White House (Taken at the Flood)

In the novel Taken at the Flood, the White House is a house in Warmsley Vale where Adela Marchmont lives with her daughter Lynn. It is situated on the outskirts of the village among other "charming houses with pleasant old-world gardens", shaded by the hills of Downe Copse, Bats Hill and Long Ridge. Just off the main road from Warmsley Vale, reachable by a small side-road, it lies between the village, Furrowbank and the Long Willows farm. It is unknown whether the house is indeed white.


 * "On the third morning she looked out of her bedroom window, across the untidy lawn to the elms in the meadow beyond, and sniffed the air happily. It was a gentle grey morning with a smell of soft wet earth. That kind of smell that she had been missing for the past two years and a half."

(Lynn after returning home from the war, in Taken at the Flood, Book I, Chapter One)

Lynn's bedroom is on the first floor, the kitchen and the living room on the groud floor. It is implied that the house is cool and not very labour-saving, and were it not for the money provided by her brother Gordon Cloade, the widow Adela might have moved into a smaller, more economical house.

The garden is attended to by "Old Tom". When Poirot comes to the house from the village, he gives a description of it:


 * The garden of the White House was looking very lovely. It held many flowering shrubs, lilacs and laburnums, and in the centre of the lawn was a big old gnarled apple tree. Under it, stretched out on a deck-chair, was Lynn Marchmont.

(from Taken at the Flood, Book II, Chapter Twelve)

Before the war, the house employed stable staff, but in early 1946, servants are hard to get by and the small income fixed by Gordon has been nearly halved by taxation. All the work in the household now lies on the shoulders of the elderly Mrs Marchmont and an "unreliable woman" who comes in to help four times a week. Albeit remaining pleasant, the house is described as "shabby" by Lynn when she returns home.

Mrs Marchmont's financial situation is very desperate and she does not know what to do, since she spends all her money on food and necessary upkeep of the house. There is not a smaller house in the neigbourhood she could move into; and since her generous brother died unexpectedly in the Blitz, he failed to make a will and left all his money to his wife Rosaleen.

Lynn suggests they could ask Rosaleen for help. However, after she meets the widow and her brother David, she becomes sick of the Cloade family's two-faced behaviour towards them and asks her mother not to beg them for money. Nevertheless, Mrs Marchmont strategically visits Furrowbank when David Hunter is away and gets a neat sum of five hundred pounds. She settles her debts and Lynn notices with alarm that her mother is starting to count on a steady income from Rosaleen. She even contemplates hiring another gardener, as Old Tom is short-handed, the garden is in bad shape, and growing their own vegetables would in fact be an economy. Lynn argues with her, but it is unknown which woman gets her way in the end.