Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  ‘Did you think it would happen so soon?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh well, rumours have been going around–we were told not to say anything. And now,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to decide what to do next.’ ‘What do you mean, do next?’

  ‘I think the best thing to do will be to leave the Air Force.’ ‘You really mean to leave the Air Force?’ I was dumbfounded.

  ‘No future in it. You must see that. There can’t be any future in it.

  No promotion for years.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’d like to go into the City. I’ve always wanted to go into the City. There are one or two opportunities going.’

  I always had an enormous admiration for Archie’s practical outlook. He accepted everything without surprise, and calmly put his brain, which was a good one, to work on the next problem.

  At the moment, Armistice or no Armistice, life went on as before. Archie went every day to the Air Ministry. The wonderful Bartlett, alas, got himself demobbed very quickly. I suppose the dukes and earls were pulling strings to regain his services. Instead, we had a rather terrible creature called Verrall. I think he did his best, but he was inefficient, quite untrained, and the amount of dirt, grease and smears on the silver, plates, knives and forks, was beyong anything I had seen before. I was really thankful when he, too, got his demobilisation papers.

  Archie got some leave and we went to Torquay. It was while I was there that I went down with what I thought at first was a terrific attack of tummy sickness and general misery. However, it was something quite different. It was the first sign that I was going to have a baby.

  I was thrilled. My ideas of having a baby had been that they were things that were practically automatic. After each of Archie’s leaves I had been deeply disappointed to find that no signs of a baby appeared. This time I had not even expected it. I went to consult a doctor–our old Dr Powell had retired, so I had to choose a new one. I didn’t think I would choose any of the doctors whom I had worked with in the hospital–I felt I knew rather too much about them and their methods. Instead I went to a cheery doctor who rejoiced in the somewhat sinister name of Stabb.

  He had a very pretty wife, with whom my brother Monty had been deeply in love since the age of nine. ‘I have called my rabbit,’ he said then, ‘after Gertrude Huntly, because I think she is the most beautiful lady I have ever seen’. Gertrude Huntly, afterwards Stabb, was nice enough to show herself deeply impressed, and to thank him for this honour accorded her.

  Dr Stabb told me that I seemed a healthy girl, and nothing should go wrong, and that was that. No further fuss was made. I cannot help being rather pleased that in my day there were none of those ante-natal clinics in which you are pulled about every month or two. Personally, I think we were much better off without them. All Dr Stabb suggested was that I should go to him or to a doctor in London about a couple of months before the baby was due, just to see that everything was the right way up. He said I might go on being sick in the morning, but after three months that it would disappear. There, I regret to say, he was wrong. My morning sickness never disappeared. It was not only a morning ailment. I was sick four or five times every day, and it made life in London quite embarrassing. To have to skip off a bus when you had perhaps only just got on it, and be violently sick in the gutter, is humiliating for a young woman. Still, it had to be put up with. Fortunately nobody thought in those days of giving you things like Thalidomide. They just accepted the fact that some people were sicker than others having a baby. Mrs Woods, as usual omniscient on all subjects to do with birth and death, said, ‘Ah well, Dearie, I’d say myself that you are going to have a girl. Sickness means girls. Boys you go dizzy and faint. It’s better to be sick.’

  Of course I did not think it was better to be sick. I thought to swoon away would be more interesting. Archie, who had never liked illness–and was apt to sheer off if people were ill, saying: ‘I think you’ll do better without me bothering you’–was on this occasion most unexpectedly kind. He thought of all sorts of things to cheer me up. I remember he bought a lobster, at that time an excessively expensive luxury, and placed it in my bed to surprise me. I can still remember coming in and seeing the lobster with its head and whiskers lying on my pillow. I laughed like anything. We had a splendid meal with it. I lost it soon afterwards, but at any rate I had had the pleasure of eating it. He was also noble enough to make me Benger’s Food, which had been recommended by Mrs Woods as more likely to ‘keep down’ than other things. I remember Archie’s hurt face when he had made me some Benger’s, and allowed it to go cold because I could not drink it hot. I had had it, and had said it was very nice–‘No lumps in it tonight, and you’ve made it beautifully’–then half an hour later there was the usual tragedy.

  ‘Well, look here,’ said Archie, in an injured manner. ‘What’s the good of my making you these things? I mean, you might just as well not take them at all.’

  It seemed to me, in my ignorance, that so much vomiting would have a bad effect on our coming child–that it would be starved. This, however, was far from the case. Although I continued to be sick up to the day of the birth, I had a strapping eight-and-a-half-pound daughter, and I myself, though never seeming to retain any nourishment at all, had put on rather than lost weight. The whole thing was like a nine-month ocean voyage to which you never got acclimatised. When Rosalind was born, and I found a doctor and a nurse leaning over me, the doctor saying, ‘Well, you’ve got a daughter all right,’ and the nurse, more gushing, ‘Oh, what a lovely little daughter!’ I responded with the important announcement: ‘I don’t feel sick any more. How wonderful!’

  Archie and I had had great arguments the preceding month about names, and about which sex we wanted. Archie was very definite that he must have a daughter.

  ‘I’m not going to have a boy,’ he said, ‘because I can see I should be jealous of it. I’d be jealous of your paying attention to it.’

  ‘But I should pay just as much attention to a girl.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be the same thing.’

  We argued about a name. Archie wanted Enid. I wanted Martha. He shifted to Elaine–I tried Harriet. Not till after she was born did we compromise on Rosalind.

  I know all mothers rave about their babies, but I must say that, though I personally consider new-born babies definitely hideous, Rosalind actually was a nice looking baby. She had a lot of dark hair, and she looked rather like a Red Indian; she had not that pink, bald look that is so depressing in babies, and she seemed, from an early age, both gay and determined.

  I had an extremely nice nurse, who took grave exception to the ways of our household. Rosalind was born, of course, at Ashfield. Mothers did not go to nursing-homes in those days; the whole birth, with attendance, cost fifteen pounds, which seems to me, looking back, extremely reasonable. I kept the nurse, on my mother’s advice, for an extra two weeks, so that I could get full instructions in looking after Rosalind, and also go to London and find somewhere else to live.

  The night when we knew Rosalind would be born we had a curious time. Mother and Nurse Pemberton were like two females caught up in the rites of Nativity: happy, busy, important, running about with sheets, setting things to order. Archie and I wandered about, a little timid, rather nervous, like two children who were not sure they were wanted. We were both frightened and upset. Archie, as he told me afterwards, was convinced that if I died it would be all his fault. I thought I possibly might die, and if so I would be extremely sorry because I was enjoying myself so much. But it was really just the unknown that was frightening. It was also exciting. The first time you do a thing is always exciting.

  Now we had to make plans for the future. I left Rosalind at Ashfield with Nurse Pemberton still in charge, and went to London to find a) a place to live in; b) a nurse for Rosalind; and c) a maid to look after whatever house or flat we should find. The last was really no problem at all, for a month before Rosalind’s birth who should burst in but my dear Devonshire Lu
cy; just out of the WAAFs, breathless, warm-hearted, full of exuberance: the same as ever, and a tower of strength. ‘I’ve heard the news,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard you are going to have a baby–and I’m ready. The moment you want me, I’ll move in.’

  After consultation with my mother, I decided that Lucy must be offered a wage such as never before, in my mother’s or my experience, had been paid to a cook or a general maid. It was thirty-six pounds a year–an enormous sum in those days–but Lucy was well worth it and I was delighted to have her.

  By this time, nearly a year after the armistice, finding anywhere to live was about the most difficult thing in the world. Hundreds of young couples were scouring London to find anything that would suit them at a reasonable price. Premiums, too, were being asked. The whole thing was very difficult. We decided to take a furnished flat first while we looked around for something that would really suit us. Archie’s plans were working out. As soon as he got his demobilisation he was going in with a City firm. I have forgotten the name of his boss by this time; I will call him for convenience Mr Goldstein. He was a large, yellow man. When I had asked Archie about him that was the first thing he had said: ‘Well, he’s very yellow. Fat too, but very yellow.’

  At that time the City firms were being forward in offering postings to young demobilised officers. Archie’s salary was to be £500 a year. I had £100 a year which I still received under my grandfather’s will, and Archie had his gratuity and sufficient savings to bring him in a further £100 a year. It was not riches, even in those days; in fact it was far from riches, because rents had risen so enormously, and also the price of food. Eggs were eightpence each, which was no joke for a young couple. However, we had never expected to be rich, and had no qualms.

  Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant, but they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars. Sometimes, in the last days of my pregnancy, when I was waiting in queues for buses, elbowed aside because of my cumbrous movements–men were not particularly gallant at that period–I used to think as cars swept past me; ‘How wonderful it would be if I could have one one day.’

  I remember a friend of Archie’s saying bitterly: ‘Nobody ought to be allowed to have a car unless they are on very essential business.’ I never felt like that. It is always exciting, I think, to see someone having luck, someone who is rich, someone who has jewels. Don’t the children in the street all press their faces against the windows to spy on parties, to see people with diamond tiaras? Somebody has got to win the Irish Sweep-stake. If the prizes for it were only £30 there would be no excitement.

  The Calcutta Sweep, the Irish Sweep, nowadays the football pools; all those things are romance. That, too, is why there are large crowds on the pavements watching film stars as they arrive at the premières of film shows. To the watchers they are heroines in wonderful evening dresses, made up to the back teeth: figures of glamour. Who wants a drab world where nobody is rich, or important, or beautiful, or talented? Once one stood for hours to look at kings and queens; nowadays one is more inclined to gasp at pop stars, but the principle is the same.

  As I said, we were prepared to have a nurse and a servant as a necessary extravagance, but would never have dreamed of having a car. If we went to theatres it would be to the pit. I would have perhaps one evening dress, and that would be a black one so as not to show the dirt, and when we went out on muddy evenings, I would always of course, have, black shoes for the same reason. We would never take a taxi anywhere. There is a fashion in the way you spend your money, just as there is a fashion in everything. I’m not prepared to say now whether ours was a worse or a better way. It made for less luxury, plainer food, clothes and all those things. On the other hand, in those days you had more leisure–there was leisure to think, to read, and to indulge in hobbies and pursuits. I think I am glad that I was young in those times. There was a great deal of freedom in life, and much less hurry and worry.

  We found a flat, rather luckily, quite soon. It was on the ground floor of Addison Mansions, which were two big blocks of buildings situated behind Olympia. It was a big flat, four bedrooms and two sitting-rooms. We took it furnished for five guineas a week. The woman who let it to us was a terrifically peroxided blonde of forty-five, with an immense swelling bust. She was very friendly and insisted on telling me a lot about her daughter’s internal ailments. The flat was filled with particularly hideous furniture, and had some of the most sentimental pictures I have ever seen. I made a mental note that the first thing Archie and I would do would be to take them down and stack them tidily to await the owner’s return. There was plenty of china and glass and all that kind of thing, including one egg-shell tea-set which frightened me because I thought it so fragile that it was sure to get broken. With Lucy’s aid, we stored it away in one of the cupboards as soon as we arrived.

  I then visited Mrs Boucher’s Bureau, which was the recognised rendezvous–indeed I believe it still is–for those who want nannies. Mrs Boucher managed to bring me down to earth rather quickly. She sniffed at the wages I was willing to pay, inquired about conditions and what staff I kept, and then sent me to a small room where prospective employees were interviewed. A large, competent woman was the first to come in. The mere sight of her filled me with alarm. The sight of me, however, did not fill her with any alarm whatever. ‘Yes, Madam? How many children would it be?’ I explained that it would be one baby.

  ‘And from the month, I hope? I never consent to taking any baby unless it is from the month. I get my babies into good ways as soon as possible.’

  I said it would be from the month.

  ‘And what staff do you keep, Madam?’

  I said apologetically that as staff I kept one maid. She sniffed again. ‘I’m afraid, Madam, that would hardly suit me. You see, I have been accustomed to having my nurseries waited on and looked after, and a fully equipped and pleasant establishment.’ I agreed that my post was not what she was looking for, and got rid of her with some relief. I saw three more, but they all despised me.

  However, I returned for further interviews the next day. This time I was lucky. I came across Jessie Swannell, thirty-five, sharp of tongue, kind of heart, who had lived most of her time as nurse with a family in Nigeria. I broke to her, one by one, the shameful conditions of my employment. Only one maid, one nursery, not a day and night nursery, the grate attended to, but otherwise she would have to do her own nursery and–final and last straw–the wages.

  ‘Ah well,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t sound too bad. I’m used to hard work, and that doesn’t bother me. A little girl, is it? I like girls.’

  So Jessie Swannell and I fixed it up. She was with me two years, and I liked her very much, though she had her disadvantages. She was one of those who by nature dislike the parents of the child they are looking after. To Rosalind she was goodness itself, and would have died for her, I think. Me she regarded as an interloper, though she grudgingly did as I wanted her to do, even if she did not always agree with me. On the other hand, if any disaster occurred, she was splendid; kind, ready to help, and cheerful. Yes, I respect Jessie Swannell, and I hope she has had a good life and done the kind of thing she wanted to do.

  So all was settled, and Rosalind, myself, Jessie Swannell, and Lucy all arrived at Addison Mansions and started family life. Not that my search was ended. I had now to look for an unfurnished flat to be our permanent home. That of course was not so easy: in fact it was hellishly difficult. As soon as one heard of anything one rushed off, rang up, wrote letters, yet there really seemed to be nothing possible. Sometimes they were dirty, shabby, so broken down that you could hardly imagine living in them. Time after time someone got in just ahead of you. We circled London: Hampstead, Chiswick, Pimlico, Kensington, St. John’s Wood–my day seemed one long bus to
ur. We visited all the estate agents; and before long we began to get anxious. Our furnished let was only two months. When the peroxided Mrs N. and her married daughter and children returned they would not be likely to let it to us for any longer. We must find something.

  At last it seemed we were lucky. We secured, or more or less secured, a flat near Battersea Park. Its rent was reasonable, the owner, Miss Llewellyn, was moving out in about a month’s time, but would actually be content to go a little sooner. She was moving to a flat in a different part of London. All seemed settled, but we had counted our chickens too soon. A terrible blow befell us. Only about a fortnight before the date of moving we heard from Miss Llewellyn that she was unable to get into her new flat, because the people in it were in their turn unable to get into theirs! It was a chain reaction.

  It was a severe blow. Every two or three days we telephoned to Miss Llewellyn for news. The news was worse each time. Always, it seemed, the other people were having more difficulty getting into their flat, so she was equally full of doubt about leaving her own. It finally seemed as though it might be three or four months before we would be able to get possession, and even that date was uncertain. Feverishly, we began once again studying the advertisements, ringing up house agents, and all the rest of it. Time went on, and by now we were desperate. Then a house agent rang up and offered us not a flat but a house. A small house in Scarsdale Villas. It was for sale though, not to let. Archie and I went and saw it. It was a charming little house. It would mean selling out practically all the small capital we had–a terrible risk. However, we felt we had to risk something, so we duly agreed to buy it, signed on a dotted line and went home to decide what securities we should sell.

  It was two mornings later when, at breakfast, I was glancing through the paper, turning first to the flat column, which by now was such a habit with me that I was unable to stop it, and saw an advertisement: ‘Flat to let unfurnished, 96 Addison Mansions, £90 per annum.’ I uttered a hoarse cry, dashed down my coffee cup, read the advertisement to Archie, and said, ‘There’s no time to lose!’