‘You made theatrical history tonight,’ said Peter Saunders, doing his best to encourage me. I suppose that is true, in a way.
III
We were staying some years ago at the Embassy in Vienna, when Sir James and Lady Bowker were there and Elsa Bowker took me seriously to task when reporters had come for an interview.
‘But, Agatha!’ she cried in her delightful foreign voice, ‘I do not understand you! If it were me I should rejoice, I should be proud. I should say yes! come, come, and sit down! It is wonderful what I have done, I know it. I am the best detective story writer in the world. Yes, I am proud of the fact. Yes, yes, of course I will tell you. But I am delighted. Ah yes, I am very clever indeed. If I were you I should feel clever, I should feel so clever that I could not stop talking about it all the time.’
I laughed like anything, and said, ‘I wish to goodness, Elsa, you and I could change into each other’s skins for the next half-hour. You would do the interview so beautifully, and they would love you for it. But I just am not qualified at all to do things properly if I have to do them in public.’
On the whole I have had sense enough not to do things in public, except when it has been absolutely necessary, or would hurt people’s feelings badly if I didn’t. When you don’t do a thing well it is so much more sensible not to attempt it, and I don’t really see any reason why writers should–it’s not part of their stock-in-trade. There are many careers where personalities and public relations matter–for instance if you are an actor, or a public figure. An author’s business is simply to write. Writers are diffident creatures–they need encouragement.
The third play that I was to have running in London (all at the same time) was Spider’s Web. This was specially written for Margaret Lockwood. Peter Saunders asked me to meet her and talk about it. She said that she liked the idea of my writing a play for her, and I asked her exactly what kind of play she wanted. She said at once that she didn’t want to continue being sinister and melodramatic, that she had done a good many films lately in which she had been the ‘wicked lady’. She wanted to play comedy. I think she was right, because she has an enormous flair for comedy, as well as being able to be dramatic. She is a very good actress, and has that perfect timing which enables her to give lines their true weight.
I enjoyed myself writing the part of Clarissa in Spider’s Web. There was a little indecision at first as to the title; we hesitated between ‘Clarissa Finds a Body’ and ‘Spider’s Web’, but in the end ‘Spider’s Web’ got it. It ran for over two years, and I was very pleased with it. When Margaret Lockwood proceeded to lead the Police-Inspector up the garden path she was enchanting.
Later I was to write a play called The Unexpected Guest, and another which, though not a success with the public, satisfied me completely. It was put on under the title of Verdict–a bad title. I had called it No
Fields of Amaranth, taken from the words of Walter Landor’s: ‘There are no flowers of amaranth on this side of the grave’. I still think it is the best play I have written, with the exception of Witness for the Prosecution. It failed, I think, because it was not a detective story or a thriller. It was a play that concerned murder, but its real background and point was that an idealist is always dangerous, a possible destroyer of those who love him–and poses the question of how far you can sacrifice, not yourself, but those you love, to what you believe in, even though they do not.
Of my detective books, I think the two that satisfy me best are Crooked House and Ordeal by Innocence. Rather to my surprise, on re-reading them the other day, I find that another one I am really pleased with is The Moving Finger. It is a great test to re-read what one has written some seventeen or eighteen years later. One’s view changes. Some do not stand the test of time, others do.
An Indian girl who was interviewing me once (and asking, I must say, a good many silly questions), included among them, ‘Have you ever written and published a book you consider really bad?’ I replied with indignation that I had not. No book, I said, was exactly as I wanted it to be, and I was never quite satisfied with it, but if I thought a book I had written was really bad I should not publish it.
However, I have come near it, I think, in The Mystery of the Blue Train. Each time I read it again, I think it commonplace, full of cliches, with an uninteresting plot. Many people, I am sorry to say, like it. Authors are always said to be no judge of their own books
How sad it will be when I can’t write any more, though I should not be greedy. After all, to be able to continue writing at the age of seventy-five is very fortunate. One ought to be content and prepared to retire by then. In fact, I played with the idea that perhaps I would retire this year, but I was lured on by the fact that my last book had sold more than any of the previous ones: it seemed rather a foolish moment to stop writing. Perhaps now I had better make a deadline of eighty?
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find–at the age of fifty, say–that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about. You find that you like going to picture exhibitions, concerts and the opera, with the same enthusiasm as when you went at twenty or twenty-five. For a period, your personal life has absorbed all your energies, but now you are free again to look around you. You can enjoy leisure; you can enjoy things. You are still young enough to enjoy going to foreign places, though you can’t perhaps put up with living quite as rough as you used to. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you. With it, of course, goes the penalty of increasing old age–the discovery that your body is nearly always hurting somewhere: either your back is suffering from lumbago; or you go through a winter with rheumatism in your neck so that it is agony to turn your head; or you have trouble with arthritis in your knees so that you cannot stand long or walk down hills–all these things happen to you, and have to be endured. But one’s thankfulness for the gift of life is, I think, stronger and more vital during those years than it ever has been before. It has some of the reality and intensity of dreams–and I still enjoy dreaming enormously.
IV
By 1948 archaeology was rearing its erudite head once more. Everyone was talking of possible expeditions, and making plans to visit the Middle East. Conditions were now favourable again for digging in Iraq.
Syria had provided the cream of the finds before the war, but now the Iraqi authorities and the Department of Antiquities were offering fair terms. Though any unique objects found would go to the Baghdad Museum, any ‘duplicates’, as they were called, would be divided up and the excavator would get a fair share. So, after a year’s tentative digging on a small scale here and there, people began to resume work in that country. A Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology had been created after the war, of which Max became Professor at the Institute of Archaeology at London University. He would have time for so many months every year for work in the field.
With enormous pleasure we started off once more, after a lapse of ten years, to resume our work in the Middle East. No Orient Express this time, alas! It was no longer the cheapest way–indeed one could not take a through journey by it now. This time we flew–the beginning of that dull routine, travelling by air. But one could not ignore the time it saved. Still sadder, there were no more journeys across the desert by Nairn; you flew from London to Baghdad and that was that. In those early years one still spent a night here or there on the way, but it was the beginning of what one could see plainly was going to become a schedule of excessive boredom and expense without pleasure.
Anyway, we got to Baghdad, Max and I, together with Robert Hamilton, who had dug with the Campbell-Thompsons and later had been Curator of the Museum in Jerusalem. In due course we went up together, visiting sites in the North of Iraq, between the lesser and the greater Zab, until we arrived at the picturesque mound and town of Erbil. From there we went on towards Mosul, and on the way paid our second visit to Nimrud.<
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Nimrud was just as lovely a part of the country as I remembered it on our visit long ago. Max examined it with particular zeal this time. Before it had not been even a practical possibility, but now, although he did not say so at this moment, something might be done. Once again we picnicked there. We visited a few other mounds, and then reached Mosul.
The result of this tour was that Max finally came into the open and said firmly that all he wanted to do was to dig Nimrud. ‘It’s a big site, and an historic site–a site that ought to be dug. Nobody has touched it for close on a hundred years, not since Layard, and Layard only touched the fringe of it. He found some beautiful fragments of ivory–there must be heaps more. It is one of the three important cities of Assyria. Assur was the religious capital, Nineveh was the political capital, and Nimrud, or Calah, as its name was then, was the military capital. It ought to be dug. It will mean a lot of men, a lot of money, and it will take several years. It has every chance, if we are lucky, of being one of the great sites, one of the historic digs which will add to the world’s knowledge.’
I asked him if he had now had his fun with pre-historic pottery. He said Yes; so many of the questions had been answered now that he was wholly interested in Nimrud as a historic site to dig.
‘It will rank,’ he said, ‘with Tut-ankh-amun’s Tomb, with Knossos in Crete, and with Ur. For a site like this, too,’ he said, ‘you can ask for money.’
Money was forthcoming; not much to start with, but as our finds grew, it increased. The Metropolitan Museum in New York was one of our biggest contributors; there was money from the Gertrude Bell School of Archaeology in Iraq; and many other contributors: the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam, Birmingham. So we began what was to be our work for the next ten years.
This year, this very month, my husband’s book Nimrud and its Remains will be published. It has taken him ten years to write. He has always had the fear that he might not live to complete it. Life is so uncertain, and things like coronary thrombosis, high blood-pressure and all the rest of the modern ills seem to be lying in wait, particularly for men. But all is well. It is his life work: what he has been moving steadily towards ever since 1921. I am proud of him and happy for him. It seems a kind of miracle that both he and I should have succeeded in the work we wanted to do.
Nothing could be further apart than our work. I am a lowbrow and he a highbrow, yet we complement each other, I think, and have both helped each other. Often he has asked me for my judgment on certain points, and whilst I shall always remain an amateur I do know quite a lot about his special branch of archaeology–indeed, many years ago, when I was once saying sadly to Max it was a pity I couldn’t have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject, he said, ‘Don’t you realise that at this moment you know more about pre-historic pottery than almost any woman in England.’
At that moment perhaps I did, though things did not remain like that. I shall never have a professional attitude or remember the exact dates of the Assyrian kings, but I do take an enormous interest in the personal aspects of what archaeology reveals. I like to find a little dog buried under the threshold, inscribed on which are the words: ‘Don’t stop to think, Bite him!’ Such a good motto for a guard-dog; you can see it being written on the clay, and someone laughing. The contract tablets are interesting, throwing light on how and where you sell yourself into slavery, or the conditions under which you adopt a son. You can see Shalmaneser building up his zoo, sending back foreign animals from his campaigns, trying out new plants and trees. Always greedy, I was fascinated when we discovered a stele describing a feast given by the King in which he lists all the things they had to eat. The oddest thing seemed to me, after a hundred sheep, six hundred cows and quantities of that kind, to come down to a mere twenty loaves of bread. Why should it be such a small number? Indeed why have loaves of bread at all?
I have never been a scientific enough digger really to enjoy levels, plans, and all the rest of it, which are discussed with such gusto by the modern school. I am unabashedly devoted to the objects of craftsmanship and art which turn up out of the soil. I daresay the first is more important, but for me there will never be any fascination like the work of human hands: the little pyxis of ivory with musicians and their instruments carved round it; the winged boy; the wonderful head of a woman, ugly, full of energy and personality.
We lived in a portion of the Sheikh’s house in the village between the tell and the Tigris. We had a room downstairs for eating in and stacking things, a kitchen next door to it, and two rooms upstairs–one for Max and myself and a little one over the kitchen for Robert. I had to do the developing in the dining-room in the evenings, so Max and Robert would go upstairs. Every time they walked across the room, bits of mud used to fall off the ceiling and drop into the developing dish. Before starting the next batch, I would go up and say furiously: ‘Do remember that I’m developing underneath you. Every time you move something falls. Can’t you just talk without moving?’
They always used, in the end, to get excited, and rush off to a suit-case to take out a book and consult it, and down would fall the dried mud again.
In the courtyard was a storks’ nest, and the storks used to make a terrific noise mating, with their wings flapping and a noise like the rattling of bones. Storks are highly thought of in most of the Middle East, and everyone treats them with great respect.
When we left at the end of the first season, we got everything settled for building a house of mud-brick actually on the mound. The bricks were made and laid out to be dried, and the roofing was arranged for.
When we came out the following year we were very proud of our house. There was a kitchen; next to it a long mess-room and sitting-room, and next to that a drawing-office and antica-room. We slept in tents. A year or two later we built on to the house: a small office with a desk and a window in front of it through which one could pay the men on pay-day, and on the other, side an epigraphist’s desk. Next to this was the drawing-office and work-room, with trays of things being repaired. Beyond that again was the usual dog-hole in which the wretched photographer had to develop and do loading. Every now and then there was a terrific dust-storm and a wind which came up from nowhere. Immediately we would rush out and hang on to the tents with all our might while all the dust-bin lids blew away. In the end the tents usually came down with a flop, burying someone underneath their folds.
Finally, a year or two later still, I petitioned to be allowed to have a small room added on of my own. This I would pay for myself. So, for £50, I built on a small, square, mud-brick room, and it was there that I began writing this book. It had a window, a table, an upright chair, and the collapsed remains of a former ‘Minty’ chair, so decrepit it was difficult to sit on, but still quite comfortable. On the wall I had hung two pictures by young Iraqi artists. One was of a sad-looking cow by a tree; the other a kaleidoscope of every colour imaginable, which looked like patchwork at first, but suddenly could be seen to be two donkeys with men leading them through the Suq–a most fascinating picture, I have always thought. I left it behind in the end, because everyone was attached to it, and it was moved into the main sitting-room. But some day I think I want to have it back again.
On the door, Donald Wiseman, one of our epigraphists, fixed the placard in cuneiform, which announces that this is the Beit Agatha–Agatha’s House, and in Agatha’s house I went every day to do a little of my own work. Most of the day, however, I spent on photography or on mending and cleaning ivories.
We had a splendid succession of cooks. One of them was mad. He was a Portuguese Indian. He cooked well, but he became quieter and quieter as the season went on. Finally the kitchen boys came and said they were worried about Joseph–he was becoming very peculiar. One day he was missing. We searched for him, and notified the police, but in the end it was the Sheikh’s people who brought him back. He explained that he had had a command from the Lord and had to obey, but he had now been told that he must come back
and ascertain the Lord’s wishes. There seemed to be some slight confusion in his mind between the Almighty and Max. He strode round the house, fell on his knees before Max, who was expounding something to some workmen, and kissed the bottom of his trousers, much to Max’s embarrassment.
‘Get up, Joseph,’ said Max.
‘I must do what you command me, Lord. Tell me where to go and I will go there. Send me to Basra and I will go to Basra. Tell me to visit Baghdad and I will visit Baghdad; to go to the snows of the north and I will go to the snows of the north.’
‘I tell you,’ said Max, accepting the role of the Almighty. ‘I tell you to go forthwith to the kitchen, to cook us food for our needs.’
‘I go, Lord,’ said Joseph, who then kissed the turn-up of Max’s trousers once more and left for the kitchen. Unfortunately the wires seemed crossed, for other commands kept coming to Joseph and he used to stray away. In the end we had to send him back to Baghdad. His money was sewn up in his pocket and a wire was dispatched to his relations.
Thereupon our second house-boy, Daniel, said he had a little knowledge of cooking and would carry on for the last three weeks of the season. We had permanent indigestion as a result. He fed us entirely on what he called ‘Scotch eggs’ excessively indigestible, and cooked in most peculiar fat. Daniel disgraced himself before leaving. He had a row with our driver, who then split on him and informed us that he had already salted away in his luggage twenty-four tins of sardines and sundry other delicacies. The riot act was read, Daniel was told that he was disgraced both as a Christian and a servant, that he had lowered the Christian in Arab eyes, and that he would no more be engaged by us. He was the worst servant we ever had.
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