After Frederick’s death, Agatha became increasingly anxious lest Clara should be run over by a tram or die suddenly in the night; she would creep along the passage and listen at the door to ensure that her mother was still breathing. Although, as Agatha admitted, children of twelve or thirteen do suffer such exaggerated worries, Clara’s condition did give grounds for concern. She, too, had suffered a number of mild heart attacks and eventually Agatha took to sleeping in what had been Frederick’s dressing room, next to Clara’s bedroom, to be on hand to revive her in the night with brandy or sal volatile. This is not to say that Clara was a prostrate invalid. In many ways she was as lively as ever, suddenly carrying Agatha off to hear Sir Henry Irving (‘He may not live much longer and you must see him, a great actor. We’ve just time to catch the train …’) and, when she accompanied Agatha to Paris, going with her to the theatre and the opera.
Clara depended largely on Agatha for companionship and amusement. They could no longer afford to entertain at home and, partly for that reason, Clara did not often go out to lunch or to dine. In any case, the position of a widow, even a young one, was different from that of a woman with a husband to escort her, particularly if, as in Clara’s case, she had not been accustomed to going about alone even before her marriage. In the evenings she and Agatha would read aloud from Scott, Thackeray and, their favourite, Dickens – Clara, who wanted light nearer than the gas jets, balancing a candlestick on her chest.
Clara’s circle had been enlarged, however, by Madge’s marriage. James Watts’s mother, Annie Browne, had been a great friend of Clara’s when they were schoolgirls and it was in this way that Madge and James had met. James came from a prosperous Manchester family, whose fortunes derived from a colonial export business founded by his grandfather, Sir James Watts. In his palatial warehouses Sir James stored the bicycles, alarm clocks, flannel trousers and other goods destined for the furthest reaches of the Empire. His house, Abney Hall, was an equally famous sight. An enormous Victorian Gothic mansion, it had been altered and extended at Sir James’s direction and included a vast room that was used for religious and political gatherings, for Sir James was Lord Mayor of Manchester. The Prince Consort was entertained at Abney. while Mr and Mrs Gladstone and, on a separate occasion, Mr and Mrs Disraeli had stayed there. Madge’s father-in-law, James Watts Senior, had inherited the house in the late eighteen-seventies. An antiquarian and amateur photographer, he had continued to embellish and enrich it until it almost overwhelmed the occupants.
Much of Abney’s lavish ornamentation, including its carvings, carpets, furniture and hangings, was ‘Gothic revival’; indeed, the work was based on designs by Pugin, who had worked on the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament. There were unnumerable staircases, alcoves, galleries and arches, all fancifully decorated. Windows of coloured glass were traceried, mullioned and ornamented with gargoyles. The main drawing-room had a frieze on which a proverb was endlessly repeated, the walls were hung with green damask covered with more hangings stencilled in bright colours, and the ceiling had octagon-shaped inverted pinnacles, tipped with gold, descending from each panel – ‘like the Alhambra,’ the children said. Another drawing-room, bursting with chintz-covered sofas, had a fireplace set in a huge curlicued marble chimney-piece. The woodwork and the papier-mâché carving of doorways and shutters was picked out in ultramarine, vermilion and green; ceilings and tiles were initialled; doorhandles, lock-plates and hinges, grates, candelabra and standard lamps were all specially designed. Agatha remembered Abney as having three pianos and an organ and, years later, when it was sold, harpsichords and virginals were discovered here and there (as well as half a valuable tapestry whose remainder had hung for centuries in a church in Bruges). Every corridor was crowded with oak chests and every wall hung with paintings, some by Madge’s father-in-law. There was a room for jigsaws and in the garden a lake, a waterfall, a tunnel and a set of houses for children to play in, one a small fort with its own pointed windows and crenellations.
Madge and her husband lived at Cheadle Hall, a Georgian house nearby. Agatha and Clara spent part of every winter there, for after 1903, when Madge’s son Jack was born, they would go north to look after him while his parents went to St Moritz for skating, and at Christmas they joined the whole Watts family at Abney, feasting gloriously with James and Annie, Madge and James, Madge’s four brothers-in-law and her sister-in-law Nan. Christmas Day was especially strenuous, with a huge lunch, tea and supper, interspersed with quantities of chocolates, preserved fruits and confections from the store-room, to which, unlike its counterpart at Ealing, access was unrestrained. On Boxing Day there was an expedition to Manchester to the pantomime, while Abney itself was pervaded by charades and dressing-up, for all the Watts family, apart from James, were enthusiastic actors. Humphrey, James’s brother, who was eight or nine years older than Agatha, had his own theatre in Manchester, while Lionel, another brother, acted professionally in London. Madge, too, never lost her mania for disguise. Once, late in her married life, she came down to dinner dressed as a cricketer, in black breeches, cricket cap and shorts. James disapproved, but she induced Agatha to show solidarity by assuming the appearance and manners of a Turkish woman; entirely swaddled in black, she sat through the meal making little belching noises, as Madge instructed. (Jack Watts, Madge’s son, had the same trait. As an undergraduate at Oxford he is reputed to have dressed up in women’s clothing, on one occasion as the Virgin Mary.)
From the day of his birth Jack gave Agatha great pleasure; she was then thirteen, still baffled as to how babies originated and ignorant as to how long they took to arrive, but enthusiastically assuming the duties of an aunt. Her Autobiography has many descriptions of Jack’s sayings and doings and her album pages of photographs of her playing with him, reading to him and, wearing a large oilskin cap like a pudding-basin cover, taking him bathing in the sea. Agatha liked small boys and from the age of twelve until her marriage at the age of twenty-four she saw a good number – the children of her mother’s friends or of her own. One of these remembered, years later, playing at Ashfield when he was three and she was twenty. He had sprinkled someone’s feet with a watering-can and, when Agatha told him he was a rascal, gleefully cried out, ‘And you’re a lady rascal.’ She carried him off to the schoolroom, riding on her back, so he called her ‘Lady Elephant’, and, when she showed him the stuffed swans in two glass cases in the Billiard Room, he called her ‘Lady Swan’. Agatha remembered this occasion too; nearly twenty years afterwards she brought back a lapis lazuli elephant from the East as a present for her former playmate, and the game they played is described by Mrs Ariadne Oliver in Elephants Can Remember.
From 1902 or thereabouts, Agatha’s companions were not just little boys of her nephew’s age. This was the time when she was sent for lessons first to Miss Guyer’s and then to the succession of French pensions, in part, perhaps, because Clara did not wish that the two of them should become too exclusively dependent on each other’s company. At home in Torquay Agatha was now old enough to go about independently with other young people – the Huxleys, Hoopers, Morrises, Lucys, Bushes and Thellusons: to the Fair, where they bought nougat from a stall and rode on switchbacks and gilded roundabout horses, the girls sitting side-saddle, balancing their fruit, flower and ribbon-laden hats; to the Regattas at Dartmouth and Torquay, where they watched the yachts from the quay and the fireworks in the evening. There were teas and suppers on neighbours’ lawns and grand garden parties, with splendid ices and cakes, served by professional waiters, whom they knew because they also helped at dinner