But one is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one! War, I think, has had its time and place; when, unless you were warlike, you would not live to perpetuate your species–you would die out. To be meek, to be gentle, to give in easily, would spell disaster; war was a necessity then, because either you or the others would perish. Like a bird or animal, you had to fight for your territory. War brought you slaves, land, food, women–the things you needed to survive. But now we have got to learn to avoid war, not because of our nicer natures or our dislike of hurting others, but because war is not profitable, we shall not survive war, but shall, as well as our adversaries, be destroyed by war. The time of the tigers is over; now, no doubt, we shall have the time of the rogues and the charlatans, of the thieves, the robbers and pickpockets; but that is better–it is a stage on the upward way.
There is at least the dawn, I believe, of a kind of good will. We mind when we hear of earthquakes, of spectacular disasters to the human race. We want to help. That is a real achievement; which I think must lead somewhere. Not quickly–nothing happens quickly–but at any rate we can hope. I think sometimes we do not appreciate that second virtue which we mention so seldom in the trilogy–faith, hope and charity. Faith we have had, shall we say, almost too much of–faith can make you bitter, hard, unforgiving; you can abuse faith. Love we cannot but help knowing in our own hearts is the essential. But how often do we forget that there is hope as well, and that we seldom think about hope? We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, ‘What’s the good of doing anything?’ Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age.
We have made ourselves a Welfare State, which has given us freedom from fear, security, our daily bread and a little more than our daily bread; and yet it seems to me that now, in this Welfare State, every year it becomes more difficult for anybody to look forward to the future. Nothing is worth-while. Why? Is it because we no longer have to fight for existence? Is living not even interesting any more? We cannot appreciate the fact of being alive. Perhaps we need the difficulties of space, of new worlds opening up, of a different kind of hardship and agony, of illness and pain, and a wild yearning for survival?
Oh well, I am a hopeful person myself. The one virtue that would never, I think, be quenched for me, would be hope. That is where I always have found my dear Mathew such a rewarding person to be with. He has always had an incurably optimistic temperament. I remember once when he was at his prep school, and Max was asking him whether he thought he had any chance of getting into the First Cricket Eleven. ‘Oh well,’ said Mathew, with a beaming smile, ‘there’s always hope!’
One should adopt something like that, I think, as one’s motto in life. It made me mad with anger to hear of one middle-aged couple who had been living in France when the war broke out. When they thought the Germans might be approaching on their march across France, they decided the only thing to be done was to commit suicide, which they did. But the waste! The pity of it! They did no good to anyone by their suicide. They could have lived through a difficult life of enduring, of surviving. Why should one give up any hope until one is dead?
It reminds me of the story that my American godmother used to tell me years and years ago about two frogs who fell into a pail of milk. One said: ‘Ooh, I’m drowning, I’m drowning!’ The other frog said, ‘I‘m not going to drown.’ ‘How can you stop drowning?’ asked the other frog. ‘Why, I’m going to hustle around, and hustle around, and hustle around like mad,’ said the second frog. Next morning the first frog had given up and drowned, and the second frog, having hustled around all night, was sitting there in the pail, right on top of a pat of butter.
Everyone, I think, got a bit restless towards the last years of the war. Ever since D-day there was a feeling that there could be an end to the war, and many people who had said there couldn’t were beginning to eat their words.
I began to feel restless. Most patients had moved out of London, though of course there were still the out-patients. Even there, one sometimes felt, it was not as it had been in the last war, where you were patching up wounded men straight from the trenches. Half the time, now, you had only to give out large quantities of pills to epileptics–necessary work, but it lacked that involvement with war that one felt one needed. The mothers brought their babies to the Welfare–and I used to think they often would have done much better to have kept them at home. In this the chief pharmacist entirely agreed with me.
I considered one or two projects at this time. One young friend of mine who was in the W.A.A.F. arranged for me to see a friend of hers with a view to doing some intelligence photographic work. I was furnished with an impressive pass which enabled me to wander through what seemed miles of subterranean corridors underneath the War Office, and I was finally received by a grave young lieutenant who frightened me to death. Although I had had a lot of experience in photography, the one thing I had never done and knew nothing about was aerial photography. In consequence, I found it practically impossible to recognise any photograph that was shown me. The only one I was reasonably sure of was one of Oslo, but I had become so defeatist by that time that I didn’t dare say so, having made several boss shots already. The young man sighed, looked at me as the complete moron I was, and said gently: ‘I think perhaps you had better go back to hospital work.’ I departed feeling completely deflated.
Towards the beginning of the war, Graham Greene had written to me and asked if I would like to do propaganda work. I did not think I was the kind of writer who would be any good at propaganda, because I lacked the single-mindedness to see only one side of the case. Nothing could be more ineffectual than a lukewarm propagandist. You want to be able to say ‘X is black as night’ and feel it. I didn’t think I could ever be like that.
But every day now I was getting more restless. I wanted work that had at least something to do with the war. I got an offer to be a dispenser to a doctor in Wendover; it was near where some friends of mine were living. I thought that that would be very nice for me, and I would like being in the country. Only, if Max were to come home from North Africa–and after three years, he might come–I should feel I was treating my doctor badly.
I also had a theatrical project. It was possible that I might go with E.N.S.A. as a sort of extra producer or something on a tour of North Africa. I was thrilled by that idea. It would be wonderful if I got out to North Africa. It was fortunate that I did nothing of the kind. About a fortnight before I would have left England, I got a letter from Max saying that he quite probably would be coming back from North Africa to the Air Ministry in two to three weeks’ time. What misery, if I had arrived out in North Africa with E.N.S.A. just at the moment he came home.
The next few weeks were agony. There I was, all keyed up, waiting. In a fortnight, in three weeks, no, perhaps longer–I told myself that these things always took longer than one expected.
I went down for a weekend to Rosalind in Wales and came back by a late train on the Sunday night. It was one of those trains one had so often to endure in wartime, freezing cold, and of course when one got to Paddington there was no means of getting anywhere. I took some complicated train which finally landed me at a station in Hampstead not too far away from Lawn Road Flats, and from there I walked home, carrying some kippers and my suitcase. I got in, weary and cold, and started by turning on the gas, throwing off my coat and putting my suitcase down. I put the kippers in the frying pan. Then I heard the most peculiar clanking noise outside, and wondered what it could be. I went out on the balcony and I looked down the stairs. Up them came a figure burdened with everything imaginable–rather like the caricatures of Old Bill in the first war–clanking things hung all over him. Perhaps the White Knight would have been a good description of him. It seemed impossible that anyone could be hung over with so much. But there was no doubt who it was–it was my husband! Two minutes later I knew that all my fears that things might be different, that h
e would have changed, were baseless. This was Max! He might have left yesterday. He was back again. We were back again. A terrible smell of frying kippers came to our noses and we rushed into the flat.
‘What on earth are you eating?’ asked Max.
‘Kippers,’ I said. ‘You had better have one.’ Then we looked at each other. ‘Max!’ I said. ‘You are two stone heavier.’
‘Just about. And you haven’t lost any weight yourself,’ he added.
‘It’s because of all the potatoes,’ I said. ‘When you haven’t meat and things like that, you eat too many potatoes and too much bread.’
So there we were. Four stone between us more than when he left. It seemed all wrong. It ought to have been the other way round.
‘Living in the Fezzan Desert ought to be very slimming,’ I said. Max said that deserts were not at all slimming, because one had nothing else to do but sit and eat oily meals, and drink beer.
What a wonderful evening it was! We ate burnt kippers, and were happy.
PART XI
AUTUMN
I
I am writing this in 1965. And that was in 1945. Twenty years, but it does not seem like twenty years. The war years do not seem like real years, either. They were a nightmare in which reality stopped. For some years afterwards I was always saying, ‘Oh, so-and-so happened five years ago,’ but each time, really, I ought to have added another five. Now, when I say a few years ago, I mean quite a lot of years. Time has altered for me, as it does for the old.
My life began again, first with the ending of the German war. Though technically the war continued with Japan, our war ended then. Then came the business of picking up the pieces, all the bits and pieces scattered everywhere–bits of one’s life.
After having some leave, Max went back to the Air Ministry. The Admiralty decided to derequisition Greenway–as usual, at a moment’s notice–and the date they chose for it was Christmas Day. There could not have been a worse day for having to take over an abandoned house. We narrowly missed one bit of good fortune. Our electric generator engine, by which we made our own electricity, had been on its last legs when the Admiralty took over. The American Commander had told me several times he was afraid it would conk out altogether before long. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we’ll put you in a jolly good new one when we do replace it, so you will have something to look forward to.’ Unfortunately the house was derequisitioned just three weeks before the electric generator was scheduled to be replaced.
Greenway was beautiful when we went down there again on a sunny winter’s day–but it was wild, wild as a beautiful jungle. Paths had disappeared, the kitchen garden, where carrots and lettuces had been grown, was all a mass of weeds, and the fruit-trees had not been pruned. It was sad in many ways to see it like that, but its beauty was still there. The inside of the house was not as bad as we had feared. There was no linoleum left, which was tiresome, and we could not obtain a permit to get any more because the Admiralty had taken it over and paid us for it when they moved in. The kitchen was indescribable, with the blackness and oily soot of the walls–and there were, as I have said, fourteen lavatories along the stone passage down there.
I had a splendid man who battled for me with the Admiralty, and I must say the Admiralty needed some battling with. Mr Adams was a firm ally of mine. Somebody had told me that he was the only man capable of wringing blood from a stone or money from the Admiralty!
They refused to allow sufficient to redecorate rooms on the absurd pretext that the house had been freshly painted only a year or two before they took over–therefore they’d only allow for a portion of each room. How can you decorate three quarters of a room? However, it turned out the boat house had been a good deal damaged, with stones removed, steps broken down, and various things like that, and this was costly structural damage, for which they had to pay–so when I got the money for that I was able to redecorate the kitchen.
We had another desperate battle about the lavatories, because they said they ought to be charged against me as improvements. I said it was no improvement to have fourteen lavatories that you didn’t need along a kitchen passage. What you needed there was the larder and the wood shed and the pantry that had been there originally. They said all those lavatories would be an enormous improvement if the place was going to be turned into a girls’ school. I pointed out it was not going to be turned into a girls’ school. They could leave me one extra lavatory, I said, very graciously. However, they wouldn’t do that. Either they were going to take all the lavatories away, or I should have to pay the cost of them as installed against what was allowed for other damage. So, like the Red Queen, I said, ‘Take them all away!’
This meant a lot of trouble and expense for the Admiralty, but they had to take them away. Then Mr Adams got their people to come back again and again to take them away properly, as they always left pipes and bits of things sticking out, and to replace the pantry and larder fittings. It was a long dreary battle.
In due course, the removers came and redistributed the furniture all over the house. It was amazing how little anything had been damaged or spoilt, apart from the destruction by moths of carpets. They had been told to mothproof them, but had neglected to do so through false optimism: ‘It will be all over by Christmas.’ A few books had been damaged by damp–but surprisingly few. Nothing had come through the roof of the drawing-room, and all the furniture had remained in remarkably good condition.
How beautiful Greenway looked in its tangled splendour; but I did wonder if we would ever clear any of the paths again, or even find where they were. The place became more of a wilderness every day, and was regarded as such in the neighbourhood. We were always turning people out of the drive. They would often walk up there in the spring, pulling off great branches of rhododendrons, and carelessly ruining the shrubs. Of course the place was empty for a time after the Admiralty moved out. We were in London, and Max was still at the Air Ministry. There was no caretaker, and everybody came in to help themselves freely to everything–not just picking flowers, but breaking off the branches anyhow.
We were able to settle in at last, and life began again, though not as it had been before. There was the relief that peace had at last come, but no certainty in the future of peace, or indeed of anything. We went gently, thankful to be together, and tentatively trying out life, to see what we would be able to make of it. Business was worrying too. Forms to fill up, contracts to sign, tax complications–a whole welter of stuff one didn’t understand.
It is only now that I fully realise, looking back over my wartime output, that I produced an incredible amount of stuff during those years. I suppose it was because there were no distractions of a social nature; one practically never went out in the evenings.
Besides what I have already mentioned, I had written an extra two books during the first years of the war. This was in anticipation of my being killed in the raids, which seemed to be in the highest degree likely as I was working in London. One was for Rosalind, which I wrote first–a book with Hercule Poirot in it–and the other was for Max–with Miss Marple in it. Those two books, when written, were put in the vaults of a bank, and were made over formally by deed of gift to Rosalind and Max. They were, I gather, heavily insured against destruction.
‘It will cheer you up,’ I explained to them both, ‘when you come back from the funeral, or the Memorial Service, to think that you have got a couple of books, one belonging to each of you!’ They said they would rather have me, and I said: ‘I should hope so, indeed!’ And we all laughed a good deal.
I cannot see why people are always so embarrassed by having to discuss anything to do with death. Dear Edmund Cork, my agent, always used to look most upset when I raised the question of ‘Yes, but supposing I should die?’ But really the question of death is so important nowadays, that one has to discuss it. As far as I could make out from what lawyers and tax people told me about death duties–very little of which I ever understood–my demise was going to be an unparallele
d disaster for all my relations, and their only hope was to keep me alive as long as possible!
Seeing the point to which taxation has now risen, I was pleased to think it was no longer really worth-while for me to work so hard: one book a year was ample. If I wrote two books a year I should make hardly more than by writing one, and only give myself a great deal of extra work. Certainly there was no longer the old incentive. If there was something out of the ordinary that I really wanted to do, that would be different.
About then the B.B.C. rang me up and asked me if I would like to do a short radio play for a programme they were putting on for some function to do with Queen Mary. She had expressed the wish to have something of mine, as she liked my books. Could I manage that for them quite soon? I was attracted by the idea. I thought hard, walked up and down, then rang them back and said Yes. An idea came to me that I thought would do, and I wrote the little radio sketch called Three Blind Mice. As far as I know Queen Mary was pleased with it.
That would seem to be the end of that, but shortly afterwards it was suggested I might enlarge it into a short story. The Hollow, which I had adapted for the stage, had been produced by Peter Saunders, and had been successful. I had so enjoyed it myself that I began to think about further essays in play-writing. Why not write a play instead of a book? Much more fun. One book a year would take care of finances, so I could now enjoy myself in an entirely different medium.
The more I thought of Three Blind Mice, the more I felt that it might expand from a radio play lasting twenty minutes to a three-act thriller. It wanted a couple of extra characters, a fuller background and plot, and a slow working up to the climax. I think one of the advantages The Mousetrap, as the stage version of Three Blind Mice was called, has had over other plays is the fact that it was really written from a précis, so that it had to be the bare bones of the skeleton coated with flesh. It was all there in proportion from the first. That made for good construction.
An Autobiography Page 65