Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  One dream of mine faded before I left Paris. Miss Dryden was expecting an old pupil of hers, the Countess of Limerick, who herself was a very fine pianist, a pupil of Charles Fürster’s. Usually the two or three girls who were studying the piano would give an informal concert on these occasions. I was one of them. The result was catastrophic. I was nervous beforehand, but not unusually so, no more than would be natural, but as soon as I sat down at the piano inefficiency overwhelmed me like a tide. I played wrong notes, my tempo went, my phrasing was amateur and ham-handed–I was just a mess.

  Nobody could have been kinder than Lady Limerick. She talked to me later and said she had realised how nervous I had been, and that one did get these fits of what really qualified as stage-fright. Perhaps I would get over them later when I became more experienced in playing before an audience. I was grateful for those kind words, but I knew myself that there was more to it than that.

  I continued to study, but before I finally went home I asked Charles Fürster frankly whether he thought that by hard work and application I could one day be a professional pianist. He, too, was kind, but he told me no lies. He said that he thought I had not the temperament to play in public, and I knew he was right. I was grateful to him for telling me the truth. I was miserable about it for a while, but I tried hard not to dwell on it more than I could help.

  If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognise it and go forward, instead of dwelling on one’s regrets and hopes. Such a rebuff coming early helped me for the future; it taught me that I had not the kind of temperament for exhibition of any kind. I can describe what it seemed like by saying that I could not control my physical reaction.

  PART IV

  FLIRTING, COURTING, BANNS UP, MARRIAGE

  (Popular Victorian Game)

  I

  Soon after I came home from Paris, my mother had a serious illness. In the usual manner of doctors, it was diagnosed as appendicitis, paratyphoid, gallstones and a few more things. Several times she had been on the brink of being carted off to the operating-table. Treatment did not improve her condition–she was constantly having relapses, and various different operations were mooted. My mother was an amateur doctor herself. When her brother Ernest had been working as a medical student, she had helped him with mounting enthusiasm. She would have made a far better doctor than he would. In the end he had to give up the idea owing to the fact that he could not stand the sight of blood. By that time mother was practically as fully trained as he was–and would not have minded blood, wounds, or any other physical offences to the eye. I noticed that, whenever we went to the dentist together, my mother ignored the Queen or The Tatler and immediately seized The Lancet or the British Medical journal if it was anywhere about on the table.

  Finally losing patience with her medical attendants, she said, ‘I don’t think they know–I don’t know myself. I think the great thing is to get out of the doctors’ hands.’

  She succeeded in finding yet another doctor who was what you might call the biddable kind, and was soon able to announce that he had advised sunshine and a warm dry climate. ‘We will go to Egypt for the winter,’ she informed me.

  Once more we set about letting the house. It was fortunate that the expenses of travelling must have been fairly low in those days, and that the cost of living abroad seemed easily covered by the high rent asked for Ashfield. Torquay was of course at that period still a winter resort. Nobody went there during the summer, and people who lived there always went away then to avoid ‘the terrible heat’. (I can’t imagine what this terrible heat could be: nowadays I always find South Devon extremely cold in the summer.) Usually they went up to the moor and took houses there. Father and mother did that once, but they found it so hot on the moor that father hired a dog-cart and drove back into Torquay to sit in his own garden practically every afternoon. Anyway, Torquay was then the Riviera of England, and people paid large rents for furnished villas there, during quite a gay winter season with concerts in the afternoons, lectures, occasional dances, and a great deal of other social activity.

  I was now ready to ‘come out’. My hair was ‘up’, which at that period meant done in the Grecian style, with large knots of curls high up on the back of the head and a kind of fillet round it. It was really a becoming style, particularly suited to evening dress. My hair was very long–I could sit on it easily. This for some reason was considered something to be proud of in a woman, though what it actually meant was that your hair was completely unmanageable and was always coming down. To counter-act this, hairdressers created what was called a postiche–a large false knot of curls, with your own hair pinned away as tight to your head as possible, and the postiche pinned to that.

  ‘Coming-out’ was a thing of great importance in a girl’s life. If you were well off, your mother gave a dance for you. You were supposed to go for a season in London. Of course the season was by no means the commercial and highly organised racket it has become in the last twenty or thirty years. The people you asked to your dance then, and the people to whose dances you went, were your personal friends. There was always a slight difficulty in scraping up enough men; but the dances were on the whole informal affairs, or else there were charity balls, to which you took a large party.

  Of course, there could be nothing like that in my life. Madge had had her coming-out in New York and been to parties and dances there, but father had not been able to afford a London season for her, and there was certainly no question of my having one now. But my mother was anxious that I should have what was considered a young girl’s birthright, that is to say that she should emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, from a schoolgirl to a young lady of the world, meeting other girls and plenty of young men, and, to put it plainly, be given her chance of finding a suitable mate.

  Everyone made a point of being kind to young girls. They asked them to house-parties, and they arranged pleasant theatre evenings for them. You could rely on all your friends to rally round. There was nothing approaching the French system of shielding daughters and permitting them to meet only a selected few partis, who would all make suitable husbands, who had committed their follies and sown their young men’s wild oats, and who had sufficient money or property to keep a wife. This system was, I think, a good one; it resulted, certainly, in a high percentage of happy marriages. The English belief that young French girls were forced to marry rich old men was quite untrue. A French girl could make her choice, but it was definitely a limited choice. The rackety, wild-living young man, the charming mauvais sujet whom she would doubtless have preferred, was never allowed to enter her orbit.

  In England that was not so. Girls went out to dances and met all kinds of young men. Their mothers were there, too, sitting wearily as chaperones, but mothers were fairly helpless. Of course, people were reasonably careful about the young men with whom they allowed their daughters to associate, but there was still a wide field of choice, and girls were notorious for preferring undesirable young men, and even going so far as to get engaged to them or having what was termed an ‘understanding’. ‘Having an understanding’ was a really useful term; by it parents avoided the friction of bad feeling over refusing to accept their daughter’s choice. ‘You are very young still, dear, and I am sure Hugh is quite charming, but he also is young and has not established himself yet. I see no reason why you should not have an understanding and should meet occasionally, but no letters and no formal engagement.’ They then worked behind the scenes to try to produce a suitable young man so that he might distract the girl’s mind from the first one. This often happened. Direct opposition would, of course, have made the girl cling frantically to her first choice, but having it authorised took away some of the glamour, and as most girls are capable of being sensible they quite often changed their minds.

  Owing to the fact that we were badly off, my mother saw that it was going to be difficult for me to enter society on the usual terms. Her choice of Cairo as a convalescent centre for hersel
f was, I think, made mainly on my behalf, and was a good one. I was a shy girl, not brilliant socially; if I could be familiarized with dancing, talking to young men, and all the rest of it, as an everyday thing, it would be the best way of giving me some worth-while experience.

  Cairo, from the point of view of a girl, was a dream of delight. We spent three months there, and I went to five dances every week. They were given in each of the big hotels in turn. There were three or four regiments stationed in Cairo; there was polo every day; and at the cost of living in a moderately expensive hotel all this was at your disposal. A good many people went out there for the winter, and many of them were mothers and daughters. I was shy at first, and remained shy in many ways, but I was passionately fond of dancing and I danced well. Also I liked young men, and I soon found they liked me, so everything went well. I was just seventeen–Cairo as Cairo meant nothing to me–girls between eighteen and twenty-one seldom thought of anything but young men, and very right and proper, too!

  The art of flirtation is lost nowadays, but then it was in full swing, and was an approximation, I think, to what the old troubadours called ‘le pays du tendre’. It is a good introduction to life: the half-sentimental-half-romantic attachment that grows up between what I think of now in my advanced age as ‘girls and boys’. It teaches them something of life and of each other without having to pay too violent or disillusioning a price. I certainly don’t remember any illegitimate babies among my friends or their families. No, I am wrong. It was not a pretty story: a girl whom we knew went to spend her holidays with a schoolfriend, and was seduced by the schoolfriend’s father, an elderly man with a nasty reputation.

  Sexual attachments would have been difficult to enter into because young men had a high opinion of young girls, and adverse public opinion would have affected them as well as the girls. Men had their sexual fun with married women, usually a good deal older than themselves, or else with ‘little friends’ in London, about whom no one was supposed to know. I do remember one incident when I was staying in a house-party in Ireland later. There were two or three other girls and young men, soldiers mostly, in the house, and one of the soldiers left abruptly one morning, saying he had had a telegram from England. This was patently untrue. Nobody knew the cause, but he had confided in a much older girl, whom he knew well and whom he considered able to appreciate his dilemma. Apparently he had been asked to accompany one of the girls to a dance some little distance away to which the others had not been invited. He duly drove her there, but on the way the girl suggested that they should stop at a hotel and engage a room. ‘We shall arrive at the dance a bit late,’ she said, ‘but nobody notices, I find–I’ve often done it.’ The young man was so horrified that, having refused the suggestion he felt it quite impossible to meet her again the next day. Hence his abrupt departure.

  ‘I could hardly believe my ears–she seemed such a nicely brought up girl, quite young, nice parents, and everything. Just the sort of girl one would feel one would want to marry.’

  Those were still great days for the purity of young girls. I do not think we felt in the least repressed because of it. Romantic friendships, tinged certainly with sex or the possibility of sex, satisfied us completely. Courtship is, after all, a recognised stage in all animals. The male struts and courts, the female pretends not to notice anything, but is secretly gratified. You know it is not yet the real thing, but it is a kind of apprenticeship. The troubadours were quite right when they made their songs about the pays du tendre. I can re-read Aucassin and Nicolette always, for its charm, its naturalness and its sincerity. Never again, after your youth, do you have that particular feeling: the excitement of friendship with a man; that sense of being in affinity, of liking the same things, of the other one saying what you have just been thinking. A great deal of it is illusion, of course, but it is a wonderful illusion, and I think it ought to have its part in every woman’s life. You can smile at yourself later, saying, ‘I was really rather a young fool.’

  However, in Cairo I didn’t even get as far as falling slightly in love. I had too much to do. There was so much going on, and so many attractive, personable young men. The ones that did stir my heart were men of about forty, who kindly danced with the child now and again, and teased me as a pretty young thing, but that was all. Society decreed that you should not dance more than two dances on your programme with the same man in an evening. It was possible, occasionally, to stretch this to three, but the sharp eyes of the chaperones were then upon you.

  One’s first evening dresses, of course, were a great joy. I had one of pale green chiffon with little lace frills, and a white silk one, rather plainly made, and a rather gorgeous one of deep turquoise blue taffeta, the material for which Grannie had unearthed from one of her secret remnant chests. It was a magnificent piece of stuff, but alas, having been in storage for so many years, it was unable to stand the Egyptian climate, and one evening in the course of a dance it split up the skirt, down the sleeves and round the neck, and I had to retire hurriedly to the Ladies’ Cloakroom.

  Next day we went to one of the Levantine dressmakers of Cairo. They were very expensive: my own dresses, bought in England, had been cheap. Still, I did get a lovely dress; it was a shot pale pink satin, and had a bunch of pink rose-buds on one shoulder. What I wanted, of course, was a black evening dress; all girls wanted a black evening dress to make them look mature. All their mothers refused to let them have them.

  A young Cornishman, called Trelawny, and a friend of his, both in the 60th Rifles, were my chief partners. One of the older men, a Captain Craik, who was engaged to a nice American girl, brought me back to my mother after a dance one night and said, ‘Here’s your daughter. She has learnt to dance. In fact she dances beautifully. You had better try to teach her to talk now.’ It was a justified reproach. I had still, alas, no conversation.

  I was good-looking. My family, of course, laugh uproariously whenever I say that I was a lovely girl. My daughter and her friends, particularly, say: ‘But, Mother, you couldn’t have been. Look at those awful old photographs!’ It is true that some of the photographs of those days are pretty terrible, but that, I think, is due to the clothes, which are not yet quite old enough to have become period. Certainly at that time we were wearing monstrous hats, practically a yard across, of straw, ribbon, flowers, and large veils. Studio portraits were often taken in hats like this, sometimes tied with a ribbon under the chin; or sometimes you were shown with a much-frizzled head of hair, holding an enormous bunch of roses like a telephone receiver up to your ear. Looking at my early photographs, one, taken before I came out, with two long pigtails, sitting, for God knows what reason, at a spinning-wheel, is quite attractive. As one young man said to me once, ‘I like the Gretchen one, very much.’ I suppose I did look rather like Marguerite in Faust. There was one nice one of me in Cairo in one of my plainer hats, an enormous dark blue straw with one pink rose. It makes an attractive angle round the face, and is not so overladen with ribbons as most. Dresses were, on the whole, fussy and frilly.

  I soon became mad about polo, and used to watch it every afternoon. Mother tried to broaden my mind by taking me occasionally to the Museum, and also suggested we should go up the Nile and see the glories of Luxor. I protested passionately, with tears in my eyes, ‘Oh no, mother, oh no, don’t let’s go away now. There’s the fancy dress dance on Monday, and I promised to go on a picnic to Sakkara on Tuesday…’ and so on and so forth. The wonders of antiquity were the last thing I cared to see, and I am very glad she did not take me. Luxor, Karnak, the beauties of Egypt, were to come upon me with wonderful impact about twenty years later. How it would have spoilt them for me if I had seen them then with unappreciative eyes.

  There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time. Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before
you take in the beauty of the words and of the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awe-struck voice, ‘You know, if I hadn’t know beforehand that that was Shakespeare, I should never have believed it.’ This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such. Macbeth having been a success with Mathew, we proceeded to The Merry Wives of Windsor. In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slap-stick–no subtlety about it. The last representation of the Merry Wives I saw–in 1965–had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheek–well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking. The Merry Wives of Windsor went down well indeed with Mathew, I am glad to say–particular delight being taken over the Welsh schoolmaster.

  I think there is nothing more delightful than introducing the young to things that we ourselves have long taken for granted, and have taken for granted in a particular way. Max and I went on a motor tour of the castles of the Loire once with my daughter, Rosalind, and one of her friends. The friend measured all the castles we saw by one criterion only: she would look round with experienced eyes and say, ‘They could really have made whoopee here, couldn’t they?’ I had never thought of the castles of the Loire in terms of making whoopee before, but again it was a shrewd observation. The old kings and noblemen of France did indeed use their castles for whoopee. The moral (since I was brought up always to find morals) is that you are never too old to learn. There is always some new point of view being shown you unexpectedly.