Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

they often performed pantomimes in a room known as the Council Chamber. An enormous curtained alcove in front of the fireplace made an excellent stage, and, on account of her porcelain features and dreamy manner, Agatha was nicknamed ‘Starry Eyes’ by the Watts family.
    Years later, after the disappearance, Agatha developed agoraphobia, a nervous reaction to crowds and strangers that led many to suppose that she was pathologically shy. Yet those who knew Agatha before the incident remembered her as an extremely attractive young girl who, when she grew older, had no shortage of male admirers. Her reticence, which arose from her pleasure in observing others and her disinclination to part with information except on her own terms, meant that she was often mistaken by those who did not know her well as either aloof or shy.
    Nan’s father, James II, used to make Agatha feel self-conscious by asking her, ‘What is our dream-child thinking of?’ He would encourage her to play the piano and sing sentimental songs to him, which she found easier to do than talking to him. She much preferred Nan’s mother, Anne, whom she found brisk, cheerful and completely factual. At this time Nan went in for being an enfant terrible and firing off damns and blasts at her mother, which upset her a great deal.
    In addition to Jimmy, Nan had three other brothers: the sensitive and charming Humphrey (Ughtred had died at the age of two), the gifted and precocious Lyonel and the shy and handsome Miles. They all loved acting with the exception of Jimmy. Humphrey eventually owned his own theatre in Manchester and ran a firm called Fitups, later known as Watts and Corry, which supplied scenery and stage equipment to amateur societies and did camouflage work during the Second World War. Lyonel married three times and had one daughter Pamela, known as Merelina, by his first wife, the actress Jean Blomfield, who was related to the actor-manager Sir Nigel Playfair. During the 1920s Lyonel helped Sir Nigel run the Lyric Theatre at Hammersmith in London. In addition to acting professionally on the stage, Lyonel also appeared in several films, including Outward Bound and So Well Remembered with John Mills and Trevor Howard. Humphrey and Lyonel also became the inspiration for the two brothers Alex and Stephen Restarick in Agatha’s 1952 novel They Do It With Mirrors.
    The youngest brother Miles, despite being shy all his life, was very good with children and used to play a game called ‘sitting on books’, which endeared him to Agatha and Nan. He was easily the most handsome of all the brothers – tall, with clean-cut features and very fair hair – and he duly boasted of this in a piece of verse.
Miles once pondered in a deep reverie,
And the gist of his thoughts he confided to me.
Which were that he thought in the whole family
There was no-one as handsome or as clever as he.
    Despite his retiring nature Miles joined the Grenadier Guards as a private spoke fluently. He often carried messages behind enemy lines and his work resulted in him being awarded the French Croix de Guerre medal. In 1927 he took his capital out of the family firm S. and J. Watts and bought a fruit farm that was only intermittently successful.
    On Boxing Day Agatha accompanied the Wattses to a pantomime in Manchester. A love of pantomimes stayed with her all her life. She and the family returned home on the train singing all the songs they had heard, with the Wattses rendering the comedians’ songs in broad Lancashire accents. One song they bawled out together went, ‘I was born on a Friday, I was born on a Friday, I was born on a Friday when my mother wasn’t at ’ome!’ Humphrey sang the supreme favourite in a melancholy voice, ‘The window, The window, I’ve push it through the window. I have no pain, dear Mother, now, I’ve pushed it through the window.’
    Back in Torquay, when she was not helping Clarissa run Ashfield, Agatha’s activities included reading, embroidering