This was Reggie Lucy, the elder brother of Blanche, Marguerite and Muriel, with whom Agatha played tennis, croquet and Diabolo, picnicked on Dartmoor and roller-skated on the pier. A casual, comfortable family, they had first taken Agatha under their wing when Clara and Madge had gone to France shortly after Frederick’s death and she had stayed behind at Ashfield. The Lucys were a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care collection, racy and informal – the two younger girls were known as Margie and Noonie and, apart from Jack Watts, they seem to have been the only people ever to escape with calling Agatha ‘Aggie’. Reggie, a Major in the Gunners, now came home after his foreign service; he took Agatha’s erratic golf in hand and, as time passed, proposed to her in an unemphatic and companionable way. As always with the Lucys, who were constantly missing trams, trains and meals, there was no urgency: ‘Just bear me in mind, and, if nobody else turns up, there I am, you know.’ Agatha immediately agreed. Reggie, however, insisted equably that they should wait a couple of years so that Agatha could survey the field before settling down with him. He returned to his Regiment and their courtship continued by post. Reggie, who is the model for Peter Maitland in Unfinished Portrait, assured Agatha that, despite their understanding, she should consider herself absolutely free. Agatha, like Celia, in that book, did not wish to be. ‘Don’t be too humble,’ says Celia’s mother to Peter. ‘Women don’t appreciate it.’ Sadly, she was right. Agatha was carried away by someone more determined and impetuous.
Archie Christie (it is impossible to think of that engaging young man as Archibald) is also described in Unfinished Portrait, as Dermot, whom Celia meets at a regimental ball in York. He spirits her away from the partners to whom she is pledged and, within a few weeks, from her fiancé. As we know from Agatha’s Autobiography, and from her own and Archie’s papers, the reality was only a little less dramatic. The dance was given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh, who had invited some of the garrison at Exeter, and Agatha was taken by old family friends who lived near Chudleigh, about twelve miles from Torquay. She already had one friend among the Exeter garrison, Arthur Griffiths, and, although he could not be there himself, he took the trouble to write to ask her to look out for a friend of his. This was Archie. That dance is the first non-military entry in a record Archie made of the most important events of his life. It took place on October 12th, 1912; Agatha was just twenty-two, Archie (whose birthday was a fortnight after hers) twenty-three. His history and interests were romantic. He had been born in India, where his father was a judge in the Indian Civil Service, and he had one brother, Campbell, who like Archie was in the Army. Archie’s father had become very ill after falling from a horse – the fall had affected his brain – and had died in hospital in England. His mother then married William Hemsley, a housemaster at Clifton College in Bristol, where Archie had been Head of the School. He was resourceful and intelligent and, on taking the entrance examination for the Woolwich Military Academy, was placed fourth on the list. He was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in July 1909, joining the 138th Battery at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain. The Brigade had moved to Exeter early in 1912.
He was, however, fascinated not by soldiering but by flying; the aeroplane was just beginning to be regarded as more than a bizarre plaything and the farsighted saw it as a powerful weapon of war. In June 1912, Archie, who was practical and ambitious, paid the £75 fee (‘including breakages’) for a course of lessons at the Bristol School at Larkhill, on the ‘Special Reduced Terms’ offered to ‘those desirous of qualifying for The Royal Flying Corps’. He took a month’s leave and found where his heart and talent lay.
By June 27th he was flying solo, practising right- and left-hand turns, and on July 6th he flew alone for twenty-five minutes at the dizzy height of 300 feet in a five-mile-an-hour wind. The exercise was precarious; the official log made special mention of the fact that all landings were achieved ‘without even breaking so much as a piece of wire …’. By mid-July, flying a Bristol Box Kite, Archie qualified for the Royal Aero Club Aviator’s Certificate, a magnificent document, printed in English and French. The ranks of qualified aviators were noticeably small; Archie’s certificate was only No. 245. He thereupon applied to join the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and returned to his Brigade at Exeter.
It was three months later that he met Agatha at the Cliffords’ dance. From his photographs we can see that he was tall and well-built, with fair, crisply curling hair, cut short. He had strong features: an attractive mouth, a nose with a small crinkle in it, blue eyes, heavy brows and a look of slightly anxious intensity. He was very young and determined and fell in love with Agatha almost at once. They danced together a great many times. In his scrapbook Archie pasted the programme and next to it a newspaper cutting of a jolly verse, ‘The New Romance’, which began:
When first she fell in love with Frank,
’Twas not the latter’s youth and rank,
Nor yet his balance at the bank
That won the heart of Elsie;
’Twas not the whiteness of his soul
That made her lose all self-control,
But ’twas the way he kicked a goal,
When playing ‘back’ for Chelsea.…
Whether in Archie’s case it was his dancing or his heart-stopping profession as an aviator that attracted Agatha we do not know, but he felt sufficiently confident to appear at Ashfield shortly afterwards, on his motor-bike.
Agatha was playing badminton with the Mellors, who lived opposite; she used to go across to their house whenever their son was at home, to try out the latest intricate dance steps, a joke that had begun years before when they had practised waltzing, in the fashion of popular operettas, up and down the staircase. Clara, always exasperated at finding herself left to entertain Agatha’s young men unaided, summoned her home on the telephone. Rather cross, because she thought this was the ‘dreary young naval lieutenant who asked me to read his poems’, Agatha returned. There was Archie, pink and embarrassed, with a story about being in Torquay and thinking he might drop in. (Agatha spotted that he must have gone to some trouble to ask Arthur Griffiths for her address.) The afternoon passed; Agatha, Clara and Archie continued to talk, evening came, and the two women silently telegraphed to each other that he was to be invited to stay for supper.
Archie did indeed come, like Dermot, ‘in a whirlwind’ into Agatha’s life. Her Autobiography describes this important meal as taking place both ‘a week or ten days’ after the Cliffords’ dance (that is, on about October 20th) and ‘soon after Christmas, because I know there was cold turkey in the larder’. Archie then roared off into the night, returning several times during the next few weeks (or, in Agatha’s understandably shaky chronology, days). Books were exchanged, though not for reading, Archie invited Agatha to a concert at Exeter, where they decorously drank tea at the railway station (Clara judged an hotel to be too compromising), and Agatha asked Archie to the New Year Ball at Torquay. The dance was on January 2nd. Archie was moody and Agatha puzzled. Two days later, after listening to Wagner at the Pavilion, she learnt the reason. When they returned to Ashfield, Archie announced that he was soon to leave Exeter for Farnborough, since his application to the Royal Flying Corps had been accepted. He begged her to marry him. She explained about her understanding with Reggie Lucy; Archie waved it aside. He wanted to marry her immediately and Agatha knew she wanted to marry him. They were ‘poles apart in our reactions to things’, but she believed, and continued all her life to believe, that this was what fascinated both of them. It was, she said, ‘the excitement of the stranger’ and, as she remembered years later, it was at this time that she had awoken from a dream to find herself saying: ‘The stranger from the sea, the stranger