, since no one had warned her, the French language. Instead of sea, there were mountains, and it was there when summer came, that at the little town of Cauterets she met three or four English and American girls of her own age, with whom she could romp and explore. Like other children, she found living in a big hotel particularly agreeable, with its huge public rooms, empty at certain times of the day, long corridors for racing, interesting lifts and surprising staircases. There was more forbidden territory than at home and, precisely because it was not home, more scope for mischief. Feuds could be sustained and alliances struck with pages, maids and waiters (one, called Victor, used to carve mice out of radishes for Agatha and her friends), pacts and contests more intense than engagements with the servants at home, because, being transient figures, hotel staff could be teased with less risk. All summer long Agatha larked about with Dorothy and Mary Selwyn – putting sugar in the salt-cellars, cutting pigs out of orange peel to decorate astonished visitors’ plates – and, when the Selwyns left Cauterets, conspiring with Margaret Home, an English girl, and Marguerite Prestley, an American, whose chief attraction was her fascinating pronunciation and vocabulary and her possession of a good deal of inaccurate but ingenious biological information. In old age Agatha remembered this interlude clearly and affectionately.
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