PART X. The second war

I

And so we were back again in wartime. It was not a war like the last one. One expected it to be, because I suppose one always does expect things to repeat themselves.
The first war came with a shock of incomprehension, as something unheard of, impossible, something that had never happened in living memory, that never would happen. This war was different.

At first, there was an almost incredulous surprise that nothing happened. One expected to hear that London was bombed that first night. London was not bombed.

I think everyone was trying to ring up everyone else. Peggy MacLeod, my doctor friend from Mosul days, rang up from the east coast, where she and her husband practised, to ask if I would have their children. She said: ‘We are so frightened here–this is where it will all start, they say. If you can have the children, I’ll start off in the car to bring them down to you.’ I said that would be quite all right: she could bring them and the nurse too if she liked; so that was settled.

Peggy MacLeod arrived next day, having motored day and night across England with Crystal, my godchild, who was three years old, and David, who was five. Peggy was worn out. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without benzedrine,’ she said. ‘Look here, I’ve got an extra thing of it here. I had better give it to you. It may be useful to you some time when you are absolutely exhausted.’ I have still got that small flat tin of benzedrine: I have never used it. I have kept it, perhaps as an insurance against the moment when I should be utterly exhausted.

We got organised, more or less, and there we sat, waiting for something to happen. But since nothing did happen, little by little we went on with our own pursuits and some additional war activities.

Max joined the Home Guard, which was really like a comic opera at that time. There were hardly any guns–one between eight men, I think. Max used to go out with them every night. Some of the men enjoyed themselves very much–and some of the wives were deeply suspicious as to what their husbands were doing under this pretence of guarding the country. Indeed, as months passed and nothing happened, it became an uproarious and cheerful gathering. In the end, Max decided to go to London. Like everybody else, he was clamouring to be sent abroad, to be given some work to do–but all anyone seemed to want to do was to say: ‘Nothing could be done at the present’–‘Nobody was wanted.’

I went to the hospital at Torquay and asked if they would let me work in the dispensary there to freshen up my knowledge in case I should be useful to them later. Since casualty cases were expected all the time, the chief dispenser there was quite willing to have me. She brought me up to date with the various medicines and things that were prescribed nowadays. On the whole it was much simpler than it had been in my young days, there were so many pills, tablets, powders and things already prepared in bottles.

The war started, when it did start, not in London or on the east coast, but down in our part of the world. David MacLeod, a most intelligent boy, was crazy about aeroplanes, and did a great deal towards teaching me the various types. He showed me pictures of Messerschmitts and others, and pointed out Hurricanes and Spitfires in the sky.

‘Now have you got it right, this time?’ he would say anxiously. ‘You see what that is up there?’

It was so far away it was only a speck, but I said hopefully it was a Hurricane.

‘No,’ said David, disgusted. ‘You make a mistake every time. That is a Spitfire.’

On the following day he remarked, looking up at the sky, ‘That is a Messerschmitt coming over now.’

‘No, no, dear,’ I said, ‘it isn’t a Messerschmitt. It’s one of ours–it’s a Hurricane.’

‘It’s not a Hurricane.’

‘Well it’s a Spitfire, then.’

‘It is not a Spitfire, it’s a Messerschmitt. Can’t you tell a Hurricane or a Spitfire from a Messerschmitt?’

‘But it can’t be a Messerschmitt,’ I said. At that moment two bombs dropped on the hillside.

David looked very like weeping. ‘I told you it was a Messerschmitt,’ he said, in a voice of lament.

That same afternoon, when the children were going across the ferry in the boat with nurse, a plane swooped down and machine-gunned all the craft on the river. Bullets had gone all round nurse and the children, and she came back somewhat shaken. ‘I think you had better ring up Mrs MacLeod,’ she said. So I did ring up Peggy, and we wondered what to do.

‘Nothing has happened here,’ said Peggy. ‘I suppose it may start any time. I don’t think they ought to come back here do you?’

‘Perhaps there won’t be any more,’ I said.

David had been excited over the bombs, and insisted on going to see where they had fallen. Two had fallen in Dittisham by the river, and some others up on the hill behind us. We found one of these by scrambling through a lot of nettles and a hedge or two, and finally came upon three farmers, all looking at a bomb crater in the field, and at another bomb which appeared to have dropped without exploding.

‘Dang it all,’ said one farmer, administering a hearty kick to the unexploded bomb, ‘regular nasty it is, I call it, sending those things down-nasty!

He kicked it again. It seemed to me it would be much better if he did not kick it, but he obviously wished to show his contempt for all the works of Hitler.

‘Can’t even explode properly,’ he said with disparagement.

They were, of course, all very small bombs, compared to what we were to get later in the war–but there it was: hostilities had begun. Next day there was news from Cornworthy, a little village further up the Dart: a plane there had swooped down and sprayed the school playground when the children were out at play. One of the mistresses had been hit in the shoulder.

Peggy rang me again, and said she had arranged for the children to go to Colwyn Bay, where their grandmother lived. It seemed to be peaceful there, at any rate.

The children departed, and I was terribly sorry to lose them. Soon afterwards a Mrs Arbuthnot wrote to me and wanted me to let the house to her. Now that the bombing had started, children were being evacuated to various parts of England. She wished to have Greenway for a nursery for children evacuated from St. Pancras.

The war seemed to have shifted from our part of the world; there was no more bombing; and in due course Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot arrived, took over my butler and his wife, and established two hospital nurses and ten children under five. I had decided that I would go to London and join Max, who was working there on Turkish Relief.

I arrived in London, just after the raids, and Max, having met me at Paddington, drove me to a flat in Half Moon Street. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically, ‘it is a pretty nasty one. We can look around for something else.’

What slightly put me off, when I arrived, was the fact that the house in question stood up like a tooth–the houses on either side of it were missing. They had apparently been hit by a bomb about ten days before, and for that reason the flat was available for rent, its owners having cleared out quickly. I can’t say I felt very comfortable in that house. It smelt horribly of dirt and grease and cheap scent.

Max and I moved after a week into Park Place, off St. James’s Street, which had once been rather an expensive service flat. We lived there for some little time, with noisy sessions of bombs going off all round us. I was particularly sorry for the waiters, who had to serve meals in the evening and then take themselves home through the air raids.

Presently our tenants in Sheffield Terrace asked if they could give up the lease of our house, so we moved back in.

Rosalind had filled in forms for the Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force, but she was not particularly enthusiastic about it, and thought on the whole that she would prefer to go as a landgirl.

She went for an interview with the W.A.A.F. and showed herself lamentably lacking in tact. When asked why she wanted to join she merely said: ‘Because one must do something and this will do as well as anything else.’ That, though candid, was not, I think, well received. A little later, after a brief period delivering school meals and doing work in a military office somewhere, she said she thought she might as well join the A.T.S. They weren’t, she said, as bossy as the W.A.A.F. She filled up a fresh set of papers.

Then Max, to his great joy, got into the Air Force, helped by our friend Stephen Glanville, who was a Professor of Egyptology. He and Max were both at the Air Ministry, where they shared a room, both of them smoking–Max a pipe–without ceasing. The atmosphere was such that it was called by all their friends ‘the small cat-house’.



Events happened in confusing order. I remember that Sheffield Terrace was bombed on a weekend when we were away from London. A land-mine came down exactly opposite it, on the other side of the street, and completely destroyed three houses. The effect it had on 48 Sheffield Terrace was to blow up the basement, which might have been presumed the safest place, and to damage the roof and the top floor, leaving the ground and first floors almost unharmed. My Steinway was never quite the same afterwards.

Since Max and I had always slept in our own bedroom, and never went down to the basement, we should not have suffered any personal damage even if we had been in the house. I myself never went down to any shelter during the war. I always had a horror of being trapped under-ground–so I slept in my own bed no matter where I was. I became used in the end to raids on London–so much so, that I hardly woke up. I would think, half drowsily, that I heard the siren, or bombs not too far away.

‘Oh dear, there they are again!’ I would mutter, and turn over.

One of the difficulties with the bombing of Sheffield Terrace was that by this time it was difficult to get storage space anywhere in London. As the house now was, it was difficult to get into it through the front door and one could only get access to it by ladder. In the end, I prevailed upon a firm to move me, and hit upon the idea of storing the furniture at Wallingford, in the squash court which we had built a year or two previously. So everything was moved down there. I had builders in attendance ready to take out the squash court door and its framework if necessary–and this they had to do because the sofa and chairs would not go through the narrow doorway.

Max and I moved to a block of flats in Hampstead–Lawn Road Flats–and I started work at University College Hospital as a dispenser.

When Max broke to me what he had already known, I think, for some time, that he would have to go abroad to the Middle East, probably North Africa or Egypt, I was glad for him. I knew how he had been fretting to go, and it seemed right, too, that his knowledge of Arabic should be used. It was our first parting for ten years.

Lawn Road Flats was a good place to be since Max had to be away. They were kindly people there. There was also a small restaurant, with an informal and happy atmosphere. Outside my bedroom window, which was on the second floor, a bank ran along behind the flats planted with trees and shrubs. Exactly opposite my window was a big, white, double cherry-tree which came to a great pyramidal point. The effect of the bank was much like that in the second act of Barrie’s Dear Brutus, when they turn to the window and find that Lob’s wood has come right up to the window-panes. The cherry-tree was especially welcome. It was one of the things in spring that cheered me every morning when I woke.

There was a little garden at one end of the flats, and on summer evenings one could have meals out there, or sit out. Hampstead Heath, too, was only about ten minutes’ walk away, and I used to go there and take Carlo’s James for walks. I had the Sealyham with me because Carlo was now working in a munition factory and unable to have him there. They were very good to me at University College Hospital: they let me bring him to the dispensary. James behaved impeccably. He laid his white sausage-like body out under the shelves of bottles and remained there, occasionally accepting kind attentions from the charwoman when she was cleaning.



Rosalind had successfully not been accepted for the W.A.A.F. and various other kinds of war work, without settling, as far as I could see, to anything in particular. With a view to joining the A.T.S. she filled up a large number of forms with dates, places, names, and all the unnecessary information officialdom has to have. Then she suddenly remarked: ‘I tore up all those forms this morning. I am not going to join the A.T.S. after all.’

‘Really, Rosalind!’ I said severely. ‘You must make up your mind about things. I don’t care what you do–do exactly the sort of thing you fancy–but don’t keep starting to do things, then tearing forms up and changing your mind.’

‘Well, I’ve thought of something better to do,’ said Rosalind. She added, with the extreme reluctance that all young people of her generation seem to have in imparting any information to their parents: ‘As a matter of fact, I am going to marry Hubert Prichard next Tuesday.’

This was not completely a surprise, except for the fact that the date was fixed for Tuesday of the following week.

Hubert Prichard was a Major in the regular Army, a Welshman; Rosalind had met him at my sister’s, where he had come originally as a friend of my nephew Jack. He had been down once to stay with us at Greenway, and I liked him very much. He was quiet, dark, extremely intelligent, and owned a number of greyhounds. He and Rosalind had been friends for some time now, but I had rather given up the idea that anything was coming of it.

‘I suppose,’ said Rosalind, ‘I suppose you want to come to the wedding, Mother?’

‘Of course I want to come to the wedding,’ I said.

‘I supposed you would…But really it is a quite unnecessary fuss, I think. I mean, don’t you think it would really be simpler for you and less tiring if you didn’t? We’ll have to get married up at Denbigh, you know, because he can’t get leave.’

‘That’s all right,’ I assured her. ‘I’11 come to Denbigh.’

‘You are sure you really want to?’ said Rosalind, as a last hope.

‘Yes,’ I said firmly. Then I said: ‘I’m rather surprised that you told me you were going to get married, instead of announcing it afterwards.’ Rosalind blushed, and I saw I had touched upon the truth. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘Hubert made you tell me.’

‘Well–well, yes,’ said Rosalind, ‘in a way. He said, too, that I am under twenty-one still.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘you had better resign yourself to my being there.’ There was something oyster-like about Rosalind that always made one laugh, and I couldn’t help laughing now.

I travelled with Rosalind to Denbigh by train. Hubert came and picked her up at the hotel in the morning. He had one of his brother officers with him, and we went to the Registrar’s office, where the ceremony was performed, with the minimum of fuss! The only hitch in the whole proceedings was that the aged Registrar flatly refused to believe that Rosalind’s father’s name and title were correctly styled: ‘Colonel Archibald Christie, C.M.G., D.S.O., R.F.C.

‘If he was in the Air Force, he can’t be a Colonel,’ said the Registrar. ‘But he is,’ said Rosalind, ‘that is his proper rank and title.’ ‘He must be a Wing-Commander,’ said the Registrar.

‘No, he is not a Wing-Commander.’ Rosalind did her best to explain that twenty years ago the Royal Air Force had not yet come into being. The Registrar continued to say that he had never heard of it, so I added my testimony to Rosalind’s, and finally he grudgingly wrote it down.


II

So time went on, now not so much like a nightmare as something that had been always going on, had always been there. It had become, in fact, natural to expect that you yourself might be killed soon, that the people you loved best might be killed, that you would hear of deaths of friends. Broken windows, bombs, land-mines, and in due course flying-bombs and rockets–all these things would go on, not as something extraordinary, but as perfectly natural. After three years of war, they were an everyday happening. You could not really envisage a time when there would not be a war any more.

I had plenty to keep me occupied. I worked two whole days, three half-days, and alternate Saturday mornings at the Hospital. The rest of the time I wrote.

I had decided to write two books at once, since one of the difficulties of writing a book is that it suddenly goes stale on you. Then you have to put it by, and do other things–but I had no other things to do. I had no wish to sit and brood. I believed that if I wrote two books, and alternated the writing of them, it would keep me fresh at the task. One was The Body in the Library, which I had been thinking of writing for some time, and the other one was N or M?, a spy story, which was in a way a continuation of the second book of mine, The Secret Adversary, featuring Tommy and Tuppence. Now with a grown-up son and daughter, Tommy and Tuppence were bored by finding that nobody wanted them in wartime. However, they made a splendid come-back as a middle-aged pair, and tracked down spies with all their old enthusiasm.

I never found any difficulty in writing during the war, as some people did; I suppose because I cut myself off into a different compartment of my mind. I could live in the book amongst the people I was writing about, and mutter their conversations and see them striding about the room I had invented for them.

Once or twice I went down to stay with Francis Sullivan, the actor, and his wife. They had a house at Haslemere, with Spanish chestnut woods all round it.

I always found it restful to stay with actors in wartime, because to them, acting and the theatrical world were the real world, any other world was not. The war to them was a long drawn-out nightmare that prevented them from going on with their own lives, in the proper way, so their entire talk was of theatrical people, theatrical things, what was going on in the theatrical world, who was going into E.N.S.A.–it was wonderfully refreshing.

Then I would be back again in Lawn Road, my face covered with a pillow as a protection against flying glass, and on a chair by my side, my two most precious possessions: my fur coat, and my hot-water-bottle–a rubber hot-water-bottle, something at that time quite irreplaceable. Thus I was ready for all emergencies.

Then something unexpected happened. I opened a letter and found it was a notification that the Admiralty were preparing to take over Greenway, practically at a moment’s notice.

I went down there, and met a polite young naval lieutenant. He could give me hardly any time at all, he said. He had been unimpressed by the plight of Mrs Arbuthnot, who, having first tried to fight against the order, was now pleading for time to confer with the Ministry of Health as to where to move her nursery. The Ministry of Health cut no ice at all when it came into opposition with the Admiralty. They all moved out, and there I was left, with a household of furniture to move! The trouble was that there was nowhere to move it to. Again, no removal or storage firm anywhere had any room: every warehouse was already full to the ceiling. Finally, I got on to the Admiralty and they agreed that I should have the use of the drawing-room, in which all the furniture could be stored, and also one small room on the top floor.

While the work of furniture-moving was in progress Hannaford, the gardener, who was a faithful old rogue, devoted to anyone he had served for long enough, took me aside and said, ‘You look now what I’ve saved for you from Her.’ I had no idea who Her might be, but I accompanied him to the clock tower above the stables. There, leading me through a kind of secret door, he showed me with great pride an enormous quantity of onions on the floor, covered with straw, and also a mass of apples.

‘Come to me afore she went, she did, and said, were there any onions and apples, because as she’d take ‘em with her, but I wasn’t going to let Her have them–no fear, I wasn’t. Said most of the crop had failed, and I just gave her enough as was good for her. Why, they apples were grown here, and so were those onions–she’s not going to have ‘em, take them away to the Midlands or the East Coast or wherever she’s going.’

I was touched by Hannaford’s feudal spirit, though nothing could have been more embarrassing. I would a thousand times rather Mrs Arbuthnot had taken away all the apples and onions; now they were landed on my hands, with Hannaford wagging his tail like a dog who has retrieved something you don’t want from the river.

We packed up cases of apples, and I sent them to relations who had children and might like them. I could not face returning to Lawn Road with two hundred odd onions. I tried to wish them on to various hospitals, but there were far too many onions for anyone to want.

Though our Admiralty was conducting the negotiations, it would be the United States Navy which would take over Greenway. Maypool, the big house above us on the hill, was to accommodate the ratings, and the officers of the flotilla were to take over our house.

I cannot speak too highly of the kindness of the Americans, and the care they took of our house. It was inevitable, of course, that the kitchen quarters should be more or less a shambles–they had to cook for about forty people, and they put in some ghastly great smoky stoves–but they were very careful with our mahogany doors; in fact the Commander had them all walled up in ply-wood. They appreciated the beauty of the place too. A good many of this particular flotilla came from Louisiana, and the big magnolias, and especially the magnolia grandiflora, made them feel at home.

Ever since the war, relations of some officer or other who was at Greenway have come along to see where their son or cousin or whoever it was had been stationed. They have told me how he wrote about it and how he had described the place. I have been round the garden with them sometimes, trying to identify certain parts of it he had particularly loved, though it is not always easy because of the way things have grown up.

By the third year of the war of all my various houses none was available to me at the moment I wanted it. Greenway was taken by the Admiralty; Wallingford was full of evacuees, and as soon as they went back to London, some other friends of ours–an elderly invalid and his wife–rented Wallingford from me, and their daughter and her child joined them there. 48 Campden Street I had sold at an excellent profit. Carlo, had shown the people over it. ‘I won’t take less than £3,500 for it,’ I had said to her. It seemed a lot to us at that time. Carlo came back rather pleased with herself. ‘I’ve made them pay an extra £500,’ she said. ‘I thought they deserved to.’

‘What do you mean, deserved to?’

‘They were rude,’ said Carlo, who had a real Scottish dislike of what she called insolence.

‘They said disparaging things about it in front of me, which they shouldn’t have done. They said “What hideous decorations! All this flowered wallpaper–I’ll soon change that!’ “How extraordinary some people are–fancy taking that partition wall down!’ So I thought,’ said Carlo, ‘they had better have a lesson–and I put up the price £500.’ Apparently they had paid without a qualm.

I have a war memorial of my own at Greenway. In the library, which was their mess-room, an artist has done a fresco round the top of the walls. It depicts all the places where that flotilla went, starting at Key West, Bermuda, Nassau, Morocco, and so on, finally ending with a slightly glorified exaggeration of the woods of Greenway and the white house showing through the trees. Beyond that again is an exquisite nymph, not quite finished–a pin-up girl in the nude–which I have always supposed to represent the hopes of houris at journey’s end when the war was at last over. The Commander wrote and asked me if I would like this fresco painted out and the wall put back as it was. I hurriedly replied it would bean historic memorial, and that I was delighted to have it. Over the mantelpiece were sketched out roughly the heads of Winston Churchill, Stalin and President Roosevelt. I wish I knew the name of the artist.

When I left Greenway I felt sure that it would be bombed and that I would never see it again, but, luckily, all my presentiments were wrong. Greenway was untouched. Fourteen lavatories were added, instead of the larder, and I had to fight the Admiralty to take them away again.


III

My grandson Mathew was born in Cheshire, on Sept 21, 1943, at a nursing home close by my sister’s house. Punkie, devoted to Rosalind as she always had been, was delighted that she should come back for the baby to be born. My sister was the most indefatigable woman I have ever known; a kind of human dynamo. Since her father-in-law’s death, she and James had come to live in Abney, which, as I have already mentioned, was an enormous house, with fourteen bedrooms, masses of sitting-rooms, and in my young days, when I first went to stay there, sixteen indoor servants. Now there was nobody in the house except my sister and a former kitchen-maid, since married, who came in and cooked the meals every day.

When I stayed there, I would hear my sister moving around at about half-past five any morning. She did the whole house then–dusted it, tidied it, swept it, did the fires, cleaned brass, and polished furniture, and then started calling people with early tea. After breakfast she cleaned the baths, then finished up the bedrooms. By half-past ten there was no more housework to do, so she then rushed into the kitchen garden–which was filled with new potatoes, rows of peas, French beans, broad beans, asparagus, little carrots, and all the rest of it. A weed never dared lift its head in Punkie’s kitchen garden. The rosebeds and beds around the house never had a weed either.

She had taken on a chow dog whose officer master had been unable to look after it, and the chow always slept in the billiard room. One morning, when she came down and looked into the billiard room, she saw the chow sitting quietly in his basket, but the main part of the floor had an enormous bomb nestling cosily in it. The night before there had been a lot of incendaries on the roof, and everybody had been up there helping to put them out. This particular bomb had come down into the billiard room, unheard among the general din, and had not exploded.

My sister rang up the disposal people, who rushed along. After examining it, they said everybody must be out of there in twenty minutes. ‘Just take anything essential.’

‘And what do you think I took?’ asked my sister, ‘Really one is quite mad when one gets rattled.’

‘Well, what did you take?’ I asked.

‘Well, first I took Nigel and Ronnie’s personal things’–those were her two billeted officers at that time–‘because I thought it would be so awful if anything happened to them. And I took my toothbrush and washing things, of course–and then I couldn’t think of anything else to take. I looked all over the house, but my brain went blank. So for some reason I took that great bouquet of wax flowers in the drawing-room.’

‘I never knew you were particularly fond of that,’ I said.

‘But I’m not,’ said Punkie, ‘that’s the curious part of it.’

‘Didn’t you take your jewellery or a fur-coat?’

‘Never thought of it,’ she said.

The bomb was taken away and duly exploded, and fortunately no more incidents of that kind occurred.

In due course I got a telegram from Punkie and rushed up there, to find Rosalind looking very proud of herself in a nursing-home and inclined to be boastful of her baby’s strength and size.

‘He’s a monster,’ she said with a face of delight. ‘A terrifically big baby–a real monster!’

I looked at the monster. He was looking well and happy, with a crinkled-up face and a slight grin which was probably wind but looked like amiability.

‘You see?’ said Rosalind; ‘I forget what length they told me he was–but he’s a monster!’

So there the monster was, and everybody was happy. And when Hubert and his faithful batman Barry came to see the baby, there was indeed jubilation. Hubert was as pleased as Punch, and so was Rosalind.

It had been arranged that Rosalind would go to live in Wales after the baby was born. Hubert’s father had died in December, 1942, and his mother was moving to a smaller house nearby. Now the plans went ahead. Rosalind was to remain in Cheshire for three weeks after the birth, then a nurse, who was ‘between babies’ as she put it, would be with her to look after her and the baby while she settled in Wales. There I also would assist her, as soon as things were ready for her to go.

Nothing, of course, was easy in wartime. Rosalind and the nurse came to London, and I put them in 47 Campden Street. Since Rosalind was still slightly weak, I used to come over from Hampstead and cook dinner for them in the evening. To begin with I did breakfast in the morning as well, but Nurse, once she was sure that her status as a hospital-nurse-who-did-no-work-in-the-house was not assailed, declared herself willing to deal with breakfast herself. Unfortunately, though, the bombs were getting worse again. Night after night, it seemed, we sat there anxiously. When the alarm went off we pushed Mathew in his carry-cot underneath a solid papier-mache table with a thick glass top, as the heaviest thing we could find to put him under. It was worrying for a young mother, and I wished badly that I had either Winterbrook House or Greenway.



Max was now in North Africa. He had started in Egypt, but was now in Tripoli. Later he went down to the Fezzan Desert. Letters were slow, and I sometimes did not hear from him for over a month. My nephew Jack was also abroad in Iran.

Stephen Glanville was still in London, and I was glad to have him there. Sometimes he would call for me at the Hospital and take me back to his house at Highgate to dine. We usually celebrated if one or other of us had received a food parcel.

‘I’ve got some butter from America–can you bring a tin of soup?’

‘I’ve been sent two tins of lobster, and a whole dozen eggs–brown.‘

One day he announced real fresh herrings–from the East Coast. We arrived in the kitchen, and Stephen unwrapped his parcel. Alas–alas! O lovely herrings that might have been. There was only one place for them now–the hot water boiler. A sad evening.

One’s friends and acquaintances had begun to vanish by this stage of the war. You could no longer keep in touch with the people you used to know; you seldom even wrote to your friends.

Two close friends I did contrive to see were Sidney and Mary Smith. He was Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum; a prima donna by temperament, and a man of most interesting thoughts. His views on anything were unlike anybody else’s, and if I spent half an hour talking to him I went away so stimulated by the ideas he had put into my head that I left the house feeling as though I was walking on air. He always aroused violent resistance in me, so that I had to argue every point with him. He could not and did not want to agree with people. Once he disapproved of people, or disliked them, he never relented. On the other hand, if you were once really a friend of his, you were a friend of his. That was that. His wife, Mary, was an extremely clever painter, and a beautiful woman, with lovely grey hair, and a long slender neck. She had also the most devastating common sense, like the tang of a really good savoury served for dinner.

The Smiths were extremely good to me. They lived not far away, and I was always welcome to come there after I had left the Hospital, and talk to Sidney for an hour. He would lend me books that he thought it would interest me to read, and would sit there, rather like a Grecian philosopher of old, while I sat at his feet, feeling like a humble disciple.

He enjoyed my detective stories, though his criticisms of them were unlike anybody else’s. About something that I didn’t think good he would often say, ‘That’s the best point in that book of yours.’ Anything that I was pleased with he would say, ‘No, it’s not up to your best–you were below standard there.’



One day Stephen Glanville attacked me. ‘I’ve got a project I’ve thought out for you.’

‘Oh, what’s that?’

‘I want you to write a detective story about ancient Egypt.’ ‘About ancient Egypt?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I couldn’t’

‘Oh yes, you could. There is no difficulty at all. There is no reason why a detective story shouldn’t be just as easy to place in ancient Egypt as in 1943 in England.’

I saw what he meant. People are the same in whatever century they live, or where.

‘And it would be so interesting,’ he said. ‘One ought to have a detective story written so that someone who enjoys reading detective stories and reading about those times can combine his pleasures.’

Again I said I couldn’t do anything of that kind. I didn’t know enough. But Stephen was an extraordinarily persuasive man, and by the end of the evening he had almost convinced me that I could.

‘You’ve read a lot of Egyptology,’ he said. ‘You are not only interested in Mesopotamia.’

It was true that one of the books I had been fondest of in the past, was Breasted’s The Dawn of Conscience, and that I had read a good deal of Egyptian history when I had written my play about Akhnaton.

‘All you want to do is fix on a period, or an incident, some definite setting,’ said Stephen.

I had a terrible feeling that the die was cast.

‘But you would have to give me some ideas,’ I said weakly, ‘as to what time or place.’

‘Well,’ said Stephen, ‘there is an incident or two here that might do–’ He pointed out one or two things in one of the books he took from his shelves. Then he gave me half a dozen or so more books, drove me and the books home to Lawn Road Flats, and said: ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday. You can have a nice two days reading through these and see what strikes your imagination.’

In the end I had marked down three possibly interesting points–none of them particularly well-known incidents, or about well-known figures, because I think that is what so often makes novels set in historic periods seem so phoney. After all, one doesn’t really know anything of what King Pepi or Queen Hatshepsut was like, and to pretend you do is a kind of arrogance. But you can place a character of your own creation in those times, and as long as you know enough of the local colour and the general feeling of the period it would be all right. One of my choices was a fourth dynasty incident, another very much later–in the time, I think, of one of the later Rameses–and the third one, the one which I finally decided upon, was drawn from recently published letters from a Ka priest in the IIth Dynasty.

These letters painted to perfection the picture of a living family: the father, fussy, opinionated, annoyed with his sons who did not do what he said; the sons, one obedient but obviously not bright, and the other, sharp-tempered, showy, and extravagant. The letters the father wrote to his two sons were about how he must take care of a certain middle-aged woman, obviously one of those poor relations who all through the ages live with families, to whom the heads of families are always kindly, whereas the children usually grow up disliking them because they are often sycophants and makers of mischief.

The old man laid down rules about how they were to do so-and-so with the oil, and so-and-so with the barley. They were not to let this person or that person cheat them over the quality of certain foods. The whole family grew clearer and clearer in my mind. I added a daughter, and some details from one or two other texts–the arrival of a new wife, by whom the father was besotted. I also threw in a spoilt small boy and a greedy but shrewd grandmother.

Excited, I started work. I had no book on hand at the moment. Ten Little Niggers had been successfully running at the St. James’ Theatre until that theatre was bombed; it then transferred to the Cambridge for some further months. I was just playing about with a new idea for a book, so this was just the moment to get started on an Egyptian detective story.

There is no doubt that I was bullied into it by Stephen. There was no doubt, either, that if Stephen was determined that I should write a detective story set in ancient Egypt, I should have to do so. He was that kind of man.

As I pointed out to him in the ensuing weeks and months, he must have become extremely sorry that he had urged me to do anything of the sort. I was continually ringing him up and demanding information which, as he said, only took me three minutes to ask for, but which he usually had to look through eight different books to find. ‘Stephen, what did they eat for meals? How did they have their meat cooked? Were there any special things for special feasts? Did the men and women eat together? What sort of rooms did they sleep in?’

‘Oh dear,’ Stephen would groan, and then he would have to look up things, pointing out to me that one has to deduce a great deal from little evidence. There were pictures of reed birds on spits being served, pictures of loaves, of bunches of grapes being picked–and so on. Anyway, I got enough to make my daily life of the period sound all right, and then I came back with a few more queries.

‘Did they eat at the table, or on the floor? Did the women occupy a separate part of the house? Did they keep linen in chests or in cupboards? What sort of houses did they have?’

Houses were far more difficult to find out about than temples or palaces, owing to the fact that the temples and palaces were still there, being built of stone, whereas houses had been of more perishable material.

Stephen argued with me a great deal on one point of my denouement, and I am sorry to say that I gave in to him in the end. I was always annoyed with myself for having done so. He had a kind of hypnotic influence about that sort of thing; He was so positive himself that he was right that you couldn’t help having doubts yourself. Up to then, on the whole, though I have given in to people on every subject under the sun, I have never given in to anyone over what I write.

If I think I have got a certain thing right in a book–the way it should be–I’m not easily moved from it. In this case, against my better judgment, I did give in. It was a moot point, but I still think now, when I re-read the book, that I would like to re-write the end of it–which shows that you should stick to your guns in the first place, or you will be dissatisfied with yourself. But I was a little hampered by the gratitude I felt to Stephen for all the trouble he had taken, and the fact that it had been his idea to start with. Anyway, Death Comes as the End was duly written.

Shortly after that, I wrote the one book that has satisfied me completely. It was a new Mary Westmacott, the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken. Through her own actions, her own feelings and thoughts, this would be revealed to the reader. She would be, as it were, continually meeting herself, not recognising herself, but becoming increasingly uneasy. What brought about this revelation would be the fact that for the first time in her life she was alone–completely alone–for four or five days.

I had the background now, which I had not had in my mind before. It would be one of those resthouses on journeys through Mesopotamia, where you are immobilised, you cannot travel on, there is no one there but natives who hardly speak English–who bring you meals and nod their heads and agree to what you say. There is nowhere to go, no one to see, and you are stuck there till you can go on. So you sit and think about yourself, having read the only two books you have with you. You think about yourself. And my starting point–I had always known what that would be–was when she was leaving Victoria, going out to see one of her daughters who was married abroad, looking back as the train moved out of the station, at her husband’s back retreating up the platform, and the sudden pang it gave her as he went striding along, striding along just like a man who was terrifically relieved, who was released from bondage, who was going to have a holiday. It was so surprising that she could hardly believe her eyes. Of course she was mistaken, of course Rodney was going to miss her terribly, and yet–that little seed–it would stay in her mind worrying her; and then, she was all alone and began thinking, the pattern of her life would unroll little by little. It was going to be technically difficult to do, the way I wanted it; lightly, colloquially, but with a growing feeling of tension, of uneasiness, the sort of feeling one has–everyone has, sometime, I think–of who am I? What am I like really? What do all the people I love think of me? Do they think of me as I think they do?

The whole world looks different; you begin to see it in different terms. You keep reassuring yourself, but the suspicion, the anxiety comes back.

I wrote that book in three days flat. On the third day, a Monday, I sent an excuse to the Hospital, because I did not dare leave my book at that point–I had to go on until I had finished it. It was not a long book–a mere fifty thousand words–but it had been with me a long time.

It is an odd feeling to have a book growing inside you, for perhaps six or seven years knowing that one day you will write it, knowing that it is building up, all the time, to what it already is. Yes, it is there already–it just has to come more clearly out of the mist. All the people are there, ready, waiting in the wings, ready to come on to the stage when their cues are called–and then, suddenly, one gets a clear and sudden command: Now!

Now is when you are ready. Now, you know all about it. Oh, the blessing that for once one is able to do it then and there, that now is really now.

I was so frightened of interruptions, of anything breaking the flow of continuity, that after I had written the first chapter in a white heat, I proceeded to write the last chapter, because I knew so clearly where I was going that I felt I must get it down on paper. Otherwise I did not have to interrupt anything–I went straight through.

I don’t think I have ever been so tired. When I finished, when I had seen that the chapter I had written earlier needed not a word changed, I fell on my bed, and as far as I remember slept more or less for twenty-four hours straight through. Then I got up and had an enormous dinner, and the following day I was able to go to the Hospital again.

I looked so peculiar that everyone was upset about me there. ‘You must have been really ill,’ they said, ‘you have got the most enormous circles under your eyes.’ It was only fatigue and exhaustion, but to have that fatigue and exhaustion was worth-while when for once writing had been no difficulty–no difficulty at all, that is, beyond the physical effort. Anyway, it was a very rewarding experience to have had.

I called the book Absent in the Spring, from that sonnet of Shakespeare’s which begins with those words: ‘From you have I been absent in the spring.’ I don’t know myself, of course, what it is really like. It may be stupid, badly written, no good at all. But it was written with integrity, with sincerity, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy an author can have.

A few years later I wrote another book of Mary Westmacott–called The Rose and the Yew Tree. It is one I can always read with great pleasure, though it was not an imperative, like Absent in the Spring. But there again, the idea behind the book had been with me a long time–in fact since about 1929. Just a sketchy picture, that I knew would come to life one day.

One wonders where these things come from–I mean the ones that are a must. Sometimes I think that is the moment one feels nearest to God, because you have been allowed to feel a little of the joy of pure creation. You have been able to make something that is not yourself. You know a kinship with the Almighty, as you might on a seventh day, when you see that what you have made is good.

I was to make one more variation from my usual literary work. I wrote a book out of nostalgia, because I was separated from Max, could so seldom get news of him, and recalled with such poignant remembrance the days we had spent in Arpachiyah and in Syria. I wanted to re-live our life, to have the pleasure of remembering–and so I wrote Come, Tell Me How You Live, a light-hearted frivolous book; but it does mirror the times we went through, so many little silly things one had forgotten. People have liked that book very much. There was only a small edition of it, because paper was short.

Sidney Smith, of course, said to me: ‘You can’t publish that, Agatha.’ ‘I’m going to,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You had better not publish that.’

‘But I want to.’ Sidney Smith looked at me disapprovingly. It was not the kind of sentiment he would approve of. Doing what you personally wanted did not go with Sidney’s somewhat Calvinist outlook.

‘Max might not like it.’

I considered that doubtfully.

‘I don’t think he’ll mind. He’ll probably like remembering about all the things we did, too. I would never try to write a serious book about archaeology; I know that I’d make far too many silly mistakes. But this is different, this is personal. And I am going to publish it,’ I continued. ‘I want something to hold on to, to remember. You can’t trust your own memory. Things go. So that’s why I want to publish it.’

‘Oh! well,’ said Sidney. He still sounded doubtful. However, ‘Oh! well’ was a concession when it came from Sidney.

‘Nonsense,’ said his wife Mary. ‘Of course you can publish it. Why not? It is very amusing. And I quite see what you mean about liking to remember and read back over it.’

The other people who didn’t like it were my publishers. They were suspicious and disapproving, afraid that I was getting completely out of hand. They had hated Mary Westmacott writing anything. They were now prepared to be suspicious of Come, Tell Me How You Live, or anything, in fact, that enticed me away from mystery stories. However, the book was a success, and I think they then regretted that paper was so short. I published it under the name of Agatha Christie Mallowan so that it should not be confused with any of my detective books.


IV

There are things one does not want to go over in one’s mind again. Things that you have to accept because they have happened, but you don’t want to think of them again.

Rosalind rang me up one day and told me that Hubert, who had been in France now for some time, had been reported missing, believed killed.

That is, I think, the most cruel thing that can happen to any young wife in wartime. The awful suspense. To have your husband killed is bad enough; but it is something you have got to live with, and you know that you have. This fatal holding out of hope is cruel, cruel… And no one can help you.

I went down to join her, and stayed at Pwllywrach for some time. We hoped–of course one always hopes–but I don’t think Rosalind, in her own heart, ever did quite hope. She had always been one to expect the worst. And I think, too, that there had always been something about Hubert–not exactly melancholy, but that touch or look of someone who is not fated for long life. He was a dear person; good to me always, with, I think, a great vein, not exactly of poetry, but of something of that kind in him. I wish I had had a greater chance to know him better; not just a few short visits and encounters.

It was not for a good many months that we got any further news. Rosalind, I think, had had the news for a full twenty-four hours before she said anything to me. She had behaved just the same as usual; she was and always has been a person of enormous courage. Finally, hating to do so but knowing it had to be done, she said abruptly: ‘You had better see this, I suppose,’ and she handed me the telegram which reported that he was now definitely classified as killed in action.

The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering. You can do things to aid people’s physical disabilities; but you can do little to help the pain of the heart. I thought, I may have been wrong, that the best thing I could do to help Rosalind was to say as little as possible, to go on as usual. I think that would have been my own feeling. You hope no one will speak to you, or enlarge upon things. I hope that was best for her, but you cannot know for another person. It may be it would have been easier for her if I had been the determined kind of mother who broke her down and insisted on her being more demonstrative. Instinct cannot be infallible. One wants so badly not to hurt the person one loves–not to do the wrong thing for them. One feels one ought to know, but one can never be sure.

She continued to live at Pwllywrach in the big empty house with Mathew–an enchanting little boy, and always, in my memory, such a happy little boy: he had a great knack for happiness. He still has. I was so glad that Hubert saw his son; that he knew he had a son, though it sometimes seemed more cruel to know that he was not to come back and live in the home he loved, or to bring up the son whom he had wanted so much.

Sometimes one cannot help a tide of rage coming over one when one thinks of war. In England we had too much war in too short a time.

The first war seemed unbelievable, amazing; it seemed so unnecessary. But one did hope and believe that the thing had been scotched then, that the wish for war would never arise again in the same German hearts. But it did–we know now, from the documents which are part of history, that Germany was planning for war in the years before the Second War came.

But one is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one! War, I think, has had its time and place; when, unless you were warlike, you would not live to perpetuate your species–you would die out. To be meek, to be gentle, to give in easily, would spell disaster; war was a necessity then, because either you or the others would perish. Like a bird or animal, you had to fight for your territory. War brought you slaves, land, food, women–the things you needed to survive. But now we have got to learn to avoid war, not because of our nicer natures or our dislike of hurting others, but because war is not profitable, we shall not survive war, but shall, as well as our adversaries, be destroyed by war. The time of the tigers is over; now, no doubt, we shall have the time of the rogues and the charlatans, of the thieves, the robbers and pickpockets; but that is better–it is a stage on the upward way.

There is at least the dawn, I believe, of a kind of good will. We mind when we hear of earthquakes, of spectacular disasters to the human race. We want to help. That is a real achievement; which I think must lead somewhere. Not quickly–nothing happens quickly–but at any rate we can hope. I think sometimes we do not appreciate that second virtue which we mention so seldom in the trilogy–faith, hope and charity. Faith we have had, shall we say, almost too much of–faith can make you bitter, hard, unforgiving; you can abuse faith. Love we cannot but help knowing in our own hearts is the essential. But how often do we forget that there is hope as well, and that we seldom think about hope? We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, ‘What’s the good of doing anything?’ Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age.

We have made ourselves a Welfare State, which has given us freedom from fear, security, our daily bread and a little more than our daily bread; and yet it seems to me that now, in this Welfare State, every year it becomes more difficult for anybody to look forward to the future. Nothing is worth-while. Why? Is it because we no longer have to fight for existence? Is living not even interesting any more? We cannot appreciate the fact of being alive. Perhaps we need the difficulties of space, of new worlds opening up, of a different kind of hardship and agony, of illness and pain, and a wild yearning for survival?

Oh well, I am a hopeful person myself. The one virtue that would never, I think, be quenched for me, would be hope. That is where I always have found my dear Mathew such a rewarding person to be with. He has always had an incurably optimistic temperament. I remember once when he was at his prep school, and Max was asking him whether he thought he had any chance of getting into the First Cricket Eleven. ‘Oh well,’ said Mathew, with a beaming smile, ‘there’s always hope!’

One should adopt something like that, I think, as one’s motto in life. It made me mad with anger to hear of one middle-aged couple who had been living in France when the war broke out. When they thought the Germans might be approaching on their march across France, they decided the only thing to be done was to commit suicide, which they did. But the waste! The pity of it! They did no good to anyone by their suicide. They could have lived through a difficult life of enduring, of surviving. Why should one give up any hope until one is dead?

It reminds me of the story that my American godmother used to tell me years and years ago about two frogs who fell into a pail of milk. One said: ‘Ooh, I’m drowning, I’m drowning!’ The other frog said, ‘I‘m not going to drown.’ ‘How can you stop drowning?’ asked the other frog. ‘Why, I’m going to hustle around, and hustle around, and hustle around like mad,’ said the second frog. Next morning the first frog had given up and drowned, and the second frog, having hustled around all night, was sitting there in the pail, right on top of a pat of butter.



Everyone, I think, got a bit restless towards the last years of the war. Ever since D-day there was a feeling that there could be an end to the war, and many people who had said there couldn’t were beginning to eat their words.

I began to feel restless. Most patients had moved out of London, though of course there were still the out-patients. Even there, one sometimes felt, it was not as it had been in the last war, where you were patching up wounded men straight from the trenches. Half the time, now, you had only to give out large quantities of pills to epileptics–necessary work, but it lacked that involvement with war that one felt one needed. The mothers brought their babies to the Welfare–and I used to think they often would have done much better to have kept them at home. In this the chief pharmacist entirely agreed with me.

I considered one or two projects at this time. One young friend of mine who was in the W.A.A.F. arranged for me to see a friend of hers with a view to doing some intelligence photographic work. I was furnished with an impressive pass which enabled me to wander through what seemed miles of subterranean corridors underneath the War Office, and I was finally received by a grave young lieutenant who frightened me to death. Although I had had a lot of experience in photography, the one thing I had never done and knew nothing about was aerial photography. In consequence, I found it practically impossible to recognise any photograph that was shown me. The only one I was reasonably sure of was one of Oslo, but I had become so defeatist by that time that I didn’t dare say so, having made several boss shots already. The young man sighed, looked at me as the complete moron I was, and said gently: ‘I think perhaps you had better go back to hospital work.’ I departed feeling completely deflated.

Towards the beginning of the war, Graham Greene had written to me and asked if I would like to do propaganda work. I did not think I was the kind of writer who would be any good at propaganda, because I lacked the single-mindedness to see only one side of the case. Nothing could be more ineffectual than a lukewarm propagandist. You want to be able to say ‘X is black as night’ and feel it. I didn’t think I could ever be like that.

But every day now I was getting more restless. I wanted work that had at least something to do with the war. I got an offer to be a dispenser to a doctor in Wendover; it was near where some friends of mine were living. I thought that that would be very nice for me, and I would like being in the country. Only, if Max were to come home from North Africa–and after three years, he might come–I should feel I was treating my doctor badly.

I also had a theatrical project. It was possible that I might go with E.N.S.A. as a sort of extra producer or something on a tour of North Africa. I was thrilled by that idea. It would be wonderful if I got out to North Africa. It was fortunate that I did nothing of the kind. About a fortnight before I would have left England, I got a letter from Max saying that he quite probably would be coming back from North Africa to the Air Ministry in two to three weeks’ time. What misery, if I had arrived out in North Africa with E.N.S.A. just at the moment he came home.

The next few weeks were agony. There I was, all keyed up, waiting. In a fortnight, in three weeks, no, perhaps longer–I told myself that these things always took longer than one expected.

I went down for a weekend to Rosalind in Wales and came back by a late train on the Sunday night. It was one of those trains one had so often to endure in wartime, freezing cold, and of course when one got to Paddington there was no means of getting anywhere. I took some complicated train which finally landed me at a station in Hampstead not too far away from Lawn Road Flats, and from there I walked home, carrying some kippers and my suitcase. I got in, weary and cold, and started by turning on the gas, throwing off my coat and putting my suitcase down. I put the kippers in the frying pan. Then I heard the most peculiar clanking noise outside, and wondered what it could be. I went out on the balcony and I looked down the stairs. Up them came a figure burdened with everything imaginable–rather like the caricatures of Old Bill in the first war–clanking things hung all over him. Perhaps the White Knight would have been a good description of him. It seemed impossible that anyone could be hung over with so much. But there was no doubt who it was–it was my husband! Two minutes later I knew that all my fears that things might be different, that he would have changed, were baseless. This was Max! He might have left yesterday. He was back again. We were back again. A terrible smell of frying kippers came to our noses and we rushed into the flat.

‘What on earth are you eating?’ asked Max.

‘Kippers,’ I said. ‘You had better have one.’ Then we looked at each other. ‘Max!’ I said. ‘You are two stone heavier.’

‘Just about. And you haven’t lost any weight yourself,’ he added.

‘It’s because of all the potatoes,’ I said. ‘When you haven’t meat and things like that, you eat too many potatoes and too much bread.’

So there we were. Four stone between us more than when he left. It seemed all wrong. It ought to have been the other way round.

‘Living in the Fezzan Desert ought to be very slimming,’ I said. Max said that deserts were not at all slimming, because one had nothing else to do but sit and eat oily meals, and drink beer.

What a wonderful evening it was! We ate burnt kippers, and were happy.

Posted in An Autobiography