An Autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  ‘Now if you taste these two,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe you’ll be able to tell margarine from butter.’

  The two old pussies looked scornful, then tried and tested. They had no doubts: ‘It’s absolutely plain which is which, Ma’am, no doubt about it.’

  ‘You really think there is so much difference?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I can’t bear the taste of margarine–neither of us can. It makes us feel quite sick.’ They handed it back to my mother with disgust. ‘You do like the other?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am, very good butter. No fault to find with that.’

  ‘Well, I might as well tell you,’ said my mother, ‘that that is the margarine; this is the butter.’

  At first they wouldn’t believe it. Then when they were convinced they were not pleased.

  My grandmother was now living with us. She used to fret a great deal at my returning alone to the hospital at night.

  ‘So dangerous, dear, walking home by yourself. Anything might happen. You must make some other arrangement.’

  ‘I don’t see what other arrangement I could make, Grannie. And anyway, nothing has happened to me. I’ve been doing it for several months.’

  ‘It’s not right. Somebody might speak to you.’

  I reassured her as best I could. My hours of duty were two o’clock till ten, and it was usually about half-past ten before I left the hospital after the night shift had come on. It took about three-quarters of an hour to walk home, along, it must be admitted, fairly lonely roads. However, I never had any trouble. I once met a very drunken sergeant, but he was only too anxious to be gallant. ‘Fine work you’re doing,’ he said, staggering slightly as he walked. ‘Fine work you’re doing at the hospital. I’ll see you home, Nurse. I’ll see you home because I wouldn’t like anything to happen to you.’ I told him that there was no need but that it was kind of him. Still home with me he duly tramped, saying goodbye in a most respectful manner at our gate.

  I forget exactly when it was that my grandmother came to live with us.

  Shortly after the outbreak of the war, I imagine. She had become very blind indeed with cataract, and she was, of course, too old to be operated on. She was a sensible woman, so though it was a terrible wrench for her to give up her house in Ealing and her friends and all the rest of it, she saw plainly that she would be helpless living there alone and that servants were unlikely to stay. So the great move had been made. My sister came down to help my mother, I came up from Devon, and we all became busy. I don’t think I realised in the least at the time what poor Grannie suffered, but now I have a clear picture of her sitting helpless and half blind in the middle of her possessions and everything that she prized, while all round her were three vandals, rummaging in things, turning things out, deciding what to do away with. Little sad cries rose from her: ‘Oh, you’re not going to throw away that dress; Madame Poncereau’s, my beautiful velvet.’ Difficult to explain to her that the velvet was moth-eaten, and that the silk had disintegrated. There were trunkfuls and drawers full of things eaten by moth, their usefulness ended. Because of her worry, many things were kept which ought to have been destroyed. Trunk after trunk, filled with papers, needle-books, lengths of print for servants’ dresses, lengths of silk and velvet bought at sales, remnants: so many many things that at one time could have been useful if they had been used, but which had simply piled up. Poor Grannie sat in her large chair and wept.

  Then, after the clothes, her store-room was attacked. Jams that had gone mouldy, plums that had fermented, even packets of butter and sugar which had slipped down behind things and been nibbled by mice: all the things of her thrifty and provident life, all the things that had been bought and stored and saved for the future; and now, here they were, vast monuments of waste! I think that is what hurt her so much: the waste. Here were her home-made liqueurs–they at least, owing to the saving quality of alcohol, were in good condition. Thirty-six demijohns of cherry brandy, cherry gin, damson gin, damson brandy and the rest of it, went off in the furniture van. On arrival there were only thirty-one. ‘And to think,’ said Grannie, ‘those men said they were all teetotallers!’

  Perhaps the removers were taking their revenge: they had got little sympathy from my grandmother in moving things. When they wished to take the drawers out of the vast mahogany tallboy chests of drawers, Grannie was scornful. ‘Take the drawers out? Why? The weight! You’re three strong men, aren’t you? Men carried them up these stairs full of things. Nothing was taken out then. The idea! Men aren’t worth anything at all nowadays.’ The men pleaded they couldn’t manage it. ‘Weaklings,’ said Grannie, giving in at last. ‘Absolute weaklings. Not a man worth his salt nowadays.’ The cases included comestibles purchased to save Grannie from starvation. The only thing that cheered her when we arrived at Ashfield was devising good hiding places for them. Two dozen tins of sardines were laid flat on top of a Chippendale escritoire. There they remained, some of them to be entirely forgotten–so much so that when my mother, after the war, was selling a piece of furniture, the man who came to fetch it away said with an apologetic cough: ‘I think there is a large amount of sardines on the top of this.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said my mother. ‘Yes, I suppose there might be.’ She did not explain. The man did not ask. The sardines were removed. ‘I suppose,’ said mother, ‘we’d better have a look on top of some of the other pieces of furniture.’

  Things like sardines and bags of flour seemed to turn up in the most unexpected places for many years to come. A disused clothes-basket in the spare-room was full of flour, slightly weevily. The hams, at any rate, had been eaten in good condition. Jars of honey, bottles of French plums, and some, but not many, tinned goods were liable to be found–though Grannie disapproved of tinned goods, and suspected them of being a source of ptomaine poisoning. Only her own preserving in bottles and jars was felt by her to be a properly safe conserve.

  Indeed, tinned food was regarded with disapproval by all in the days of my girlhood. All girls were warned when they went to dances: ‘Be very careful you don’t eat lobster for supper. You never know, it may be tinned!’–the word ‘tinned’ being spoken with horror. Tinned crab was such a terrible commodity as not even to need warning against. If anyone then could have envisaged a time where one’s main nourishment was frozen food and tinned vegetables, with what apprehension and gloom it would have been regarded.

  In spite of affection and willing service, how little I sympathised with my poor grandmother’s sufferings. Even when technically unselfish, one is still so self-centred. It must have been, I see now, a terrible thing for my poor grandmother, by then, I suppose, well over eighty, to uproot herself from a house where she had lived for thirty or forty years, having gone there only a short time after her widowhood. Not so much perhaps leaving the house itself–that must have been bad enough, although her personal furniture came with her: the large four-poster bed, the two big chairs that she liked to sit in. But worse than anything was the loss of all her friends. Many had died, but there were still a good many left: neighbours who came in often, people with whom to gossip over old days, or to discuss the news in the daily papers–all the horrors of infanticide, rape, secret vice and all the things that cheer the lives of the old. It is true that we read the papers to Grannie every day but we were not really interested in the horrible fate of a nursemaid, a baby abandoned in her perambulator, a young girl assaulted in a train. World affairs, politics, moral welfare, education, the topics of the day–none of these really interested my grandmother in the least; not because she was a stupid woman, nor because she revelled in disaster; it was rather that she needed something that contradicted the even tenor of everyday life: some drama, some terrible happenings, which, although she herself was shielded from them, were occurring perhaps not too far away.

  My poor grandmother had nothing exciting now in her life except the disasters which she had read to her from the daily papers. She could no longer have a friend drop in with sad news of the awful
behaviour of Colonel So-and-So to his wife, or the interesting disease from which a cousin suffered and for which no doctor had yet been able to find a cure. I see now how sad it was for her, how lonely, and how dull. I wish I had been more understanding.

  She got up slowly in the morning after breakfast in bed. She came down about eleven and looked hopefully for someone who might have time to read the papers to her. Since she did not come down at a fixed time this was not always possible. She was patient, she sat in her chair. For a year or two she was still able to knit, because for knitting she did not have to see well; but as her eyesight grew worse she had to knit coarser and coarser types of garments, and even there she would drop a stitch and not know it. Sometimes one would find her weeping quietly in her armchair because she had dropped a stitch several rows back and it had all to be pulled out. I used to do it for her, pick it up and knit it up for her so that she could go on from where she had left off; but that did not really heal the sorrowful hurt that she was no longer able to be useful.

  She could seldom be persuaded to go out for a little walk on the terrace, or anything like that. Outside air she considered definitely harmful. She sat in the dining-room all day because she had always sat in the dining-room in her own house. She would come and join us for afternoon tea, but then she would go back again. Yet sometimes, especially if we had a party of young people in for supper, when we went up to the schoolroom afterwards, suddenly Grannie would appear, creeping slowly and with difficulty up the stairs. On these occasions she did not want, as usual, to go to an early bed: she wanted to be in it, to hear what was going on, to share our gaiety and laughter. I suppose I wished she wouldn’t come. Although she wasn’t actually deaf, a good many things had to be repeated to her, and it placed a slight constraint over the company. But I am glad at least that we never discouraged her from coming up. It was sad for poor Grannie, and yet it was inevitable. The trouble with her, as with so many old people, was the loss of her independence. I think it is the sense of being a dispaced person that makes so many elderly people indulge in the illusion that they are being poisoned or their belongings stolen. I don’t think really it is a weakening of the mental faculties–it is an excitement that they need, a kind of stimulant: life would be more interesting if someone were trying to poison you. Little by little Grannie began to indulge in these fancies. She assured my mother that the servants were ‘putting things in my food’. ‘They want to get rid of me!’

  ‘But Auntie dear, why should they want to get rid of you? They like you very much.’

  ‘Ah, that’s what you think, Clara. But–come a little nearer: they are always listening at doors, that I know. My egg yesterday–scrambled egg it was. It tasted very peculiar–metallic. I know!’ she nodded her head. ‘Old Mrs Wyatt, you know, she was poisoned by the butler and his wife.’

  ‘Yes dear, but that was because she had left them a lot of money. You haven’t left any of the servants any money.’

  ‘No fear,’ said Grannie. ‘Anyway, Clara, in future I want a boiled egg only for my breakfast. If I have a boiled egg they can’t tamper with that.’ So a boiled egg Grannie had.

  The next thing was the sad disappearance of her jewellery. This was heralded by her sending for me. ‘Agatha? Is that you? Come in, and shut the door, dear.’

  I came up to the bed. ‘Yes, Grannie, what is the matter?’ She was sitting on her bed crying, her handkerchief to her eyes. ‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘It’s all gone. My emeralds, my two rings, my beautiful ear-rings–all gone! Oh dear!’

  ‘Now look, Grannie, I’m sure that they haven’t really gone. Let’s see, where were they.’

  ‘They were in that drawer–the top drawer on the left–wrapped up in a pair of mittens. That’s where I always keep them.’

  ‘Well, let’s see, shall we?’ I went across to the dressing-table, and looked through the drawer in question. There were two pairs of mittens rolled up in balls, but nothing inside them. I transferred my attention to the drawer below. There was a pair of mittens in there, with a hard satisfactory feeling to them. I brought them over to the foot of the bed, and assured Grannie that here they were–the ear-rings, the emerald brooch, and her two rings.

  ‘It was in the third drawer down instead of the second.’ I explained. ‘They must have put them back.’

  ‘I don’t think they could have managed that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you be careful, Agatha dear. Very careful. Don’t leave your bag lying about. Now tiptoe over to the door, will you, and see if they are listening.’

  I obeyed and assured Grannie that nobody was listening.

  How terrible it is, I thought, to be old! It was a thing, of course, that would happen to me, but it did not seem real. Strong in one’s mind is always the conviction: ‘I shall not be old. I shall not die.’ You know you will, but at the same time you are sure you won’t. Well, now I am old. I have not yet begun to suspect that my jewellery is stolen, or that anyone is poisoning me, but I must brace myself and know that that too will probably come in time. Perhaps by being forewarned I shall know that I am making a fool of myself before it does begin to happen.

  One day Grannie thought that she heard a cat, somewhere near the back stairs. Even if it had been a cat, it would have been more sensible either to leave it there or to mention it to one of the maids, or to me, or to mother. But Grannie had to go and investigate herself–with the result that she fell down the back stairs and fractured her arm. The doctor was doubtful when he set it. He hoped, he said, it would knit again all right, but at her age–over eighty…However, Grannie rose triumphantly to the occasion. She could use her arm quite well in due course, though she was not able to lift it high above her head. No doubt about it, she was a tough old lady. The stories she always told me of her extreme delicacy in youth, and the fact that the doctors despaired of her life on several occasions between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five were, I feel sure, quite untrue. They were a Victorian assertion of interesting illness.

  What with ministering to Grannie, and late hours on duty in the hospital, life was fairly full.

  In the summer Archie got three days’ leave, and I met him in London. It was not a very happy leave. He was on edge, nervy, and full of knowledge of the conditions of the war which must have been causing everyone anxiety. The big casualties were beginning to come in, though it had not yet dawned upon us in England that, far from being over by Christmas, the war would in all probability last for four years. Indeed, when the demand came out for conscription–Lord Derby’s three years or for the duration–it seemed ridiculous to contemplate as much as three years.

  Archie never mentioned the war or his part in it: his one idea in those days was to forget such things. We had as pleasant meals as we could procure–the rationing system was much fairer in the first war than in the second. Then, whether you dined in a restaurant or at home, you had to produce your meat coupons etc. if you wanted a meat meal. In the second war the position was much more unethical: if you cared, and had the money, you could eat a meat meal every day of the week by going to a restaurant, where no coupons were required at all.

  Our three days passed in an uneasy flash. We both longed to make plans for the future, but both felt it was better not. The one bright spot for me was that shortly after that leave Archie was no longer flying. His sinus condition not permitting such work, he was instead put in charge of a depot. He was always an excellent organiser and administrator. He had been mentioned several times in despatches, and was finally awarded the C.M.G., as well as the D.S.O. But the one award he was always most proud of was the first issued: being mentioned in despatches by General French, right at the beginning. That, he said, was really worth something. He was also awarded a Russian decoration–the order of St. Stanislaus–which was so beautiful that I would have liked to have worn it myself as a decoration at parties.

  Later that year I had flu badly, and after it congestion of the lungs which rendered me unable to go back to the hospital for three weeks
or a month. When I did go back a new department had been opened–the dispensary–and it was suggested that I might work there. It was to be my home from home for the next two years.

  The new department was in the charge of Mrs Ellis, wife of Dr Ellis, who had dispensed for her husband for many years, and my friend Eileen Morris. I was to assist them, and study for my Apothecary’s Hall examination, which would enable me to dispense for a medical officer or a chemist. It sounded interesting, and the hours were much better–the dispensary closed down at six o’clock and I would be on duty alternate mornings and afternoons–so it would combine better with my home duties as well.

  I can’t say I enjoyed dispensing as much as nursing. I think I had a real vocation for nursing, and would have been happy as a hospital nurse. Dispensing was interesting for a time, but became monotonous–I should never have cared to do it as a permanent job. On the other hand, it was fun being with my friends. I had great affection and an enormous respect for Mrs Ellis. She was one of the quietest and calmest women I had ever known, with a gentle, rather sleepy voice and a most unexpected sense of humour which popped out at different moments. She was also a very good teacher, since she understood one’s difficulties–and the fact that she herself, as she confessed, usually did her sums by long division made one feel on comfortable terms with her. Eileen was my instructress in chemistry, and was frankly a great deal too clever for me to begin with. She started not from the practical side but from the theory To be introduced suddenly to the Periodic Table, Atomic Weight, and the ramifications of coal-tar derivatives was apt to result in bewilderment. However, I found my feet, mastered the simpler facts, and after we had blown up our Cona coffee machine in the process of practising Marsh’s test for arsenic our progress was well on the way.