III
My grandson Mathew was born in Cheshire, on Sept 21, 1943, at a nursing home close by my sistera€?s house. Punkie, devoted to Rosalind as she always had been, was delighted that she should come back for the baby to be born. My sister was the most indefatigable woman I have ever known; a kind of human dynamo. Since her father-in-lawa€?s death, she and James had come to live in Abney, which, as I have already mentioned, was an enormous house, with fourteen bedrooms, masses of sitting-rooms, and in my young days, when I first went to stay there, sixteen indoor servants. Now there was nobody in the house except my sister and a former kitchen-maid, since married, who came in and cooked the meals every day.
When I stayed there, I would hear my sister moving around at about half-past five any morning. She did the whole house thena€“dusted it, tidied it, swept it, did the fires, cleaned brass, and polished furniture, and then started calling people with early tea. After breakfast she cleaned the baths, then finished up the bedrooms. By half-past ten there was no more housework to do, so she then rushed into the kitchen gardena€“which was filled with new potatoes, rows of peas, French beans, broad beans, asparagus, little carrots, and all the rest of it. A weed never dared lift its head in Punkiea€?s kitchen garden. The rosebeds and beds around the house never had a weed either.
She had taken on a chow dog whose officer master had been unable to look after it, and the chow always slept in the billiard room. One morning, when she came down and looked into the billiard room, she saw the chow sitting quietly in his basket, but the main part of the floor had an enormous bomb nestling cosily in it. The night before there had been a lot of incendaries on the roof, and everybody had been up there helping to put them out. This particular bomb had come down into the billiard room, unheard among the general din, and had not exploded.
My sister rang up the disposal people, who rushed along. After examining it, they said everybody must be out of there in twenty minutes. a€?Just take anything essential.a€?
a€?And what do you think I took?a€asked my sister, a€?Really one is quite mad when one gets rattled.a€?
a€?Well, what did you take?a€I asked.
a€?Well, first I took Nigel and Ronniea€?s personal thingsa€?a€“those were her two billeted officers at that timea€“a€?because I thought it would be so awful if anything happened to them. And I took my toothbrush and washing things, of coursea€“and then I couldna€?t think of anything else to take. I looked all over the house, but my brain went blank. So for some reason I took that great bouquet of wax flowers in the drawing-room.a€?
a€?I never knew you were particularly fond of that,a€I said.
a€?But Ia€?m not,a€said Punkie, a€?thata€?s the curious part of it.a€?
a€?Didna€?t you take your jewellery or a fur-coat?a€?
a€?Never thought of it,a€she said.
The bomb was taken away and duly exploded, and fortunately no more incidents of that kind occurred.
In due course I got a telegram from Punkie and rushed up there, to find Rosalind looking very proud of herself in a nursing-home and inclined to be boastful of her babya€?s strength and size.
a€?Hea€?s a monster,a€she said with a face of delight. a€?A terrifically big babya€“a real monster!a€?
I looked at the monster. He was looking well and happy, with a crinkled-up face and a slight grin which was probably wind but looked like amiability.
a€?You see?a€said Rosalind; a€?I forget what length they told me he wasa€“but hea€?s a monster!a€?
So there the monster was, and everybody was happy. And when Hubert and his faithful batman Barry came to see the baby, there was indeed jubilation. Hubert was as pleased as Punch, and so was Rosalind.
It had been arranged that Rosalind would go to live in Wales after the baby was born. Huberta€?s father had died in December, 1942, and his mother was moving to a smaller house nearby. Now the plans went ahead. Rosalind was to remain in Cheshire for three weeks after the birth, then a nurse, who was a€?between babiesa€as she put it, would be with her to look after her and the baby while she settled in Wales. There I also would assist her, as soon as things were ready for her to go.
Nothing, of course, was easy in wartime. Rosalind and the nurse came to London, and I put them in 47 Campden Street. Since Rosalind was still slightly weak, I used to come over from Hampstead and cook dinner for them in the evening. To begin with I did breakfast in the morning as well, but Nurse, once she was sure that her status as a hospital-nurse-who-did-no-work-in-the-house was not assailed, declared herself willing to deal with breakfast herself. Unfortunately, though, the bombs were getting worse again. Night after night, it seemed, we sat there anxiously. When the alarm went off we pushed Mathew in his carry-cot underneath a solid papier-mache table with a thick glass top, as the heaviest thing we could find to put him under. It was worrying for a young mother, and I wished badly that I had either Winterbrook House or Greenway.
Max was now in North Africa. He had started in Egypt, but was now in Tripoli. Later he went down to the Fezzan Desert. Letters were slow, and I sometimes did not hear from him for over a month. My nephew Jack was also abroad in Iran.
Stephen Glanville was still in London, and I was glad to have him there. Sometimes he would call for me at the Hospital and take me back to his house at Highgate to dine. We usually celebrated if one or other of us had received a food parcel.
a€?Ia€?ve got some butter from Americaa€“can you bring a tin of soup?a€?
a€?Ia€?ve been sent two tins of lobster, and a whole dozen eggsa€“brown.a€?
One day he announced real fresh herringsa€“from the East Coast. We arrived in the kitchen, and Stephen unwrapped his parcel. Alasa€“alas! O lovely herrings that might have been. There was only one place for them nowa€“the hot water boiler. A sad evening.
Onea€?s friends and acquaintances had begun to vanish by this stage of the war. You could no longer keep in touch with the people you used to know; you seldom even wrote to your friends.
Two close friends I did contrive to see were Sidney and Mary Smith. He was Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum; a prima donna by temperament, and a man of most interesting thoughts. His views on anything were unlike anybody elsea€?s, and if I spent half an hour talking to him I went away so stimulated by the ideas he had put into my head that I left the house feeling as though I was walking on air. He always aroused violent resistance in me, so that I had to argue every point with him. He could not and did not want to agree with people. Once he disapproved of people, or disliked them, he never relented. On the other hand, if you were once really a friend of his, you were a friend of his. That was that. His wife, Mary, was an extremely clever painter, and a beautiful woman, with lovely grey hair, and a long slender neck. She had also the most devastating common sense, like the tang of a really good savoury served for dinner.
The Smiths were extremely good to me. They lived not far away, and I was always welcome to come there after I had left the Hospital, and talk to Sidney for an hour. He would lend me books that he thought it would interest me to read, and would sit there, rather like a Grecian philosopher of old, while I sat at his feet, feeling like a humble disciple.
He enjoyed my detective stories, though his criticisms of them were unlike anybody elsea€?s. About something that I didna€?t think good he would often say, a€?Thata€?s the best point in that book of yours.a€Anything that I was pleased with he would say, a€?No, ita€?s not up to your besta€“you were below standard there.a€?
One day Stephen Glanville attacked me. a€?Ia€?ve got a project Ia€?ve thought out for you.a€?
a€?Oh, whata€?s that?a€?
a€?I want you to write a detective story about ancient Egypt.a€a€?About ancient Egypt?a€?
a€?Yes.a€?
a€?But I couldna€?ta€?
a€?Oh yes, you could. There is no difficulty at all. There is no reason why a detective story shouldna€?t be just as easy to place in ancient Egypt as in 1943 in England.a€?
I saw what he meant. People are the same in whatever century they live, or where.
a€?And it would be so interesting,a€he said. a€?One ought to have a detective story written so that someone who enjoys reading detective stories and reading about those times can combine his pleasures.a€?
Again I said I couldna€?t do anything of that kind. I didna€?t know enough. But Stephen was an extraordinarily persuasive man, and by the end of the evening he had almost convinced me that I could.
a€?Youa€?ve read a lot of Egyptology,a€he said. a€?You are not only interested in Mesopotamia.a€?
It was true that one of the books I had been fondest of in the past, was Breasteda€?s The Dawn of Conscience, and that I had read a good deal of Egyptian history when I had written my play about Akhnaton.
a€?All you want to do is fix on a period, or an incident, some definite setting,a€said Stephen.
I had a terrible feeling that the die was cast.
a€?But you would have to give me some ideas,a€I said weakly, a€?as to what time or place.a€?
a€?Well,a€said Stephen, a€?there is an incident or two here that might doa€“a€He pointed out one or two things in one of the books he took from his shelves. Then he gave me half a dozen or so more books, drove me and the books home to Lawn Road Flats, and said: a€?Tomorrowa€?s Saturday. You can have a nice two days reading through these and see what strikes your imagination.a€?
In the end I had marked down three possibly interesting pointsa€“none of them particularly well-known incidents, or about well-known figures, because I think that is what so often makes novels set in historic periods seem so phoney. After all, one doesna€?t really know anything of what King Pepi or Queen Hatshepsut was like, and to pretend you do is a kind of arrogance. But you can place a character of your own creation in those times, and as long as you know enough of the local colour and the general feeling of the period it would be all right. One of my choices was a fourth dynasty incident, another very much latera€“in the time, I think, of one of the later Ramesesa€“and the third one, the one which I finally decided upon, was drawn from recently published letters from a Ka priest in the IIth Dynasty.
These letters painted to perfection the picture of a living family: the father, fussy, opinionated, annoyed with his sons who did not do what he said; the sons, one obedient but obviously not bright, and the other, sharp-tempered, showy, and extravagant. The letters the father wrote to his two sons were about how he must take care of a certain middle-aged woman, obviously one of those poor relations who all through the ages live with families, to whom the heads of families are always kindly, whereas the children usually grow up disliking them because they are often sycophants and makers of mischief.
The old man laid down rules about how they were to do so-and-so with the oil, and so-and-so with the barley. They were not to let this person or that person cheat them over the quality of certain foods. The whole family grew clearer and clearer in my mind. I added a daughter, and some details from one or two other textsa€“the arrival of a new wife, by whom the father was besotted. I also threw in a spoilt small boy and a greedy but shrewd grandmother.
Excited, I started work. I had no book on hand at the moment. Ten Little Niggers had been successfully running at the St. Jamesa€Theatre until that theatre was bombed; it then transferred to the Cambridge for some further months. I was just playing about with a new idea for a book, so this was just the moment to get started on an Egyptian detective story.
There is no doubt that I was bullied into it by Stephen. There was no doubt, either, that if Stephen was determined that I should write a detective story set in ancient Egypt, I should have to do so. He was that kind of man.
As I pointed out to him in the ensuing weeks and months, he must have become extremely sorry that he had urged me to do anything of the sort. I was continually ringing him up and demanding information which, as he said, only took me three minutes to ask for, but which he usually had to look through eight different books to find. a€?Stephen, what did they eat for mealsHow did they have their meat cookedWere there any special things for special feastsDid the men and women eat togetherWhat sort of rooms did they sleep in?a€?
a€?Oh dear,a€Stephen would groan, and then he would have to look up things, pointing out to me that one has to deduce a great deal from little evidence. There were pictures of reed birds on spits being served, pictures of loaves, of bunches of grapes being pickeda€“and so on. Anyway, I got enough to make my daily life of the period sound all right, and then I came back with a few more queries.
a€?Did they eat at the table, or on the floorDid the women occupy a separate part of the houseDid they keep linen in chests or in cupboardsWhat sort of houses did they have?a€?
Houses were far more difficult to find out about than temples or palaces, owing to the fact that the temples and palaces were still there, being built of stone, whereas houses had been of more perishable material.
Stephen argued with me a great deal on one point of my denouement, and I am sorry to say that I gave in to him in the end. I was always annoyed with myself for having done so. He had a kind of hypnotic influence about that sort of thing; He was so positive himself that he was right that you couldna€?t help having doubts yourself. Up to then, on the whole, though I have given in to people on every subject under the sun, I have never given in to anyone over what I write.
If I think I have got a certain thing right in a booka€“the way it should bea€“Ia€?m not easily moved from it. In this case, against my better judgment, I did give in. It was a moot point, but I still think now, when I re-read the book, that I would like to re-write the end of ita€“which shows that you should stick to your guns in the first place, or you will be dissatisfied with yourself. But I was a little hampered by the gratitude I felt to Stephen for all the trouble he had taken, and the fact that it had been his idea to start with. Anyway, Death Comes as the End was duly written.
Shortly after that, I wrote the one book that has satisfied me completely. It was a new Mary Westmacott, the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken. Through her own actions, her own feelings and thoughts, this would be revealed to the reader. She would be, as it were, continually meeting herself, not recognising herself, but becoming increasingly uneasy. What brought about this revelation would be the fact that for the first time in her life she was alonea€“completely alonea€“for four or five days.
I had the background now, which I had not had in my mind before. It would be one of those resthouses on journeys through Mesopotamia, where you are immobilised, you cannot travel on, there is no one there but natives who hardly speak Englisha€“who bring you meals and nod their heads and agree to what you say. There is nowhere to go, no one to see, and you are stuck there till you can go on. So you sit and think about yourself, having read the only two books you have with you. You think about yourself. And my starting pointa€“I had always known what that would bea€“was when she was leaving Victoria, going out to see one of her daughters who was married abroad, looking back as the train moved out of the station, at her husbanda€?s back retreating up the platform, and the sudden pang it gave her as he went striding along, striding along just like a man who was terrifically relieved, who was released from bondage, who was going to have a holiday. It was so surprising that she could hardly believe her eyes. Of course she was mistaken, of course Rodney was going to miss her terribly, and yeta€“that little seeda€“it would stay in her mind worrying her; and then, she was all alone and began thinking, the pattern of her life would unroll little by little. It was going to be technically difficult to do, the way I wanted it; lightly, colloquially, but with a growing feeling of tension, of uneasiness, the sort of feeling one hasa€“everyone has, sometime, I thinka€“of who am IWhat am I like reallyWhat do all the people I love think of meDo they think of me as I think they do?
The whole world looks different; you begin to see it in different terms. You keep reassuring yourself, but the suspicion, the anxiety comes back.
I wrote that book in three days flat. On the third day, a Monday, I sent an excuse to the Hospital, because I did not dare leave my book at that pointa€“I had to go on until I had finished it. It was not a long booka€“a mere fifty thousand wordsa€“but it had been with me a long time.
It is an odd feeling to have a book growing inside you, for perhaps six or seven years knowing that one day you will write it, knowing that it is building up, all the time, to what it already is. Yes, it is there alreadya€“it just has to come more clearly out of the mist. All the people are there, ready, waiting in the wings, ready to come on to the stage when their cues are calleda€“and then, suddenly, one gets a clear and sudden command: Now!
Now is when you are ready. Now, you know all about it. Oh, the blessing that for once one is able to do it then and there, that now is really now.
I was so frightened of interruptions, of anything breaking the flow of continuity, that after I had written the first chapter in a white heat, I proceeded to write the last chapter, because I knew so clearly where I was going that I felt I must get it down on paper. Otherwise I did not have to interrupt anythinga€“I went straight through.
I dona€?t think I have ever been so tired. When I finished, when I had seen that the chapter I had written earlier needed not a word changed, I fell on my bed, and as far as I remember slept more or less for twenty-four hours straight through. Then I got up and had an enormous dinner, and the following day I was able to go to the Hospital again.
I looked so peculiar that everyone was upset about me there. a€?You must have been really ill,a€they said, a€?you have got the most enormous circles under your eyes.a€It was only fatigue and exhaustion, but to have that fatigue and exhaustion was worth-while when for once writing had been no difficultya€“no difficulty at all, that is, beyond the physical effort. Anyway, it was a very rewarding experience to have had.
I called the book Absent in the Spring, from that sonnet of Shakespearea€?s which begins with those words: a€?From you have I been absent in the spring.a€I dona€?t know myself, of course, what it is really like. It may be stupid, badly written, no good at all. But it was written with integrity, with sincerity, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy an author can have.
A few years later I wrote another book of Mary Westmacotta€“called The Rose and the Yew Tree. It is one I can always read with great pleasure, though it was not an imperative, like Absent in the Spring. But there again, the idea behind the book had been with me a long timea€“in fact since about 1929. Just a sketchy picture, that I knew would come to life one day.
One wonders where these things come froma€“I mean the ones that are a must. Sometimes I think that is the moment one feels nearest to God, because you have been allowed to feel a little of the joy of pure creation. You have been able to make something that is not yourself. You know a kinship with the Almighty, as you might on a seventh day, when you see that what you have made is good.
I was to make one more variation from my usual literary work. I wrote a book out of nostalgia, because I was separated from Max, could so seldom get news of him, and recalled with such poignant remembrance the days we had spent in Arpachiyah and in Syria. I wanted to re-live our life, to have the pleasure of rememberinga€“and so I wrote Come, Tell Me How You Live, a light-hearted frivolous book; but it does mirror the times we went through, so many little silly things one had forgotten. People have liked that book very much. There was only a small edition of it, because paper was short.
Sidney Smith, of course, said to me: a€?You cana€?t publish that, Agatha.a€a€?Ia€?m going to,a€I said.
a€?No,a€he said. a€?You had better not publish that.a€?
a€?But I want to.a€Sidney Smith looked at me disapprovingly. It was not the kind of sentiment he would approve of. Doing what you personally wanted did not go with Sidneya€?s somewhat Calvinist outlook.
a€?Max might not like it.a€?
I considered that doubtfully.
a€?I dona€?t think hea€?ll mind. Hea€?ll probably like remembering about all the things we did, too. I would never try to write a serious book about archaeology; I know that Ia€?d make far too many silly mistakes. But this is different, this is personal. And I am going to publish it,a€I continued. a€?I want something to hold on to, to remember. You cana€?t trust your own memory. Things go. So thata€?s why I want to publish it.a€?
a€?Oh! well,a€said Sidney. He still sounded doubtful. However, a€?Oh! wella€was a concession when it came from Sidney.
a€?Nonsense,a€said his wife Mary. a€?Of course you can publish it. Why notIt is very amusing. And I quite see what you mean about liking to remember and read back over it.a€?
The other people who didna€?t like it were my publishers. They were suspicious and disapproving, afraid that I was getting completely out of hand. They had hated Mary Westmacott writing anything. They were now prepared to be suspicious of Come, Tell Me How You Live, or anything, in fact, that enticed me away from mystery stories. However, the book was a success, and I think they then regretted that paper was so short. I published it under the name of Agatha Christie Mallowan so that it should not be confused with any of my detective books.