An Autobiography

  ‘I couldn’t leave Captain Miller now.’ So, meaning for the best, we rebuffed Monty’s wilder ideas, and arranged instead for rooms at a small pension in the south of France for both Mrs Taylor and him. I sold the granite bungalow and saw them off on the Blue Train. They looked radiantly happy, but, alas, Mrs Taylor caught a chill on the journey, developed pneumonia, and died in hospital a few days later. They took Monty into hospital at Marseilles too. He was broken down by Mrs Taylor’s death. Madge went out knowing that something would have to be arranged, but at her wits’ end to know what. The nurse who was looking after him was sympathetic and helpful. She would see what could be done. A week later we had a wire from the bank manager in whose hands financial arrangements had been left, saying that he thought a satisfactory solution had been found. Madge could not go to see him, so I went along. The manager met me and took me out to lunch. No one could have been nicer or more sympathetic. He was, however, curiously evasive. I couldn’t think why. Presently the cause of his embarrassment came out. He was nervous of what Monty’s sisters would say to the proposal. The nurse, Charlotte, had offered to take Monty to her apartment and be responsible for him. The bank manager must have feared an outburst of prudish disapproval from us both–but how little he knew! Madge and I would have fallen on Charlotte’s neck in gratitude. Madge got to know her well and became attached to her. Charlotte managed Monty–and he was very fond of her too. She kept control of the purse strings–whilst tactfully listening to Monty’s grandiose plans for living on a large yacht and so on. He died quite suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage at a cafe on the front one day, and Charlotte and Madge wept together at the funeral. He was buried at the Military Cemetery at Marseilles. I think, being Monty, he enjoyed himself to the end. Colonel Dwyer and I became close friends after that. Sometimes I would go and dine with him; sometimes he would dine with me in my hotel; and our talk always seemed to come back to Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and Uganda and the Lake, and stories about my brother. In a masterful and military manner Colonel Dwyer made arrangements for my entertainment on my next trip abroad. ‘I have planned three good safaris for you,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to fix it for you some time when I can get away at a time that suits you. I think I shall meet you somewhere in Egypt–then I’d fix a trek on a camel convoy right across North Africa. It would take two months but it would be a wonderful trip–something you would never forget. I can take you where none of these ridiculous trumped-up guides would be able to–I know every inch of that country. Then there is the interior.’ And he outlined further travel plans, mostly in a bullock cart. From time to time I had doubts in my own mind as to whether I would ever be tough enough to carry out these programmes. Perhaps we both knew that they were in the realms of wishful thinking. He was a lonely man, I think. Colonel Dwyer had risen from the ranks, had a fine military career, had gradually grown apart from a wife who refused to leave England–all she cared for, he said, was living in a neat little house in a neat little road–and his children had not cared for him when he came home on leave. They had thought his ideas of travelling in wild places silly and unrealistic.

  ‘In the end I sent her home whatever money she wanted for herself and for educating the children. But my life is out here, round these parts. Africa, Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, Saudi Arabia–all of that. This is the life for me.’ He was, I think, though lonely, satisfied. He had a dry sense of humour and told me several extremely funny stories about the various intrigues that went on. At the same time he was in many ways highly conventional. He was a religious, upright martinet, with stern ideas of right and wrong. An old Covenanter would describe him best.

  It was November now, and the weather was beginning to change. There were no longer blistering hot sunlit days; occasionally there was even rain. I had booked my trip home, and I would be leaving Baghdad with regret–but not too much regret, because I was already forming plans for coming back again. The Woolleys had thrown out a hint that I might like to visit them next year, and perhaps travel part of the way home again with them; and there had been other invitations and encouragement.

  The day came at last when I once more embarked on the six-wheeler, this time being careful to have reserved a seat near the front of the bus so that I should not again disgrace myself. We started off, and I was soon to learn some of the antics of the desert. The rain came, and, as is customary in that country, firm going at 8.30 a.m. had within hours become a morass of mud. Every time you took a step, an enormous pancake of mud weighing perhaps twenty pounds attached itself to each foot. As for the six-wheeler, it skidded unceasingly, swerved, and finally stuck. The drivers sprang out, spades were lifted, boards came down and were fixed under wheels, and the whole business of digging out the bus began. After about forty minutes or an hour’s work a first attempt was made. The bus shuddered, lifted itself, and relapsed. In the end, with the rain increasing in violence, we had to turn back, and arrived once more in Baghdad. Our second attempt the next day was better. We still had to dig ourselves out once or twice, but finally we passed Ramadi, and when we got to the fortress of Rutbah we were out in clear desert again, and there was no more difficulty underfoot.

  III

  One of the nicest parts of travelling is coming home again. Rosalind, Carlo, Punkie and her family–I looked upon them all with new appreciation.

  We went for Christmas to stay with Punkie in Cheshire. After that we came to London, where Rosalind had one of her friends to stay–Pam Druce, whose mother and father we had met originally in the Canary Islands. We planned that we would go to a pantomime, and then Pam would come down to Devonshire with us till the end of the holidays.

  We had a happy evening after Pam arrived, until in the small hours I was awakened by a voice saying: ‘Do you mind if I come into your bed, Mrs Christie? I feel as though I am having rather queer dreams.’

  ‘Why, of course, Pam,’ I said. I switched the light on and she got in and lay down with a sigh. I was slightly surprised, because Pam had not struck me as being a nervous child. However, it was the most comforting thing for her, no doubt, so we both went to sleep till morning.

  After the curtains were drawn and my tea brought, I switched on my light and looked at Pam. Never have I seen a face so completely covered with spots. She noticed something rather peculiar in my expression, and said: ‘You are staring at me!’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘well, yes, I am.’

  ‘Well, I’m surprised too,’ said Pam. ‘How did I get into your bed?’

  ‘You came in in the night, and said you had had some nasty dreams.’

  ‘Did I? I don’t remember a thing about it. I couldn’t think what I was doing in your bed.’ She paused, and then said, ‘Is there anything else the matter?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid there is. Do you know, Pam, I think you’ve got the measles.’ I brought a hand-glass and she examined her face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I do look peculiar, don’t I?’ I agreed.

  ‘And what’s going to happen, now?’ Pam asked. ‘Can’t I go to the theatre tonight?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘I think the first thing we’d better do is telephone your mother.’ I telephoned Beda Druce, who came round at once. She immediately cancelled her departure, and took Pam off. I put Rosalind into the car and drove down to Devonshire, where we would wait ten days and see whether she was going to have measles or not. The drive was not made easier by the fact that I had been vaccinated only a week previously in the leg and driving was somewhat painful. The first thing that happened at the end of the ten days was that I proceeded to have a violent headache and every sign of fever.

  ‘Perhaps you are going to have the measles and not me,’ suggested Rosalind.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I had measles very badly myself when I was fifteen.’ But I did feel slightly uneasy. People did have measles twice–and why should I feel so ill otherwise? I rang up my sister, and Punkie, always ready to come to the rescue, said that on receipt of a telegram she would come at once
and deal with either me or Rosalind, or both, and anything else that should happen. Next day I felt worse, and Rosalind complained of having a cold–her eyes watered and she sneezed. Punkie arrived, full of her usual enthusiasm for dealing with disasters. In due course Dr Carver was summoned and pronounced that Rosalind had the measles.

  ‘And what’s the matter with you?’ he said. ‘You don’t look too well.’ I said I felt pretty dreadful, and thought I had a temperature. He put a few more searching inquiries. ‘Been vaccinated, have you?’ he said. ‘And you motored down here. Vaccinated in the leg, too? Why weren’t you vaccinated in the arm?’

  ‘Because vaccination marks look so dreadful in evening dress.’

  ‘Well there’s no harm being vaccinated in the leg, but it’s silly to motor over two hundred miles when you have had that done. Let’s have a look.’ He had a look. ‘Your leg is enormously swollen,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you realised that?’…

  ‘Well, yes, I had, but I thought it was just the vaccination feeling sore.’ ‘Sore? It’s a good deal more than that. Let’s take your temperature.’ He did, then exclaimed, ‘Good Lord! Haven’t you taken it?’

  ‘Well, I did take it yesterday, and it was 102, but I thought perhaps it would go down. I do feel a bit odd.’

  ‘Odd! I should think you do. It’s over 103 now. You lie here on your bed and wait while I fix up a few things.’ He came back to say that I was to go into a nursing home immediately and that he would send round an ambulance. I said an ambulance was nonsense. Why couldn’t I just go in a car or a taxi?

  ‘You will do as you are told,’ said Dr Carver, not perhaps quite as sure of this as he might have been. ‘I’ll have a word with Mrs Watts first.’ Punkie, came in and said, ‘I’ll look after Rosalind while she has the measles. Dr Carver seems to think you are in rather a bad way though. What have they done? Poisoned you with the vaccination?’ Punkie packed a few necessities for me, and I lay on my bed waiting for the ambulance and wishing that I could collect my thoughts. I had a terrible feeling of being on a slab in a fishmonger’s shop: all round me were filleted, quivering fish on ice, but at the same time I was encased in a log of wood which was on fire and smoking–the combination of the two was most unfortunate. Every now and then, with an enormous effort, I came out of this unpleasant nightmare, saying to myself, ‘I’m just Agatha lying on my bed–there are no fish here, no fishmonger’s shop, and I am not a blazing log.’ However, soon I was slithering about on a slippery sheepskin, and the fishes’ heads were around me. There was one very unpleasant fish-head, I remember–it was a large turbot, I think, with protuberant eyes and a gaping mouth, and it looked at me in a most disagreeable way. Then the door opened and into the room came a woman in nurse’s uniform, what appeared to be an ambulance attendant, and with them a kind of portable chair. I made a good many protests–I had no intention of going anywhere in a portable chair. I could perfectly well walk downstairs and get into an ambulance. I was overborne by the nurse, saying in a snappish voice: ‘Doctor’s orders. Now dear, just sit here and we will strap you in.’ I never remember anything more frightening than being conveyed down the flight of steep stairs to the hall. I was a good weight–well over eleven stone–and the ambulance attendant was an extaordinarily weakly young man. He and the nurse between them got me into the chair and began carrying me downstairs. The chair creaked and showed every sign of falling to pieces, and the ambulance man kept slipping and clutching at the stair-rail. The moment came when the chair did begin to disintegrate in the middle of the stairs. ‘Dear, dear, Nurse,’ panted the attendant, ‘I do believe it’s coming to pieces.’

  ‘Let me out of it,’ I shouted. ‘Let me walk down.’ They had to give in. They undid the strap, I took hold of the banisters, and marched valiantly down the stairs, feeling a great deal safer and happier, and only just containing myself from saying what absolute fools I thought they were. The ambulance drove off, and I arrived at the nursing home. A pretty little probationer nurse with red hair put me to bed. The sheets were cold, but not cold enough. Visions of fish and ice began to recur, and also a blazing cauldron.

  ‘Ooh!’ said the probationer nurse, looking at my leg with great interest. ‘Last time we had a leg in like that it came off on the third day.’ Fortunately, by this time I was so delirious that the words hardly registered at all–in any case at that moment I couldn’t have cared less if they had cut off both my legs and arms and even my head. But it passed through my mind as the little probationer arranged the bed-clothes and tucked me in tightly that possibly she had mistaken her vocation and that her bedside manner was not going to go down well with all the patients in a hospital. Fortunately my leg did not come off on the third day. After four or five days of high fever and delirium from bad blood posioning the whole thing began to mend. I was convinced, and still believe, that some batch of vaccine had been sent out double strength. The doctors tended to believe that it was occasioned entirely by the fact that I had not been vaccinated since I was a baby, and that I had strained my leg by driving down from London. After about a week I was more or less myself again, and interested to hear over the telephone progress of Rosalind’s measles. They had been like Pam’s–a splendid display of rash. Rosalind had much enjoyed her Auntie Punkie’s ministrations, and had called in a clear voice nearly every night saying: ‘Auntie Punkie! Would you like to sponge me down again like you did last night? I found it very very comforting.’ So in due course I came home, still with a large dressing on my left thigh, and we all had a cheerful convalescence together. Rosalind did not go back to school until two weeks after the opening, when she was quite herself again and strong and cheerful. I took another week, while my leg healed, and then I too departed, first to Italy and then to Rome, I could not stay there as long as I had planned, because I had to catch my boat for Beirut.

  IV

  This time I travelled by Lloyd Triestino boat to Beirut, spent a few days there, then once more took the Nairn Transport across the desert. It was somewhat rough along the coast from Alexandretta, and I had not been feeling too well. I had also noticed another woman on the boat. Sybil Burnett, the woman in question, told me afterwards that she had not been feeling too good in the swell either. She had looked at me and thought: ‘That is one of the most unpleasant women I have ever seen.’ At the same time I had been thinking the same about her. I had said to myself, ‘I don’t like that woman. I don’t like the hat she is wearing, and I don’t like her mushroom-coloured stockings.’

  On this mutual tide of dislike we proceeded to cross the desert together. Almost at once we became friends–and were to remain friends for many years. Sybil, usually called ‘Bauff’ Burnett, was the wife of Sir Charles Burnett, at that time Air Vice-Marshal, and was going out to join her husband. She was a woman of great originality, who said exactly what came into her head, loved travelling and foreign places, had a beautiful house in Algiers, four daughters and two sons by a previous marriage, and an inexhaustible enjoyment of life. With us there was a party of Anglo-Catholic ladies who were being shepherded out to Iraq to make tours of various Biblical places. In charge of them was an excessively fierce-looking woman, a Miss Wilbraham. She had large feet, encased in flat black shoes, and wore an enormous topee. Sybil Burnett said that she looked exactly like a beetle, and I agreed. She was the kind of woman that one cannot help wanting to contradict. Sybil Burnett contradicted her at once.

  ‘Forty women I have with me,’ said Miss Wilbraham, ‘and I really must congratulate myself. Every one of them is a sahib except one. So important, don’t you agree?’

  ‘No,’ said Sybil Burnett. ‘I think to have them all sahibs is very dull. You want a good many of the other kind.’ Miss Wilbraham paid no attention–that was her strong point: she never paid attention. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I really do congratulate myself.’ Bauff and I then put our heads together to see if we could spot the one black sheep who did not pass the test and was labelled for the trip as not being a sahib.

  With Mi
ss Wilbraham was her second-in-command and friend, Miss Amy Ferguson. Miss Ferguson was devoted to all Anglo-Catholic causes, and even more so to Miss Wilbraham, whom she regarded as a super-woman. The only thing that upset her was her own incapacity to live up to Miss Wilbraham. ‘The trouble is,’ she confided, ‘Maude is so splendidly strong. Of course, my health is good, but I must confess I do get tired sometimes. Yet I’m only sixty-five, and Maude is nearly seventy.’

  ‘A very good creature,’ said Miss Wilbraham of Amy. ‘Most able, most devoted. Unfortunately she is continually feeling fatigued–most annoying. She can’t help it, I suppose, poor thing, but there it is. Now I,’ said Miss Wilbraham, ‘never feel fatigue.’ We felt quite sure of it. We arrived in Baghdad. I met several old friends, and enjoyed myself there for four or five days, then, on receipt of a telegram from the Woolleys, went down to Ur. I had seen the Woolleys in London the preceding June, when they were home, and indeed had lent them the little mews house which I had recently bought, in Cresswell Place. It was a delightful house, or so I thought–one of four or five houses in the mews which had been built like cottages: old-fashioned country cottages. When I bought it it had stables still, with the loose-boxes and mangers all round the wall, a big harness-room also on the ground floor, and a little bedroom squeezed between them. A ladder-like stair lead to two rooms above, with a sketchy bathroom and another tiny room next to that. With the help of a biddable builder it had been transformed. The big stable downstairs had had the loose-boxes and the wood-work arranged flat against the wall, and above that I had a big frieze of a kind of wallpaper which happened to be in fashion at that moment, of a herbaceous border, so that to enter the room was like walking into a small cottage garden. The harness-room was turned into the garage and the room between the two was a maid’s room. Upstairs the bathroom was made splendid with green dolphins prancing round the walls and a green porcelain bath; and the bigger bedroom was turned into a dining-room, with a divan that turned into a bed at night. The very small room was a kitchen, and the other room a second bedroom. It was while the Woolleys were installed in this house that they had made a lovely plan for me. I was to come to Ur about a week before the end of the season, when they were packing up, and after that I would travel back with them, through Syria, on to Greece, and in Greece go to Delphi with them. I was very happy at this prospect. I arrived at Ur in the middle of a sandstorm. I had endured a sandstorm when visiting there before, but this was far worse and went on for four or five days. I had never known that sand could permeate to the extent it did. Although the windows were shut, and mosquito-wired as well, one’s bed at night was full of sand. You shook it all out on the floor, got in, and in the morning there was more sand weighing down on your face, your neck, and everywhere else. It was five days of near torture. However, we had interesting talks, everyone was friendly, and I enjoyed my time there enormously. Father Burrows was there again, and Whitburn, the architect–and this time there was Leonard Woolley’s assistant, Max Mallowan, who had been with him for five years, but who had been absent the previous year when I came down. He was a thin, dark, young man, and very quiet–he seldom spoke, but was perceptive to everything that was required of him. I noticed this time something I had not taken in before: the extraordinary silence of everyone at table. It was as though they were afraid to speak. After a day or two I began to find out why. Katharine Woolley was a temperamental woman, and she had a great facility either for putting people at their ease or for making them nervous. I noticed that she was extremely well waited on: there was always someone to offer her more milk with her coffee or butter for her toast, to pass the marmalade, and so on. Why I wondered, were they all so scared of her? One morning when she was in a bad mood I began to discover a little more.