Agatha Christie and a Hat to Win an Election

The Rose and the Yew Tree by Agatha Christie

(under the name Mary Westmacott)

published 1948

 

The narrator’s sister-in-law is expected to help out in the runup to the UK general election of 1945, in a small town in Cornwall

Teresa, who never wears a hat unless she goes to a wedding, had made an expedition to London and had returned with the kind of hat which was, according to her, suitable for a Conservative Woman…

It must, she said, be a hat of good material, not dowdy, but not too fashionable. It must set well on the head and it must not be frivolous… She put it on and Robert and I applauded. ‘It’s damned good, Teresa,’ said Robert. ‘It makes you look earnest and as though you had a purpose in life.’ You will understand, therefore, that to see Teresa sitting on the platform wearing the Hat lured me irresistibly to the Drill Hall on a remarkably fine summer’s afternoon…

 

Hat no 1 – from NYPL – might be too frivolous, but not as much as you might think, if you look at hats of the time.

Hat  no 2 - The picture shows a matronly hat, on a most respectable scientist called Alice Brown, from the Smithsonian. Too dowdy.

Something in between?

 

Last year I completed my Agatha Christie Project: at least one post (often more) on each of the canonical crime books. I’ve also covered various other works by and about her – including a couple of the Mary Westmacotts. She published these ‘straight’ novels under that other name, and at first the author’s identity was a secret from the public. It’s a long time since I read this one, and I remembered almost nothing about it - then I saw a reference to it and decided to give it another look.

It is very readable, you can speed through it, and has some funny and interesting moments. The title is a quotation from TS Eliot.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration

The narrator, Hugh, has been badly injured in a road accident, and is in a wheelchair. After a dramatic and intriguing prologue, he goes back to tell us the story of one John Gabriel. After his accident, and a failed love affair,  Hugh goes to rebuild his life with his brother and sister-in-law in Cornwall – St Loo, an invented town that Christie used several times.

As above, the book is set at a very specific time: the 1945 general election in the UK, held just after World War 2 ended. Hugh and everyone he knows becomes involved in working (of course) for the Conservative Party, and John Gabriel is their candidate: a war hero from a lower-class background.

‘I wish this chap was a gentleman, but he isn’t, and there it is. If you can’t have a gentleman, I suppose a hero is the next best thing.’

That’s the conservative agent. Local worthy Lady Tressilian says

 ‘It’s such a pity that he’s got such common legs.’

There is a young woman, Isabella, languishing around -  her character never became completely clear to me. Gabriel and she have some kind of repulsion/attraction feeling. Gabriel also is mixed up with the vet’s wife, Milly, and although that is platonic, there is a fear of scandal.

Isabella is waiting for her cousin Rupert to come home from the  war, and everyone hopes they will be married.

There is a lot of talk of politics: Lady Tressilian thinks MPs shouldn’t be paid, because the right kind of person would have a private income and do it out of duty. This had been an issue in Trollope’s Phineas Finn, written 80 years earlier.

Also discussed: bravery, and love and roses – and of course the class system. Shakespeare is much mulled over: Hamlet and Othello. There is talk of evacuees who have been treated cruelly – the seeds perhaps of another work by Christie around the same time.

There is a big social event

Our next local excitement was the whist drive. It was being got up by the Women’s Institute…People flocked along to the Long Barn. There was fancy dress and dancing as well as the whist drive proper.

though Christie lets us down rather by having Hugh sit outside rather than attending. But then:

I saw a tall white-clad figure come out from the Long Barn. It hesitated a moment then walked in my direction. I had known at once it was Isabella. She came and sat down on the stone bench. The harmony of the night was complete.

John Gabriel is very free with being rude about Lady St Loo ‘That old bitch fairly puts the wind up me!’ which I don’t think is a common usage in Christie – though Eva Kane in Mrs McGinty’s Dead is described as one.

Everything will come to a head around the time of the election: July 5^th 1945.

Then, a couple of years pass, and some of the main characters will meet up again with dramatic scenes in a Balkan city called Zagrade. And then more years pass (we are now well into the future from publication date, not a usual Christie thing) and the story resolves itself.

‘White-clad’, above, and ‘a long dark tweed coat’ are as close to clothes descriptions as we get so I picked out another dress of the era for Isabella, and a hat poised to show what an enigma she was. (Not a Conservative Lady hat)

Her almost-fiance Rupert says this about her:

‘I think what I like best about her is that she’s got no sense of humour.’

‘You don’t think she has?’

‘None whatever. It’s wonderfully restful … I’ve always suspected that a sense of humour is a kind of parlour trick we civilized folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment. We make a conscious effort to see things as funny, simply because we suspect they are unsatisfactory.’

Well, there was something in that …

Rupert himself is said to have had ‘no bad fairies at his christening.  Well, if there’s not one bad fairy — where’s your story? That, perhaps, was what made Rupert St Loo not quite real.

What a very strange book this is. You can see it in a line with some of the odder Christie short stories…. The male first-person narrator is something of a familiar figure. The book also has surprising echoes of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

I enjoyed reading it, and thought Christie had some very interesting things to say in it, but I fear I may have missed the point, I didn’t get the real feel behind it, and would welcome anyone else telling me what they took from it. Laura Thompson’s highly enjoyable 2007 biography of Christie uses the other Westmacott novels as an absolute guide to Agatha's life – but even she cannot seem to make much of this one. The character of Isabella is a blank at the centre of the book, which is a shame: Christie created other female characters – even minor ones - in a few lines, compelling and convincing ones.

Photo of people voting at the July 45 General Election from the Imperial War Museum collection. Taken by a Ministry of Information photographer.

A village whist drive, also from Imperial War Museum.

The dowdy matron’s hat was used in this post

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp, where Julia (the best Sharp heroine) was trying to look more respectable. Though that is undoubtedly not Julia’s face.

I will be writing more about matrons’ hats soon…

Fashion sketch from the NY Met collection: designed by Lelong for Bergdorf Goodman.