Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart
in this family. ‘Madam, we, in our country, have a great tenderness, a great respect for the mother. The mère de famille, she is everything!’ was how he introduced himself to a matron in ‘The King of Clubs’; and ‘I comprehend the mother’s heart. No one comprehends it better than I, Hercule Poirot,’ he told the Dowager Duchess of Merton in Lord Edgware Dies. Throughout his life he was to stand in awe of mothers. ‘Mothers, Madame, are particularly ruthless when their children are in danger,’ he said to a somewhat enigmatic one in Death on the Nile. Perhaps Madame Poirot had cause to be formidable? One imagines her determined and orderly, keeping strict accounts, supervising lessons, fighting against considerable odds to bring her children up to be good little bourgeois, and insisting, in their small quarters, that everyone have good manners and be very neat. Is it Madame Poirot we are seeing, shepherding her large flock to church, in Poirot’s recollection of how women looked in his youth: ‘… a coiffure high and rigid – so – and the hat attached with many hatpins – là – là – là et là.’
But life was not all obedience and hard work. Madame Poirot’s children had some good times as well. ‘Les Feux d’Artifices, the Party, the Games with balls,’ recalled Poirot in Peril at End House. Little Hercule must have been especially enthralled with ‘the conjurer, the man who deceives the eye, however carefully it watches’. And they all must have had a splendid time at the Ommegang, the great holiday in July when the Grand Place is thronged with merrymakers. Like most Europeans, however, Poirot regarded childhood as not a particularly desirable state, but as something to be got over with as quickly as possible. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead, listening to Superintendent Spence dwell in nostalgic detail on the pleasure of childhood:
Poirot waited politely. This was one of the moments when, even after half a lifetime in the country, he found the English incomprehensible. He himself had played at Cache Cache in his childhood, but he felt no desire to talk about it or even think about it.
What of his brothers and sisters? ‘There were many of us,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite, but there is a mention of only one of them in all the Poirot literature, and it is a mention that is quickly erased. In the original version of ‘The Chocolate Box’, a short story that recalls his earlier days in Belgium, Poirot says:
‘I was informed that a young lady was demanding me. Thinking that it was, perhaps, my little sister Yvonne, I prayed my landlady to make her mount.’3
Later versions of this story omit this reference to Yvonne, but it does provide an affectionate glimpse of Poirot as an older brother, a glimpse reflected in an avuncular way a generation later in Cards on the Table when Poirot says to a young woman:
‘It is, you understand, that Christmas is coming on. I have to buy presents for many nieces and grand-nieces.’
One has to be a bit wary about this mention of nieces and grand-nieces, however, as Poirot, who practically never mentioned his real family, was apt to invent imaginary relatives to suit his purposes. The most outrageous example of this is the appearance among the dramatis personae of The Big Four of a twin brother, Achille. When first told of this hitherto unsuspected twin, Hastings was understandably surprised. ‘What does he do?’ he demanded, ‘putting aside a half-formed wonder as to the character and disposition of the late Madame Poirot, and her classical taste in Christian names.’ Replied Poirot, smoothly:
‘He does nothing. He is, as I tell, of a singularly indolent disposition. But his abilities are hardly less than my own – which is saying a great deal.’
‘Is he like you to look at?’
‘Not unlike. But not nearly so handsome. And wears no moustaches.’4
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Poirot invented a nephew to extract information from that indomitable purveyor of village news, Miss Caroline Sheppard. ‘I never knew that Poirot had an imbecile nephew?’ said her brother, Dr Sheppard.
‘Didn’t you? Oh, he told me all about it. Poor lad. It’s a great grief to all the family. They’ve kept him at home so far, but it’s getting to such a pitch that they’re afraid he’ll have to go into some kind of institution.’
‘I suppose you know pretty well everything there is to know about Poirot’s family by this time,’ I said, exasperated.
‘Pretty well,’ said Caroline complacently. ‘It’s a great relief to people to be able to tell all their troubles to some one.’
In Dumb Witness, to Hastings’s amusement, Poirot produced three more unfortunate relatives: an invalid uncle, a cousin with jaundice, and an ailing but belligerent mother:
This time he had an aged mother for whom he was anxious to find a sympathetic hospital nurse.
‘You comprehend – I am going to speak to you quite frankly. My mother, she is difficult. We have had some excellent nurses, young women, fully competent but the very fact that they are young has been against them. My mother dislikes young women, she insults them, she is rude and fractious, she fights against open windows and modern hygiene. It is very difficult.’
There may, of course, have been germs of truth in some of these confidences, but one thing we can be sure of is that Poirot once had a grandfather who possessed ‘a large turnip of a watch’ (Hastings called it ‘a large grotesque turnip of a watch’) and that Poirot fell heir to it. ‘Take my watch in your hand – with care,’ he once instructed. ‘It is a family heirloom!’
As a young child, Poirot, a good little Catholic, was ‘educated by the nuns’. There is an evocative scene in ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’ when, working on a case in Ireland, he heard the tolling of a convent bell. At once he was transported back in time: ‘He understood that bell. It was a sound he had been familiar with from early youth.’ He may have heard it with mixed feelings. In Five Little Pigs there is a clue that his convent school had its share of dragons. In meeting ‘the shrewd, penetrating glance’ of a retired governess, Poirot ‘once again felt the years falling away and himself a meek and apprehensive little boy’.
As to his later education – and despite Dr Burton’s suspicions that he was never properly taught the classics – Poirot appears to have undergone a thorough and conventional schooling including the study of English, German and Italian in addition, of course, to the two languages of Belgium, French and Flemish. ‘Alas, there is no proper education nowadays,’ he lamented in After the Funeral. ‘Apparently one learns nothing but economics – and how to set Intelligence Tests!’
It is not easy to imagine Poirot as a youth, his moustache in mere infancy, but bits and pieces emerge in the kindness he later showed to injudicious and awkward young men. ‘I cannot overcome my shyness. I say always the wrong thing. I upset water jugs,’ confessed one of them in Murder in Mesopotamia. ‘“We all do these things when we are young,” said Poirot, smiling. “The poise, the savoir faire, it comes later”’; and ‘It is the time for follies, when one is young,’ he said encouragingly to another in ‘Christmas Adventure’.5
An endearing glimpse of Poirot himself as a youth is provided in Evil Under the Sun:
‘When I was young (and that, Mademoiselle, is indeed a long time ago) there was a game entitled “If not yourself, who would you be?” One wrote the answer in young ladies’ albums. They had gold edges and were bound in blue leather.’
From an early age Poirot knew exactly who he would be:
‘To most of us the test comes early in life. A man is confronted quite soon with the necessity to stand on his own feet, to face dangers and difficulties and to take his own line of dealing with them.’
And here we have it, the surprising lure