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