An Autobiography

  Then I would be back again in Lawn Road, my face covered with a pillow as a protection against flying glass, and on a chair by my side, my two most precious possessions: my fur coat, and my hot-water-bottle–a rubber hot-water-bottle, something at that time quite irreplaceable. Thus I was ready for all emergencies.

  Then something unexpected happened. I opened a letter and found it was a notification that the Admiralty were preparing to take over Greenway, practically at a moment’s notice.

  I went down there, and met a polite young naval lieutenant. He could give me hardly any time at all, he said. He had been unimpressed by the plight of Mrs Arbuthnot, who, having first tried to fight against the order, was now pleading for time to confer with the Ministry of Health as to where to move her nursery. The Ministry of Health cut no ice at all when it came into opposition with the Admiralty. They all moved out, and there I was left, with a household of furniture to move! The trouble was that there was nowhere to move it to. Again, no removal or storage firm anywhere had any room: every warehouse was already full to the ceiling. Finally, I got on to the Admiralty and they agreed that I should have the use of the drawing-room, in which all the furniture could be stored, and also one small room on the top floor.

  While the work of furniture-moving was in progress Hannaford, the gardener, who was a faithful old rogue, devoted to anyone he had served for long enough, took me aside and said, ‘You look now what I’ve saved for you from Her.’ I had no idea who Her might be, but I accompanied him to the clock tower above the stables. There, leading me through a kind of secret door, he showed me with great pride an enormous quantity of onions on the floor, covered with straw, and also a mass of apples.

  ‘Come to me afore she went, she did, and said, were there any onions and apples, because as she’d take ‘em with her, but I wasn’t going to let Her have them–no fear, I wasn’t. Said most of the crop had failed, and I just gave her enough as was good for her. Why, they apples were grown here, and so were those onions–she’s not going to have ‘em, take them away to the Midlands or the East Coast or wherever she’s going.’

  I was touched by Hannaford’s feudal spirit, though nothing could have been more embarrassing. I would a thousand times rather Mrs Arbuthnot had taken away all the apples and onions; now they were landed on my hands, with Hannaford wagging his tail like a dog who has retrieved something you don’t want from the river.

  We packed up cases of apples, and I sent them to relations who had children and might like them. I could not face returning to Lawn Road with two hundred odd onions. I tried to wish them on to various hospitals, but there were far too many onions for anyone to want.

  Though our Admiralty was conducting the negotiations, it would be the United States Navy which would take over Greenway. Maypool, the big house above us on the hill, was to accommodate the ratings, and the officers of the flotilla were to take over our house.

  I cannot speak too highly of the kindness of the Americans, and the care they took of our house. It was inevitable, of course, that the kitchen quarters should be more or less a shambles–they had to cook for about forty people, and they put in some ghastly great smoky stoves–but they were very careful with our mahogany doors; in fact the Commander had them all walled up in ply-wood. They appreciated the beauty of the place too. A good many of this particular flotilla came from Louisiana, and the big magnolias, and especially the magnolia grandiflora, made them feel at home.

  Ever since the war, relations of some officer or other who was at Greenway have come along to see where their son or cousin or whoever it was had been stationed. They have told me how he wrote about it and how he had described the place. I have been round the garden with them sometimes, trying to identify certain parts of it he had particularly loved, though it is not always easy because of the way things have grown up.

  By the third year of the war of all my various houses none was available to me at the moment I wanted it. Greenway was taken by the Admiralty; Wallingford was full of evacuees, and as soon as they went back to London, some other friends of ours–an elderly invalid and his wife–rented Wallingford from me, and their daughter and her child joined them there. 48 Campden Street I had sold at an excellent profit. Carlo, had shown the people over it. ‘I won’t take less than £3,500 for it,’ I had said to her. It seemed a lot to us at that time. Carlo came back rather pleased with herself. ‘I’ve made them pay an extra £500,’ she said. ‘I thought they deserved to.’

  ‘What do you mean, deserved to?’

  ‘They were rude,’ said Carlo, who had a real Scottish dislike of what she called insolence.

  ‘They said disparaging things about it in front of me, which they shouldn’t have done. They said “What hideous decorations! All this flowered wallpaper–I’ll soon change that!’ “How extraordinary some people are–fancy taking that partition wall down!’ So I thought,’ said Carlo, ‘they had better have a lesson–and I put up the price £500.’ Apparently they had paid without a qualm.

  I have a war memorial of my own at Greenway. In the library, which was their mess-room, an artist has done a fresco round the top of the walls. It depicts all the places where that flotilla went, starting at Key West, Bermuda, Nassau, Morocco, and so on, finally ending with a slightly glorified exaggeration of the woods of Greenway and the white house showing through the trees. Beyond that again is an exquisite nymph, not quite finished–a pin-up girl in the nude–which I have always supposed to represent the hopes of houris at journey’s end when the war was at last over. The Commander wrote and asked me if I would like this fresco painted out and the wall put back as it was. I hurriedly replied it would bean historic memorial, and that I was delighted to have it. Over the mantelpiece were sketched out roughly the heads of Winston Churchill, Stalin and President Roosevelt. I wish I knew the name of the artist.

  When I left Greenway I felt sure that it would be bombed and that I would never see it again, but, luckily, all my presentiments were wrong. Greenway was untouched. Fourteen lavatories were added, instead of the larder, and I had to fight the Admiralty to take them away again.

  III

  My grandson Mathew was born in Cheshire, on Sept 21, 1943, at a nursing home close by my sister’s house. Punkie, devoted to Rosalind as she always had been, was delighted that she should come back for the baby to be born. My sister was the most indefatigable woman I have ever known; a kind of human dynamo. Since her father-in-law’s death, she and James had come to live in Abney, which, as I have already mentioned, was an enormous house, with fourteen bedrooms, masses of sitting-rooms, and in my young days, when I first went to stay there, sixteen indoor servants. Now there was nobody in the house except my sister and a former kitchen-maid, since married, who came in and cooked the meals every day.

  When I stayed there, I would hear my sister moving around at about half-past five any morning. She did the whole house then–dusted it, tidied it, swept it, did the fires, cleaned brass, and polished furniture, and then started calling people with early tea. After breakfast she cleaned the baths, then finished up the bedrooms. By half-past ten there was no more housework to do, so she then rushed into the kitchen garden–which was filled with new potatoes, rows of peas, French beans, broad beans, asparagus, little carrots, and all the rest of it. A weed never dared lift its head in Punkie’s kitchen garden. The rosebeds and beds around the house never had a weed either.

  She had taken on a chow dog whose officer master had been unable to look after it, and the chow always slept in the billiard room. One morning, when she came down and looked into the billiard room, she saw the chow sitting quietly in his basket, but the main part of the floor had an enormous bomb nestling cosily in it. The night before there had been a lot of incendaries on the roof, and everybody had been up there helping to put them out. This particular bomb had come down into the billiard room, unheard among the general din, and had not exploded.

  My sister rang up the disposal people, who rushed along. After examining it, they said ev
erybody must be out of there in twenty minutes. ‘Just take anything essential.’

  ‘And what do you think I took?’ asked my sister, ‘Really one is quite mad when one gets rattled.’

  ‘Well, what did you take?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, first I took Nigel and Ronnie’s personal things’–those were her two billeted officers at that time–‘because I thought it would be so awful if anything happened to them. And I took my toothbrush and washing things, of course–and then I couldn’t think of anything else to take. I looked all over the house, but my brain went blank. So for some reason I took that great bouquet of wax flowers in the drawing-room.’

  ‘I never knew you were particularly fond of that,’ I said.

  ‘But I’m not,’ said Punkie, ‘that’s the curious part of it.’

  ‘Didn’t you take your jewellery or a fur-coat?’

  ‘Never thought of it,’ she said.

  The bomb was taken away and duly exploded, and fortunately no more incidents of that kind occurred.

  In due course I got a telegram from Punkie and rushed up there, to find Rosalind looking very proud of herself in a nursing-home and inclined to be boastful of her baby’s strength and size.

  ‘He’s a monster,’ she said with a face of delight. ‘A terrifically big baby–a real monster!’

  I looked at the monster. He was looking well and happy, with a crinkled-up face and a slight grin which was probably wind but looked like amiability.

  ‘You see?’ said Rosalind; ‘I forget what length they told me he was–but he’s a monster!’

  So there the monster was, and everybody was happy. And when Hubert and his faithful batman Barry came to see the baby, there was indeed jubilation. Hubert was as pleased as Punch, and so was Rosalind.

  It had been arranged that Rosalind would go to live in Wales after the baby was born. Hubert’s father had died in December, 1942, and his mother was moving to a smaller house nearby. Now the plans went ahead. Rosalind was to remain in Cheshire for three weeks after the birth, then a nurse, who was ‘between babies’ as she put it, would be with her to look after her and the baby while she settled in Wales. There I also would assist her, as soon as things were ready for her to go.

  Nothing, of course, was easy in wartime. Rosalind and the nurse came to London, and I put them in 47 Campden Street. Since Rosalind was still slightly weak, I used to come over from Hampstead and cook dinner for them in the evening. To begin with I did breakfast in the morning as well, but Nurse, once she was sure that her status as a hospital-nurse-who-did-no-work-in-the-house was not assailed, declared herself willing to deal with breakfast herself. Unfortunately, though, the bombs were getting worse again. Night after night, it seemed, we sat there anxiously. When the alarm went off we pushed Mathew in his carry-cot underneath a solid papier-mache table with a thick glass top, as the heaviest thing we could find to put him under. It was worrying for a young mother, and I wished badly that I had either Winterbrook House or Greenway.

  Max was now in North Africa. He had started in Egypt, but was now in Tripoli. Later he went down to the Fezzan Desert. Letters were slow, and I sometimes did not hear from him for over a month. My nephew Jack was also abroad in Iran.

  Stephen Glanville was still in London, and I was glad to have him there. Sometimes he would call for me at the Hospital and take me back to his house at Highgate to dine. We usually celebrated if one or other of us had received a food parcel.

  ‘I’ve got some butter from America–can you bring a tin of soup?’

  ‘I’ve been sent two tins of lobster, and a whole dozen eggs–brown.‘

  One day he announced real fresh herrings–from the East Coast. We arrived in the kitchen, and Stephen unwrapped his parcel. Alas–alas! O lovely herrings that might have been. There was only one place for them now–the hot water boiler. A sad evening.

  One’s friends and acquaintances had begun to vanish by this stage of the war. You could no longer keep in touch with the people you used to know; you seldom even wrote to your friends.

  Two close friends I did contrive to see were Sidney and Mary Smith. He was Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum; a prima donna by temperament, and a man of most interesting thoughts. His views on anything were unlike anybody else’s, and if I spent half an hour talking to him I went away so stimulated by the ideas he had put into my head that I left the house feeling as though I was walking on air. He always aroused violent resistance in me, so that I had to argue every point with him. He could not and did not want to agree with people. Once he disapproved of people, or disliked them, he never relented. On the other hand, if you were once really a friend of his, you were a friend of his. That was that. His wife, Mary, was an extremely clever painter, and a beautiful woman, with lovely grey hair, and a long slender neck. She had also the most devastating common sense, like the tang of a really good savoury served for dinner.

  The Smiths were extremely good to me. They lived not far away, and I was always welcome to come there after I had left the Hospital, and talk to Sidney for an hour. He would lend me books that he thought it would interest me to read, and would sit there, rather like a Grecian philosopher of old, while I sat at his feet, feeling like a humble disciple.

  He enjoyed my detective stories, though his criticisms of them were unlike anybody else’s. About something that I didn’t think good he would often say, ‘That’s the best point in that book of yours.’ Anything that I was pleased with he would say, ‘No, it’s not up to your best–you were below standard there.’

  One day Stephen Glanville attacked me. ‘I’ve got a project I’ve thought out for you.’

  ‘Oh, what’s that?’

  ‘I want you to write a detective story about ancient Egypt.’ ‘About ancient Egypt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I couldn’t’

  ‘Oh yes, you could. There is no difficulty at all. There is no reason why a detective story shouldn’t be just as easy to place in ancient Egypt as in 1943 in England.’

  I saw what he meant. People are the same in whatever century they live, or where.

  ‘And it would be so interesting,’ he said. ‘One ought to have a detective story written so that someone who enjoys reading detective stories and reading about those times can combine his pleasures.’

  Again I said I couldn’t do anything of that kind. I didn’t know enough. But Stephen was an extraordinarily persuasive man, and by the end of the evening he had almost convinced me that I could.

  ‘You’ve read a lot of Egyptology,’ he said. ‘You are not only interested in Mesopotamia.’

  It was true that one of the books I had been fondest of in the past, was Breasted’s The Dawn of Conscience, and that I had read a good deal of Egyptian history when I had written my play about Akhnaton.

  ‘All you want to do is fix on a period, or an incident, some definite setting,’ said Stephen.

  I had a terrible feeling that the die was cast.

  ‘But you would have to give me some ideas,’ I said weakly, ‘as to what time or place.’

  ‘Well,’ said Stephen, ‘there is an incident or two here that might do–’ He pointed out one or two things in one of the books he took from his shelves. Then he gave me half a dozen or so more books, drove me and the books home to Lawn Road Flats, and said: ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday. You can have a nice two days reading through these and see what strikes your imagination.’

  In the end I had marked down three possibly interesting points–none of them particularly well-known incidents, or about well-known figures, because I think that is what so often makes novels set in historic periods seem so phoney. After all, one doesn’t really know anything of what King Pepi or Queen Hatshepsut was like, and to pretend you do is a kind of arrogance. But you can place a character of your own creation in those times, and as long as you know enough of the local colour and the general feeling of the period it would be all right. One of my choices was a fourth dynasty
incident, another very much later–in the time, I think, of one of the later Rameses–and the third one, the one which I finally decided upon, was drawn from recently published letters from a Ka priest in the IIth Dynasty.

  These letters painted to perfection the picture of a living family: the father, fussy, opinionated, annoyed with his sons who did not do what he said; the sons, one obedient but obviously not bright, and the other, sharp-tempered, showy, and extravagant. The letters the father wrote to his two sons were about how he must take care of a certain middle-aged woman, obviously one of those poor relations who all through the ages live with families, to whom the heads of families are always kindly, whereas the children usually grow up disliking them because they are often sycophants and makers of mischief.

  The old man laid down rules about how they were to do so-and-so with the oil, and so-and-so with the barley. They were not to let this person or that person cheat them over the quality of certain foods. The whole family grew clearer and clearer in my mind. I added a daughter, and some details from one or two other texts–the arrival of a new wife, by whom the father was besotted. I also threw in a spoilt small boy and a greedy but shrewd grandmother.

  Excited, I started work. I had no book on hand at the moment. Ten Little Niggers had been successfully running at the St. James’ Theatre until that theatre was bombed; it then transferred to the Cambridge for some further months. I was just playing about with a new idea for a book, so this was just the moment to get started on an Egyptian detective story.

  There is no doubt that I was bullied into it by Stephen. There was no doubt, either, that if Stephen was determined that I should write a detective story set in ancient Egypt, I should have to do so. He was that kind of man.