Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Rosalind throws things at her?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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