PART VIII. Second spring

I

Trains have always been one of my favourite things. It is sad nowadays that one no longer has engines that seem to be one’s personal friends.
I entered my wagon lit compartment at Calais, the journey to Dover and the tiresome sea voyage disposed of, and settled comfortably in the train of my dreams. It was then that I became acquainted, with one of the first dangers of travel. With me in the carriage was a middle-aged woman, a well-dressed, experienced traveller, with a good many suitcases and hat-boxes–yes, we still travelled with hat-boxes in those days–and she entered into conversation with me. This was only natural, since we were to share the carriage, which, like all second-class ones, had two berths. It was in some ways much nicer to travel by second rather than first class, since it was a much bigger carriage, and enabled one to move about. Where was I going? my companion asked. To Italy? No, I said, further than that. Where then was I going? I said that I was going to Baghdad. Immediately she was all animation. She herself lived in Baghdad. What a coincidence. If I was staying there with friends, as she presumed, she was almost sure to know them. I said I wasn’t going to stay with friends.

‘But where are you going to stay, then? You can’t possibly stay in a hotel in Baghdad.’ I asked why not. After all, what else are hotels for? That at least was my private thought, though not uttered aloud. Oh! the hotels were all quite impossible. ‘You can’t possibly do that. I tell you what you must do: you must come to us!’ I was somewhat startled.

‘Yes, yes, I won’t take any denial. How long did you plan to stay there?’ ‘Oh, probably quite a short time,’ I said.

‘Well, at any rate you must come to us to start with, and then we can pass you on to someone else.’ It was very kind, very hospitable, but I felt an immediate revolt. I began to understand what Commander Howe had meant when he advised me not to let myself be caught up in the social life of the English colony. I could see myself tied hand and foot. I tried to give a rather stammering account of what I planned to do and see, but Mrs C.–she had told me her name, that her husband was already in Baghdad, and that she was one of the oldest residents there–quickly put aside all my ideas.

‘Oh, you’ll find it quite different when you get there. One has a very good life indeed. Plenty of tennis, plenty going on. I think you really will enjoy it. People always say that Baghdad is terrible, but I can’t agree. And one has lovely gardens, you know.’ I agreed amiably to everything. She said, ‘I suppose you are going to Trieste, and will take a boat there on to Beirut?’ I said no, I was going the whole way through by the Orient Express. She shook her head a bit over that. ‘I don’t think that’s advisable, you know. I don’t think you would like it. Oh well, I suppose it can’t be helped now. Anyway, we shall meet, I expect. I’ll give you my card, and as soon as you get to Baghdad, if you just wire ahead from Beirut, when you are leaving, my husband will come down and meet you and bring you straight back to our house.’ What could I say except thank you very much and add that my plans were rather unsettled? Fortunately Mrs C. was not going to make the whole journey with me–thank God for that, I thought, as she would never have stopped talking. She was going to get out at Trieste, and take a boat to Beirut. I had prudently not mentioned my plans for staying in Damascus and Stamboul, so she would probably come to the conclusion that I had changed my mind about travelling to Baghdad. We parted on the most friendly terms the next day in Trieste, and I settled down to enjoy myself. The journey was all that I had hoped for. After Trieste we went through Yugoslavia and the Balkans, and there was all the fascination of looking out at an entirely different world: going through mountain gorges, watching ox-carts and picturesque wagons, studying groups of people on the station platforms, getting out occasionally at places like Nish and Belgrade and seeing the large engines changed and new monsters coming on with entirely different scripts and signs. Naturally I picked up a few acquaintances en route, but none of them, I am glad to say, took charge of me in the same way as my first had done. I passed the time of day agreeably with an American missionary lady, a Dutch engineer, and a couple of Turkish ladies. With the last I could not do much conversing, though we managed a little sporadic French. I found myself in what was the obviously humiliating position of having only had one child, and that a daughter. The beaming Turkish lady had had, as far as I could understand her, thirteen children, five of whom were dead, and at least three, if not four miscarriages. The sum total seemed to her quite admirable though I gathered that she was not giving up hope of continuing her splendid record of fertility. She pressed on me every possible remedy for increasing my family. The things with which I was urged to stimulate myself: tisanes of leaves, concoctions of herbs, the use of certain kinds of what I thought might be garlic, and finally the address of a doctor in Paris, who was ‘absolutely wonderful’. Not until you travel by yourself do you realise how much the outside world will protect and befriend you–not always quite to one’s own satisfaction. The missionary lady urged various intestinal remedies on me: she had a wonderful supply of aperient salts. The Dutch engineer took me seriously to task as to where I was going to stay in Stamboul, warning me of all the dangers in that city. ‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘You are well brought up lady, living in England, protected I think always by husband or relations. You must not believe what people say to you. You must not go out to places of amusement unless you know where you are being taken.’ In fact he treated me like an innocent of seventeen. I thanked him, but assured him that I would be fully on my guard. To save me from worse dangers he invited me out to dinner on the night I arrived. ‘The Tokatlian,’ he said, ‘is a very good hotel. You are quite safe there. I will call for you about 9 o’clock, and will take you to a very nice restaurant, very correct. It is run by Russian ladies–White Russians they are, all of noble birth. They cook very well and they keep the utmost decorum in their restaurant.’ I said that would be very nice, and he was as good as his word. Next day, when he had finished his business, he called for me, showed me some of the sights in Stamboul, and arranged a guide for me. ‘You will not take the one from Cook’s–he is too expensive–but I assure you this one is very respectable.’ After another pleasant evening, with the Russian ladies sailing about, smiling aristocratically and patronising my engineer friend, he showed me more of the sights of Stamboul and finally delivered me once more at the Tokatlian Hotel. ‘I wonder,’ he said, as we paused on the threshold. He looked at me inquiringly. ‘I wonder now–’ and the inquiry became more pronounced as he sized up my likely reaction. Then he sighed, ‘No. I think it will be wiser that I do not ask.’

‘I think you are very wise,’ I said, ‘and very kind.’ He sighed again. ‘It would have been pleasant if it had been otherwise, but I can see–yes, this is the right way.’ He pressed my hand warmly, raised it to his lips, and departed from my life for ever. He was a nice man–kindness itself–and I owe it to him that I saw the sights of Constantinople under pleasant auspices. Next day I was called on by Cook’s representatives in the most conventional fashion, and taken across the Bosphorus to Haidar Pasha, where I resumed my journey on the Orient Express. I was glad to have my guide with me, for anything more like a lunatic asylum than Haidar Pasha Station cannot be imagined. Everyone shouted, screamed, thumped, and demanded the attention of the Customs Officer. I was introduced then to the technique of Cook’s Dragomen. ‘You give me one pound note now,’ he said. I gave him one pound note. He immediately sprang up on the Customs benches and waved the note aloft. ‘Here, here,’ he called. ‘Here, here!’ His cries proved effective. A customs gentleman covered with gold braid hurried in our direction, put large chalk marks all over my baggage, said to me ‘I wish you good voyage’–and departed to harry those who had not as yet adopted the Cook’s one pound procedure. ‘And now I settle you in train,’ said Cook’s man. ‘And now?’ I was a little doubtful how much, but as I was looking among my Turkish money–some change, in fact, which had been given me on the wagon lit–he said with some firmness, ‘It is better that you keep that money. It may be useful. You give me another pound note.’ Rather doubtful about this but reflecting that one has to learn by experience, I yielded him another pound note, and he departed with salutation and benedictions. There was a subtle difference on passing from Europe into Asia. It was as though time had less meaning. The train ambled on its way, running by the side of the Sea of Marmara, and climbing mountains–it was incredibly beautiful all along this way. The people in the train now were different too–though it is difficult to describe in what the difference lay. I felt cut off, but far more interested in what I was doing and where I was going. When we stopped at the stations I enjoyed looking out, seeing the motley crowd of costumes, peasants thronging the platform, and the strange meals of cooked food that were handed up to the train. Food on skewers, wrapped in leaves, eggs painted various colours–all sorts of things. The meals became more unpalatable and fuller of hot, greasy, tasteless morsels as we went further East. Then, on the second evening, we came to a halt, and people got out of the train to look at the Cilician Gates. It was a moment of incredible beauty. I have never forgotten it. I was to pass that way many times again. both going to and coming from the Near East and, as the train schedules changed, I stopped there at different times of day and night: sometimes in the early morning, which was indeed beautiful; sometimes, like this first time, in the evening at six o’clock; sometimes, regrettably, in the middle of the night. This first time I was lucky. I got out with the others and stood there. The sun was slowly setting, and the beauty indescribable. I was so glad then that I had come–so full of thankfulness and joy. I got back into the train, whistles blew, and we started down the long side of a mountain gorge, passing from one side to the other, and coming out on the river below. So we came slowly down through Turkey and into Syria at Aleppo. Before we reached Aleppo, however, I had a short spell

‘Man arrange,’ she said. She elucidated further: ‘Un homme–un type–il va arranger.’ She nodded reassuringly and disappeared. I was a little doubtful as to what ‘tin type’ was, but it seemed in the end that it was the bath attendant, the lowest of the low, dressed in a great deal of striped cotton, who finally ushered my dressing-gowned form into a kind of basement apartment. Here he turned various taps and wheels. Boiling water ran out all over the stone floor, and steam filled the air so that I was unable to see. He nodded, smiled, gestured, gave me to understand that all was well, and departed. He had turned off everything before going, and the water had all run away through the trough in the floor. I was uncertain as to what I was meant to do next. I really dared not turn on the boiling water again. There were about eight or ten small wheels and knobs round the walls, any one of which, I felt, might produce a different phenomenon–such as a shower of boiling water on my head. In the end I took off my bedroom slippers and other garments and padded about, washing myself in steam rather than risking the dangers of actual water. For a moment I felt homesick. How long would it be before I should enter a familiar shiny-papered apartment with a solid white porcelain tub and two taps labelled hot and cold which one turned on according to one’s taste? As far as I remember, I had three days in Damascus, during which I duly did my sight-seeing, shepherded by the invaluable Cook’s. On one occasion I made an expedition to some Crusader castle, in company with an American engineer–engineers seemed pretty thick on the ground all through the Near East–and a very aged clergyman. We met for the first time as we took our places in the car at 8.30. The aged clergyman, beneficence itself, had made up his mind that the American engineer and I were man and wife. He addressed us as such. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said the American engineer. ‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I am so sorry that he thinks you are my husband.’ The phrase seemed somewhat ambiguous, and we both laughed. The old clergyman treated us to a dissertation on the merits of married life, the necessity of give and take, and wished us all happiness. We gave up explaining, or trying to explain–he appeared so distressed when the American engineer shouted into his ear that we were not married that it seemed better to leave things as they were. ‘But you ought to get married,’ he insisted, shaking his head. ‘Living in sin, you know, it doesn’t do–it really doesn’t do.’ I went to see lovely Baalbek, I visited the bazaars, and the Street called Straight, bought many of the attractive brass plates they make there. Each plate was made by hand, and each pattern peculiar to the one family that made it. Sometimes it was a design of fish, with threads of silver and brass raised in a pattern running all over it. There is something fascinating in thinking of each family with its pattern handed down from father to son and to grandson, with no one else ever copying it and nobody mass-producing it. I imagine that if you were to go to Damascus now you would find few of the old craftsmen and their families left: there would be factories instead. Already in those days the inlaid wooden boxes and tables had become stereotyped and universally reproduced–still done by hand, but in conventional patterns and ways. I also bought a chest of drawers–a huge one, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver–the sort of furniture that reminds one of fairyland. It was despised by the Dragoman who was guiding me.

‘Not good work that,’ he said. ‘Quite old–fifty years old, sixty years old, more perhaps. Old-fashioned, you understand. Very old-fashioned. Not new.’ I said I could see that it wasn’t new and that there weren’t many of them. Perhaps there would never be another one made.

‘No. Nobody make that now. You come and look at this box. See? Very good. And this here. Here is a chest of drawers here. You see? It has many woods in it. You see how many different woods it has? Eighty-five different woods.’ The net result, I thought, was hideous. I wanted my mother-of-pearl, ivory and silver chest. The only thing that worried me was how I was ever going to get it home to England–but that apparently held no difficulties. I was passed on through Cook’s to somebody else, to the hotel, to a firm of shippers, and finally made various arrangements and calculations, with the result that nine or ten months later an almost forgotten mother-of-pearl and silver chest turned up in South Devon. That was not the end of the story. Though it was a glorious thing to look at, and capacious inside, it produced in the middle of the night a strange noise, as if large teeth were champing something. Some creature was eating my beautiful chest. I took the drawers out and examined them. There seemed no sign of tooth-marks or holes. Yet night after night, after the witching hour of midnight, I could hear ‘Crump, crump, crump‘. At last I took one of the drawers out and carried it to a firm in London which was said to specialize in tropical wood-pests. They agreed immediately that something sinister was at work in the recesses of the wood. The only thing would be to remove the wood entirely and re-line it. This, I may say, was going to add heavily to the expense–in fact it would probably cost three times as much as the chest itself had done and twice as much as its fare to England. Still, I could no longer bear that ghostly munching and gnawing. About three weeks later I was rung up and an excited voice said ‘Madam, can you come down to the shop here. I should really like you to see what I have got.’ I was in London at the time, so I hurried round immediately–and was shown with pride a repulsive cross between a worm and a slug. It was large and white and obscene, and had clearly enjoyed its diet of wood so much as to make it obese beyond belief. It had eaten nearly all the surrounding wood in two of the drawers. After a few more weeks my chest was returned to me, and thereafter the night hours held only silence.



After intensive sightseeing that only increased my determination to return to Damascus and explore much more there, the day came when I was to undertake my journey across the desert to Baghdad. At this time the service was done by a big fleet of six-wheeler cars or buses which were operated by the Nairn Line. Two brothers, Gerry and Norman Nairn, ran this. They were Australians, and the most friendly of men. I became acquainted with them on the night before my trip, when they were both busy in an amateurish way making up cardboard boxes of lunch, and invited me to help them.

The bus started at dawn. Two hefty young drivers were on the job, and when I came out following my baggage they were busy stowing a couple of rifles into the car, carelessly throwing an armful of rugs over them.

‘Can’t advertise that we’ve got these, but I wouldn’t care to cross the desert without them,’ said one.

‘Hear we’ve got the Duchess of Alwiyah on this run,’ said the other. ‘God Almighty,’ said the first. ‘We’ll have trouble there, I expect. What does she want this time, do you think?’ Everything upside down and down side up,’ said the other. At that moment a procession arrived down the steps of the hotel. To my surprise, and I am afraid not to my pleasure, the leading figure was none other than Mrs C., from whom I had parted at Trieste. I had imagined that by now she would have already got to Baghdad, since I had lingered to see the sights.

‘I thought you would be on this run,’ she said, greeting me with pleasure. ‘Everything is fixed up, and I am carrying you back with me to Alwiyah. It would have been quite impossible for you to have stayed in any hotel in Baghdad.’ What could I say? I was captured. I had never been to Baghdad, and never seen the hotels there. They might, for all I knew, be one seething mass of fleas, bed-bugs, lice, snakes, and the kind of pale cockroach that I particularly abhor. So I had to stammer some thanks. We ensconced ourselves, and I realised that ‘The Duchess of Alwiyah’ was none other than my friend Mrs C. She refused at once the seat she had been given as too near the rear of the bus, where she was always sick. She must have the front seat behind the driver. But that had been reserved by an Arab lady weeks ago. The Duchess of Alwiyah merely waved a hand. Nobody counted, apparently, but Mrs C. She gave the impression that she was the first European woman ever to set foot in the city of Baghdad, before whose whims all else must fall down. The Arab lady arrived and defended her seat. Her husband took her part, and a splendid free-for-all ensued. A French lady also made claim, and a German general, too, made himself difficult. I don’t know what arguments were urged, but, as usual on this earth, four of the meek were dispossessed of the better seats and more or less thrown into the back of the car. The German general, the French lady, the Arab lady, shrouded in veils, and Mrs C. were left with the honours of war. I have never been a good fighter and did not stand a chance, though actually my seat number would have entitled me to one of these desirable positions. In due course we rumbled off. Having been fascinated by rolling across the yellow sandy desert, with its undulating sand-dunes and rocks, I finally became more or less hypnotised by the sameness of the surroundings, and opened a book. I had never been car-sick in my life but the action of the six-wheeler, if you were sitting towards the back of it, was much the same motion as a ship, and what with that and reading I was severely sick before I knew what had happened to me. I felt deeply disgraced, but Mrs C. was very kind to me, and said it often took people unawares. Next time she would see to it that I had one of the front seats. The forty-eight hour trip across the desert was fascinating and rather sinister. It gave one the curious feeling of being enclosed rather than surrounded by a void. One of the first things I was to realise was that at noon it was impossible to tell whether you were going north, south, east or west, and I learnt that it was at this time of day when the big six-wheeled cars most often went off the track. On one of my later journeys across the desert this did actually happen. One of the drivers–one of the most experienced too–discovered himself, after two or three hours, driving across the desert in the direction of Damascus, with his back turned to Baghdad. It happened at the point where the tracks divided. There was a maze of tracks all over the surface. On that occasion a car appeared in the distance, shooting off a rifle, and the driver took an even wider loop than usual. He thought he had got back on to the track, but actually he was driving in the opposite direction. Between Damascus and Baghdad there is nothing but a great stretch of desert–no landmarks, and only one halt in the whole place: the big fort of Rutbah. We reached there, I think, about midnight. Suddenly, out of the darkness, there loomed a flickering light. We had arrived. The great gates of the fortress were unbarred. Beside the door, on the alert, their rifles raised, were the Guards of the Camel Corps, prepared for bandits masquerading as bona fide travellers. Their wild dark faces were rather frightening. We were scrutinised and allowed to pass in, and the gates were shut behind us. There were a few rooms there with bedsteads, and we had three hours’ rest, five or six women to a room. Then we went on again. About five or six in the morning, when dawn came, we had breakfast in the desert. Nowhere in the world is there such a good breakfast as tinned sausages cooked on a primus stove in the desert in the early morning. That and strong black tea fulfilled all one’s needs, and revived one’s flagging energy; and the lovely colours all over the desert–pale pinks, apricots and blues–with the sharp-toned air, made a wonderful ensemble. I was entranced. This was what I longed for. This was getting away from everything–with the pure invigorating morning air, the silence, the absence even of birds, the sand that ran through one’s fingers, the rising sun, and the taste of sausages and tea. What else could one ask of life? Then we moved on, and came at last to Felujah on the Euphrates, went over the bridge of boats, past the air station at Habbaniyah, and on again, until we began to see palm-groves and a raised road. In the distance, on the left, we saw the golden domes of Kadhimain, then on and over another bridge of boats, over the river Tigris, and so into Baghdad–along a street full of rickety buildings, with a beautiful mosque with turquoise domes standing, it seemed to me, in the middle of the street. I never had a chance even to look at a hotel. I was transferred by Mrs C. and her husband Eric, to a comfortable car, and driven along the one main street that is Baghdad, past the statue of General Maude and out from the city, with great rows of palms on either side of the road, and herds of black beautiful buffaloes watering in pools of water. It was like nothing I had seen before. Then we came to houses and gardens full of flowers–not so many as there would have been later in the year…And there I was–in what I sometimes thought of as Mem-Sahib Land.


II

They were so nice to me in Baghdad. Everyone was kind and pleasant–and I felt ashamed of myself for the caged feeling from which I suffered. Alwiyah is now part of a continuous city, full of buses and other means of transport, but was then divided by some miles from the city itself. To get there, somebody would have to drive you in. It was always a fascinating ride.

One day I was taken to see Buffalo Town, which you can still see from the train as you come into Baghdad from the north. To the uninitiated eye it looks a place of horror–a slum, a vast enclosure full of buffaloes and their excreta. The stench is terrific, and the shacks made of petrol cans lead one to believe that it is an extreme example of poverty and degradation. Actually this is far from being the case. Owners of buffaloes are very well to do. Although they may live in squalor, a buffalo is worth £100 or more–probably far more nowadays. The owners of them consider themselves lucky people, and as the women squelch about in the mud, handsome bracelets of silver and turquoise can be seen decorating their ankles.

I learnt soon enough that nothing in the Near East is what it appears to be. One’s rules of life and conduct, observation and behaviour, have all to be reversed and relearnt. When you see a man gesticulating at you violently to go away, you retreat rapidly–actually he is inviting you to approach. On the other hand, if he beckons you, he is telling you to go away. Two men at opposite ends of the field, yelling fiercely at each other, would appear to be threatening each other with sudden death. Not at all. They are two brothers passing the time of day, and raising their voices because they are too lazy to approach each other. My husband Max once told me that he had determined on his first visit, shocked at the way everybody shouted at Arabs, that he would never shout at them. However, before he had been working long with the workmen he discovered that any remark uttered in an ordinary tone of voice was unheard–not so much through deafness as a belief that anyone talking like that was talking to himself, and that any man who really wished to make a remark would take the trouble to make it in a loud enough voice for you to hear.

The people of Alwiyah offered me charming hospitality. I played tennis, I drove to races, I was shown sights, taken to shop–and I felt that I might just as well be in England. Geographically I might be in Baghdad, spiritually I was in England still; and my idea of travelling had been to get away from England and see other countries. I decided that something must be done.

I wanted to visit Ur. I made inquiries, and was delighted to find that here I was encouraged, not rebuffed. My journey was arranged for me, as I discovered later, with a good many unnecessary additional adornments. ‘You must take a bearer with you, of course,’ said Mrs C. ‘We’ll reserve your train journey for you, and we’ll wire to Ur junction to tell Mr and Mrs Woolley that you will be arriving and would like to be shown things. You can spend a couple of nights in the rest-house there, and then Eric will meet you when you come back.’

I said it was very kind of them to take so much trouble and felt guiltily that it was a good thing they did not know that I was also taking trouble with my arrangements for when I came back. In due course I set off. I eyed my bearer with slight alarm. He was a tall, thin man, with an air of having accompanied Mem-Sahibs all over the Near East and knowing a great deal more about what was good for them than they knew themselves. Splendidly attired, he settled me in my bare and not particularly comfortable carriage, salaamed, and left me, explaining that at a suitable station he would return to usher me to the platform dining-room.

The first thing I did when left to my own devices was extremely ill-judged: I threw open the window. The stuffiness of the compartment was more than I could bear; I longed for fresh air. What came in was not so much fresh air as much hotter, infinitely dustier air and a troupe of about twenty-six large hornets. I was horrified. The hornets zoomed round in a menacing fashion. I could not make up my mind whether to leave the window open and hope they would go out, or shut the window and at least confine myself to the twenty-six that were in already. It was all very unfortunate, and I sat cramped in one corner for about an hour and a half till my bearer came to rescue me and take me to the platform restaurant.

The meal was greasy and not particularly good, and there was not much time to eat it. Bells clanged, my faithful servant reclaimed me, and I returned to my carriage. The window had been shut and the hornets dispossessed. After that I was more careful what I tampered with. I had the whole compartment to myself–that seemed to be usual–and the time passed rather slowly, since it was impossible to read because the whole train shook so much, and there was nothing much to be seen out of the window except bare scrub or sandy desert. It was a long and wearisome journey, punctuated by meals, and uncomfortable sleep.

The times of day for arriving at Ur junction have varied during the many years that I have made the journey, but have invariably been inconvenient. On this occasion, I think, 5 a.m. was the appointed hour. Awakened, I descended, proceeded to the station guest-house, and passed the time there in a clean, stern-looking bedroom until I felt disposed for breakfast at 8 o’clock. Shortly after that a car arrived which was said to be taking me up to the dig, about a mile and a half away. Although I did not know it, I was greatly honoured. After the experience now of being on digs for many years myself, I realise, as I certainly did not then, how loathed visitors were–always arriving at awkward times, wanting to be shown things, wanting to be talked to, wasting valuable time, and generally incommoding everything. On a successful dig such as Ur, every minute was occupied and everyone was working flat out. To have a lot of dithering females wandering round was the most irritating thing that could occur. By now the Woolleys had got things pretty well taped: people went round in a party of their own, being shown what was necessary, and were shooed off afterwards. But I was received most kindly as a valued guest, and I ought to have appreciated it far more than I did.

This treatment was due entirely to the fact that Katharine Woolley, Leonard Woolley’s wife, had just finished reading one of my books, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and was so enthusiastic about it that I was given the V.I.P. treatment. Other members of the expedition were asked if they had read the book, and if they said they had not, were severely reprimanded.

Leonard Woolley, in his kindly fashion, showed me things, and I was also taken around by Father Burrows, a Jesuit priest and epigraphist. He, too, was a most original character, and the way he described things to me made a rather delightful contrast. Leonard Woolley saw with the eye of imagination: the place was as real to him as if it had been 1500 B.C., or a few thousand years earlier. Wherever we happened to be, he could make it come alive. While he was speaking I felt in my mind no doubt whatever that that house on the corner had been Abraham’s–it was his reconstruction of the past and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also. Father Burrows’ technique was entirely different. With an apologetic air, he described the big courtyard, a temenos, or a street of shops, and just as you became interested would always say: ‘Of course we don’t know if it is that really. Nobody can be sure. No, I think probably it was not.’ And in the same way: ‘Yes, yes, they were shops, but I don’t suppose they were constructed as we think they were–they might have been quite different.’ He had a passion for denigrating everything. He was an interesting person–clever, friendly and yet aloof: there was something faintly inhuman about him.

Once, for no reason, he spoke to me at luncheon, describing to me the sort of detective story which he thought I could write very well, and which he urged me to write. Until that moment I had had no idea that he enjoyed detective stories. The story he was outlining, though vague in fact, somehow built up a picture of an intriguing problem, and I determined that one day I would do something about it. A great many years passed, but one day, perhaps twenty-five years later, the whole idea came back to me, and I wrote, not a book, but a long short story based on the particular combination of circumstances he had outlined. Father Burrows had been long dead by then, but I hoped that somehow he could realise that I used his idea with gratitude. As with all writers, it turned into my idea, and ended up by being not much like his; still, his inspiration was what had made it.

Katharine Woolley, who was to become one of my great friends in the years to come, was an extraordinary character. People have been divided always between disliking her with a fierce and vengeful hatred, and being entranced by her–possibly because she switched from one mood to another so easily that you never knew where you were with her. People would declare that she was impossible, that they would have no more to do with her, that it was insupportable the way she treated you; and then, suddenly, once again they would be fascinated. Of one thing I am quite positive, and that is if one had to choose one woman to be a companion on a desert island, or some place where you would have no one else to entertain you, she would hold your interest as practically no one else could. The things she wanted to talk about were never banal. She stimulated your mind into thinking along some pathway that had not before suggested itself to you. She was capable of rudeness–in fact she had an insolent rudeness, when she wanted to, that was unbelievable – but if she wished to charm you she would succeed every time.

I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurrat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute. I enjoyed the workmen, the foremen, the little basket-boys, the pick-men – the whole technique and life. The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. How unfortunate it was, I thought, that I had always led such a frivolous life. And it was then that I remembered with deep shame how in Cairo as a girl my mother had tried to persuade me to go to Luxor and Aswan to see the past glories of Egypt, and how I had wanted only to meet young men and dance till the small hours of the morning. Well, I suppose there is a time for everything.

Katharine Woolley and her husband urged me to stay one more day and see more of the excavations, and I was only too delighted to agree. My bearer, wished upon me by Mrs C., was completely unnecessary. Katharine Woolley directed him to return to Baghdad and say that my day of return was still unsure. In that way I hoped to return unnoticed by my former kind hostess, and establish myself firmly in the Tigris Palace Hotel (if that was its name at the moment – it has had so many names that I forget its first one).

This plan did not come off, because Mrs C.’s wretched husband had been sent to meet the train from Ur every day. However, I disposed of him quite easily. I thanked him enormously, said how kind his wife had been, but that I really felt it was better for me to go to the hotel, and that I had already made arrangements there. So he drove me there. I settled myself in, thanked Mr C. once more, and accepted an invitation to tennis in three or four days’ time. In this way I escaped from the thraldom of social life in the English manner. I was no longer a Mem-Sahib, I had become a tourist.

The hotel was not at all bad. You passed first into deep gloom: a big lounge and dining-room, with curtains permanently drawn. On the first floor there was a kind of veranda all round the bedrooms, from where, as far as I could see, anyone going by could look in and pass the time of day with you as you lay in bed. One side of the hotel gave on to the river Tigris, which was a dream of delight, with the ghufas and various boats on the river. At meal-times you went down into the sirdab of complete darkness with very weak electric lights. Here you had several meals in one; course after course, all bearing a strange resemblance to each other – large lumps of fried meat and rice, hard, little potatoes, tomato omelettes, rather leathery, immense pale cauliflowers, and so on, ad lib.

The Howes, that pleasant couple who had set me off on my voyage, had given me one or two introductions. These I valued as not being social ones: they were to people whom they themselves had found it well worth while to meet, and who had shown them some of the more interesting parts of the city. Baghdad, in spite of the English life of Alwiyah, was the first really oriental city I had ever seen – and it was oriental. You could turn off Rashid Street and wander down the narrow little alley-ways, and so into different suqs: the copper suq, with the copper-smiths beating and hammering; or the piled up spices of all kinds in the spice suq.

‘Once you think of time and infinity, personal things will cease to affect you in the same way. Sorrow, suffering, all the finite things of life, show in an entirely different perspective.’ He asked me if I had ever read Dunne’s Experiment with Time. I had not. He lent it to me, and from that moment I realise that something happened to me–not a change of heart, not quite a change of outlook, but somehow I saw things more in proportion; myself less large; as only one facet of a whole, in a vast world with hundreds of inter-connections. Every now and then one could be aware of oneself observing, from some other plane of existence, oneself existing. It was all crude and amateurish to begin with, but I did feel from that moment onwards a great sensation of comfort and a truer knowledge of serenity than I had ever obtained before. It is to Maurice Vickers that I am grateful for that introduction to a wider view of life. He had a large library of books, philosophy and otherwise, and was, I think, a remarkable young man. Sometimes I wondered whether we should ever meet again, but I think on the whole I was satisfied that we should not. We had been ships that pass in the night. He had handed me a gift that I had accepted; the kind of gift that I had never had before, since it was a gift from the intellect–from the mind, not just from the heart. I did not have much more time to spend in Baghdad, because I was anxious to get home to prepare for Christmas. I was told that I ought to go to Basra, and particularly to Mosul–Maurice Vickers urged the latter on me, and said that if he could find time he would take me there himself. One of the surprising things about Baghdad, and about Iraq generally, was that there was always someone to escort you to places. Except for renowned travellers, women seldom went about alone. As soon as you wished to travel, somebody produced a friend, a cousin, a husband or an uncle who would manage to make time and escort you there.



At the hotel I met a Colonel Dwyer, in the King’s African Rifles. He had travelled a great deal all over the world. He was an elderly man, but there was little he did not know about the Middle East. Our talk happened to fall on Kenya and Uganda, and I mentioned that I had a brother who had lived out there for many years. He asked his name, and I told him it was Miller. He stared at me then, an expression on his face with which I was already acquainted: a kind of incredulous doubt.

‘Do you mean to say that you are Miller’s sister? That your brother was Puffing Billy Miller?’ I had not heard the epithet of Puffing Billy.

‘Mad as a hatter?’ he added, interrogatively.

‘Yes,’ I said, heartily agreeing. ‘He has always been as mad as a hatter.’ ‘And you are his sister! My goodness, he must have put you through it now and again!’ I said that that was a pretty fair assessment.

‘One of the greatest characters I ever met. You couldn’t push him, you know. You couldn’t make him change his mind–obstinate as a pig–but you couldn’t help respecting him. One of the bravest chaps I have ever known.’ I considered, and said yes, I thought he well might be.

‘But hell to manage during a war,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I commanded that regiment later, and I sized him up from the beginning. I’ve met his kind often, travelling about the world on their own. They’re eccentric, pig-headed, almost geniuses but not quite, so they are usually failures. They’re the best conversationalists in the world–but only when they feel like it, mind. At other times they won’t even answer you–won’t speak.’ Every word he was saying was absolutely true.

‘You’re a good deal younger than he is, aren’t you?’

‘Ten years younger.’

‘He went abroad when you were still a kid–is that right?’

‘Yes. I didn’t ever know him really very well. But he came home on leave.’

‘What happened to him eventually? The last I heard of him he was ill in hospital.’ I explained the circumstances of my brother’s life, and how he had been finally sent home to die but had succeeded in living for some years afterwards in spite of all that the doctors had prophesied.

‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘Billy wouldn’t die until he felt like it. Put him in a hospital train, I remember, arm in a sling, badly wounded…He got an idea in his head he didn’t want to go to hospital. Every time they put him in one side he got out the other–had a terrible job with him. They got him there at last, but on the third day he managed to walk out of the hospital without anyone seeing him. He had a battle called after him–did you know that?’…I said I had had some vague idea.

‘Got across his commanding officer. He would, of course. A conventional chap–bit of a stuffed shirt–not Miller’s kind at all. He was in charge of mules at that time–wonderful hand with mules Billy was. Anyway, he said suddenly this was the place to give battle to the Germans, and his mules were halting there–nothing would do better. His commanding officer said he would have him up for mutiny–he was to obey orders or else! Billy just sat down and said he wouldn’t move, and his mules wouldn’t either. Quite right about the mules: they wouldn’t move–not unless Miller wanted them to. Anyway, he was scheduled for court martial. But just then a great force of Germans arrived.’

‘And they had a battle?’ I asked.

‘Certainly they did–and won it. The most decisive victory so far in the campaign. Well then, of course, the Colonel, old Whatsisname–Rush–something–was mad with rage, mad as could be. There he had been with a battle on his hands entirely due to an insubordinate officer whom he was going to court martial! Only, he couldn’t court martial him as things turned out, so there it was. Anyway, there was a lot of face-saving all round–but it’s always remembered as Miller’s Battle.’

‘Did you like him?’ he once asked abruptly. It was a difficult question.

‘Part of the time I did,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have ever known him for long enough to have what you might call family affection for him. Sometimes I despaired of him, sometimes I was maddened by him, sometimes–well I was fascinated by him–charmed.’

‘He could charm women very easily,’ said Colonel Dwyer. ‘Came and ate out of his hand, they did. Wanted to marry him, usually. You know, marry him and reform him, train him and settle him down to a nice steady job. I gather he’s not still alive?’

‘No, he died some years ago.’

‘Pity! Or is it?’

‘I’ve often wondered,’ I said. What actually is the border between failure and success? By all outward showing, my brother Monty’s life had been a disaster. He had not succeeded at anything he had attempted. But was that perhaps only from the financial view? Had one not to admit that, despite financial failure, he had for the greater part of his life enjoyed himself?

‘I suppose,’ he had said to me once cheerfully, ‘I’ve led rather a wicked life. I owe people a lot of money all over the world. Broken the laws of a lot of countries. Got a nice little hoard of illicit ivory tucked away in Africa. They know I have, too! But they won’t be able to find it! Given poor old mother and Madge a good deal of worry. Don’t suppose the parsons would approve of me. But, my word, kid, I’ve enjoyed myself. I’ve had a thundering good time. Never been satisfied with anything but the best.’ Where Monty’s luck had always held was that right up to old Mrs Taylor some woman would turn up in his hour of need to minister to him. Mrs Taylor and he had lived peacefully together on Dartmoor. Then she had gone down badly with bronchitis. She had been slow to recover and the doctor had shaken his head over her passing another winter on Dartmoor. She ought to go somewhere warm–perhaps the south of France. Monty was delighted. He sent for every travel brochure imaginable. Madge and I agreed that to ask Mrs Taylor to stay on Dartmoor was too much–although she assured us she did not mind, she would be quite willing to do so.

‘I couldn’t leave Captain Miller now.’ So, meaning for the best, we rebuffed Monty’s wilder ideas, and arranged instead for rooms at a small pension in the south of France for both Mrs Taylor and him. I sold the granite bungalow and saw them off on the Blue Train. They looked radiantly happy, but, alas, Mrs Taylor caught a chill on the journey, developed pneumonia, and died in hospital a few days later. They took Monty into hospital at Marseilles too. He was broken down by Mrs Taylor’s death. Madge went out knowing that something would have to be arranged, but at her wits’ end to know what. The nurse who was looking after him was sympathetic and helpful. She would see what could be done. A week later we had a wire from the bank manager in whose hands financial arrangements had been left, saying that he thought a satisfactory solution had been found. Madge could not go to see him, so I went along. The manager met me and took me out to lunch. No one could have been nicer or more sympathetic. He was, however, curiously evasive. I couldn’t think why. Presently the cause of his embarrassment came out. He was nervous of what Monty’s sisters would say to the proposal. The nurse, Charlotte, had offered to take Monty to her apartment and be responsible for him. The bank manager must have feared an outburst of prudish disapproval from us both–but how little he knew! Madge and I would have fallen on Charlotte’s neck in gratitude. Madge got to know her well and became attached to her. Charlotte managed Monty–and he was very fond of her too. She kept control of the purse strings–whilst tactfully listening to Monty’s grandiose plans for living on a large yacht and so on. He died quite suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage at a cafe on the front one day, and Charlotte and Madge wept together at the funeral. He was buried at the Military Cemetery at Marseilles. I think, being Monty, he enjoyed himself to the end. Colonel Dwyer and I became close friends after that. Sometimes I would go and dine with him; sometimes he would dine with me in my hotel; and our talk always seemed to come back to Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and Uganda and the Lake, and stories about my brother. In a masterful and military manner Colonel Dwyer made arrangements for my entertainment on my next trip abroad. ‘I have planned three good safaris for you,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to fix it for you some time when I can get away at a time that suits you. I think I shall meet you somewhere in Egypt–then I’d fix a trek on a camel convoy right across North Africa. It would take two months but it would be a wonderful trip–something you would never forget. I can take you where none of these ridiculous trumped-up guides would be able to–I know every inch of that country. Then there is the interior.’ And he outlined further travel plans, mostly in a bullock cart. From time to time I had doubts in my own mind as to whether I would ever be tough enough to carry out these programmes. Perhaps we both knew that they were in the realms of wishful thinking. He was a lonely man, I think. Colonel Dwyer had risen from the ranks, had a fine military career, had gradually grown apart from a wife who refused to leave England–all she cared for, he said, was living in a neat little house in a neat little road–and his children had not cared for him when he came home on leave. They had thought his ideas of travelling in wild places silly and unrealistic.

‘In the end I sent her home whatever money she wanted for herself and for educating the children. But my life is out here, round these parts. Africa, Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, Saudi Arabia–all of that. This is the life for me.’ He was, I think, though lonely, satisfied. He had a dry sense of humour and told me several extremely funny stories about the various intrigues that went on. At the same time he was in many ways highly conventional. He was a religious, upright martinet, with stern ideas of right and wrong. An old Covenanter would describe him best.



It was November now, and the weather was beginning to change. There were no longer blistering hot sunlit days; occasionally there was even rain. I had booked my trip home, and I would be leaving Baghdad with regret–but not too much regret, because I was already forming plans for coming back again. The Woolleys had thrown out a hint that I might like to visit them next year, and perhaps travel part of the way home again with them; and there had been other invitations and encouragement.

The day came at last when I once more embarked on the six-wheeler, this time being careful to have reserved a seat near the front of the bus so that I should not again disgrace myself. We started off, and I was soon to learn some of the antics of the desert. The rain came, and, as is customary in that country, firm going at 8.30 a.m. had within hours become a morass of mud. Every time you took a step, an enormous pancake of mud weighing perhaps twenty pounds attached itself to each foot. As for the six-wheeler, it skidded unceasingly, swerved, and finally stuck. The drivers sprang out, spades were lifted, boards came down and were fixed under wheels, and the whole business of digging out the bus began. After about forty minutes or an hour’s work a first attempt was made. The bus shuddered, lifted itself, and relapsed. In the end, with the rain increasing in violence, we had to turn back, and arrived once more in Baghdad. Our second attempt the next day was better. We still had to dig ourselves out once or twice, but finally we passed Ramadi, and when we got to the fortress of Rutbah we were out in clear desert again, and there was no more difficulty underfoot.


III

One of the nicest parts of travelling is coming home again. Rosalind, Carlo, Punkie and her family–I looked upon them all with new appreciation.

We went for Christmas to stay with Punkie in Cheshire. After that we came to London, where Rosalind had one of her friends to stay–Pam Druce, whose mother and father we had met originally in the Canary Islands. We planned that we would go to a pantomime, and then Pam would come down to Devonshire with us till the end of the holidays.

We had a happy evening after Pam arrived, until in the small hours I was awakened by a voice saying: ‘Do you mind if I come into your bed, Mrs Christie? I feel as though I am having rather queer dreams.’

‘Why, of course, Pam,’ I said. I switched the light on and she got in and lay down with a sigh. I was slightly surprised, because Pam had not struck me as being a nervous child. However, it was the most comforting thing for her, no doubt, so we both went to sleep till morning.

After the curtains were drawn and my tea brought, I switched on my light and looked at Pam. Never have I seen a face so completely covered with spots. She noticed something rather peculiar in my expression, and said: ‘You are staring at me!’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘well, yes, I am.’

‘Well, I’m surprised too,’ said Pam. ‘How did I get into your bed?’

‘You came in in the night, and said you had had some nasty dreams.’

‘Did I? I don’t remember a thing about it. I couldn’t think what I was doing in your bed.’ She paused, and then said, ‘Is there anything else the matter?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid there is. Do you know, Pam, I think you’ve got the measles.’ I brought a hand-glass and she examined her face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I do look peculiar, don’t I?’ I agreed.

‘And what’s going to happen, now?’ Pam asked. ‘Can’t I go to the theatre tonight?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘I think the first thing we’d better do is telephone your mother.’ I telephoned Beda Druce, who came round at once. She immediately cancelled her departure, and took Pam off. I put Rosalind into the car and drove down to Devonshire, where we would wait ten days and see whether she was going to have measles or not. The drive was not made easier by the fact that I had been vaccinated only a week previously in the leg and driving was somewhat painful. The first thing that happened at the end of the ten days was that I proceeded to have a violent headache and every sign of fever.

‘Perhaps you are going to have the measles and not me,’ suggested Rosalind.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I had measles very badly myself when I was fifteen.’ But I did feel slightly uneasy. People did have measles twice–and why should I feel so ill otherwise? I rang up my sister, and Punkie, always ready to come to the rescue, said that on receipt of a telegram she would come at once and deal with either me or Rosalind, or both, and anything else that should happen. Next day I felt worse, and Rosalind complained of having a cold–her eyes watered and she sneezed. Punkie arrived, full of her usual enthusiasm for dealing with disasters. In due course Dr Carver was summoned and pronounced that Rosalind had the measles.

‘And what’s the matter with you?’ he said. ‘You don’t look too well.’ I said I felt pretty dreadful, and thought I had a temperature. He put a few more searching inquiries. ‘Been vaccinated, have you?’ he said. ‘And you motored down here. Vaccinated in the leg, too? Why weren’t you vaccinated in the arm?’

‘Because vaccination marks look so dreadful in evening dress.’

‘Well there’s no harm being vaccinated in the leg, but it’s silly to motor over two hundred miles when you have had that done. Let’s have a look.’ He had a look. ‘Your leg is enormously swollen,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you realised that?’…

‘Well, yes, I had, but I thought it was just the vaccination feeling sore.’ ‘Sore? It’s a good deal more than that. Let’s take your temperature.’ He did, then exclaimed, ‘Good Lord! Haven’t you taken it?’

‘Well, I did take it yesterday, and it was 102, but I thought perhaps it would go down. I do feel a bit odd.’

‘Odd! I should think you do. It’s over 103 now. You lie here on your bed and wait while I fix up a few things.’ He came back to say that I was to go into a nursing home immediately and that he would send round an ambulance. I said an ambulance was nonsense. Why couldn’t I just go in a car or a taxi?

‘You will do as you are told,’ said Dr Carver, not perhaps quite as sure of this as he might have been. ‘I’ll have a word with Mrs Watts first.’ Punkie, came in and said, ‘I’ll look after Rosalind while she has the measles. Dr Carver seems to think you are in rather a bad way though. What have they done? Poisoned you with the vaccination?’ Punkie packed a few necessities for me, and I lay on my bed waiting for the ambulance and wishing that I could collect my thoughts. I had a terrible feeling of being on a slab in a fishmonger’s shop: all round me were filleted, quivering fish on ice, but at the same time I was encased in a log of wood which was on fire and smoking–the combination of the two was most unfortunate. Every now and then, with an enormous effort, I came out of this unpleasant nightmare, saying to myself, ‘I’m just Agatha lying on my bed–there are no fish here, no fishmonger’s shop, and I am not a blazing log.’ However, soon I was slithering about on a slippery sheepskin, and the fishes’ heads were around me. There was one very unpleasant fish-head, I remember–it was a large turbot, I think, with protuberant eyes and a gaping mouth, and it looked at me in a most disagreeable way. Then the door opened and into the room came a woman in nurse’s uniform, what appeared to be an ambulance attendant, and with them a kind of portable chair. I made a good many protests–I had no intention of going anywhere in a portable chair. I could perfectly well walk downstairs and get into an ambulance. I was overborne by the nurse, saying in a snappish voice: ‘Doctor’s orders. Now dear, just sit here and we will strap you in.’ I never remember anything more frightening than being conveyed down the flight of steep stairs to the hall. I was a good weight–well over eleven stone–and the ambulance attendant was an extaordinarily weakly young man. He and the nurse between them got me into the chair and began carrying me downstairs. The chair creaked and showed every sign of falling to pieces, and the ambulance man kept slipping and clutching at the stair-rail. The moment came when the chair did begin to disintegrate in the middle of the stairs. ‘Dear, dear, Nurse,’ panted the attendant, ‘I do believe it’s coming to pieces.’

‘Let me out of it,’ I shouted. ‘Let me walk down.’ They had to give in. They undid the strap, I took hold of the banisters, and marched valiantly down the stairs, feeling a great deal safer and happier, and only just containing myself from saying what absolute fools I thought they were. The ambulance drove off, and I arrived at the nursing home. A pretty little probationer nurse with red hair put me to bed. The sheets were cold, but not cold enough. Visions of fish and ice began to recur, and also a blazing cauldron.

‘Ooh!’ said the probationer nurse, looking at my leg with great interest. ‘Last time we had a leg in like that it came off on the third day.’ Fortunately, by this time I was so delirious that the words hardly registered at all–in any case at that moment I couldn’t have cared less if they had cut off both my legs and arms and even my head. But it passed through my mind as the little probationer arranged the bed-clothes and tucked me in tightly that possibly she had mistaken her vocation and that her bedside manner was not going to go down well with all the patients in a hospital. Fortunately my leg did not come off on the third day. After four or five days of high fever and delirium from bad blood posioning the whole thing began to mend. I was convinced, and still believe, that some batch of vaccine had been sent out double strength. The doctors tended to believe that it was occasioned entirely by the fact that I had not been vaccinated since I was a baby, and that I had strained my leg by driving down from London. After about a week I was more or less myself again, and interested to hear over the telephone progress of Rosalind’s measles. They had been like Pam’s–a splendid display of rash. Rosalind had much enjoyed her Auntie Punkie’s ministrations, and had called in a clear voice nearly every night saying: ‘Auntie Punkie! Would you like to sponge me down again like you did last night? I found it very very comforting.’ So in due course I came home, still with a large dressing on my left thigh, and we all had a cheerful convalescence together. Rosalind did not go back to school until two weeks after the opening, when she was quite herself again and strong and cheerful. I took another week, while my leg healed, and then I too departed, first to Italy and then to Rome, I could not stay there as long as I had planned, because I had to catch my boat for Beirut.


IV

This time I travelled by Lloyd Triestino boat to Beirut, spent a few days there, then once more took the Nairn Transport across the desert. It was somewhat rough along the coast from Alexandretta, and I had not been feeling too well. I had also noticed another woman on the boat. Sybil Burnett, the woman in question, told me afterwards that she had not been feeling too good in the swell either. She had looked at me and thought: ‘That is one of the most unpleasant women I have ever seen.’ At the same time I had been thinking the same about her. I had said to myself, ‘I don’t like that woman. I don’t like the hat she is wearing, and I don’t like her mushroom-coloured stockings.’

On this mutual tide of dislike we proceeded to cross the desert together. Almost at once we became friends–and were to remain friends for many years. Sybil, usually called ‘Bauff’ Burnett, was the wife of Sir Charles Burnett, at that time Air Vice-Marshal, and was going out to join her husband. She was a woman of great originality, who said exactly what came into her head, loved travelling and foreign places, had a beautiful house in Algiers, four daughters and two sons by a previous marriage, and an inexhaustible enjoyment of life. With us there was a party of Anglo-Catholic ladies who were being shepherded out to Iraq to make tours of various Biblical places. In charge of them was an excessively fierce-looking woman, a Miss Wilbraham. She had large feet, encased in flat black shoes, and wore an enormous topee. Sybil Burnett said that she looked exactly like a beetle, and I agreed. She was the kind of woman that one cannot help wanting to contradict. Sybil Burnett contradicted her at once.

‘Forty women I have with me,’ said Miss Wilbraham, ‘and I really must congratulate myself. Every one of them is a sahib except one. So important, don’t you agree?’

‘No,’ said Sybil Burnett. ‘I think to have them all sahibs is very dull. You want a good many of the other kind.’ Miss Wilbraham paid no attention–that was her strong point: she never paid attention. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I really do congratulate myself.’ Bauff and I then put our heads together to see if we could spot the one black sheep who did not pass the test and was labelled for the trip as not being a sahib.

With Miss Wilbraham was her second-in-command and friend, Miss Amy Ferguson. Miss Ferguson was devoted to all Anglo-Catholic causes, and even more so to Miss Wilbraham, whom she regarded as a super-woman. The only thing that upset her was her own incapacity to live up to Miss Wilbraham. ‘The trouble is,’ she confided, ‘Maude is so splendidly strong. Of course, my health is good, but I must confess I do get tired sometimes. Yet I’m only sixty-five, and Maude is nearly seventy.’

‘A very good creature,’ said Miss Wilbraham of Amy. ‘Most able, most devoted. Unfortunately she is continually feeling fatigued–most annoying. She can’t help it, I suppose, poor thing, but there it is. Now I,’ said Miss Wilbraham, ‘never feel fatigue.’ We felt quite sure of it. We arrived in Baghdad. I met several old friends, and enjoyed myself there for four or five days, then, on receipt of a telegram from the Woolleys, went down to Ur. I had seen the Woolleys in London the preceding June, when they were home, and indeed had lent them the little mews house which I had recently bought, in Cresswell Place. It was a delightful house, or so I thought–one of four or five houses in the mews which had been built like cottages: old-fashioned country cottages. When I bought it it had stables still, with the loose-boxes and mangers all round the wall, a big harness-room also on the ground floor, and a little bedroom squeezed between them. A ladder-like stair lead to two rooms above, with a sketchy bathroom and another tiny room next to that. With the help of a biddable builder it had been transformed. The big stable downstairs had had the loose-boxes and the wood-work arranged flat against the wall, and above that I had a big frieze of a kind of wallpaper which happened to be in fashion at that moment, of a herbaceous border, so that to enter the room was like walking into a small cottage garden. The harness-room was turned into the garage and the room between the two was a maid’s room. Upstairs the bathroom was made splendid with green dolphins prancing round the walls and a green porcelain bath; and the bigger bedroom was turned into a dining-room, with a divan that turned into a bed at night. The very small room was a kitchen, and the other room a second bedroom. It was while the Woolleys were installed in this house that they had made a lovely plan for me. I was to come to Ur about a week before the end of the season, when they were packing up, and after that I would travel back with them, through Syria, on to Greece, and in Greece go to Delphi with them. I was very happy at this prospect. I arrived at Ur in the middle of a sandstorm. I had endured a sandstorm when visiting there before, but this was far worse and went on for four or five days. I had never known that sand could permeate to the extent it did. Although the windows were shut, and mosquito-wired as well, one’s bed at night was full of sand. You shook it all out on the floor, got in, and in the morning there was more sand weighing down on your face, your neck, and everywhere else. It was five days of near torture. However, we had interesting talks, everyone was friendly, and I enjoyed my time there enormously. Father Burrows was there again, and Whitburn, the architect–and this time there was Leonard Woolley’s assistant, Max Mallowan, who had been with him for five years, but who had been absent the previous year when I came down. He was a thin, dark, young man, and very quiet–he seldom spoke, but was perceptive to everything that was required of him. I noticed this time something I had not taken in before: the extraordinary silence of everyone at table. It was as though they were afraid to speak. After a day or two I began to find out why. Katharine Woolley was a temperamental woman, and she had a great facility either for putting people at their ease or for making them nervous. I noticed that she was extremely well waited on: there was always someone to offer her more milk with her coffee or butter for her toast, to pass the marmalade, and so on. Why I wondered, were they all so scared of her? One morning when she was in a bad mood I began to discover a little more.

‘I suppose no one is ever going to offer me the salt,’ she said. Immediately four willing hands shoved it across the table, almost upsetting it in the process. A pause ensued, then nervously Mr Whitburn leaned forward and pressed toast upon her.

‘Don’t you see my mouth is full, Mr Whitburn?’ was the only response he got. He sat back, blushing nervously, and everybody ate toast feverishly before offering it to her again. She refused. ‘But I really think,’ she said. ‘that you might occasionally not finish all the toast before Max has had a chance to have a piece.’ I looked at Max. The remaining piece of toast was offered to him. He took it quickly, without protest. Actually he had already had two pieces, and I wondered why he did not say so. That again I was to realise more fully later. Mr Whitburn initiated me into some of these mysteries: ‘You see,’ he said, ‘she always has favourites.’

‘Mrs Woolley?’

‘Yes. They don’t stay the same, you know. Sometimes one person, sometimes another. But, I mean, either everything you do is wrong, or everything is right. I’m the one in the doghouse at present.’ It was equally clear that Max Mallowan was the person who did everything right. It may have been because he had been away the preceding season, and so was more of a novelty than the others, but I think myself it was because in the course of five years he had learnt the way to treat the two Woolleys. He knew when to keep quiet; he knew when to speak. I soon realised how good he was at managing people. He managed the workmen well, and, what was far more difficult, he managed Katharine Woolley well. ‘Of course,’ said Katharine to me, ‘Max is the perfect assistant. I don’t know what we would have done without him all these years. I think you’ll like him very much. I am sending him with you to Nejef and Kerbala. Nejef is the Moslem holy city of the dead, and Kerbala has a wonderful mosque. So when we pack up here and go to Baghdad he will take you there. You can go and see Nippur on the way.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘but–won’t he want to go to Baghdad too? I mean, he will have friends there to see before he goes home.’ I was dismayed at the thought of being sent off with a young man who was probably yearning for freedom and some fun in Baghdad after the strain of a three months season at Ur.

‘Oh no,’ said Katharine firmly. ‘Max will be delighted.’

I didn’t think Max would be delighted, though I had no doubt that he would conceal the fact. I felt very uncomfortable. I regarded Whitburn as a friend, having seen him the year before, and so I spoke to him about it.

‘Don’t you think it’s rather high-handed? I hate to do that sort of thing. Do you think I could say I didn’t want to see Nejef and Kerbala?’

‘Well, I think you ought to see them,’ said Whitburn. ‘It will be quite all right. Max won’t mind. And anyway, I mean, if Katharine has made up her mind, then that’s settled, you see.’ I saw, and an enormous admiration spread over me. How wonderful to be the sort of woman who, as soon as she had made up her mind, had everybody within sight immediately falling in with it, not grudgingly, but as a matter of course. Many months later, I remember speaking to Katharine with some admiration of her husband Len. ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said, ‘how unselfish he is. The way he gets up on the boat at night and goes off and makes you Benger’s or hot soup. There aren’t many husbands who would do that.’

‘Really?’ said Katharine, looking surprised. ‘Oh, but Len thinks it’s a privilege.’ And he did think it was a privilege. In fact, everything that one did for Katharine felt, at any rate for the moment, like a privilege. Of course, when you got home and realised you had parted with the two library books you had just fetched and were looking forward to reading, profering them to her eagerly because she sighed and said she had nothing to read, and not even grudging the fact until later, you realised what a remarkable woman she was. Only exceptional people did not fall under her sway. One was, I remember, Freya Stark. Katharine was ill one day and wanted a lot of things fetched and done for her. Freya Stark, who was staying with her, was firm, cheerful and friendly: ‘I can see you are not awfully well, dear, but I am absolutely no good with illness, so the best thing I can do for you is to go out for the day.’ And go out for the day she did. Strangely enough, Katharine did not resent this; she merely thought it a splendid example of what force of character Freya had. And it certainly did show that. To get back to Max, everybody seemed to agree it was perfectly natural that a young man, who had worked hard on an arduous dig and was about to be released for rest and a good time, should sacrifice himself and drive off into the blue to show a strange woman a good many years older than him, who knew little about archaeology, the sights of the country. Max seemed to take it as a matter of course. He was a grave-looking young man, and I felt slightly nervous of him. I worried whether I should offer some apology. I did essay some kind of stumbling phrase to the effect that I had not myself suggested this tour, but Max was calm about it all. He said he had nothing particular to do. He was going back home by degrees, first travelling with the Woolleys, and then, since he had already been to Delphi, dividing from them and going up to see the Temple of Bassae and other places in Greece. He himself would quite enjoy going to Nippur. It was a most interesting site, where he always enjoyed going–and also Nejef and Kerbala, which were well worth seeing. So the day came when we started off. I enjoyed the day at Nippur very much, though it was extremely exhausting. We motored for hours over rough ground, and walked round what seemed acres of excavations. I don’t suppose I would have found it very interesting had I not had someone with me to explain it all. As it was I became more enamoured of digging than ever. Finally, at about seven o’clock at night, we came to Diwaniya, where we were to stay the night with the Ditchburns. I was reeling on my feet with the desire to sleep, but somehow or other managed to comb the sand out of my hair, wash it off my face, apply a little restorative powder, and struggle into some kind of evening dress. Mrs Ditchburn loved entertaining guests. She was a great talker–indeed never stopped talking, in a bright and cheerful voice. I was introduced to her husband, and placed next to him. He seemed to be a quiet man, which was perhaps to be expected, and for a long time sat in lowering silence. I made a few rather inane remarks about my sightseeing, to which he did not respond. On the other side of me was an American missionary. He too was very taciturn. When I looked sideways at him, I noticed that his hands were twisting and turning beneath the table, and that he was slowly tearing a handkerchief to shreds. I found that rather alarming, and wondered what occasioned it. His wife sat across the table, and she too seemed in a highly nervous condition. It was a curious evening. Mrs Ditchburn was in full social flight, chatting with her neighbours, talking to me and to Max. Max was responding reasonably well. The two missionaries, husband and wife, remained tongue-tied, the wife watching her husband desperately, and he still tearing his handkerchief to smaller and smaller shreds. In a dazed dream of half-sleep, ideas of a superb detective story came into my head. A missionary slowly going mad with the strain. The strain of what? The strain of something, at any rate. And wherever he has been, torn-up handkerchiefs, reduced to shreds, provide clues. Clues, handkerchiefs, shreds–the room reeled around me, as I nearly slipped off my chair with sleep. At this moment a harsh voice spoke in my left ear. ‘All archaeologists,’ said Mr Ditchburn with a kind of bitter venom, ‘are liars.’ I woke up and considered him and his statement. He threw it at me in the most challenging manner. I did not feel in the least competent to defend the veracity of archaeologists, so I merely said mildly. ‘Why do you think they are liars? What do they tell lies about?’

‘Everything,’ said Mr Ditchburn. ‘Everything. Saying they know the dates of things, and when things happened–that this is 7,000 years old, and the other is 3,000 years old, that this king reigned then, and another king reigned afterwards! Liars! All liars, every one of them!’

‘Surely,’ I said. ‘that can’t be so?’

‘Can’t it?’ Mr Ditchburn uttered a sardonic laugh and relapsed into silence. I addressed a few more words to my missionary, but I got little more response. Then Mr Ditchburn broke the silence once more, and incidentally revealed a possible clue to his bitterness by saying: ‘As usual, I have had to turn out of my dressing-room for this archaeological chap.’

‘Oh,’ I said uncomfortably, ‘I am so sorry. I didn’t realise.

‘It happens every time,’ said Mr Ditchburn. ‘She’s always doing it–my wife, I mean. Has to be asking someone or other to put up with us. No, it’s not you–you’ve got one of the regular guest-rooms. We’ve got three of those, but that isn’t enough for Elsie. No, she’s always got to fill up all the rooms there are, and then have my dressing-room as well. How I stand it I don’t know.’ I said again I was sorry. I could not have been more uncomfortable, but presently I was once more bending all my energies on keeping awake. I could only just manage it. After dinner I pleaded to be allowed to go to bed. Mrs Ditchburn was much disappointed, because she had had plans for a splendid rubber of bridge, but by this time my eyes were practically closed, and I only just managed to stumble upstairs, throw off my clothes, and fall into bed. We left at five o’clock next morning. Travelling in Iraq was my introduction to a somewhat strenuous way of living. We visited Nejef, which was indeed a wonderful place: a real necropolis, a city of the dead, with the dark figures of the black-veiled Muslim women wailing and moving about it. It was a hot-bed of extremists, and it was not always possible to visit it. You had to inform the police first, and they would then be on the lookout to see that no outbreaks of fanaticism occurred. From Nejef we went to Kerbala, where there was a beautiful mosque, with a gold and turquoise dome. It was the first that I had seen close up. We stayed the night there at the police post. A roll of bedding that Katharine had lent me was unfastened on the floor and my bed was made in a small police cell. Max had another police cell, and urged me to invoke his assistance if needed during the night. In the days of my Victorian upbringing I should have thought it most strange that I should awaken a young man whom I hardly knew and ask him to be kind enough to escort me to the lavatory, yet this soon seemed a matter of course. I woke Max, he summoned a policeman, the policeman fetched a lantern, and we three tramped along long corridors and finally arrived at a remarkably evil-smelling room containing a hole in the floor. Max and the policeman waited politely outside the door to light me back to my couch. Dinner was served at the police post on a table outside, with a large moon above us, and the constant monotonous yet musical croaking of frogs. Whenever I hear frogs I think of Kerbala and that evening. The policeman sat down with us. Now and again he said a few words of English rather carefully, but mostly spoke Arabic with Max, who occasionally translated a few words which were addressed to me. After one of the refreshing silences that always form part of Eastern contacts and accord so harmoniously with one’s feelings, our companion suddenly broke his silence. ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit!’ he said. ‘Bird thou never wert.’ I looked at him, startled. He proceeded to finish the poem. ‘I learned that,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘Very good, in English.’ I said it was very good. That seemed to end that part of the conversation. I should never have envisaged myself coming all the way to Iraq so as to have Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’ recited to me by an Iraqi policeman in an Eastern garden at midnight. We breakfasted early the next morning. A gardener, who was picking some roses, advanced with a bouquet. I stood expectantly, ready to smile graciously. Somewhat to my discomposure he passed me without a glance and handed them with a deep bow to Max. Max laughed, and pointed out to me that I was now in the East, where offerings were made to men and not to women. We embarked with our belongings, bedding, stack of fresh bread, and the roses, and started off again. We were going to make a detour on our way back to Baghdad to see the Arab city of Ukhaidir. This lay far out in the desert. The scenery was monotonous, and to pass the time we sang songs, calling upon a repertoire of things we both knew, starting with Fr ere Jacques, and proceeding to various other ballads and ditties. We saw Ukhaidir, wonderful in its isolation, and about an hour or two after we had left it came upon a desert lake of clear, sparkling blue water. It was outrageously hot, and I longed to bathe. ‘Would you really like to?’ said Max. ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

‘Could I?’ I looked thoughtfully at my roll of bedding and small suit-case. ‘But I haven’t got any bathing-dress–’

‘Haven’t you got anything that would–well–do?’ asked Max delicately. I considered, and in the end, dressed in a pink silk vest and a double pair of knickers. I was ready. The driver, the soul of politeness and delicacy, as indeed all Arabs are, moved away. Max, in shorts and a vest, joined me, and we swam in the blue water. It was heaven–the world seemed perfect–or at least it did until we went to start the car again. It had sunk gently into the sand and refused to move, and I now realised some of the hazards of desert driving. Max and the driver, pulling out steel mats, spades, and various other things from the car, endeavoured to free us, but with no success. Hour succeeded hour. It was still ragingly hot. I lay down in the shelter of the car, or what shelter there was on one side of it, and went to sleep. Max told me afterwards, whether truthfully or not, that it was at that moment he decided that I would make an excellent wife for him. ‘No fuss!’ he said. ‘You didn’t complain or say that it was my fault, or that we never should have stopped there. You seemed not to care whether we went on or not. Really it was at that moment I began to think you were wonderful.’ Ever since he said that to me I have tried to live up to the reputation I had made for myself. I am fairly good at taking things as they come, and not getting in a state. Also I have the useful art of being able to go to sleep at any moment, anywhere. We were not on a caravan route here, and it was possible that no lorries or anything else might come this way for days, perhaps as long as a week. We had with us a guard, one of the Camel Corps, and in the end he said he would go and get help within, presumably, twenty-four hours, or at any rate within forty-eight. He left us what water he had. ‘We of the Desert Camel Corps,’ he said loftily, ‘do not need to drink in emergency.’ He stalked off, and I looked after him with some foreboding. This was adventure, but I hoped it was going to turn out a pleasant one. The water did not seem very much, and the thought of not having water made me thirsty straight away. However, we were lucky. A miracle happened. One hour later, a T Ford with fourteen passengers drove out of the horizon. Sitting beside the driver was our Camel Corps friend, waving an exuberant rifle. At intervals on our journey back to Baghdad we stopped to look at tells, and walked round them picking up sherds of pottery. I was particularly enchanted with all the glazed fragments. The brilliant colours: green, turquoise, blue, and a sort of golden patterned one–they were all of a much later period than that in which Max was interested, but he was indulgent of my fancies, and we collected a large bag of them. After we arrived in Baghdad, and I had been returned to my hotel, I spread out my mackintosh, dipped all the sherds in water, and arranged them in glistening iridescent patterns of colour. Max, kindly falling in with my whim, supplied his own mackintosh and added four sherds to the display. I caught him looking at me with the air of an indulgent scholar looking kindly at a foolish but not unlikeable child–and, really, I believe at that time that was his attitude towards me. I have always loved things like seashells or little bits of coloured rock–all the odd treasures one picks up as a child. A bright bird’s feather, a variegated leaf–these things, I sometimes feel, are the true treasures of life, and one enjoys them better than topazes, emeralds, or expensive little boxes by Faberge. Katharine and Len Woolley had already arrived in Baghdad, and were not at all pleased with us for having arrived twenty-four hours late–this owing to our detour to Ukhaidir. I was exonerated from blame since I had been merely a parcel carried about and taken to places with no knowledge of where I was going.

‘Max might have known that we should be worried,’ Katharine said. ‘We might have sent out a search party or done something silly.’ Max repeated patiently that he was sorry; it had not occurred to him that they would be alarmed. A couple of days later we left Baghdad by train for Kirkuk and Mosul, on the first leg of our journey home. My friend Colonel Dwyer came to Baghdad North Station to see us off. ‘You’ll have to stand up for yourself, you know,’ he remarked to me, confidentially.

‘Stand up for myself? What do you mean?’

‘With Her Ladyship there.’ He nodded to where Katharine Woolley was talking to a friend.

‘But she’s been so nice to me.’

‘Oh yes, I can see you feel the charm. All of us have felt it from time to time. To be honest, I feel it still. That woman could get me where she wants me any time, but, as I say, you’ve got to stand up for yourself. She could charm the birds off a tree and make them feel it was only natural.’ The train was making those peculiar banshee-like wails which I soon learnt were characteristic of the Iraqi railways. It was a piercing, eerie noise–in fact, a woman wailing for her demon lover would have expressed it exactly. However, it was nothing so romantic: merely a locomotive raring to go. We climbed aboard–Katharine and I shared one sleeping compartment, Max and Len the other–and we were off. We reached Kirkuk the following morning, had breakfast in the rest-house, and motored to Mosul. It was at that time a six to eight-hour run, most of it on a very rutted road, and included the crossing of the river Zab by ferry. The ferry-boat was so primitive that one felt almost Biblical embarking upon it. At Mosul, too, we stayed at the rest-house, which had a charming garden. Mosul was to be the centre of my life for many years in the future, but it did not impress me then, mainly because we did little sightseeing. Here I met Dr and Mrs MacLeod, who ran the hospital, and were to be great friends. They were both doctors, and whilst Peter MacLeod was in charge of the hospital his wife Peggy would occasionally assist him with certain operations. These had to be performed in a peculiar fashion owing to the fact that he was not allowed to see or touch the patient. It was impossible for a Muslim woman to be operated on by a man, even though he was a doctor. Screens, I gather, had to be rigged up; Dr MacLeod would stand outside the screen with his wife inside; he would direct her how to proceed, and she, in turn, would describe to him the conditions of the organs as she arrived at them, and all the various details. After two or three days in Mosul we started on our travels proper. We spent one night at a rest-house at Tell Afar, which was two hours or so from Mosul, then at five the following morning motored off in a trek across country. We visited some sites on the Euphrates, and departed to the north, in search of Len’s old friend Basrawi, who was Sheikh of one of the tribes there. After a good many crossings of wadis, losing and finding our way again, we finally arrived towards the evening, and were given a great welcome, a terrific meal, and at last retired for the night. There were two tumble-down rooms in a mud-brick house which were apportioned to us, with two small iron beds diagonally in the corners of each. A slight difficulty arose here. One room had a corner bed with an excellent ceiling above it–that is to say no water actually dripped through or fell on the bed: a phenomenon we were able to observe because it had started to rain. The other bed, however, was in a draughty corner with a good deal of water dripping on to it. We had a look at the second room. This one had an equally doubtful roof, and was smaller; the beds were narrower and there was less air and light.

‘I think, Katharine,’ said Len, ‘that you and Agatha had better have the smaller room with the two dry beds, and we’ll have the other.’

‘I think,’ said Katharine, ‘that I really must have the larger room and the good bed. I won’t sleep a wink if there is water dripping on my face.’

She went firmly across to the delectable corner and placed her things on the bed.

‘I expect I can pull my bed out a bit and avoid the worst,’ I said.

‘I really don’t see,’ said Katharine, ‘why Agatha should be forced to have this bad bed with the roof dripping on it. One of you men can have it.

Either Max or Len had better go in the bad bed in this room, and the other one can go in the other room with Agatha.’ This suggestion was considered, and Katharine, sizing up Max and Len to see which she thought would be the more useful to her, finally decided on the privilege of loving Len, and sent Max to share the small room. Only our cheerful host seemed to be amused by this arrangement–he made several remarks of a ribald nature in Arabic to Len. ‘Please yourselves,’ he said. ‘Please yourselves! Divide up how you like–either way the man will be happy.’

However, by the morning nobody was happy. I woke at about six with rain pouring on my face. In the other corner Max was fully exposed to a deluge. He dragged my bed away from the worst leak, and pushed his own also out of the corner. Katharine had come off no better than anyone else: she, too, now had a leak. We had a meal, and took a tour round with Basrawi, surveying his domain, then went on our way once more. The weather was really bad now; some of the wadis were much swollen, and difficult to cross.

We arrived at last, wet and extremely tired, at Aleppo, to the comparative luxury of Baron’s Hotel, where we were greeted by the son of the house, Coco Baron. He had a large round head, faintly yellow face, and mournful dark eyes.

The one thing I yearned for was a hot bath. I discovered the bathroom to be of a semi-western, semi-eastern type, and managed to turn on some hot water, which, as usual, came out in clouds of steam and frightened me to death. I tried to turn it off but did not succeed, and had to yell to Max for help. He arrived down the passage, subdued the water, then told me to go back to my room. He would call me when he had got the bath sufficiently under control for me to enjoy it. I went back to my room and waited. I waited a long time and nothing happened. Finally I sallied forth in my dressing-gown, sponge clasped under my arm. The door was locked. At that moment Max appeared.

‘Where’s my bath?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, Katharine Woolley is in there now,’ said Max.

‘Katharine?’ I said, ‘Did you let her have my bath that you were running for me?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Max. ‘She wanted it,’ he explained.

He looked me straight in the eye with a certain firmness of manner.

I saw that I was up against something like the laws of the Medes and Persians. I said: ‘Well, I think it is very unfair. I was running that bath.

It was my bath.’

‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘I know that. But Katharine wanted it.’

I went back to my room and reflected upon Colonel Dwyer’s words.

I was to reflect on them again the next day. Katharine’s bedside lamp gave her trouble. She was not feeling well, and was staying in bed with a miserable headache. This time of my own accord, I proffered her my bedside lamp in exchange. I took it into her room, fixed it up and left her with it. It seemed there was a shortage of lamps, so I had to read as best I could the next night with only one feeble lamp in the ceiling high above me. It was only on the next day that some slight indignation arose on my part. Katharine decided to change her room for one which would have less noise from the traffic. Since there was a perfectly good bedside lamp in her new room she had not bothered to return the other lamp to me, and it was now firmly in the possession of some third party. However, Katharine was Katharine, take it or leave it.

I decided in future to do a little more to protect my own interests.

The next day, though Katharine had hardly any fever, she said she felt much worse. She was in a mood when she could not bear anyone to come near her.

’ I f only you would all go away’ she wailed. ‘All go away and leave me.

I cannot stand people coming in and out of my bedroom all day, asking me if I want anything–continually bothering me. If I could just be quite quiet, with nobody coming near me, then I might feel all right by this evening.’ I thought I knew just how she felt, because it was very much how I feel when I am ill: I want people to go away and leave me.

It is the feeling of the dog who crawls away to a quiet corner and hopes to be left undisturbed until the miracle happens and he feels himself again.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Len helplessly. ‘Really I don’t know what to do for her.’

‘Well,’ I said consolingly, for I was very fond of Len, ‘I expect she knows herself what she feels is best for her. I think she does want to be left alone. I should leave her until this evening, and then see if she feels better.’

So this was arranged. Max and I went out together on an expedition to visit a Crusader’s castle at Kalaat Siman. Len said he would remain at the hotel so as to be at hand if Katharine wanted anything.

Max and I set off happily. The weather had improved, and it was a lovely drive. We drove over hills with scrub and red anemones, with flocks of sheep and later, as the road went higher, black goats and kids.

Finally we arrived at Kalaat Siman, and had our picnic lunch. Sitting there and looking round, Max told me a little more about himself, his life, and the luck he had had in getting the job with Leonard Woolley, just as he was leaving the University. We picked up a few bits of pottery here and there, and finally made our way back just as the sun was setting.

We arrived home to trouble. Katharine was enormously incensed at the way in which we had gone off and left her.

‘But you said you wanted to be alone,’ I said.

‘One says things when one doesn’t feel well. To think you and Max could go off in that heartless way. Oh well, perhaps it’s not so bad of you, because you don’t understand so well, but Max–that Max, who knows me well, who knows that I might have needed anything–could go off like that.’ She closed her eyes and said, ‘You had better leave me now.’

‘Can’t we get you anything, or stay with you?’

‘No, I don’t want you to get me anything. Really, I feel very hurt about all this. As for Len, his behaviour was absolutely disgraceful.’

‘What has he done?’ I asked, with some curiosity.

‘He left me here without a single drop to drink–not a drop of water not lemonade, nothing at all. Just lying here, helpless, parched with thirst.’

‘But couldn’t you have rung the bell and asked for some water?’

I asked. It was the wrong thing to say. Katharine gave me a withering glance: ‘I can see you don’t understand the first thing about it. To think that Len could be as heartless as that. Of course, if a woman had been here, it would have been different. She would have thought.’

We hardly dared approach Katharine in the morning, but she behaved in the most Katharine-like manner. She was in a charming mood, smiled, was pleased to see us, grateful for anything we did for her, gracious if slightly forgiving, and all was well.

She was indeed a remarkable woman. I grew to understand her a little better as the years went on, but could never predict beforehand in what mood she would be. She ought, I think, to have been a great artist of some kind–a singer or an actress–then her moods would have been accepted as natural to her temperament. As it was, she was nearly an artist: she had done a sculptured head of Queen Shubad, which was exhibited with the famous gold necklace and head-dress on it.

She did a good head of Hamoudi, of Leonard Woolley himself, and a beautiful head of a young boy, but she was diffident of her own powers, always apt to invite other people to help her, or to accept their opinions.

Leonard waited on her hand and foot–nothing he could do was good enough. I think she despised him a little for that. Perhaps any woman would do so. No woman likes a doormat, and Len, who could be extremely autocratic on his dig, was butter in her hands.

One early Sunday morning before we left Aleppo, Max took me on a tour of assorted religions. It was quite strenuous.

We went to the Maronites, the Syrian Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, the Nestorians, the Jacobites, and more that I can’t remember. Some of them were what I called ‘Onion Priests’–that is to say, having a kind of round onion-like head-dress. The Greek Orthodox I found the most alarming, since there I was firmly parted from Max and herded with the other women on one side of the church. One was pushed into something which looked like a horse-stall, with a kind of halter looped round one, and attached to the wall. It was a splendidly mysterious service, most of which took place behind an altar curtain or veil. Rich sonorous sounds came from behind this and out into the church, accompanied by clouds of incense. We all bobbed and bowed at prescribed intervals. In due course Max reclaimed me.



When I look back over my life, it seems that the things that have been most vivid, and which remain most clearly in my mind, are the places I have been to. A sudden thrill of pleasure comes into my mind–a tree, a hill, a white house tucked away somewhere, by a canal, the shape of a distant hill. Sometimes I have to think a moment to remember where, and when. Then the picture comes clearly, and I know.

People, I have never had a good memory for. My own friends are dear to me, but people that I merely meet and like pass out of my mind again almost at once. Far from being able to say, ‘I never forget a face’ I might more truly say, ‘I never remember a face.’ But places remain firmly in my mind. Often, returning somewhere after five or six years, I remember quite well the road to take, even if I have only been there once before.

I don’t know why my memory for places should be good, and for people so faint. Perhaps it comes from being far-sighted. I have always been far-sighted, so that people have a rather sketchy appearance, because they are near at hand, while places I have seen with accuracy because they are further away.

I am quite capable of disliking a place just because the hills seem to me the wrong shape—it is very, very important that hills should be the right shape. Practically all the hills in Devonshire are the right shape. Most of the hills in Sicily are the wrong shape, so I do not care for Sicily. The hills of Corsica are sheer delight; the Welsh hills, too, are beautiful.

In Switzerland the hills and mountains stand about you too closely.

Snow mountains can be incredibly dull; they owe any excitement they have to the varying effects of light. ‘Views’ can be dull, too. You climb up a path to a hill top–and there! A panorama is spread before you.

But it is all there. There is nothing further. You have seen it. ‘Superb,’ you say. And that is that. It’s all below you. You have, as it were, conquered it.


V

From Aleppo we went on by boat to Greece, stopping at various ports on the way. I remember best going ashore with Max at Mersin, and spending a happy day on the beach, bathing in a glorious warm sea. It was on that day that he picked me enormous quantities of yellow marigolds. I made them into a chain and he hung them around my neck, and we had a picnic lunch in the midst of a great sea of yellow marigolds.

I was looking forward enormously to seeing Delphi with the Woolleys; they spoke of it with such lyric rapture. They had insisted that I was to be their guest there, which I thought extremely kind of them. I have rarely felt so happy and full of anticipation as when we arrived at Athens.

But things come always at the moment one does not expect them.

I can remember, standing at the hotel desk and being handed my mail, on top of it a pile of telegrams. The moment I saw them a sharp agony seized me, because seven telegrams could mean nothing but bad news.

We had been out of touch for the last fortnight at least, and now bad news had caught up with me. I opened one telegram–but the first was actually the last. I put them into order. They told me that Rosalind was very ill with pneumonia. My sister had taken the responsibility of removing her from school and motoring her up to Cheshire. Further ones reported her condition as serious. The last one, the one I had opened first, stated that her condition was slightly better.

Nowadays, of course, one could have been home in less than twelve hours, with air services going from the Piraeus every day, but then, in 1930, there were no such facilities. At the very earliest, if I could book a seat, the next Orient Express, would not get me to London for four days.

My three friends all reacted to my bad news with the utmost kindness.

Len laid aside what he was doing and went out to contact travel agencies and find the earliest seat that could be booked. Katharine spoke with deep sympathy. Max said little, but he, too, went out with Len to the travel agency.

Walking along the street, half dazed with shock, I put my foot into one of those square holes in which trees seemed eternally to be being planted in the streets of Athens. I sprained my ankle badly, and was unable to walk. Sitting in the hotel, receiving the commiserations of Len and Katharine, I wondered where Max was. Presently he came in. With him he had two good solid crepe bandages and an elastoplast. Then, he explained quietly that he would be able to look after me on the journey home and help me with my ankle.

‘But you are going up to the Temple of Bassae,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you meeting somebody?’

‘Oh, I’ve changed my plans,’ he said. ‘I think I really ought to get home, so I will be able to travel with you. I can help you along to the dining-car or bring meals along to you, and get things done for you.’

It seemed too marvellous to be true. I thought then, and indeed have thought ever since, what a wonderful person Max is. He is so quiet, so sparing with words of commiseration. He does things. He does just the things you want done and that consoles you more than anything else could. He didn’t condole with me over Rosalind or say she would be all right and that I mustn’t worry. He just accepted that I was in for a bad time. There were no sulpha drugs then, and pneumonia was a real menace.

Max and I left the next evening. On our journey he talked to me a great deal about his own family, his brothers, his mother, who was French and very artistic and keen on painting, and his father, who sounded a little like my brother Monty–only fortunately more stable financially.

At Milan we had an adventure. The train was late. We got out I could limp about now, my ankle supported by elastoplast–and asked the wagon lit conductor how long the wait would be. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. Max suggested we should go and buy some oranges-so we walked along to a fruit-stall, then walked back to the platform again.

I suppose about five minutes had elapsed, but there was no train at the platform. We were told it had left.

‘Left? I thought it waited here twenty minutes,’ I said.

‘Ah yes, Signora, but it was very much in lateness–it waited only a short time.’

We looked at each other in dismay. A senior railway official then came to our aid. He suggested that we hire a powerful car and race the train.

He thought we would have a sporting chance of catching it at Domodossola.

A journey rather like one on the cinema then began. First we were ahead of the train, then the train was ahead of us. Now we felt despair, the next moment we felt comfortably superior, as we went through the mountain roads and the train popped in and out of tunnels, either ahead of or behind us. Finally we reached Domodossola about three minutes after the train. All the passengers it seemed, were leaning out of the windows–certainly all in our own wagon lit coach–to see whether we had arrived.

‘Ah, Madame,’ said an elderly Frenchman as he helped me into the train. ‘Que vous avez dû éprouver des émotions?’ The French have a wonderful way of putting things.

As a result of hiring this excessively expensive car, about which we had no time to bargain, Max and I had practically no money left. Max’s mother was meeting him in Paris, and he suggested hopefully I should be able to borrow money from her. I have often wondered what my future mother-in-law thought of the young woman who jumped out of the train with her son, and after the briefest of greetings borrowed practically every sou she happened to have on her. There was little time to explain because I had to take the train on to England, so with confused apologies I vanished, clutching the money I had extracted from her. It cannot, I think, have prejudiced her in my favour.

I remember little of that journey with Max except his extraordinary kindness, tact, and sympathy. He managed to distract me by talking a good deal about his own doings and thoughts. He bandaged my ankle repeatedly, and helped me along to the dining-car, which I do not think I could have reached by myself, especially with the jolting of the Orient Express as it gathered strength and speed. One remark I do remember.

We had been running alongside the sea on the Italian Riviera. I had been half asleep, sitting back in my corner, and Max had come into my carriage and sitting opposite me. I woke up and found him studying me, thoughtfully.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you really have a noble face.’ This so astonished me that I woke up a little more. It was a way I should never have thought of describing myself–certainly nobody else had ever done so.

A noble face–had I? It seemed unlikely. Then a thought occurred to me.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that is because I have rather a Roman nose.’ Yes, I thought, a Roman nose. That would give me a slightly noble profile.

I was not quite sure that I liked the idea. It was the kind of thing that was difficult to live up to. I am many things: good-tempered, exuberant, scatty, forgetful, shy, affectionate, completely lacking in self-confidence, moderately unselfish; but noble–no, I can’t see myself as noble. However, I relapsed into sleep, rearranging my Roman nose to look its best–full-face, rather than profile.


VI

It was a horrible moment when I first lifted the telephone on my arrival in London. I had had no news now for five days. Oh, the relief when my sister’s voice told me that Rosalind was much better, out of danger, and making a rapid recovery. Within six hours I was in Cheshire.

Although Rosalind was obviously mending fast, it was a shock to see her. I had had little experience then of the rapidity with which children go up and down in illness. Most of my nursing experience had been amongst grown men, and the frightening way in which children can look half dead one moment and in the pink the next was practically unknown to me. Rosalind had the appearance of having grown much taller and thinner, and the listless way she lay back in an arm-chair was so unlike my girl.

The most notable characteristic of Rosalind was her energy. She was the kind of child who was never still for a moment; who, if you returned from a long and gruelling picnic, would say brightly: ‘There’s at least half an hour before supper-what can we do? It was not unusual to come round the corner of the house and find her standing on her head.

‘What on earth are you doing that for, Rosalind?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, just putting in time. One must do something? But here was Rosalind lying back, looking frail and delicate, and completely devoid of energy. All my sister said was, ‘You should have seen her a week ago. She really looked like death.’

Rosalind mended remarkably quickly. Within a week of my return she was down in Devonshire, at Ashfield, and seemed almost back to her old self–though I did my best to restrain her from the perpetual motion which she wished to renew.

Apparently Rosalind had gone back to school in good health and spirits. All had gone well until an epidemic of influenza passed over the school, and half the children went down with it. I suppose flu on top of the natural weakness after measles had led to pneumonia. Everybody was worried about her though a little doubtful about my sister’s removing her by car to the north. But Punkie had insisted, being sure that it was the best thing–and so indeed it had proved to be.

Nobody could have made a better recovery than Rosalind did. The doctor pronounced her as strong and fit as she had ever been–if not more so, ‘She seems,’ he added, ‘a very live wire.’ I assured him that toughness had always been one of Rosalind’s qualities. She was never one to admit she was ill. In the Canary Islands, she had suffered from tonsilitis but never breathed a word about it except to say: ‘I am feeling very cross? I had learnt by experience that when Rosalind said she was feeling very cross, there were two possibilities: either she was ill or it was a literal statement of fact–she was feeling cross, and thought it only fair to warn us of the fact.

Mothers are, of course, partial towards their children-why should they not be–but I cannot help believing that my daughter was more fun than most. She had a great talent for the unexpected answer. So often you know beforehand what children are going to say, but Rosalind usually surprised me. Possibly it was the Irish in her. Archie’s mother was Irish, and I think it was from the Irish side of her ancestry that she got her unexpectedness.

‘Of course,’ said Carlo to me with that air of impartiality she liked to assume, ‘Rosalind can be maddening sometimes. I get furious with her.

All the same I find other children very boring after her. She may be maddening, but she is never boring.’ That, I think, has held true throughout her fife.

We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then, whereas at twenty we put on a show of being someone else, of being in the mode of the moment. If there is an intellectual fashion, you become an intellectual; if girls are fluffy and frivolous, you are fluffy and frivolous. As life goes on, however, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned.

I wonder if the same holds good for writing. Certainly, when you begin to write, you are usually in the throes of admiration for some writer, and, whether you will or no, you cannot help copying their style. Often it is not a style that suits you, and so you write badly. But as time goes on you are less influenced by admiration. You still admire certain writers, you may even wish you could write like them, but you know quite well that you can’t. Presumably, you have learnt literary humility. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do. As the Bible say, ‘Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’

Often there flashes through my head a picture of the plate which hung upon my nursery wall: one which I think I must have won at a coconut shy at one of the regattas. ‘Be a wheel-greaser if you can’t drive a train’ is written across it–and never was there a better motto with which to go through life. I think I have kept to it. I have had a few tries at this and that, mind you, but I have never stuck to trying to do things which I do badly, and for which I do not have a natural aptitude. Rumer Godden, in one of her books, once wrote down a list of the things she liked and the things she didn’t like. I found it entertaining, and immediately wrote down a list of my own. I think I could add to that now by writing down things I can’t do and things I can do. Naturally, the first list is much the longer.

I was never good at games; I am not and never shall be a good conversationalist;

I am so easily suggestible that I have to get away by myself before I know what I really think or need to do. I can’t draw; I can’t paint; I can’t model or do any kind of sculpture; I can’t hurry without getting rattled; I can’t say what I mean easily-I can write it better.

I can stand fast on a matter of principle, but not on anything else. Although I know tomorrow is Tuesday, if somebody tells me more than four times that tomorrow is Wednesday, after the fourth time I shall accept that it is Wednesday, and act accordingly.

What can I do? Well, I can write. I could be a reasonable musician, but not a professional one. I am a good accompanist to singers. I can improvise things when in difficulties–this has been a most useful accomplishment; the things I can do with hairpins and safety pins when in domestic difficulties would surprise you. It was I who fashioned bread into a sticky pill, stuck it on a hairpin, attached the hairpin with sealing wax on the end of a window pole, and managed to pick up my mother’s false teeth from where they had fallen on to the conservatory roof!

I successfully chloroformed a hedgehog that was entangled in the tennis net and so managed to release it. I can claim to be useful about the house.

And so on and so forth. And now for what I like and don’t like.

I don’t like crowds, being jammed up against people, loud voices, noise, protracted talking, parties, and especially cocktail parties, cigarette smoke and smoking generally, any kind of drink except in cooking, marmalade, oysters, lukewarm food, grey skies, the feet of birds, or indeed the feel of a bird altogether. Final and fiercest dislike: the taste and smell of hot milk.

I like sunshine, apples, almost any kind of music, railway trains, numerical puzzles and anything to do with numbers, going to the sea, bathing and swimming, silence, sleeping, dreaming, eating, the smell of coffee, lilies of the valley, most dogs, and going to the theatre.

I could make much better lists, much grander-sounding, much more important, but there again it wouldn’t be me, and I suppose I must resign myself to being me.



Now that I was starting life again, I had to take stock of my friends. All that I had gone through made for a kind of acid test. Carlo and I compiled between us two orders: the Order of the Rats and the Order of the Faithful Dogs. We would sometimes say of someone, ‘Oh yes, we will give him the Order of the Faithful Dogs, first class,’ or, ‘We will give him the Order of the Rats, third class.’ There were not many Rats, but there were some rather unexpected ones: people who you had thought were your true friends, but who turned out anxious to disassociate themselves from anybody who had attracted notoriety of the wrong sort. This discovery, of course, made me more sensitive and more inclined to withdraw from people. On the other hand, I found many most unexpected friends, completely loyal, who showed me more affection and kindness than they had ever done before.

I think I admire loyalty almost more than any other virtue. Loyalty and courage are two of the finest things there are. Any kind of courage, physical or moral, arouses my utmost admiration. It is one of the most important virtues to bring to life. If you can bear to live at all, you can bear to live with courage. It is a must.

I found many worthy members of the Order of Faithful Dogs amongst my men friends. There are faithful Dobbins in most women’s lives, and I was particularly touched by one of these who arrived at a Dobbin-like gallop. He sent me enormous bunches of flowers, wrote me letters, and finally asked me to marry him. He was a widower, and some years older than I was. He told me that when he had first met me earlier, he had thought me far too young, but that now he could make me happy and give me a good home. I was touched by this, but I had no wish to marry him, nor indeed had I ever had any such feelings towards him. He had been a good, kind friend, and that was all. It is heartening to know that someone cares–but it is most foolish to marry someone simply because you wish to be comforted, or to have a shoulder to cry upon.

In any case, I did not wish to be comforted. I was scared of marriage.

I realised, as I suppose many women realise sooner or later, that the only person who can really hurt you in life is a husband. Nobody else is close enough. On nobody else are you so dependent for the everyday companionship, affection, and all that makes up marriage. Never again, I decided, would I put myself at anyone’s mercy.

One of my Air Force friends in Baghdad had said something to me that disquieted me. He had been discussing his own marital difficulties, and said at the end: ‘You think you have arranged your life, and that you can carry it on in the way you mean to do, but it will come to one of two things in the end. You will have either to take a lover or to take several lovers.

You can make a choice between those two.’ Sometimes I had an uneasy feeling that what he said was right. But better either of those alternatives, I thought, than marriage. Several lovers could not hurt you. One lover could, but not in the way a husband could. For me, husbands would be out. At the moment all men were out–but that, my Air Force friend had insisted, would not last.

What did surprise me was the amount of passes that were made as soon as I was in the slightly equivocal position of being separated from or having divorced a husband. One young man said to me, with the air of finding me thoroughly unreasonable: ‘Well, you’re separated from your husband, and I gather probably divorcing him, so what else can you expect?’

At first I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was pleased or annoyed by these attentions. I thought on the whole that I was pleased. One is never too old to be insulted. On the other hand it made sometimes for tiresome complications–in one case with an Italian. I brought it on myself by not understanding Italian conventions. He asked me if I found the noise of the coaling of the boat kept me awake at night, and I said no because my cabin was on the starboard side away from the quay. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought you had cabin thirty-three.’ ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘mine’s an even number: sixty-eight.’ That was surely an innocent enough conversation from my point of view? I did not realise that to ask the number of your cabin was the convention by which an Italian asked if he might visit you there. Nothing more was said, but some time after midnight my Italian appeared. A very funny scene ensued. I did not speak Italian, he spoke hardly any English, so we both argued in furious whispers in French, I expressing indignation, he also expressing indignation but of a different kind. The conversation ran something like:

‘How dare you come to my cabin.’

‘You invited me here.’

‘I did nothing of the sort.’

‘You did. You told me your cabin number was sixty-eight.’

‘Well, you asked me what it was.’

‘Of course I asked you what it was. I asked you what it was because I wanted to come to your cabin. And you told me I could.’

‘I did nothing of the sort.’

This proceeded for some time, every now and then rising heatedly, until I hushed him down. I was quite sure that a rather prim Embassy doctor and his wife, who were in the next cabin to me, were forming the worst possible conjectures. I urged him angrily to go away. He insisted that he should stay. In the end his indignation rose to the point when it became greater than mine, and I began apologising to him for not realising that his question had been in effect a proposition. I got rid of him at last, still injured but finally accepting that I was not the experienced woman of the world he had thought. I also explained to him, which seemed to calm him down even more, that I was English and therefore frigid by nature. He condoled with me on this, and so honour–his honour–was satisfied. The Embassy doctor’s wife gave me a cold look the next morning.

It was not until a good deal later that I discovered that Rosalind had sized up my various admirers from the beginning in a thoroughly practical fashion. ‘Well I thought of course you’d marry again some time, and naturally I was a bit concerned as to who it would be,’ she explained.

Max had now returned from his stay in France with his mother. He said he would be working at the British Museum, and hoped I would let him know if I was up in London. This did not seem likely just at present, as I was settled at Ashfield. But then it happened that my publishers, Collins, were throwing a large party at the Savoy to which they particularly wanted me to come to meet my American publishers and other people.

I would have appointments pretty well all that day, so in the end I went up by the night train, and invited Max to come and have breakfast with me at the Mews house.

I was delighted at the thought of seeing him again, but strangely enough, the moment he arrived I was stricken with shyness. After the journey we had done together and the friendly terms on which we had been, I could not imagine why I was so thoroughly paralysed. He too, I think, was shy. However, by the end of breakfast, which I cooked for him, we were getting back to our old terms. I asked him if he could stay with us in Devon, and we fixed up a weekend when he could come. I was very pleased that I was not going to lose touch with him.



I had followed up The Murder of Roger Ackroyd with The Seven Dials Mystery. This was a sequel to my earlier book The Secret of Chimneys, and was one of what I called ‘the light-hearted thriller type’. These were always easy to write, not requiring too much plotting and planning.

I was gaining confidence over my writing now. I felt that I would have no difficulty in producing a book every year, and possibly a few short stories as well. The nice part about writing in those days was that I directly related it to money. If I decided to write a story, I knew it would bring me in £60, or whatever it was. I could deduct income tax–at that time 4/- or 5/- in the pound–and therefore I knew that I had a good £45 which was mine. This stimulated my output enormously. I said to myself, ‘I should like to take the conservatory down and fit it up as a loggia in which we could sit. How much will that be?’ I got my estimate, I went to my typewriter, I sat, thought, planned, and within a week a story was formed in my mind. In due course I wrote it, and then I had my loggia.

How different from the last ten or twenty years of my life. I never know what I owe. I never know what money I have. I never know what money I shall have next year–and anyone who is looking after my income tax is always arguing over problems arising several years previously, which have not yet been ‘agreed’. What can one do in circumstances like this?

But those were the sensible days. It was what I always call my plutocratic period. I was beginning to be serialised in America, and the money that came in from this, besides being far larger than anything I ever made from serial rights in Britain, was also at that time free of income tax.

It was regarded as a capital payment. I was not getting the sums I was to receive later, but I could see them coming, and it seemed to me that all I had to do was to be industrious and rake in the money.

Now I often feel that it might be as well if I never wrote another word, because if I do it will only make further complications.



Max came down to Devon. We met at Paddington and went down by the midnight train. Things always happened when I was away. Rosalind greeted us with her usual bouncing good spirits, and immediately announced disaster. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘has bitten Freddie Potter in the face.’

That one’s precious resident cook-housekeeper has had her precious child bitten in the face by one’s precious dog is the last news one wishes to hear on returning to one’s household.

Rosalind explained that it had not really been Peter’s fault: she had told Freddie Potter not to put his face near Peter and make whooping noises.

‘He came nearer and nearer to Peter, zooming, so of course Peter bit him.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I don’t suppose Mrs Potter understands that.’

‘Well, she’s not been too bad about it. But of course, she’s not pleased.’

‘No, she wouldn’t be.’

‘Anyway,’ said Rosalind, ‘Freddie was very brave about it. He always is,’ she added, in loyal defence of her favourite playmate. Freddie Potter, the cook’s little boy, was junior to Rosalind by about three years, and she enormously enjoyed bossing him about, taking care of him, and acting the part of the munificent protector, as well as being a complete tyrant in arranging what games they played. ‘It’s lucky, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘that Peter didn’t bite his nose right off? If so, I suppose I should have had to look for it and stick it on some way or other–I don’t know quite how I mean, I suppose you would have to sterilise it first, or something, wouldn’t you? I don’t see quite how you would sterilise a nose. I mean you can’t boil it.’

The day turned out to be one of those indecisive days which might be fine, but, to those experienced in Devonshire weather, was almost certain to be wet. Rosalind proposed we should go for a picnic on the moor.

I was keen on this, and Max agreed, with an appearance of pleasure.

Looking back, I can see that one of the things my friends had to suffer out of affection for me was my optimism about weather, and my misplaced belief that on the moor it would be finer than in Torquay. Actually the reverse was almost certain to be the case. I used to drive my faithful Morris Cowley, which was of course an open touring car, and which had an elderly hood with several gaps in its structure, so that, sitting in the back, water coursed steadily down the back of your neck. In all, going for a picnic with the Christies was a distinct endurance test.

So we started off and the rain came on. I persisted, however, and told Max of the many beauties of the moor, which he could not quite see through the driving mist and rain. It was a fine test for my new friend from the Middle East. He certainly must have been fond of me to have endured it and preserve his air of enjoying himself.

When we eventually got home and dried ourselves, then had got wet all over again in hot baths, we played a great many games with Rosalind.

And next day, since it was also rather wet, we put on our mackintoshes and went for rousing walks in the rain with the unrepentant Peter, who was, however, by now on the best of terms once more with Freddie Potter.

I was very happy being with Max again. I realised how close our companionship had been; how we seemed to understand each other almost before we spoke. Nevertheless, it was a shock to me when the next night, after Max and I had said goodnight and I had gone to bed, as I was lying there reading, there was a tap at the door and Max came.

He had a book in his hand which I had lent him.

‘Thank you for lending me this,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it.’ He put it down beside me. Then he sat down on the end of my bed, looked at me thoughtfully, and said that he wanted to marry me. No Victorian Miss exclaiming, ‘Oh, Mr Simpkins, this is so sudden!’ could have looked more completely taken aback than I did. Most females, of course, know pretty well what is in the wind–in fact they can see a proposal coming days ahead and can deal with it in one of two ways: either they can be so off-putting and disagreeable that their suitor becomes disgusted with his choice or they can let him gently come to the boil and get it over. But I know now that one can say perfectly genuinely, ‘Oh Mr Simpkins, this is so sudden!’

It had never occurred to me that Max and I would be or ever could be on those terms. We were friends. We had become instant and closer friends, it seemed to me, than I and any friend had ever been before.

We had a ridiculous conversation that there seems not much point in writing down here. I said immediately that I couldn’t. He asked why couldn’t I? I said for every reason. I was years older than he was–he admitted that, and said he had always wanted to marry someone older than he was. I said that was nonsense and it was a bad thing to do. I pointed out he was a Catholic, and he said he had considered that also–in fact, he said, he had considered everything. The only thing, I suppose, that I didn’t say, and which naturally I would have said if I had felt it, was that I didn’t want to marry him–because, quite suddenly, I felt that nothing in the world would be as delightful as being married to him.

If only he was older or I was younger.

We argued, I think, for about two hours. He gradually wore me down–not so much with protestations as with gentle pressure.

He departed the next morning by the early train, and as I saw him off he said: ‘I think you will marry me, you know-when you have had plenty of time to think it over.’

It was too early in the morning to marshal my arguments again.

Having seen him off I went back home in a state of miserable indecision.

I asked Rosalind if she liked Max. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I like him very much. I like him better than Colonel R. and Mr B.’ One could trust Rosalind to know what was going on, but to have the good manners not to mention it openly.

How awful those next few weeks were. I was so miserable, so uncertain, so confused. First I decided that the last thing I wanted to do was to marry again, that I must be safe, safe from ever being hurt again; that nothing could be more stupid than to marry a man many years younger than myself; that Max was far too young to know his own mind; that it wasn’t fair to him–he ought to marry a nice young girl; that I was just beginning to enjoy life on my own. Then, imperceptibly, I found my arguments changing. It was true that he was much younger than I was, but we had so much in common. He was not fond of parties, gay, a keen dancer; to keep up with a young man like that would have been very difficult for me. But surely I could walk round museums as well as anyone, and probably with more interest and intelligence than a younger woman.

I could go round all the churches in Aleppo and enjoy it; I could listen to Max talking about the classics; could learn the Greek alphabet and read translations of the Aeneid–in fact I could take far more interest in Max’s work and his ideas than in any of Archie’s deals in the City.

I could go round all the churches in Aleppo and enjoy it; I could listen to Max talking about the classics; could learn the Greek alphabet and read translations of the Aeneid–in fact I could take far more interest in Max’s work and his ideas than in any of Archie’s deals in the City.

‘But you mustn’t marry again,’ I said to myself. ‘You mustn’t be such a fool.‘

The whole thing had happened so insidiously. If I had considered Max as a possible husband when I first met him, then I should have been on my guard. I should never have slipped into this easy, happy relationship. But I hadn’t seen this coming–and there we were, so happy, finding it all as much fun and as easy to talk to each other as if we had been married already.

Desperately I consulted my home oracle. ‘Rosalind,’ I said, ‘would you mind if I married again?’

‘Well, I expect you will sometime,’ said Rosalind, with the air of one who always considers all possibilities. ‘I mean, it is the natural thing to do, isn’t it?’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘I shouldn’t have liked you to marry Colonel R.,’ said Rosalind thoughtfully. I found this interesting, as Colonel R. had made a great fuss of Rosalind and she had appeared delighted with the games he had played for her enjoyment.

I mentioned the name of Max.

‘I think he’d be much the best,’ said Rosalind. ‘In fact I think it would be a very good thing if you did marry him.’ Then she added: ‘We might have a boat of our own, don’t you think? And he would be useful in a lot of ways. He is rather good at tennis, isn’t he? He could play with me.’ She pursued the possibilities with the utmost frankness, considering them entirely from her own utilitarian point of view. ‘And Peter likes him’ said Rosalind, in final approval.

All the same, that summer was one of the most difficult of my life. One person after another was against the idea. Perhaps really, at bottom, that encouraged me. My sister was firmly against it. The age difference! Even my brother-in-law, James, sounded a note of prudence.

‘Don’t you think,’ he said, ‘that you may have been rather well–influenced by the life you enjoyed so much? The archaeological life? That you enjoyed being with the Woolleys at Ur? Perhaps you have mistaken that for what isn’t quite such a warm feeling as you think.’

But I knew that wasn’t so.



‘Of course, it’s entirely your own business,’ he added gently. Dear Punkie, of course, did not at all think it was my own business–she thought it was her own particular business to save me from making a silly mistake. Carlo, my own very dear Carlo, and her sister, were towers of strength. They supported me, though entirely through loyalty, I think. I believe they, too, probably, thought it a silly thing to do, but they would never have said so because they were not the kind of people who wanted to influence anyone in their plans. I am sure they thought it a pity that I had not the desire to marry an attractive colonel of forty-two, but as I had decided otherwise, well, they would back me up.

I finally broke the news to the Woolleys. They seemed pleased. Certainly Len was pleased; with Katharine it was always more difficult to tell.

‘Only,’ she said firmly, ‘you mustn’t marry him for at least two years.’ ‘Two years?’ I said, dismayed.

‘No, it would be fatal.’

‘Well, I think,’ I said, ‘that’s very silly. I am already a great many years older than he is. What on earth is the point of waiting until I am older still? He might as well have such youth as I’ve got.’

‘I think it would be very bad for him,’ said Katharine. ‘Very bad for him at his age to think he can have everything he wants at once. I think it would be better to make him wait for it–a good long apprenticeship.’

This was an idea that I could not agree with. It seemed to me to be a severe and puritanical point of view.

To Max I said that I thought his marrying me was all wrong, and that he must think it over very carefully.

‘What do you suppose I’ve been doing for the last three months?’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all the time I was in France. Then I thought: “Well, I shall know when I see her again, in case I have imagined everything.’ But I hadn’t. You were just as I remembered you, and you were just as I want you.’

‘It’s a terrible risk.’

‘It’s not a risk for me. You may think it a risk for you. But does it matter taking risks? Does one get anywhere if one doesn’t take risks?’

To that I agreed. I have never refrained from doing anything on the grounds of security. I was happier after that. I felt, ‘Well, it is my risk, but I believe it is worth taking a risk to find a person with whom you are happy. I shall be sorry if it goes wrong for him, but after all that is his risk, and he is regarding it quite sensibly.’ I suggested we might wait for six months. He said he did not think that would be any good. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘I’ve got to go abroad again, to Ur. I think we ought to get married in September.’ I talked to Carlo and we made our plans.

I had had so much publicity, and been caused so much misery by it, that I wanted things kept as quiet as possible. We agreed that Carlo and Mary Fisher, Rosalind and I should go to Skye and spend three weeks there. Our marriage banns could be called there, and we would be married quietly in St. Columba’s Church in Edinburgh.

Then I took Max up to visit Punkie and James–James, resigned but sad, Punkie actively endeavouring to prevent our marriage.

In fact I came very near to breaking the whole thing off just before, in the train going up, as Max, paying more attention to my account of my family than he had so far, said: ‘James Watts, did you say? I was at New College with a Jack Watts. Could that have been your one’s son? A terrific comedian–did wonderful imitations.’ I felt shattered that Max and my nephew were contemporaries. Our marriage seemed impossible. ‘You are too young,’ I said desperately. ‘You are too young.’ This time Max was really alarmed. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I went to the University rather young, and all my friends were so serious; I wasn’t at all in Jack Watts’ gay set.’ But I felt conscience-stricken.

Punkie did her best to reason with Max, and I began to be afraid that he would take a dislike to her, but the contrary proved true. He said she was so genuine, and so desperately anxious for me to be happy–and also, he added, so funny. That was always the final verdict on my sister. ‘Dear Punkie,’ my nephew Jack used to say to his mother, ‘I do love you–you are so funny and so sweet.’ And really that described her very well.

The visit finished with Punkie retiring in storms of tears, and James being very kind to me. Fortunately my nephew Jack was not there–he might have upset the applecart.

‘Of course I knew at once that you had made up your mind to marry him,’ said my brother-in-law. ‘I know that you don’t change your mind.’

‘Oh Jimmy, you don’t know. I seem to be changing it all day long.’

‘Not really. Well, I hope it turns out all right. It’s not what I would have chosen for you, but you have always shown good sense, and I think he is the sort of young man who might go far.’

How much I loved dear James, and how patient and long-suffering he always was. ‘Don’t mind Punkie,’ he said. ‘You know what she is like–she’ll turn right round when it’s really done.’

Meanwhile we kept it a secret.

I asked Punkie if she would like to come to Edinburgh to our marriage, but she thought she had better not. ‘I shall only cry,’ she said, ‘and upset everyone.’ I was really rather thankful. I had my two good, calm Scottish friends to provide a stalwart background for me. So I went to Skye with them and with Rosalind.

I found Skye lovely, I did sometimes wish it wouldn’t rain every day, though it was only a fine misty rain which did not really count. We walked miles over the moor and the heather, and there was a lovely soft earthy smell with a tang of peat in it.

One of Rosalind’s remarks caused some interest in the hotel dining-room a day or two after our arrival. Peter, who was with us, did not, of course, attend meals in the public rooms, but Rosalind, in a loud voice, in the middle of lunch, announced to Carlo: ‘Of course, Carlo, Peter really ought to be your husband, oughtn’t he? I mean, he sleeps in your bed, doesn’t he?’ The clientele of the hotel, mostly old ladies, as one person turned a barrage of eyes upon Carlo.

Rosalind also gave me a few words of advice on the subject of marriage: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘when you are married to Max, you will have to sleep in the same bed as him?’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Well, yes, I supposed you did know, because after all you were married to Daddy, but I thought you might not have thought of it.’ I assured her I had thought of everything relevant to the occasion.

So the weeks passed. I walked on the moor and had fits of occasional misery when I thought I was doing the wrong thing and ruining Max’s life.

Meanwhile Max threw himself into an extra amount of work at the British Museum and elsewhere, finishing off his drawings of pots and archaeological work. The last week before the marriage he stayed up till five in the morning every night, drawing. I have a suspicion that Katharine Woolley induced Len to make the work even heavier than it might have been: she was much annoyed with me for not postponing the marriage.

Before we left London, Len had called round to see me. He was so embarrassed that I couldn’t think what was the matter with him.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it is perhaps going to make it rather awkward for us. I mean at Ur and in Baghdad. I mean it wouldn’t be–you do understand?–it wouldn’t be in any way possible for you to come on the expedition. I mean, there is no room for anyone but archaeologists.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘I quite understand that–we’ve talked it over. I’ve no useful knowledge of any kind. Both Max and I thought it would be much better this way, only he didn’t want to leave you high and dry at the beginning of the season, where there would be very little time to find anybody else to replace him.’

‘I thought…I know…’ Len paused. ‘I thought perhaps that–well, I mean people might think it rather odd if you didn’t come to Ur.’

‘Oh, I don’t know why they should think that,’ I said. ‘After all, I shall come out at the end of the season to Baghdad.’

‘Oh yes, and I hope you will come down then and spend a few days at Ur.’

‘So that’s all right, isn’t it?’ I said encouragingly.

‘What I thought–what we thought–I mean, what Katharine–I mean, what we both thought…’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘-was that it might be better if you didn’t come to Baghdad–now. I mean, if you are coming with him as far as Baghdad, and then he goes to Ur and you go home, don’t you think that perhaps it would look odd? I mean, I don’t know that the Trustees would think it a good idea.’

That suddenly aroused my annoyance. I was quite willing not to come to Ur. I should never have suggested it, because I thought it would be a very unfair thing to do: but I could see no reason why I could not come to Baghdad if I wanted to.

Actually I had already decided with Max that I did not want to come to Baghdad: it would be a rather meaningless journey. We were going to Greece for our honeymoon, and from Athens he would go to Iraq and I should return to England. We had already arranged this, but at this moment I was not going to say so.

I replied with some asperity: ‘I think Len, it is hardly for you to suggest to me where I should and should not travel in the Middle East. If I want to come to Baghdad, I shall come there with my husband, and it is nothing to do with the dig or with you.’

‘Oh! Oh, I do hope you don’t mind. It was just that Katharine thought…’

I was quite sure that it was Katharine’s thought, not Len’s. Though I was fond of her, I was not going to have her dictate my life. When I saw Max, therefore, I said that though I did not propose to come to Baghdad, I had carefully not told Len that that was so. Max was furious. I had to calm him down.

‘I’m almost inclined to insist that you come,’ he said.

‘That would be silly. It would mean a lot of expense, and it would be rather miserable parting from you there.’

It was then that he told me that he had been approached by Dr Campbell-Thompson and that there was a possibility that in the following year he would go and dig at Nineveh in the north of Iraq. In all probability I should be able to accompany him there. ‘Nothing is settled,’ he said. ‘It all has to be arranged. But I am not going to be parted from you for another six months the season after this. Len will have had plenty of time to find a successor by then.’

The days passed in Skye, my banns were duly read in church, and all the old ladies sitting round beamed on me with the kindly pleasure all old ladies take in something romantic like marriage.

Max came up to Edinburgh, and Rosalind and I, Carlo, Mary, and Peter came over from Skye. We were married in the small chapel of St Columba’s Church. Our wedding was quite a triumph–there were no reporters there and no hint of the secret had leaked out. Our duplicity continued, because we parted, like the old song, at the church door. Max went back to London to finish his Ur work for another three days, while I returned the next day with Rosalind to Cresswell Place, where I was received by my faithful Bessie, who was in on the secret. Max kept away, then two days later drove up to the door of Cresswell Place in a hired Daimler. We drove off to Dover and from thence crossed the Channel to the first stopping-place of our honeymoon, Venice.

Max had planned the honeymoon entirely himself: it was going to be a surprise. I am sure nobody enjoyed a honeymoon better than we did. There was only one jarring spot on it, and that was that the Orient Express, even in its early stages before Venice, was once again plagued by the emergence of bed-bugs from the woodwork.

Posted in An Autobiography