However, I have come near it, I think, in The Mystery of the Blue Train. Each time I read it again, I think it commonplace, full of cliches, with an uninteresting plot. Many people, I am sorry to say, like it. Authors are always said to be no judge of their own books
How sad it will be when I can’t write any more, though I should not be greedy. After all, to be able to continue writing at the age of seventy-five is very fortunate. One ought to be content and prepared to retire by then. In fact, I played with the idea that perhaps I would retire this year, but I was lured on by the fact that my last book had sold more than any of the previous ones: it seemed rather a foolish moment to stop writing. Perhaps now I had better make a deadline of eighty?
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find–at the age of fifty, say–that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about. You find that you like going to picture exhibitions, concerts and the opera, with the same enthusiasm as when you went at twenty or twenty-five. For a period, your personal life has absorbed all your energies, but now you are free again to look around you. You can enjoy leisure; you can enjoy things. You are still young enough to enjoy going to foreign places, though you can’t perhaps put up with living quite as rough as you used to. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you. With it, of course, goes the penalty of increasing old age–the discovery that your body is nearly always hurting somewhere: either your back is suffering from lumbago; or you go through a winter with rheumatism in your neck so that it is agony to turn your head; or you have trouble with arthritis in your knees so that you cannot stand long or walk down hills–all these things happen to you, and have to be endured. But one’s thankfulness for the gift of life is, I think, stronger and more vital during those years than it ever has been before. It has some of the reality and intensity of dreams–and I still enjoy dreaming enormously.
IV
By 1948 archaeology was rearing its erudite head once more. Everyone was talking of possible expeditions, and making plans to visit the Middle East. Conditions were now favourable again for digging in Iraq.
Syria had provided the cream of the finds before the war, but now the Iraqi authorities and the Department of Antiquities were offering fair terms. Though any unique objects found would go to the Baghdad Museum, any ‘duplicates’, as they were called, would be divided up and the excavator would get a fair share. So, after a year’s tentative digging on a small scale here and there, people began to resume work in that country. A Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology had been created after the war, of which Max became Professor at the Institute of Archaeology at London University. He would have time for so many months every year for work in the field.
With enormous pleasure we started off once more, after a lapse of ten years, to resume our work in the Middle East. No Orient Express this time, alas! It was no longer the cheapest way–indeed one could not take a through journey by it now. This time we flew–the beginning of that dull routine, travelling by air. But one could not ignore the time it saved. Still sadder, there were no more journeys across the desert by Nairn; you flew from London to Baghdad and that was that. In those early years one still spent a night here or there on the way, but it was the beginning of what one could see plainly was going to become a schedule of excessive boredom and expense without pleasure.
Anyway, we got to Baghdad, Max and I, together with Robert Hamilton, who had dug with the Campbell-Thompsons and later had been Curator of the Museum in Jerusalem. In due course we went up together, visiting sites in the North of Iraq, between the lesser and the greater Zab, until we arrived at the picturesque mound and town of Erbil. From there we went on towards Mosul, and on the way paid our second visit to Nimrud.
Nimrud was just as lovely a part of the country as I remembered it on our visit long ago. Max examined it with particular zeal this time. Before it had not been even a practical possibility, but now, although he did not say so at this moment, something might be done. Once again we picnicked there. We visited a few other mounds, and then reached Mosul.
The result of this tour was that Max finally came into the open and said firmly that all he wanted to do was to dig Nimrud. ‘It’s a big site, and an historic site–a site that ought to be dug. Nobody has touched it for close on a hundred years, not since Layard, and Layard only touched the fringe of it. He found some beautiful fragments of ivory–there must be heaps more. It is one of the three important cities of Assyria. Assur was the religious capital, Nineveh was the political capital, and Nimrud, or Calah, as its name was then, was the military capital. It ought to be dug. It will mean a lot of men, a lot of money, and it will take several years. It has every chance, if we are lucky, of being one of the great sites, one of the historic digs which will add to the world’s knowledge.’
I asked him if he had now had his fun with pre-historic pottery. He said Yes; so many of the questions had been answered now that he was wholly interested in Nimrud as a historic site to dig.
‘It will rank,’ he said, ‘with Tut-ankh-amun’s Tomb, with Knossos in Crete, and with Ur. For a site like this, too,’ he said, ‘you can ask for money.’
Money was forthcoming; not much to start with, but as our finds grew, it increased. The Metropolitan Museum in New York was one of our biggest contributors; there was money from the Gertrude Bell School of Archaeology in Iraq; and many other contributors: the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam, Birmingham. So we began what was to be our work for the next ten years.
This year, this very month, my husband’s book Nimrud and its Remains will be published. It has taken him ten years to write. He has always had the fear that he might not live to complete it. Life is so uncertain, and things like coronary thrombosis, high blood-pressure and all the rest of the modern ills seem to be lying in wait, particularly for men. But all is well. It is his life work: what he has been moving steadily towards ever since 1921. I am proud of him and happy for him. It seems a kind of miracle that both he and I should have succeeded in the work we wanted to do.
Nothing could be further apart than our work. I am a lowbrow and he a highbrow, yet we complement each other, I think, and have both helped each other. Often he has asked me for my judgment on certain points, and whilst I shall always remain an amateur I do know quite a lot about his special branch of archaeology–indeed, many years ago, when I was once saying sadly to Max it was a pity I couldn’t have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject, he said, ‘Don’t you realise that at this moment you know more about pre-historic pottery than almost any woman in England.’
At that moment perhaps I did, though things did not remain like that. I shall never have a professional attitude or remember the exact dates of the Assyrian kings, but I do take an enormous interest in the personal aspects of what archaeology reveals. I like to find a little dog buried under the threshold, inscribed on which are the words: ‘Don’t stop to think, Bite him!’ Such a good motto for a guard-dog; you can see it being written on the clay, and someone laughing. The contract tablets are interesting, throwing light on how and where you sell yourself into slavery, or the conditions under which you adopt a son. You can see Shalmaneser building up his zoo, sending back foreign animals from his campaigns, trying out new plants and trees. Always greedy, I was fascinated when we discovered a stele describing a feast given by the King in which he lists all the things they had to eat. The oddest thing seemed to me, after a hundred sheep, six hundred cows and quantities of that kind, to come down to a mere twenty loaves of bread. Why should it be such a small number? Indeed why have loaves of bread at all?
I have never been a scientific enough digger really to enjoy levels, plans, and all the rest of it, which are discussed with such gusto by the modern school. I am unabashedly devoted to the objects of craftsmanship and art which turn up out of the soil. I daresay the first is more import
ant, but for me there will never be any fascination like the work of human hands: the little pyxis of ivory with musicians and their instruments carved round it; the winged boy; the wonderful head of a woman, ugly, full of energy and personality.
We lived in a portion of the Sheikh’s house in the village between the tell and the Tigris. We had a room downstairs for eating in and stacking things, a kitchen next door to it, and two rooms upstairs–one for Max and myself and a little one over the kitchen for Robert. I had to do the developing in the dining-room in the evenings, so Max and Robert would go upstairs. Every time they walked across the room, bits of mud used to fall off the ceiling and drop into the developing dish. Before starting the next batch, I would go up and say furiously: ‘Do remember that I’m developing underneath you. Every time you move something falls. Can’t you just talk without moving?’
They always used, in the end, to get excited, and rush off to a suit-case to take out a book and consult it, and down would fall the dried mud again.
In the courtyard was a storks’ nest, and the storks used to make a terrific noise mating, with their wings flapping and a noise like the rattling of bones. Storks are highly thought of in most of the Middle East, and everyone treats them with great respect.
When we left at the end of the first season, we got everything settled for building a house of mud-brick actually on the mound. The bricks were made and laid out to be dried, and the roofing was arranged for.
When we came out the following year we were very proud of our house. There was a kitchen; next to it a long mess-room and sitting-room, and next to that a drawing-office and antica-room. We slept in tents. A year or two later we built on to the house: a small office with a desk and a window in front of it through which one could pay the men on pay-day, and on the other, side an epigraphist’s desk. Next to this was the drawing-office and work-room, with trays of things being repaired. Beyond that again was the usual dog-hole in which the wretched photographer had to develop and do loading. Every now and then there was a terrific dust-storm and a wind which came up from nowhere. Immediately we would rush out and hang on to the tents with all our might while all the dust-bin lids blew away. In the end the tents usually came down with a flop, burying someone underneath their folds.
Finally, a year or two later still, I petitioned to be allowed to have a small room added on of my own. This I would pay for myself. So, for £50, I built on a small, square, mud-brick room, and it was there that I began writing this book. It had a window, a table, an upright chair, and the collapsed remains of a former ‘Minty’ chair, so decrepit it was difficult to sit on, but still quite comfortable. On the wall I had hung two pictures by young Iraqi artists. One was of a sad-looking cow by a tree; the other a kaleidoscope of every colour imaginable, which looked like patchwork at first, but suddenly could be seen to be two donkeys with men leading them through the Suq–a most fascinating picture, I have always thought. I left it behind in the end, because everyone was attached to it, and it was moved into the main sitting-room. But some day I think I want to have it back again.
On the door, Donald Wiseman, one of our epigraphists, fixed the placard in cuneiform, which announces that this is the Beit Agatha–Agatha’s House, and in Agatha’s house I went every day to do a little of my own work. Most of the day, however, I spent on photography or on mending and cleaning ivories.
We had a splendid succession of cooks. One of them was mad. He was a Portuguese Indian. He cooked well, but he became quieter and quieter as the season went on. Finally the kitchen boys came and said they were worried about Joseph–he was becoming very peculiar. One day he was missing. We searched for him, and notified the police, but in the end it was the Sheikh’s people who brought him back. He explained that he had had a command from the Lord and had to obey, but he had now been told that he must come back and ascertain the Lord’s wishes. There seemed to be some slight confusion in his mind between the Almighty and Max. He strode round the house, fell on his knees before Max, who was expounding something to some workmen, and kissed the bottom of his trousers, much to Max’s embarrassment.
‘Get up, Joseph,’ said Max.
‘I must do what you command me, Lord. Tell me where to go and I will go there. Send me to Basra and I will go to Basra. Tell me to visit Baghdad and I will visit Baghdad; to go to the snows of the north and I will go to the snows of the north.’
‘I tell you,’ said Max, accepting the role of the Almighty. ‘I tell you to go forthwith to the kitchen, to cook us food for our needs.’
‘I go, Lord,’ said Joseph, who then kissed the turn-up of Max’s trousers once more and left for the kitchen. Unfortunately the wires seemed crossed, for other commands kept coming to Joseph and he used to stray away. In the end we had to send him back to Baghdad. His money was sewn up in his pocket and a wire was dispatched to his relations.
Thereupon our second house-boy, Daniel, said he had a little knowledge of cooking and would carry on for the last three weeks of the season. We had permanent indigestion as a result. He fed us entirely on what he called ‘Scotch eggs’ excessively indigestible, and cooked in most peculiar fat. Daniel disgraced himself before leaving. He had a row with our driver, who then split on him and informed us that he had already salted away in his luggage twenty-four tins of sardines and sundry other delicacies. The riot act was read, Daniel was told that he was disgraced both as a Christian and a servant, that he had lowered the Christian in Arab eyes, and that he would no more be engaged by us. He was the worst servant we ever had.
To Harry Saggs, one of the epigraphists, Daniel went, saying ‘You are the only good man on this dig; you read your Bible–I have seen you. Therefore since you are a good man, you will give me your best pair of trousers.’
‘Indeed,’ said Harry Saggs, ‘I shall do nothing of the sort.’
‘You will be a Christian if you give me your best trousers.’
‘Not my best trousers, nor my worst trousers,’ said Harry Saggs. ‘I need both my pairs of trousers.’ Daniel retired to try to cadge something elsewhere. He was extremely lazy, and always managed to clean the shoes after dark so that no one would see that he was not really cleaning them at all but just sitting and humming to himself, smoking.
Our best house-boy was Michael, who had been in service with the British Consulate in Mosul. He looked like an El Greco, with a long, melancholy face and enormous eyes. He was always having great trouble with his wife. Occasionally she tried to kill him with a knife. In the end the doctor persuaded him to take her to Baghdad.
‘He has written to me,’ said Michael, appearing one day, ‘and he says it is only a matter of money. If I will give him £200 he will try to cure her.’
Max urged him to take her to the main hospital to which he had already given him a chit, and not to be victimised by quacks.
‘No,’ said Michael, ‘this is a very grand man, he lives in a grand street in a grand house. He must be the best.’
Life at Nimrud for the first three or four years was relatively simple. Bad weather often separated us from the so-called road, which, kept a lot of visitors away. Then one year, owing to our growing importance, a kind of track was made to link us to the main road, and the actual road to Mosul itself was tarmacked for a good length of its way.
This was very unfortunate. For the last three years we could have employed one person to do nothing but show people round, do the courtesies, offer drinks of tea or coffee, and so on. Whole charabancs of school-children came out. This was one of the worst headaches, because there were large excavations everywhere and the crumbling tops of these were unsafe unless you knew exactly where you were walking. We begged the school-teachers to keep the children away from the actual excavations, but they, of course, adopted the usual attitude of ‘Inshallah, all will be well.’ In time a great many babies got brought out by their parents.
‘This place,’ Robert Hamilton said in a dissatisfied tone as he looked round the drawing-office, which was filled up with three carry
-cots containing squalling infants, ‘this place is nothing but a creche!’ he sighed. ‘I shall go out and measure up those levels.’
We all screamed at Robert in protest. ‘Now then, Robert, you are a father of five. You are the right person to be in charge of the creche. You can’t leave these young bachelors to look after babies!’
Robert looked coldly at us and departed.
They were good days. Every year had its fun, though in a sense, every year life became more complicated, more sophisticated, more urban.
As for the mound itself, it lost its early beauty, owing to all the great dumps. Gone was that innocent simplicity, with the stone heads poking up out of the green grass, studded with red ranunculus. The flocks of bee-eaters–lovely little birds of gold, green and orange, twittering and fluttering over the mound–still came every spring, and a little later the rollers, bigger birds, also blue and orange, which had a curious way of falling suddenly and clumsily from the sky–hence their name. In the legend, they had been punished by Ishtar by being bitten through the wing because they had insulted her in some way.
Now Nimrud sleeps.
We have scarred it with our bull-dozers. Its yawning pits have been filled in with raw earth. One day its wounds will have healed, and it will bloom once more with early spring flowers.
Here was once Calah, that great City. Then Calah slept…
Here came Layard to disturb its peace. And again Calah-Nimrud slept…
Here came Max Mallowan and his wife. Now again Calah sleeps…Who shall disturb it next?
We do not know.
I have not yet mentioned our house in Baghdad. We had an old Turkish house on the West bank of the Tigris. It was thought a very curious taste on our part to be so fond of it, and not to want one of the modern boxes, but our Turkish house was cool and delightful, with its courtyard and the palm-trees coming up to the balcony rail. Behind us were irrigated palm-gardens, and a tiny squatter’s house, made of tutti (petrol tins). Children played there happily. The women came in and out and went down to the river to wash their pots and pans. The rich and the poor live cheek by jowl in Baghdad.
Agahta Christie: An autobiography Page 67