An Autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  ‘You are not to tear them up,’ said Max.

  ‘I shall tear them up,’ said Rosalind.

  They then had an enormous fight, Rosalind trembling with rage, Max also really angry. The drawings of the painted pots were salvaged, and appeared in Max’s book of Tell Brak–but Rosalind never professed herself satisfied with them.

  Horses were procured from the Sheikh, and Rosalind went riding, accompanied by Guilford Bell, the young architect nephew of my Australian friend, Aileen Bell. He was a very dear boy and he did some extraordinarily lovely pencil drawings of our amulets at Brak. They were beautiful little things–frogs, lions, rams, bulls–and the delicate shading of his pencil drawings made a perfect medium for them.

  That summer Guilford came to stay with us at Torquay, and one day we saw that a house was up for sale that I had known when I was young–Greenway House, on the Dart, a house that my mother had always said, and I had thought also, was the most perfect of the various properties on the Dart.

  ‘Let’s go and look at it,’ I said. ‘It would be lovely to see it again. I haven’t seen it since I went there calling with Mother when I was a child.’

  So we went over to Greenway, and very beautiful the house and grounds were. A white Georgian house of about 1780 or 90, with woods sweeping down to the Dart below, and a lot of fine shrubs and trees–the ideal house, a dream house. Since we had an order to view, I asked its price, though without much interest. I didn’t think I had heard the answer correctly.

  ‘Sixteen thousand, did you say?’

  ‘Six thousand.’

  ‘Six thousand?’ I could hardly believe it. We drove home talking about it. ‘It’s incredibly cheap,’ I said. ‘It’s got thirty-three acres. It doesn’t look in bad condition either; wants decorating, that’s all.’

  ‘Why don’t you buy it?’ asked Max.

  I was so startled, this coming from Max, that it took my breath away. ‘You’ve been getting worried about Ashfield, you know,’

  I knew what he meant. Ashfield, my home, had changed. Where our neighbours’ houses had once been ringed round us–other villas of the same kind–there was now, blocking the view in the narrowest part of the garden, a large secondary school, which stood between us and the sea. All day there were noisy shouting children. On the other side of us there was now a mental nursing home. Sometimes queer sounds would come from there, and patients would appear suddenly in the garden. They were not certified, so I presume they were free to do as they liked, but we had had some unpleasant incidents. A brawny colonel in pyjamas appeared, waving a golf-club, determined he was going to kill all the moles in the garden; another day he came to attack a dog who had barked. The nurses apologised, fetched him back, and said he was quite all right, just a little ‘disturbed’, but it was alarming, and once or twice children staying with us had been badly frightened.

  Once it had been all countryside out of Torquay: three villas up the hill and then the road petered out into country. The lush green fields where I used to go to look at the lambs in spring had given way to a mass of small houses. No one we knew lived in our road any longer. It was as though Ashfield had become a parody of itself.

  Still, that was hardly a reason for buying Greenway House. Yet, how it appealed to me. I had known always that Max did not really like Ashfield. He had never told me so–but I knew it. I think in some way he was jealous of it because it was a part of my life that I hadn’t shared with him–it was all my own. And he had said, unprompted, of Greenway, ‘Why don’t you buy it?‘

  And so we made inquiries. Guilford helped us. He looked over the house professionally, and said: ‘Well, I’ll give you my advice. Pull half of it down.’

  ‘Pull half of it down!’

  ‘Yes. You see, the whole of that back wing is Victorian. You could leave the 1790 house and take away all that addition–the billiard room, the study, the estate room, those bedrooms and new bathrooms upstairs. It would be a far better house, far lighter. The original is a very beautiful house, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘We shan’t have any bathrooms left if we pull the Victorian ones down,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Well, you can easily make bathrooms on the top floor. Another thing, too; it would bring your rates down by quite a lot.’

  And so we bought Greenway. We put Guilford in charge, and he redesigned the house on its original lines. We added bathrooms upstairs, and downstairs we affixed a small cloakroom, but the rest of it we left untouched. I only wish now that I had had the gift of foresight–if so I would have taken off another large chunk of the house: the vast larder, the great caverns in which you soaked pigs, the kindling store, the suite of sculleries. Instead I would have put on a nice, small kitchen from which I could go to the dining-room in a few steps, and which would be easy to run with no help. But it would never have occurred to me that a day would come when there was no domestic help. So we left the kitchen wing as it was. When the alterations were all done, and the house decorated plainly in white, we moved in.

  Just after we had done so, and were exulting in it, the second war came. It was not quite so much out-of-the-blue as in 1914. We had had warnings: there had been Munich; but we had listened to Chamberlain’s reassurances, and we had thought then that when he said, ‘Peace in our time’, it might be the truth.

  But Peace in our time was not to be.

  PART X

  THE SECOND WAR

  I

  And so we were back again in wartime. It was not a war like the last one. One expected it to be, because I suppose one always does expect things to repeat themselves. The first war came with a shock of incomprehension, as something unheard of, impossible, something that had never happened in living memory, that never would happen. This war was different.

  At first, there was an almost incredulous surprise that nothing happened. One expected to hear that London was bombed that first night. London was not bombed.

  I think everyone was trying to ring up everyone else. Peggy MacLeod, my doctor friend from Mosul days, rang up from the east coast, where she and her husband practised, to ask if I would have their children. She said: ‘We are so frightened here–this is where it will all start, they say. If you can have the children, I’ll start off in the car to bring them down to you.’ I said that would be quite all right: she could bring them and the nurse too if she liked; so that was settled.

  Peggy MacLeod arrived next day, having motored day and night across England with Crystal, my godchild, who was three years old, and David, who was five. Peggy was worn out. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without benzedrine,’ she said. ‘Look here, I’ve got an extra thing of it here. I had better give it to you. It may be useful to you some time when you are absolutely exhausted.’ I have still got that small flat tin of benzedrine: I have never used it. I have kept it, perhaps as an insurance against the moment when I should be utterly exhausted.

  We got organised, more or less, and there we sat, waiting for something to happen. But since nothing did happen, little by little we went on with our own pursuits and some additional war activities.

  Max joined the Home Guard, which was really like a comic opera at that time. There were hardly any guns–one between eight men, I think. Max used to go out with them every night. Some of the men enjoyed themselves very much–and some of the wives were deeply suspicious as to what their husbands were doing under this pretence of guarding the country. Indeed, as months passed and nothing happened, it became an uproarious and cheerful gathering. In the end, Max decided to go to London. Like everybody else, he was clamouring to be sent abroad, to be given some work to do–but all anyone seemed to want to do was to say: ‘Nothing could be done at the present’–‘Nobody was wanted.’

  I went to the hospital at Torquay and asked if they would let me work in the dispensary there to freshen up my knowledge in case I should be useful to them later. Since casualty cases were expected all the time, the chief dispenser there was quite willing to have me. She brought me up to d
ate with the various medicines and things that were prescribed nowadays. On the whole it was much simpler than it had been in my young days, there were so many pills, tablets, powders and things already prepared in bottles.

  The war started, when it did start, not in London or on the east coast, but down in our part of the world. David MacLeod, a most intelligent boy, was crazy about aeroplanes, and did a great deal towards teaching me the various types. He showed me pictures of Messerschmitts and others, and pointed out Hurricanes and Spitfires in the sky.

  ‘Now have you got it right, this time?’ he would say anxiously. ‘You see what that is up there?’

  It was so far away it was only a speck, but I said hopefully it was a Hurricane.

  ‘No,’ said David, disgusted. ‘You make a mistake every time. That is a Spitfire.’

  On the following day he remarked, looking up at the sky, ‘That is a Messerschmitt coming over now.’

  ‘No, no, dear,’ I said, ‘it isn’t a Messerschmitt. It’s one of ours–it’s a Hurricane.’

  ‘It’s not a Hurricane.’

  ‘Well it’s a Spitfire, then.’

  ‘It is not a Spitfire, it’s a Messerschmitt. Can’t you tell a Hurricane or a Spitfire from a Messerschmitt?’

  ‘But it can’t be a Messerschmitt,’ I said. At that moment two bombs dropped on the hillside.

  David looked very like weeping. ‘I told you it was a Messerschmitt,’ he said, in a voice of lament.

  That same afternoon, when the children were going across the ferry in the boat with nurse, a plane swooped down and machine-gunned all the craft on the river. Bullets had gone all round nurse and the children, and she came back somewhat shaken. ‘I think you had better ring up Mrs MacLeod,’ she said. So I did ring up Peggy, and we wondered what to do.

  ‘Nothing has happened here,’ said Peggy. ‘I suppose it may start any time. I don’t think they ought to come back here do you?’

  ‘Perhaps there won’t be any more,’ I said.

  David had been excited over the bombs, and insisted on going to see where they had fallen. Two had fallen in Dittisham by the river, and some others up on the hill behind us. We found one of these by scrambling through a lot of nettles and a hedge or two, and finally came upon three farmers, all looking at a bomb crater in the field, and at another bomb which appeared to have dropped without exploding.

  ‘Dang it all,’ said one farmer, administering a hearty kick to the unexploded bomb, ‘regular nasty it is, I call it, sending those things down-nasty!

  He kicked it again. It seemed to me it would be much better if he did not kick it, but he obviously wished to show his contempt for all the works of Hitler.

  ‘Can’t even explode properly,’ he said with disparagement.

  They were, of course, all very small bombs, compared to what we were to get later in the war–but there it was: hostilities had begun. Next day there was news from Cornworthy, a little village further up the Dart: a plane there had swooped down and sprayed the school playground when the children were out at play. One of the mistresses had been hit in the shoulder.

  Peggy rang me again, and said she had arranged for the children to go to Colwyn Bay, where their grandmother lived. It seemed to be peaceful there, at any rate.

  The children departed, and I was terribly sorry to lose them. Soon afterwards a Mrs Arbuthnot wrote to me and wanted me to let the house to her. Now that the bombing had started, children were being evacuated to various parts of England. She wished to have Greenway for a nursery for children evacuated from St. Pancras.

  The war seemed to have shifted from our part of the world; there was no more bombing; and in due course Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot arrived, took over my butler and his wife, and established two hospital nurses and ten children under five. I had decided that I would go to London and join Max, who was working there on Turkish Relief.

  I arrived in London, just after the raids, and Max, having met me at Paddington, drove me to a flat in Half Moon Street. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically, ‘it is a pretty nasty one. We can look around for something else.’

  What slightly put me off, when I arrived, was the fact that the house in question stood up like a tooth–the houses on either side of it were missing. They had apparently been hit by a bomb about ten days before, and for that reason the flat was available for rent, its owners having cleared out quickly. I can’t say I felt very comfortable in that house. It smelt horribly of dirt and grease and cheap scent.

  Max and I moved after a week into Park Place, off St. James’s Street, which had once been rather an expensive service flat. We lived there for some little time, with noisy sessions of bombs going off all round us. I was particularly sorry for the waiters, who had to serve meals in the evening and then take themselves home through the air raids.

  Presently our tenants in Sheffield Terrace asked if they could give up the lease of our house, so we moved back in.

  Rosalind had filled in forms for the Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force, but she was not particularly enthusiastic about it, and thought on the whole that she would prefer to go as a landgirl.

  She went for an interview with the W.A.A.F. and showed herself lamentably lacking in tact. When asked why she wanted to join she merely said: ‘Because one must do something and this will do as well as anything else.’ That, though candid, was not, I think, well received. A little later, after a brief period delivering school meals and doing work in a military office somewhere, she said she thought she might as well join the A.T.S. They weren’t, she said, as bossy as the W.A.A.F. She filled up a fresh set of papers.

  Then Max, to his great joy, got into the Air Force, helped by our friend Stephen Glanville, who was a Professor of Egyptology. He and Max were both at the Air Ministry, where they shared a room, both of them smoking–Max a pipe–without ceasing. The atmosphere was such that it was called by all their friends ‘the small cat-house’.

  Events happened in confusing order. I remember that Sheffield Terrace was bombed on a weekend when we were away from London. A land-mine came down exactly opposite it, on the other side of the street, and completely destroyed three houses. The effect it had on 48 Sheffield Terrace was to blow up the basement, which might have been presumed the safest place, and to damage the roof and the top floor, leaving the ground and first floors almost unharmed. My Steinway was never quite the same afterwards.

  Since Max and I had always slept in our own bedroom, and never went down to the basement, we should not have suffered any personal damage even if we had been in the house. I myself never went down to any shelter during the war. I always had a horror of being trapped under-ground–so I slept in my own bed no matter where I was. I became used in the end to raids on London–so much so, that I hardly woke up. I would think, half drowsily, that I heard the siren, or bombs not too far away.

  ‘Oh dear, there they are again!’ I would mutter, and turn over.

  One of the difficulties with the bombing of Sheffield Terrace was that by this time it was difficult to get storage space anywhere in London. As the house now was, it was difficult to get into it through the front door and one could only get access to it by ladder. In the end, I prevailed upon a firm to move me, and hit upon the idea of storing the furniture at Wallingford, in the squash court which we had built a year or two previously. So everything was moved down there. I had builders in attendance ready to take out the squash court door and its framework if necessary–and this they had to do because the sofa and chairs would not go through the narrow doorway.

  Max and I moved to a block of flats in Hampstead–Lawn Road Flats–and I started work at University College Hospital as a dispenser.

  When Max broke to me what he had already known, I think, for some time, that he would have to go abroad to the Middle East, probably North Africa or Egypt, I was glad for him. I knew how he had been fretting to go, and it seemed right, too, that his knowledge of Arabic should be used. It was our first parting for ten years.

  Lawn Road Flat
s was a good place to be since Max had to be away. They were kindly people there. There was also a small restaurant, with an informal and happy atmosphere. Outside my bedroom window, which was on the second floor, a bank ran along behind the flats planted with trees and shrubs. Exactly opposite my window was a big, white, double cherry-tree which came to a great pyramidal point. The effect of the bank was much like that in the second act of Barrie’s Dear Brutus, when they turn to the window and find that Lob’s wood has come right up to the window-panes. The cherry-tree was especially welcome. It was one of the things in spring that cheered me every morning when I woke.

  There was a little garden at one end of the flats, and on summer evenings one could have meals out there, or sit out. Hampstead Heath, too, was only about ten minutes’ walk away, and I used to go there and take Carlo’s James for walks. I had the Sealyham with me because Carlo was now working in a munition factory and unable to have him there. They were very good to me at University College Hospital: they let me bring him to the dispensary. James behaved impeccably. He laid his white sausage-like body out under the shelves of bottles and remained there, occasionally accepting kind attentions from the charwoman when she was cleaning.

  Rosalind had successfully not been accepted for the W.A.A.F. and various other kinds of war work, without settling, as far as I could see, to anything in particular. With a view to joining the A.T.S. she filled up a large number of forms with dates, places, names, and all the unnecessary information officialdom has to have. Then she suddenly remarked: ‘I tore up all those forms this morning. I am not going to join the A.T.S. after all.’