An Autobiography by Agatha Christie
‘Do you mean take my money out of Chaflin’s?’
He was evasive. He said that you had to watch investments, that it was awkward for her, being English by birth and living in England, as the widow of an American. He said several things which, of course, were not the real explanation at all, but Grannie accepted them. Like all women of that time, you accepted completely any business advice that was given you by anyone you trusted. Mr Bailey said leave it to him, he would reinvest her money in a way that would give her nearly as much income as she had now. Reluctantly Grannie agreed; and therefore, when the crash came, her income was safe. Mr Bailey was dead by that time, but he had done his duty for the partner’s widow, without giving away his fears about the solvency of the company. Younger members of the firm had, I believe, launched out in a big way, and had seemed successful, but actually they had expanded too much, had opened too many branches all over the country, and spent too much money on salesmanship. Whatever its cause, the crash was a complete one.
It was like a recurrence of my childhood’s experience, when I had heard mother and father talking together about money difficulties, and had pranced down happily to announce to the household below stairs that we were ruined. ‘Ruin’ had seemed to me then a fine and exciting thing. It did not seem nearly so exciting now; it spelt final disaster for Archie and myself. The £100 a year I had belonging to me must of course go to support mother. No doubt Madge would help also. By selling Ashfield she might just be able to exist.
Things turned out to be not quite so bad as we thought, because Mr John Chaflin wrote from America to my mother and said how deeply grieved he was. She might count on an income of £300 a year, sent to her not from the firm, which was bankrupt, but from his own private fortune, and this would last until her death. That relieved us of the first anxiety. But when she died that money would cease. £100 a year and Ashfield was all I could count upon for the future. I wrote and told Archie that I could never marry him, that we should have to forget each other. Archie refused to listen to this. Somehow or other he was going to make money. We would get married, and he might even be able to help support my mother. He made me confident and hopeful. We got engaged again.
My mother’s eyesight became much worse, and she went to a specialist. He told her she had cataracts in both eyes, and that for various reasons it would be impossible to operate. They might not grow fast, but in time would certainly lead to blindness. Again I wrote to Archie, breaking off the engagement, saying that it was obviously not meant to be, and that I could never desert my mother if she were blind. Again he refused to concur. I was to wait and see how my mother’s eyesight got on–there might be a cure for it, an operation might be possible, and anyway she wasn’t blind now so we might as well remain engaged. We did remain engaged. Then I had a letter from Archie, saying, ‘It’s no good, I can never marry you. I am too poor. I have been trying one or two small investments with what I had, and it’s no good whatsoever, I’ve lost it. You must give me up.’ I wrote and said I would never give him up. He wrote back and said I must. We then agreed we would give each other up.
Four days later Archie managed to get leave and arrived suddenly on his motor-bicycle from Salisbury Plain. It was no good, we had got to be engaged again, we had got to be hopeful and wait–something would happen, even if we had to wait four or five years. We went through emotional storms, and in the end, once more, our engagement was on, though every month the possibility of marriage receded further into the distance. It was hopeless, I felt in my heart, but I wouldn’t recognise it. Archie thought it was hopeless too, but we still clung desperately to the belief that we could not live without each other, so we might as well remain engaged and pray for some sudden stroke of fortune.
I had by now met Archie’s family. His father had been a Judge in the Indian Civil Service, and had had a severe fall from a horse. He became rapidly ill after that–the fall had affected his brain–and had finally died in hospital in England. After some years of widowhood, Archie’s mother had remarried William Hemsley. No one could have been kinder to us or more fatherly than he always was. Archie’s mother, Peg, came from Southern Ireland, near Cork, and was one of twelve children. She had been staying with her eldest brother, who was in the Indian Medical, when she had met her first husband. She had two boys, Archie and Campbell. Archie had been head of the school at Clifton, and had passed fourth into Woolwich: he had brains, resource, audacity. Both boys were in the Army.
Archie broke the news of his engagement to her, and sang my praises in the way that sons are apt to do in describing the girl of their choice. Peg looked at him with a doubtful eye, and said in a rich Irish voice: ‘Would she now be one of those girls that’s wearing one of these newfangled Peter Pan collars?’ Rather uneasily Archie had to admit that I did wear Peter Pan collars. They were rather a feature of the moment. We girls had at last abandoned the high collars to our blouses, which were stiffened by little zigzag bones, one up each side and one at the back, so as to leave red, uncomfortable marks on the neck. A day came when people determined to be daring and achieve comfort. The Peter Pan collar was designed, presumably, from the turned-down collar worn by Peter Pan in Barrie’s play. It fitted round the bottom of the neck, was of soft material, had nothing like a bone about it, and was heaven to wear. It could hardly have been called daring. When I think of the reputation for possible fastness that we girls incurred, just by showing the four inches of neck from below the chin, it seems incredible. Looking round and seeing girls in bikinis on the beach now makes one realise how far one has gone in fifty years.
Anyway, I was one of these go-ahead girls who, in 1912, wore a Peter Pan collar.
‘And she looks lovely in it,’ said the loyal Archie.
‘Ah, she would, no doubt,’ said Peg. Whatever doubts she may have had about me on account of this, however, she greeted me with extreme kindness, and indeed what I almost thought of as gush. She professed to be so fond of me, so delighted–I was just the girl she had wanted for her boy, and so on and so on–that I didn’t believe a word of it. The real truth was that she thought her son much too young to marry. She had no particular fault to find with me–I could no doubt have been much worse. I might have been a tobacconist’s daughter (always accounted a symbol of disaster) or a young divorcee–there were some about by then–or even a chorus-girl. Anyway, she doubtless decided that with our prospects the engagement would come to nothing. So she was very sweet to me, and I was slightly embarrassed by her. Archie, true to temperament, was not particularly interested in what she thought of me or I of her. He had the happy attribute of going through life without the least interest in what anyone thought of him or his belongings: his mind was always entirely bent on what he wanted himself.
So there we were, still engaged, but no nearer getting married–in fact, rather further off. Promotion did not seem likely to come more quickly in the Flying Corps than anywhere else. Archie had been dismayed to find that he suffered a good deal from sinus trouble when flying a plane. He had a good deal of pain, but carried on. His letters were full of technical accounts of Farman biplanes and Avros: his opinions on the planes that meant more or less certain death for the pilot, and the ones that were pretty steady and ought to develop well. The names of his squadron became familiar to me: Joubert de la Ferte, Brooke-Popham, John Salmon. There was also a wild Irish cousin of Archie’s who had by now crashed so many machines that he was more or less permanently grounded.
It seems odd that I don’t remember being at all worried about Archie’s safety. Flying was dangerous–but then so was hunting, and I was used to people breaking their necks in the hunting field. It was just one of the hazards of life. There was no great insistence on safety then; the slogan ‘Safety first’ would have been considered rather ridiculous. To be concerned with this new form of locomotion, flying, was glamorous. Archie was one of the first pilots to fly–his pilot’s number was, I think, just over the hundred: 105 or 106. I was enormously proud of him.
I don’t mean that I am not fascinated by the conquering of air by man, by his adventures into space, possessed of that one gift that other forms of life do not have, the sense of adventure, the unconquerable spirit, and with it courage–not merely the courage of self-defence, which all animals have, but the courage to take your life into your hands and go out into the unknown. I am proud and excited to feel that all this has happened in my lifetime, and I would like to be able to look into the future to see the next steps: one feels they will follow quickly on one another now, with a snowballing effect.
What will it all end in? Further triumphs? Or possibly the destruction of man by his own ambition? I think not. Man will survive, though possibly only in pockets here and there. There may be some great catastrophe–but not all mankind will perish. Some primitive community, rooted in simplicity, knowing of past doings only by hearsay, will slowly build up a civilisation once more.
IX
I don’t remember in 1913 having any anticipation of war. Naval officers occasionally shook their heads and murmured ‘Der Tag’, but we had been hearing that for years, and paid no attention. It served as a suitable basis for spy stories–it wasn’t real. No nation could be so crazy as to fight another except on the N.W. frontier or some far away spot.
All the same, First Aid and Home Nursing classes were popular during 1913, and at the beginning of 1914. We all went to these, bandaged each other’s legs and arms, and even attempted to do neat head-bandaging: much more difficult. We passed our exams, and got a small printed card to prove our success. So great was female enthusiasm at this time that if any man had an accident he was in mortal terror of ministerng women closing in on him.
‘Don’t let those First Aiders come near me!’ the cry would rise. ‘Don’t touch me, girls. Don’t touch me!’
There was one extremely snuffy old man amongst the examiners. With a diabolical smile he laid traps for us. ‘Here is your patient,’ he would say, pointing to a boy scout prostrate on the ground. ‘Broken arm, fractured ankle, get busy on him.’ An eager pair, I and another, swooped upon him and trotted out our bandages. We were good at bandaging–beautiful, neat bandages we had practised–carefully reversing as we went up a leg, so that the whole thing looked deliciously taut and tidy, with a few figure-of-eights thrown in for good measure. In this case, however, we were taken aback–there was to be no neatness or beauty here: stuff was already bulkily wound round the limb. ‘Field dressings,’ said the old man. ‘Put your bandages on top of them; you’ve nothing else to replace them by, remember.’ We bandaged. It was much more difficult to bandage this way, making neat turns and twists. ‘Get on with it,’ said the old man. ‘Use the figure-of-eight: you’ll have to come to it in the end. No good trying to go by the text-books and reverse from top to bottom. You’ve got to keep the dressing on, girl, that’s the point of it. Now then, the bed is through the hospital doors there.’ We picked up our patient, having duly fixed, we hoped, the splints where splints should be fixed, and carried him to the bed.
Then we paused, slightly taken aback–neither of us had thought of opening up the bed clothes before arriving with the patient. The old man cackled with glee. ‘Ha ha! Haven’t thought of everything, have you, young ladies? Ha ha–always see your bed is ready for your patient before you start carrying him there.’ I must say that, humiliated as he made us feel, that old man taught us a great deal more than we had learnt in six lectures.
Besides our text-books, there was some practical work arranged for us. Two mornings a week we were allowed to attend the local hospital in the out-patients ward. That was intimidating, because the regular nurses, who were in a hurry and had a lot to do, despised us thoroughly. My first job was to remove the dressing from a finger, prepare warm boracic and water for it, and soak the finger for the requisite time. That was easy. The next job was an ear that needed syringing, and that I was quickly forbidden to touch. Syringing an ear was a highly technical thing, said the Sister. Nobody unskilled should attempt it.
‘Remember that. Don’t think you’re being useful by doing what you haven’t learned to do. You might do a lot of harm.’
The next thing I had to do was to remove the dressings from the leg of a small child who had pulled over a boiling kettle on itself. That was the moment when I nearly gave up nursing for good. The bandages had, as I knew, to be soaked off gently in lukewarm water, and whatever way you did this, or touched them, the pain was agonising to the child. Poor little thing, she was only about three years old. She screamed and screamed: it was horrible. I felt so upset that I thought I was going to be sick then and there. The only thing that saved me was the sardonic gleam in the eye of a staff nurse nearby. These stuck-up young fools, the eyes said, think they can come in here and know all about everything–and they can’t manage the first thing they are asked to do. Immediately I determined that I would stick it. After all, it had got to be soaked off–not only the child had to bear her pain, but I had to bear her pain also. I went on with it, still feeling sick, setting my teeth, but managing it, and being as gentle as I could. I was quite taken aback when the staff nurse said suddenly to me: ‘Not a bad job you’ve done there. Turned you up a bit at first, didn’t it? It did me once.’
Another part of our education was a day with the District Nurse. Here again, two of us were taken on one day of the week. We went round a number of small cottages, all of them with windows tightly closed, some of them smelling of soap, others of something quite different–the yearning to throw open a window was sometimes almost irresistible. The ailments seemed rather monotonous. Practically everyone had what was tersely referred to as ‘bad legs’. I was slightly hazy as to what bad legs were. The District Nurse said, ‘Blood poisoning is very common–some the result of venereal disease, of course–some ulcers–bad blood all of it.’ Anyway that was the generic name for it among the people themselves, and I understood much better in years to come when my daily help would always say, ‘My mother’s ill again.’
‘Oh, what’s the matter with her?’
‘Oh, bad legs–she’s always had bad legs.’
One day on our rounds we found one of the patients had died. The District Nurse and I laid out the body. Another experience. Not so heart-rending as scalded children, but unexpected if you had never done it before.
When, in far off Serbia, an archduke was assassinated, it seemed such a faraway incident–nothing that concerned us. After all, in the Balkans people were always being assassinated. That it should touch us here in England seemed quite incredible–and I speak here not only for myself but for almost everybody else. Swiftly, after that assassination, what seemed like incredible storm clouds appeared on the horizon. Extraordinary rumours got about, rumours of that fantastic thing–War! But of course that was only the newspapers, No civilised nations went to war. There hadn’t been any wars for years; there probably never would be again.
No, the ordinary people, everyone in fact, apart from, I suppose, a few senior Ministers and inner circles of the Foreign Office, had no conception that anythi
England was at war.
PART V
WAR
I
England was at war. It had come.
I can hardly express the difference between our feelings then and now. Now we might be horrified, perhaps surprised, but not really astonished that war should come, because we are all conscious that war does come; that it has come in the past and that, at any moment, it might come again. But in 1914 there had been no war for–how long? Fifty years–more? True, there had been the ‘Great Boer War’, and skirmishes on the North-west Frontier, but those had not been wars involving one’s own country–they had been large army exercises, as it were; the maintenance of power in far places. This was different–we were at war with Germany.
I received a wire from Archie: ‘Come Salisbury if you can hope to see you.’ The Flying Corps would be among the first to be mobilised. ‘We must go,’ I said to mother. ‘We must.’
Without more ado we set off to the railway station. We had little money in hand; the banks were shut, there was a moratorium, and no means of getting money in the town. We got into the train, I remember, but whenever ticket collectors came, though we had three or four £5 notes that mother always kept by her, they refused them: nobody would take £5 notes. All over southern England, our names and addresses were taken by infinite numbers of ticket collectors. The trains were delayed and we had to change at various stations, but in the end we reached Salisbury that evening. We went to the County Hotel there. Half an hour after our arrival Archie came. We had little time together: he could not even stay and dine. We had half an hour, no more. Then he said goodbye and left.