What was it? Why, of course, the Gun Man was there.
And suddenly, just when you were having lots of fun, a queer feeling crept over you. It would be a happy dream, a picnic or a party. “Always so tragic and macabre.”Ĭhristie also remembered the suicide of the gardener (whose hanging body was discovered by her father) and a recurring nightmare in which a figure called the Gun Man-with powdered hair, a three-cornered hat, and a French regimental uniform-appeared from nowhere: “I adore nursery rhymes, don’t you?” says a character in The Mousetrap (1952).
#Daphne from stuck in the middle now full
But despite these sepia scenes, Worsley says, “there was something unexpectedly dark about view of the world,” and the alternative version of nursery life can be seen in the titles of her future books: And Then There Were None Five Little Pigs A Pocket Full of Rye Hickory Dickory Dock One, Two, Buckle My Shoe Crooked House Three Blind Mice. It is the safe world of the nursery, however, with its wallpaper of mauve irises and the ever-present figure of “Nursey,” that Christie remembers with the most pleasure: removing Nursey’s “snowy ruffled cap” to tie a satin bow around her head, the taste of Nursey’s juicy steak, falling asleep while Nursey sits sewing by her side. In An Autobiography (1977), the excursion into memory that is Worsley’s principal source, Christie describes Ashfield as “truly a happy house” and a happy childhood as “one of the luckiest things that can happen to you.” There is little about her formative years that Christie cannot recall: a third of An Autobiography’s five hundred pages is devoted to her hoop, her bird, her dog, her dollhouses, the names of her toy soldiers and imaginary kittens, the story about the poisoned candle that her mother never finished telling her, the mathematical problems she enjoyed solving with her father. Her older siblings, Monty and Madge, were at boarding school for the duration of her childhood, and so Agatha-educated, as an experiment, at home-had her adoring mother to herself.
Act 1 takes place in Ashfield, the white-fronted villa in Torquay, on the Devonshire coast, where Agatha Miller was born in 1890. The biography falls into two acts, with an interval. Christie’s greatest achievement, Worsley concludes, was to show that an author need no longer be “a grand old man with a beard.” Christie, for example, is described as an iconoclast who “shattered the twentieth century’s rules for women.” At a time when “females of her generation and social class were supposed to be slender, earn nothing, blindly adore their numerous children and constantly give themselves to others,” Agatha was overweight and a distant mother, and she earned a fortune. Worsley approaches the subject with a “historical” rather than a literary “bent,” but this is history-lite.
Accordingly, Agatha Christie reads as though it were being spoken to a camera: ideas are expressed as simply as possible there is no argumentative rigor the tone is upbeat until, at the end of each chapter, it becomes ominous the lexicon is limited (“dark” and “darkness” are her refrain) and there are goofy asides to the audience-“Urgh,” Worsley shudders in response to the “creepy” behavior of one of Christie’s wartime coworkers. Like Christie herself, Worsley is a prolific writer who aims to address a broad demographic and whose books are made into television shows. She is interested in women’s lives, the national obsession with murder, and the history of the British home, which makes Agatha Christie her ideal subject. Lucy Worsley is a popular British historian and the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.
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