An Autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  We were amateurish, but perhaps being so made us more careful and conscientious. The work was uneven in quality, of course. Every time we had a fresh convoy of patients in, we worked furiously hard. Medicines, ointments, jars and jars of lotions to be filled, replenished and turned out every day. After working in a hospital with several doctors, one realises how medicine, like everything else in this world, is very much a matter of fashion: that, and the personal idiosyncrasy of every medical practitioner.

  ‘What is there to do this morning?’

  ‘Oh, five of Dr Whittick’s, and four of Dr James’s, and two of Dr Vyner’s specials.’

  The ignorant layman, or laywoman, as I suppose I ought to call myself, believes that the doctor studies your case individually, considers what drugs would be best for it, and writes a prescription to that effect. I soon found that the tonic prescribed by Dr Whittick, and the tonic prescribed by Dr James and the tonic prescribed by Dr Vyner were all quite different, and particular, not to the patient, but to the doctor. When one comes to think of it, it is quite reasonable, though it does not perhaps make a patient feel quite as important as he did before. The chemists and dispensers take rather a lofty view where doctors are concerned: they have their opinions also. One might think that Dr James’s is a good prescription and Dr Whittick’s below contempt–but, they have to make them up just the same. Only when it comes to ointments do doctors really become experimental. That is mainly because skin afflictions are enigmas to the medical profession and to everyone else. A calamine type of application cures Mrs D. in a sensational manner; Mrs C., however, coming along with the same complaint, does not respond to calamine at all–it only produces additional irritation–but a coal tar preparation, which only aggravated the trouble with Mrs D. has unexpected success with Mrs C.; so the doctor has to keep on trying until he finds the appropriate preparation. In London, skin patients also have their favourite hospitals. ‘Tried the Middlesex? I did, and the stuff they gave me did no good at all. Now here, at U.C.H., I’m nearly cured already.’ A friend then chimes in: ‘Well, I’m beginning to think there is something in the Middlesex. My sister was treated here and it did her no good, so she went to the Middlesex and she was as right as rain after two days.’

  I still have a grudge against one particular skin specialist, a persistent and optimistic experimenter, belonging to the school of ‘try anything once’, who conceived the idea of a concoction of cod liver oil to be smeared all over a baby just a few months old. The mother and the other members of the household must have found poor baby’s proximity very hard to bear. It did no good whatsoever and was discontinued after the first ten days. The making of it also rendered me a pariah in the home, for you cannot deal with large quantities of cod liver oil without returning home smelling to high heaven of noisome fish.

  I was a pariah on several occasions in 1916–more than once as the result of the fashion for Bip’s Paste, which was applied to all wounds treated. It consisted of bismuth and iodoform worked into a paste with liquid paraffin. The smell of the iodoform was with me in the dispensary, on the tram, in the home, at the dinner table, and in my bed. It has a pervasive character which oozed up from your finger tips, wrists, arms, and over your elbows, and of course was quite impossible to wash off as far as the smell went. To save my family’s feelings I used to have a meal tray in the pantry. Towards the end of the war, Bip’s Paste went out of favour–it was replaced by other more innocuous preparations, and finally was succeeded by enormous demijohns of hypochlorous lotion. This, arising from ordinary chloride of lime with soda and other ingredients, caused a penetrating smell of chlorine to pervade all your clothes. Many of the disinfectants of sinks, etc., nowadays have this kind of basis. The mere sniff of them is enough to sicken me. I furiously attacked a very obstinate manservant we had at one time:

  ‘What have you been putting down the sink in the pantry? It smells horrible!’

  He produced a bottle proudly. ‘First class disinfectant, Madam,’ he said.

  ‘This isn’t a hospital,’ I cried. ‘You’ll be hanging up a carbolic sheet next. Just rinse the sink out with good hot water, and a little soda occasionally if you must. Throw that filthy chloride of lime preparation away!’

  I gave him a lecture on the nature of disinfectants and the fact that anything which is harmful to a germ is usually equally harmful to human tissue; so that spotless cleanliness and not disinfection was the thing to aim at. ‘Germs are tough,’ I pointed out to him. ‘Weak disinfectants won’t discourage any good sturdy germ. Germs will flourish in a solution of one in sixty carbolic.’ He was not convinced, and continued to use his nauseous mixture whenever he was sure I was safely out of the house.

  As part of my preparation for my examination at Apothecaries Hall, it was arranged that I should have a little outside instruction from a proper commercial chemist. One of the principal pharmacists in Torquay was gracious enough to say that I could come in on certain Sundays and that he would give me instruction. I arrived meek and frightened, anxious to learn.

  A chemist’s shop, the first time that you go behind the scenes, is a revelation. Being amateurs in our hospital work, we measured every bottle of medicine with the utmost accuracy. When the doctor prescribed twenty grains of bismuth carbonate to a dose, exactly twenty grains the patient got. Since we were amateurs, I think this was a good thing, but I imagine that any chemist who has done his five years, and got his minor pharmaceutical degree, knows his stuff in the same way as a good cook knows hers. He tosses in portions from the various stock bottles with the utmost confidence, without bothering to measure or weigh at all. He measures his poisons or dangerous drugs carefully, of course, but the harmless stuff goes in in the approximate dollops. Colouring and flavouring are added in much the same way. This sometimes results in the patients coming back and complaining that their medicine is a different colour from last time. ‘It is a deep pink I have as a rule, not this pale pink,’ or ‘This doesn’t taste right; it is the peppermint mixture I have–a nice peppermint mixture, not nasty, sweet, sickly stuff.’ Then chloroform water has clearly been added instead of peppermint water.

  The majority of patients in the out-patient department at University College Hospital, where I worked in 1948, were particular as to the exact colour and taste of their preparations. I remember an old Irish woman who leant into the dispensary window, pressed half-a-crown into my palm, and murmured: ‘Make it double strong, dearie, will you? Plenty of peppermint, double strong.’ I returned her the half-a-crown, saying priggishly that we didn’t accept that sort of thing, and added that she had to have the medicine exactly as the doctor had ordered it. I did, however, give her an extra dollop of peppermint water, since it could not possibly do her any harm and she enjoyed it so much.

  Naturally, when one is a novice at this kind of job, one has a nervous horror of making mistakes. The addition of poison to a medicine is always checked by one of the other dispensers, but there can still be frightening moments. I remember one of mine. I had been making up ointments that afternoon, and for one of them I had placed a little pure carbolic in a convenient ointment pot lid, then carefully, with a dropper, added it to the ointment that I was mixing on the slab. Once it was duly bottled, labelled, and put out on a slab, I went on with my other work. It was about three in the morning, I think, that I woke up in bed and said to myself, ‘What did I do with that ointment pot lid: the one I put the carbolic in?’ The more I thought the less I was able to remember having taken it and washed it. Had I perhaps clapped it on some other ointment I had made, not noticing that it had anything in it? Again, the more I thought, the more I was sure that that was what I had done. I had put it out on the ward shelf with the others to be collected on the following morning by the ward-boy in his basket, and one ointment for one patient would have a layering of strong carbolic in the top. Worried to death, I could bear it no longer. I got out of bed, dressed, walked down to the hospital, went in–fortunately I did not have to go through the ward,
since the staircase to the dispensary was outside it–went up, surveyed the ointments I had prepared, opened the lids, and sniffed cautiously. To this day I don’t know whether I imagined it or not, but in one of them I seemed to detect a faint odour of carbolic which there should not have been. I took out the top layer of the ointment, and so made sure that all was well. Then I crept out again and walked home and back to bed.

  On the whole it is not usually the novices who make mistakes in chemists’ shops. They are nervous, and always asking advice. The worst cases of poisoning through mistakes arise with the reliable chemists who have worked for many years. They are so familiar with what they are doing, so able to do it without really thinking any more, that the time does come when one day, preoccupied perhaps with some trouble of their own, they make a slip. This happened in the cases of the grandchild of a friend of mine. The child was ill and the doctor came and wrote a prescription which was taken to the chemist to be made up. In due course the dose was administered. That afternoon the grandmother did not like the look of the child; she said to the nannie, ‘I wonder whether there is anything wrong with that medicine?’ After a second dose, she was still more worried. ‘I think there is something wrong,’ she said. She sent for the doctor; he took a look at the child, examined the medicine–and took immediate action. Children tolerate opium and its preparations very badly. The chemist had blundered; had put in quite a serious overdose. He was terribly upset, poor man; he had worked for this particular firm for fourteen years and was one of their most careful and trusted dispensers. It shows what can happen to anybody.

  During the course of my pharmaceutical instruction on Sunday afternoons, I was faced with a problem. It was incumbent upon the entrants to the examination to deal with both the ordinary system and the metric system of measurements. My pharmacist gave me practice in making up preparations to the metric formula. Neither doctors nor chemists like the metrical system in operation. One of our doctors at the hospital never learned what ‘containing 0.1’ really meant, and would say, ‘Now let me see, is this solution one in a hundred or one in a thousand?’ The great danger of the metric system is that if you go wrong you go ten times wrong.

  On this particular afternoon I was having instruction in the making of suppositories, things which were not much used in the hospital, but which I was supposed to know how to make for the exam. They are tricky things, mainly owing to the melting point of the cocoa butter, which is their base. If you get it too hot it won’t set; if you don’t get it hot enough it comes out of the moulds the wrong shape. In this case Mr P. the pharmacist was giving me a personal demonstration, and showed me the exact procedure with the cocoa butter, then added one metrically calculated drug. He showed me how to turn the suppositories out at the right moment, then told me how to put them into a box and label them professionally as so-and-so one in a hundred. He went away then to attend to other duties, but I was worried, because I was convinced that what had gone into those suppositories was 10% and made a dose of one in ten in each, not one in a hundred. I went over his calculations and they were wrong. In using the metric system he had got his dot in the wrong place. But what was the young student to do? I was the merest novice, he was the best-known pharmacist in the town. I couldn’t say to him: ‘Mr P., you have made a mistake.’ Mr P. the pharmacist was the sort of person who does not make a mistake, especially in front of a student. At this moment, re-passing me, he said, ‘You can put those into stock; we do need them sometimes.’ Worse and worse. I couldn’t let those suppositories go into stock. It was quite a dangerous drug that was being used. You can stand far more of a dangerous drug if it is being given through the rectum, but all the same…I didn’t like it, and what was I to do about it? Even if I suggested the dose was wrong, would he believe me? I was quite sure of the answer to that: he would say, ‘It’s quite all right. Do you think I don’t know what I’m doing in matters of this kind?’

  There was only one thing for it. Before the suppositories cooled, I tripped, lost my footing, upset the board on which they were reposing, and trod on them firmly.

  ‘Mr P.,’ I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry; I’ve knocked over those suppositories and stepped on them.’

  ‘Dear, dear, dear,’ he said vexedly. ‘This one seems all right.’ He picked up one which had escaped the weight of my beetle-crushers. ‘It’s dirty,’ I said firmly, and without more ado tipped them all into the waste-bin. ‘I’m very sorry,’ I repeated.

  ‘That’s all right, little girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry too much,’ and patted me tenderly on the shoulders. He was too much given to that kind of thing–pats on the shoulders, nudges, occasionally a faint attempt to stroke my cheek. I had to put up with it because I was being instructed, but I was as stand-offish as possible, and usually managed to engage the other dispenser in conversation so that I could not be alone with him.

  He was a strange man, Mr P. One day, seeking perhaps to impress me, he took from his pocket a dark-coloured lump and showed it to me, saying, ‘Know what this is?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It’s curare,’ he said. ‘Know about curare?’

  I said I had read about it.

  ‘Interesting stuff,’ he said. ‘Very interesting. Taken by the mouth, it does you no harm at all. Enter the bloodstream, it paralyses and kills you. It’s what they use for arrow poison. Do you know why I carry it in my pocket?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ It seemed to me an extremely foolish thing to do, but I didn’t add that.

  ‘Well, you know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it makes me feel powerful.’

  I looked at him then. He was a rather funny-looking little man, very roundabout and robin redbreast looking, with a nice pink face. There was a general air of childish satisfaction about him.

  Shortly afterwards I finished my instructional course, but I often wondered about Mr P. afterwards. He struck me, in spite of his cherubic appearance, as possible rather a dangerous man. His memory remained with me so long that it was still there waiting when I first conceived the idea of writing my book The Pale Horse–and that must have been, I suppose, nearly fifty years later.

  III

  It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story. The idea had remained in my mind since Madge’s earlier challenge–and my present work seemed to offer a favourable opportunity. Unlike nursing, where there always was something to do, dispensing consisted of slack or busy periods. Sometimes I would be on duty alone in the afternoon with hardly anything to do but sit about. Having seen that the stock bottles were full and attended to, one was at liberty to do anything one pleased except leave the dispensary.

  I began considering what kind of a detective story I could write. Since I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected. I settled on one fact which seemed to me to have possibilities. I toyed with the idea, liked it, and finally accepted it. Then I went on to the dramatis personae. Who should be poisoned? Who would poison him or her? When? Where? How? Why? And all the rest of it. It would have to be very much of an intime murder, owing to the particular way it was done; it would have to be all in the family, so to speak. There would naturally have to be a detective. At that date I was well steeped in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. So I considered detectives. Not like Sherlock Holmes, of course: I must invent one of my own, and he would also have a friend as a kind of butt or stooge–that would not be too difficult. I returned to thoughts of my other characters. Who was to be murdered? A husband could murder his wife–that seemed to be the most usual kind of murder. I could, of course, have a very unusual kind of murder for a very unusual motive, but that did not appeal to me artistically. The whole point of a good detective story was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. Though really, of course, he had done it. At that point I go
t confused, and went away and made up a couple of bottles of extra hypochlorous lotion so that I should be fairly free of work the next day.

  I went on playing with my idea for some time. Bits of it began to grow. I saw the murderer now. He would have to be rather sinister-looking. He would have a black beard–that appeared to me at that time very sinister. There were some acquaintances who had recently come to live near us–the husband had a black beard, and he had a wife who was older than himself and who was very rich. Yes, I thought, that might do as a basis. I considered it at some length. It might do, but it was not entirely satisfactory. The man in question would, I was sure, never murder anybody. I took my mind away from them and decided once and for all that it is no good thinking about real people–you must create your characters for yourself. Someone you see in a tram or a train or a restaurant is a possible starting point, because you can make up something for yourself about them.

  Sure enough, next day, when I was sitting in a tram, I saw just what I wanted: a man with a black beard, sitting next to an elderly lady who was chattering like a magpie. I didn’t think I’d have her, but I thought he would do admirably. Sitting a little way beyond them was a large, hearty woman, talking loudly about spring bulbs. I liked the look of her too. Perhaps I could incorporate her? I took them all three off the tram with me to work upon–and walked up Barton Road muttering to myself just as in the days of the Kittens.

  Very soon I had a sketchy picture of some of my people. There was the hearty woman–I even knew her name: Evelyn. She could be a poor relation or a lady gardener or a companion–perhaps a lady housekeeper? Anyway, I was going to have her. Then there was the man with the black beard whom I still felt I didn’t know much about, except for his beard, which wasn’t really enough–or was it enough? Yes, perhaps it was; because you would be seeing this man from the outside–so you could only see what he liked to show–not as he really was: that ought to be a clue in itself. The elderly wife would be murdered more for her money than her character, so she didn’t matter very much. I now began adding more characters rapidly. A son? A daughter? Possibly a nephew? You had to have a good many suspects. The family was coming along nicely.