Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  I rushed from the breakfast table, crossed the grass courtyard between the two blocks at a run, and went up the stairs of the opposite block, four flights of them, like a maniac. The time was a quarter past eight in the morning. I rang the bell of No. 96. It was opened by a startled-looking young woman in a dressing-gown.

  ‘I’ve come about the flat,’ I said, with as much coherence as I could manage in my breathlessness.

  ‘About this flat? Already? I only put the advertisement in yesterday. I didn’t expect anyone so soon.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘Well…Well, it’s a little early.’

  ‘I think it will do for us,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll take it.’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose you can look round. It’s not very tidy.’ She drew back.

  I charged in regardless of her hesitations, took one rapid look round the flat; I was not going to run any risk of losing it.

  ‘£90 per annum?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s the rent. But I must warn you it’s only a quarterly lease.’ I considered that for a moment, but it did not deter me. I wanted somewhere to live, and soon.

  ‘And when is possession?’

  ‘Oh well, any time really–in a week or two? My husband’s got to go abroad suddenly. And we want a premium for the linoleum and fittings.’

  I did not much take to the linoleum surrounds, but what did that matter? Four bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, a nice outlook on green–four flights of stairs to come up and down, true, but plenty of light and air. It wanted doing up, but we could do that ourselves. Oh, it was wonderful–a godsend.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I said. ‘That’s definite.’

  ‘Oh, you’re sure? You haven’t told me your name.’

  I told her, explained that I was living in a furnished flat opposite, and all was settled. I rang up the agents there and then from her flat. I had been beaten to the punch too often before. As I descended the stairs again I met three couples coming up; each of them, I could see at a glance, going to No. 96. This time we had won. I went back and told Archie in triumph.

  ‘Splendid,’ he said. At that moment the telephone rang. It was Miss Llewellyn. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that you will be able to have the flat quite certainly in a month now.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, I see.’ I put back the receiver. ‘Good Lord,’ said Archie. ‘Do you know what we’ve got? We’ve now taken two flats and bought a house!’

  It seemed something of a problem. I was about to ring up Miss Llewellyn and tell her we didn’t want the flat, but then a better idea occurred to me. ‘We’ll try to get out of the Scarsdale Villa house,’ I said, ‘but we’ll take the Battersea flat, and we’ll ask a premium for it from someone else. That will pay the premium on this one.’

  Archie approved highly of this idea, and I think myself it was a moment of high financial genius on my part, because we could ill afford the £100 premium. Then we went to see the agents about the house we had bought in Scarsdale Villas. They were really very amiable. They said it would be quite easy to sell it to someone else–in fact there were several people who had been bitterly disappointed about it. So we got out of that with no more than a small fee to the agents.

  We had a flat, and in two weeks time we moved into it. Jessie Swannell was a brick. She made no trouble at all about having to go up and down four flights of stairs, which was more than I would have believed possible of any other nurse from Mrs Boucher’s.

  ‘Ah well,’ she said, ‘I’m used to lugging things about. Mind you, I could do with a nigger or two. That’s the best of Nigeria–plenty of niggers.’

  We loved our flat, and threw ourselves heartily into the business of decoration. We spent a good portion of Archie’s gratuity on furniture: good modern furniture for Rosalind’s nursery from Heal’s, good beds from Heal’s for us–and quite a lot of things came up from Ashfield, which was far too crowded with tables and chairs and cabinets, plate and linen. We also went to sales and bought odd chests of drawers and old-fashioned wardrobes for a song.

  When we got into our new flat we chose papers and decided on paint–some of the work we did ourselves, part we got in a small painter and decorator to help us with. The two sitting-rooms–a quite large drawing-room and a rather smaller dining-room–faced over the court, but they faced north. I preferred the rooms at the end of a long passage at the back. They were not quite so big, but they were sunny and cheerful, so we decided to have our sitting-room and Rosalind’s nursery in the two back rooms. The bathroom was opposite them, and there was a small maid’s room. Of the two large rooms we made the larger our bedroom and the smaller a dining-room and possible emergency spare-room. Archie chose the bathroom decoration: a brilliant scarlet and white tiled paper. Our decorator and paper-hanger was extremely kind to me. He showed me how to cut and fold wallpaper in the proper way ready for pasting, and, as he put it, ‘not to be afraid of it’ when we papered the walls. ‘Slap it on, see? You can’t do any harm. If it tears, you paste it over. Cut it all out first, and have it all measured, and write the number on the back. That’s right. Slap it on. A hairbrush is a very good thing to use to take the bubbles out.’ I became quite efficient in the end. The ceilings we left to him to deal with–I didn’t feel ready to do a ceiling.

  Rosalind’s room had pale yellow water paint on the walls, and there again I learnt a little about decoration. One thing our mentor did not warn me about was that if you did not get spots of water paint off the floor quickly it hardened up and you could only remove it with a chisel. However, one learns by experience. We did Rosalind’s nursery with an expensive frieze of paper from Heal’s with animals round the top of the walls. In the sitting-room I decided to have very pale pink shiny walls and to paper the ceiling with a black glossy paper with hawthorn all over it. It would make me feel, I thought, that I was in the country. It would also make the room look lower, and I liked low rooms. In a small room they looked more cottagey. The ceiling paper was to be put on by the professional of course, but he proved unexpectedly averse to doing it.

  ‘Now, look here, Missus, you’ve got it wrong, you know. What you want is the ceiling done pale pink and the black paper on the walls.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said, ‘I want the black paper on the ceiling and the pink distemper on the walls.’

  ‘But that’s not the way you do rooms. See? You’re going light up to dark. That’s the wrong way. You should do dark up to light.’

  ‘You don’t have to dark up to light if you prefer light up to dark,’ I argued.

  ‘Well, I can only tell you, Ma’am, that it’s the wrong way and that nobody ever does it.’

  I said that I was going to do it.

  ‘It will bring the ceiling right down, you see if it doesn’t. It will make the ceiling come down towards the floor. It will make the room look quite low.’

  ‘I want it to look low.’

  He gave me up then, and shrugged his shoulders. When it was finished I asked him if he didn’t like it.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s odd. No, I can’t say I like it, but…well, it’s odd like, but it is quite pretty if you sit in a chair and look up.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ I said.

  ‘But if I was you, and you wanted to do that sort of thing, I’d have had one of them bright blue papers with stars.’

  ‘I don’t want to think I’m out of doors at night,’ I said. ‘I like to think I’m in a cherry blossom orchard or under a hawthorn tree.’

  He shook his head sadly.

  Most of the curtains we had made for us. The loose covers I had decided to make myself. My sister Madge–now renamed Punkie: her son’s name for her–assured me in her usual positive fashion that this was quite easy to do. ‘Just pin and cut them wrong side out,’ she said, ‘then stitch them, and turn them outside in. It’s quite simple; anyone could do it.’

  I had a try. They did not look very professional, and I did not dare to attempt any piping, but they looked bright and ni
ce. All our friends admired our flat, and we never had such a happy time as when settling in there. Lucy thought it was marvellous, and enjoyed every minute of it. Jessie Swannell grumbled the whole time, but was surprisingly helpful. I was quite content for her to hate us, or rather me–I don’t think she disapproved of Archie quite so much. ‘After all,’ as I explained to her one day, ‘a baby has got to have parents or you wouldn’t have one to look after.’

  ‘Ah well, I suppose you’ve got something there,’ said Jessie, and she gave a grudging smile.

  Archie had started his job in the City. He said he liked it and seemed quite excited about it. He was delighted to be out of the Air Force, which, he continued to repeat, was absolutely no good for the future. He was determined to make a lot of money. The fact that we were at the moment hard up did not worry us. Occasionally Archie and I went to the Palais de Danse at Hammersmith, but on the whole we did without amusements, since we really couldn’t afford them. We were a very ordinary young couple, but we were happy. Life seemed well set ahead of us. We had no piano, which was a pity–but I made up for it by playing the piano madly whenever I was at Ashfield.

  I had married the man I loved, we had a child, we had somewhere to live, and as far as I could see there was no reason why we shouldn’t live happily ever after.

  One day I got a letter. I opened it quite casually and read it without at first taking it in. It was from John Lane, The Bodley Head, and it asked if I would call at their office in connection with the manuscript I had submitted entitled The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

  To tell the truth, I had forgotten all about The Mysterious Affair at Styles. By this time it must have been with The Bodley Head for nearly two years, but in the excitement of the war’s ending, Archie’s return and our life together such things as writing and manuscripts had gone far away from my thoughts.

  I went off to keep the appointment, full of hope. After all they must like it a bit or they wouldn’t have asked me to come. I was shown into John Lane’s office, and he rose to greet me; a small man with a white beard, looking somehow rather Elizabethan. All round him there appeared to be pictures–on chairs, leaning against tables–all with the appearance of old masters, heavily varnished and yellow with age. I thought afterwards that he himself would look quite well in one of those frames with a ruff around his neck. He had a benign, kindly manner, but shrewd blue eyes, which ought to have warned me, perhaps, that he was the kind of man who would drive a hard bargain. He greeted me, told me gently to take a chair. I looked round–it was quite impossible: every chair was covered with a picture. He suddenly saw this and laughed. ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘there isn’t much to sit on, is there?’ He removed a rather grimy portrait, and I sat down.

  Then he began to talk to me about the MS. Some of his readers, he said, had thought it showed promise; something might be made of it. But there would have to be considerable changes. The last chapter, for instance; I had written it as a court scene, but it was quite impossible written like that. It was in no way like a court scene–it would be merely ridiculous. Did I think I could do something to bring about the denouement in another way? Either someone could help me with the law aspect, though that would be difficult, or I might be able to change it in some other way. I said immediately that I thought I could manage something. I would think about it–perhaps have a different setting. Anyway, I would try. He made various other points, none of them really serious apart from the final chapter.

  Then he went on to the business aspect, pointing out what a risk a publisher took if he published a novel by a new and unknown writer, and how little money he was likely to make out of it. Finally he produced from his desk drawer an agreement which he suggested I should sign.

  I was in no frame of mind to study agreements or even think about them. He would publish my book. Having given up hope for some years now of having anything published, except the occasional short story or poem, the idea of having a book come out in print went straight to my head. I would have signed anything. This particular contract entailed my not receiving any royalties until after the first 2000 copies had been sold–after that a small royalty would be paid. Half any serial or dramatic rights would go to the publisher. None of it meant much to me–the whole point was, the book would be published.

  I didn’t even notice that there was a clause binding me to offer him my next five novels, at an only slightly increased rate of royalty. To me it was success, and all a wild surprise. I signed with enthusiasm. Then I took the MS away to deal with the anomalies of the last chapter. I managed that quite easily.

  And so it was that I started on my long career; not that I suspected at the time that it was going to be a long career. In spite of the clause about the next five novels, this was to me a single and isolated experiment. I had been dared to write a detective story; I had written a detective story; it had been accepted, and was going to appear in print. There, as far as I was concerned, the matter ended. Certainly at that moment I did not envisage writing any more books, I think if I had been asked I would have said that I would probably write stories from time to time. I was the complete amateur–nothing of the professional about me. For me, writing was fun.

  I went home, jubilant, and told Archie, and we went to the Palais de Danse at Hammersmith that night to celebrate.

  There was a third party with us, though I did not know it. Hercule Poirot, my Belgian invention, was hanging round my neck, firmly attached there like the old man of the sea.

  V

  After I had dealt satisfactorily with the last chapter of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I returned it to John Lane, then, once I had answered a few more queries and agreed to a few more alterations, the excitement receded into the background, and life went on as it would with any other young married couple who are happy, in love with each other, rather badly off, but not too much hampered by the fact. Our times off at weekends were usually spent in going to the country by train and walking somewhere. Sometimes we made a round trip of it.

  The only serious blow that befell us was that I lost my dear Lucy. She had been looking worried and unhappy, and finally she came to me rather sadly one day and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry to let you down, Miss Agatha–I mean, Ma’am, and I don’t know what Mrs Rowe would think of me, but–well, there it is, I’m going to get married.’

  ‘Married, Lucy? Who to?’

  ‘Someone I knew before the war. I always fancied him.’

  I got more enlightenment from my mother. As soon as I told her, she exclaimed, ‘It’s not that Jack again, is it?’ It appeared that my mother had not much approved of ‘that Jack’. He’d been an unsatisfactory suitor of Lucy’s, and it had been decided by her family that it was a good thing when the couple quarrelled and parted company. However, they had come together again now. Lucy had been faithful to the unsatisfactory Jack and there it was: she was going to get married and we should have to look for another maid.

  By this time such a thing was even more impossible. No maids were to be found anywhere. However, at last, whether through an agency or a friend–I can’t remember–I came across someone called Rose. Rose was highly desirable. She had excellent references, a round pink face, a nice smile, and looked as though she was quite prepared to like us. The only trouble was she was highly averse to going anywhere where there was a child and a nurse. I felt that she had to be prevailed upon. She had been with people in the Flying Corps, and when she heard that my husband had been in the Flying Corps too she obviously softened towards me. She said that she expected my husband knew her own employer, Squadron-Leader G. I rushed home and said to Archie, ‘Did you ever know a Squadron-Leader G.?’

  ‘Not that I can remember,’ said Archie.

  ‘Well, you must remember,’ I said. ‘You must say that you came across him, or that you were buddies, or something like that–we’ve got to have Rose. She’s wonderful, she really is. If you knew the awful creatures I have seen.’

  So in due course Rose came to look upon us
with favour. She was introduced to Archie, who said some complimentary things about Squadron-Leader G., and was finally prevailed upon to accept the position.

  ‘But I don’t like nurses,’ she said warningly. ‘Don’t really mind children–but nurses, they always make trouble.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure,’ I said, ‘that Nurse Swannell won’t make trouble.’ I was not so sure, but on the whole I thought that all would be well. The only person Jessie Swannell would make trouble for would be me, and that I could stand by now. As it happened, Rose and Jessie got along well together. Jessie told her all about her life in Nigeria, and the joy it had been to have endless niggers under her control, and Rose told her all that she had suffered in her various situations. ‘Starved, I was, sometimes,’ said Rose to me one day. ‘Starved. Do you know what they gave me for breakfast?’

  I said that I didn’t know.

  ‘Kippers,’ said Rose gloomily. ‘Nothing but tea and a kipper, and toast and butter and jam. Well, I mean, I got so thin I was wasting away.’

  There was no sign of Rose wasting away now–she was pleasantly plump. However, I made sure that when we had kippers for breakfast two kippers were always pressed upon Rose, or even three, and that eggs and bacon were served to her in lavish quantities. She was, I think, happy with us and fond of Rosalind.

  My grandmother died soon after Rosalind’s birth. She had been much herself up to the end, but then got a bad attack of bronchitis, and her heart was not strong enough to recover from it. She was ninety-two, still able to enjoy life, not too deaf, though very blind by this time. Her income, like my mother’s, had been reduced by the Chaflin failure in New York, but Mr Bailey’s advice had saved her from losing all of it. This now came to my mother. It was not much by this time, because some of the shares had depreciated through the war, but it gave her £3–400 a year, which, with her allowance from Mr Chaflin, made things possible for her. Of course everything got far more expensive in the years after the war. Still, she was able to keep on Ashfield. It made me rather unhappy not to be able to contribute my small income towards the upkeep of Ashfield, as my sister did. But it was really impossible in our case–we needed every penny we had to live on.