Anne Hart - Agatha Christie’s Marple

‘We went to have tea at the Elysée Hotel. And my grandmother looked round, and she said suddenly, “Clara, I do believe I am the only woman here in a bonnet!” And she was, too! When she got home she packed up all her bonnets, and her beaded mantles too – and sent them off.’

It is clear that these two, her mother and grandmother, undertook to initiate Miss Marple at an early age into the obligations and mysteries of being a lady. ‘To wit: that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised’; that ‘a gentlewoman should always be able to control herself in public, however much she may give way in private’; and, above all, that a lady must always do her duty: ‘Port wine jelly and calf’s head broth taken to the sick. My mother used to do it.’

In later years Miss Marple was to speak of ‘the old days, with all the big family reunions.’ At such gatherings there were no doubt assembled her aunts: her Great Aunt Fanny, for example, who told Miss Marple when she was sixteen that ‘young people think the old people are fools – but the old people know the young people are fools!’; her Aunt Helen who, perhaps because she had never been to Paris, would probably arrive wearing a bonnet and what she always called her ‘black poplin’ mantle; the survivor aunt, whose name we do not know, who had been shipwrecked on five different occasions; and the detective aunt, no doubt a significant early model, who could smell when people told lies, because ‘their noses twitched, she said, and then the smell came.’

Also arriving would be the uncles: Great Uncle Thomas, the retired admiral, who lived in a handsome terrace in Richmond; Uncle Henry, the bachelor, described on one occasion as ‘a man of unusual self-control,’ and on another as someone who was given to temper tantrums over food and a habit of keeping a great deal of money hidden in his library behind volumes of sermons. And then would come the canons: the uncle who was a canon of Chichester Cathedral, and Uncle Thomas, who was a canon of Ely.

Her cousins, Anthony and Gordon, would probably be there as well. ‘Whatever Anthony did always went right for him, and with poor Gordon it was just the other way about; race horses went lame, and stocks went down.’ Cousin Fanny Godfrey, who stuttered, would no doubt be present, and perhaps Cousin Ethel, Lady Merridew, who lived in style in Lowndes Square. Many years later Miss Marple was to gaze upon a painful scene – a vast skyscraper of modern design built upon the site where Lady Merridew’s house once stood. ‘There must be progress I suppose,’ mused Miss Marple. ‘If Cousin Ethel knew, she’d turn in her grave, I’m sure.’

At fourteen Miss Marple was given a great treat – a visit to London with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Thomas, the Canon of Ely, to stay At Bertram’s Hotel . Forever after, Bertram’s, ‘dignified, unostentatious and quietly expensive,’ was to remain in Miss Marple’s mind as the ultimate holiday. It was probably during a visit such as this that a pilgrimage was made across Battersea Bridge to visit a retired governess, Miss Ledbury, who lived at Princes Terrace Mansions, and it was almost certainly the occasion for one of her Aunt Helen’s memorable expeditions, niece in tow, to the grocery department of the Army & Navy Stores, there to seek out ‘our special man’ from whom to order, in an ensuing leisurely hour,

every conceivable grocery that could be purchased and stored up for future use. Christmas was provided for, and there was even a far-off look towards Easter. The young Jane had fidgeted somewhat, and been told to go and look at the glass department by way of amusement … Having had a thoroughly pleasant morning, Aunt Helen would say in the playful manner of those times ‘And how would a little girl feel about some luncheon.’ Whereupon they went up in the lift to the fourth floor and had luncheon which always finished with a strawberry ice.

To round off her education, Miss Marple was sent, at about the age of sixteen, to school in Florence. There she met two American girls, Ruth and Carrie Louise Martin, ‘exciting to the English girl because of their quaint ways of speech and their forthright manner and vitality.’ They were to become her lifelong friends. ‘In spite of all my aches and pains,’ Carrie Louise was to say to Miss Marple nearly fifty years later, ‘it seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Fräulein Schweich and her boots?’

‘Of course it was the fashion when we were young to have ideals,’ Carrie’s sister, Ruth, once said to Miss Marple.

‘We all had them, it was the proper thing for young girls. You were going to nurse lepers, Jane, and I was going to be a nun. One gets over all that nonsense. Marriage, I suppose one might say, knocks it out of one. Still, taking it by and large, I haven’t done badly out of marriage.’

Neither did Carrie Louise. Between them the two sisters were to acquire six husbands and a great deal of wealth. It can hardly be said that Miss Marple followed their examples.

Though she herself did not marry and was destined, in fact, to become the archetypal village spinster, Miss Marple had her own salad days and a number of beaux. In old age she was to recall them with indulgence:

Jane Marple, that pink and white eager young girl … Such a silly girl in many ways … now who was that very unsuitable young man whose name – oh dear, she couldn’t even remember it now! How wise her mother had been to nip that friendship so firmly in the bud. She had come across him years later – and really he was quite dreadful! At the time she had cried herself to sleep for at least a week!

And there was:

A young man she had met at a croquet party. He had seemed so nice – rather gay, almost Bohemian in his views. And then he had been unexpectedly warmly welcomed by her father. He had been suitable, eligible; he had been asked freely to the house more than once, and Miss Marple had found that, after all, he was dull. Very dull.

And she had enjoyed dancing. In old age, holidaying in the Caribbean, she would have preferred ‘the muted strains of the “Blue Danube”,’ though she had to confess that watching the local dancing had its merits as well: ‘She liked the shuffling feet and the rhythmic sway of the bodies.’ Rather more comfortable, perhaps, than

‘dancing with a man dressed as a brigand chief when I was a young girl. He had five kinds of knives and daggers, and I can’t tell you how awkward and uncomfortable it was for his partner.’

In later years, when she was in her sixties, seventies, and eighties, Miss Marple occasionally made such references to her girlhood, but on no recorded occasion did she ever refer directly to all the other years between. We know nothing of her life as a young woman, her middle age, or how she came to her appointed place as the resident sleuth of St Mary Mead. One would like to speculate, to imagine something vaguely heroic, perhaps, but it is all explained as much as it will ever be, I suspect, by scattered references to home nursing. ‘I am used to sick people,’ she once said. ‘I have had a great deal to do with them in my time.’ On another occasion we are told: ‘Long experience of nursing made Miss Marple almost automatically straighten the sheet and tuck it under the mattress on her side of the bed.’

‘Long experience of nursing …’ From this single phrase emerges a picture of the unmarried daughter, the once pink-and-white eager girl, who stayed at home in some provincial town to gradually become, as the years passed, the companion and nurse of her parents in their old age. She also became, as we shall see, the real or honorary favourite aunt – sometimes doting, sometimes vinegary – of a number of people.