drink soup out of the tureen in the dining-room before you all came into dinner.’
This caused lively interest on the part of both my mother and Madge. ‘But why didn’t you ever tell me?’ asked mother. I stared at her. I couldn’t see the point.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seemed–’ I hesitated, mustering all my dignity, and proclaimed: ‘I don’t care for parting with information.’
After that it was always a joke brought up against me. ‘Agatha doesn’t like parting with information.’ It was true enough. I didn’t. Unless they struck me as apposite or interesting, I tucked away any scraps of information that came to me, locked them up, as it were, in a file inside my head. This was incomprehensible to the rest of my family, who were all extrovert talkers. If asked to keep a secret they never by any chance remembered to do so! It made them all much more entertaining than I was.
If Madge went to a dance or to a garden party, when she came back she had quantities of amusing things to tell. Indeed my sister was an entertaining person in every way–wherever she went things happened to her. Even later in life, going down the village to do a little marketing, she would come back with something extraordinary that had occurred or something somebody had said. These things were not untruths, either–there was always a good foundation of fact, but worked up by Madge to make a better story.
I, on the contrary, presumably taking after my father in this respect, when asked if anything amusing had happened, would immediately say, ‘Nothing’. ‘What was Mrs So-and-so wearing at the party?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Mrs S. has done up her drawing-room again I hear; what colour is it now?’ ‘I didn’t look.’ ‘Oh, Agatha, you really are hopeless, you never notice anything.’
I continued on the whole to keep my own counsel. I don’t think I meant to be secretive. It just seemed to me that most things didn’t matter–so why keep talking about them? Or else I was so busy conducting the conversations and quarrels of ‘the girls’ and inventing adventures for Tony and myself that I could not pay attention to the small affairs going on round me. It took something like a rumour of ruin to get me really aroused. Undoubtedly I was a dull child, with every prospect of growing up to be the kind of person who is most difficult to integrate properly in a party.
I have never been good at parties–and never much enjoyed them. I suppose there were children’s parties, but I don’t think there were nearly as many then as there are nowadays. I do remember going to tea with friends and friends coming to tea with me. That I did enjoy–and do nowadays. Set Parties, I think, in my youth only happened round Christmas time. I seem to remember one fancy-dress party and another at which there was a conjuror.
I fancy my mother was anti-party, being of the opinion that children got too hot, over-excited and over-eaten, and frequently came home and were sick from all three causes. She was probably right. At any children’s parties of any size that I have gone to, I have come to the conclusion that at least a third of the children are not really enjoying themselves.
A party is controllable up to twenty in number–beyond that, I should say, it is dominated by a lavatory complex! Children who want to go to the lavatory, who don’t like to say they want to go to the lavatory, leave going to the lavatory till the last minute, and so on. If the lavatories are inadequate to deal with large quantities of children who all want to use them at once, chaos and some regrettable incidents ensue. I remember one little girl of only two whose mother had been persuaded, against the advice of her experienced Nanny, to bring her child to one party. ‘Annette is so sweet, she must come. I’m sure she will enjoy it, and we’ll all take great care of her.’ As soon as they got to the party her mother, to be on the safe side, marched her to a potty. Annette, worked up to a fever of excitement, was quite unable to do her little performance. ‘Oh, well, perhaps she doesn’t really want to go,’ said the mother hopefully. They came downstairs and when a conjuror was producing things of every kind from his ears and his nose, and making the children laugh, and they were all standing round shouting and clapping their hands, the worst happened.
‘My dear,’ said an elderly aunt, recounting this to my mother. ‘You really have never seen anything like it–poor child. Right in the middle of the floor. Just like a horse, it was!’
Marie must have left some time before my father’s death–possibly a year or two. She had contracted to come for two years to England, but she stayed on at least a year after. She was homesick for her family and, also, I think, being sensible and practical, realised it was time for her to think in a serious French way about marriage. She had saved up a very nice little dot from her wages, and so, with tears, fond embraces to her ‘dear Mees’, Marie went, and left me very lonely.
We had, however, before she departed, come to an agreement on the subject of my sister’s future husband. That, as I have said, had been one of our continual sources of speculation. Marie’s selection had been firmly ‘le Monsieur blond’.
My mother, as a girl living with her aunt in Cheshire, had had a schoolfriend to whom she was much devoted. When Annie Browne married James Watts and my mother married her step-cousin Frederick Miller the two girls agreed that they would never forget each other and that they would always exchange letters and news. Although my grandmother left Cheshire for London, the two girls still kept in touch with each other. Annie Watts had five children–four boys and a girl–mother, of course, had three. They exchanged photographs of their children at various ages, and sent presents to them at Christmas.
So when my sister was going on a visit to Ireland, to make up her mind whether she was going to get engaged to a certain young man who was anxious to marry her, my mother mentioned Madge’s journey to Annie Watts, and Annie begged Madge to come and stay at Abney Hall in Cheshire, on her way back from Holyhead. She would so much like to see one of mother’s children.
Madge, therefore, having had a good time in Ireland and having decided that she did not want to marry Charlie P. after all, broke her journey back and stayed with the Watts family. The eldest son, James, who was then twenty-one or twenty-two, and was still at Oxford, was a quiet fair-haired young man. He had a soft low voice and did not speak much, and he paid much less attention to my sister than most young men did. She found this so extraordinary that it excited her interest. She took a good deal of trouble over James, but was not sure what effect she had made. Anyway, after she came home, desultory correspondence took place between them.
Actually James had been bowled over by her from the first moment she appeared, but it was not in his nature to display such emotion. He was shy and reserved. He came to stay with us the following summer. I took a great fancy to him at once. He was kind to me, always treating me seriously, and not making silly jokes or talking to me as though I was a little girl. He treated me as an individual, and I became devoted to him. Marie also thought well of him. So ‘le Monsieur blond’ was constantly discussed between us in the sewing room.
‘I don’t think they really seem to care for each other very much, Marie.’
‘Ah, mais oui, he thinks of her a great deal, and he watches her when she is not looking. Oh yes, il est bien épris. And it would be a good marriage, very sensible. He has the good prospects, I hear, and is tout à fait un garçon serieux. He will make a very good husband. And Mademoiselle, she is gay, witty, full of fun and laughter. It will suit her well to have a quiet and steady husband, and he will appreciate her because she is so different.’
The person who didn’t like him, I think, was my father, but I believe that is almost inevitable with the fathers of charming and gay daughters–they want somebody much better than could ever have been born at all. Mothers are supposed to feel the same about their sons’ wives. As my brother never married, my mother was not affected that way.
I must say, she never considered that her daughters’ husbands were good enough for them, but she admitted herself that that was a failing on her part rather than a failing on theirs. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I can’t think any man would be good enough for either of my two daughters.’
One of the great joys in life was the local theatre. We were all lovers of the theatre in my family. Madge and Monty went practically every week