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Poetic Licence: Some people are born old

Kaleem Omar

In 1953 Agatha Christie gave the rights of her play “The Mousetrap,” to a favourite nephew as a present for his 12th birthday. Needless to say, the lucky boy has never had to do a stroke of work in his life since then. I wish I had an aunt like Agatha Christie, don’t you?

The late British
film star Margaret Rutherford was a delightful old biddy, striding about the rain-soaked English countryside in her cape, rumpled skirt, shapeless hat and sensible shoes, her jowls quivering with indignation. But I can’t, for the life of me, imagine a youthful Rutherford? Some people are born old.
Rutherford played Miss Marples, the amateur detective character made famous by Agatha Christie. That’s Miss Marples, not Ms. I can’t imagine a Ms Marples either. Rutherford also made a wonderfully wacky Duchess of Brighton in the 1963 movie, “The V.I.Ps”.
Directed by Anthony Asquith, the film focuses on the problems of an assortment of passengers stranded at Heathrow Airport due to fog. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the stars of this glossy drama, were easily upstaged by the solid supporting cast, especially Maggie Smith and Rutherford, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as the fuddy duddy Duchess.
There’s a hilarious scene in the film when Rutherford, all hot, bothered and bewildered, and lugging a huge tote bag, goes up to the concierge at the airport hotel and says, “You wouldn’t by any chance have any idea where Room 326 is, would you?” “Some idea, Madam, yes,” replies the concierge, poker-faced.
Rutherford had her best Miss Marples outing in the 1963 film, “Murder at the Gallop”, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s mystery, “After the Funeral”. Rutherford and Robert Morley play off each other beautifully in this comedy-laced tale, which has Miss Marples insinuating herself into a murder investigation set in a small English country hotel catering to the riding set. Stringer Davis, Rutherford’s real-life husband, plays Miss Marples’ assistant, the long-suffering Mr Stringer.
On the subject of Agatha Christie, it was recently reported in one of Britain’s Sunday papers that the sales of her murder mysteries now total more than a billion copies, making her the best selling author of all time.
Born in Torquay, England, in 1890, Agatha Miller became Agatha Christie on her marriage to Archibald Christie in 1914. She was later divorced, and married the archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930.
In 1961 she accompanied Mallowan on a trip to some archaeological digs in Pakistan. Sadly, the trip didn’t result in a crime novel with a Pakistani setting, otherwise, who knows, we might have had a book titled “Murder on the Khyber Mail” to add to the Christie oeuvre.
“The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, published in 1920, was the first of a very large number of her crime novels that were hugely popular. She also wrote plays. The most successful of these is “The Mousetrap”, which opened in London’s West End in 1951 and ran continuously for more than four decades, making it the world’s longest continuously-running play by far.
In 1953 she gave the rights of the play to a favourite nephew as a present for his 12th birthday. Needless to say, the lucky boy has never had to do a stroke of work in his life since then. I wish I had an aunt like Agatha Christie, don’t you?
I can’t imagine Agatha Christie as a young person either. No, the image of a teenage Miss Christie simply doesn’t gel somehow.
Then, there was T.S. Eliot. Evidently, he, too, thought of himself as old before his time. His poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, published in Chicago’s “Poetry” magazine in 1912, when Eliot was only 24 years old, contains the following lines: “I grow old... I grow old, / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...”
Born in St Louis, Missouri, of American parents, in 1888, Eliot was educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England while in his twenties, married an Englishwoman in 1915, and eventually became a British subject and a practicing member of the Church of England.
In 1919 Leonard and Virginia Woolf - founder members of the Bloomsbury Group - brought out a hand-printed volume of Eliot’s “Poems” as one of the first publications of their recently founded Hogarth Press, London.
Any doubts that remained concerning Eliot’s stature as a major poet were dispelled with the publication in 1922 of “The Waste Land”, generally reckoned to be the greatest poem in English in the twentieth century.
Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”, published in 1939, was intended for children, but the verses delighted adults too, and found a new audience in the 1980s when Andrew Lloyd-Webber used them for his musical “Cats”, which went on to become a smash hit on the London stage and Broadway. Eliot’s estate (he died in 1964) earned millions of pounds in royalties from “Cats”.

Old Possum, incidentally, was Eliot’s tongue-in-cheek name for himself - further proof that he thought of himself as old before his time

As a poet, Eliot had a very individual voice, and used or discarded metre and rhyme innovatively. Asked once about his use of free verse, he said, “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.”

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