‘I was devoted to Daddy! He was terribly attractive and the greatest fun to live with! But I always knew he was a bad hat.’
(We are in posh world)

What was one to do, thought Adela, with someone who didn’t talk gardening or dogs – those standbyes of rural conversation.
(Country Life)

‘You don’t mean – murder -!’ Her voice was horrified.
(The innocence of dim young Rosaleen)

‘She’s quite harmless, you know.’
‘I wonder,’ said Poirot.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is anybody – ever – quite harmless?’
(Wisdom of the wise old owl)

Poirot waved a deprecating hand and tried to look modest.
(Poirot is, essentially, a comic character)

Superintendent Spence stared. ‘Chief Inspector Japp,’ he remarked, ‘always said you
have a tortuous mind.’
(Opinion of an old favourite)

‘It’s the human interest that’s getting you?’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘It is always the human interest.’
(Poirot’s central motivation)

‘What are you doing, M. Poirot?’
‘Talking to people. That is what I do. Just talk to people.’
(The essence of Poirot’s method)

‘Taken at the Flood’ gets poor reviews as one of Christie’s weaker works and so I nearly didn’t read it but I’m glad I did for the sake of its vivid social history. The big reveal at the end is no more preposterous and far-fetched than the conclusions of most of her books.

1. Gordon Cloade

‘Taken at the Flood’ is the story of the extended Cloade family, four brothers and sisters and a few nephews, and their partners, who had all basked in the generosity of their immensely rich Uncle Gordon Cloade. As well as giving them gifts and subsidies throughout their lives, Gordon made it clear that he would leave them each handsome bequests in his will, and so they carry on leading upper-middle-class lifestyles they could ill afford if solely reliant on their own incomes.

Marriage and death

Until disaster strikes, in fact twin disasters. First, on a boat from South America old Gordon meets and falls in love with a blonde young Irish lovely named Rosaleen and all the Cloades are horrified to get telegrams from New York announcing that he has married her.

But then, he’s barely been back in England a few weeks before the house he’s in is a direct hit from a German bomb which kills all the servants. Cloade is pulled alive from the wreckage but dies on the way to hospital.

The legal situation this creates is that, regardless of a lifetime of promises to fund the Cloades, and in the absence of a new will made since his marriage (and there had barely been time to get back to London and unpack), Gordon’s entire fortune goes to his brainless young wife. She would be completely overwhelmed by all this if she didn’t have in tow her brother, the angry young Irishman, David Hunter, who plays Svengali. It is implied that David it was who guided Rosaleen towards the millionaire on the boat, and snared him into marriage.

So that’s the backstory (or one backstory). The novel opens with all the characters living in the little village of Warmsley Vale:

• Dr Lionel Cloade, Gordon’s elder brother, and his wife, Katherine ‘Aunt Kathie’
• lawyer Jeremy Cloade, 63, and his wife, Frances
• Adela Cloade, over 60, who married a Mr Marchamont, now deceased – known as ‘Mums’ to her daughter, Lynn Marchmont, just back from serving as a Wren in the war
• and Rowley Cloade, son of Gordon’s brother Maurice

With Rosaleen and David ensconced in the big smart new house Gordon had built for himself upon the hill titled Furrowbank. With Christie’s usual brisk efficiency she not only sketches in all these characters but outlines why all four of these households are in dire financial straits and are reduced to more or less begging money from Rosaleen.

While angry Irish brother David exults in these self-satisfied posh people getting their come-uppance.

Social history

And this is my point about social history: all four households have been brought low, among other things, by the collapse in value of their investments, but more by the new Labour government’s extortionate new taxes and extravagant new paperwork. The hapless older generation doesn’t fully understand where all their money has gone. They stand for the old rentier class which lived such feather-bedded lives between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, only to see their lifestyles collapse during the war, the end of civilised living bemoaned in Evelyn Waugh’s nostalgia-fest Brideshead Revisited.

While angry, sneering, jeering David stands for the new world, the new generation of angry young men, the poor outsiders who have unexpectedly found themselves kings of the new roost and revel in the snobs’ downfall:

‘That’s just what I get a kick out of,’ said David. ‘I like seeing their smug faces eaten up with envy and malice. Don’t grudge me my fun, Rosaleen.’
She said in a low troubled voice: ‘I wish you didn’t feel like that. I don’t like it.’
‘Have some spirit, girl. We’ve been pushed around enough, you and I. The Cloades have lived soft – soft. Lived on big brother Gordon. Little fleas on a big flea. I hate their kind – I always have.’

This, it seems to me, is what the book is about. It is a long lament for the style and class of the old ways and a bitter recrimination of the new socialist government. This may explain why the plot itself feels a bit of an afterthought.

Heath and Vale

This sense of a clash between two worlds, between civilised old world and functional, charmless new world, between class and vulgarity, is embodied in the contrast between the two adjoining settlements Warmsley Heath and Warmsley Vale. As the text tells us right at the start of chapter 1, laying out the dichotomy which will underpin the narrative:

Warmsley Heath consists of a Golf Course, two Hotels, some very expensive modern villas giving on to the Golf Course, a row of what were, before the war, luxury shops, and a railway station. Emerging from the railway station, a main road roars its way to London on your left – to your right a small path across a field is signposted Footpath to Warmsley Vale.

Warmsley Vale, tucked away amongst wooded hills, is as unlike Warmsley Heath as well can be. It is in essence a microscopic old-fashioned market town now degenerated into a village. It has a main street of Georgian houses, several pubs, a few unfashionable shops and a general air of being a hundred and fifty instead of twenty-eight miles from London.

Its occupants one and all unite in despising the mushroom growth of Warmsley Heath.

There you have as pretty a little microcosm of the English class system and its petty snobberies as you could ask for.

2. Robert Underhay

And this is the second backstory I referred to: because in fact, right at the start of the novel, an old club bore tells the story of one Robert Underhay, a district commissioner (imperial official) in British Nigeria, who met and married a pretty little actress, while he was on leave in South Africa. However, once he’d taken her back to his base it turned out she hated being isolated miles from anywhere in the hot tropical jungle and, after giving it a go for a while, they decided to call it a day. Because he was a practicing Roman Catholic, Underhay arranged to go on a trip up-country and pretend to have died there i.e. get his loyal servants to return to the compound and say he’d died, thus freeing the wife of any obligations without the necessity of a divorce. (Can you feel how this whole scenario is creaking a little with plot holes and inconsistencies?) As the Major tells it:

His natives were a trustworthy lot and they came back with a good circumstantial tale and a few last words scrawled in Underhay’s writing saying they’d done all they could for him, and he was afraid he was pegging out…

Anyway, it is this young lady, recently ‘widowed’, who Gordon met and was manoeuvred into falling in love with and marrying. Yes, the current widow sitting atop a huge fortune, Mrs Rosaleen Cloade, is the very same Rosaleen who married Robert Underhay 4 or 5 years earlier before he disappeared into the jungle, presumed dead.

3. Enter Enoch Arden* the blackmailer

It takes 100 pages, the first third of this 300-page novel, to establish this, to explain the two backstories and to paint in the various characters and their fractious relationships (Lynn Marchmont resents her mother’s obeisance to Rosaleen, she is engaged to oafish Rowley the farmer, though neither of them are very excited about it etc).

And then one fine afternoon, a tall bronzed stranger gets off the train at Warmsley Heath and asks the way for Warmsley Vale (asking the puzzled young farmer, Rowley Cloade on the way).

The man was tall, with a bronzed face, a beard, and very blue eyes. He was about forty and not ill-looking in a tough and rather dare-devil style. It was not, perhaps, a wholly pleasant face.

This stranger checks into the local pub, the Stag, giving his name as ‘Enoch Arden’ and sends a note up to the posh house for the attention of David Hunter, who duly comes to meet him in his room that evening.

Here he makes the staggering revelation that Robert Underhay, rich Rosaleen Cloade’s supposedly dead husband, is still alive! Not only this, but he is fully informed of Rosaleen’s situation i.e. she married an old guy who promptly died and inherited his huge fortune, thus disappointing all his relatives who are filled with fury and frustration. If Underhay reveals that he is still alive, Rosaleen’s second marriage becomes null and void, and so does her inheritance of the fortune. At a stroke she will be penniless again, and the terms of Gordon’s old will come into force, redistributing his fortune to the four Cloade households.

Imagine how much they’d pay for this fact to come out!? So the bronzed stranger proceeds to blackmail David Hunter, asking how much he will pay for this ruinous fact not to be made public.

*Explanation of Enoch Arden

This is a reference to a long narrative poem by the English poet Alfred Tennyson. In it Enoch Arden, a sailor, is shipwrecked on a desert island and spends ten years there. Upon his return, he discovers that his wife, Annie Lee, having believed him dead, has remarried and started a new family with a man named Philip. Tragedy: Rather than reveal his return and disrupt his wife’s happiness, Enoch chooses to remain silent, dying of a broken heart.

When he had canvassed the idea of disappearing into the jungle to fake his own death, Underhay had joked that he might ‘do an Enoch Arden’ and one day return to check up on his remarried wife. Well now, no joke, this is exactly what he’s come to do!

Poirot

Remember how I mentioned that Christie has a club bore tell us a lot of the backstory, on the basis that said bore knew Underhay out in Nigeria, and then read the account of Gordon’s death in the papers and connected it with the pretty little actress he knew Underhay married… Well, as he rattles on his eyes fall disapprovingly on one of the figures sitting nearby:

Again Major Porter paused. His eyes had travelled up from the patent leather shoes – striped trousers – black coat – egg-shaped head and colossal moustaches. Foreign, of course! That explained the shoes. ‘Really,’ thought Major Porter, ‘what’s the club coming to? Can’t get away from foreigners even here.’

‘Who could that be’ we ask ourselves. Yes, Hercule Poirot and this is the twenty-third (I think) Poirot novel (there are 33 in total). That scene is followed by another one in which Poirot is paid a surprise visit at home by Mrs Katherine Cloade. She says she has been told to consult him by the figures from the beyond in her seances and ask him whether they could hire him to investigate the claims that Robert Underhay is not dead. He listens in amusement and then says no, leaving Katherine Cloade to go away disappointed.

These two scenes in the prologue are clearly designed to explain how and why Poirot comes to be involved in the case, as he has already 1) heard the backstories from the club bore and 2) been directly approached by one of the Cloade family.

Then everything goes quiet on the Poirot front, until Christie has painted in all the events summarised above and Poirot makes his reappearance on page 172, exactly halfway through the 325-page novel.

The murder

I’d nearly forgotten the murder. Yes, well first an important fact. The conversation at the Stag in Arden’s private room (room 5) when Arden explained to David Hunter that he thought Robert Underhay was still alive and tried to extort money out of him, all this was overheard by the landlady, Beatrice Lippincott, who promptly sends a message (a letter) to Rowley Cloade. When he comes that evening for a drink, she invites him into the office and describes the whole conversation.

Rowley is flabbergasted, realising that this will change the circumstances of the entire family and so walks to the lawyer, Jeremy Cloade’s house. But while waiting in the lawyer’s study for the family to finish dinner, he has second thoughts and leaves.

The following evening, Lynn is walking over the downs when David Hunter comes bursting out of nearby trees, running fast to Warmsley Heath to catch the train. With no further ado, he embraces and kisses her and tells her she belongs to him, not to that oaf Rowley, and rushes off, leaving poor Lynn bewildered.

Next morning ‘Enoch Arden’s body is discovered in his pub bedroom, his head smashed in with fire tongs. So the reader immediately suspects that David Hunter did it rather than pay Arden off, and that’s why he was running from the scene of the crime in such a hurry to catch the train. He’s the obvious suspect. Or could it have been someone else? But who? And why?

Cast

• Major Porter – old India hand and club bore at the Coronation Club
• young Mr Mellon – hosting Poirot at the Coronation Club
• Hercule Poirot – forced to listen to the club bore’s account of Underhay and Gordon Cloade
  • George – Poirot’s manservant
• old Gordon Cloade – funder of the whole Cloade family, who all relied on his largesse, until he unexpectedly married a young lovely and, weeks later, was killed in the Blitz on London
• Rosaleen Cloade – 26, Gordon Cloade’s widow, previously married to Robert Underhay staying at Furrowbank
• David Hunter – Rosaleen’s rude and controlling brother – ‘a thin young man with dark hair and dark eyes. His face was unhappy and defiant and slightly insolent’ – Irish, in the commandos during the war – ‘tall thin bitter-looking young man’
  • Old Mullard – their gardener
• Dr Lionel Cloade – ‘spare and grey-haired – but he had not the lawyer’s imperturbability. His manner was brusque and impatient… his nervous irritability’
• Mrs Katherine ‘Aunt Kathie’ Cloade – between 40 and 50 – into spiritualism, in debt to various clairvoyants
• Jeremy Cloade – Gordon’s elder brother – senior partner in a firm of solicitors, Cloade, Brunskill and Cloade – ‘a spare grey-haired man of sixty-three, with a dry expressionless face’ – has been embezzling money
• Frances Cloade – 48, ‘one of those lean greyhound women who look well in tweeds. There was a rather arrogant ravaged beauty about her face which had no make-up except a little carelessly applied lipstick’ – the only daughter of Lord Edward Trenton, who had trained his horses in the neighbourhood of Warmsley Heath
  • Edna – 15-year-old servant
• Antony Cloade – their son, killed on active service
• Adela Marchmont née Cloade – aka Mums – over 60, never a strong woman, borne down by bills, begs £500 off Rosaleen – lives at the White House with…
• Lynn Marchmont – her daughter, a far-travelled Wren during the war (Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, part of the Royal Navy)
• Rowley Cloade – son of deceased Maurice Cloade – ‘a big square young man with a brick-red skin, thoughtful blue eyes and very fair hair. He had a slowness that seemed more purposeful than ingrained’ – farm called Long Willows
• Johnnie Vavasour – Rowley’s friend and partner on the farm, killed in the war
• Beatrice Lippincott – barmaid at the Stag pub
• Gladys – chambermaid at the Stag pub
• Superintendent Spence – local police
• Sergeant Graves – his subordinate (tactful enough not to show off his superior French accent)
• Mr Pebmarsh – coroner at the inquest on Enoch Arden
• Jenkins – the police surgeon

Poirot’s foreignness

Poirot’s foreignness is always emphasised.

Rowley Cloade was eyeing Poirot rather doubtfully. The flamboyant moustaches, the sartorial elegance, the white spats and the pointed patent leather shoes all filled this insular young man with distinct misgivings.

‘Do you remember old Jeremy mentioning a chap called Hercule Poirot?’
‘Hercule Poirot?’ Lynn frowned. ‘Yes, I do remember something… Well? Lynn demanded impatiently.
‘Fellow has the wrong clothes and all that. French chap – or Belgian. Queer fellow but he’s the goods all right.’

The impoverishment of the rentier class

As discussed above, the book abounds in descriptions of how the privileged rentier and professional classes of between the wars, had fallen on hard times, by the Labour government’s introduction of ruinous taxes and a jungle of forms, and the general decay in quality and standards left by the war.

Tax

Hence the surprising harping on this issue of new high taxes and how they were affecting numerous characters in the story.

Lynn realised with some dismay how their financial position had changed. The small but adequate fixed income which had kept them going comfortably before the war was now almost halved by taxation. Rates, expenses, wages had all gone up. ‘Oh, brave new world,’ thought Lynn grimly…

Dramatically, and with a trembling lip, Mrs Marchmont produced a sheaf of bills. ‘And look at all these,’ she wailed. ‘What am I to do? What on earth am I to do, Lynn? The bank manager wrote me only this morning that I’m overdrawn. I don’t see how I can be. I’ve been so careful. But it seems my investments just aren’t producing what they used to. Increased taxation, he says. And all these yellow things. War Damage Insurance or something – one has to pay them whether one wants to or not…’

ADELA: ‘I’m overdrawn at the bank, and I owe bills – repairs to the house – and the rates haven’t been paid yet. You see, everything’s halved – my income, I mean. I suppose it’s taxation…’

DAVID: ‘Rosaleen can’t touch the capital, you know. Only the income. And she pays about nineteen and six in the pound income tax.’
‘Oh, I know. Taxation‘s dreadful these days.’

ADELA: ‘Everything is so expensive nowadays. And it gets worse and worse.’

Major Porter had the first floor of a small shabby house. They were admitted by a cheerful blowsy-looking woman who took them up. It was a square room with bookshelves round it and some rather bad sporting prints. There were two rugs on the floor – good rugs with lovely dim colour but very worn. Poirot noticed that the centre of the floor was covered with a new heavy varnish whereas the varnish round the edge was old and rubbed. He realised then that there had been other better rugs until recently – rugs that were worth good money in these days. He looked up at the man standing erect by the fireplace in his well-cut shabby suit.

Poirot guessed that for Major Porter, retired Army officer, life was lived very near the bone. Taxation and increased cost of living struck hardest at the old war-horses.

KATHIE CLOADE: ‘But then, when Gordon died like that – well, you know what things are, M. Poirot, nowadays. Taxation and everything. He can’t afford to retire and it’s made him very bitter…’

Plus, after the Second World War Christie herself became the victim of aggressive tax authorities in both the UK and USA, tax problems which were to dog her for the rest of her life. So there’s personal animus, as well, behind these references.

Forms

And the new levels of post-war bureaucracy:

ROWLEY: ‘I’m only just keeping my head above water as it is. And what with not knowing what this damned Government is going to do next – hampered at every turn – snowed under with forms up to midnight trying to fill them in sometimes – it’s too much for one man.’

‘I wonder what Rowley wants?’
Jeremy said wearily:
‘Probably fallen foul of some Government regulation. No farmer understands more than a quarter of these forms they have to fill up.’

‘Come,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t keep that bucolic young man waiting too long. Go and help him to fill up form eleven hundred and ninety-nine, or whatever it is.’

General decay

Shepherd’s Court, Mayfair, was a large block of luxury service flats. Unharmed by the ravages of enemy action, they had nevertheless been unable to keep up quite their pre-war standard of ease. There was service still, although not very good service. Where there had been two uniformed porters there was now only one. The restaurant still served meals, but except for breakfast, meals were not sent up to the apartments.

‘I’ve checked up,’ said Spence. ‘The last time a woman occupied that room was three weeks ago. I know service isn’t up to much nowadays – but I still think they run a mop under the furniture once in three weeks.’

Says the fierce old lady in the Stag’s Residents Only bar, old Mrs Leadbetter:

‘Every year I come and stay in this place. My husband died here sixteen years ago. He’s buried here. I come every year for a month.’
‘A pious pilgrimage,’ said Poirot politely.
‘And every year things get worse and worse. No service! Food uneatable! Vienna steaks indeed! A steak’s either Rump or Fillet steak – not chopped-up horse!’

Everything is going to the dogs:

‘It [the lipstick] was found on the floor of No. 5. It had rolled under the chest of drawers and of course just possibly it might have been there some time. No fingerprints on it. Nowadays, of course, there isn’t the range of lipsticks there used to be – just a few standard makes.’

‘His reason for coming down,’ the Superintendent broke in, ‘was, according to him, to get certain things he’d left behind, letters and papers, a chequebook, and to see if some shirts had come back from the laundry – which, of course, they hadn’t. My word, laundry’s a problem nowadays. Four ruddy weeks since they’ve been to our place – not a clean towel left in our house, and the wife washes all my things herself now.’

After the war

And it’s not just money. There’s a mean spirit abroad after the war. At least that’s how pukka middle-class Lynn sees it.

Lynn thought suddenly, ‘But that’s what’s the matter everywhere. I’ve noticed it ever since I got home. It’s the aftermath war has left. Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and amongst workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will.’

After reading a number of passages like this I began to wonder, Is this what the book is about? About the impoverishment of the rentier class and the revenge of the outsider class? Angry Irishman David Hunter gets quite a few opportunities to express his glee at the humbling of the posh Cloades:

‘Gordon Cloade died before he had time to make a will. That’s what’s called the luck of the game. We win, you and I. The others – lose.’

Self-referentiality

All Christie’s books have characters comparing the events or people to events or people in books or detective stories. There is a continual stagey self-awareness to the characters and events, a regular nudge in the ribs that all this is fiction.

‘Perhaps it’s just a feeling of unreality. In books the blackmailer gets slugged. Does he in real life? Apparently the answer is yes. But it seems unnatural.’

‘I’ve no experience, of course, of police cases. And anyway medical evidence isn’t the hard-and-fast, cast-iron business that laymen or novelists seem to think…’

Credit

‘Taken At The Flood’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1948.

Related links

• Taken At The Flood online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews