During the Second World War, when I was working in London, I wrote an account of our time in Syria. I called it Come, Tell Me How You Live, and I get pleasure in reading it over from time to time, and remembering our days in Syria. One year on a dig is very like another–the same sort of things happen–so repetition would not avail much. They were happy years, we enjoyed ourselves immensely, and had a great measure of success in our digging.
Those years, between 1930 and 1938, were particularly satisfying because they were so free of outside shadows. As the pressure of work, and especially success in work, piles up, one tends to have less and less leisure; But these were carefree years still, filled with a good deal of work, yes, but not as yet all-absorbing. I wrote detective stories, Max wrote archaeological books, reports and articles. We were busy but we were not under intense strain.
Since it was difficult for Max to get down to Devonshire as much as he wanted to, we spent Rosalind’s holidays there, but lived most of the time in London, moving to one or other of my houses, trying to decide which one we liked the best. Carlo and Mary had searched for a suitable house while we were out in Syria one year, and had a listful for me. They said I must certainly go and look at No. 48 Sheffield Terrace. When I saw it I wanted to live there as badly as I had ever wanted to live in any house. It was perfect, except perhaps for the fact that it had a basement. It had not many rooms, but they were all big and well-proportioned. It was just what we needed. As one went in there was a large dining-room on the right. On the left was the drawing-room. On the half-landing there was a bathroom and lavatory, and on the first floor, to the right, over the dining-room, the same-sized room for Max’s library–plenty of space for large tables to take the papers and bits of pottery. On the left, over the drawing-room, was a large double bedroom for us. On the floor above were two more big rooms and a small room between them. The small room was to be Rosalind’s; the big room over Max’s study was to be a double spare-room when we wanted it; and the left-hand room, I declared, I was going to have for my own workroom and sitting-room. Everybody was surprised at this, since I had never thought of having such a thing before, but they all agreed that it was quite time for poor old Missus to have a room of her own.
I wanted somewhere where I would not be disturbed. There would not be a telephone in the room. I was going to have a grand piano; large, firm table; a comfortable sofa or divan; a hard upright chair for typing; and one armchair to recline in, and there was to be nothing else. I bought myself a Steinway grand, and I enjoyed ‘my room’ enormously. Nobody was allowed to use the Hoover on that floor while I was in the house, and short of the house being on fire, I was not to be approached. For once, I had a place of my own, and I continued to enjoy it for the five or six years until the house was bombed in the war. I don’t know why I never had anything of the kind again. I suppose I got used to using the dining-room table or the corner of the washstand once more.
48 Sheffield Terrace was a happy house; I felt it the moment I came into it. I think if one has been brought up with large rooms, such as we had at Ashfield, one misses that feeling of space very much. I had lived in several charming small houses–both the Campden Street houses and the little Mews house–but they were never quite right. It is not a question of grandeur; you can have a very smart, tiny flat, or you can rent a large, shabby, country vicarage, rapidly falling to pieces, for much less money. It is the feeling of space round you–of being able to deploy yourself.
Indeed, if you have any cleaning to do yourself it is much easier to clean a large room than to get round all the corners and bits of furniture in a small room, where one’s behind is always getting terribly in the way.
Max indulged himself by personally superintending the building of a new chimney in his library. He had dealt with so many fire-places and chimneys in burnt-brick in the Middle East that he rather fancied himself at the job. The builder looked doubtfully at the plans. You never can tell with chimneys or flues, he said, according to all the rules they ought to go right, but they didn’t.
‘And this one of yours here isn’t going to go right, I can tell you that,’ he said to Max.
‘You build it exactly as I say,’ said Max, ‘and you’ll see.’
Much to Mr Withers’ sorrow, he did see. Max’s chimney never smoked once. It had a great Assyrian brick with cuneiform writing on it inset over the mantelpiece, and the room was therefore clearly labelled as an archaeologist’s private den.
Only one thing disturbed me after moving in to Sheffield Terrace, and that was a pervasive smell in our bedroom. Max couldn’t smell it and Bessie thought I was imagining things, but I said firmly that I wasn’t: I smelt gas. There was no gas in the house, Max pointed out. There was no gas laid on.
‘I can’t help it,’ I said, ‘I smell gas.’
I had the builders in, and the gas-men, and they all lay down on their stomachs and sniffed under the bed and told me I was imagining it.
‘Of course, what it may turn out to be, if there is anything–though I can’t smell it, lady,’ said the gas-man, ‘is a dead mouse, or maybe it’s a dead rat. I don’t think it’s a rat, though, because I’d smell if it were–but it might be a mouse. A very small mouse.’
‘It might, I suppose,’ I said. ‘If so, it is a very dead small mouse, at any rate.’
‘We’ll have the boards up.’
So they had the boards up, but they couldn’t find any dead mouse, large or small. Yet, whether gas or dead mouse, something continued to smell.
I went on sending for builders, gas people, plumbers, and everybody I could think of. They looked at me with loathing in the end. Everyone got fed up with me–Max, Rosalind, Carlo–they all said it was ‘Mother’s imagination’. But Mother knew gas when she smelt it, and she continued to say so. Finally, after I had driven everyone nearly insane, I was vindicated. There was an obsolete gas pipe under the floor of my bedroom, and gas was continuing to escape from it. Whose meter it was being charged on, nobody knew–there was no gas meter in our house–but there was a disused gas pipe still connected and gas was quietly seeping away. I was so conceited about having been proved right on this point that I was unbearable to live with for some time–and more than ever, I may say, confident in the prowess of my nose.
Before the acquisition of Sheffield Terrace, Max and I had bought a house in the country. We wanted a small house or cottage, because travelling to and from Ashfield for weekends was impracticable. If we could have a country cottage not too far from London, it would make all the difference.
Max’s two favourite parts of England were near Stockbridge, where he had stayed as a boy, or else near Oxford. His time at Oxford had been one of the happiest times of his life. He knew all the country round there, and he loved the Thames. So we also went up and down the Thames in our search. We looked at Goring, Wallingford, Pangbourne. Houses were difficult on the Thames, because they were either hideous late Victorian or else the kind of cottage that was completely submerged during the winter.
In the end I saw an advertisement in The Times. It was about a week before we were going abroad to Syria one autumn.
‘Look, Max,’ I said. ‘There’s a house advertised in Wallingford. You know how much we liked Wallingford? Now, if this should be one of those houses on the river. There was nothing to let when we were there.’ We rang up the agent, and dashed down.
It was a delightful, small, Queen Anne house, rather close to the road, but behind it was a garden with a walled kitchen section–bigger than we wanted–and below that again what Max has always thought of as ideal: meadows sweeping right down to the river. It was a pretty bit of river, about a mile out of Wallingford. The house had five bedrooms, three sitting-rooms, and a remarkably nice kitchen. Looking out of the drawing-room window, through the pouring rain, we saw a particularly fine cedar tree, a cedar of Lebanon. It was actually in the field, but the field came right up to a ha-ha near the house, and I thought to myself that we would have a lawn beyond the ha-ha, and wo
uld push the meadows further down, so that the cedar tree would be in the middle of the lawn, and on hot days in summer we could have tea under it.
We hadn’t much time to dilly-dally. The house was remarkably cheap, for sale freehold, and we made up our minds then and there. We rang up the agent, signed things, spoke to lawyers and surveyors, and, subject to the usual surveyor’s approval, bought the house.
Unfortunately we were not able to see it again for about nine months. We left for Syria, and spent the whole time there wondering whether we had been terribly foolish. We had meant to buy a tiny cottage, instead we had bought this Queen Anne house with gracious windows and good proportions. But Wallingford was a nice place. It had a poor railway service, and was therefore not at all the sort of place people came to, either from Oxford or from London. ‘I think,’ said Max, ‘we are going to be very happy there.’
And sure enough we have been very happy there, for nearly thirty-five years now, I suppose. Max’s library has been enlarged to twice its length, and he looks right down the length of it to the river. Winterbrook House, Wallingford, is Max’s house, and always has been. Ashfield was my house, and I think Rosalind’s.
So our lives went on. Max with his archaeological work and his enthusiasm for it, and I with my writing, which was now becoming more professional and therefore a great deal less enthusiastic.
It had been exciting, to begin with, to be writing books–partly because, as I did not feel I was a real author, it was each time astonishing that I should be able to write books that were actually published. Now I wrote books as a matter of course. It was my business to do so. People would not only publish them–they would urge me to get on with writing them. But the eternal longing to do something that is not my proper job, was sure to unsettle me; in fact it would be a dull life if it didn’t.
What I wanted to do now was to write something other than a detective story. So, with a rather guilty feeling, I enjoyed myself writing a straight novel called Giant’s Bread. It was mainly about music, and betrayed here and there that I knew little about the subject from the technical point of view. It was well reviewed and sold reasonably for what was thought to be a ‘first novel’. I used the name of Mary Westmacott, and nobody knew that it was written by me. I managed to keep that fact a secret for fifteen years.
I wrote another book under the same pseudonym a year or two later, called Unfinished Portrait. Only one person guessed my secret: Nan Watts–now Nan Kon. Nan had a very retentive memory, and some phrase I had used about some children, and a poem in the first book, attracted her attention. Immediately she said to herself, ‘Agatha wrote that, I am certain of it.’
One day she nudged me in the ribs and said in a slightly affected voice: ‘I read a book I liked very much the other day; now let me see–what was it? Dwarf’s Blood–that’s it–Dwarf’s Blood!’ Then she winked at me in the most wicked manner. When I got her home, I said: ‘Now–how did you guess about Giant’s Bread?‘
‘Of course I knew it was you–I know the way you talk,’ said Nan.
I wrote songs from time to time, mostly ballads–but I had no idea that I was going to have the stupendous luck to step straight into an entirely different department of writing, and to do it, too, at an age when fresh adventures are not so easily undertaken.
I think what started me off was annoyance over people adapting my books for the stage in a way I disliked. Although I had written the play Black Coffee, I had never thought seriously of play-writing–I had enjoyed writing Akhnaton, but had never believed that it would ever be produced. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t like the way other people had adapted my books, I should have a shot at adapting them myself It seemed to me that the adaptations of my books to the stage failed mainly because they stuck far too closely to the original book. A detective story is particularly unlike a play, and so is far more difficult to adapt than an ordinary book. It has such an intricate plot, and usually so many characters and false clues, that the thing is bound to become confusing and overladen. What was wanted was simplification.
I had written the book Ten Little Niggers because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it. It was clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation; in fact it had to have an epilogue in order to explain it. It was well received and reviewed, but the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been.
Presently I went one step farther. I thought to myself it would be exciting to see if I could make it into a play. At first sight that seemed impossible, because no one would be left to tell the tale, so I would have to alter it to a certain extent. It seemed to me that I could make a perfectly good play of it by one modification of the original story. I must make two of the characters innocent, to be reunited at the end and come safe out of the ordeal. This would not be contrary to the spirit of the original nursery rhyme, since there is one version of ‘Ten Little Nigger Boys’ which ends: ‘He got married and then there were none’.
I wrote the play. It did not get much encouragement. ‘Impossible to produce’ was the verdict. Charles Cochran, however, took an enormous fancy to it. He did his utmost to get it produced, but unfortunately could not persuade his backers to agree with him. They said all the usual things–that it was unproduceable and unplayable, people would only laugh at it, there would be no tension. Cochran said firmly that he disagreed with them–but there it was.
‘I hope you have better luck some time with it,’ he said, ‘because I would like to see that play on.’
In due course I got my chance. The person who was keen on it was Bertie Mayer, who had originally put on Alibi with Charles Laughton. Irene Henschell produced the play, and did so remarkably well, I thought. I was interested to see her methods of production, because they were so different from Gerald Du Maurier’s. To begin with, she appeared to my inexperienced eye to be fumbling, as though unsure of herself, but as I saw her technique develop I realised how sound it was. At first she, as it were, felt her way about the stage, seeing the thing, not hearing it; seeing the movements and the lighting, how the whole thing would look. Then, almost as an afterthought, she concentrated on the actual script. It was effective, and very impressive. The tension built up well, and her lighting, with three baby spots, of one scene when they are all sitting with candles burning as the lights have failed, worked wonderfully well.
With the play also well acted, you could feel the tension growing up, the fear and distrust that rises between one person and another; and the deaths were so contrived that never, when I have seen it, has there been any suggestion of laughter or of the whole thing being too ridiculously thrillerish. I don’t say it is the play or book of mine I like best, or even that I think it is my best, but I do think in some ways that it is a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else I have written. I suppose it was Ten Little Niggers that set me on the path of being a playwright as well as a writer of books. It was then I decided that in future no one was going to adapt my books except myself: I would choose what books should be adapted, and only those books that were suitable for adapting.
The next one that I tried my hand on, though several years later, was The Hollow. It came to me suddenly one day that The Hollow would make a good play. I said so to Rosalind, who has had the valuable role in life of eternally trying to discourage me without success.
‘Making a play of The Hollow, Mother!’ said Rosalind in horror. ‘It’s a good book, and I like it, but you can’t possibly make it into a play.’ ‘Yes, I can,’ I said, stimulated by opposition.
‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Rosalind, sighing.
Anyway, I enjoyed myself scribbling down ideas for The Hollow. It was, of course, in some ways rather more of a novel than a detective story. The Hollow was a
book I always thought I had ruined by the introduction of Poirot. I had got used to having Poirot in my books, and so naturally he had come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.
The Hollow got written, in spite of opposition from others beside Rosalind. Peter Saunders, who has produced so many of my plays since then, was the man who liked it.
When The Hollow proved a success, I had the bit between my teeth. Of course I knew that writing books was my steady, solid profession. I could go on inventing my plots and writing my books until I went gaga. I never felt any desperation as to whether I could think of one more book to write.
There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off. Then you go out, you interrupt someone who is busy–Max usually, because he is so good-natured–and you say: ‘It’s awful, Max, do you know I have quite forgotten how to write–I simply can’t do it any more! I shall never write another book.’
‘Oh yes, you will,’ Max would say consolingly. He used to say it with some anxiety at first; now his eyes stray back again to his work while he talks soothingly.
‘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.