An Autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  People, I have never had a good memory for. My own friends are dear to me, but people that I merely meet and like pass out of my mind again almost at once. Far from being able to say, ‘I never forget a face’ I might more truly say, ‘I never remember a face.’ But places remain firmly in my mind. Often, returning somewhere after five or six years, I remember quite well the road to take, even if I have only been there once before.

  I don’t know why my memory for places should be good, and for people so faint. Perhaps it comes from being far-sighted. I have always been far-sighted, so that people have a rather sketchy appearance, because they are near at hand, while places I have seen with accuracy because they are further away.

  I am quite capable of disliking a place just because the hills seem to me the wrong shape—it is very, very important that hills should be the right shape. Practically all the hills in Devonshire are the right shape. Most of the hills in Sicily are the wrong shape, so I do not care for Sicily. The hills of Corsica are sheer delight; the Welsh hills, too, are beautiful.

  In Switzerland the hills and mountains stand about you too closely.

  Snow mountains can be incredibly dull; they owe any excitement they have to the varying effects of light. ‘Views’ can be dull, too. You climb up a path to a hill top–and there! A panorama is spread before you.

  But it is all there. There is nothing further. You have seen it. ‘Superb,’ you say. And that is that. It’s all below you. You have, as it were, conquered it.

  V

  From Aleppo we went on by boat to Greece, stopping at various ports on the way. I remember best going ashore with Max at Mersin, and spending a happy day on the beach, bathing in a glorious warm sea. It was on that day that he picked me enormous quantities of yellow marigolds. I made them into a chain and he hung them around my neck, and we had a picnic lunch in the midst of a great sea of yellow marigolds.

  I was looking forward enormously to seeing Delphi with the Woolleys; they spoke of it with such lyric rapture. They had insisted that I was to be their guest there, which I thought extremely kind of them. I have rarely felt so happy and full of anticipation as when we arrived at Athens.

  But things come always at the moment one does not expect them.

  I can remember, standing at the hotel desk and being handed my mail, on top of it a pile of telegrams. The moment I saw them a sharp agony seized me, because seven telegrams could mean nothing but bad news.

  We had been out of touch for the last fortnight at least, and now bad news had caught up with me. I opened one telegram–but the first was actually the last. I put them into order. They told me that Rosalind was very ill with pneumonia. My sister had taken the responsibility of removing her from school and motoring her up to Cheshire. Further ones reported her condition as serious. The last one, the one I had opened first, stated that her condition was slightly better.

  Nowadays, of course, one could have been home in less than twelve hours, with air services going from the Piraeus every day, but then, in 1930, there were no such facilities. At the very earliest, if I could book a seat, the next Orient Express, would not get me to London for four days.

  My three friends all reacted to my bad news with the utmost kindness.

  Len laid aside what he was doing and went out to contact travel agencies and find the earliest seat that could be booked. Katharine spoke with deep sympathy. Max said little, but he, too, went out with Len to the travel agency.

  Walking along the street, half dazed with shock, I put my foot into one of those square holes in which trees seemed eternally to be being planted in the streets of Athens. I sprained my ankle badly, and was unable to walk. Sitting in the hotel, receiving the commiserations of Len and Katharine, I wondered where Max was. Presently he came in. With him he had two good solid crepe bandages and an elastoplast. Then, he explained quietly that he would be able to look after me on the journey home and help me with my ankle.

  ‘But you are going up to the Temple of Bassae,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you meeting somebody?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve changed my plans,’ he said. ‘I think I really ought to get home, so I will be able to travel with you. I can help you along to the dining-car or bring meals along to you, and get things done for you.’

  It seemed too marvellous to be true. I thought then, and indeed have thought ever since, what a wonderful person Max is. He is so quiet, so sparing with words of commiseration. He does things. He does just the things you want done and that consoles you more than anything else could. He didn’t condole with me over Rosalind or say she would be all right and that I mustn’t worry. He just accepted that I was in for a bad time. There were no sulpha drugs then, and pneumonia was a real menace.

  Max and I left the next evening. On our journey he talked to me a great deal about his own family, his brothers, his mother, who was French and very artistic and keen on painting, and his father, who sounded a little like my brother Monty–only fortunately more stable financially.

  At Milan we had an adventure. The train was late. We got out I could limp about now, my ankle supported by elastoplast–and asked the wagon lit conductor how long the wait would be. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. Max suggested we should go and buy some oranges-so we walked along to a fruit-stall, then walked back to the platform again.

  I suppose about five minutes had elapsed, but there was no train at the platform. We were told it had left.

  ‘Left? I thought it waited here twenty minutes,’ I said.

  ‘Ah yes, Signora, but it was very much in lateness–it waited only a short time.’

  We looked at each other in dismay. A senior railway official then came to our aid. He suggested that we hire a powerful car and race the train.

  He thought we would have a sporting chance of catching it at Domodossola.

  A journey rather like one on the cinema then began. First we were ahead of the train, then the train was ahead of us. Now we felt despair, the next moment we felt comfortably superior, as we went through the mountain roads and the train popped in and out of tunnels, either ahead of or behind us. Finally we reached Domodossola about three minutes after the train. All the passengers it seemed, were leaning out of the windows–certainly all in our own wagon lit coach–to see whether we had arrived.

  ‘Ah, Madame,’ said an elderly Frenchman as he helped me into the train. ‘Que vous avez dû éprouver des émotions?’ The French have a wonderful way of putting things.

  As a result of hiring this excessively expensive car, about which we had no time to bargain, Max and I had practically no money left. Max’s mother was meeting him in Paris, and he suggested hopefully I should be able to borrow money from her. I have often wondered what my future mother-in-law thought of the young woman who jumped out of the train with her son, and after the briefest of greetings borrowed practically every sou she happened to have on her. There was little time to explain because I had to take the train on to England, so with confused apologies I vanished, clutching the money I had extracted from her. It cannot, I think, have prejudiced her in my favour.

  I remember little of that journey with Max except his extraordinary kindness, tact, and sympathy. He managed to distract me by talking a good deal about his own doings and thoughts. He bandaged my ankle repeatedly, and helped me along to the dining-car, which I do not think I could have reached by myself, especially with the jolting of the Orient Express as it gathered strength and speed. One remark I do remember.

  We had been running alongside the sea on the Italian Riviera. I had been half asleep, sitting back in my corner, and Max had come into my carriage and sitting opposite me. I woke up and found him studying me, thoughtfully.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you really have a noble face.’ This so astonished me that I woke up a little more. It was a way I should never have thought of describing myself–certainly nobody else had ever done so.

  A noble face–had I? It seemed unlikely. Then a thought occurred to me.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, �
�that is because I have rather a Roman nose.’ Yes, I thought, a Roman nose. That would give me a slightly noble profile.

  I was not quite sure that I liked the idea. It was the kind of thing that was difficult to live up to. I am many things: good-tempered, exuberant, scatty, forgetful, shy, affectionate, completely lacking in self-confidence, moderately unselfish; but noble–no, I can’t see myself as noble. However, I relapsed into sleep, rearranging my Roman nose to look its best–full-face, rather than profile.

  VI

  It was a horrible moment when I first lifted the telephone on my arrival in London. I had had no news now for five days. Oh, the relief when my sister’s voice told me that Rosalind was much better, out of danger, and making a rapid recovery. Within six hours I was in Cheshire.

  Although Rosalind was obviously mending fast, it was a shock to see her. I had had little experience then of the rapidity with which children go up and down in illness. Most of my nursing experience had been amongst grown men, and the frightening way in which children can look half dead one moment and in the pink the next was practically unknown to me. Rosalind had the appearance of having grown much taller and thinner, and the listless way she lay back in an arm-chair was so unlike my girl.

  The most notable characteristic of Rosalind was her energy. She was the kind of child who was never still for a moment; who, if you returned from a long and gruelling picnic, would say brightly: ‘There’s at least half an hour before supper-what can we do? It was not unusual to come round the corner of the house and find her standing on her head.

  ‘What on earth are you doing that for, Rosalind?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, just putting in time. One must do something? But here was Rosalind lying back, looking frail and delicate, and completely devoid of energy. All my sister said was, ‘You should have seen her a week ago. She really looked like death.’

  Rosalind mended remarkably quickly. Within a week of my return she was down in Devonshire, at Ashfield, and seemed almost back to her old self–though I did my best to restrain her from the perpetual motion which she wished to renew.

  Apparently Rosalind had gone back to school in good health and spirits. All had gone well until an epidemic of influenza passed over the school, and half the children went down with it. I suppose flu on top of the natural weakness after measles had led to pneumonia. Everybody was worried about her though a little doubtful about my sister’s removing her by car to the north. But Punkie had insisted, being sure that it was the best thing–and so indeed it had proved to be.

  Nobody could have made a better recovery than Rosalind did. The doctor pronounced her as strong and fit as she had ever been–if not more so, ‘She seems,’ he added, ‘a very live wire.’ I assured him that toughness had always been one of Rosalind’s qualities. She was never one to admit she was ill. In the Canary Islands, she had suffered from tonsilitis but never breathed a word about it except to say: ‘I am feeling very cross? I had learnt by experience that when Rosalind said she was feeling very cross, there were two possibilities: either she was ill or it was a literal statement of fact–she was feeling cross, and thought it only fair to warn us of the fact.

  Mothers are, of course, partial towards their children-why should they not be–but I cannot help believing that my daughter was more fun than most. She had a great talent for the unexpected answer. So often you know beforehand what children are going to say, but Rosalind usually surprised me. Possibly it was the Irish in her. Archie’s mother was Irish, and I think it was from the Irish side of her ancestry that she got her unexpectedness.

  ‘Of course,’ said Carlo to me with that air of impartiality she liked to assume, ‘Rosalind can be maddening sometimes. I get furious with her.

  All the same I find other children very boring after her. She may be maddening, but she is never boring.’ That, I think, has held true throughout her fife.

  We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then, whereas at twenty we put on a show of being someone else, of being in the mode of the moment. If there is an intellectual fashion, you become an intellectual; if girls are fluffy and frivolous, you are fluffy and frivolous. As life goes on, however, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned.

  I wonder if the same holds good for writing. Certainly, when you begin to write, you are usually in the throes of admiration for some writer, and, whether you will or no, you cannot help copying their style. Often it is not a style that suits you, and so you write badly. But as time goes on you are less influenced by admiration. You still admire certain writers, you may even wish you could write like them, but you know quite well that you can’t. Presumably, you have learnt literary humility. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do. As the Bible say, ‘Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’

  Often there flashes through my head a picture of the plate which hung upon my nursery wall: one which I think I must have won at a coconut shy at one of the regattas. ‘Be a wheel-greaser if you can’t drive a train’ is written across it–and never was there a better motto with which to go through life. I think I have kept to it. I have had a few tries at this and that, mind you, but I have never stuck to trying to do things which I do badly, and for which I do not have a natural aptitude. Rumer Godden, in one of her books, once wrote down a list of the things she liked and the things she didn’t like. I found it entertaining, and immediately wrote down a list of my own. I think I could add to that now by writing down things I can’t do and things I can do. Naturally, the first list is much the longer.

  I was never good at games; I am not and never shall be a good conversationalist;

  I am so easily suggestible that I have to get away by myself before I know what I really think or need to do. I can’t draw; I can’t paint; I can’t model or do any kind of sculpture; I can’t hurry without getting rattled; I can’t say what I mean easily-I can write it better.

  I can stand fast on a matter of principle, but not on anything else. Although I know tomorrow is Tuesday, if somebody tells me more than four times that tomorrow is Wednesday, after the fourth time I shall accept that it is Wednesday, and act accordingly.

  What can I do? Well, I can write. I could be a reasonable musician, but not a professional one. I am a good accompanist to singers. I can improvise things when in difficulties–this has been a most useful accomplishment; the things I can do with hairpins and safety pins when in domestic difficulties would surprise you. It was I who fashioned bread into a sticky pill, stuck it on a hairpin, attached the hairpin with sealing wax on the end of a window pole, and managed to pick up my mother’s false teeth from where they had fallen on to the conservatory roof!

  I successfully chloroformed a hedgehog that was entangled in the tennis net and so managed to release it. I can claim to be useful about the house.

  And so on and so forth. And now for what I like and don’t like.

  I don’t like crowds, being jammed up against people, loud voices, noise, protracted talking, parties, and especially cocktail parties, cigarette smoke and smoking generally, any kind of drink except in cooking, marmalade, oysters, lukewarm food, grey skies, the feet of birds, or indeed the feel of a bird altogether. Final and fiercest dislike: the taste and smell of hot milk.

  I like sunshine, apples, almost any kind of music, railway trains, numerical puzzles and anything to do with numbers, going to the sea, bathing and swimming, silence, sleeping, dreaming, eating, the smell of coffee, lilies of the vall
ey, most dogs, and going to the theatre.

  I could make much better lists, much grander-sounding, much more important, but there again it wouldn’t be me, and I suppose I must resign myself to being me.

  Now that I was starting life again, I had to take stock of my friends. All that I had gone through made for a kind of acid test. Carlo and I compiled between us two orders: the Order of the Rats and the Order of the Faithful Dogs. We would sometimes say of someone, ‘Oh yes, we will give him the Order of the Faithful Dogs, first class,’ or, ‘We will give him the Order of the Rats, third class.’ There were not many Rats, but there were some rather unexpected ones: people who you had thought were your true friends, but who turned out anxious to disassociate themselves from anybody who had attracted notoriety of the wrong sort. This discovery, of course, made me more sensitive and more inclined to withdraw from people. On the other hand, I found many most unexpected friends, completely loyal, who showed me more affection and kindness than they had ever done before.

  I think I admire loyalty almost more than any other virtue. Loyalty and courage are two of the finest things there are. Any kind of courage, physical or moral, arouses my utmost admiration. It is one of the most important virtues to bring to life. If you can bear to live at all, you can bear to live with courage. It is a must.

  I found many worthy members of the Order of Faithful Dogs amongst my men friends. There are faithful Dobbins in most women’s lives, and I was particularly touched by one of these who arrived at a Dobbin-like gallop. He sent me enormous bunches of flowers, wrote me letters, and finally asked me to marry him. He was a widower, and some years older than I was. He told me that when he had first met me earlier, he had thought me far too young, but that now he could make me happy and give me a good home. I was touched by this, but I had no wish to marry him, nor indeed had I ever had any such feelings towards him. He had been a good, kind friend, and that was all. It is heartening to know that someone cares–but it is most foolish to marry someone simply because you wish to be comforted, or to have a shoulder to cry upon.