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.
When September came her parents moved on to Paris and then to Brittany. In Dinard they found some old friends and their two sons, but the boys took scant notice of the little seven-year-old, and Agatha’s recollections were chiefly of their mother, Lilian Pirie, whom she greatly admired, and continued to see at intervals over the next forty years. Mrs Pirie’s character and habits – she was well-informed, well-read, and decorated her houses in ‘a startling and original manner’ – in some respects resembled Agatha’s own. The Millers’ last stay was in the Channel Islands, not Jersey where Clara had spent her first nine years, but Guernsey, where Agatha once again found herself playing alone, constructing stories about three exotic birds she had been given for her birthday.
Nursie had long before retired and, after the failure of a number of unfortunate experiments with French governesses hired in Pau, Clara carried off, with one of her capricious master-strokes, the assistant at a dressmaker’s establishment there. This was Marie Sijé, a sweet-natured, conscientious twenty-two-year-old, the middle sister in a family of five children. Marie spoke no English and it was from her that Agatha learnt her idiomatic and fluent French, never accurate on the page but always intelligible and convincing in speech. The two quickly became excellent friends, Marie depending on Agatha, as much as Agatha on Marie, for stimulus and reassurance, particularly when they came home to Torquay, where the other maids thought the French girl very odd, with her plain wardrobe and simple habits, sending home the greater part of her wages and saving the rest for her dot. Agatha, who noticed Marie’s homesickness and unhappiness, admired her industry and good sense; the impoverished but determined young women who eventually appeared in some of her stories (in The Hollow one works for a sour-tempered dress-maker) are a belated compliment.
At Ashfield, however, Agatha saw less of Marie than during their months of companionship in France. It was then that she invented the School, not, she wrote later, ‘because I had any desire myself to go to school,’ but because it constituted ‘the only background into which I could conveniently fit seven girls of varying ages and appearances … instead of making them a family, which I did not want to do.’ Their faces and figures were based on reproductions of pictures in the Royal Academy which Agatha found in Auntie-Grannie’s bound volumes and on the representations of flowers in human form drawn by Walter Crane in The Feast of Flora, a book which now seems droopingly sentimental but which was very popular in Agatha’s youth.
Agatha discussed ‘the girls’ at length in her Autobiography. The one about which she said least was ‘Sue de Verte’, whom she described as ‘curiously colourless, not only in appearance … but also in character’. This, Agatha said, was probably because Sue really stood for herself, being the character the author assumed in order to take part in the story, ‘an observer, not really one of the dramatis personae’. This was appropriate because, although she did not say so, when Agatha invented the girls she was naturally unclear about the sort of person she was or might become. Any tentative ideas she entertained were embodied not in Sue de Verte but in the seventh girl to be added to her collection, ‘Sue’s step-sister, Vera de Verte’, aged thirteen, who was to grow up into ‘a raving beauty’, her ‘straw-coloured hair and forget-me-not blue eyes’ being already more impressive than the vaguer features of Sue. There was also a mystery about Vera’s parentage (as girls of Agatha’s age often wish there might be about their own). For want of any better ideas, Agatha ‘half planned various futures