Here was a collection of young people, at their most healthy and attractive, primed with romantic anticipation, lacking sexual experience but not sexual exuberance: as Agatha later said, ‘We didn’t need pep pills; we didn’t need sedatives.’ They were not careworn or anxious; Agatha attributed this to the fact that neither examinations nor careers weighed them down. Their responsibilities were limited: the world’s affairs were considered a matter for adults and the business of the young was held to be emotion, not facts. As for their own entanglements, shrewd social arrangements minimised risk. Chaperones were ever present and philandering men and ‘fast’ girls who flouted convention were as far as possible excluded from dances and weekend parties. Overall, a careful balance was struck. On the one hand the young were encouraged to indulge intensely romantic emotion; on the other, they were protected from the consequences of mistakes which, given their innocence and inexperience, they might easily make. Life was, as Agatha recalled, ‘great fun’; it was also reasonably safe.
Agatha’s own friends, particularly the younger married couples, rallied round to assist in this process of maximising choice while minimising risk. On her return from Cairo she found herself invited four or five times a year for country house visits, of which the centrepiece might be a local hunt or military ball, a race meeting, a regatta. Attractive young people to fill the house and help make up a party were much in demand and it was not necessary to be rich to enjoy friends’ hospitality and do them credit. There were, of course, fares to find and the right clothes, though not necessarily many. Although the getting and spending of money was thought an inappropriate subject for conversation, people breezily acknowledged into which serviceable category – ‘very rich’, ‘well-off’, ‘not well-off’, ‘poor’ – their friends and acquaintances came. Hosts and hostesses ensured that impoverished girls were not induced to gamble for money at cards or at the races; once arrived at a house there would be no unexpected expenses, apart from small tips to the maid. What is more, certainly in the society in which Agatha spent her girlhood, there was little defensiveness about being badly off or, for that matter, rich, perhaps because in other ways – socially, morally, even as a nation – people felt easy and assured. There was no shame in retrimming a hat, recycling the same six dresses or wearing mended stockings; there was, moreover, time in which to do it.
Again, Agatha’s album illustrates the weekends she spent with people she and Clara had met in Cairo: Mr Park-Lyle, ‘the Sugar King’, and his kind, if artificially preserved, wife, with whom she stayed in Suffolk, where the party played tennis and croquet and gazed at the lake; Sir Walter and Lady Barttelot, at Littlegreen House in Petersfield, from which they went to the races at Goodwood; and the Ralston-Patricks, where Agatha nervously rode round a field (her previous experience being confined to ambling a dispirited horse about the lanes of Devonshire and scrabbling over an occasional wall), and, exhilaratingly, in a motor car. Agatha had first seen motor cars in France as a child and had been greatly excited by them. Robin Ralston-Patrick’s motor was highly temperamental and to make an expedition in it exhausting, but she never forgot a fifty-mile trip they made to Banbury in 1909, equipped with rugs, scarves and baskets of provisions and seen off with tender farewells. More alarming was the occasion when she was driven back to Torquay from Petersfield by Lady Barttelot’s brother. They charged along the lanes at what Agatha believed to be nearer fifty miles an hour than what was considered the ‘safe’ speed of twenty, with her driver, rather like Toad in The Wind in the Willows, dashing past the places where he believed the police to be lurking – ‘Yes, the villains, that’s what they do, hide behind a hedge and then come out and measure the time’ – and then dropping suddenly to ten miles an hour – ‘that dished him!’ She found her driver disconcerting but she loved his bright red motor.
On one of these visits Agatha met Charles Cochran, the theatrical impresario, and his delicate and adoring wife, Evelyn. Some months later the Cochrans invited her to stay with them in London and here she particularly enjoyed hearing intimate theatrical gossip. Agatha had been taken to plays and musical comedies since she was a small child: her Ealing grandmother was especially fond of them and, fortified with half a pound of coffee creams from the Army and Navy Stores, would take her to matinée performances, buying the score to play at home afterwards. Frederick had taken a great interest in the local amateur dramatic society in Torquay, for which he had stage-managed (this, as Agatha wrote dryly, ‘was then the term used for production and did not mean a harassed young woman in trousers being blamed for everything …’), while Madge and Monty had initiated Agatha into going weekly to the pit stalls in the local theatre. (Frederick’s account book shows that in 1901 a seat at the play cost a shilling, comparing well with one shilling and sixpence for a haircut and ninepence for a banana.) In Dinard, at the end of the year that had taken the Millers to Pau, Agatha had begun her own theatrical performances. Her parents’ bedroom there had a large bow window, almost an alcove, across which the curtains could be drawn, and Agatha conscripted Marie into helping her present a version of various fairy stories, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Cinderella’ and so on, which Frederick and Clara patiently endured every evening after dinner. Now, as Agatha grew into her twenties, the amateur theatricals became grander, with a bigger cast: one set of photographs, taken in 1912 or so, shows her larking about with a dozen friends, the women in beads and veils and the men in baggy trousers, turbans and magnificent whiskers, for a performance of The Blue Beard of Unhappiness, an original work in part derived from A Thousand and One Nights, Blue Beard and light musical comedy. (Its nature is indicated by the title of Act 1: Why Did They Bag-Dad?) It was put on at Cockington Court, where Agatha’s friends the Mallocks lived; Mrs Mallock played Scheherazade, and Agatha, in voluminous harem trousers, Sister Anne.
As well as concocting sketches with her friends, Agatha was by now doing a fair amount of her own writing. Much of this was poetry. With her liking for words and her ear for rhythm and patterns, she found it easy, particularly since she need not start cold but could choose a verse form to follow or a model to parody. Poetry, too, offered a convenient vehicle for an adolescent to express confused but deeply felt emotions; being in a formalised code, it kept her secrets safe, and, being poetry, it could be opaque. Agatha read and bought a good deal of poetry. Amongst the volumes was a beautifully bound edition of Herrick, in olive green leather, tooled with a design of gold tulips. The edition, published in 1906, falls open at the poem called ‘Discontents in Devon’:
More Discontents I never had
Since I was born, than here;
Where I have been, and still am sad,
In this dull Devon-shire:
Yet justly too I must confess;
I ne’er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the Presse,
Than where I loathed so much.
A poem Agatha wrote at the age of eleven had been published in the local paper. The new tram service had been extended to Ealing, much to the fury of the residents, and Agatha recollected her first verse as being:
When first the electric trams did run
In all their scarlet glory,
’Twas well, but ere the day was done,
It was another story.
This poem, however, cannot be traced. Between 1901 and 1906 only three poems about trams appeared in issues of The Middlesex County Times and The Hanwell and Ealing Post, none