Agatha and Archie were mesmerised by one another; Clara, taken aback by Agatha’s announcement that ‘Archie Christie has asked me to marry him and I want to, I want to dreadfully,’ brought them back to earth. The understanding with Reggie was ended but Clara insisted that they wait, since Archie could not hope to support a wife on a subaltern’s pay, supplemented only by Agatha’s allowance of £100 a year from her grandfather’s trust. Archie, determined they should not wait a day longer than they could help, was momentarily bitter, but reflected that in any case the Royal Flying Corps preferred its young men to be single, in case they crashed. Agatha, too, was desperate at the thought that they might have years of delay. She was twenty-two and full of turbulent emotion. It is not surprising that for the next year and a half their relationship was stormy, first one and then the other wanting to break things off.
Archie, at least, had his training to occupy his time and attention. Shortly after the end of January 1913 he passed the RFC examination and was posted to Larkhill, in a squadron commanded by Major Brooke-Popham. His flights became ever higher (1,800 feet on April 22nd, 2,000 feet on April 24th), longer (45 minutes on April 17th), further (90 miles on April 22nd), gustier (20 miles an hour wind on April 29th), and more hazardous (April 2nd: machine wrecked; April 29th: dropped passenger engine; May 5th: bent chassis strut, goggles oily). He described his manoeuvres to Agatha: making spirals, observing artillery fire, swerving, firing double rockets from a Very pistol. She was appalled. On that first afternoon at Ashfield, when Archie had described his chosen career to Agatha and Clara, they had been enchanted. It was new and thrilling, and Agatha was fascinated by the aeroplane. She had enjoyed the hair-raising drives in fast motors; the magic of flying was still more entrancing. She had herself already flown in one of those rickety early machines, for in May 1911 Clara had taken her to see a flying exhibition where for the sum of £5 visitors could be taken up in the air for a few minutes. As Agatha acknowledged, Clara was wonderful, not just for agreeing to spend what was then, and for them, an enormous sum, but also for subduing her fears that the aeroplane, and Agatha, might hurtle to the ground. Agatha never forgot that experience. Her small straw hat firmly wedged on her head, she was taken up, the plane circled round and round and then, ‘with that wonderful switch-back down’, it ‘vol-planed’ back to earth.
None of this, however, resigned her to the perilous activities Archie was undertaking as his daily routine. She wrote begging him to give it up. Archie replied with a charming, though not wholly reassuring, letter:
I was so glad to get your note today, but I can’t give up flying yet.
For your sake, more than my own, I am taking no risks and feel perfectly confident that no harm can come to me. That poor fellow who was killed was not safe in any machine and the Cody biplane is very unstable and carries much too great a weight on the elevator. He hated flying it but did not like to refuse when he was asked to, showing a lack of moral courage.
I am terribly sorry for his family – so much so that I will give up this Corps if you really are unhappy about it but I know I am perfectly safe – I always carry St Christopher with me. It does make one morbid reading about these accidents – still more so seeing them – but confidence soon returns.
He came to see Agatha whenever he could, first from Larkhill and then from Netheravon, to which he was posted at the end of 1913. His letters to his ‘dearest Angel’ reflected the doubt and despair they were both feeling. ‘The reason why I was unwell last week,’ he wrote, ‘was that I was so worried because I thought that it would be best for you if I never saw you again and hated telling you so. Now I have not a trace of pessimism left and feel sure that all must come right.… I was only doing in a clumsy way what I thought would be best for you …’. Then, more cheerfully, ‘To return to Aviation …’.
At other times their spirits were more buoyant. After three days’ leave with Agatha in Torquay, Archie wrote that ‘One day we will have our cottage which will be heavenly happiness and will never say goodbye again. You will have to be poor but I will have you to love and look after for ever so all will be well.’ They plunged into despair and out of it again. Some of their fears were exaggerated; Agatha, for instance, wrote breaking off their engagement when she learnt that Clara might lose her sight. Archie persuaded her that this was foolish, since it might not happen for years, by which time a cure for cataract might be found. But their financial insecurity was not misplaced. Archie’s pay was minuscule and, after his stepfather’s only rich relation unexpectedly left his fortune to the Charing Cross Hospital (who sent Mr Hemsley a handsome walking stick as a token of thanks), their hope of help from that source expired. Agatha’s situation was even more precarious than before. The crash of H.B. Chaflin was now complete and Clara depended for her income on an annual allowance from the private fortune of the son of one of the partners. An indication of the economies the Millers now practised is given by a letter that Clara sent in February 1914 to the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Frederick’s father was buried in the family plot. The site was valuable and its tending expensive, and Clara enquired whether the title might be sold: ‘the lot being of no further possible use to the family, they do not wish to pay for its upkeep, and also desire the money for its sale, as they are in England, and never likely to be in America and in extremely low financial circumstances.’ The application, however, was not sent off; Clara and Agatha somehow made ends meet.
As it turned out, the engagement lasted less than two years, but the delay seemed interminable to both Agatha and Archie, not least because they did not know when its end would come. Suddenly, however, in August 1914, they were swept into a drama far bigger than their own.
6 ‘This waiting is rather hard but all is ready’
It is difficult to appreciate how unexpected the First World War actually was, especially to people like Agatha and her mother, who did not read between the lines of politicians’ speeches or bother with dissecting the ambitions of the Kaiser. There had been no major European wars for a generation – colonial imbroglios were not the same. True, there were those who perceived that German interests and Balkan quarrels would lead to trouble but even those responsible for running the country were surprised that things came to a head when they did. The summer months, a time when politicians and officials, like the rest of the English middle and upper classes, went to the country, the sea, Scotland, the spas, were in 1914 gloriously sunny; it seemed, afterwards, as if those weeks had been the last miraculous moment, like the pause before a wave topples over, of a world that for many had been golden and assured. Not for all; support was swelling for economic and social change. The Labour Party, formed in 1900, was growing in strength; the Liberals, despite Lloyd George’s programme of reform, were losing their grip; the House of Lords, for what was not to be the last time, teetered on the precipice of abolition. There was trade union agitation, rebellion in Ireland and disruption by women demanding female emancipation and the vote. Some time the wave would break, but not yet, not in these languid days and glowing evenings. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia at the end of June was the catalyst, and war came.
The Royal Flying Corps was among the first forces to be mobilised. Archie’s last letter from Netheravon, written as they were waiting for orders to move, describes his own attempt to swell the size of the Expeditionary Force:
On Friday I took my recruit to Devizes to get him enlisted and there heard of a bankrupt Russian Baron, who was in need of a job, so as he was a good mechanic and could speak Russian, French, German and English perfectly I persuaded him in the end to enlist in the RFC too.
He tried to reassure Agatha:
This waiting is rather hard but all is ready.
I have a revolver in a holster and an ammunition pouch full of bullets, just to please you.
The last time I shot off my gun was after travelling all night from Cheadle and