Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  ‘But I know I won’t. I can’t think of an idea. I had an idea, but now it seems no good.’

  ‘You’ll just have to get through this phase. You’ve had all this before. You said it last year. You said it the year before.’

  ‘It’s different this time,’ I say, with positive assurance.

  But it wasn’t different, of course, it was just the same. You forget every time what you felt before when it comes again. Such misery and despair, such inability to do anything that will be in the least creative. And yet it seems that this particular phase of misery has got to be lived through. It is rather like putting the ferrets in to bring out what you want at the end of the rabbit burrow. Until there has been a lot of subterranean disturbance, until you have spent long hours of utter boredom–you can never feel normal. You can’t think of what you want to write, and if you pick up a book you find you are not reading it properly. If you try to do a crossword your mind isn’t on the clues; you are possessed by a feeling of paralyzed hopelessness.

  Then, for some unknown reason, an inner ‘starter’ gets you off at the post. You begin to function, you know then that ‘it’ is coming, the mist is clearing up. You know suddenly, with absolute certitude, just what A wants to say to B. You can walk out of the house, down the road, talking to yourself violently, repeating the conversation that Maud, say, is going to have with Aylwin, and exactly where they will be, just where the other man will be watching them from the trees, and how the little dead pheasant on the ground makes Maud think of something that she had forgotten, and so on and so on. And you come home bursting with pleasure; you haven’t done anything at all yet, but you are–triumphantly–there.

  At that moment writing plays seemed to me entrancing, simply because it wasn’t my job, because I hadn’t got the feeling that I had to think of a play–I only had to write the play that I was already thinking of. Plays are much easier to write than books, because you can see them in your mind’s eye, you are not hampered with all that description which clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you getting on with what’s happening. The circumscribed limits of the stage simplifies things for you. You don’t have to follow the heroine up and down the stairs, or out to the tennis lawn and back, thinking thoughts that have to be described. You have only what can be seen and heard and done to deal with. Looking and listening and feeling is what you have to deal with.

  I should always write my one book a year–I was sure of that. Dramatic writing would be my adventure–that would always be, and always must be hit and miss. You can have play after play a success, and then, for no reason, a series of flops. Why? Nobody really knows. I’ve seen it happen with many playwrights. I have seen a play which to my mind was just as good or better than one of their successes fail–because it did not catch the fancy of the public; or because it was written at the wrong time; or because the cast made such a difference to it. Yes, play-writing was not a thing I could be sure of. It was a glorious gamble every time, and I liked it that way.

  I knew after I had written The Hollow that before long I should want to write another play, and if possible, I thought to myself, I was going to write a play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.

  Caledonia had been a great success for Rosalind. It was, I think, one of the most remarkable schools that I have known. All its teachers seemed the best of their kind. They certainly brought out the best in Rosalind. She was the head of the school at the end, though, as she pointed out to me, this was unfair, because there was a Chinese girl there who was much cleverer than she was. ‘And I know what they think–they think it ought to be an English girl who is head of the school.’ I expect she was right too.

  From Caledonia Rosalind went to Benenden. She was bored by it from the start. I don’t know why–it was by all accounts a very good school. She was not interested in learning for its own sake–there was nothing of the scholar about her. She cared least of all for the subjects I would have been interested in, such as history, but she was good at mathematics. When I was in Syria I used to get letters from her urging me to let her leave Benenden. ‘I really can’t stick another year of this place,’ she wrote. However, I felt that having embarked on a school career she must at least terminate it in the proper way, so I wrote back to her and said that, once she had passed her School Certificate–she could leave Benenden and proceed to some other form of education.

  Miss Sheldon, Rosalind’s headmistress, had written to me and said that, though Rosalind was anxious to take her School Certificate next term, she did not think she would have any chance of passing it, but that there was no reason why she should not try. Miss Sheldon was proved wrong, however, because Rosalind passed her School Certificate with ease. I had to think up a next step for a daughter of barely fifteen.

  Going abroad was what we both agreed on. Max and I went on what I found an intensely worrying mission to inspect various scholastic establishments: a family in Paris, a few carefully nurtured girls in Evian, at least three highly recommended educators in Lausanne, and an establishment in Gstaad, where the girls would get skiing and other winter sports. I was bad at interviewing people. The moment I sat down I became tongue-tied. What I felt was: ‘Shall I send my daughter to you or not?

  How can I find out what you are really like? How on earth can I find out if she would like being with you? And anyway, what’s it all about?’ Instead, I used to stammer and say ‘er–er’–and ask what I could hear were thoroughly idiotic questions.

  After much family consultation, we decided on Mademoiselle Tschumi’s Pension at Gstaad. It proved a fiasco. I seemed to get letters from Rosalind twice a week; ‘This place is awful, Mother, absolutely awful. The girls here–you’ve no idea what they are like! They wear snoods–that will show you?’

  It didn’t show me. I didn’t see why girls shouldn’t wear snoods, and I didn’t know what snoods were anyway.

  ‘We walk about two by two–two by two–fancy! At our age! And we’re never even allowed in the village for a second to buy anything at a shop. It’s awful! Absolute imprisonment! They don’t teach us anything either. And as for those bathrooms you talk about, it’s an absolute swizzle! They’re never used. None of us has ever had a bath once! There isn’t even any hot water laid on yet! And for skiing, of course, it’s far too far down. There may be a bit in February, but I don’t believe they will ever take us there even then.’

  We rescued Rosalind from her durance and sent her first to a pension at Chateau d’Oex and then to a pleasantly old-fashioned family in Paris. On our way back from Syria we picked her up in Paris, and said we hoped she now spoke French. ‘More or less,’ said Rosalind, careful not to allow us to hear her speak a word. Then it occurred to her that the taxi-driver taking us from the Gare de Lyon to Madame Laurent’s house was following an unnecessarily devious route. Rosalind flung down the window, stuck out her head, and addressed him in vivid and idiomatic French, asking him why on earth he thought he was taking those particular streets and telling him what streets he ought to take. He was vanquished at once, and I was delighted to find out what otherwise I might have had some difficulty in establishing: that Rosalind could speak French.

  Madame Laurent and I had amicable conversations. She assured me that Rosalind had comported herself extremely well, had behaved always tres comme it faut–but, she said, ‘Madame, elle est d’une froideur–mais d’une froideur excessive! C’est peut-étre le phlegme brittanique.’

  I said hurriedly that I was quite sure that it was le phlegme britannique. Again Madame Laurent assured me that she had tried to be like a mother to Rosalind. ‘Mais cette froideur–cette froideur anglaise!’

  Madame Laurent sighed with the memory of the rejection of her demonstrative heart.

  Rosalind still had six months, or possibly a year, of education to put in. She passed it with a family near Munich learning German. Next came a London season.

  At this she was a decided success, was called one of the best looking debu
tantes of her year, and had plenty of fun. I think, myself, that it did her a great deal of good, and gave her self-confidence and nice manners. It also cured her of any mad wish to continue the social racket indefinitely. She said she had enjoyed the experience, but had no intention of doing any more of that silly kind of thing.

  I raised the subject of a job with Rosalind and her great friend, Susan North.

  ‘You’ve got to choose something to do,’ I said to Rosalind dictatorially. ‘I don’t care what it is. Why don’t you train as a masseuse? That would be useful later in life. Or I suppose you could go and arrange flowers.’

  ‘Oh, everybody is doing that,’ said Susan.

  Finally, the girls came to me and said they thought they would like to take up photography. I was overjoyed; I had been wishing to study photography myself. I had been doing most of the photography on the dig, and I thought it would be useful for me to have some lessons in studio photography, about which I knew little. So many of our objects had to be photographed in the open, and not in studio conditions, and since some of them would remain in Syria it was important that we should have the best photographs of them possible. I enlarged enthusiastically on the subject and the girls went into fits of laughter.

  ‘We don’t mean what you mean,’ they said. ‘We don’t mean photography classes, at all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘Oh, being photographed in bathing-dresses and things, for advertisements.’

  I was horribly shocked, and showed it.

  ‘You are not going to be photographed for advertisements for bathing-dresses,’ I said. ‘I won’t hear of anything like that.’

  ‘Mother is so terribly old-fashioned,’ said Rosalind, with a sigh. ‘Lots of girls are photographed for advertisements. They are terribly jealous of each other.’

  ‘And we do know some photographers,’ Susan said. ‘I think we could persuade one of them to do one of us for soap.’

  I continued to veto the project. In the end Rosalind said she would think about photography classes. After all, she said, she could do model photography classes–it needn’t be for bathing-dresses. ‘It could be real clothes, buttoned up to the neck, if you like!’

  So I went off one day to the Reinhardt School of Commercial Photography, and I became so interested that when I came home I had to confess that I had booked myself for a course of photography and not them. They roared with laughter. ‘Mother’s got caught by it, instead of us!’ said Rosalind.

  ‘Oh, you poor dear, you will be so tired,’ said Susan. And tired I was! After the first day running up and down stone flights of stairs, developing and retaking my particular subject, I was worn out.

  The Reinhardt School of Photography had many different departments, including one on commercial photography, and one of my courses was in this. There was a passion at that time for making everything look as unlike itself as possible. You would place six tablespoons on a table, then climb on a stepladder, hang over the top of it, and achieve some fore-shortened view or out of focus effect. There was also a tendency to photograph an object not in the middle of the plate but somewhere in the left-hand corner, or running off it, or a face that was only a portion of a face. It was all very much the latest thing. I took a beechwood sculptured head to the School, and did various experiments in photographing that, using all kinds of filters–red, green, yellow–and seeing the extraordinarily different effects you could get using various cameras with the various filters.

  The person who did not share my enthusiasm was the wretched Max. He wanted his photography to be the opposite of what I was now doing. Things had to look exactly what they were, with as much detail as possible, exact perspective, and so on.

  ‘Don’t you think this necklace looks rather dull like that?’ I would say. ‘No, I don’t,’ said Max. ‘The way you’ve got it, it’s all blurred and twisted.’

  ‘But it looks so exciting that way!’

  ‘I don’t want it to look exciting,’ said Max. ‘I want it to look like what it is. And you haven’t put a scale rod in.’

  ‘It ruins the artistic aspect of a photograph if you have to have a scale rod, It looks awful.’

  ‘You’ve got to show what size it is,’ said Max. ‘It is most important.’ ‘You can put it underneath, can’t you, in the caption?’

  ‘It’s not the same thing. You want to see exactly the scale.’

  I sighed. I could see I had been betrayed by my artistic fancies into straying from what I had promised to do, so I got my instructor to give me extra lessons on photographing things in exact perspective. He was rather bored at having to do this, and disapproving of the results. However, it was going to be useful to me.

  I had learnt one thing at least: there was no such thing as taking a photograph of something, and later taking another one because that one didn’t come out well. Nobody at the Reinhardt School ever took less than ten negatives of any subject; a great many of them took twenty. It was singularly exhausting, and I used to come home so weary that I wished I had never started. However, that had gone by the next morning.

  Rosalind came out to Syria one year, and I think enjoyed being on our dig. Max got her to do some of the drawings. Actually she draws exceptionally well, and she made a good job of it, but the trouble with Rosalind is that, unlike her slap-happy mother, she is a perfectionist. Unless she could get a thing perfectly as she wanted it, she would immediately tear it up. She did a series of these drawings, and then said to Max: ‘They are no good really–I shall tear them up.’

  ‘You are not to tear them up,’ said Max.

  ‘I shall tear them up,’ said Rosalind.

  They then had an enormous fight, Rosalind trembling with rage, Max also really angry. The drawings of the painted pots were salvaged, and appeared in Max’s book of Tell Brak–but Rosalind never professed herself satisfied with them.

  Horses were procured from the Sheikh, and Rosalind went riding, accompanied by Guilford Bell, the young architect nephew of my Australian friend, Aileen Bell. He was a very dear boy and he did some extraordinarily lovely pencil drawings of our amulets at Brak. They were beautiful little things–frogs, lions, rams, bulls–and the delicate shading of his pencil drawings made a perfect medium for them.

  That summer Guilford came to stay with us at Torquay, and one day we saw that a house was up for sale that I had known when I was young–Greenway House, on the Dart, a house that my mother had always said, and I had thought also, was the most perfect of the various properties on the Dart.

  ‘Let’s go and look at it,’ I said. ‘It would be lovely to see it again. I haven’t seen it since I went there calling with Mother when I was a child.’

  So we went over to Greenway, and very beautiful the house and grounds were. A white Georgian house of about 1780 or 90, with woods sweeping down to the Dart below, and a lot of fine shrubs and trees–the ideal house, a dream house. Since we had an order to view, I asked its price, though without much interest. I didn’t think I had heard the answer correctly.

  ‘Sixteen thousand, did you say?’

  ‘Six thousand.’

  ‘Six thousand?’ I could hardly believe it. We drove home talking about it. ‘It’s incredibly cheap,’ I said. ‘It’s got thirty-three acres. It doesn’t look in bad condition either; wants decorating, that’s all.’

  ‘Why don’t you buy it?’ asked Max.

  I was so startled, this coming from Max, that it took my breath away. ‘You’ve been getting worried about Ashfield, you know,’

  I knew what he meant. Ashfield, my home, had changed. Where our neighbours’ houses had once been ringed round us–other villas of the same kind–there was now, blocking the view in the narrowest part of the garden, a large secondary school, which stood between us and the sea. All day there were noisy shouting children. On the other side of us there was now a mental nursing home. Sometimes queer sounds would come from there, and patients would appear suddenly in the garden. They were not certifi
ed, so I presume they were free to do as they liked, but we had had some unpleasant incidents. A brawny colonel in pyjamas appeared, waving a golf-club, determined he was going to kill all the moles in the garden; another day he came to attack a dog who had barked. The nurses apologised, fetched him back, and said he was quite all right, just a little ‘disturbed’, but it was alarming, and once or twice children staying with us had been badly frightened.

  Once it had been all countryside out of Torquay: three villas up the hill and then the road petered out into country. The lush green fields where I used to go to look at the lambs in spring had given way to a mass of small houses. No one we knew lived in our road any longer. It was as though Ashfield had become a parody of itself.

  Still, that was hardly a reason for buying Greenway House. Yet, how it appealed to me. I had known always that Max did not really like Ashfield. He had never told me so–but I knew it. I think in some way he was jealous of it because it was a part of my life that I hadn’t shared with him–it was all my own. And he had said, unprompted, of Greenway, ‘Why don’t you buy it?‘

  And so we made inquiries. Guilford helped us. He looked over the house professionally, and said: ‘Well, I’ll give you my advice. Pull half of it down.’

  ‘Pull half of it down!’

  ‘Yes. You see, the whole of that back wing is Victorian. You could leave the 1790 house and take away all that addition–the billiard room, the study, the estate room, those bedrooms and new bathrooms upstairs. It would be a far better house, far lighter. The original is a very beautiful house, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘We shan’t have any bathrooms left if we pull the Victorian ones down,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Well, you can easily make bathrooms on the top floor. Another thing, too; it would bring your rates down by quite a lot.’

  And so we bought Greenway. We put Guilford in charge, and he redesigned the house on its original lines. We added bathrooms upstairs, and downstairs we affixed a small cloakroom, but the rest of it we left untouched. I only wish now that I had had the gift of foresight–if so I would have taken off another large chunk of the house: the vast larder, the great caverns in which you soaked pigs, the kindling store, the suite of sculleries. Instead I would have put on a nice, small kitchen from which I could go to the dining-room in a few steps, and which would be easy to run with no help. But it would never have occurred to me that a day would come when there was no domestic help. So we left the kitchen wing as it was. When the alterations were all done, and the house decorated plainly in white, we moved in.