Free Curtain Up by Julius Green Page A

trouble to get, and not much use once you’ve got ’em.’
    Women over the age of thirty were finally enfranchised in Britain in 1918, but this play’s 1914 setting places it at the height of the suffrage campaign; the previous year, the Women’s Social and Political Union had mobilised thousands of supporters to march through the streets of London behind the coffin of suffragette Emily Davison, who had thrown herself in front of the king’s horse at Epsom. The characters in a play, of course, all speak with their own voices and without the benefit of authorial comment. Agatha’s writing, as ever, is well considered and fully engaged with the issues of the day, but it is up to the audience whether they believe Stevens to be speaking from a position of ignorance or whether they think her homespun philosophy may contain some pearls of wisdom.
    Meanwhile, the ‘Eugenic Institute’ in the play turns out not to be all that Eugenia had hoped. The physically farcical elements of the piece are not as well handled as the comic dialogue, but suffice to say that Eugenia’s schemes to find the physically perfect partner are frustrated, and she resigns herself to marrying the devoted but self-professedly less than physically perfect Goldberg who, from his name, we may assume to be Jewish. Agatha’s play thus wittily subverts eugenic philosophy and underlines the importance of putting the heart first. They decide to tie the knot immediately, before the new ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ takes effect:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  GOLDBERG: It seems to me, the only solution is for us to get married before next Wednesday.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EUGENIA: (reflectively) After all, if everyone is forced into Eugenics it will be far more chic to have an uneugenic husband . . .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  GOLDBERG: Well, you know man hunting’s quite ousting foxhunting as a sport amongst the fair sex. You can hunt a man all the year round, you see, and English women are so deuced sporting.
    Agatha’s own hunt for a husband, which had started in the social whirlwind of colonial Cairo and moved on to the more genteel setting of English house parties, was about to result in her marriage, at the age of twenty-five. Abandoning her fiancé, family friend Reggie Lucy, she opted instead for love from a stranger, and the promise of adventure offered by dashing young airman Archie Christie.
    â€˜Archie and I were poles apart in our reaction to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’ 21 Married on Christmas Eve 1914, their early years together were disrupted by war, with Archie gaining distinction for his contribution to the ground-based operations of the Royal Flying Corps, mostly on overseas postings, while Agatha remained in Torquay as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, completing the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and becoming a dispenser.
    At the end of the war Archie, by now a colonel, was stationed at the Air Ministry in London, and after the war ended he found himself a job in the City. The couple divided their time between a flat in St John’s Wood and Ashfield, Agatha’s mother’s house in Torquay, where their daughter Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919.
    The following year Agatha enjoyed a successful publishing debut with her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles . Written on a break from her hospital work during the war, it was finally accepted for publication by Devon-born John Lane of the idiosyncratic and often controversial publishing house The Bodley Head, which specialised in books of poetry, and whose authors included Eden Phillpotts’ friend Arnold Bennett. The Bodley Head had been responsible at the end of the previous century for the notoriously decadent literary quarterly The Yellow Book. The five-book deal she signed