Agatha Christie’s Marple: The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple. Anne Hart
still depend on faithful Inch, and while there were new faces at the St Mary Mead and Much Benham police stations, their owners seemed as incapable of preventing the less attractive members of the community from murdering or being murdered as had their predecessors.
Nevertheless, some real changes did occur in St Mary Mead in those postwar decades: the building of the new Development, for example, and the wave of outsiders it brought with it; the alterations to the High Street; the arrival of a glittering new supermarket; and the rather frightening proximity of an airfield (a jet plane once broke the sound barrier and two windows in Miss Marple’s greenhouse at the same time). All these were radical departures from the past. Next door to Miss Marple, an even more profound change occurred with the departure of the Clements and the arrival of a new, and even more absent-minded, vicar.
Perhaps the most interesting changes of all were the ones that took place at Gossington Hall. Following the death of Colonel Bantry, Mrs Bantry, who became as comfortable and cheerful a widow as she had been a wife, sold Gossington Hall, keeping the East Lodge for herself. Cast adrift, Gossington Hall had a checkered career reminiscent of Old Hall in the 1930s. First run as an unsuccessful guest house, it was then
bought by four people who had shared it as four roughly divided flats and subsequently quarrelled. Finally the Ministry of Health had bought it for some obscure purpose for which they eventually did not want it.
The next owner was far more exciting, easily the most glamorous outsider ever to alight in St Mary Mead. A film star of international repute, Marina Gregg arrived in the village with her fifth husband and a retinue of assorted eccentrics to live in a fabulously renovated Gossington Hall. Tarted up, it once again proved a splendid place for bodies. Three, possibly four, sensational killings in quick succession were enough to set a village, even one as experienced as St Mary Mead, completely agog.
And what of St Mary Mead today? Does an Arab sheik now preside over the palm court and pool at Gossington Hall? If so, what is his imminent fate? As Development follows Development, will St Mary Mead disappear entirely into the boundaries of an unsuspecting Much Benham? Has a judicial inquiry been appointed, or a Royal Commission struck, to investigate the uncontrollable rise in village crime since the sad departure of its resident Nemesis?
‘I regard St Mary Mead as a stagnant pool,’ Miss Marple’s sophisticated young nephew once remarked.
‘That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,’ his aunt replied briskly. ‘Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.’
* A charming country town and a favourite haunt during the 1920s and 1930s of a well-known contemporary of Miss Marple’s, M. Hercule Poirot. See Dumb Witness and ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ (in Poirot’s Early Cases).
† At risk of further confusing the reader, it should be added that Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead is not the village of the same name described in The Mystery of the Blue Train. That St Mary Mead is in Kent.
‘I live very quietly in the country, you see.’
—Miss Marple, NEMESIS
Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy – which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life,’ wrote Agatha Christie in her autobiography. Embryonically, Miss Marple may have had some early relationship to Caroline, the doctor’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published four years before the first appearance of Miss Marple. Of Caroline, Dr Sheppard said:
‘The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr Kipling tells us, is: “Go and find out.” If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One might omit the first part of the motto. Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is.’
Agatha Christie was fond of Caroline, and when, in an adaptation of Roger Ackroyd to the stage, she was replaced by a young, attractive girl, she resented her removal very much: ‘I liked the part she played in village life … I think at that moment, in St Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born.’*
Agatha Christie’s grandmother and her friends provided further inspiration. Miss Marple was, in Agatha Christie’s words,
the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies – old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her – though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.
Despite Miss Marple’s first appearance as a detective at the age of sixty-five or thereabouts, it is possible to piece together something of her childhood and girlhood from clues she occasionally dropped in conversation during her extraordinarily long old age. Characteristically, she had from the beginning an excellent memory: ‘I’ve always remembered the mauve irises on my nursery walls and yet I believe it was re-papered when I was only three.’ On this wallpaper, over her bed, was pinned a prophetic text: Ask and you shall receive.
There was probably only one other child in the nursery, a sister, and the two little girls seem to have spent the sort of strict, sheltered, governess-run lives familiar to us from the first chapters of many Victorian autobiographies.
There are reports of long hours in the schoolroom. In old age Miss Marple knew very well how hard it was for youth to picture her ‘young and pigtailed and struggling with decimals and English literature,’ but adds, wryly, ‘I was, I think, well educated for the standard of my day. My sister and I had a German governess – a Fräulein. A very sentimental creature. She taught us the language of flowers.’ This mild disrespect for the kind of education girls of her time received was once confided to, of all people, her old enemy, Inspector Slack:
‘So difficult, you know, to explain oneself, don’t you think? … not having been educated in the modern style – just a governess, you know, who taught one the dates of the Kings of England and General Knowledge … Discursive, you know, but not teaching one to keep to the point.’
To her great ally, Inspector Craddock, when he spoke admiringly of the women of her generation, she replied:
‘I’m sure, my dear boy, you would find the young lady of the type you refer to as a very inadequate helpmeet nowadays. Young ladies were not encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees or any kind of academic distinction.’
There were many dos and don’ts: ‘Miss Marple sat very upright because she had been taught to use a back-board as a girl’; ‘In my young days it was considered to be very bad manners to take medicines with one’s meals. It was on a par with blowing your nose at the dinner table’; ‘When I was a girl, Inspector, nobody ever mentioned the word stomach.’
But there were useful compensations: riddles and Mother Goose rhymes in early childhood, playing with disappearing ink, conjuring tricks (‘It was the trick of the Lady Sawn in Half that made me think of it,’ she was to say many years later to a bemused Inspector Curry), and visits to Madame Tussaud’s.
Who were her parents, and where did they live? We are never told exactly, but a distinctly clerical pattern, almost Mafia-like in its family connections, seems to emerge. Miss Marple was, we do know, a ‘pink and white English girl from a Cathedral Close’ and probably, therefore, the daughter of a canon or the dean of a cathedral.