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

the ship went down. A cat that was rescued gave birth to four kittens, and Nan, unfazed by the incident, made use of her Kodak camera to photograph her fellow victims sheltering under the tarpaulins.
    Years later Agatha would use the shipwreck in her story ‘The Voice in the Dark’. The incident made front-page news in the Otago Witness , and Nan triumphantly bore copies of the newspaper back to England to show her disbelieving family. On the return sea voyage she became romantically attached to a man from Belfast called Hugo Pollock whom she would marry two years later, and she happily regaled Agatha with the details of their liaison.
    Agatha demonstrated her physical bravery on 10 May 1911 when she and her mother attended an aeroplane flying exhibition. The pilots were offering members of the public £5 to go flying with them, and Agatha begged Clarissa to pay the fee so she could take her first aeroplane flight. Although aviation was in its infancy and aeroplanes frequently crashed, Clarissa gave her consent because she did not wish to disappoint her daughter. After returning safely to earth Agatha described her five-minute flight as ‘fantastic’.
    Around this time the most serious of Agatha’s romances was with the modest, kindly and happy-go-lucky Reggie Lucy, a major in the Gunners, who later became the model for Peter Maitland in her autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait , which was published under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Clarissa approved their engagement, and when Reggie Lucy returned to his regiment in Hong Kong their courtship continued by post.
    Despite Reggie Lucy’s lazy charm there was one thing he was unable to offer Agatha: she had a secret desire to be conquered by a stranger, ‘the Man from the Sea’, as she termed him in her autobiography. The need to be swept away by a stranger became a romantic obsession.
    Reggie Lucy, despite his devil-may-care attitude, had missed out on many things in life, and his suggestion that Agatha should keep her options open gave her an escape clause. The romance and adventure that Agatha craved suddenly materialized on 12 October 1912 in the form of Archibald Christie, the man who would change her life for ever then break her heart.

Chapter Two
The Man from the Sea
     
    Agatha was just twenty-two years old when she met the dashing and assertive Archibald Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh at their home Ugbrooke House in Devon. Twenty-three years old, he was tall and handsome, with wavy fair hair, a cleft chin, an unusually upturned nose and intensely blue eyes. He had been born on 30 September 1889 in Peshawar in northern India.
    Archie’s Irish mother, Ellen Ruth Christie, was alive, but his English father, Archibald Christie Senior, a former divisional judge in the Indian civil service, had died some years earlier after falling from his horse following his return to England. Ellen Christie, known within family circles as Peg, later married William Hemsley, a schoolmaster from Clifton College in Bristol, where Archie had been head boy. There was another son from the first marriage, Campbell Manning Christie, four years younger, who ended his military career as a major-general. He was a paler version of his brother, with artistic leanings that reached fruition after the Second World War when he wrote a series of highly successful plays.
    Archie had trained at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy after leaving Clifton and was a lieutenant stationed at Exeter in Devon. He encouraged Agatha to cut several partners so that she could dance with him on their first meeting, but Agatha wistfully assumed theirs had been a passing encounter. Much to her surprise he turned up at Ashfield several days later on a motor cycle.
    Agatha was quickly drawn out of herself by Archie’s charm, intelligence and impetuosity. Here was someone who promised romance and adventure in equal proportions and could challenge her reticence and seek out