PART IX. Life with max

I

Our honeymoon took us to Dubrovnik, and from there to Split. Split I have never forgotten.
We were wandering round the place in the evening, from our hotel, when we came round the corner into one of the squares, and there, looming up to the sky, was the figure of St Gregory of Nin, one of the finest works of the sculptor Mestrovic. It towered over everything, one of those things that stand out in your memory as a permanent landmark.

We had enormous fun with the menus there. They were written in Yugoslavian, and of course we had no idea what they meant. We used to point to some entry and then wait with some anxiety to see what would be delivered. Sometimes it was a colossal dish of chicken, on another occasion poached eggs in a highly seasoned white sauce, another time again a sort of super-goulash. All the helpings were enormous, and none of the restaurants ever wished you to pay the bill. The waiter would murmur in broken French or English or Italian: ‘Not tonight, not tonight. You can come in and pay tomorrow.’ I don’t know what happened when people had meals for a week without paying and then went off on a boat. Certainly on the last morning when we did go to pay we had the utmost difficulty in getting our favourite restaurant to accept the money. ‘Ah, you can do it later,’ they said. ‘But,’ we explained, or tried to explain, ‘we cannot do it later, because we are going off by boat at twelve o’clock.’ The little waiter sighed sadly at the prospect of having to do some arithmetic. He retired to a cubicle, scratched his head, used several pencils in turn, groaned, and after about five minutes brought us what seemed a very reasonable account for the enormous amounts we had eaten. Then he wished us good luck and we departed.

The next stage of our journey was down the Dalmatian coast and along the coast of Greece to Patras. It was just a little cargo boat, Max explained. We stood on the quay waiting for its arrival, and became a little anxious. Then we suddenly saw a boat so minute–such a cockleshell–that we could hardly believe it was what we were waiting for. It had an unusual name, composed entirely of consonants–Srbn–how it was pronounced we never learnt. But this was the boat sure enough. There were four passengers on board–ourselves in one cabin and two others in a second. They left at the next port, so we then had the boat to ourselves.

Never have I tasted such food as we had on that boat: delicious lamb, very tender, in little cutlets, succulent vegetables, rice, sumptuous sauce, and savoury things on skewers. We chatted to the captain in broken Italian. ‘You like the food?’ he said. ‘I am glad. I have English food I ordered. It is very English food for you.’ I sincerely hoped he would never come to England, in case he discovered what English food was really like. He said that he had been offered promotion to a bigger passenger boat, but he preferred to stay on this one because he had a good cook here, and he enjoyed his peaceful life: he was not worried by passengers. ‘Being on a boat with passengers is having trouble all the time,’ he explained. ‘So I prefer not to be promoted.’

We had a happy few days on that little Serbian boat. We stopped at various ports–Santa Anna, Santa Maura, Santi Quaranta. We would go ashore and the captain would explain that he would blow the funnel half an hour before he was due to depart again. So, as we wandered through olive groves or sat among the flowers, we would suddenly hear the ship’s funnel, turn round and hurry back to the ship. How lovely it was, sitting in those olive groves, feeling so completely peaceful and happy together. It was a Garden of Eden, a Paradise on earth.

We arrived at last at Patras, bade cheerful farewells to the Captain, and got into a funny little train which was to take us to Olympia. It not only took us as passengers, it took a great many more bed-bugs. This time they got up the legs of the trousers I was wearing. The following day I had to slit the cloth because my legs were so swollen.

Greece needs no description. Olympia was as lovely as I thought it would be. The next day we went on mules to Andritsena–and that, I must say, very nearly tore the fabric of our married life.

With no previous training in mule-back riding, a fourteen hours’ journey resulted in such agony as is hardly to be believed! I got to a stage when I didn’t know if it would be more painful to walk or to sit on the mule. When we finally arrived, I fell off the mule, so stiff that I could not walk, and I reproached Max, saying: ‘You are really not fit to marry anybody if you don’t know what someone feels after a journey like this!’

Actually, Max was quite stiff and in pain himself. Explanations that the journey ought not to have taken more than eight hours by his calculations were not well received. It took me seven or eight years to realise that his estimates of journeys were always to prove vastly lower than they proved to be in reality, so that one immediately added a third at least to his prognostication.

We took two days to recover at Andritsena. Then I admitted that I was not sorry to have married him after all, and that perhaps he could learn the proper way to treat a wife–by not taking her on mule rides until he had carefully calculated the distance. We proceeded on a rather more cautious mule ride of not more than five hours, to the Temple of Bassae, and that I did not find exhausting at all.

We went to Mycenae, to Epidaurus, and we stayed in what seemed the Royal Suite in a hotel at Nauplia–it had red velvet hangings and an enormous four-poster with gold brocaded curtains. We had breakfast on a slightly insecure but ornamented balcony, looking out towards an island in the sea, and then went down to bathe, rather doubtfully, among large quantities of jelly-fish.

Epidaurus seemed particularly beautiful to me, but it was there really that I ran up against the archaeological character for the first time. It was a heavenly day, and I climbed up to the top of the theatre and sat there, having left Max in the museum looking at an inscription. A long time passed and he did not come to join me. Finally I got impatient, came down again, and went into the museum. Max was still lying flat on his face on the floor, pursuing his inscription with complete delight.

‘Are you still reading that thing?’ I asked.

‘Yes, rather an unusual one,’ he said. ‘Look here–shall I explain it to you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s lovely outside–absolutely beautiful.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ said Max absently.

‘Would you mind,’ I said, ‘if I went back outside?’

‘Oh no,’ said Max, slightly surprised, ‘that’s quite all right. I just thought you might find this inscription interesting.’

‘I don’t think I should find it as interesting as all that,’ I said, and went back to my seat at the top of the theatre. Max rejoined me about an hour later, very happy, having deciphered one particular obscure Greek phrase which, as far as he was concerned, had made his day.

Delphi was the highlight, though. It struck me as so unbelievably beautiful that we went round trying to select a site where we might build a little house one day. We marked out three, I remember. It was a nice dream: I don’t know that we believed in it ourselves even at the time. When I went there a year or two ago and saw the great buses travelling up and down, and the cafes, the souvenirs, and the tourists, how glad I was that we had not built our house there.

We were always choosing sites for houses. This was mainly owing to me, houses having always been my passion–there was indeed a moment in my life, not long before the outbreak of the second war, when I was the proud owner of eight houses. I had become addicted to finding broken-down, slummy houses in London and making structural alterations, decorating and furnishing them. When the second war came and I had to pay war damage insurance on all these houses, it was not so funny. However, in the end they all showed a good profit when I sold them. It had been an enjoyable hobby while it lasted–and I am always interested to walk past one of ‘my’ houses, to see how they are being kept up, and to guess the sort of person who is living in them now.

On the last day we walked down from Delphi to the sea at Itea below. A Greek came with us to show us the way, and Max talked to him. Max has a very inquiring mind, and always has to ask a lot of questions of any native who is with him. On this occasion he was asking our guide the names of various flowers. Our charming Greek was only too anxious to oblige. Max would point out a flower and he would say the name, then Max would carefully write it down in his notebook. After he had written down about twenty-five specimens he noticed that there was a certain amount of repetition. He repeated the Greek name which was now being given him for a blue flower with spiky thorns on it, and recognised it as the same name as had been used for one of the first flowers, a large yellow marigold. It then dawned upon us that, in his anxiety to please, the Greek was merely telling us the names of as many flowers as he knew. As he did not know many he was beginning to repeat them for each new flower. With some disgust Max realised that his careful list of wild flowers was completely useless.

We ended up at Athens, and there, with separation only four or five days ahead of us, disaster struck the happy inhabitants of Eden. I went down with what I took at first to be one of the ordinary tummy complaints that often strike one in the Middle East, known as Gyppy Tummy, Baghdad Tummy, Teheran Tummy, and so on. This I took to be Athens Tummy–but it proved to be worse than that.

I got up after a few days, but when driving out on an excursion I felt so ill that I had to be driven straight back again. I found I had quite a high fever, and in the end, after many protests on my part, and when all other remedies had failed, we got hold of a doctor. Only a Greek doctor was obtainable. He spoke French, and I soon learnt that, though my French was socially adequate, I did not know any medical terms.

The doctor attributed my downfall to the heads of red mullet, in which, according to him, there lurked great danger, especially for strangers who were not used to dissecting this fish in the proper way. He told me a gruesome tale about a cabinet minister who suffered from this to the point almost of death and only made a last moment recovery. I certainly felt ill enough to die at any minute! I went on having a temperature of 105 and being unable to keep anything down. However, my doctor succeeded in the end. Suddenly I lay there feeling human once more. The thought of eating was horrible, and I did not feel I ever wanted to move again–but I was on the mend and knew it. I assured Max that he would be able to get off the following day.

‘It’s awful. How can I leave you, dear?’

Our trouble was that Max had been entrusted with the responsibility of reaching Ur in time to build on various additions to the burnt-brick expedition house so as to be ready for the Woolleys and the other members of the expedition when they arrived in a fortnight’s time. He was to build a new dining-room and a new bathroom for Katharine.

‘They will understand, I’m sure,’ said Max. But he said it doubtfully, and I knew quite well that they wouldn’t. I got terrifically worked up, and pointed out that they would lay dereliction of duty on Max’s part on me. It became a point of honour with us both that Max should be there on time. I assured him that now I should be quite all right. I would lie there, quietly recovering for another week perhaps, and then go straight home by the Orient Express.

Poor Max was torn to bits. He, too, was invested with a terrific English sense of duty. It had been put to him firmly by Leonard Woolley: ‘I trust you, Max. You may be enjoying yourself and all that, but it is really serious that you should give me your word that you will be there on the right day and take charge.’

‘You know what Len will say,’ I pointed out.

‘But you’re really ill.’

‘I know I’m ill, but they won’t believe it. They’ll think that I’m just keeping you away, and I can’t have that. And if you go on arguing, my temperature will go up again and I really shall be very ill indeed.’

So, in the end, both of us feeling heroic, Max departed on the path of duty.

The one person who did not agree with any of this was the Greek doctor, who threw his hands up to Heaven and burst into torrents of indignant French. ‘Ah, yes, they are all alike, the English. I have known many of them, oh, so many of them–they are all the same. They have a devotion to their work, to their duty. What is work, what is duty, compared with human beings? A wife is a human being, is she not? A wife is ill, and she is a human being, and that is what matters. That is all that matters–a human being in distress!’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘This is really important. He gave his word he would be there. He has a heavy responsibility.’

‘Ah, what is responsibility? What is work, what is duty? Duty? It is nothing, duty, to affection. But Englishmen are like that. Ah, what coldness, what froideur. What horror to be married to an Englishman! I would not wish that on any woman–no indeed, I would not!’

I was much too limp to argue more, but I assured him that I should get on all right.

‘You will have to be very careful,’ he warned me. ‘But it is no good saying things like that. This cabinet minister of whom I tell you–do you know how long it was before he returned to duty? A whole month.’

I was not impressed. I told him that English stomachs were not like that. English stomachs, I assured him, recovered very quickly. The doctor threw up his hands once again, vociferated more French, and departed, more or less washing his hands of me. If I felt like it, he said, I could at any time have a small plate of plain boiled macaroni. I didn’t want anything. Least of all did I want plain boiled macaroni. I lay like a log in my green wall-papered bedroom, feeling sick as a cat, painful round the waist and stomach, and so weak that I hated to move an arm. I sent for plain boiled macaroni. I ate about three winding strings of it, and then put it aside. It seemed to me impossible that I should ever fancy eating again.

I thought of Max. He would have arrived at Beirut by now. The following day he would be starting by Nairn convoy across the desert. Poor Max, he would be worried about me.

Fortunately I was no longer worried about myself. In fact I felt stirring in me a determination to do something or get somewhere. I ate more plain boiled macaroni; progressed to having a little grated cheese on it; and walked three times round the room each morning to get back some strength into my legs. I told the doctor I was much better when he arrived.

‘That is good. Yes, you are better, I see.’

‘In fact,’ I said, ‘I shall be able to go home the day after tomorrow.’ do not talk such folly. I tell you, the cabinet minister–’

I was getting very tired of the cabinet minister. I summoned the hotel clerk and made him book me a seat on the Orient Express in three days’ time. I did not break my intention to the doctor until the night before I left. Then his hands went up again. He accused me of ingratitude, of foolhardiness, and warned that I would probably be taken off the train en route and die on a railway platform. I knew quite well it was not as bad as that. English stomachs, I said again, recover quickly.

In due course, I left. My tottering footsteps were supported by the hotel porter into the train. I collapsed in my bunk, and more or less remained there. Occasionally I got them to bring me some hot soup from the dining-car, but as it was usually greasy I did not fancy it. All this abstention would have been good for my figure a few years later, but at that time I was still slender, and at the end of my journey home I looked like a mass of bones. It was wonderful to get back and to flop into my own bed. All the same, it took me nearly a month to recover my old health and spirits.

Max had reached Ur safely, though with tremendous trepidation about me, dispatching various telegrams en route, and waiting for the telegrams from me to arrive, which they never did. He put such energy into the work that he did far more than the Woolleys had expected.

‘I’11 show them,’ he said. He built Katharine’s bathroom entirely to his own specifications, as small and cramped as possible, and added such other embellishments to it and the dining-room as he thought fit.

‘But we didn’t mean you to do all this,’ Katharine exclaimed, when they arrived.

‘I thought I had better get on with it as I was here,’ said Max grimly. He explained that he had left me at death’s door in Athens.

‘You should have stayed with her,’ said Katharine.

‘I think probably I should,’ said Max. ‘But you both impressed on me how important this work was.’

Katharine took it out of Len by telling him that the bathroom was not at all to her liking and would have to be taken down and rebuilt–and this was done, at considerable inconvenience. Later, however, she congratulated Max on the superior design of the living-room, and said what a difference it had made to her.

At my present age I have learnt pretty well how to deal with temperamental people of all kinds–actors, producers, architects, musicians, and natural prima donnas such as Katharine Woolley. Max’s mother was what I should call a prima donna in her own right. My own mother came near to being one: she could work herself into terrific states, but had invariably forgotten all about them by the next day. ‘But you seemed so desperate!’ I would say to her. ‘Desperate?’ said my mother, highly surprised. ‘Was I? Did I sound like that?’

Several of our acting friends can throw a temperament as well as anyone. When Charles Laughton was playing Hercule Poirot in Alibi, and sipping ice-cream sodas with me during a break in rehearsal, he explained his method. ‘It’s a good thing to pretend to have a temperament, even if you haven’t. I find it very helpful. People will say, “Don’t let’s do anything to annoy him. You know how he throws temperaments.”’

‘It’s tiring sometimes,’ he added, ‘especially if you don’t happen to want to. But it pays. It pays every time.’


II

My literary activities at this period seem curiously vague in my memory. I don’t think, even then, that I considered myself a bona fide author. I wrote things–yes–books and stories. They were published, and I was beginning to accustom myself to the fact that I could count upon them as a definite source of income. But never, when I was filling in a form and came to the line asking for Occupation, would it have occurred to me to fill it in with anything but the time-honoured ‘Married woman’. I was a married woman, that was my status, and that was my occupation. As a sideline, I wrote books. I never approached my writing by dubbing it with the grand name of ‘career’. I would have thought it ridiculous.

My mother-in-law could not understand this. ‘You write so well, Agatha dear, and because you write so well, surely you ought to write something–well–more serious?’ Something ‘worth while’ was what she meant. I found it difficult to explain to her, and indeed did not really try, that my writing was for entertainment.

I wanted to be a good detective story writer, yes, and indeed by this time I was conceited enough to think that I was a good detective story writer. Some of my books satisfied and pleased me. They never pleased me entirely, of course, because I don’t suppose that is what one ever achieves. Nothing turns out quite in the way you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.

My dear mother-in-law would, I think, have liked me to write a biography of some world-famous figure. I cannot think of anything I should be worse at doing. Anyway, I remained sufficiently modest to say occasionally, without thinking, ‘Yes, but then of course I am not really an author.’ This was usually corrected by Rosalind, who would say: ‘But you are an author, mother. You are quite definitely an author by this time.’

Poor Max had one serious penalty laid on him by marriage. He had, as far as I could find out, never read a novel. Katharine Woolley had forced The Murder of Roger Ackroyd upon him, but he had got out of reading it. Somebody had discussed the denouement in front of him, and after that, he said, ‘What on earth is the good of reading a book when you know the end of it?’ Now, however, as my husband, he started manfully on the task.

By that time I had written ten books at least, and he started slowly to catch up with them. Since a really erudite book on archaeology or on classical subjects was Max’s idea of light reading, it was funny to see what heavy weather he made of reading light fiction. However, he stuck to it, and I am proud to say appeared to enjoy his self-imposed task in the end.

The funny thing is that I have little memory of the books I wrote just after my marriage. I suppose I was enjoying myself so much in ordinary living that writing was a task which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write. This has caused much trouble for me in the ensuing years, since whenever I had to receive an interviewer their first wish would always be to take a photograph of me at my work. ‘Show me where you write your books.’

‘Oh, anywhere.’

‘But surely you have a place where you always work?’

But I hadn’t. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter. I had begun now to write straight on to the typewriter, though I still used to do the beginning chapters and occasionally others in long-hand and then type them out. A marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place to write; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.

My family usually noticed a time of approaching activity by saying, ‘Look, Missus is broody again.’ Carlo and Mary always called me Missus, supposedly in Peter the dog’s language, and Rosalind, too, more often called me Missus than Mummy or Mother. Anyway, they all recognised the signs when I was broody, looked at me hopefully, and urged me to shut myself up in a room somewhere and get busy.

Many friends have said to me, ‘I never know when you write your books, because I’ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.’ I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone: they depart for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same. I felt slightly embarrassed if I was going to write. Once I could get away, however, shut the door and get people not to interrupt me, then I was able to go full speed ahead, completely lost in what I was doing.

Actually my output seems to have been rather good in the years 1929 to 1932: besides full-length books I had published two collections of short stories. One consisted of Mr Quin stories. These are my favourite. I wrote one, not very often, at intervals perhaps of three or four months, sometimes longer still. Magazines appeared to like them, and I liked them myself, but I refused all offers to do a series for any periodical. I didn’t want to do a series of Mr Quin: I only wanted to do one when I felt like it. He was a kind of carry-over for me from my early poems in the Harlequin and Columbine series.

Mr Quin was a figure who just entered into a story–a catalyst, no more–his mere presence affected human beings. There would be some little fact, some apparently irrelevant phrase, to point him out for what he was: a man shown in a harlequin-coloured light that fell on him through a glass window; a sudden appearance or disappearance. Always he stood for the same things: he was a friend of lovers, and connected with death. Little Mr Satterthwaite, who was, as you might say, Mr Quin’s emissary, also became a favourite character of mine.

I had also published a book of short stories called Partners in Crime.

Each story here was written in the manner of some particular detective of the time. Some of them by now I cannot even recognise. I remember Thornley Colton, the blind detective–Austin Freeman, of course; Freeman Wills Croft with his wonderful timetables; and inevitably Sherlock Holmes. It is interesting in a way to see who of the twelve detective story writers that I chose are still well known–some are household names, others have more or less perished in oblivion. They all seemed to me at the time to write well and entertainingly in their different fashions. Partners in Crime featured in it my two young sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence, who had been the principal characters in my second book, The Secret Adversary. It was fun to get back to them for a change. Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but I cannot remember where, when or how I wrote it, why I came to write it, or even what suggested to me that I should select a new character–Miss Marple–to act as the sleuth in the story. Certainly at the time I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my life. I did not know that she was to become a rival to Hercule Poirot.

People never stop writing to me nowadays to suggest that Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot should meet–but why should they? I am sure they would not enjoy it at all. Hercule Poirot, the complete egoist, would not like being taught his business by an elderly spinster lady. He was a professional sleuth, he would not be at home at all in Miss Marple’s world. No, they are both stars, and they are stars in their own right. I shall not let them meet unless I feel a sudden and unexpected urge to do so.

I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book–an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home. When the book was adapted as a play, one of the things that saddened me most was Caroline’s removal. Instead, the doctor was provided with another sister–a much younger one–a pretty girl who could supply Poirot with romantic interest.

I had no idea when the idea was first suggested what terrible suffering you go through with plays, owing to the alterations made in them. I had already written a detective play of my own, I can’t remember exactly when. It was not approved of by Hughes Massie; in fact they suggested it would be better to forget it entirely, so I didn’t press on with it. I had called it Black Coffee. It was a conventional spy thriller, and although full of cliches, it was not, I think, at all bad. Then, in due course, it came into its own. A friend of mine from Sunningdale days, Mr Burman, who was connected with the Royalty Theatre, suggested to me that it might perhaps be produced.

It always seems strange to me that whoever plays Poirot is always an outsize man. Charles Laughton had plenty of avoirdupois, and Francis Sullivan was broad, thick, and about 6’2’ tall. He played Poirot in Black Coffee. I think the first production was at the Everyman in Hampstead, and the part of Lucia was played by Joyce Bland, whom I always thought a very good actress.

Black Coffee ran for a mere four or five months when it finally came to the West End, but it was revived twenty-odd years later, with minor alterations and it did quite well in repertory.

Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot–all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang a la Moriarty–provided first by the Germans, the ‘Huns’ of the first war; then the Communists, who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.

Alibi, the first play to be produced from one of my books–The Murder of Roger Ackroyd–was adapted by Michael Morton. He was a practised hand at adapting plays. I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him. I was by this time so stuck with Poirot that I realised I was going to have him with me for life. I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier, who was producing, backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor’s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl. As I have said, I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal: I liked the part she played in village life: and I liked the idea of village life reflected through the life of the doctor and his masterful sister.

I think at that moment, in St. Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born, and with her Miss Hartnell, Miss Wetherby, and Colonel and Mrs Bantry–they were all there lined up below the border-line of consciousness, ready to come to life and step out on to the stage.

Reading Murder at the Vicarage now, I am not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters, and too many sub-plots. But at any rate the main plot is sound. The village is as real to me as it could be–and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days. Little maids from orphanages, and well-trained servants on their way to higher things have faded away, but the daily women who have come to succeed them, are just as real and human–though not, I must say, nearly as skilled as their predecessors.

Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies–old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her–though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised if so-and-so isn’t going on,’ my grandmother used to say, nodding her head darkly, and although she had no grounds for these assertions, so-and-so was exactly what was going on. ‘A downy fellow, that–I don’t trust him,’ Grannie would remark, and when later a polite young bank-clerk was found to have embezzled some money, she was not at all surprised, but merely nodded her head.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve known one or two like him.’

Nobody would ever have wheedled my grandmother out of her savings or put up a proposition to her which she would swallow gullibly. She would have fixed him with a shrewd eye and have remarked later: ‘I know his kind. I knew what he was after. I think I’ll just ask a few friends to tea and mention that a young man like that is going around.’

Grannie’s prophecies were much dreaded. My brother and sister had had a tame squirrel as a pet in the house for about a year, when Grannie, after picking it up with a broken paw in the garden one day, had said sapiently: ‘Mark my words! That squirrel will be off up the chimney one of these days!’ It went up the chimney five days later.

Then there was the case of the jar on a shelf over the drawing-room door. ‘I shouldn’t keep that there, if I were you, Clara,’ said Grannie. ‘One of these days someone will slam the door, or the wind will slam it, and down it will come.’

‘But dear Auntie-Grannie, it has been there for ten months.’ ‘That may be,’ said my grandmother.

A few days later we had a thunderstorm, the door banged, and the jar fell down. Perhaps it was second sight. Anyway, I endowed my Miss Marple with something of Grannie’s powers of prophecy. There was no unkindness in Miss Marple, she just did not trust people. Though she expected the worst, she often accepted people kindly in spite of what they were.

Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy–which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he could have grown old with me.

I gave Miss Marple five colleagues for the series of six stories. First was her nephew; a modern novelist who dealt in strong meat in his books, incest, sex, and sordid descriptions of bedrooms and lavatory equipment–the stark side of life was what Raymond West saw. His dear, pretty, old, fluffy Aunt Jane he treated with an indulgent kindness as one who knew nothing of the world. Secondly I produced a young woman who was a modern painter, and was just getting on very special terms with Raymond West. Then there were Mr Pettigrew, a local solicitor, dry, shrewd, elderly; the local doctor–a useful person to know of cases which would make a suitable story for an evening’s problem; and a clergyman.

The problem told by Miss Marple herself bore the somewhat ridiculous title of The Thumb Mark of St. Peter, and referred to a haddock. Some time later I wrote another six Miss Marple stories, and the twelve, with an extra story, were published in England under the title of The Thirteen Problems, and in America as The Tuesday Club Murders.

Peril at End House was another of my books which left so little impression on my mind that I cannot even remember writing it. Possibly I had already thought out the plot some time previously, since this has always been a habit of mine, and often confuses me as to when a book was written or published. Plots come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hat-shop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, ‘Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.’ Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book.

So far so good–but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that had struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books, to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot–do it yourself-Girl and not really sister–August–with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.

Then there are the plots that tease my mind, that I like to think about and play with, knowing that one day I am going to write them. Roger Ackroyd played about in my mind for a long time before I could get the details fixed. I had another idea that came to me after going to a performance by Ruth Draper. I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were; the wonderful way she could transform herself from a nagging wife to a peasant girl kneeling in a cathedral. Thinking about her led me to the book Lord Edgware Dies.

When I began writing detective stories I was not in any mood to criticise them or to think seriously about crime. The detective story was the story of the chase; it was also very much a story with a moral; in fact it was the old Everyman Morality Tale, the hunting down of Evil and the triumph of Good. At that time, the time of the 1914 war, the doer of evil was not a hero: the enemy was wicked, the hero was good: it was as crude and as simple as that. We had not then begun to wallow in psychology. I was, like everyone else who wrote books or read them, against the criminal and for the innocent victim.

There was one exception in the popular hero Raffles, a sporting cricketer and successful cracksman, with his rabbit-like associate Bunny. I think I always felt slightly shocked by Raffles, and in looking back now I feel much more shocked than I did then, though it was certainly in the tradition of the past–he was the Robin Hood type. But Raffles was a light-hearted exception. No one could have dreamt then that there would come a time when crime books would be read for their love of violence, the taking of sadistic pleasure in brutality for its own sake. One would have thought that the community would rise up in horror against such things; but now cruelty seems almost everyday bread and butter. I wonder still how it can be so, when one considers that the vast majority of people one knows, girls and boys as well as the older folk, are extraordinarily kind and helpful: they will do things to help older people; they are willing and anxious to be of service. The minority of what I call ‘the haters’ is quite small, but, like all minorities, it makes itself felt far more than the majority does.

As a result of writing crime books one gets interested in the study of criminology. I am particularly interested in reading books by those who have been in contact with criminals, especially those who have tried to benefit them or to find ways of what one would have called in the old days ‘reforming’ them–for which I imagine one uses far more grand terms nowadays! There seems no doubt that there are those, like Richard III as Shakespeare shows him, who do indeed say: ‘Evil be thou my Good.’ They have chosen Evil, I think, much as Milton’s Satan did: he wanted to be great, he wanted power, he wanted to be as high as God. He had no love in him, so he had no humility. I would say myself, from the ordinary observation of life, that where there is no humility the people perish.

One of the pleasures of writing detective stories is that there are so many types to choose from: the light-hearted thriller, which is particularly pleasant to do; the intricate detective story with an involved plot which is technically interesting and requires a great deal of work, but is always rewarding; and then what I can only describe as the detective story that has a kind of passion behind it–that passion being to help save innocence. Because it is innocence that matters, not guilt.

I can suspend judgment on those who kill–but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which, perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare them–because you cannot spare them any more than you could spare the man who staggers out from a plague-stricken village in the Middle Ages to mix with innocent and healthy children in a nearby village. The innocent must be protected; they must be able to live at peace and charity with their neighbours.

It frightens me that nobody seems to care about the innocent. When you read about a murder case, nobody seems to be horrified by the picture, say, of a fragile old woman in a small cigarette shop, turning away to get a packet of cigarettes for a young thug, and being attacked and battered to death. No one seems to care about her terror and her pain, and the final merciful unconsciousness. Nobody seems to go through the agony of the victim–they are only full of pity for the young killer, because of his youth.

Why should they not execute him? We have taken the lives of wolves, in this country; we didn’t try to teach the wolf to lie down with the lamb–I doubt really if we could have. We hunted down the wild boar in the mountains before he came down and killed the children by the brook. Those were our enemies–and we destroyed them.

What can we do to those who are tainted with the germs of ruthlessness and hatred, for whom other people’s lives go for nothing? They are often the ones with good homes, good opportunities, good teaching, yet they turn out to be, in plain English, wicked. Is there a cure for wickedness? What one can do with a killer? Not imprisonment for life–that surely is far more cruel than the cup of hemlock in ancient Greece. The best answer we ever found, I suspect, was transportation. A vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings, where man could live in simpler surroundings.

Let us face the thought that what we regard as defects were once qualities. Without ruthlessness, without cruelty, without a complete lack of mercy, perhaps man would not have continued to exist; he would have been wiped out quite soon. The evil man nowadays may be the successful man of the past. He was necessary then, but he is not necessary and is a danger now.

The only hope, it seems to me, would be to sentence such a creature to compulsory service for the benefit of the community in general. You might allow your criminal the choice between the cup of hemlock and offering himself for experimental research, for instance. There are many fields of research especially in medicine and healing, where a human subject is vitally necessary–animals will not do. At present, it seems to me, the scientist himself, a devoted researcher, risks his own life, but there could be human guinea-pigs, who accepted a certain period of experiment in lieu of death, and who, if they survived it, would then have redeemed themselves, and could go forth free men, with the mark of Cain removed from their foreheads.

This might make no difference to their lives; they might only say, ‘Well, I had good luck–anyway–I got away with it.’ Yet the fact of society owing them thanks might make some faint difference. One should never hope too much, but one can always hope a little. They would at least have had a chance to do a worthwhile act, and to escape the retribution they had earned–it would be up to them to start again. Mightn’t they start a little differently? Might they not even feel a certain pride in themselves?

If not, one can only say, God pity them. Not in this life, perhaps, but in the next, they may move ‘on the upward way’. But the important thing is still the innocent; those who live sincerely and fearlessly in the present age, who demand that they should be protected and saved from harm. They are the ones that matter.

Perhaps Wickedness may find its physical cure–they can sew up our hearts, deep-freeze us–some day they may rearrange our genes, alter our cells. Think of the number of cretins there used to be, dependent for intellect on the sudden discovery of what thyroid glands, deficient or in excess, could do to you.

This seems to have taken me a long way from detective stories, but explains, perhaps, why I have got more interest in my victims than my criminals. The more passionately alive the victim, the more glorious indignation I have on his behalf, and am full of a delighted triumph when I have delivered a near-victim out of the valley of the shadow of death.

Returning from the valley of the shadow of death, I have decided not to tidy up this book too much. For one thing I am elderly. Nothing is more wearying than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way round. I am perhaps talking to myself–a thing one is apt to do when one is a writer. One walks along the street, passing all the shops one meant to go into, or all the offices one ought to have visited, talking to oneself hard–not too loud, I hope–and rolling one’s eyes expressively, and then one suddenly sees people looking at one and drawing slightly aside, clearly thinking one is mad.

Oh well, I suppose it is just the same as when I was four years old talking to the kittens. I am still talking to the kittens, in fact.


III

In March of the following year, as arranged, I went out to Ur. Max met me at the station. I had wondered if I should feel shy–after all we had been married only a short time before parting. Rather to my surprise, it was as if we had met the day before. Max had written me full letters, and I felt as well informed on the archaeological progress of that year’s dig as anyone possibly could be who was a novice in the subject. Before our journey home I spent some days at the Expedition House. Len and Katharine greeted me warmly and Max took me determinedly over the dig.

We were unlucky in our weather, for there was a dust-storm blowing. It was then that I noticed that Max’s eyes were impervious to sand. While I stumbled along behind him, blinded by this wind-blown horror, Max, with his eyes apparently wide open, pointed out this, that and the other feature. My first idea was to race for the shelter of the house, but I stuck to it manfully, because in spite of great discomfort I was extremely interested to see all the things about which Max had written.



With the season’s expedition at an end, we decided to go home by way of Persia. There was a small air service–German–which had just started running from Baghdad to Persia, and we went by that. It was a single-engined machine, with one pilot, and we felt extremely adventurous. Probably it was rather adventurous–we seemed to be flying into mountain peaks the entire time.

The first stop was at Hamadan, the second at Teheran.

From Teheran we flew to Shiraz, and I remember how beautiful it looked–like a dark emerald-green jewel in a great desert of greys and browns. Then, as one circled nearer, the emerald grew even more intense, and finally we came down to find a green city of oasis, palms, and gardens. I had not realised how much desert there was in Persia, and I now understood why the Persians so appreciated gardens–it was because it was so very difficult to have gardens.

We went to one beautiful house, I remember. Years later, on our second visit to Shiraz, I tried hard to find it again, but failed. Then the third time we succeeded. I identified it because one of the rooms had various pictures painted in medallions on the ceiling and walls. One of them was of Holborn Viaduct. Apparently a Shah of Victorian times, after visiting London, had sent an artist back there with instructions to paint various medallions of scenes he wanted portrayed–and there, among them, many years later, was Holborn Viaduct still, a little bruised and scratched with wear. The house was already dilapidated, and was not lived in by then, but it was still beautiful, even if dangerous to walk about in. I used it as the setting for a short story called The House at Shiraz.

From Shiraz we went by car to Isfahan. It was a long drive on a rough track, through desert the whole time, with now and then a meagre village. We had to stop the night in an excessively primitive rest-house. We had a rug from the car and bare boards to sleep on, and a rather doubtful-looking bandit in charge, aided by some ruffianly peasants.

We passed an excessively painful night. The hardness of a board to sleep on is unbelievable; one would not think that one’s hips, elbows, and shoulders could get so bruised as they do in a few hours. Once, sleeping uncomfortably in my Baghdad hotel bedroom, I investigated the cause, and found that under the mattress a heavy board had been placed to combat the sagging of the wired springs. An Iraqi lady had used the room last, so the house-boy explained, and had been unable to sleep because of the softness, so the board had been put in to enable her to have a good night’s rest.

We resumed our drive, and arrived, rather weary, in Isfahan, and Isfahan, from that time forward, has been listed by me as the most beautiful city in the world. Never have I seen anything like its glorious colours, of rose, blue and gold–the flowers, birds, arabesques, lovely fairy-tale buildings, and everywhere beautiful coloured tiles–yes, a fairyland city. After I saw it that first time I did not visit it again for nearly twenty years, and I was terrified to go there then because I thought it would be completely different. Fortunately it had changed very little. Naturally there were more modern streets, and a few slightly more modern shops, but the noble Islamic buildings, the courts, the tiles and the fountains–they were all there still. The people were less fanatical by this time, and one could visit many of the interiors of the mosques which were inaccessible before.

Max and I decided we would continue our journey home through Russia, if that did not prove too difficult as regards passports, visas, money, and everything else. In pursuit of this idea we went to the Bank of Iran. This building is so magnificent that you could not help considering it more as a palace than a mere financial establishment–and indeed it was hard to find where in it the banking was going on. When, finally, you arrived through the corridors set with fountains in a vast ante-chamber, there in the distance was a counter behind which smartly dressed young men in European suits were writing in ledgers. But as far as I could see, in the Middle East you never transacted business at the counter of a bank. You were always passed on to a manager, a sub-manager, or at least to someone who looked like a manager.

A clerk would beckon to one of the bank messengers who stood about in picturesque attitudes and costumes, and he would then wave you to any one of several enormous leather divans, and disappear. By and by he would return, beckon you towards him, take you up marble stairs of great magnificence, and lead you to some presumably sacred door. Your guide would tap on it, go in leaving you standing outside, to return presently, beaming all over his face and showing himself delighted that you had passed the test successfully. You would enter the room feeling that you were no less than a Prince of Ethiopia.

A charming man, usually rather portly, would rise to his feet, greet you in perfect English or French, beckon you to a seat, offer you tea or coffee; ask when you had arrived, whether you liked Teheran, where you had come from, and finally–quite, as it were, by accident–proceed to the question of what you might happen to want. You would mention such things as travellers’ cheques. He would sound a little bell on his desk, another messenger would enter and would be told: ‘Mr Ibrahim.’ Coffee would arrive, there would be more conversation on travel, the general state of politics, failure or success of crops.

Presently Mr Ibrahim would arrive. He would be wearing a puce-coloured European suit, and would be about thirty years of age. The bank manager would explain your requirements and you would mention what money you would like the payment to be made in. He would then produce six or more different forms which you would sign. Mr Ibrahim would then disappear and another long interlude would take place.

It was at this moment on the present occasion that Max began to talk about the possibility of our going to Russia. The bank manager sighed and raised his hands.

‘You will have difficulties,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Max said, he expected there would be difficulties, but surely it was not impossible? There was no actual bar, was there, to crossing the frontier?

‘You have no diplomatic representation at present, I believe. You have no Consulates there.’

Max said, no, he knew we had no consuls there, but he understood there was no prohibition on English people entering the country if they wanted to.

‘No, there is no prohibition at all. Of course, you would have to take money with you.’

Naturally, Max said, he expected he would have to take money with him.

‘And no financial transaction that you can make with us will be legal,’ said the bank manager sadly.

This startled me a little. Max, of course, was not new to Oriental ways of doing business, but I was. It seemed to me odd that in a bank a financial transaction could be both illegal and yet practised.

‘You see,’ explained the bank manager, ‘they alter the laws; they alter them the whole time. And anyway the laws contradict each other. One law says you shall not take out money in one particular form, but another law says that is the only form in which you can take it out–so what is one to do? One does what seems best on that particular day of the month. I tell you this,’ he added, ‘so that you may understand beforehand that though I can arrange a transaction, I can send out to the bazaar, I can get you the most suitable kind of money to take, it will all be illegal.’

Max said that he quite understood that. The bank manager cheered up, and told us that he thought we would enjoy the journey very much. ‘Let me see now–you want to go down to the Caspian by car? Yes? That is a beautiful drive. You will go to Resht, and from Resht you will go by boat to Baku. It is a Russian boat. I know nothing about it, nothing whatsoever, but people go by it, yes.’

His tone suggested that people who went by it disappeared into space, and nothing was known of what happened to them afterwards. ‘You will not only have to take money,’ he warned us, ‘you will have to take food. I do not know if there are any arrangements for getting food in Russia. At any rate there are no arrangements for buying food on the train from Baku to Batum–you must take everything with you.’

We discussed hotel accommodation and other problems, and all seemed equally difficult.

Presently another gentleman in a puce suit arrived. He was younger than Mr Ibrahim, and his name was Mr Mahomet. Mr Mahomet brought with him several more forms, which Max signed, and also demanded various small sums of money to purchase the necessary stamps. A messenger was summoned, and sent to the bazaar for currency.

Mr Ibrahim then reappeared. He set out the amount of money we had asked for in a few notes of large denomination instead of the notes of small denomination we had requested.

‘Ah! but it is always very difficult,’ he said sadly. ‘Very difficult indeed. You see sometimes we have a lot of one denomination, and some days we have a lot of another. It is just your good fortune or your bad fortune what you get.’ We were obviously to accept our bad fortune in this case.

The manager attempted to cheer us by sending for yet more coffee. Turning to us, he went on, ‘It is best that you take all the money you can to Russia in tomans. Tomans,’ he added, ‘are illegal in Persia, but they are the only things we can use here because they are the only things they will take in the bazaar.’

He sent yet another myrmidon out into the bazaar to change large quantities of our newly-acquired money into tomans. Tomans turned out to be Maria Theresa dollars–pure silver and excessively heavy.

‘Your passport, it is in order?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘It is valid for the Soviet Union?’ We said yes, it was valid for all countries in Europe including the Soviet Union.

‘Then that is all right. The visa, no doubt, will be easy. It is understood then? You must make your arrangements for a car–the hotel will do that for you–and you must take with you sufficient food for three or four days. The journey from Baku to Batum lasts several days.’

Max said he would also like to break his journey at Tiflis.

‘Ah, for that you will have to inquire when you get your visa. I do not think it is possible.’

That rather upset Max. However, he accepted it. We said goodbye and thanked the manager. Two hours and a half had passed.

We went back to our hotel, where our diet was somewhat monotonous. Whatever we ordered, or whatever we asked for, the waiter would say: ‘There is very good caviare today–very good, very fresh.’ Eagerly we used to order caviare. It was amazingly cheap, and though we used to have enormous amounts of it, it always seemed to cost us only five shillings. We did, however, occasionally baulk at having it for breakfast–somehow one does not want caviare for breakfast.

‘What have you got for breakfast?’ I would ask.

‘Caviare–tres frais.‘

‘No, I don’t want caviare, I want something else. Eggs? Bacon?’ ‘There is nothing else. There is bread.’

‘Nothing else at all? What about eggs?’

‘Caviare, tres frais,’ said the waiter firmly.

So we had a little caviare and a great deal of bread. The only other thing offered us for a meal at lunch except caviare was something called La Tourte, which was a large and excessively sweet kind of jam tart, heavy, but of pleasant flavour.

We had to consult this waiter as to what food we should take into Russia with us. On the whole the waiter recommended caviare. We agreed to take two enormous tins of it. The waiter also suggested taking six cooked ducks. In addition we took bread, a tin of biscuits, pots of jam and a pound of tea–‘for the engine,’ the waiter explained. We did not quite see what the engine had to do with it. Perhaps it was usual to offer the engine-driver a present of tea? Anyway we took tea and coffee essence.

After dinner that evening we fell into conversation with a young Frenchman and his wife. He was interested to hear of our proposed journey, and shook his head in horror. ‘C’est impossible! C’est impossible pour Madame. Ce bateau, k bateau de Resht a Baku, ce bateau russe, c’est infecte! Infecte, Madame!’ French is a wonderful language. He made the word infecte sound so depraved and filthy that I could hardly bear to contemplate the prospect.

‘You cannot take Madame there,’ the Frenchman insisted firmly. But Madame did not shrink.

‘I don’t suppose it’s nearly so infecte as he says,’ I remarked later to Max. ‘Anyway, we’ve got lots of bug powder and things like that.’

So in due course we started, laden with quantities of tomans and given our credentials by the Russian consulate, who were quite adamant about not letting us get off at Tiflis. We hired a good car, and off we went.

It was a lovely drive down to the Caspian. We climbed first up bare and rocky hills, and then as we came over the top and down the other side discovered ourselves in another world–finally arriving in soft warm weather and falling rain at Resht.

We were ushered on to the infecte Russian boat feeling rather nervous. Everything was as different as could be from Persia and Iraq. First, the boat was scrupulously clean; as clean as a hospital, indeed rather like a hospital. Its little cabins had high iron beds, hard straw palliasses, clean coarse-cotton sheets, and a simple tin jug and basin. The crew of the boat were like robots; they seemed all to be six foot high, with fair hair and impassive faces. They treated us politely, but as though we were not really there. Max and I felt exactly like the suicide couple in the play, Outward Bound–the husband and wife who move about the boat like ghosts. Nobody spoke to us, looked at us, or paid the least attention to us.

Presently, however, we saw that food was being served in the saloon. We went hopefully to the door and looked in. Nobody made any sign to us or appeared to see us. Finally, Max took his courage in both hands and asked if we could have some food. The demand was clearly not understood.

Max tried French, Arabic, and such Persian as he knew, but with no effect. Finally he pointed his finger firmly down his throat in that age-old gesture which cannot fail to be recognised. Immediately the man pulled forward two seats at the table, we sat down, and the food was brought to us. It was quite good, though very plain, and it cost an incredible amount.

Then we arrived at Baku. Here we were met by an Intourist agent. He was charming, full of information, and spoke French fluently. He thought, he said, that we might like to go to a performance of Faust at the Opera. This, however, I did not want to do. I felt I had not come all the way to Russia to see Faust performed. So he said he would arrange some other entertainment for us. Instead of Faust we were forced to go and look at various building sites and half-built blocks of flats.

When getting off the boat, the procedure was simple. Six robot-like porters advanced in order of seniority. The charge, said the Intourist man, was one rouble for each piece. They advanced upon us, and each porter took one piece. An unlucky one had Max’s heavy suitcase full of books; the luckiest one had only an umbrella–but they both had to be paid the same.

The hotel we went to was curious also. It was a relic of more luxurious days, I should imagine, and the furniture was grand but old-fashioned. It had been painted white, and was carved with roses and cherubs. For some reason it was all standing in the middle of the room, rather as though furniture movers had just pushed a wardrobe, a table, and a chest of drawers in and left them. Even the beds were not against the wall. These last were magnificently handsome in style, and most comfortable, but they had on them coarse cotton sheets, too small to cover the mattress.

Max asked for hot water for shaving the next morning, but had not much luck. Hot water were the only words he knew in Russian–apart from the words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. The woman he asked shook her head vigorously and brought us along a large jug of cold water. Max used the word for hot several times hopefully, explaining, as he put his razor to his chin, what he needed it for. She shook her head and looked shocked and disapproving.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you are being a luxurious aristocrat by asking for hot water to shave in. You’d better stop.’

Everything in Baku seemed like a Scottish Sunday. There was no pleasure in the streets; most of the shops were shut; the one or two that were open had long queues, and people were standing waiting patiently for unattractive articles.

Our Intourist friend saw us off at the train. The queue for tickets was enormous. ‘I will just see about some reserved seats,’ he said, and moved away. We edged slowly forward in the queue.

Suddenly someone patted us on the arm. It was a woman from the front of the queue. She was smiling broadly. In fact all these people seemed ready to smile if there was anything to smile at. They were kindliness itself. Then, with a good deal of pantomime, the woman urged us to step up to the top of the queue. We didn’t like to do this, and hung back, but the whole of the queue insisted. They patted us on the arm and on the shoulder, nodded and beckoned, and finally one man took us up by the arm and moved us forcibly forward, and the woman at the front stepped aside and bowed and smiled. We purchased our tickets at the Surchet.

The Intourist man came back. ‘Ah, you are ready,’ he said.

‘These kind people gave us their places,’ said Max rather doubtfully. ‘I wish you would explain that we didn’t want to take them.’ but they always do that,’ said he. ‘In fact, they enjoy going to the back of the queue. It is a great occupation standing in a queue, you know. They like to make it as long as possible. They are always very polite to strangers.’

They were indeed. They nodded and waved at us as we left for the train. The platform was erowded; we discovered later, however, that practically nobody was going by train except ourselves. They had just come to see the fun and enjoy their afternoon there. We finally got into our carriage. The Intourist man said goodbye to us and assured us that we would be met at Batum in three days’ time, and that everything would go well.

‘You have not a teapot with you, I see,’ he said. ‘But one of the women will doubtless lend you one.’

I discovered what this meant when the train made its first stop after about two hours’ run. Then an old woman in our compartment patted me violently on the shoulder, showed me her teapot, and explained, with the help of a boy in the corner who spoke German, that the thing to do was to put a pinch of tea in your teapot and take it along to the engine where the driver would supply hot water. We had cups with us, and the woman assured us she would do the rest. She returned with two steaming cups of tea, and we unpacked our provisions. We offered some to our new friends and our journey was well on its way.

Our food held out moderately well–that is to say we got through the ducks, fortunately before they went bad, and ate some bread which grew staler and staler. We had hoped to be able to buy bread on the way, but that did not seem to be possible. We had, of course, got down to the caviare as soon as possible. Our last day brought semi-starvation because we had nothing left but the wing of a duck and two pots of pineapple marmalade. There is something rather sickly in eating a whole pot of pineapple marmalade neat, but it assuaged the pangs of hunger.

We arrived at Batum at midnight, in pouring rain. We had, of course, no hotel booking. We passed out of the station into the night with our baggage. No signs of anyone from Intourist to meet us. There was a droshky waiting, a dilapidated horse-cab rather like an old-fashioned Victoria. Obliging as always, the driver helped us to get in, and piled our baggage over and upon us. We then said we wanted a hotel. He nodded encouragingly, cracked his whip, and we set off at a ramshackle trot through the wet streets.

Soon we came to a hotel, and the driver made signs for us to go in first. We soon saw why. As soon as we got inside we were told there were no rooms. We asked where else we should go, but the man merely shook his head uncomprehendingly. We went out and the driver started off once more. We went to about seven hotels; every one was full up.

At the eighth Max said we would have to take sterner measures, we had got to find somewhere to sleep. On arrival we plonked ourselves down on the plush couch in the hall, and looked half-wittedly uncomprehending when we were told that there was no room. In the end, the receptionists and clerks threw up their hands and looked at us in despair. We continued to look uncomprehending, and to say at intervals in such languages as we thought might possibly be understood that we wanted a room for the night. Finally they left us. The driver came in, put our bags down by us, and went off, waving a cheerful farewell.

‘Don’t you think we have rather burnt our boats now?’ I asked dole-fully.

‘It’s the only hope,’ said Max. ‘Once we haven’t got any transport to take us away, and our luggage is here, I think they will do something about us.’

Twenty minutes passed, and suddenly an angel of succour arrived in the form of a vast man over six foot high, with a terrific black moustache, wearing riding boots and looking exactly like a figure out of a Russian ballet. I gazed at him in admiration. He smiled at us, patted us on the shoulder in a friendly fashion, and beckoned us to follow him. He went up two flights of stairs to the top floor, then pushed up a trapdoor in the roof and hung a ladder to it. It seemed unconventional, but there was nothing for it; Max pulled me up after him, and we came out upon the roof. Still beckoning and smiling, our host led us across the roof on to the roof of the next house, and finally down through another trapdoor. We were shown into a large attic room, quite nicely furnished, with two beds in it. He patted the beds, pointed to us, disappeared, and shortly afterwards our luggage arrived. Luckily we had not much luggage with us by this time; it had been taken from us at Baku and we had been told by the Intourist man that we should find it waiting at Batum. We hoped that that would happen next day, in the meantime the only thing we wanted was bed and sleep.

Next morning we wanted to find our way to the French boat which was sailing that day to Stamboul, and on which we had tickets booked. Though we tried to explain this to our host, he did not understand, and there appeared to be nobody there who did. We went out and searched the streets ourselves. I never realised before how difficult it was to find the sea if you can get no view from any kind of hill. We walked one way, then another, then a third at intervals asking for things like ‘boat’ in as many languages as we knew–‘harbour’, ‘quay’: nobody understood French or German or English. In the end we managed to find our way back to the hotel.

Max drew a picture of a boat on a piece of paper, and our host expressed immediate comprehension. He took us up to a sitting-room on the first floor, sat us down on a sofa, and explained in dumb show that we were to wait there. At the end of half an hour he reappeared with a very old man in a peaked blue cap who spoke to us in French. This ancient had apparently been a porter in a hotel in former days and still dealt with visitors. He expressed immediate readiness to lead us to our boat, and to carry our luggage there.

First of all we had to reclaim the luggage which should have arrived from Baku. The old man took us straight to what was clearly a prison, and we were led into a heavily barred cell with our luggage, sitting demurely in the middle of it. The old man collected it, and led us off to the harbour. He grumbled the whole way, and we became rather nervous, as the last thing we wished to do was to criticise the government in a country where we had no consul to get us out of a mess.

We tried to hush the old man down, but it was no good. ‘Ah, things are not what they used to be,’ he said. ‘Why, what do you think? Do you see this coat I have now? It is a good coat, yes, but does it belong to me?

No, it belongs to the government. In the old days I had not one coat–I had four coats. Perhaps they were not as good as this coat, but they were my coats. Four coats–a winter coat, a summer coat, a rain-coat and a smart coat. Four coats I had!’

Finally he lowered his voice slightly and said: ‘It is strictly forbidden to give any tips to the service here, so if you were thinking of giving me anything it would be as well to do it while we walk down this little street here.’ Such a plain hint could not be ignored, and as his services had been invaluable we hastily parted with a generous sum of money to him. He expressed approbation, grumbled about the government some more, and finally gestured proudly to the docks, where a smart Messageries Maritimes boat was waiting by the quay.

We had a lovely trip down the Black Sea, The thing I remember best was putting in to the port of Inebolu, where they took on board eight or ten darling little brown bears. They were going, I heard, to a zoo at Marseilles, and I felt sad about them: they were so completely teddy-bearish. Still they might have had a worse fate–shot perhaps, and stuffed, or something equally disagreeable. As it was they had at least a pleasant voyage on the Black Sea. It makes me laugh still to remember a rugged French sailor solemnly feeding one little bear after another with milk from a feeding bottle.


IV

The next thing of importance that happened in our lives was my being taken to visit Dr and Mrs Campbell-Thompson for the week-end, so that I could be vetted before being allowed to go to Nineveh. Max was now practically fixed up to go and dig with them the following autumn and winter. The Woolleys were not pleased at his leaving Ur, but he was determined on the change.

C. T., as he was usually known, had certain tests which he applied to people. One of them was the cross-country scramble. When he had anyone like me staying, he would take them out on the wettest day possible over rough country, and notice what kind of shoes they wore, whether they were tireless, whether they were agreeable to burrowing through hedges, and forcing their way through woods. I was able to pass that test successfully, having done so much walking and exploring on Dartmoor. Rough country held no terrors for me. But I was glad it was not entirely over ploughed fields, which I think are very tiring.

The next test was to find if I was fussy about eating. C. T. soon discovered that I could eat anything, and that again pleased him. He also was fond of reading my detective stories, which prejudiced him in my favour. Having decided, presumably, that I would fit in well enough at Nineveh, things were fixed up. Max was to go there late in September, and I was to join him at the end of October.

My plan was to spend a few weeks writing and relaxing in Rhodes and then to sail to the port of Alexandretta, where I knew the British Consul. There I would hire a car to drive me to Aleppo. At Aleppo I would take the train to Nisibin on the Turkish–Iraqi frontier, and there would then be an eight-hour drive to Mosul.

It was a good plan, and agreed with Max, who would meet me at Mosul–but arrangements in the Middle East seldom run true to plan. The sea can be very rough in the Mediterranean, and after we had put in at Mersin, the waves were rising high and I was lying groaning in my bunk. The Italian steward was full of compassion, and much upset by the fact that I no longer wished to eat anything. At intervals he would put his head in and tempt me with something on the current day’s menu. ‘I bring you lovely spaghetti. Very good, very nice rich tomato sauce–you like it very much.’ ‘Oh,’ I groaned, the mere thought of hot greasy spaghetti with tomato sauce practically finishing me. He would return later. ‘I have something you like now. Vine leaves in olive oil–rolled up in olive oil with rice. Very good.’ More groans from me. He did once bring me a bowl of soup, but the inch of grease on the top of it made me turn green once more.

As we were approaching Alexandretta I managed to get myself on my feet, dressed, packed, and then staggered out uncertainly on deck to revive myself with fresh air. As I stood there, feeling rather better in the cold sharp wind, I was told I was wanted in the Captain’s cabin. He broke the news to me that the steamer would not be able to put in to Alexandretta. ‘It is too rough,’ he said. ‘It is not easy there, you see, to land.’ This was serious indeed. It seemed that I could not even communicate with the Consul.

‘What shall I do?’ I asked.

The Captain shrugged his shoulders. ‘You will have to go on to Beirut. There is nothing else for it.’

I was dismayed. Beirut was entirely in the wrong direction. However, it had to be endured.

‘We do not charge you any more,’ the Captain said, encouragingly. ‘Since we are unable to land you there, we take you on to the next port.’

The sea had abated somewhat by the time we got to Beirut, but it was still rough. I was decanted into an excessively slow train which carried me to Aleppo. It took, as far as I can remember, all day and more–sixteen hours at least. There was no kind of lavatory on the train, and when you stopped at a station you never knew if there was a lavatory there or not. I had to endure the entire sixteen hours, but I was fortunately gifted in that direction.

Next day I took the Orient Express on to Tel Kochek, which was at that time the terminus of the Berlin-Baghdad railway. At Tel Kochek there was more bad luck. They had had such bad weather that the track to Mosul was washed away in two places, and the wadis were up. I had to spend two days at the rest-house–a primitive place, with absolutely nothing to do there. I wandered round a barbed-wire entanglement, walked a short distance into the desert, and the same distance back again. Meals were the same every time: fried eggs and tough chicken. I read the only book I had left; after that, I was reduced to thinking!

At last I arrived at the rest-house in Mosul. Word seemed mysteriously to have reached there, for Max was standing on the steps to greet me.

‘Weren’t you terribly worried,’ I asked, ‘when I didn’t arrive three days ago?’

‘Oh no, said Max, ‘It often happens.’

We drove off to the house that the Campbell-Thompsons had taken, near the big mound of Nineveh. It was a mile and a half out of Mosul, and altogether charming–one that I shall always think of with love and affection. It had a flat roof with a square tower room on one side of it, and a handsome marble porch. Max and I had the upstairs room. It was sparsely furnished, mainly with orange boxes, and had two camp-beds. All round the little house was a mass of rose bushes. They had lots of pink rose-buds on them when we arrived. Tomorrow morning, I thought, the roses will be fully out; how lovely they will look. But no, next morning they were rose-buds still. This phenomenon of nature I could not understand–a rose is surely not a night-blooming cereus–but the truth was that these were grown for making ottar of roses and men came at four o’clock in the morning to pick them as they opened. By daybreak, the next crop of buds was all that remained.

Max’s work involved being able to ride a horse. I doubt much if he had often ridden at that time, but he insisted he could and before coming out had attended a riding-stable in London. He would have been more apprehensive if he had realised that C.T.’s passion in life was economy–although in many ways a most generous man he paid his workmen the lowest wage possible. One of his economies was never to pay much for a horse, therefore any beast that he purchased was likely to have some unpleasant personal characteristic that remained hidden until its owner had managed to clinch the sale. It usually reared, bucked, shied, or did some trick or other. This one was no exception, and having to ride up a slippery, muddy path to the top of the mound every morning was somewhat of an ordeal, especially as Max did it with an appearance of the utmost insouciance. All went well, however, and he never fell off. That, indeed, would have been the supreme disgrace.

‘Remember,’ C.T. said to him, before leaving England, ‘that to fall off your horse means that not a single workman will have a scrap of respect for you.’

The ritual started at 5 a.m. C.T. would mount to the roof, Max would join him, and, after consultation, would signal with a lamp to the night-watchman on top of the mound of Nineveh. This message conveyed whether the weather was such that work could proceed. Since it was now autumn and the rainy season, this was a matter of some anxiety; a great many of the workmen had to come from two or three miles away, and they looked for the beacon light on the mound to know whether to start from home or not. In due course Max and C.T. departed on their horses to ride up to the top of the mound.

Barbara Campbell-Thompson and I would walk up to the mound at about 8 a.m. where we had breakfast together: hard-boiled eggs, tea and native bread. In those October days it was very pleasant, though in another month it was chilly and we were then well wrapped up. The country round was lovely: the hills and mountains in the distance, the frowning Jebel Maqlub, sometimes the Kurdish mountains with snow on them. Looking the other way, you saw the river Tigris and the city of Mosul with its minarets. We would return to the house, and later would go up for a picnic lunch again.

I had one battle with C.T. He gave in to me with courtesy, but I think I went down in his estimation. All I wanted was to buy myself a table in the bazaar. I could keep my clothes in orange-boxes, I used orange-boxes to sit on, and I kept an orange-box by my bed, but what I had to have, if I was going to do my own work, was a solid table at which I could type-write, and under which I could get my knees. There was no question of C.T. paying for the table–I was going to buy it–it was just that he looked down on me for being willing to spend money on something not absolutely necessary. But I insisted that it was absolutely necessary.

Writing books, I pointed out, was my work, and I had to have certain tools for it: a typewriter, a pencil, and a table at which I could sit. So C.T. gave way, but he was sad about it. I insisted also on having a solid table, not a mere affair of four legs and a top that rocked when you touched it, so the table cost £10–an unheard-of sum. I think it took him quite a fortnight to forgive me for this luxurious extravagance. However, once I had my table, I was very happy, and C.T. used to inquire kindly after the progress of my work. The book in question was Lord Edgware Dies, and a skeleton which came to light in a grave on the mound was promptly christened Lord Edgware.

The point of coming to Nineveh, for Max, was to dig down a deep pit through the mound of Nineveh. C.T. was not nearly so enthusiastic, but they had agreed beforehand that Max should have a shot at this. In archaeology, pre-history had suddenly become the fashion. Nearly all excavations up to then had been of an historical nature, but now everyone was passionately interested in pre-historic civilisation, about which as yet so little was known.

They examined small, obscure mounds all over the country, picked up fragments of painted pottery wherever they went, labelling them, tying them up in bags, and examining the patterns–it was endlessly interesting. Although it was so old–it was new!

Since writing had not been invented when this pottery was made, the dating of it was exceptionally difficult. It was hard to tell whether one type of pottery preceded or followed another. Woolley, at Ur, had dug down to the Flood levels and below, and the exciting painted pottery of Tell ’Ubaid was causing enormous speculation. Max was bitten with the bug as badly as anyone–and indeed the results of our deep pit in Nineveh were very exciting, because it soon became apparent that the enormous mound, ninety feet high, was three-quarters pre-historic, which had never been suspected before. Only the top levels were Assyrian.

The deep pit became rather frightening after a while, because they had to dig down ninety feet to virgin soil. It was just completed by the end of the season. C.T., who was a brave man, always made a point of going down himself with the workmen once a day. He hadn’t a good head for heights, and it was agony to him. Max, had no trouble about heights, and was quite happy going up and down. The workmen like all Arabs were oblivious to any kind of vertigo. They rushed up and down the narrow spiral causeway, wet and slippery in the morning; throwing baskets to each other, carrying up the dirt, making playful pushes and passes at each other about an inch from the edge.

‘Oh, my God!’ C.T. used to groan, and clasped his hands to his head, unable to look down at them. ‘Someone will be killed soon.’ But nobody was killed. They were as surefooted as mules.

On one of our rest days we decided to hire a car and go to find the great mound of Nimrud, which had last been dug by Layard, getting on for a hundred years before. Max had some difficulty in getting there, for the roads were very bad. Most of the way had to be across country, and the wadis and irrigation ditches were often impassable. But in the end we arrived and picnicked there–and oh, what a beautiful spot it was then. The Tigris was just a mile away, and on the great mound of the Acropolis, big stone Assyrian heads poked out of the soil. In one place there was the enormous wing of a great genie. It was a spectacular stretch of country–peaceful, romantic, and impregnated with the past.

I remember Max saying, ‘This is where I would like to dig, but it would have to be on a very big scale. One would have to raise a lot of money but if I could, this is the mound I would choose, out of all the world.’ He sighed: ‘Oh well, I don’t suppose it will ever happen.’



Max’s book lies before me now: Nimrud and its Remains. How glad I am that the wish of his heart has been fulfilled. Nimrud has woken from its hundred years sleep. Layard began the work, my husband finished it.

He discovered its further secrets: the great Fort Shalmaneser out at the boundary of the town; the other palaces on other parts of the mound. The story of Calah, the military capital of Assyria, has been laid bare. Historically, Nimrud is now known for what it was, and, in addition to this, some of the most beautiful objects ever made by craftsmen–or artists, as I would rather call them–have been brought to the museums of the world. Delicate, exquisitely fashioned ivories: they are such beautiful things.

I had my part in cleaning many of them. I had my own favourite tools, just as any professional would: an orange stick, possibly a very fine knitting needle–one season a dentist’s tool, which he lent, or rather gave me–and a jar of cosmetic face-cream, which I found more useful than anything else for gently coaxing the dirt out of the crevices without harming the friable ivory. In fact there was such a run on my face cream that there was nothing left for my poor old face after a couple of weeks!

How thrilling it was; the patience, the care that was needed; the delicacy of touch. And the most exciting day of all–one of the most exciting days of my life–when the workmen came rushing into the house from their work clearing out an Assyrian well, and cried: ‘We have found a woman in the well! There is a woman in the well!’ And they brought in, on a piece of sacking, a great mass of mud.

I had the pleasure of gently washing the mud off in a large wash-basin. Little by little the head emerged, preserved by the sludge for about 2,500 years. There it was–the biggest ivory head ever found: a soft, pale brownish colour, the hair black, the faintly coloured lips with the enigmatic smile of one of the maidens of the Akropolis. The Lady of the Well–the Mona Lisa, as the Iraqi Director of Antiquities insisted on calling her–she has her place now in the new museum at Baghdad: one of the most exciting things ever to be found.

There were many other ivories, some perhaps of even greater beauty than the head, if not so spectacular. The plaques of cows with turned heads suckling their calves; ivory ladies at the window, looking out, no doubt like Jezebel the wicked; two wonderful plaques of a negro being killed by a lioness. He lies there, in a golden loin-cloth, gold points in his hair, and his head lifted in what seems like ecstasy as the lioness stands over him for the kill. Behind them is the foliage of the garden: lapis, carnelian and gold form the flowers and foliage. How fortunate that two of these were found. One is now in the British Museum, the other in Baghdad.

One does feel proud to belong to the human race when one sees the wonderful things human beings have fashioned with their hands. They have been creators–they must share a little the holiness of the Creator, who made the world and all that was in it, and saw that it was good. But he left more to be made. He left the things to be fashioned by men’s hands. He left them to fashion them, to follow in his footsteps because they were made in his image, to see what they made, and see that it was good.

The pride of creation is an extraordinary thing. Even the carpenter who once fashioned a particularly hideous towel-rail of wood for one of our expedition houses had the creative spirit. When asked why he had put such enormous feet on it against orders, he said reproachfully: ‘I had to make it that way because it was so beautiful like that!’ Well, it seemed hideous to us, but it was beautiful to him, and he made it in the spirit of creation, because it was beautiful.

Men can be evil–more evil than their animal brothers can ever be–but they can also rise to the heavens in the ecstasy of creation. The cathedrals of England stand as monuments to man’s worship of what is above himself. I like that Tudor rose–it is, I think, on one of the capitals of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge–where the stone-carver, against orders, put the Madonna’s face in the centre of it, because, he thought the Tudor Kings were being worshipped too much, and that the Creator, the God for whom this place of worship was built, was not honoured enough.



This was to be Dr Campbell-Thompson’s final season. He was, of course, mainly an epigraphist himself, and to him the written word, the historical record, was far more interesting than the archaeological side of digging. Like all epigraphists, he was always hoping to find a hoard of tablets.

There had been so much excavation done on Nineveh, that it was difficult to make sense of all the buildings. For Max, the palace buildings were not particularly interesting: it was his deep pit in the pre-historic period that really interested him, because so little was known about it.

He had already formed the plan, which I found a very exciting one, of digging a small mound on his own in this part of the world. It would have to be small, since it would be difficult to raise much money, but he thought it could be done, and that it was enormously important that it should be done. So he had a special interest, as time went on, in the progress of the deep pit down towards virgin soil. By the time it was reached the base was a tiny patch of ground, only a few yards across. There had been a few sherds–not many, owing to the small space–and they were of a different period to those found higher up. From then on Nineveh was re-labelled from the bottom upwards: Ninevite 1, next to virgin soil, then Ninevite 2, Ninevite 3, Ninevite 4, and Ninevite 5. Ninevite 5 in which period the pottery was turned on a wheel, had beautiful pots with both painted and incised patterns. Vessels like chalices were particularly characteristic of it, and the decorations and paintings were vigorous and charming. Yet the pottery itself–the texture–was of not nearly so fine a quality as that made possibly several thousand years earlier: the beautiful apricot-coloured delicate ware, almost like Greek pottery to handle, with its smooth glazed surface and its mainly geometric decorations, in particular a pattern of dots. It was, Max said, like the pottery found at Tell Halaf in Syria, but that had always been thought to be much later, and in any case this was of finer quality.

He got the workmen to bring him various bits of pottery from villages where they lived all within a radius of one to eight miles. On some mounds the pottery was mostly of late Ninevite 5 quality, and in addition to the painted variety there was another very beautiful type of incised pot, delicately worked. Then there was red ware, of an earlier period and grey ware, both plain and not painted.

Evidently one or two of the small pimples which covered the country all the way up to the mountains, had been abandoned early, before there was any question of pottery being made on the wheel: and this fine early pottery was hand-made. There was in particular a very small mound called Arpachiyah–it was only about four miles east of the great circle of Nineveh. On this little pimple there was hardly any trace of anything later than the fine painted sherds of Ninevite 2. Apparently that was its last main period of occupation.

Max was attracted by it. I egged him on, because I thought the pottery so beautiful that it would be tremendously exciting to find out something about it. It would be a gamble, said Max. It must be a very small village indeed and could hardly have been an important one, so it was doubtful what you would find. But still, the people who made that pottery must have lived there. Their occupation was perhaps primitive, but the pottery was not: it was of the finest quality. They could not have made it for the great city of Nineveh, nearby, like some local Swansea or Wedgwood, for Nineveh did not exist when they were moulding their clay. It would not exist for several thousand years to come. So what did they make it for? Sheer love of making something so beautiful?

Naturally, C.T. thought Max was mistaken in attaching so much importance to the pre-historic days, and to all this ‘modern fuss’ about pottery. Historical records, he said, were the only things that mattered; man telling his own story, not in spoken words but in written ones. They were both right in a sense: C.T. because historical records were indeed uniquely revealing, and Max because to find out something new about the history of man one must use what he himself can tell you, in this case by what he made with his hands. And I was right too to notice that the pottery in this tiny hamlet was beautiful, and to mind about that. And I think I was right to be continually asking myself ‘Why?’ all the time, because to people like me, asking why is what makes life interesting.

I enjoyed my first experience of living on a dig enormously. I had liked Mosul; I had become deeply attached to both C.T. and Barbara; I had completed the final demise of Lord Edgware, and had tracked down his murderer successfully. On a visit to C.T. and his wife I had read them the whole manuscript aloud, and they had been very appreciative. I think they were the only people to whom I ever did read a manuscript–except, that is, my own family.

I could only half believe it, when, in February of the following year, Max and I were once again in Mosul, staying this time at the guest-house. Negotiations were under way for digging at our pimple of a mound, Arpachiyah; little Arpachiyah, that nobody as yet cared or knew about, but which was to become a name known throughout the archaeological world. Max had persuaded John Rose, who had been architect at Ur, to work with us. He was a friend of us both: a beautiful draughtsman, with a quiet way of talking, and a gentle humour that I found irresistible. John was undecided at first whether or not to join us: he did not want to return to Ur, certainly, but was doubtful whether to continue with archaeological work or return to the practice of architecture. However, as Max pointed out to him, it would not be a long expedition–two months at the most–and there probably wouldn’t be much to do.

‘In fact,’ he said persuasively, ‘you can consider it a holiday. Lovely time of year, lovely flowers, good climate–not dust-storms like at Ur–mountains and hills. You’ll enjoy it enormously. An absolute rest for you.’ John was convinced.

‘It’s a gamble, of course,’ said Max. It was an anxious time for him, because he was at the start of his career. He had taken upon himself to make this choice, and would stand or fall by its result.

Everything started unpropitiously. To begin with, the weather was awful. The rain poured down; it was almost impossible to go anywhere by car; and it proved incredibly difficult to find out who owned the land on which we proposed to dig. Questions of land-ownership in the Middle East are always fraught with difficulty. If far enough away from cities, the land is under the jurisdiction of a sheikh, and you make your arrangements, financial and otherwise, with him; with some backing from the Government to lend you authority. All land scheduled as a tell–that is to say, which was occupied in antiquity–is the property of the Government, not the property of the land-owner. But I doubt if Arpachiyah, being such a small pimple on the surface of the ground, would have been so labelled, so we had to get in touch with the land owner.

It seemed simple. A vast cheerful man came along, and assured us he was the owner. But the next day we heard that he was not–that a second cousin of his wife’s was the actual owner. The day after that we heard that the land was not in fact the property of the second cousin of the wife, and that several other people were involved. On the third day of incessant rain, when everyone had behaved in an extremely difficult manner, Max threw himself down on the bed with a great groan. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘There are nineteen owners.‘

‘Nineteen owners of that tiny bit of land?’ I said incredulously. ‘So it seems.’

We got the whole tangle undone in the end. The real owner was found–she was a second cousin of somebody’s aunt’s husband’s cousin’s aunt, who, being quite incapable of doing any business on her own, had to be represented by her husband and several other relatives. With the help of the Mutassarif of Mosul, the Department of Antiquities in Baghdad; the British Consul, and a few other assistants, the whole thing was settled, and a contract of extreme severity drawn up. Terrible penalties were to be exacted on either side if anyone failed to keep to their agreement. What pleased the land-owner’s husband most was the insertion of a clause which stated that, if in any way our work of excavation was interfered with, or the contract was voided, he would have to pay £1000 down. He immediately went away and boasted of this to all his friends.

‘It is a matter of such importance,’ he said proudly, ‘that unless I give all the assistance in my power, and keep all the promises I have made on my wife’s behalf, I shall lose £1000.’

Everybody was enormously impressed.

‘£1000,’ they said. ‘It is possible he will lose £1000! have you heard that? They can extract from him £1000 if anything goes wrong!’

I should say that if any penalty of a financial nature had been demanded from the good man, about ten dinars would have been all that he could have produced.

We rented a small house which was much like the one we had had with the C.T.’s. It was a little further from Mosul and nearer to Nineveh, but it had the same flat roof and a marble verandah, with Mosul marble windows of a slightly ecclesiastical nature, and marble sills on which pottery could be laid out. We had a cook and a house-boy; a large fierce dog to bark at the other dogs in the neighbourhood and anyone who approached the house–and in due course six puppies which belonged to the dog. We also had a small lorry and an Irishman called Gallagher as a driver. He had stayed behind here after the 1914 war, and had never taken himself home again.

He was an extraordinary person, was Gallagher. He told us wonderful tales sometimes. He had a saga about his discovery of a sturgeon on the shores of the Caspian, and how he and a friend had managed to bring it, packed with ice, across the mountains and down into Iran to sell it for a large price. It was like listening to the Odyssey or the Aenead, with innumerable adventures that happened on the way.

He gave us such useful information as the exact price of a man’s life. ‘Iraq is better than Iran,’ he said. ‘In Iran it costs you £7, cash down, to kill a man. In Iraq only £3.’

Gallagher had still remembrances of his wartime-service and he always drilled the dogs in the most military fashion. The six puppies had their names called out one at a time, and came up to the cook-house in order. Swiss Miss was Max’s favourite, and she was always called first. All the puppies were excessively ugly, but they had the charm that puppies have all the world over. They used to come along to the verandah after tea and we used to de-tick them with great attention. They were always just as full of ticks the next day, but we did our best for them.

Gallagher also turned out to be an omnivorous reader. I used to have parcels of books sent out by my sister, every week–and I passed them on to him in due course. He read quickly, and seemed to have no preference whatsoever as to what he read: biographies, fiction, love stories, thrillers, scientific works, almost anything. He was like a starving man who would say that any kind of food is the same: you don’t mind what it is, you just want food. He wanted food for his mind.

He once told us about his ‘Uncle Fred’, ‘A crocodile got him in Burma,’ he said sadly. ‘I didn’t know what to do about it really. However, we thought the best thing was to have the crocodile stuffed, so we did, and we got it sent home to his wife.’

He spoke in a quiet matter-of-fact voice. At first I thought he was romancing, but finally I came to the conclusion that practically everything he told us was true. He was just the sort of man to whom extraordinary things happen.

It was an anxious time for us. As yet there was nothing to show whether Max’s gamble was going to pay off. We uncovered only buildings of a poor and decrepit nature–not even really mud-brick: pisé walls, difficult to trace. There were charming sherds of pottery everywhere, and some lovely black obsidian knives with delicately knotched edges, but nothing as yet out of the ordinary in the way of finds.

John and Max bolstered each other up, murmuring that it was too soon to tell, and that before Dr Jordan, the German Director of Antiquities in Baghdad, arrived, we would at any rate get all our levels nicely measured up and labelled, so that the whole thing would show that digging had been done properly and scientifically.

And then, out of the blue, the great day came. Max rushed back to the house to fetch me from where I was busy, mending some of the pottery.

‘A wonderful find,’ he said. ‘We’ve found a burnt potter’s shop. You must come back with me. It’s the most wonderful sight you have ever seen.’

And it was indeed; a crowning piece of luck. The potter’s shop was all there, under the soil. It had been abandoned when burnt, and the burning had preserved it. There were glorious dishes, vases, cups and plates, polychrome pottery, all shining in the sun–scarlet and black and orange–a magnificent sight.

From then on, we were so frantically busy we didn’t know how to cope. Vessel after vessel came up. They were smashed by the fall of the roof–but they were there, and could nearly all be reconstructed. Some of them were slightly charred, but the walls had fallen on top of them and preserved them, and there for about six thousand years they had lain untouched. One enormous burnished dish, in a lovely deep red with a petalled rosette centre and beautiful designs all round it, very geometrical, was in 76 pieces. Every piece was there, and was reassembled, and it is now a wonderful sight to see in the museum where it lies. There was another bowl I loved, with an all-over pattern rather like a Union Jack; it was in deep, soft, tangerine.

I was bursting with happiness. So was Max, and so, in his quieter way, was John. But, oh, how we worked, from then on until the end of the season!

I had done some homework that autumn, trying to learn to draw to scale. I had gone to the local secondary school, and had instruction there from a charming little man, who could not believe that I knew as little as I did.

‘You don’t seem to have even heard of a right-angle,’ he said to me, disapprovingly. I admitted that that was true. I hadn’t.

‘It makes it hard to describe things,’ he said.

However, I learnt to measure and calculate, and work out things to two thirds of the actual size, or whatever it had to be. Now the time had come when I had to put what I had learnt to the test. There was far too much to be done unless we all pulled our weight. I took, of course, two or three times as long as either of the others but John had to have some assistance, and I was able to provide it.

Max had to be out on the dig all day, while John drew. He would stagger down to dinner at night, saying, ‘I think I’m going blind. My eyes feel queer, and I am so dizzy I can hardly walk. I have been drawing without ceasing at top speed since eight o’clock this morning.’

‘And we’ll all have to go on after dinner,’ said Max.

‘And you are the man who told me,’ said John accusingly, ‘you are the man who said that this was going to be a holiday!’

To celebrate the end of the season we decided to organise a race for the men. This had never been done before. There were to be several splendid prizes and it was open to all the men to compete.

There was a great deal of talk about it. To begin with, some of the grave, older men questioned whether they might not lose dignity by competing in such an event. Dignity was always very important. To compete with younger men, possibly beardless boys, was not the sort of thing that a dignified man, a man of substance, ought to do. However, they all came round to it in the end, and we arranged the details. The course was to be about three miles, and they would cross the Khosr River just beyond the mound of Nineveh. Rules were drawn up carefully. The main rule was that there were to be no fouls; nobody was to throw anybody down, do any bumping or boring, crossing, or any such thing. Although we hardly expected that such a rule would be respected, we hoped that the worst excesses would be avoided.

The prizes were first, a cow and calf; second, a sheep; third, a goat. There were several smaller prizes–hens, sacks of flour, and from a hundred eggs down to ten. There was also, for everyone who completed the course, a handful of dates and as much halva as a man could hold clasped in his two hands. These prizes, I may say, cost us £10. Those were the days, no doubt about it.

We called it the A.A.A.A.–the Arpachiyah Amateur Athletic Association. The river was in flood at the moment, and nobody could cross the bridge to attend, but the R.A.F. was invited to watch the race from the sky.

The day came, and it was a memorable sight. The first thing that happened, of course, was that everyone made a concerted rush forward when the starting pistol went, and most of them fell flat on their faces into the Khosr. Others disentangled themselves from the swarming mass and ran on. The foul play was not too bad; nobody actually knocked anybody down There had been a great deal of betting on the race, but none of the favourites was even placed or looked like being placed. Three dark horses won–and the applause was terrific. First was a strong and athletic man; second–a most popular win–a very poor man, who always looked half-starved; and third was a young boy. That night there was immense rejoicing: the foremen danced, the men danced; and the man who had won the second prize of the sheep killed it immediately and feasted all his family and friends. It was a great day for the Arpachiyah Amateur Athletic Association.

We departed to cries of good will: ‘God bless you!’, ‘You will come again’ ‘God is very merciful’ and so on. We then went to Baghdad, where all our finds were waiting in the Museum, and there Max and John Rose unpacked them and the division took place. It was by then May, and in Baghdad it was 108 in the shade. The heat did not suit John, and he looked terribly ill each day. I was fortunate in that I was not part of the packing squad. I could stay in the house.

Times in Baghdad were gradually worsening politically and though we hoped to return next year, either to move on to another mound or to excavate Arpachiyah a little further, we were already doubtful whether it would be possible. After we left trouble arose over the shipping of the antiquities, and there was great difficulty in getting our cases out. Things were smoothed over at last, but it took many months, and for that reason it was declared inadvisable for us to come out and dig the following year. For some years practically no one excavated in Iraq any longer; everyone went to Syria. And so it was that the following year we too decided to choose a suitable site in Syria.

One last thing I remember which was like a portent of things to come. We had been having tea in Dr Jordan’s house in Baghdad. He was a good pianist, and was sitting that day playing us Beethoven. He had a fine head, and I thought, looking at him, what a splendid man he was. He had seemed always gentle and considerate. Then there was a mention by someone, quite casually, of Jews. His face changed; changed in an extraordinary way that I had never noticed on anyone’s face before.

He said: ‘You do not understand. Our Jews are perhaps different from yours. They are a danger. They should be exterminated. Nothing else will really do but that.’

I stared at him unbelievingly. He meant it. It was the first time I had come across any hint of what was to come later from Germany. People who had travelled there were, I suppose, already realising it at that time, but for ordinary people, in 1932 and 1933, there was a complete lack of fore-knowledge.

On that day as we sat in Dr Jordan’s sitting-room and he played the piano, I saw my first Nazi–and I discovered later that his wife was an even fiercer Nazi than he was. They had a duty to perform there: not only to be Director of Antiquities or even to work for their country, but also to spy on their own German Ambassador. There are things in life that make one truly sad when one can make oneself believe them.


V

We came home to England, flushed with triumph, and Max began a busy summer writing up his account of the campaign. We had an exhibition at the British Museum of some of our finds; and Max’s book on Arpachiyah came out either that year or the next–there was to be no time lost in publishing it, Max said: all archaeologists tend to put off publishing for too long, and knowledge ought to be released as soon as possible.

During the Second World War, when I was working in London, I wrote an account of our time in Syria. I called it Come, Tell Me How You Live, and I get pleasure in reading it over from time to time, and remembering our days in Syria. One year on a dig is very like another–the same sort of things happen–so repetition would not avail much. They were happy years, we enjoyed ourselves immensely, and had a great measure of success in our digging.

Those years, between 1930 and 1938, were particularly satisfying because they were so free of outside shadows. As the pressure of work, and especially success in work, piles up, one tends to have less and less leisure; But these were carefree years still, filled with a good deal of work, yes, but not as yet all-absorbing. I wrote detective stories, Max wrote archaeological books, reports and articles. We were busy but we were not under intense strain.



Since it was difficult for Max to get down to Devonshire as much as he wanted to, we spent Rosalind’s holidays there, but lived most of the time in London, moving to one or other of my houses, trying to decide which one we liked the best. Carlo and Mary had searched for a suitable house while we were out in Syria one year, and had a listful for me. They said I must certainly go and look at No. 48 Sheffield Terrace. When I saw it I wanted to live there as badly as I had ever wanted to live in any house. It was perfect, except perhaps for the fact that it had a basement. It had not many rooms, but they were all big and well-proportioned. It was just what we needed. As one went in there was a large dining-room on the right. On the left was the drawing-room. On the half-landing there was a bathroom and lavatory, and on the first floor, to the right, over the dining-room, the same-sized room for Max’s library–plenty of space for large tables to take the papers and bits of pottery. On the left, over the drawing-room, was a large double bedroom for us. On the floor above were two more big rooms and a small room between them. The small room was to be Rosalind’s; the big room over Max’s study was to be a double spare-room when we wanted it; and the left-hand room, I declared, I was going to have for my own workroom and sitting-room. Everybody was surprised at this, since I had never thought of having such a thing before, but they all agreed that it was quite time for poor old Missus to have a room of her own.

I wanted somewhere where I would not be disturbed. There would not be a telephone in the room. I was going to have a grand piano; large, firm table; a comfortable sofa or divan; a hard upright chair for typing; and one armchair to recline in, and there was to be nothing else. I bought myself a Steinway grand, and I enjoyed ‘my room’ enormously. Nobody was allowed to use the Hoover on that floor while I was in the house, and short of the house being on fire, I was not to be approached. For once, I had a place of my own, and I continued to enjoy it for the five or six years until the house was bombed in the war. I don’t know why I never had anything of the kind again. I suppose I got used to using the dining-room table or the corner of the washstand once more.

48 Sheffield Terrace was a happy house; I felt it the moment I came into it. I think if one has been brought up with large rooms, such as we had at Ashfield, one misses that feeling of space very much. I had lived in several charming small houses–both the Campden Street houses and the little Mews house–but they were never quite right. It is not a question of grandeur; you can have a very smart, tiny flat, or you can rent a large, shabby, country vicarage, rapidly falling to pieces, for much less money. It is the feeling of space round you–of being able to deploy yourself.

Indeed, if you have any cleaning to do yourself it is much easier to clean a large room than to get round all the corners and bits of furniture in a small room, where one’s behind is always getting terribly in the way.

Max indulged himself by personally superintending the building of a new chimney in his library. He had dealt with so many fire-places and chimneys in burnt-brick in the Middle East that he rather fancied himself at the job. The builder looked doubtfully at the plans. You never can tell with chimneys or flues, he said, according to all the rules they ought to go right, but they didn’t.

‘And this one of yours here isn’t going to go right, I can tell you that,’ he said to Max.

‘You build it exactly as I say,’ said Max, ‘and you’ll see.’

Much to Mr Withers’ sorrow, he did see. Max’s chimney never smoked once. It had a great Assyrian brick with cuneiform writing on it inset over the mantelpiece, and the room was therefore clearly labelled as an archaeologist’s private den.

Only one thing disturbed me after moving in to Sheffield Terrace, and that was a pervasive smell in our bedroom. Max couldn’t smell it and Bessie thought I was imagining things, but I said firmly that I wasn’t: I smelt gas. There was no gas in the house, Max pointed out. There was no gas laid on.

‘I can’t help it,’ I said, ‘I smell gas.’

I had the builders in, and the gas-men, and they all lay down on their stomachs and sniffed under the bed and told me I was imagining it.

‘Of course, what it may turn out to be, if there is anything–though I can’t smell it, lady,’ said the gas-man, ‘is a dead mouse, or maybe it’s a dead rat. I don’t think it’s a rat, though, because I’d smell if it were–but it might be a mouse. A very small mouse.’

‘It might, I suppose,’ I said. ‘If so, it is a very dead small mouse, at any rate.’

‘We’ll have the boards up.’

So they had the boards up, but they couldn’t find any dead mouse, large or small. Yet, whether gas or dead mouse, something continued to smell.

I went on sending for builders, gas people, plumbers, and everybody I could think of. They looked at me with loathing in the end. Everyone got fed up with me–Max, Rosalind, Carlo–they all said it was ‘Mother’s imagination’. But Mother knew gas when she smelt it, and she continued to say so. Finally, after I had driven everyone nearly insane, I was vindicated. There was an obsolete gas pipe under the floor of my bedroom, and gas was continuing to escape from it. Whose meter it was being charged on, nobody knew–there was no gas meter in our house–but there was a disused gas pipe still connected and gas was quietly seeping away. I was so conceited about having been proved right on this point that I was unbearable to live with for some time–and more than ever, I may say, confident in the prowess of my nose.

Before the acquisition of Sheffield Terrace, Max and I had bought a house in the country. We wanted a small house or cottage, because travelling to and from Ashfield for weekends was impracticable. If we could have a country cottage not too far from London, it would make all the difference.

Max’s two favourite parts of England were near Stockbridge, where he had stayed as a boy, or else near Oxford. His time at Oxford had been one of the happiest times of his life. He knew all the country round there, and he loved the Thames. So we also went up and down the Thames in our search. We looked at Goring, Wallingford, Pangbourne. Houses were difficult on the Thames, because they were either hideous late Victorian or else the kind of cottage that was completely submerged during the winter.

In the end I saw an advertisement in The Times. It was about a week before we were going abroad to Syria one autumn.

‘Look, Max,’ I said. ‘There’s a house advertised in Wallingford. You know how much we liked Wallingford? Now, if this should be one of those houses on the river. There was nothing to let when we were there.’ We rang up the agent, and dashed down.

It was a delightful, small, Queen Anne house, rather close to the road, but behind it was a garden with a walled kitchen section–bigger than we wanted–and below that again what Max has always thought of as ideal: meadows sweeping right down to the river. It was a pretty bit of river, about a mile out of Wallingford. The house had five bedrooms, three sitting-rooms, and a remarkably nice kitchen. Looking out of the drawing-room window, through the pouring rain, we saw a particularly fine cedar tree, a cedar of Lebanon. It was actually in the field, but the field came right up to a ha-ha near the house, and I thought to myself that we would have a lawn beyond the ha-ha, and would push the meadows further down, so that the cedar tree would be in the middle of the lawn, and on hot days in summer we could have tea under it.

We hadn’t much time to dilly-dally. The house was remarkably cheap, for sale freehold, and we made up our minds then and there. We rang up the agent, signed things, spoke to lawyers and surveyors, and, subject to the usual surveyor’s approval, bought the house.

Unfortunately we were not able to see it again for about nine months. We left for Syria, and spent the whole time there wondering whether we had been terribly foolish. We had meant to buy a tiny cottage, instead we had bought this Queen Anne house with gracious windows and good proportions. But Wallingford was a nice place. It had a poor railway service, and was therefore not at all the sort of place people came to, either from Oxford or from London. ‘I think,’ said Max, ‘we are going to be very happy there.’

And sure enough we have been very happy there, for nearly thirty-five years now, I suppose. Max’s library has been enlarged to twice its length, and he looks right down the length of it to the river. Winterbrook House, Wallingford, is Max’s house, and always has been. Ashfield was my house, and I think Rosalind’s.



So our lives went on. Max with his archaeological work and his enthusiasm for it, and I with my writing, which was now becoming more professional and therefore a great deal less enthusiastic.

It had been exciting, to begin with, to be writing books–partly because, as I did not feel I was a real author, it was each time astonishing that I should be able to write books that were actually published. Now I wrote books as a matter of course. It was my business to do so. People would not only publish them–they would urge me to get on with writing them. But the eternal longing to do something that is not my proper job, was sure to unsettle me; in fact it would be a dull life if it didn’t.

What I wanted to do now was to write something other than a detective story. So, with a rather guilty feeling, I enjoyed myself writing a straight novel called Giant’s Bread. It was mainly about music, and betrayed here and there that I knew little about the subject from the technical point of view. It was well reviewed and sold reasonably for what was thought to be a ‘first novel’. I used the name of Mary Westmacott, and nobody knew that it was written by me. I managed to keep that fact a secret for fifteen years.

I wrote another book under the same pseudonym a year or two later, called Unfinished Portrait. Only one person guessed my secret: Nan Watts–now Nan Kon. Nan had a very retentive memory, and some phrase I had used about some children, and a poem in the first book, attracted her attention. Immediately she said to herself, ‘Agatha wrote that, I am certain of it.’

One day she nudged me in the ribs and said in a slightly affected voice: ‘I read a book I liked very much the other day; now let me see–what was it? Dwarf’s Blood–that’s it–Dwarf’s Blood!’ Then she winked at me in the most wicked manner. When I got her home, I said: ‘Now–how did you guess about Giant’s Bread?‘

‘Of course I knew it was you–I know the way you talk,’ said Nan.

I wrote songs from time to time, mostly ballads–but I had no idea that I was going to have the stupendous luck to step straight into an entirely different department of writing, and to do it, too, at an age when fresh adventures are not so easily undertaken.

I think what started me off was annoyance over people adapting my books for the stage in a way I disliked. Although I had written the play Black Coffee, I had never thought seriously of play-writing–I had enjoyed writing Akhnaton, but had never believed that it would ever be produced. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t like the way other people had adapted my books, I should have a shot at adapting them myself It seemed to me that the adaptations of my books to the stage failed mainly because they stuck far too closely to the original book. A detective story is particularly unlike a play, and so is far more difficult to adapt than an ordinary book. It has such an intricate plot, and usually so many characters and false clues, that the thing is bound to become confusing and overladen. What was wanted was simplification.

I had written the book Ten Little Niggers because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it. It was clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation; in fact it had to have an epilogue in order to explain it. It was well received and reviewed, but the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been.

Presently I went one step farther. I thought to myself it would be exciting to see if I could make it into a play. At first sight that seemed impossible, because no one would be left to tell the tale, so I would have to alter it to a certain extent. It seemed to me that I could make a perfectly good play of it by one modification of the original story. I must make two of the characters innocent, to be reunited at the end and come safe out of the ordeal. This would not be contrary to the spirit of the original nursery rhyme, since there is one version of ‘Ten Little Nigger Boys’ which ends: ‘He got married and then there were none’.

I wrote the play. It did not get much encouragement. ‘Impossible to produce’ was the verdict. Charles Cochran, however, took an enormous fancy to it. He did his utmost to get it produced, but unfortunately could not persuade his backers to agree with him. They said all the usual things–that it was unproduceable and unplayable, people would only laugh at it, there would be no tension. Cochran said firmly that he disagreed with them–but there it was.

‘I hope you have better luck some time with it,’ he said, ‘because I would like to see that play on.’

In due course I got my chance. The person who was keen on it was Bertie Mayer, who had originally put on Alibi with Charles Laughton. Irene Henschell produced the play, and did so remarkably well, I thought. I was interested to see her methods of production, because they were so different from Gerald Du Maurier’s. To begin with, she appeared to my inexperienced eye to be fumbling, as though unsure of herself, but as I saw her technique develop I realised how sound it was. At first she, as it were, felt her way about the stage, seeing the thing, not hearing it; seeing the movements and the lighting, how the whole thing would look. Then, almost as an afterthought, she concentrated on the actual script. It was effective, and very impressive. The tension built up well, and her lighting, with three baby spots, of one scene when they are all sitting with candles burning as the lights have failed, worked wonderfully well.

With the play also well acted, you could feel the tension growing up, the fear and distrust that rises between one person and another; and the deaths were so contrived that never, when I have seen it, has there been any suggestion of laughter or of the whole thing being too ridiculously thrillerish. I don’t say it is the play or book of mine I like best, or even that I think it is my best, but I do think in some ways that it is a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else I have written. I suppose it was Ten Little Niggers that set me on the path of being a playwright as well as a writer of books. It was then I decided that in future no one was going to adapt my books except myself: I would choose what books should be adapted, and only those books that were suitable for adapting.

The next one that I tried my hand on, though several years later, was The Hollow. It came to me suddenly one day that The Hollow would make a good play. I said so to Rosalind, who has had the valuable role in life of eternally trying to discourage me without success.

‘Making a play of The Hollow, Mother!’ said Rosalind in horror. ‘It’s a good book, and I like it, but you can’t possibly make it into a play.’ ‘Yes, I can,’ I said, stimulated by opposition.

‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Rosalind, sighing.

Anyway, I enjoyed myself scribbling down ideas for The Hollow. It was, of course, in some ways rather more of a novel than a detective story. The Hollow was a book I always thought I had ruined by the introduction of Poirot. I had got used to having Poirot in my books, and so naturally he had come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.

The Hollow got written, in spite of opposition from others beside Rosalind. Peter Saunders, who has produced so many of my plays since then, was the man who liked it.

When The Hollow proved a success, I had the bit between my teeth. Of course I knew that writing books was my steady, solid profession. I could go on inventing my plots and writing my books until I went gaga. I never felt any desperation as to whether I could think of one more book to write.

There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off. Then you go out, you interrupt someone who is busy–Max usually, because he is so good-natured–and you say: ‘It’s awful, Max, do you know I have quite forgotten how to write–I simply can’t do it any more! I shall never write another book.’

‘Oh yes, you will,’ Max would say consolingly. He used to say it with some anxiety at first; now his eyes stray back again to his work while he talks soothingly.

‘But I know I won’t. I can’t think of an idea. I had an idea, but now it seems no good.’

‘You’ll just have to get through this phase. You’ve had all this before. You said it last year. You said it the year before.’

‘It’s different this time,’ I say, with positive assurance.

But it wasn’t different, of course, it was just the same. You forget every time what you felt before when it comes again. Such misery and despair, such inability to do anything that will be in the least creative. And yet it seems that this particular phase of misery has got to be lived through. It is rather like putting the ferrets in to bring out what you want at the end of the rabbit burrow. Until there has been a lot of subterranean disturbance, until you have spent long hours of utter boredom–you can never feel normal. You can’t think of what you want to write, and if you pick up a book you find you are not reading it properly. If you try to do a crossword your mind isn’t on the clues; you are possessed by a feeling of paralyzed hopelessness.

Then, for some unknown reason, an inner ‘starter’ gets you off at the post. You begin to function, you know then that ‘it’ is coming, the mist is clearing up. You know suddenly, with absolute certitude, just what A wants to say to B. You can walk out of the house, down the road, talking to yourself violently, repeating the conversation that Maud, say, is going to have with Aylwin, and exactly where they will be, just where the other man will be watching them from the trees, and how the little dead pheasant on the ground makes Maud think of something that she had forgotten, and so on and so on. And you come home bursting with pleasure; you haven’t done anything at all yet, but you are–triumphantly–there.

At that moment writing plays seemed to me entrancing, simply because it wasn’t my job, because I hadn’t got the feeling that I had to think of a play–I only had to write the play that I was already thinking of. Plays are much easier to write than books, because you can see them in your mind’s eye, you are not hampered with all that description which clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you getting on with what’s happening. The circumscribed limits of the stage simplifies things for you. You don’t have to follow the heroine up and down the stairs, or out to the tennis lawn and back, thinking thoughts that have to be described. You have only what can be seen and heard and done to deal with. Looking and listening and feeling is what you have to deal with.

I should always write my one book a year–I was sure of that. Dramatic writing would be my adventure–that would always be, and always must be hit and miss. You can have play after play a success, and then, for no reason, a series of flops. Why? Nobody really knows. I’ve seen it happen with many playwrights. I have seen a play which to my mind was just as good or better than one of their successes fail–because it did not catch the fancy of the public; or because it was written at the wrong time; or because the cast made such a difference to it. Yes, play-writing was not a thing I could be sure of. It was a glorious gamble every time, and I liked it that way.

I knew after I had written The Hollow that before long I should want to write another play, and if possible, I thought to myself, I was going to write a play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.



Caledonia had been a great success for Rosalind. It was, I think, one of the most remarkable schools that I have known. All its teachers seemed the best of their kind. They certainly brought out the best in Rosalind. She was the head of the school at the end, though, as she pointed out to me, this was unfair, because there was a Chinese girl there who was much cleverer than she was. ‘And I know what they think–they think it ought to be an English girl who is head of the school.’ I expect she was right too.

From Caledonia Rosalind went to Benenden. She was bored by it from the start. I don’t know why–it was by all accounts a very good school. She was not interested in learning for its own sake–there was nothing of the scholar about her. She cared least of all for the subjects I would have been interested in, such as history, but she was good at mathematics. When I was in Syria I used to get letters from her urging me to let her leave Benenden. ‘I really can’t stick another year of this place,’ she wrote. However, I felt that having embarked on a school career she must at least terminate it in the proper way, so I wrote back to her and said that, once she had passed her School Certificate–she could leave Benenden and proceed to some other form of education.

Miss Sheldon, Rosalind’s headmistress, had written to me and said that, though Rosalind was anxious to take her School Certificate next term, she did not think she would have any chance of passing it, but that there was no reason why she should not try. Miss Sheldon was proved wrong, however, because Rosalind passed her School Certificate with ease. I had to think up a next step for a daughter of barely fifteen.

Going abroad was what we both agreed on. Max and I went on what I found an intensely worrying mission to inspect various scholastic establishments: a family in Paris, a few carefully nurtured girls in Evian, at least three highly recommended educators in Lausanne, and an establishment in Gstaad, where the girls would get skiing and other winter sports. I was bad at interviewing people. The moment I sat down I became tongue-tied. What I felt was: ‘Shall I send my daughter to you or not?

How can I find out what you are really like? How on earth can I find out if she would like being with you? And anyway, what’s it all about?’ Instead, I used to stammer and say ‘er–er’–and ask what I could hear were thoroughly idiotic questions.

After much family consultation, we decided on Mademoiselle Tschumi’s Pension at Gstaad. It proved a fiasco. I seemed to get letters from Rosalind twice a week; ‘This place is awful, Mother, absolutely awful. The girls here–you’ve no idea what they are like! They wear snoods–that will show you?’

It didn’t show me. I didn’t see why girls shouldn’t wear snoods, and I didn’t know what snoods were anyway.

‘We walk about two by two–two by two–fancy! At our age! And we’re never even allowed in the village for a second to buy anything at a shop. It’s awful! Absolute imprisonment! They don’t teach us anything either. And as for those bathrooms you talk about, it’s an absolute swizzle! They’re never used. None of us has ever had a bath once! There isn’t even any hot water laid on yet! And for skiing, of course, it’s far too far down. There may be a bit in February, but I don’t believe they will ever take us there even then.’

We rescued Rosalind from her durance and sent her first to a pension at Chateau d’Oex and then to a pleasantly old-fashioned family in Paris. On our way back from Syria we picked her up in Paris, and said we hoped she now spoke French. ‘More or less,’ said Rosalind, careful not to allow us to hear her speak a word. Then it occurred to her that the taxi-driver taking us from the Gare de Lyon to Madame Laurent’s house was following an unnecessarily devious route. Rosalind flung down the window, stuck out her head, and addressed him in vivid and idiomatic French, asking him why on earth he thought he was taking those particular streets and telling him what streets he ought to take. He was vanquished at once, and I was delighted to find out what otherwise I might have had some difficulty in establishing: that Rosalind could speak French.

Madame Laurent and I had amicable conversations. She assured me that Rosalind had comported herself extremely well, had behaved always tres comme it faut–but, she said, ‘Madame, elle est d’une froideur–mais d’une froideur excessive! C’est peut-étre le phlegme brittanique.’

I said hurriedly that I was quite sure that it was le phlegme britannique. Again Madame Laurent assured me that she had tried to be like a mother to Rosalind. ‘Mais cette froideur–cette froideur anglaise!’

Madame Laurent sighed with the memory of the rejection of her demonstrative heart.

Rosalind still had six months, or possibly a year, of education to put in. She passed it with a family near Munich learning German. Next came a London season.

At this she was a decided success, was called one of the best looking debutantes of her year, and had plenty of fun. I think, myself, that it did her a great deal of good, and gave her self-confidence and nice manners. It also cured her of any mad wish to continue the social racket indefinitely. She said she had enjoyed the experience, but had no intention of doing any more of that silly kind of thing.

I raised the subject of a job with Rosalind and her great friend, Susan North.

‘You’ve got to choose something to do,’ I said to Rosalind dictatorially. ‘I don’t care what it is. Why don’t you train as a masseuse? That would be useful later in life. Or I suppose you could go and arrange flowers.’

‘Oh, everybody is doing that,’ said Susan.

Finally, the girls came to me and said they thought they would like to take up photography. I was overjoyed; I had been wishing to study photography myself. I had been doing most of the photography on the dig, and I thought it would be useful for me to have some lessons in studio photography, about which I knew little. So many of our objects had to be photographed in the open, and not in studio conditions, and since some of them would remain in Syria it was important that we should have the best photographs of them possible. I enlarged enthusiastically on the subject and the girls went into fits of laughter.

‘We don’t mean what you mean,’ they said. ‘We don’t mean photography classes, at all.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, bewildered.

‘Oh, being photographed in bathing-dresses and things, for advertisements.’

I was horribly shocked, and showed it.

‘You are not going to be photographed for advertisements for bathing-dresses,’ I said. ‘I won’t hear of anything like that.’

‘Mother is so terribly old-fashioned,’ said Rosalind, with a sigh. ‘Lots of girls are photographed for advertisements. They are terribly jealous of each other.’

‘And we do know some photographers,’ Susan said. ‘I think we could persuade one of them to do one of us for soap.’

I continued to veto the project. In the end Rosalind said she would think about photography classes. After all, she said, she could do model photography classes–it needn’t be for bathing-dresses. ‘It could be real clothes, buttoned up to the neck, if you like!’

So I went off one day to the Reinhardt School of Commercial Photography, and I became so interested that when I came home I had to confess that I had booked myself for a course of photography and not them. They roared with laughter. ‘Mother’s got caught by it, instead of us!’ said Rosalind.

‘Oh, you poor dear, you will be so tired,’ said Susan. And tired I was! After the first day running up and down stone flights of stairs, developing and retaking my particular subject, I was worn out.

The Reinhardt School of Photography had many different departments, including one on commercial photography, and one of my courses was in this. There was a passion at that time for making everything look as unlike itself as possible. You would place six tablespoons on a table, then climb on a stepladder, hang over the top of it, and achieve some fore-shortened view or out of focus effect. There was also a tendency to photograph an object not in the middle of the plate but somewhere in the left-hand corner, or running off it, or a face that was only a portion of a face. It was all very much the latest thing. I took a beechwood sculptured head to the School, and did various experiments in photographing that, using all kinds of filters–red, green, yellow–and seeing the extraordinarily different effects you could get using various cameras with the various filters.

The person who did not share my enthusiasm was the wretched Max. He wanted his photography to be the opposite of what I was now doing. Things had to look exactly what they were, with as much detail as possible, exact perspective, and so on.

‘Don’t you think this necklace looks rather dull like that?’ I would say. ‘No, I don’t,’ said Max. ‘The way you’ve got it, it’s all blurred and twisted.’

‘But it looks so exciting that way!’

‘I don’t want it to look exciting,’ said Max. ‘I want it to look like what it is. And you haven’t put a scale rod in.’

‘It ruins the artistic aspect of a photograph if you have to have a scale rod, It looks awful.’

‘You’ve got to show what size it is,’ said Max. ‘It is most important.’ ‘You can put it underneath, can’t you, in the caption?’

‘It’s not the same thing. You want to see exactly the scale.’

I sighed. I could see I had been betrayed by my artistic fancies into straying from what I had promised to do, so I got my instructor to give me extra lessons on photographing things in exact perspective. He was rather bored at having to do this, and disapproving of the results. However, it was going to be useful to me.

I had learnt one thing at least: there was no such thing as taking a photograph of something, and later taking another one because that one didn’t come out well. Nobody at the Reinhardt School ever took less than ten negatives of any subject; a great many of them took twenty. It was singularly exhausting, and I used to come home so weary that I wished I had never started. However, that had gone by the next morning.



Rosalind came out to Syria one year, and I think enjoyed being on our dig. Max got her to do some of the drawings. Actually she draws exceptionally well, and she made a good job of it, but the trouble with Rosalind is that, unlike her slap-happy mother, she is a perfectionist. Unless she could get a thing perfectly as she wanted it, she would immediately tear it up. She did a series of these drawings, and then said to Max: ‘They are no good really–I shall tear them up.’

‘You are not to tear them up,’ said Max.

‘I shall tear them up,’ said Rosalind.

They then had an enormous fight, Rosalind trembling with rage, Max also really angry. The drawings of the painted pots were salvaged, and appeared in Max’s book of Tell Brak–but Rosalind never professed herself satisfied with them.

Horses were procured from the Sheikh, and Rosalind went riding, accompanied by Guilford Bell, the young architect nephew of my Australian friend, Aileen Bell. He was a very dear boy and he did some extraordinarily lovely pencil drawings of our amulets at Brak. They were beautiful little things–frogs, lions, rams, bulls–and the delicate shading of his pencil drawings made a perfect medium for them.

That summer Guilford came to stay with us at Torquay, and one day we saw that a house was up for sale that I had known when I was young–Greenway House, on the Dart, a house that my mother had always said, and I had thought also, was the most perfect of the various properties on the Dart.

‘Let’s go and look at it,’ I said. ‘It would be lovely to see it again. I haven’t seen it since I went there calling with Mother when I was a child.’

So we went over to Greenway, and very beautiful the house and grounds were. A white Georgian house of about 1780 or 90, with woods sweeping down to the Dart below, and a lot of fine shrubs and trees–the ideal house, a dream house. Since we had an order to view, I asked its price, though without much interest. I didn’t think I had heard the answer correctly.

‘Sixteen thousand, did you say?’

‘Six thousand.’

‘Six thousand?’ I could hardly believe it. We drove home talking about it. ‘It’s incredibly cheap,’ I said. ‘It’s got thirty-three acres. It doesn’t look in bad condition either; wants decorating, that’s all.’

‘Why don’t you buy it?’ asked Max.

I was so startled, this coming from Max, that it took my breath away. ‘You’ve been getting worried about Ashfield, you know,’

I knew what he meant. Ashfield, my home, had changed. Where our neighbours’ houses had once been ringed round us–other villas of the same kind–there was now, blocking the view in the narrowest part of the garden, a large secondary school, which stood between us and the sea. All day there were noisy shouting children. On the other side of us there was now a mental nursing home. Sometimes queer sounds would come from there, and patients would appear suddenly in the garden. They were not certified, so I presume they were free to do as they liked, but we had had some unpleasant incidents. A brawny colonel in pyjamas appeared, waving a golf-club, determined he was going to kill all the moles in the garden; another day he came to attack a dog who had barked. The nurses apologised, fetched him back, and said he was quite all right, just a little ‘disturbed’, but it was alarming, and once or twice children staying with us had been badly frightened.

Once it had been all countryside out of Torquay: three villas up the hill and then the road petered out into country. The lush green fields where I used to go to look at the lambs in spring had given way to a mass of small houses. No one we knew lived in our road any longer. It was as though Ashfield had become a parody of itself.

Still, that was hardly a reason for buying Greenway House. Yet, how it appealed to me. I had known always that Max did not really like Ashfield. He had never told me so–but I knew it. I think in some way he was jealous of it because it was a part of my life that I hadn’t shared with him–it was all my own. And he had said, unprompted, of Greenway, ‘Why don’t you buy it?‘

And so we made inquiries. Guilford helped us. He looked over the house professionally, and said: ‘Well, I’ll give you my advice. Pull half of it down.’

‘Pull half of it down!’

‘Yes. You see, the whole of that back wing is Victorian. You could leave the 1790 house and take away all that addition–the billiard room, the study, the estate room, those bedrooms and new bathrooms upstairs. It would be a far better house, far lighter. The original is a very beautiful house, as a matter of fact.’

‘We shan’t have any bathrooms left if we pull the Victorian ones down,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, you can easily make bathrooms on the top floor. Another thing, too; it would bring your rates down by quite a lot.’

And so we bought Greenway. We put Guilford in charge, and he redesigned the house on its original lines. We added bathrooms upstairs, and downstairs we affixed a small cloakroom, but the rest of it we left untouched. I only wish now that I had had the gift of foresight–if so I would have taken off another large chunk of the house: the vast larder, the great caverns in which you soaked pigs, the kindling store, the suite of sculleries. Instead I would have put on a nice, small kitchen from which I could go to the dining-room in a few steps, and which would be easy to run with no help. But it would never have occurred to me that a day would come when there was no domestic help. So we left the kitchen wing as it was. When the alterations were all done, and the house decorated plainly in white, we moved in.

Just after we had done so, and were exulting in it, the second war came. It was not quite so much out-of-the-blue as in 1914. We had had warnings: there had been Munich; but we had listened to Chamberlain’s reassurances, and we had thought then that when he said, ‘Peace in our time’, it might be the truth.

But Peace in our time was not to be.

Posted in An Autobiography