waited politely. This was one of the moments when, even after half a lifetime in the country, he found the English incomprehensible. He himself had played at Cache Cache in his childhood, but he felt no desire to talk about it or even think about it.
What of his brothers and sisters? ‘There were many of us,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite, but there is a mention of only one of them in all the Poirot literature, and it is a mention that is quickly erased. In the original version of ‘The Chocolate Box’, a short story that recalls his earlier days in Belgium, Poirot says:
‘I was informed that a young lady was demanding me. Thinking that it was, perhaps, my little sister Yvonne, I prayed my landlady to make her mount.’3
Later versions of this story omit this reference to Yvonne, but it does provide an affectionate glimpse of Poirot as an older brother, a glimpse reflected in an avuncular way a generation later in Cards on the Table when Poirot says to a young woman:
‘It is, you understand, that Christmas is coming on. I have to buy presents for many nieces and grand-nieces.’
One has to be a bit wary about this mention of nieces and grand-nieces, however, as Poirot, who practically never mentioned his real family, was apt to invent imaginary relatives to suit his purposes. The most outrageous example of this is the appearance among the dramatis personae of The Big Four of a twin brother, Achille. When first told of this hitherto unsuspected twin, Hastings was understandably surprised. ‘What does he do?’ he demanded, ‘putting aside a half-formed wonder as to the character and disposition of the late Madame Poirot, and her classical taste in Christian names.’ Replied Poirot, smoothly:
‘He does nothing. He is, as I tell, of a singularly indolent disposition. But his abilities are hardly less than my own – which is saying a great deal.’
‘Is he like you to look at?’
‘Not unlike. But not nearly so handsome. And wears no moustaches.’4
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Poirot invented a nephew to extract information from that indomitable purveyor of village news, Miss Caroline Sheppard. ‘I never knew that Poirot had an imbecile nephew?’ said her brother, Dr Sheppard.
‘Didn’t you? Oh, he told me all about it. Poor lad. It’s a great grief to all the family. They’ve kept him at home so far, but it’s getting to such a pitch that they’re afraid he’ll have to go into some kind of institution.’
‘I suppose you know pretty well everything there is to know about Poirot’s family by this time,’ I said, exasperated.
‘Pretty well,’ said Caroline complacently. ‘It’s a great relief to people to be able to tell all their troubles to some one.’
In Dumb Witness, to Hastings’s amusement, Poirot produced three more unfortunate relatives: an invalid uncle, a cousin with jaundice, and an ailing but belligerent mother:
This time he had an aged mother for whom he was anxious to find a sympathetic hospital nurse.
‘You comprehend – I am going to speak to you quite frankly. My mother, she is difficult. We have had some excellent nurses, young women, fully competent but the very fact that they are young has been against them. My mother dislikes young women, she insults them, she is rude and fractious, she fights against open windows and modern hygiene. It is very difficult.’
There may, of course, have been germs of truth in some of these confidences, but one thing we can be sure of is that Poirot once had a grandfather who possessed ‘a large turnip of a watch’ (Hastings called it ‘a large grotesque turnip of a watch’) and that Poirot fell heir to it. ‘Take my watch in your hand – with care,’ he once instructed. ‘It is a family heirloom!’
As a young child, Poirot, a good little Catholic, was ‘educated by the nuns’. There is an evocative scene in ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’ when, working on a case in Ireland, he heard the tolling of a convent bell. At once he was transported back in time: ‘He understood that bell. It was a sound he had been familiar with from early youth.’ He may have heard it with mixed feelings. In Five Little Pigs there is a clue that his convent school had its share of dragons. In meeting ‘the shrewd, penetrating glance’ of a retired governess, Poirot ‘once again felt the years falling away and himself a meek and apprehensive little boy’.
As to his later education – and despite Dr Burton’s suspicions that he was never properly taught the classics – Poirot appears to have undergone a thorough and conventional schooling including the study of English, German and Italian in addition, of course, to the two languages of Belgium, French and Flemish. ‘Alas, there is no proper education nowadays,’ he lamented in After the Funeral. ‘Apparently one learns nothing but economics – and how to set Intelligence Tests!’
It is not easy to imagine Poirot as a youth, his moustache in mere infancy, but bits and pieces emerge in the kindness he later showed to injudicious and awkward young men. ‘I cannot overcome my shyness. I say always the wrong thing. I upset water jugs,’ confessed one of them in Murder in Mesopotamia. ‘“We all do these things when we are young,” said Poirot, smiling. “The poise, the savoir faire, it comes later”’; and ‘It is the time for follies, when one is young,’ he said encouragingly to another in ‘Christmas Adventure’.5
An endearing glimpse of Poirot himself as a youth is provided in Evil Under the Sun:
‘When I was young (and that, Mademoiselle, is indeed a long time ago) there was a game entitled “If not yourself, who would you be?” One wrote the answer in young ladies’ albums. They had gold edges and were bound in blue leather.’
From an early age Poirot knew exactly who he would be:
‘To most of us the test comes early in life. A man is confronted quite soon with the necessity to stand on his own feet, to face dangers and difficulties and to take his own line of dealing with them.’
And here we have it, the surprising lure to this tidy and diminutive young man of a life of dangers and difficulties. ‘I entered the police force,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite.6
In police circles, in Poirot’s day, Belgium, which claimed to have an almost perfect statute book, was considered one of the least policed countries in Europe, so law-abiding were her citizens. Nevertheless, Poirot – who quickly became attached to the judicial police whose duties were to investigate crimes and apprehend offenders – had at least one combative moment. A reminiscence in Curtain recalls him in a startling role – Poirot, the Sharpshooter:
‘As a young man in the Belgian police force I shot down a desperate criminal who sat on a roof and fired at people below.’
In a few laconic sentences, Poirot, many years later, summed up perhaps forty to forty-five years he spent with the Belgian police:
‘I worked hard. Slowly I rose in that force. I began to make a name for myself. I made a name for myself. I began to acquire an international reputation.’
Poirot’s career was brilliant. In time he became head of the force. As Hastings described him in The Mysterious Affair at Styles:
