It was as well that the house was spacious, since Frederick had a mania for collecting. Torquay being a fashionable resort, patronised by people with money, taste and plenty of spare time, it had attracted a number of dealers, into whose smart shops he would make a detour on his daily walk to the Yacht Club. The shopkeeper who did best was J.O. Donoghue, of Higher Union Street, whose lengthy bills give a detailed picture of Frederick’s purchases of coffee tables, card cases, plaited baskets, salts, oriental jugs and jars, china plates, cut-glass candlesticks, paintings on rice paper, muffineers and innumerable pieces of Dresden china. The stack of bills preserved among Frederick’s papers also shows the extent of the Millers’ domestic establishment and hospitality. Five-course dinners were prepared daily by Jane, the cook, with a professional cook and butler hired for grand occasions, when at each course a choice of dishes would be presented. Clara kept a book of ‘receipts for Agatha’, which indicates the richness and expense of the food that was served: fish pies, for instance, were made of filleted sole layered with oysters (though there was a footnote saying ‘Best brand of tinned oysters “Imperial”’) and directions were given for preparing truffles to add to meat or chicken, for making breakfast dishes of cold salmon and of kidneys and mushrooms, for dishes of quail, splendid savouries, and various complicated salads, smooth creams and junkets. The only really economical recipe, for macaroni cheese, instructed the reader to ‘get the macaroni at a shop in Greek Street, Soho, kept by an Italian’ and carried the terse comment ‘Not very good.’
Into this well-equipped household Agatha was born on September 15, 1890. She was the much-loved ‘afterthought’; her mother was thirty-six, her father forty-four and there was a gap of eleven years between Agatha and Madge and ten between Agatha and Monty. Madge was by now a boarder at Miss Lawrence’s School in Brighton (later to become the celebrated girls’ boarding school Roedean) since this accorded with Clara’s current view of what should constitute female education. Madge’s letters to her baby sister – ‘My dear little chicken … Who do you get to make you a big bath of bricks in the schoolroom now that your two devoted slaves have left for school to learn their lessons?’ – reflected her gregarious and comic nature. She was a tumbling, bouncing girl, not beautiful but with an attractive, mobile face and an engaging grin. The only wistful note in her entry in ‘Confessions’ was her answer to: ‘If not yourself, who would you be?’ to which she replied, ‘A beautiful beauty.’
Madge adored jokes, pranks and disguises and Agatha was awed and delighted by her sister’s exploits. She talked with amazed pride of the time when Madge dressed up as a Greek priest to meet someone at the station and of the occasion when, having come to Paris to be ‘finished’, she accepted a dare to jump out of the window and landed on a table at which several horrified Frenchwomen were taking tea. Madge would thrill her sister by spicing affectionate play with a dash of spookiness, saying solemnly, ‘I’m not your sister,’ looking for a moment like a stranger, or, in an even more terrifying version of this game, putting on the silkily ingratiating voice of the imaginary madwoman Madge and Agatha called ‘The Elder Sister’, who lived in a cave in the nearby cliffs, and uttering the horribly unreassuring words, ‘Of course I’m your sister Madge. You don’t think I’m anyone else, do you? You wouldn’t think that?’
It is much harder to catch a glimpse of Agatha’s brother, Monty. Here and there, in the first dictated draft of the part of her autobiography that deals with her childhood, Agatha alluded to the fact that ‘at about this time, Monty disappeared from my life’; as it was, he hardly seems to have been there at all. This is partly because, when Agatha was young, Monty was at Harrow and when she was older he had vanished abroad. He was not a scholar – he left Harrow without passing his examinations – but his winning disposition helped him to survive. Agatha told the story of Monty’s being the only boy allowed to keep white mice at school, since the Headmaster had been induced to believe that Miller was especially interested in natural history. Her picture of him was, as one would expect, of someone who, by virtue of his being a boy and ten years older, led a strange and exciting life of daring exploits in boats and later in motor cars, in which he would sometimes disdainfully allow his little sister to take part.
Things cannot have been easy for Monty, in a circle of four forceful women – his energetic and argumentative elder sister, shrewd impulsive mother, and two formidable grandmothers. A photograph shows him, in an ill-fitting buttoned uniform, with a sullen expression on his handsome face; he might be any age from nine to nineteen and he looks bored and unhappy. But other pictures show Monty at his most gay and irrepressible: we see him, in smoking jacket, top-hat and huge leather boots, sitting in ‘Truelove’, the tiny wheeled horse and carriage with which the children played, cheering on a puzzled goat which has been attached to the reins. Monty has a look that is simultaneously wild and self-indulgent.
In his portrait, painted when Monty was nineteen or so, he seems calmer but somehow unconvincing, as if he were not sure whether to look foppish, quizzical, or rakish. His entry in the ‘Confessions’ (which he forgot to sign) conveys a similar impression of uncertainty. His remarks were those of someone trying to be amusing, with neither the panache nor the wit to carry it off: ‘Your favourite heroes in real life?’ – ‘Fenians’; ‘Your present state of mind?’ – ‘Oh my!’; ‘Your favourite qualities in man?’ – ‘Being a good fellow generally’; and – a clue to the fact it is Monty who is writing – ‘Your idea of misery?’ – ‘Borrowing money.’ There was something melancholy about Monty and, though his influence on his younger sister was much less direct and obvious than that of Madge, he nevertheless presented a worrying puzzle to Agatha.
Agatha Mary Clarissa was named after her mother and grandmother, the name of Agatha, she believed, being added by Clara, with her usual agility, as a result of a suggestion made on the way to the christening. (One of Clara’s favourite novels was, moreover, Miss Mulock’s Agatha’s Husband.) During the course of Agatha’s life, she was to acquire, or adopt, a number of different names and titles; to her friends and family (except those close relations who later called her ‘Nima’, her grandson’s corruption of ‘Grandma’) she was always ‘Agatha’. As her first publisher told her in 1920, it was an unusual and therefore memorable name – and that is what we will call her here.
Frederick’s collection of bills also gives some impression of the furniture, books and pictures amongst which Agatha grew up. Some of the better furniture was sold in the years after her father’s death, when her mother’s circumstances were considerably reduced, but a good deal of it, including many of the lamps, screens and pictures, and much of the china, cutlery and glass, was used to furnish the houses in which Agatha subsequently lived. As she said herself, her father’s taste in pictures did not match his discrimination in buying furniture. The fashion of the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties was to hang as many pictures as possible on whatever wall space was available and this Frederick proceeded to do, with vague oils, Japanese caricatures, pastels on copper and masses of engravings, including one called ‘Weighing the Deer’, of which he was particularly fond. Certain cherished objects were assigned to those members of the family who would eventually inherit them. (Clara’s Aunt Margaret would write names of the future beneficiaries on the backs of the canvases.) Agatha’s particular inheritance was ‘Caught’, an oil of a woman catching a boy in a shrimping net, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884 and acquired by Frederick ten years later for the sum of £40. In the same year, when Agatha was four, her father commissioned a local artist, N.H.J. Baird, to paint the family dog, an exercise which was regarded as so successful that Mr Baird was subsequently invited to paint Frederick, Agatha, Monty, Madge, and Agatha’s nurse. When, at the age of seven, Agatha was asked to name her favourite poets, painters and composers in the ‘Confessions’, she loyally put Baird’s name alongside those of Shakespeare and Tennyson.
The focus of Agatha’s life as a small child was ‘wise and patient Nanny’, the cook Jane, and successive parlourmaids. Her recollections of these companions date from an early age. Unusually, too, her Autobiography described what Nursie and Jane looked like, her nurse with ‘a wise wrinkled face with deep-set eyes’, framed, as in Mr Baird’s portrait, by a frilled cambric cap, and Jane, ‘majestic, Olympian, with vast bust, colossal hips, and a starched band that confined her waist’. Nursie represented ‘a fixed