From this moment, too, Agatha began to make a number of local friends. She saw, for example, a great deal of Dr and Mrs Huxley’s five daughters, whom she joined in the singing class they shared with three or four other girls, under the tutelage of the happily named Dr Crow. The Huxley girls were unusual and enterprising, shocking older Torquay society by their lively behaviour, which included the fact that they did not wear gloves. They merrily carried Agatha along with their plans, inducing her to take part in The Yeomen of the Guard, of which three performances were given in the Parish Rooms, to the vast amusement of the family and friends in the audience. James Watts in particular never forgot this exhibition. ‘Of course,’ Agatha reflected years later, ‘it must have been very funny. A large quantity of weak girls with squeaky breathy voices, producing the scene in the Tower of London, practically all in male roles.’ She always remembered with special hilarity her own difficulties with the middle-aged governess, drafted into the performance at the last moment to replace someone who was ill, whom she had to clasp around the waist while addressing loving phrases to her – ‘a kind of feeling of lèse-majesté’ was how Agatha described it.
The Yeomen of the Guard, Agatha maintained, was ‘one of the highlights of my existence’. Tall, with a clear, thin soprano voice, she played Colonel Fairfax, and her confident performance surprised her family. Agatha felt no stage-fright and later ascribed to this apprenticeship her lack of nervousness when it came to singing before other people. In all other respects, however, she remained very shy. It is difficult for people who are naturally outgoing to appreciate the agonies of someone who, as Agatha confessed, ‘can hardly bring herself to enter a shop and has to grit her teeth before entertaining a large party’. Madge inherited Auntie-Grannie’s chattiness, Agatha the reserve of Grannie B. and Clara. In her quiet childhood, she grew up to be a listener rather than a talker; obliged to show her paces before other people, she could be overcome by nervousness. Before the end-of-term concert at Mademoiselle Cabernet’s she was beset by anxiety, dreaming at night of the piano being transmuted into an organ, of notes sticking, or of being late, and, self-protectively, fell ill with such high fever that she was forbidden to take part. The Gilbert and Sullivan performance with the Huxleys was different; it was delivered with friends before people she knew. Outside a circle of those she trusted, she would never be entirely comfortable and her early solitude had something to do with that. Agatha learnt to work by herself and to discipline herself; she liked to make her own pace. As she was later to write, ‘the most blessed thing about being an author is that you do it in private and in your own time.’ Perhaps the company and competition of other children would have changed her; perhaps not. At any rate, she made the best of her instincts and inclinations.
3 ‘… a possession that is yours to do what you like with’
Although Agatha lacked companions of her own age, her childhood was happy and secure. The adults in her world were kind and thoughtful; her parents did not quarrel; the servants were equable and stayed for years; the household kept to a stable routine; her grandmothers, slow and massive, dispensed wise words and regular treats; birthdays and other anniversaries were properly celebrated and the progress of the seasons was marked with appropriate entertainments – sea-bathing, picnics, Christmas pantomime – and feasts – asparagus, strawberries and salmon, game, turkey and plum pudding. There was a comfortable order and predictability to life; in Agatha’s recollections of her childhood there are unexpected pleasures but no broken promises. Her world was private and safe: Ashfield and Ealing were large enough and the family sufficiently small for her to have her own quarters with her possessions around her. She was given responsibility for amusing herself and looking after her animals and birds, but the management of her surroundings was in the safe hands of sensible adults. She could see clearly where authority lay: her father was, as she put it, ‘the rock’ on which the family rested; her mother’s wishes shaped the management of the house and its members’ behaviour to one another; each grandmother was in charge of her domain at Ealing or in Bayswater; Nursie supervised Agatha and the Nursery; Jane’s sphere of influence was the kitchen; and the parlourmaid too had her own territory. These were, moreover, all adults whose authority Agatha could venerate because she respected both their characters and their professional skills. They took her questions seriously and considered her requests carefully; there were no absurd rules. Only when Agatha went to her pensions did she find regulations enforced for regulations’ sake; by then she had some self-knowledge and the support of more confident contemporaries to help her tolerate rather than be awed by people in charge. As a child she never found the grown-ups around her pettily tyrannical and the only example of injustice she later recalled was the scolding she and her friends in Pau were given when they were caught walking along a parapet at the hotel, an exploit that had not been specifically forbidden because no one had thought of it before.
Agatha was not entirely untroubled. From time to time she had a particularly disturbing dream, which she described in her Autobiography and in the novel Unfinished Portrait which she published, as ‘Mary Westmacott’, in 1934. The nightmare varied only slightly: she would dream of some sort of festivity, a family party or a picnic, at which she would suddenly be conscious of the presence of someone who was not supposed to be there. This was the ‘Gun Man’, frightening not because he carried a gun but because of his strange and terrifying way of staring at her with his pale blue eyes. Originally the Gun Man had the look of ‘a Frenchman, in grey-blue uniform, powdered hair in a queue, and a kind of three-cornered hat, … the gun … some old-fashioned kind of musket’. In later dreams Agatha, among her family and friends, would suddenly realise that, though they seemed familiar, one of them, perhaps Clara, was really the Gun Man. The manifestation described in Unfinished Portrait is even worse: ‘You looked up in Mummy’s face – of course it was Mummy – and then you saw the light steely-blue eyes – and from the sleeve of Mummy’s dress – oh, horror! – that horrible stump.’
Agatha was never able to fix on the source of this nightmare, maintaining that it resembled nothing she had overheard or read. Perhaps the picture in her mind came from something she had forgotten, an advertisement on a hoarding, or the illustrations of ‘The Man That Went Out Shooting’ and the horrid ‘Scissor-Man’ in ‘Little Suck-A-Thumb’, two stories in her copy of Dr Hoffmann’s appalling Struwwelpeter. Her terrors may have been intensified by adults’ talk, or Madge’s game of the mad ‘Elder Sister’, but her dream must have had some underlying cause. Its form – of someone familar and loving suddenly transformed into a hostile stranger – suggests that she may have doubted whether those who were supposed to love her actually did. This may seem odd. Clara and Frederick did not neglect Agatha (indeed, according to Madge and Monty, she was petted and spoilt) and she herself emphasised how close she and Clara always were. But relationships between parents and children are intricate and strange: even when profound and genuine love is demonstrated in innumerable ways, one, both or all can feel