PART VII. The land of lost content

I

While we were looking for our country cottage, bad news came from Africa of my brother Monty.
He had not featured largely in any of our lives since before the war when he had a scheme to run cargo boats on Lake Victoria. He sent Madge letters from various people out there, all enthusiastic about the idea. If she could just put up a little capital…My sister believed that here was something that Monty might succeed in. Anything to do with boats he was good at. So she paid his fare to England. The plan was to build a small boat in Essex. It was true that there was a great opening for this type of craft. There were no small cargo boats on the Lake at that time. The weak part of the scheme, however, was that Monty was to be the Captain, and nobody had any confidence that the boat would run to time, or the service be reliable.

‘It’s a splendid idea. Lots of oof to be made. But good old Miller–suppose he just didn’t feel like getting up one day? Or didn’t like a fellow’s face? I mean he’s just a law unto himself.’

But my sister, who was of a perennially optimistic nature, agreed to invest the greater part of her capital in getting the boat built.

‘James gives me a good allowance, and I can use some of that to help with Ashfield, so I shan’t miss the income.’

My brother-in-law was livid. He and Monty disliked each other intensely. Madge, he felt certain, would lose her money.

The boat was taken in hand. Madge went down to Essex several times. Everything seemed to be going well.

The only thing that worried her was the fact that Monty was always coming up to London, staying at an expensive hotel in Jermyn Street, buying quantities of luxurious silk pyjamas, a couple of specially designed Captain’s uniforms, and bestowing on her a sapphire bracelet, an elaborate petit point evening bag, and other charming and expensive presents.

‘But, Monty, the money is for the boat–not to give me presents.’

‘But I want you to have a nice present. You never buy anything for yourself.’

‘And what’s that thing on the window sill?’

‘That? It’s a Japanese dwarf tree.’

‘But they’re terribly expensive, aren’t they?’

‘It was £75. I’ve always wanted one. Look at the shape. Lovely, isn’t it?’

‘Oh Monty, I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘The trouble with you is that living with old James you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself.’ The tree had disappeared when she next visited him.

‘Did you take it back to the shop?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Take it back to the shop?’ said Monty horrified. ‘Of course not. As a matter of fact I gave it to the receptionist here. Awfully nice girl. She admired it so much, and she’d been worried about her mother.’ Words failed Madge.

‘Come out to lunch,’ said Monty.

‘All right–but we’ll go to Lyons.’

‘Very well.’ They went through to the street. Monty asked the doorman for a taxi. He hailed one that was passing by, they got in, Monty handed him a half a crown, and told the driver to go to the Berkeley. Madge burst into tears.



‘The truth of it is,’ said Monty to me later, ‘that James is such a miserably mean chap that poor old Madge has got her spirit completely broken. She seems to think of nothing but saving.’

‘Hadn’t you better begin to think, of saving? Suppose the money runs out before the boat’s built?’ Monty grinned wickedly.

‘Wouldn’t matter. Old James would have to fork up.’ Monty stayed with them for a difficult five days, and drank enormous amounts of whisky. Madge went out secretly, bought several more bottles, and put them in his room, which amused Monty very much. Monty was attracted by Nan Watts, and took her out to theatres and expensive restaurants.

‘This boat will never get to Uganda,’ Madge would say sometimes in despair. It might have done. It was Monty’s own fault that it didn’t. He loved the Batenga as he called it. He wanted it to be more than a cargo boat. He ordered fittings of ebony and ivory, a teak-panelled cabin for himself, and specially-made brown fireproof china with the name Batenga. All this delayed its dispatch. And so–the war broke out. There could be no shipping of the Batenga to Africa. Instead it had to be sold to the Government at a low price. Monty went back to the Army–this time to the King’s African Rifles. So ended the saga of the Batenga. I still have two of the coffee cups. Now a letter came from a doctor. Monty had, as we knew, been wounded in the arm in the war. It seemed that during his treatment in hospital, the wound had become infected–carelessness of a native dresser. The infection had persisted, and had recurred even after he was discharged. He had continued with his life as a hunter, but in the end had been picked up and taken to a French hospital run by nuns, very seriously ill. He had not wished at first to communicate with any of his relations, but he was now almost certainly a dying man–six months was the longest he could hope to live–and he had a great wish to come home to die. It was also possible that the climate in England might prolong his life a little. Arrangements were quickly made for Monty’s passage from Mombassa by sea. My mother started making preparations at Ashfield. She was transported with joy–she would look after him devotedly–her dearest boy. She began to envisage a mother-and-son relationship which I felt quite sure was entirely unrealistic. Mother and Monty had never really got on together harmoniously. In many ways they were too much alike. They both wanted their own way. And Monty was one of the most difficult people in the world to live with.

‘It will be different now,’ said my mother. ‘You forget how ill the poor boy is.’ I thought that Monty ill would be just as difficult as Monty well. People’s natures don’t change. Still, I hoped for the best. Mother had a little difficulty in reconciling her two elderly maids to the idea of having Monty’s African servant in the house also.

‘I don’t think, Madam–I really don’t think that we could sleep in the same house with a black man. It’s not what me and my sister have been accustomed to.’ Mother went into action. She was a woman not easy to withstand. She talked them round to staying. The lure she held out to them in the end was the possibility that they might be able to convert the African from Mohammedanism to Christianity. They were very religious women.

‘We could read the Bible to him,’ they said, their eyes lighting up. Mother, meanwhile, prepared a self-contained suite of three rooms and a new bathroom. Archie very kindly said he would go to meet Monty’s boat docked at Tilbury. He had also taken a small flat in Bayswater for him to go to with his servant. As Archie departed from Tilbury, I called after him: ‘Don’t let Monty make you take him to the Ritz.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said “Don’t let him make you take him to the Ritz”–I’ll see that the flat is all ready, and the landlady alerted and plenty of stores in.’ ‘Well, that’s all right then.’

‘I hope so. But he might prefer the Ritz.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll have him all settled in before lunch.’ The day wore on. At 6.30 Archie returned. He looked exhausted.

‘It’s all right. I’ve got him settled in. It was a bit of a job getting him off the boat. He wasn’t packed up or anything–kept saying there was plenty of time–what was the hurry? Everybody else was off the ship, and he was holding things up–but he didn’t seem to care. That Shebani is a good chap–very helpful. He managed to get things moving in the end.’ He paused, and cleared his throat.

‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t take him to Powell Square. He seemed absolutely set on going to some hotel in Jermyn Street. He said it would be much less trouble to everyone.’

‘So that’s where he is.’

‘Well–yes.’ I looked at him.

‘Somehow,’ said Archie, ‘it seemed so reasonable the way he put it.’ ‘That is Monty’s strong point,’ I informed him. Monty was taken to a specialist in tropical diseases to whom he had been recommended. The specialist gave full directions to my mother. There was a chance of partial recovery: good air–continual soaking in hot baths–a quiet life. What might prove difficult was that, having considered him almost certainly a dying man, they had kept him under drugs to such an extent that he would find it difficult to break the habit now. We got Monty and Shebani into the Powell Square flat after a day or two, and they settled down quite happily–although Shebani created quite a stir by dropping into neighbouring tobacconists, seizing a packet of fifty cigarettes, saying, ‘For my master’, and leaving the shop. The Kenya system of credit was not appreciated in Bayswater. Then, after the London treatments were over, Monty and Shebani moved down to Ashfield–and the mother-and-son ‘ending his days in peace’ concept was tried out. It nearly killed my mother. Monty had his African way of life. His idea of meals was to call for them whenever he felt like eating, even if it was four in the morning. This was one of his favourite times. He would ring bells, call to the servants, and order chops and steaks.

‘I don’t understand what you mean, mother, by “considering the servants”. You pay them to cook for you, don’t you?’

‘Yes–but not in the middle of the night.’

‘It was only an hour before sunrise. I always used to get up then. It’s the proper start to the day.’ It was Shebani who really succeeded in making things work. The elderly maids adored him. They read the Bible to him, and he listened with the greatest interest. He told them stories of life in Uganda and of the prowess of his master in shooting elephants. He gently took Monty to task for his treatment of his mother.

‘She is your mother, Bwana. You must speak to her with reverence.’ After a year Shebani had to go back to Africa to his wife and family, and things became difficult. Male attendants were not a success, either with Monty or my mother. Madge and I went down alternately to try to soothe them down. Monty’s health was improving, and as a result he was much more difficult to control. He was bored, and for relaxation took to shooting out of his window with a revolver. Tradespeople and some of mother’s visitors complained. Monty was unrepentant. ‘Some silly old spinster going down the drive with her behind wobbling. Couldn’t resist it–I sent a shot or two right and left of her. My word, how she ran!’ He even sent shots all round Madge one day on the drive, and she was frankly terrified.

‘I can’t think why!’ said Monty. ‘I shouldn’t have hurt her. Does she think I can’t aim?’ Someone complained, and we had a visit from the police. Monty produced his firearm licence and talked very reasonably about his life as a hunter in Kenya, and his wish to keep his eye in. Some silly woman had got the idea he had been firing at her. Actually he had seen a rabbit. Being Monty, he got away with it. The police accepted his explanation as quite natural for a man who had led the life that Captain Miller had.

‘The truth is, kid, I can’t stand being cooped up here. This tame sort of existence. If I could only have a little cottage on Dartmoor–that’s what I’d like. Air and space–room to breathe.’

‘Is that what you’d really like?’

‘Of course it is. Poor old mother drives me mad. Fussy–all these set times for meals. Everything cut and dried. It’s not what I’ve been used to.’ I found Monty a small granite bungalow on Dartmoor. We also found, by a kind of miracle, the right housekeeper to look after him. She was a woman of sixty-five–and when we saw her first she looked wildly unsuitable. She had bright peroxided yellow hair, curls, and a lot of rouge. She was dressed in black silk. She was the widow of a doctor who had been a morphia addict. She had lived most of her life in France, and had had thirteen children. She was the answer to a prayer–she could manage Monty as no one else had been capable of doing. She rose and cooked his chops in the middle of the night if he wanted them. But, said Monty after a while, I’ve rather given up that, kid–bit hard on Mrs Taylor, you know. She’s a good sport, but she’s not young.’ Unasked and unbidden, she dug up the small garden and produced peas, new potatoes and French beans. She listened when Monty wanted to talk, and paid no attention when he was silent. It was wonderful. Mother recovered her health. Madge stopped worrying. Monty enjoyed visits from his family, and always behaved beautifully on those occasions, very proud of the delicious meals produced by Mrs Taylor.

£800 for the Dartmoor bungalow was a cheap price for Madge and me to have paid.


II

Archie and I found our cottage in the country–though it wasn’t a cottage. Sunningdale, as I had feared, was an excessively expensive place to live. It was full of luxurious modern houses built round the golf-course, there weren’t any country cottages at all. But we found a large Victorian house, Scotswood, situated in a big garden, which was being divided into four flats. Two of these were already taken–the two on the ground floor–but there were two flats upstairs in the course of being adapted, and we looked over them. Each contained three rooms on the first floor and two on the floor above, and a kitchen and bathroom, of course. One flat was more attractive than the other–having better shaped rooms and a better outlook–but the other had a small extra room and was also cheaper, so we settled on the cheaper one. Tenants had the use of the garden, and constant hot water was supplied. The rent was more than that of our Addison Road flat, but not much so. It was, I think, £120. So we signed a lease and prepared to move in.

We came down constantly to see how the decorators and painters were getting on–which was always much less than they had promised. Every time we did so we found that something had been done wrong. Wall-papers were the most foolproof. You cannot do anything too awful to a wallpaper, unless you put the wrong one on altogether–but you can put every shade of wrong paint on, and we weren’t on the spot to see what was happening. However, all was settled in time. We had a big sitting-room, with new cretonne curtains of lilac–made by me. In the small dining-room we had some rather expensive curtains, because we fell in love with them, of tulips on a white ground. Rosalind and Site’s larger room behind it had curtains with buttercups and daisies. On the floor above, Archie had a dressing-room and emergency spare-room very virulently coloured–scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers–and in our bedroom I chose curtains of bluebells, which was not really a good choice, because since this particular room faced north the sun seldom shone through. The only time they were pretty was when one lay in bed in mid-morning and saw the light shining through them, pulled back on either side of the window, or seen at night, the blue rather faded out. In fact it was like bluebells in nature. As soon as you bring them into the house they turn grey and dispirited and refuse to hold up their heads. A bluebell is a flower that refuses to be captured and is only gay when it is in the woods. I consoled myself by writing a ballad about bluebells:

BALLAD OF THE MAYTIME

The King, he went a-walking, one merry morn in May.

The King, he laid him down to rest, and fell asleep, they say.

And when he woke, ‘twas even,

(The hour of magic mood)

And Bluebell, wild Bluebell, was dancing in the wood.

The King, he gave a banquet to all the flowers (save one),

With hungry eyes he watched them, a-seeking one alone.

The Rose was there in satin,

The Lily with green hood,

But Bluebell, wild Bluebell, only dances in the wood.

The King, he frowned in anger, his hand upon his sword.

He sent his men to seize her, and bring her to their Lord.

With silken cords they bound her,

Before the King she stood,

Bluebell, wild Bluebell, who dances in the wood.

The King, he rose to greet her, the maid he’d sworn to wed.

The King, he took his golden crown and set it on her head.

And then he paled and shivered,

The courtiers gazed in fear,

At Bluebell, grey Bluebell, so pale and ghostly there.

‘O King, your crown is heavy, ’twould bow my head with care.

Your palace walls would shut me in, who live as free as air.

The wind, he is my lover,

The sun my lover too,

And Bluebell, wild Bluebell, shall ne’er be Queen to you.’

The King, he mourned a twelvemonth, and none could ease his pain.

The King, he went a-walking a-down a lovers’ lane.

He laid aside his golden crown,

Into the wood went he,

Where Bluebell, wild Bluebell, dances ever wild and free.





The Man in the Brown Suit went very well indeed. The Bodley Head pressed me again to make a splendid new contract with them. I refused. The next book I sent them was one made from a long short story that I had written a good many years before. I was rather fond of it myself: it dealt with various supernatural happenings. I elaborated it a little, brought a few more characters into it, and sent it off to them. They did not accept it. I had been sure that they would not. There was no clause in the contract which decreed that any book I offered them had to be either a detective story or a thriller. It merely said ‘the next novel’. This had been made a full novel–just–and it was up to them to take it or refuse it. They refused it, so I had only one more book to write for them. After that, freedom. Freedom, and the advice of Hughes Massie–and from then onwards I should have first-class advice as to what to do, and, even more important, what not to do.

The next book I wrote was a completely light-hearted one, rather in the style of The Secret Adversary. They were more fun and quicker to write, and my work reflected the light-heartedness that I felt at this particular period, when everything was going so well. My life at Sunningdale, the fun of Rosalind developing every day, getting more amusing and more interesting. I have never understood people who want to keep their children as babies and regret every year that they grow older. I myself sometimes felt that I could hardly wait: I wanted to see exactly what Rosalind would be like in a year’s time, a year after that, and so on. There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger. You are the gate through which it came into the world, and you will be allowed to have charge of it for a period: after that it will leave you and blossom out into its own free life–and there it is, for you to watch, living its life in freedom. It is like a strange plant which you have brought home, planted, and can hardly wait to see how it will turn out.

Rosalind took happily to Sunningdale. She had the delight of her fairy cycle, on which she bicycled with great ardour all round the garden, falling off occasionally, but never caring. Site and I had both warned her not to go outside the gate, but I don’t think that either of us had made it a definite prohibition. Anyway, go outside the gate she did, on an early morning when we were both busy in the flat. She cycled out full steam down the hill towards the main road and, rather fortunately, fell off just before she got there. The fall drove her two front teeth inward, and would probably, I feared, prejudice her next teeth when they arrived. I took her to the dentist, and Rosalind, though not complaining, sat in the dentist’s chair with her lips firmly clasped over her teeth, refusing to open her mouth for anyone. Anything that I said, Site said, or the the dentist said was received without a word, and her teeth remained firmly clenched. I had to take her away. I was furious. Rosalind received all reproaches in silence. After some lecturing with Site and some from me, two days later she announced that she would go to the dentist.

‘Do you really mean it this time, Rosalind, or will you do the same thing when you get there?’

‘No, I’ll open my mouth this time.’

‘I suppose you were frightened?’

‘Well, you can’t be sure, can you,’ said Rosalind, ‘what anyone is going to do to you?’ I acknowledged this, but assured her that everybody that she knew and that I knew in England went to dentists, opened their mouths, and had things done to their teeth which resulted in ultimate benefit. Rosalind went, and behaved beautifully this time. The dentist removed the loosened teeth, and said she might have to wear a plate later, but he thought probably not. Dentists, I could not help feeling, were not made of the same stem stuff that they used to be in my childhood. Our dentist was called Mr Hearn, a small man, exceedingly dynamic, and with a personality that overawed his patients at once. My sister was taken to him at the tender age of three. Madge, ensconced in the dentist’s chair, immediately began to cry.

‘Now then,’ said Mr Hearn, ‘I can’t allow that. I never allow my patients to cry.’

‘Don’t you?’ said Madge, so surprised that she stopped at once.

‘No,’ said Mr Hearn, ‘it is a bad thing, so I don’t allow it.’ He had no more trouble. We were all terribly pleased to get to Scotswood: It was so exciting to be in the country again: Archie was delighted, because he was now in close proximity to Sunningdale Golf Course. Site was pleased because she was saved the long treks to the park, and Rosalind because she had the garden for her fairy cycle. So everyone was happy. This in spite of the fact that when we arrived with the furniture van nothing was ready for us. Electricians were still burrowing about in the passages, and there was the greatest difficulty in moving any furniture in. Problems with baths, taps, and electric light were incessant, and the general level of inefficiency was unbelievable.

Anna the Adventuress had now appeared in The Evening News and I had bought my Morris Cowley–and a very good car it was: much more reliable and better made than cars are nowadays. The next thing I had to do was to learn to drive it. Almost immediately, however, the General Strike was upon us, and before I had had more than about three lessons with Archie he informed me that I would have to drive him to London.

‘But I can’t. I don’t know how to drive!’

‘Oh yes, you do. You’re coming along quite well.’

Archie was a good teacher, but there was no question in those days of having to pass any test. There was no such thing as an L-driver. From the moment you took the controls of the car you were responsible for what you did with it.

‘I don’t think I can really reverse at all,’ I said doubtfully. ‘The car never seems to go where I think it’s going.’

‘You won’t have to back,’ said Archie with assurance. ‘You can steer quite well–that’s all that matters. If you go at a reasonable pace you’ll be all right. You know how to put the brake on.’

‘You taught me that first of all,’ I said.

‘Yes, of course I did. I don’t see why you should have any trouble.’

‘But the traffic,’ I said falteringly.

‘Oh no, you needn’t do the traffic at all to begin with.’

He had heard that there were electric trains going from Hounslow Station, and so my task would be to motor to Hounslow with Archie at the wheel; then he would turn the car round, put it in position for the return journey, and leave me to get on by my own devices while he went to the City.

The first time I did this was one of the worst ordeals I have ever known. I was shaking with fright, but I managed, nevertheless, to get on reasonably well. I stalled the engine once or twice by braking rather more violently than I need, and I was rather chary about passing things, which was probably just as well. But of course the traffic on the roads then was not anything like what it would be nowadays, and called for no special skill. As long as you could steer reasonably, and didn’t have to park, or turn, or reverse too much, all was well. The worst moment was when I had to turn into Scotswood and get myself into an extremely narrow garage, next to our neighbour’s car. These people lived in the flat below us–a young couple called the Rawncliffes. The wife reported to her husband: ‘I saw the first floor driving back this morning. I don’t think she has ever driven a car before. She drove into that garage absolutely shaking and as white as a sheet. I thought she was going to ram the wall, but she just didn’t!’

I don’t think anyone but Archie could have given me assurance under these conditions. He always took it for granted that I could do things about which I myself had a good deal of doubt. ‘Of course you can do it,’ he would say. ‘Why shouldn’t you? If you always think you can’t do things you never will do them.’

I gained a little confidence and after three or four days was able to penetrate further into London and to brave the dangers of the traffic. Oh the joy that car was to me! I don’t suppose anyone nowadays could believe the difference it made to one’s life. To be able to go anywhere you chose; to places beyond the reach of your legs–it widened your whole horizon. One of the greatest pleasures I had out of the car was going down to Ashfield and taking mother out for drives. She enjoyed it passionately, just as I did. We went to all sorts of places–Dartmoor, the house of friends she had never been able to see because of the difficulties of transport–and the sheer joy of driving was enough for us both. I don’t think anything has given me more pleasure, more joy of achievement, than my dear bottle-nosed Morris Cowley.



Though helpful with most practical things in life, Archie was of no use in my writing. Occasionally I felt the urge to outline to him some idea I had for a new story, or the plot of a new book. When I had described it haltingly, it sounded, even to my ears, extraordinarily banal, futile, and a great many other adjectives which I will not particularize. Archie would listen with the kind benevolence he displayed when he had decided to give his attention to other people. Finally, ‘What do you think?’ I asked timidly. ‘Do you think it will be all right?’

‘Well, I suppose it might be,’ said Archie, in a completely damping manner. ‘It doesn’t seem to have much story to it, does it? Or much excitement either?’

‘You don’t really think it will do, then?’

‘I think you can do much better.’ That plot thereupon fell dead, slain for ever, I felt. As it happened, I resurrected it, or rather it resurrected itself, five or six years later. This time, not subjected to criticism before the act, it blossomed most satisfactorily, and turned out to be one of my best books. The trouble is that it is awfully hard for an author to put things in words when you have to do it in the course of conversation. You can do it with a pencil in your hand, or sitting in front of your typewriter–then the thing comes out already formed as it should come out–but you can’t describe things that you are only going to write; or at least I can’t. I learnt in the end never to say anything about a book before it was written. Criticism after you have written it is helpful. You can argue the point, or you can give in, but at least you know how it has struck one reader. Your own description of what you are going to write, however, sounds so futile, that to be told kindly that it won’t do meets with your instant agreement. I will never agree to the hundreds of requests that reach me asking me to read someone’s MS. For one thing, of course, you would never do anything else but read MSS if you once started agreeing to do so! But the real point is that I don’t think an author is competent to criticise. Your criticism is bound to be that you yourself would have written it in such and such a way, but that does not mean that that would be right for another author. We all have our own ways of expressing ourselves. Also, there is the frightening thought that you may be discouraging someone who ought not to be discouraged. An early story of mine was shown to a well-known authoress by a kindly friend. She reported on it sadly but adversely, saying that the author would never make a writer. What she really meant, though she did not know it herself because she was an author and not a critic, was that the person who was writing was still an immature and inadequate writer who could not as yet produce anything worth publishing. A critic or an editor might have been more perceptive, because it is their profession to notice the germs of what may be. So I don’t like criticising and I think it can easily do harm. The only thing I will advance as criticism is the fact that the would-be writer has not taken any account of the market for his wares. It is no good writing a novel of 30,000 words–that is not a length which is easily publishable at present. ‘Oh,’ replies the author, ‘but this book has got to be that length.’ Well, that is probably all right if you’re a genius, but you are more likely to be a tradesman. You have got something you feel you can do well and that you enjoy doing well, and you want to sell it well. If so, you must give it the dimensions and the appearance that is wanted. If you were a carpenter, it would be no good making a chair, the seat of which was five feet up from the floor. It wouldn’t be what anyone wanted to sit on. It is no good saying that you think the chair looks handsome that way. If you want to write a book, study what sizes books are, and write within the limits of that size. If you want to write a certain type of short story for a certain type of magazine you have to make it the length, and it has to be the type of story, that is printed in that magazine. If you like to write for yourself only, that is a different matter–you can make it any length, and write it in any way you wish; but then you will probably have to be content with the pleasure alone of having written it. It’s no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius–some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman–a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas; but you must submit to the discipline of form. It was by now just beginning to dawn on me that perhaps I might be a writer by profession. I was not sure of it yet. I still had an idea that writing books was only the natural successor to embroidering sofa-cushions. Before we left London for the country I had taken lessons in sculpture. I was a great admirer of the art–much more than of pictures–and I had a real yearning to be a sculptor myself. I was early disillusioned in that hope: I saw that it was not within my capacity because I had no eye for visual form. I couldn’t draw, so I couldn’t sculpt. I had thought it might be different with sculpture, that feeling and handling clay would help with form. But I realised I couldn’t really see things. It was like being tone deaf in music. I composed a few songs by way of vanity, setting some of my verses to music. I had a look at the waltz I composed again, and thought I had never heard anything more banal. Some of the songs were not so bad. One of the series of Pierrot and Harlequin verses pleased me. I wished that I had learnt harmony and knew something about composition. But writing seemed to be indicated as my proper trade and self-expression. I wrote a gloomy play, mainly about incest. It was refused firmly by every manager I sent it to. ‘An unpleasant subject.’ The curious thing is that, nowadays, it is the kind of play which might quite likely appeal to a manager. I also wrote an historical play about Akhnaton. I liked it enormously. John Gielgud was later kind enough to write to me. He said it had interesting points, but was far too expensive to produce and had not enough humour. I had not connected humour with Akhnaton, but I saw that I was wrong. Egypt was just as full of humour as anywhere else–so was life at any time or place–and tragedy had its humour too.


III

We had been through so much worry since we came back from our world tour that it seemed wonderful to enter on this halcyon period. Perhaps it was then that I ought to have felt misgiving. Things went too well. Archie had the work he enjoyed, with an employer who was his friend; he liked the people he worked with; he had what he had always wanted, to belong to a first-class golf club, and to play every weekend. My writing was going well, and I began to consider that perhaps I should be able to go on writing books and making money by it.

Did I realise that there might be something not quite right in the even tenor of our days? I don’t think so. And yet there was a certain lack, though I don’t think I ever put it into definite terms to myself. I missed the early companionship of our time together, Archie and I. I missed the weekends when we had gone by bus or by train and had explored places.

Our weekends now were the dullest time for me. I often wanted to ask people down for the weekend, so as to see some of our London friends again. Archie discouraged that, because he said it spoilt his weekends. If we had people staying he would have to be more at home and perhaps miss his second round of golf. I suggested that he should play tennis sometimes instead of golf, because we had several friends with whom he had played tennis on public courts in London. He was horrified. Tennis, he said, would completely spoil his eye for golf. He was taking the game so seriously now that it might have been a religion.

‘Look here, you ask any of your friends down if you like, but don’t let’s ask down a married couple, because then I have to do something about it.’

That was not so easy to do, because most of our friends were married couples, and I couldn’t very well ask the wife without the husband. I was making friends in Sunningdale, but Sunningdale society was mainly of two kinds: the middle-aged, who were passionately fond of gardens and talked of practically nothing else; or the gay, sporting rich, who drank a good deal, had cocktail parties, and were not really my type, or indeed, for that matter, Archie’s.

One couple who could and did stay with us for a weekend were Nan Watts and her second husband. She had married a man called Hugo Pollock during the war, and had one daughter, Judy; but the marriage had not turned out well, and in the end she had divorced her husband. She re-married a man called George Kon, who was also a keen golfer, so that solved the weekend problem. George and Archie played together; Nan and I gossiped, talked and played some desultory golf on the ladies’ links. Then we would go up and meet the men at the club-house and have a drink there. At least Nan and I would take up our own drinks: half a pint of raw cream thinned down with milk–just as we had drunk it down at the farm at Abney in early days.

It was a great blow when Site left us, but she took her career seriously, and for some time she had wanted to take a post abroad. Rosalind, she pointed out, would be going to school the following year, and so would need her less. She had heard of a good post in the Embassy in Brussels, and would like to take it. She hated leaving us, she said, but she did want to get on so that she could go as a governess to places all over the world and see something of the life. I could not help being sympathetic towards this point of view, and sadly we agreed that she should go to Belgium.

I thought then, remembering how happy I had been with Marie and how nice it had been to learn French without tears, that I might get a French nursery governess for Rosalind. Punkie wrote to me enthusiastically saying that she knew just the person but she was Swiss, not French. She had met her, and a friend of hers knew her family in Switzerland. ‘She is a sweet girl, Marcelle. Very gentle.’ She thought that she was just the person for Rosalind, would be sorry for her because she was shy and nervous, and would look after her. I don’t know that Punkie and I agreed exactly in our estimate of Rosalind’s character!

Marcelle Vignou duly arrived. I had slight misgivings from the first. Punkie’s account of her was of a gentle, charming, little thing. She made a different impression on me. She seemed to be lethargic, though quite good-natured, lazy, and uninteresting. She was the sort of person who was incapable of managing children. Rosalind, who was reasonably well-behaved and polite, and on the whole quite satisfactory in daily life, became, almost overnight, what I can only describe as possessed by a devil.

I couldn’t have believed it. I learnt then what no doubt most child-trainers know instinctively, that a child reacts just as a dog or any other animal: it knows authority. Marcelle had no authority. She shook her head gently occasionally and said ‘Rosalind! Non, non, Rosalind!’ without the least effect.

To see them out for walks together was pitiful. Marcelle, as I discovered before long, had both feet covered with corns and bunions. She could only limp along at a funeral pace. When I did discover this I sent her off to a chiropodist, but even that did not make much difference in her pace. Rosalind, an energetic child, strode ahead, looking extremely British, with her chin in the air, Marcelle trailing miserably behind, murmuring: ‘Wait for me–attendez-moi!’

‘We’re going for a walk, aren’t we?’ Rosalind would throw back over her shoulder.

Marcelle, in an extremely foolish fashion, would then buy Rosalind peace offerings of chocolate in Sunningdale–the worst thing she could have done. Rosalind would accept the chocolate, murmuring ‘Thank you’ quite politely, and afterwards would behave as badly as ever. In the house she was a little fiend. She would take off her shoes and throw them at Marcelle, make faces at her, and refuse to eat her dinner.

‘What am I to do?’ I asked Archie. ‘She is simply awful. I punish her, but it doesn’t seem to make her any better. She is really beginning to like torturing the poor girl.’

‘I don’t think the girl really cares,’ said Archie. ‘I’ve never seen anyone more apathetic.’

‘Perhaps things will get better,’ I said. But things did not get better, they got worse. I was really worried because I did not want to see my child turn into a raging demon. After all, if Rosalind could behave properly with two nurses and a nursery governess, there must be some fault on the other side which led her to behave so badly to this particular girl.

‘Aren’t you sorry for Marcelle, coming to a strange country like this, where nobody speaks her language?’ I asked.

‘She wanted to come,’ said Rosalind. ‘She wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t wanted to. She speaks English quite well. She really is so awfully, awfully stupid.’ Nothing, of course, could have been truer than that. Rosalind was learning a little French, but not much. Sometimes, on wet days, I would suggest they played games together, but Rosalind assured me it was impossible even to teach Marcelle Beggar My Neighbour. ‘She just can’t remember it’s four for an ace and three for a king,’ she said with scorn. I told Punkie that it wasn’t being a success.

‘Oh dear, I thought she’d simply love Marcelle.’

‘She doesn’t,’ I said. ‘Far from it. And she thinks up ways of tormenting the poor girl, and she throws things at her.’

‘Rosalind throws things at her?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And she’s getting worse.’

In the end I decided that we could not bear it any longer. Why should our lives be ruined? I spoke to Marcelle, murmuring that I thought things were not being a great success and that perhaps she would be happier in some other post; that I would recommend her and try to find her a position, unless she would rather go back to Switzerland. Unperturbed, Marcelle said she had quite enjoyed seeing England, but she thought on the whole she would go back to Berne. She said goodbye, I pressed upon her an extra month’s wages–and determined to seek someone else.

What I thought I would now have was a combined secretary and governess. Rosalind would go to school every morning when she was five, at a small local school, and I could then have a secretary shorthand-typist for some hours at my beck and call. Perhaps I should be able to dictate my literary works. It seemed a good idea. I put an advertisement in the paper, asking for someone who would look after a child of five, shortly to go to school, and act as secretary shorthand-typist–I added ‘Scottish preferred’. I had noticed, now that I saw more of other children and their attendants, that the Scottish seemed to be particularly good with the young. The French were hopeless disciplinarians, and were always bullied by their charges; Germans were good and methodical, but it was not German that I really wanted Rosalind to learn. The Irish were gay but made trouble in the house; the English were of all kinds. I had a yearning for somebody Scottish.

I sorted out various answers to my advertisement, and in due course went to London to a small private hotel near Lancaster Gate to interview a Miss Charlotte Fisher. I liked Miss Fisher as soon as I saw her. She was tall, brown-haired, about twenty-three, I judged; had had experience with children, looked extremely capable, and had a nice-looking twinkle behind her general decorum. Her father was one of the Chaplains to the King in Edinburgh, and Rector of St. Columba’s there. She knew shorthand and typing, but had not had much experience recently in shorthand. She liked the idea of a post where she could do secretarial work as well as looking after a child.

‘There’s one other thing,’ I said rather doubtfully. ‘Do you–er–do you think you can–I mean, are you good at getting on with old ladies?’

Miss Fisher gave me rather an odd look. I suddenly noticed that we were sitting in a room containing about twenty old ladies, knitting, crocheting, and reading picture papers. Their eyes all slowly swivelled to me as I put this question. Miss Fisher bit her lip to stop herself laughing. I had been oblivious of my surroundings because I had been wondering how to frame my question. My mother was now definitely difficult to get on with–most people are as they get older, but mother, who had always been most independent and who got tired and bored with people easily, was more difficult than most. Jessie Swannell, particularly, had not been able to stand it.

‘I think so,’ Charlotte Fisher replied in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘I’ve never found any difficulty.’

I explained that my mother was elderly, slightly eccentric, inclined to think she knew best–and not easy to get on with. Since Charlotte seemed to view this without alarm, we settled that she would come to me as soon as she was free from her present job, which was, I gather, looking after the children of a millionaire domiciled in Park Lane. She had a sister rather older than herself, who lived in London, and she would be glad if the sister could occasionally come down and see her. I said that would be quite all right.

So Charlotte Fisher came to be my secretary and Mary Fisher came as a help in trouble when necessary, and they remained with me as friend and secretary and governess and dogsbody and everything else for many years. Charlotte is still one of my best friends.

The coming of Charlotte, or Carlo, as Rosalind began to call her after a month, was like a miracle. She had no sooner stepped inside the door of Scotswood than Rosalind was mysteriously transformed to her old self in the days of Site. She might have been sprinkled with holy water! Her shoes remained on her feet and were not thrown at anybody, she replied politely, and she appeared to take a good deal of pleasure in Carlo’s company. The raging demon had disappeared. ‘Though I must say,’ said Charlotte to me later, ‘she looked a little like a wild animal when I arrived, because nobody seemed to have cut her fringe for a long time: it was hanging down in front of her eyes, and she was peering through it.’

So the period of halcyon days began. As soon as Rosalind started school I began to prepare to start dictating a story. I was so nervous about it that I put it off from day to day. Finally the time came: Charlotte and I sat down opposite each other, she with her note-book and pencil. I stared unhappily at the mantelpiece, and began uttering a few tentative sentences. They sounded dreadful. I could not say more than a word without hesitating and stopping. Nothing I said sounded natural. We persisted for an hour. Long afterwards Carlo told me that she herself had been dreading the moment when literary work should begin. Although she had taken a shorthand-typing course she had never had much practice in it, and indeed had tried to refresh her skills by taking down sermons. She was terrified that I would rush along at a terrific pace–but nobody could have found any difficulty in taking down what I was saying. They could have written it in longhand.

After this disastrous start things went better but for creative work I usually feel happier either writing things in longhand or typing them. It is odd how hearing your own voice makes you self-conscious and unable to express yourself. It was only about five or six years ago, after I had broken a wrist and was unable to use my right hand, that I started using a dictaphone, and gradually became used to the sound of my own voice. The disadvantage of a dictaphone or tape recorder, however, is that it encourages you to be much too verbose.

There is no doubt that the effort involved in typing or writing does help me in keeping to the point. Economy of wording, I think, is particularly necessary in detective stories. You don’t want to hear the same thing rehashed three or four times over. But it is tempting when one is speaking into a dictaphone to say the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. Of course, one can cut it out later, but that is irritating, and destroys the smooth flow which one gets otherwise. It is important to profit by the fact that a human being is naturally lazy and so won’t write more than is absolutely necessary to convey his meaning.

Of course, there is a right length for everything. I think myself that the right length for a detective story is 50,000 words. I know this is considered by publishers as too short. Possibly readers feel themselves cheated if they pay their money and only get 50,000 words–so 60,000 Or 70,000 are more acceptable. If your book runs to more than that I think you will usually find that it would have been better if it had been shorter. 20,000 words for a long short story is an excellent length for a thriller. Unfortunately there is less and less market for stories of that size, and the authors tend not to be particularly well paid. One feels therefore that one would do better to continue the story, and expand it to a full-length novel. The short story technique, I think, is not really suited to the detective story at all. A thriller, possibly–but a detective story no. The Mr Fortune stories of H. C. Bailey were good in that line, because they were longer than the average magazine story.

By now Hughes Massie had settled me with a new publisher, William Collins, with whom I still remain as I am writing this book.

My first book for them, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was far and away my most successful to date; in fact it is still remembered and quoted. I got hold of a good formula there–and I owe it in part to my brother-in-law, James, who some years previously had said somewhat fretfully as he put down a detective story; ‘Almost everybody turns out to be a criminal nowadays in detective stories–even the detective. What I would like to see is a Watson who turned out to be the criminal.’ It was a remarkably original thought and I mulled over it lengthily. Then, as it happened, very much the same idea was also suggested to me by Lord Louis Mountbatten, as he then was, who wrote to suggest that a story should be narrated in the first person by someone who later turned out to be the murderer. The letter arrived when I was seriously ill and to this day I am not certain whether I acknowledged it.

I thought it was a good idea, and considered it for a long time. It had enormous difficulties, of course. My mind boggled at the thought of Hastings murdering anybody, and it was anyway going to be difficult to do it in such a way that it would not be cheating. Of course, a lot of people say that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is cheating; but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong. Such little lapses of time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an ambiguous sentence, and Dr Sheppard, in writing it down, took great pleasure himself in writing nothing but the truth, though not the whole truth.

Quite apart from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it was success all along the line at this period. Rosalind went to her first school, and enjoyed it enormously. She had pleasant friends; we had a nice flat and garden; I had my lovely bottle-nosed Morris; I had Carlo Fisher, and domestic peace. Archie thought, talked, dreamt, slept and lived for golf; his digestion improved so that he suffered less from nervous dyspepsia. All was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Dr Pangloss so happily says.

There was one lack in our lives: a dog. Dear Joey had died whilst we were abroad, so we now purchased a wire-haired terrier puppy whom we named Peter. Peter, of course, became the life and soul of the family. He slept on Carlo’s bed, and ate his way through a variety of slippers and so-called indestructible balls for terriers.

The lack of worry about finances was pleasant after all we had under-gone in the past–and possibly it went to our heads a bit. We thought of things we would not have thought of otherwise. Archie electrified me one day by suddenly saying that he thought he would like to get a really fast car. He had been excited, I think, by the Strachans’ Bentley.

‘But we’ve got a car,’ I said, shocked.

‘Ah, but I mean something really special.’

‘We could afford another baby now,’ I pointed out. I had been contemplating this for some time with a good deal of pleasure.

Archie waved aside another baby. ‘I don’t want anyone but Rosalind,’ he said. ‘Rosalind is absolutely satisfactory, quite enough.’

Archie was mad about Rosalind. He enjoyed playing with her, and she even cleaned his golf clubs. They understood each other, I think, better than Rosalind and I did. They had the same sense of humour, and saw each other’s point of view. He liked her toughness and her suspicious attitude of mind: the way she would never take anything for granted. He had been worried about the advent of Rosalind beforehand, being afraid, as he said, that nobody would take any notice of him any more. ‘That’s why I hope we have a daughter,’ he said. ‘A boy would be much worse. I could bear a daughter; it would be very hard with a son.’

Now he said, ‘If we were to have a son it would be just as bad as ever. And anyway,’ he added, ‘there’s lots of time.’

I agreed that there was plenty of time, and rather reluctantly gave into his desire for the second-hand Delage which he had already seen and marked down. The Delage gave us both great pleasure. I loved driving it, and Archie naturally did, though there was so much golf in his life that he had little time for it.

‘Sunningdale is a perfect place to live,’ said Archie. ‘It’s got everything we want. It’s the right distance from London, and now they’re opening Wentworth golf course as well, and developing that estate there. I think we might have a real house of our own.’

This was an exciting idea. Comfortable though we were in Scotswood, it had a few disadvantages. The management were not particularly reliable. The wiring of the electricity gave us trouble; the advertised constant hot water was neither constant nor hot; and the place suffered from a general lack of maintenance. We were enamoured of the idea of having a home of our very own.

We considered at first having a new house built on Wentworth Estate, which had just been taken over by a builder. It was going to be laid out with two golf courses–probably a third later–and the rest of the sixty-acre estate was to be covered by houses of all sizes and kinds. Archie and I used to spend happy summer evenings tramping over Wentworth looking out for a site which we thought would suit us. In the end, we decided on a choice between three. We then got into touch with the builder in charge of the estate. We decided that we wanted about an acre and a half of ground. We preferred a natural pine and wooded area, so that we should not have too much upkeep of a garden. The builder seemed most kind and helpful. We explained that we wanted quite a small house–I don’t know what we thought it would cost us: about, I suppose, £2000. He produced plans of a remarkably nasty-looking little house, full of every unpleasant modern ornamental feature, for which he asked what seemed to us the colossal price of £5,300. We were crestfallen. There seemed no chance of getting anything built more cheaply–that was the bottom limit. Sadly, we withdrew. We decided, however, that I should buy a debenture share in Wentworth for £100–which would entitle me to play on Saturdays and Sundays on the links there–as a kind of stake for the future. After all, since there would be two courses there, one would be able to play on at least one of them without feeling too much of a rabbit.

As it happened, my golfing ambitions got a sudden boost at this moment–I actually won a competition. Such a thing had never happened to me before, and never happened again. My L.G.U Golf handicap was 35 (the limit), but even with that it seemed unlikely I should ever win anything. However, I met in the finals a Mrs Burberry–a nice woman a few years older than myself–who also had a handicap of 35, and was just as nervous and unreliable as I was.

We met quite happily, pleased with ourselves for having reached the point we had. We halved the first hole. Thereafter Mrs Burberry, surprising herself and depressing me, succeeded in winning not only the next hole, but the hole after that, a further hole, and so on, until, at the ninth, she was eight up. Any faint hopes of even putting up a good show deserted me, and having reached that pitch I became much happier. I could now go on with the round without bothering very much, until the moment, certainly not far off, when Mrs Burberry would have won the match. Mrs Burberry now began to go to pieces. Anxiety took over. She lost hole after hole. I, still not caring, won hole after hole. The unbelievable happened. I won the next nine holes, and therefore won by one up on the last green. I think somewhere I have still got my silver trophy.

After a year or two, having looked at innumerable houses–always one of my favourite pastimes–we narrowed our choice down to two. One was rather a long way out, not too big, and had a nice garden. The other one was near the station; a sort of millionaire-style Savoy suite transferred to the country and decorated regardless of expense. It had panelled walls and quantities of bathrooms, basins in bedrooms, and every other luxury. It had passed through several hands in recent years and was said to be an unlucky house–everybody who lived there always came to grief in some way. The first man lost his money; the second his wife. I don’t know what happened to the third owners–they just separated, I think, and departed. Anyway, it was going cheap as it had been on the market for some time. It had a pleasant garden–long and narrow, comprising first a lawn, then a stream with a great many water plants, then wild garden with azaleas and rhododendrons, and so on to the end, where there was a good solid kitchen garden, and beyond it a tangle of gorse bushes. Whether we could afford it or not was another matter. Although we were both making fair incomes–mine perhaps a little doubtful and uneven, Archie’s well assured–we were lamentably short of capital. However, we arranged for a mortgage, and in due course moved in.

We bought such additional curtains and carpets as were necessary, and embarked on a course of living that was undoubtedly above our means, though our calculations looked all right on paper. We had both the Delage and the bottle-nosed Morris to keep up. We also had more servants: a married couple and a housemaid. The wife of the married couple had been a kitchenmaid in some ducal household, and it was assumed, though never actually stated, that her husband had been the butler there. He certainly did not know much about being a butler, though his wife was a most excellent cook. We discovered in the end that he had been the luggage porter. He was a man of colossal laziness. Most of the day he spent lying on his bed, and apart from waiting rather badly at table that was virtually all he ever did. In the intervals of lying on his bed he also went down to the pub. We had to decide whether to get rid of them or not. On the whole the cooking seemed more important, however, and we kept them on.

So we proceeded on our course of grandeur–and exactly what we might have expected happened. Within a year we were getting worried. Our bank account seemed to be melting in a most extraordinary way. With a few economies though, we said to each other, we should do all right.

At Archie’s suggestion, we called the house Styles, since the first book which had begun to bring me a stake in life, had been The Mysterious Affair at Styles. On the wall we hung the painting which had been done for the jacket of Styles–which had been presented to me by The Bodley Head.

But Styles proved what it had been in the past to others. It was an unlucky house. I felt it when I first went into it. I put my fancy down to the fact that the decorations were so flashy and unnatural for the countryl When we could afford to have it done up in a country style, without all this panelling and paint and gilt, then I said, it would feel quite different.


IV

The next year of my life is one I hate recalling. As so often in life, when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. About a month after I got home from a short holiday in Corsica my mother had bronchitis very badly. She was at Ashfield at the time. I went down to her, and then Punkie replaced me. Soon afterwards she sent me a telegram to say she was moving mother up to Abney, where she thought she could be better looked after, Mother seemed to improve, but she was never the same again. She moved very little from her room. I suppose her lungs were affected, she was seventy-two by that time. I did not think it was as serious as it turned out to be–I don’t believe Punkie did, either–but a week or two later I was telegraphed for, Archie was away in Spain on business.

It was going up in the train to Manchester that I knew, quite suddenly, that my mother was dead. I felt a coldness, as though I was invaded all over, from head to feet, with some deadly chill–and I thought: ‘Mother is dead’.

I was right. I looked down at her as she lay on the bed, and thought how true it was that, once dead, it is only the shell that remains. All my mother’s eager, warm, impulsive personality was far away somewhere. She had said to me several times in the past few years, ‘Sometimes one feels so eager to get out of this body–so outworn, so old, so useless. One longs to be released from this prison.’ That is what I felt about her now. She had been released from her prison. But for us there was the sadness of her passing.

Archie could not come to the funeral, because he was still in Spain. I was back at Styles when he returned a week later. I had always realised that he had a violent dislike of illness, death, and trouble of any kind. One knows these things, yet one hardly realises them, or pays much attention to them, until an emergency arises. He came into the room, I remember, acutely embarrassed, and it made him put on an appearance of jollity–a kind of ‘Hullo, her we are. Now then, we must all try and cheer up’ attitude. It is very hard to bear when you have lost a person who is one of the three you love best in the world.

He said: ‘I’ve got a very good idea. How would it be–I’ve got to go back to Spain next week–how would it be if I took you out there with me? We could have great fun, and I am sure it would distract you.’

I didn’t want to be distracted. I wanted to be with my sorrow and learn to get used to it. So I thanked him and said I’d rather stay at home. I see now that I was wrong. My life with Archie lay ahead of me. We were happy together, assured of each other, and neither of us would have dreamed that we could ever part. But he hated the feeling of sorrow in the house, and it left him open to other influences.

Then there was the problem of clearing up Ashfield. For the last four or five years all kinds of rubbish had accumulated; my grandmother’s things; all the things that my mother had been unable to cope with and had locked away. There had been no money for repairs; the roof was falling in; and some of the rooms were dripping with rain. My mother had lived at the end in only two rooms. Somebody had to go down and cope with all this and that person had to be me. My sister was too embroiled in her own concerns though she promised to come down for two or three weeks in August. Archie thought it would be best if we let Styles for the summer, which would give us a large rent and put us out of the red again. He would stay at his club in London, I would go to Torquay to clear up Ashfield. He would join me there in August–and when Punkie came we would leave Rosalind with her and go abroad. We decided on Italy–a place we had never been to before, called Alassio.

So I left Archie in London, and went down to Ashfield.

I suppose I was already run down and slightly ill, but turning out that house, with the memories, the hard work, the sleepless nights, reduced me to such a nervous state that I hardly knew what I was doing. I worked for ten or eleven hours a day, opening every room, and carrying things around. It was frightful: the moth-eaten garments, Granny’s old trunks full of her old dresses–all the things that nobody had wanted to throw away but had now got to be disposed of. We had to pay the dustman extra every week to take everything. There were difficult items such as the large wax-flower crown which was my grandfather’s memorial wreath. It lay under an enormous glass dome. I did not want to go through life with this enormous trophy but what can one do with a thing of that kind? You can’t throw it away. Finally a solution was found. Mrs Potter–mother’s cook–had always admired it. I presented it to her and she was delighted.

Ashfield was the first house that father and mother had lived in after their marriage. They went there about six months after Madge was born, and had stayed there ever since, continually adding fresh cupboards for storage. Little by little, every room in the house had become a store-room. The school-room, which had been the scene of so many happy days in my youth, was now one vast box-room: all the trunks and boxes that Grannie could not cram into her bedroom had gone up there.

A further blow dealt me by Fate was the loss of my dear Carlo. Her father and step mother had been travelling in Africa, and she suddenly heard from Kenya that her father was very ill and that the doctor said he had cancer. Though he did not yet know it himself, Carlo’s stepmother knew, and apparently he was not expected to live longer than about six months. Carlo had to go back to Edinburgh as soon as her father returned, and be with him during his last months. I bade her farewell tearfully. She hated to leave me in all this confusion and unhappiness, but it was one of those priorities that cannot be evaded. Still, another six weeks or so, and I would get it all finished. Then I could begin to live again.

I worked like a demon, I was so anxious to get through. All the trunks and cases had to be examined carefully: one could not just throw things out. Among Grannie’s things you were never sure what you would find. She had insisted on doing a good deal of her packing herself when she left Ealing, considering us sure to throw away her dearest treasures. Old letters abounded I was about to throw them all away; then a crumpled old envelope turned out to contain a dozen £5 notes! Grannie had been like a squirrel, hiding away her little nuts here and there so that they might escape the rigours of war. On one occasion there was a diamond brooch wrapped up in an old stocking.

I began to get confused and muddled over things. I never felt hungry and ate less and less. Sometimes I would sit down, put my hands to my head, and try to remember what it was I was doing. If Carlo had been there I would have been able to go to London for an occasional weekend and see Archie, but I couldn’t leave Rosalind alone in the house, and I had nowhere else to stay.

I suggested to Archie that he should come down for a weekend occasionally: it would make all the difference. He wrote back pointing out that it would be rather a foolish thing to do. After all it was an expensive journey, and, as he could not get off before Saturday and would have to go back Sunday night, it would hardly be worth it. I suspected that he would hate to miss a Sunday’s golf–but put that aside as an unworthy thought. It was not for long, he added cheerfully.

A terrible sense of loneliness was coming over me. I don’t think I realised that for the first time in my life I was really ill. I had always been extremely strong, and I had no understanding of how unhappiness, worry and overwork could affect your physical health. But I was upset one day when I was just about to sign a cheque and could not remember the name to sign it with. I felt exactly like Alice in Wonderland touching the tree.

‘But of course,’ I said. ‘I know my name perfectly well. But–but what is it?’ I sat there with the pen in my hand feeling an extraordinary frustration. What initial did it begin with? Was it perhaps Blanche Amory? It seemed familiar. Then I remembered that was some lesser character in Pendennis, a book I hadn’t read for years.

I had another warning a day or two later. I went to start the car, which usually had to be started with a starting handle–in fact, I am not sure that cars did not always have to be started with the handle in those days. I cranked and cranked, and nothing happened. Finally I burst into tears, came into the house, and lay on the sofa sobbing. That worried me. Crying just because a car wouldn’t start; I must be crazy.

Many years later, someone going through a period of unhappiness said to me: ‘You know, I don’t know what is the matter with me. I cry for nothing at all. The other day the laundry didn’t come and I cried. And the next day the car wouldn’t start–’ Something stirred in me then, and I said, ‘I think you had better be very careful; it is probably the beginning of a nervous breakdown. You ought to go and see someone about it.’

I had no such knowledge in those days. I knew I was desperately tired, and that the sorrow of losing my mother was still there deep down, though I tried–perhaps too much–to put it out of my mind. If only Archie would come, or Punkie, or someone, to be with me.

I had Rosalind, but of course I could not say anything to upset her, or talk to her about being unhappy, worried or ill. She was particularly happy herself, enjoying Ashfield very much, as she always did–and extremely helpful in my chores. She loved carrying things down the stairs and stuffing them into the dustbin, and occasionally allocating something to herself. ‘I don’t think anyone wants this–and it might be rather fun.’

Time went on, things got almost straight, and at last I could look forward to the end of my drudgery. August came–Rosalind’s birthday was on the 5th of August. Punkie came down two or three days before it, and Archie arrived on the 3rd. Rosalind was very contented at the prospect of having her Auntie Punkie with her during the two weeks Archie and I were in Italy.


V

What shall I do to drive away

Remembrance from mine eyes?



wrote Keats. But should one drive it away? If one chooses to look back over the journey that has been one’s life, is one entitled to ignore those memories that one dislikes? Or is that cowardice?

I think, perhaps, one should take one brief look, and say: ‘Yes, this is part of my life; but it’s done with. It is a strand in the tapestry of my existence. I must recognise it because it is part of me. But there is no need to dwell upon it.’

When Punkie arrived at Ashfield I felt wonderfully happy. Then Archie came.

I think the nearest I can get to describing what I felt at that moment is to recall that old nightmare of mine–the horror of sitting at a tea table, looking across at my best loved friend, and suddenly realising that the person sitting there was a stranger. That, I think, describes best what Archie was like when he came.

He went through the motions of ordinary greetings, but he was, quite simply, not Archie. I did not know what was the matter with him. Punkie noticed, and said, ‘Archie seems very queer–is he ill, or something?’ I said perhaps he might be. Archie, however, said he was quite all right. But he spoke little to us, and went off by himself. I asked him about our tickets for Alassio and he said, ‘Oh yes, well–well, that’s all settled. I’ll tell you about it later.’

Still he was a stranger. I racked my brains to think what could have happened. I had a momentary fear that something had gone wrong in the firm. It wasn’t possible that Archie could have embezzled any money? No, I couldn’t believe that. But had he, perhaps, embarked on some transaction for which he had not had proper authority? Could he be in a hole financially? Something he didn’t mean to tell me about? I had to ask him in the end.

What is the matter, Archie?’

‘Oh, nothing particular.’

‘But there must be something.’

‘Well, I suppose I’d better tell you one thing. We–I–haven’t got any tickets for Alassio. I don’t feel like going abroad.’

‘We’re not going abroad?’

‘No. I tell you I don’t feel like it.’

‘Oh, you want to stay here, do you, and play with Rosalind? Is that it? Well, I think that would be just as nice.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said irritably. It was, I think, another twenty-four hours before he told me, straight out.

‘I’m desperately sorry,’ he said, ‘that this thing has happened. You know that dark girl who used to be Belcher’s secretary? We had her down for a weekend once, a year ago with Belcher, and we’ve seen her in London once or twice.’ I couldn’t remember her name, but I knew who he meant. ‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Well, I’ve been seeing her again since I’ve been alone in London. We’ve been out together a good deal…’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘why shouldn’t you?’

‘Oh, you still don’t understand,’ he said impatiently. ‘I’ve fallen in love with her, and I’d like you to give me a divorce as soon as it can be arranged.’ I suppose, with those words, that part of my life–my happy, successful confident life–ended. It was not as quick as that, of course–because I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was something that would pass. There had never been any suspicion of anything of that kind in our lives. We had been happy together, and harmonious. He had never been the type who looked much at other women. It was triggered off, perhaps–by the fact that he had missed his usual cheerful companion in the last few months. He said: ‘I did tell you once, long ago, that I hate it when people are ill or unhappy–it spoils everything for me.’ Yes, I thought, I should have known that. If I’d been cleverer, if I had known more about my husband–had troubled to know more about him, instead of being content to idealise him and consider him more or less perfect–then perhaps I might have avoided all this. If I had been given a second chance, could I have avoided what had happened? If I had not gone to Ashfield and left him in London he would probably never have become interested in this girl. Not with this particular girl. But it might have happened with someone else, because I must in some way have been inadequate to fill Archie’s life. He must have been ripe for falling in love with someone else, though he perhaps didn’t even know it himself. Or was it just this particular girl? Was it just fate with him, falling in love with her quite suddenly? He had certainly not been in love with her on the few occasions we had met her previously. He had even objected to my asking her down to stay, he said it would spoil his golf. Yet when he did fall in love with her, he fell with the suddenness with which he had fallen in love with me. So perhaps it was bound to be. Friends and relations are of little use at a time like this. Their point of view was, ‘But it’s absurd. You’ve always been so happy together. He’ll get over it. Lots of husbands this happens with. They get over it.’ I thought so too. I thought he would get over it. But he didn’t. He left Sunningdale. Carlo had come back to me by then–the English specialists had declared that her father did not have cancer after all–and it was a terrific comfort to have her there. But she was clearer sighted than I was. She said Archie wouldn’t get over it. When he finally packed up and went I had a feeling almost of relief–he had made up his mind. However, he came back after a fortnight. Perhaps, he said, he had been wrong. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do. I said I was sure it was as far as Rosalind was concerned. After all, he was devoted to her, wasn’t he? Yes, he admitted, he really did love Rosalind.

‘And she is fond of you. She loves you better than she loves me. Oh, she wants me if she’s ill, but you are the parent that she really loves and depends upon; you have the same sense of humour and are better companions than she and I are. You must try to get over it. I do know these things happen.’ But his coming back was, I think, a mistake, because it brought home to him how keen his feeling was. Again and again he would say to me:

‘I can’t stand not having what I want, and I can’t stand not being happy. Everybody can’t be happy–somebody has got to be unhappy.’ I managed to forbear saying, ‘But why should it be me and not you?’ Those things don’t help. What I could not understand was his continued unkindness to me during that period. He would hardly speak to me or answer when he was spoken to. I understand it much better now, because I have seen other husbands and wives and learned more about life. He was unhappy because he was, I think, deep down fond of me, and he did really hate to hurt me–so he had to assure himself that this was not hurting me, that it would be much better for me in the end, that I should have a happy life, that I should travel, that I had my writing, after all, to console me. Because his conscience troubled him he could not help behaving with a certain ruthlessness. My mother had always said he was ruthless. I had always seen so clearly his many acts of kindness, his good nature, his helpfulness when Monty came home from Kenya, the trouble he would take for people. But he was ruthless now, because he was fighting for his happiness. I had admired his ruthlessness before. Now I saw the other side of it. So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it. I stood out for a year, hoping he would change. But he did not. So ended my first married life.


VI

In February of the following year Carlo, Rosalind and I went to the Canary Islands. I had some difficulty in getting my way over this, but I knew that the only hope of starting again was to go right away from all the things that had wrecked life for me. There could be no peace for me in England now after all I had gone through. The bright spot in my life was Rosalind. If I could be alone with her and my friend Carlo, things would heal again, and I could face the future. But life in England was unbearable.

From that time, I suppose, dates my revulsion against the Press, my dislike of journalists and of crowds. It was unfair, no doubt, but I think it was natural under the circumstances. I had felt like a fox, hunted, my earths dug up and yelping hounds following me everywhere. I had always hated notoriety of any kind, and now I had had such a dose of it that at some moments I felt I could hardly bear to go on living.

‘But you could live quietly at Ashfield,’ my sister suggested.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t. If I am quiet there and all alone I shall do nothing but remember–remember every happy day I ever had there and every happy thing I did.’ The important thing, once you have been hurt, is not to remember the happy times. You can remember the sad times–that doesn’t matter–but something that reminds you of a happy day or a happy thing–that’s the thing that almost breaks you in two. Archie continued to live at Styles for a time, but he was trying to sell it–with my consent, of course, since I owned half of it. I needed the money badly now, because I was in serious financial trouble again. Ever since my mother’s death I had been unable to write a word. A book was due this year, and having spent so much on Styles I had no money in hand: what little capital I had had was gone in the purchase of the house. I had no money coming in now from anywhere except what I could make or had made myself. It was vital that I should write another book as soon as possible, and get an advance on it. My brother-in-law, Archie’s brother Campbell Christie, who had always been a great friend and was a kind and lovable person, helped me here. He suggested that the last twelve stories published in The Sketch should be run together, so that they would have the appearance of a book. That would be a stop-gap. He helped me with the work–I was still unable to tackle anything of the kind. In the end it was published under the title of The Big Four, and turned out to be quite popular. I thought now that once I got away and had calmed down I could perhaps, with Carlo’s help, write another book. The one person who was entirely on my side, and reassured me in all that I was doing, was my brother-in-law, James.

‘You’re doing quite right, Agatha,’ he said in his quiet voice. ‘You know what is best for yourself, and I would do the same in your place. You must get away. It is possible that Archie may change his mind and come back–I hope so–but I don’t really think so. I don’t think he is that kind of person. When he makes up his mind it is definite, so I shouldn’t count on it.’ I said no, I wasn’t counting on it, but I thought it only fair to Rosalind to wait at least a year so that he could be quite sure that he knew what he was doing. I had been brought up, of course, like everyone in my day, to have a horror of divorce, and I still have it. Even today I have a sense of guilt because I acceded to his persistent demand and did agree to divorce him. Whenever I look at my daughter. I feel still that I ought to have stood out, that I ought perhaps to have refused. One is so hampered when one doesn’t want a thing oneself. I didn’t want to divorce Archie–I hated doing it. To break up a marriage is wrong–I am sure of it–and I have seen enough marriages broken up, and heard enough of the inner stories of them, to know that while it matters little if there are no children, it does matter if there are. I came back to England myself again–a hardened self, a self suspicious of the world, but better attuned now to deal with it. I took a small flat in Chelsea, with Rosalind and Carlo and went with my friend Eileen Morris, whose brother was now Headmaster of Horris Hill School, to look at various girls’ preparatory schools. I felt that as Rosalind had been uprooted from her home and friends, and as there were few children of her own age whom I now knew in Torquay, it would be better for her to go to boarding school. It was what she wanted to do anyway. Eileen and I saw about ten different schools. My head was quite addled by the time we had finished, though some of them had made us laugh. Nobody, of course, could have known less about schools than I did, for I had never been near one. I had no feeling about schooling one way or the other. I had never missed it myself. But after all, I said to myself, you may have missed something–you don’t know. Perhaps it would be better to give your daughter the chance. Since Rosalind was a person of the utmost good sense, I consulted her on the subject. She was quite enthusiastic. She enjoyed the day school she was going to in London, but she thought it would be nice to go to a preparatory school the following autumn. After that, she said, she would like to go to a very large school–the largest school there was. We agreed that I should try to find a nice preparatory school, and we settled tentatively on Cheltenham, which was the largest school I could think of, for the future. The first school I liked was at Bexhill: Caledonia, run by a Miss Wynne and her partner, Miss Barker. It was conventional, obviously well run, and I liked Miss Wynne. She was a person of authority and personality. All the school rules seemed to be cut and dried, but sensible, and Eileen had heard through friends of hers that the food was exceptionally good. I liked the look of the children too. The other school I liked was of a completely opposite type. Girls could have their own ponies and keep their own pets, if they liked, and more or less choose what subjects to study. There was a great deal of latitude in what they did, and if they did not want to do a thing they were not pressed to do it, because, so the Headmistress said, they then came to want to do things of their own accord. There was a certain amount of artistic training, and, again, I liked the Headmistress. She was an original-minded person, warm-hearted, enthusiastic, and full of ideas. I went home, thought about it, and finally decided to take Rosalind with me and visit each of them once more. We did this. I left Rosalind to consider for a couple of days, then said: ‘Now, which do you think you’d like?’ Rosalind, thank goodness, has always known her own mind. ‘Oh, Caledonia,’ she said, ‘every time. I shouldn’t like the other; it would be too much like being at a party. One doesn’t want being at school to be like being at a party, does one?’ So we settled on Caledonia, and it was a great success. The teaching was extremely good, and the children were interested in what they learned. It was highly organised, but Rosalind was the kind of child who liked to be highly organised. As she said with gusto in the holidays, ‘There’s never a moment’s leisure for anyone.’ Not at all what I should have liked. Sometimes the answers I would get to questions seemed quite extraordinary:

‘What time do you get up in the morning, Rosalind?’

‘I don’t know, really. A bell rings.’

‘Don’t you want to know the time the bell rings?’

‘Why should I?’ said Rosalind. ‘It’s to get us up, that’s all. And then we have breakfast about half an hour afterwards, I suppose.’ Miss Wynne kept parents in their place. I asked her once if Rosalind could come out with us on Sunday dressed in her everyday clothes instead of her Sunday silk frock, because we were going to have a picnic and a ramble over the downs. Miss Wynne replied: ‘All my pupils go out on Sunday in their Sunday clothes.’ And that was that. However, Carlo and I would pack a small bag with Rosalind’s rougher country clothes, and in a convenient wood or copse she would change from her silk Liberty frock, straw hat and neat shoes into something more suitable to the rough and tumble of our picnic. No one ever found us out. She was a woman of remarkable personality. Once I asked her what she did on Sports Day if it rained. ‘Rain?’ said Miss Wynne in a tone of surprise, ‘It has never rained on Sports Day that I can remember.’ She could, it seemed, dictate even to the elements: or, as one of Rosalind’s friends said, ‘I expect, you know, God would be on Miss Wynne’s side.’ I had managed to write the best part of a new book, The Mystery of The Blue Train, while we were in the Canary Islands. It had not been easy, and had certainly not been rendered easier by Rosalind. Rosalind, unlike her mother, was not a child who could amuse herself by any exercise of imagination: she required something concrete. Give her a bicycle and she would go off for half an hour. Give her a difficult puzzle when it was wet, and she would work on it. But in the garden of the hotel at Oratava in Tenerife there was nothing for Rosalind to do but walk around the flower-beds, or occasionally bowl a hoop–and a hoop meant little to Rosalind, again unlike her mother. To her it was only a hoop.

‘Look here, Rosalind,’ I said, ‘you must not interrupt. I’ve got some work to do. I’ve got to write another book. Carlo and I are going to be busy for the next hour with that. You must not interrupt.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Rosalind, gloomily, and went away. I looked at Carlo, sitting there with pencil poised, and I thought, and thought, and thought–cudgelling my brain. Finally, hesitantly, I began. After a few minutes, I noticed that Rosalind was just across the path, standing there looking at us.

‘What is it, Rosalind?’ I asked. ‘What do you want?’

‘Is it half an hour yet,’ she said.

‘No, it isn’t. It’s exactly nine minutes. Go away.’

‘Oh, all right.’ And she departed. I resumed my hesitant dictation. Presently Rosalind was there again.

‘I’ll call you when the time is up. It’s not up yet.’

‘Well, I can stay here, can’t I? I can just stand here. I won’t interrupt.’

‘I suppose you can stand there,’ I said, unwillingly. And I started again. But Rosalind’s eye upon me had the effect of a Medusa. I felt more strongly than ever that everything I was saying was idiotic! (Most of it was, too.) I faltered, stammered, hesitated, and repeated myself. Really, how that wretched book ever came to be written, I don’t know! To begin with, I had no joy in writing, no elan. I had worked out the plot–a conventional plot, partly adapted from one of my other stories. I knew, as one might say, where I was going, but I could not see the scene in my mind’s eye, and the people would not come alive. I was driven desperately on by the desire, indeed the necessity, to write another book and make some money. That was the moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well. I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train, but I got it written, and sent off to the publishers. It sold just as well as my last book had done. So I had to content myself with that–though I cannot say I have ever been proud of it. Oratava was lovely. The big mountain towered up; there were glorious flowers in the hotel grounds–but two things about it were wrong. After a lovely early morning, mists and fog came down from the mountain at noon, and the rest of the day was grey. Sometimes it even rained. And the bathing, to keen bathers, was terrible. You lay on a sloping volcanic beach, on your face, and you dug your fingers in and let waves come up and cover you. But you had to be careful they did not cover you too much. Masses of people had been drowned there. It was impossible to get into the sea and swim; that could only be done by one or two of the very strongest swimmers, and even one of those had been drowned the year before. So after a week we changed, and moved to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. Las Palmas is still my ideal of the place to go in the winter months. I believe nowadays it is a tourist resort and has lost its early charm. Then it was quiet and peaceful. Very few people came there except those who stayed for a month or two in winter and preferred it to Madeira. It had two perfect beaches. The temperature was perfect too: the average was about 70°, which is, to my mind, what a summer temperature should be. It had a nice breeze most of the day, and it was warm enough in the evenings to sit out of doors after dinner. It was in those evenings with Carlo that I made two close friends, Dr Lucas and his sister Mrs Meek. She was a good deal older than her brother, and had three sons. He was a tuberculosis specialist, was married to an Australian, and had a sanatorium on the east coast. He had himself been crippled in youth–whether by tuberculosis or by polio, I do not know–but he was slightly hunch-backed, and had a delicate constitution. He was by nature a born healer, though, and was extraordinarily successful with his patients. He said once: ‘My partner, you know, is a better doctor than I am–better in his qualifications, knows more than I do–but he cannot do for his patients what I can. When I go away, they droop and fall back. I just make them get well.’ He was always known as Father to all his family. Soon Carlo and I were calling him Father too. I had a bad ulcerated throat when we were there. He came to see me and said, ‘You are very unhappy about something, aren’t you? What is it? Husband trouble?’ I said yes it was, and told him something of what had happened. He was cheering and invigorating. ‘He’ll come back if you want him,’ he said. ‘Just give him time. Give him plenty of time. And when he does come back, don’t reproach him.’ I said I didn’t think he would come back, that he wasn’t the type. No, he agreed, some weren’t. Then he smiled and said: ‘But most of us are, I can tell you that. I’ve been away and come back. Anyway, whatever happens, accept it and go on. You’ve got plenty of strength and courage. You’ll make a good thing out of life yet.’ Dear Father. I owe him so much. He had enormous sympathy for all human ailments and failings. ‘When he died, five or six years later, I felt I had lost one of my best friends. Rosalind’s one fear in life was that the Spanish chamber-maid would speak to her!

‘But why shouldn’t she?’ I said. ‘You can speak to her.’

‘I can’t–she’s Spanish. She says “Senorita’ and then she says a lot of things I can’t understand.’

‘You mustn’t be so silly, Rosalind.’

‘Oh, it’s all right. You can go to dinner. I don’t mind being left alone as long as I’m in bed. Then I can shut my eyes and pretend to be asleep when the chamber-maid comes in.’ It is odd what children like or don’t like. When we got on a boat to come back it was rough, and a large, hideously ugly Spanish sailor took Rosalind in his arms, and jerked up with her from the boat to the gangway. I thought she would roar with disapprobation, but not at all. She smiled at him with the utmost sweetness.

‘He’s foreign, and you didn’t mind,’ I said.

‘Well, he didn’t talk to me. And anyway I liked his face–a nice, ugly face.’ Only one incident of note happened as we left Las Palmas for England. We arrived at Puerto de la Cruz to catch the Union Castle boat, and the discovery was made that Blue Teddy had been left behind. Rosalind’s face immediately blanched. ‘I won’t leave without Teddy,’ she said. The bus driver who had brought us was approached. Largesse was pressed upon him, though he hardly even seemed to want it. Of course he would find the little one’s blue monkey–of course, he would drive back like the wind. In the meantime he was sure the sailors would not let the boat leave–not without the favourite toy of a child. I did not agree with him. I thought the boat would leave. It was an English boat, en route from South Africa. If it had been a Spanish boat, no doubt it would have remained a couple of hours if necessary. However, all was well. Just as whistles began blowing, and everyone was told to go ashore, the bus was seen approaching in a cloud of dust. Out jumped the driver; Blue Teddy was passed to Rosalind on the gangway; and she clasped him to her heart. A happy ending to our stay there.


VII

My plan of life henceforward was more or less established, but I had to make one last decision. Archie and I met by appointment. He looked ill and tired. We talked of ordinary things and people we knew. Then I asked him what he felt now; whether he was quite sure he could not come back to live with Rosalind and me. I said once again that he knew how fond of him she was, and how much she had been puzzled over his absence. She had said once, with the devastating truthfulness of childhood: ‘I know Daddy likes me, and would like to be with me. It’s you he doesn’t seem to like.’

‘That shows you,’ I said, ‘that she needs you. Can’t you manage to do it?’ He said, ‘No, no, I’m afraid I can’t. There’s only one thing that I really want. I want madly to be happy, and I can’t be happy unless I can get married to Nancy. She’s been round the world on a trip for the last ten months, because her people hoped it would get her out of it too, but it hasn’t. That’s the only thing I want or can do.’ It was settled at last. I wrote to my lawyers and went to see them. Things were put in train. There was nothing more to do, except to decide what to do with myself. Rosalind was at school, and she had Carlo and Punkie to visit her. I had till the Christmas holidays–and I decided that I would seek sunshine. I would go to the West Indies and Jamaica. I went to Cook’s and fixed up my tickets. It was all arranged. Here we come to Fate again. Two days before I was to leave I went out to dinner with friends in London. They were not people I knew well, but they were a charming couple. There was a young couple there, a naval officer, Commander Howe, and his wife. I sat next to the Commander at dinner, and he talked to me about Baghdad. He had just come back from that part of the world, since he had been stationed in the Persian Gulf. After dinner his wife came and sat by me and we talked. She said people always said Baghdad was a horrible city, but she and her husband had been entranced by it. They talked about it, and I became more and more enthusiastic. I said I supposed one had to go by sea.

‘You can go by train–by the Orient Express.’

‘The Orient Express?’ All my life I had wanted to go on the Orient Express. When I had travelled to France or Spain or Italy, the Orient Express had often been standing at Calais, and I had longed to climb up into it. Simplon-Orient Express–Milan, Belgrade, Stamboul… I was bitten. Commander Howe wrote down for me places I must go and see in Baghdad. ‘Don’t get trapped into too much Alwiyah and Mem-sahibs and all that. You must go to Mosul–Basra you must visit–and you certainly ought to go to Ur.’

‘Ur?’ I said. I had just been reading in The Illustrated London News about Leonard Woolley’s marvellous finds at Ur. I had always been faintly attracted to archaeology, though knowing nothing about it. Next morning I rushed round to Cook’s, cancelled my tickets for the West Indies, and instead got tickets and reservations for a journey on the Simplon-Orient Express to Stamboul; from Stamboul to Damascus; and from Damascus to Baghdad across the desert. I was wildly excited. It would take four or five days to get the visas and everything, and then off I should go.

‘All by yourself?’ said Carlo, slightly doubtful. ‘All by yourself to the Middle East? You don’t know anything about it.’

‘Oh, that will be all right,’ I said. ‘After all, one must do things by oneself sometime, mustn’t one?’ I never had before–I didn’t much want to now–but I thought: ‘It’s now or never. Either I cling to everything that’s safe and that I know, or else I develop more initiative, do things on my own.’ And so it was that five days later I started for Baghdad. It is the name, really, that so fascinates one. I don’t think I had any clear picture in my mind of what Baghdad was like. I was certainly not expecting it to be the city of Haroun-al-Raschid. It was just a place that I had never thought of going to, so it held for me all the pleasures of the unknown. I had been round the world with Archie; I had been to the Canary Islands with Carlo and Rosalind; now I was going by myself I should find out now what kind of person I was–whether I had become entirely dependent on other people as I feared. I could indulge my passion for seeing places–any place I wanted to see. I could change my mind at a moment’s notice, just as I had done when I chose Baghdad instead of the West Indies. I would have no one to consider but myself. I would see how I liked that. I knew well enough that I was a dog character: dogs will not go for a walk unless someone takes them. Perhaps I was always going to be like that. I hoped not.

Posted in An Autobiography