This chapter deals with the formative years of Agatha’s adulthood, including her abrupt wartime marriage to Archie after a lot of on-again-off-again, training and working as both nurse and pharmacist, and eventually establishing herself as a housewife and an author.
She vividly describes the shock of learning to nurse wounded and dying soldiers, but also how canny she had to get, and quick. “[I]n a month or so I was quite adept at looking out for their various tricks,” as when a soldier claimed that the doctor had prescribed him a diet prominently featuring port wine!
Though married now, Agatha continued to live at home in Ashfield with her mother while Archie was gone for long tours of duty with the brand-new Air Force. During this time, her elderly Grannie, no longer able to care for herself, came to live with them. Just how unable she was to take care of herself became clear when they undertook the herculean task of emptying out her house at Ealing. The tragic specter of spoiled food pointed not only to Grannie’s growing dementia but also to the desperate search for foodstuffs in wartime. “Jams that had gone mouldy, plums that had fermented, even packets of butter and sugar which had slipped down behind things and been nibbled by mice… vast monuments of waste! I think that is what hurt her so much: the waste.”
Not to worry: some good things did survive. “Here were her home-made liqueurs—they at least, owing to the saving quality of alcohol, were in good condition. Thirty-six demijohns of cherry brandy, cherry gin, damson gin, damson brandy, and the rest of if, went off in the furniture van. On arrival there were only thirty-one. ‘And to think,’ said Grannie, ‘those men said they were all teetotallers!’” They’d have done better if they were in fact teetotallers who resold their absconded goods on the black market—financially, anyway, if not morally.
At Ashfield, unfortunately, Grannie resumed her habit of squirreling away food. “Two dozen tins of sardines were laid flat on top of a Chippendale escritoire.” “Things like sardines and bags of flour seemed to turn up in the most unexpected places for many years to come. A disused clothes-basket in the spare-room was full of flour, slightily weevily. The hams, at any rate, had been eaten in good condition. Jars of honey, bottles of French plums, and some, but not many, tinned goods were liable to be found—though Grannie disapproved of tinned goods, and suspected them of being a source of ptomaine poisoning” (Sad Cypress, anyone?) (Don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler.)
Agatha mentions by-the-bye the widespread suspicion of tinned food in her girlhood. Don’t eat the lobster at a dance, lest it be tinned! Tinned crab was so universally suspected you didn’t even need warning against it. And now the irony of wartime, when frozen food and tinned vegetables were the only way to keep yourself fed.
Grannie so internalized the fear that as dementia set in she became convinced someone was trying to poison her. Agatha surmises that “life would be more interesting if someone were trying to poison you.” Grannie would complain to Agatha’s mother Clara, “My egg yesterday—scrambled egg it was. It tasted very peculiar—metallic! … Old Mrs Wyatt, you know, she was poisoned by the butler and his wife.” Thereafter Grannie insists on a boiled egg. (I will not specify the title or author, but I know of a non-Agatha Golden Age detective novel in which a whole egg is no protection against poison. Grannie should’ve been more careful still!)
Agatha soon moved from being a nurse to training to be a pharmacist, which became the critical source of her actual scientific knowledge of poisons that she would deploy to such effect in her writing career. She remembers fondly blowing up “our Cona coffee machine in the process of practising Marsh’s test for arsenic.”
When Archie came home on his second leave, she recalls how they spent together time in the woods and picked apples from a tree in “No Man’s Land,” the name given to a neighborhood orchard in honor of a local son killed in the Air Force. The iconography and irony of what would become of their marriage in this little detail requires no further comment.
Once they settled in London, Agatha had to learn to run her own household—though not without domestic service. Heaven forfend! The landlady Mrs Woods trained Agatha in the skills of smart shopping: “That fish isn’t fresh. You didn’t poke it the way I told you to. You’ve got to poke it and look at its eye, and poke its eye.” “And those oranges now. I know you fancy an orange sometimes as a bit of a treat, in spite of the expense, but that kind there has just been soaked in boiling water to make them look fresh.” Through Archie’s Air Force rationing coupons, Agatha and Mrs Wood together once scored “an enormous piece of beef… of no recognisable cut or shape,” but still, it was exciting.
For all the restrictions, Agatha remembered the rationing in the First World War being much fairer than in the Second. Military connections were one thing, though; personal ones were better still. Agatha learned how the friends and relatives of working class shop owners got much better food. Mrs Woods again: “I’ve got a cousin, Bob, in the grocery—as much as sugar and better as we want we get, and marge.” Having such connections got you “an extra pound of butter and an extra pot of jam, and so on, without any feeling of behaving dishonestly.”
Mrs Woods did the substantial cooking for the Christies, but Agatha took on the project of producing “lighter meals, supper dishes,” like jam pies, toad-in-the-hole, and cheese soufflé. The National Kitchens were apparently the pioneers in prepared foods: “things ready cooked in a container” or “National Soup Squares,” which Archie nicknamed “sand and gravel soup.” Archie, ill and dyspeptic postwar, would sometimes reject Agatha’s creations and ask instead for “treacle or golden syrup.” I think Archie tired of Agatha herself when she stopped being “treacle” and “golden syrup” and became a real person with real feelings and real problems.
During her pregnancy Archie did step up a bit—I guess—buying an expensive lobster to cheer her up (but then leaving it in her bed with “its head and whiskers lying on my pillow” … um … ???) and occasionally stirring up a cup of the alarmingly named Benger’s Food, “a commercial food powder to be mixed with milk that was popular in the first half of the 1900s.” Though he would pout if her morning sickness prevented her from drinking it. (Remember that cheese soufflé you spurned, buster? Well, then.)
Overall, the two of them had to adjust to less money than either of them had been used to—“less luxury, plainer food, clothes and all those things.” Eggs were shockingly expensive at eightpence each. Of course, that still didn’t mean giving up the help! Do you take her for a peasant? So they hired Jessie Swannell to help with little Rosalind and a certain Rose to be their maid. Rose spoke mournfully of her maltreatment in previous households when all she got for breakfast was “tea and a kipper, and toast and butter and jam. Well, I mean, I got so thin I was wasting away.” Agatha, not eager to lose yet another competent domestic assistant, made sure Rose got two or three kippers and lavish quantites of eggs and bacon.
The last food detail in this chapter finally puts us in mind of her budding writing career. Her very first book and first detective novel, introducing none other than Hercule Poirot, was The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The Bodley Head, its publisher, had a house spelling of “coco” rather than “cocoa,” which infuriated Agatha, but no amount of pointing out real-life cocoa tins with the proper spelling could shift them. It pleases me immensely that her first big bust-up with editorial interference was over the spelling of a food word!
And anyway, she was right. It’s obviously “cocoa,” not “coco.” No wonder The Bodley Head eventually lost Agatha’s love and publishing contracts.
English Toad-in-the-Hole with a Cup of Wartime Cocoa
When I read about Agatha making toad-in-the-hole, my American mind instantly thought of a piece of bread with a circle cut out the middle, an egg cracked in the hole and topped with the missing disc, and the whole ensemble fried to a golden crisp.
My mom made this dish for me when I was little and we’d always go through the same routine. “Aw, Mommy, you only gave me a piece of fried bread!” “Well, you’ve been a very bad girl and you deserve it.” “Hey wait a minute! There’s an egg in here. I guess you do love me after all.” “Yes, I do.”
Given how thoroughly I’ve established by now my dislike of Archie and my perception that all the gustatory encounters between them are illustrative of their ultimate destiny as a couple, it should come as no surprise that I think the man deserves fried bread at most. And fried in “marge,” for that matter, not butter.
However, that is not what “toad-in-the-hole” means across the pond. There it is a handful of sausages baked in the same batter as you’d make a Yorkshire pudding with. I suppose if you covered the sausages with enough batter, you could have the same ritual dialogue with someone you love and who loves you in turn.
The cocoA is made with wartime restraint, i.e. entirely of water and powders. You used up your ration of milk in the batter for the toad-in-the-hole. But it’s rather nice all the same. (And nicer if you cheat by adding a splash of cream.)
Toad-in-the-Hole
4 precooked sausages of any kind
1 c (125 g) flour
½ tsp salt
1 c (250 mL) milk
2 eggs, beaten in the milk
coarse mustard and pickles for serving
Butter a baking dish and lay the sausages in it. Whisk together the flour and salt in a bowl. Whisk the milk and eggs together in a liquid measuring cup. Pour the milk mixture into the flour mixture slowly, whisking all the while, to make a smooth thick batter. Let the batter-coated sausages sit at room temperature for half an hour, then bake at 425°F (220°C) for 20 minutes. Check to see if the batter’s cooked through; if not, drop the temperature to 375°F (190°C) and bake another 10 minutes or so, till done. Serve at once, hot, with pickles and mustard on the side. (I’m not sure if this is how the English eat it, but it’s how it tastes good to me.)
Wartime Cocoa
per serving:
1 c (250 mL) water
2 Tbsp nonfat milk powder
1 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp malt powder (optional—but it seems like a logical add-on in the name of “nutrition.” Plus, it tastes good)
Whisk everything together in a small pot. Bring just to the edge of a boil. Serve at once.