An Autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  II

  They were so nice to me in Baghdad. Everyone was kind and pleasant–and I felt ashamed of myself for the caged feeling from which I suffered. Alwiyah is now part of a continuous city, full of buses and other means of transport, but was then divided by some miles from the city itself. To get there, somebody would have to drive you in. It was always a fascinating ride.

  One day I was taken to see Buffalo Town, which you can still see from the train as you come into Baghdad from the north. To the uninitiated eye it looks a place of horror–a slum, a vast enclosure full of buffaloes and their excreta. The stench is terrific, and the shacks made of petrol cans lead one to believe that it is an extreme example of poverty and degradation. Actually this is far from being the case. Owners of buffaloes are very well to do. Although they may live in squalor, a buffalo is worth £100 or more–probably far more nowadays. The owners of them consider themselves lucky people, and as the women squelch about in the mud, handsome bracelets of silver and turquoise can be seen decorating their ankles.

  I learnt soon enough that nothing in the Near East is what it appears to be. One’s rules of life and conduct, observation and behaviour, have all to be reversed and relearnt. When you see a man gesticulating at you violently to go away, you retreat rapidly–actually he is inviting you to approach. On the other hand, if he beckons you, he is telling you to go away. Two men at opposite ends of the field, yelling fiercely at each other, would appear to be threatening each other with sudden death. Not at all. They are two brothers passing the time of day, and raising their voices because they are too lazy to approach each other. My husband Max once told me that he had determined on his first visit, shocked at the way everybody shouted at Arabs, that he would never shout at them. However, before he had been working long with the workmen he discovered that any remark uttered in an ordinary tone of voice was unheard–not so much through deafness as a belief that anyone talking like that was talking to himself, and that any man who really wished to make a remark would take the trouble to make it in a loud enough voice for you to hear.

  The people of Alwiyah offered me charming hospitality. I played tennis, I drove to races, I was shown sights, taken to shop–and I felt that I might just as well be in England. Geographically I might be in Baghdad, spiritually I was in England still; and my idea of travelling had been to get away from England and see other countries. I decided that something must be done.

  I wanted to visit Ur. I made inquiries, and was delighted to find that here I was encouraged, not rebuffed. My journey was arranged for me, as I discovered later, with a good many unnecessary additional adornments. ‘You must take a bearer with you, of course,’ said Mrs C. ‘We’ll reserve your train journey for you, and we’ll wire to Ur junction to tell Mr and Mrs Woolley that you will be arriving and would like to be shown things. You can spend a couple of nights in the rest-house there, and then Eric will meet you when you come back.’

  I said it was very kind of them to take so much trouble and felt guiltily that it was a good thing they did not know that I was also taking trouble with my arrangements for when I came back. In due course I set off. I eyed my bearer with slight alarm. He was a tall, thin man, with an air of having accompanied Mem-Sahibs all over the Near East and knowing a great deal more about what was good for them than they knew themselves. Splendidly attired, he settled me in my bare and not particularly comfortable carriage, salaamed, and left me, explaining that at a suitable station he would return to usher me to the platform dining-room.

  The first thing I did when left to my own devices was extremely ill-judged: I threw open the window. The stuffiness of the compartment was more than I could bear; I longed for fresh air. What came in was not so much fresh air as much hotter, infinitely dustier air and a troupe of about twenty-six large hornets. I was horrified. The hornets zoomed round in a menacing fashion. I could not make up my mind whether to leave the window open and hope they would go out, or shut the window and at least confine myself to the twenty-six that were in already. It was all very unfortunate, and I sat cramped in one corner for about an hour and a half till my bearer came to rescue me and take me to the platform restaurant.

  The meal was greasy and not particularly good, and there was not much time to eat it. Bells clanged, my faithful servant reclaimed me, and I returned to my carriage. The window had been shut and the hornets dispossessed. After that I was more careful what I tampered with. I had the whole compartment to myself–that seemed to be usual–and the time passed rather slowly, since it was impossible to read because the whole train shook so much, and there was nothing much to be seen out of the window except bare scrub or sandy desert. It was a long and wearisome journey, punctuated by meals, and uncomfortable sleep.

  The times of day for arriving at Ur junction have varied during the many years that I have made the journey, but have invariably been inconvenient. On this occasion, I think, 5 a.m. was the appointed hour. Awakened, I descended, proceeded to the station guest-house, and passed the time there in a clean, stern-looking bedroom until I felt disposed for breakfast at 8 o’clock. Shortly after that a car arrived which was said to be taking me up to the dig, about a mile and a half away. Although I did not know it, I was greatly honoured. After the experience now of being on digs for many years myself, I realise, as I certainly did not then, how loathed visitors were–always arriving at awkward times, wanting to be shown things, wanting to be talked to, wasting valuable time, and generally incommoding everything. On a successful dig such as Ur, every minute was occupied and everyone was working flat out. To have a lot of dithering females wandering round was the most irritating thing that could occur. By now the Woolleys had got things pretty well taped: people went round in a party of their own, being shown what was necessary, and were shooed off afterwards. But I was received most kindly as a valued guest, and I ought to have appreciated it far more than I did.

  This treatment was due entirely to the fact that Katharine Woolley, Leonard Woolley’s wife, had just finished reading one of my books, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and was so enthusiastic about it that I was given the V.I.P. treatment. Other members of the expedition were asked if they had read the book, and if they said they had not, were severely reprimanded.

  Leonard Woolley, in his kindly fashion, showed me things, and I was also taken around by Father Burrows, a Jesuit priest and epigraphist. He, too, was a most original character, and the way he described things to me made a rather delightful contrast. Leonard Woolley saw with the eye of imagination: the place was as real to him as if it had been 1500 B.C., or a few thousand years earlier. Wherever we happened to be, he could make it come alive. While he was speaking I felt in my mind no doubt whatever that that house on the corner had been Abraham’s–it was his reconstruction of the past and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also. Father Burrows’ technique was entirely different. With an apologetic air, he described the big courtyard, a temenos, or a street of shops, and just as you became interested would always say: ‘Of course we don’t know if it is that really. Nobody can be sure. No, I think probably it was not.’ And in the same way: ‘Yes, yes, they were shops, but I don’t suppose they were constructed as we think they were–they might have been quite different.’ He had a passion for denigrating everything. He was an interesting person–clever, friendly and yet aloof: there was something faintly inhuman about him.

  Once, for no reason, he spoke to me at luncheon, describing to me the sort of detective story which he thought I could write very well, and which he urged me to write. Until that moment I had had no idea that he enjoyed detective stories. The story he was outlining, though vague in fact, somehow built up a picture of an intriguing problem, and I determined that one day I would do something about it. A great many years passed, but one day, perhaps twenty-five years later, the whole idea came back to me, and I wrote, not a book, but a long short story based on the particular combination of circumstances he had outlined. Father Burrows had been long dead by th
en, but I hoped that somehow he could realise that I used his idea with gratitude. As with all writers, it turned into my idea, and ended up by being not much like his; still, his inspiration was what had made it.

  Katharine Woolley, who was to become one of my great friends in the years to come, was an extraordinary character. People have been divided always between disliking her with a fierce and vengeful hatred, and being entranced by her–possibly because she switched from one mood to another so easily that you never knew where you were with her. People would declare that she was impossible, that they would have no more to do with her, that it was insupportable the way she treated you; and then, suddenly, once again they would be fascinated. Of one thing I am quite positive, and that is if one had to choose one woman to be a companion on a desert island, or some place where you would have no one else to entertain you, she would hold your interest as practically no one else could. The things she wanted to talk about were never banal. She stimulated your mind into thinking along some pathway that had not before suggested itself to you. She was capable of rudeness–in fact she had an insolent rudeness, when she wanted to, that was unbelievable – but if she wished to charm you she would succeed every time.

  I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurrat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute. I enjoyed the workmen, the foremen, the little basket-boys, the pick-men – the whole technique and life. The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. How unfortunate it was, I thought, that I had always led such a frivolous life. And it was then that I remembered with deep shame how in Cairo as a girl my mother had tried to persuade me to go to Luxor and Aswan to see the past glories of Egypt, and how I had wanted only to meet young men and dance till the small hours of the morning. Well, I suppose there is a time for everything.

  Katharine Woolley and her husband urged me to stay one more day and see more of the excavations, and I was only too delighted to agree. My bearer, wished upon me by Mrs C., was completely unnecessary. Katharine Woolley directed him to return to Baghdad and say that my day of return was still unsure. In that way I hoped to return unnoticed by my former kind hostess, and establish myself firmly in the Tigris Palace Hotel (if that was its name at the moment – it has had so many names that I forget its first one).

  This plan did not come off, because Mrs C.’s wretched husband had been sent to meet the train from Ur every day. However, I disposed of him quite easily. I thanked him enormously, said how kind his wife had been, but that I really felt it was better for me to go to the hotel, and that I had already made arrangements there. So he drove me there. I settled myself in, thanked Mr C. once more, and accepted an invitation to tennis in three or four days’ time. In this way I escaped from the thraldom of social life in the English manner. I was no longer a Mem-Sahib, I had become a tourist.

  The hotel was not at all bad. You passed first into deep gloom: a big lounge and dining-room, with curtains permanently drawn. On the first floor there was a kind of veranda all round the bedrooms, from where, as far as I could see, anyone going by could look in and pass the time of day with you as you lay in bed. One side of the hotel gave on to the river Tigris, which was a dream of delight, with the ghufas and various boats on the river. At meal-times you went down into the sirdab of complete darkness with very weak electric lights. Here you had several meals in one; course after course, all bearing a strange resemblance to each other – large lumps of fried meat and rice, hard, little potatoes, tomato omelettes, rather leathery, immense pale cauliflowers, and so on, ad lib.

  The Howes, that pleasant couple who had set me off on my voyage, had given me one or two introductions. These I valued as not being social ones: they were to people whom they themselves had found it well worth while to meet, and who had shown them some of the more interesting parts of the city. Baghdad, in spite of the English life of Alwiyah, was the first really oriental city I had ever seen – and it was oriental. You could turn off Rashid Street and wander down the narrow little alley-ways, and so into different suqs: the copper suq, with the copper-smiths beating and hammering; or the piled up spices of all kinds in the spice suq.

  ‘Once you think of time and infinity, personal things will cease to affect you in the same way. Sorrow, suffering, all the finite things of life, show in an entirely different perspective.’ He asked me if I had ever read Dunne’s Experiment with Time. I had not. He lent it to me, and from that moment I realise that something happened to me–not a change of heart, not quite a change of outlook, but somehow I saw things more in proportion; myself less large; as only one facet of a whole, in a vast world with hundreds of inter-connections. Every now and then one could be aware of oneself observing, from some other plane of existence, oneself existing. It was all crude and amateurish to begin with, but I did feel from that moment onwards a great sensation of comfort and a truer knowledge of serenity than I had ever obtained before. It is to Maurice Vickers that I am grateful for that introduction to a wider view of life. He had a large library of books, philosophy and otherwise, and was, I think, a remarkable young man. Sometimes I wondered whether we should ever meet again, but I think on the whole I was satisfied that we should not. We had been ships that pass in the night. He had handed me a gift that I had accepted; the kind of gift that I had never had before, since it was a gift from the intellect–from the mind, not just from the heart. I did not have much more time to spend in Baghdad, because I was anxious to get home to prepare for Christmas. I was told that I ought to go to Basra, and particularly to Mosul–Maurice Vickers urged the latter on me, and said that if he could find time he would take me there himself. One of the surprising things about Baghdad, and about Iraq generally, was that there was always someone to escort you to places. Except for renowned travellers, women seldom went about alone. As soon as you wished to travel, somebody produced a friend, a cousin, a husband or an uncle who would manage to make time and escort you there.

  At the hotel I met a Colonel Dwyer, in the King’s African Rifles. He had travelled a great deal all over the world. He was an elderly man, but there was little he did not know about the Middle East. Our talk happened to fall on Kenya and Uganda, and I mentioned that I had a brother who had lived out there for many years. He asked his name, and I told him it was Miller. He stared at me then, an expression on his face with which I was already acquainted: a kind of incredulous doubt.

  ‘Do you mean to say that you are Miller’s sister? That your brother was Puffing Billy Miller?’ I had not heard the epithet of Puffing Billy.