An Autobiography. Agatha Christie

of the sweets.

      This attitude was one he adopted throughout his life. There seemed to be a natural conspiracy to slave for him. Again and again various women have said to me, ‘You know you don’t really understand your brother Monty. What he needs is sympathy.’ The truth was that we understood him only too well. It was impossible, mind you, not to feel affection for him. He recognised his own faults with the utmost frankness, and was always sure that everything was going to be different in future. He was, I believe, the only boy at Harrow who was allowed to keep white mice. His housemaster, in explaining this, said to my father, ‘You know he really seems to have such a deep love of natural history that I thought he should be allowed this privilege.’ The family opinion was that Monty had no love of natural history at all. He just wished to keep white mice!

      I think, on looking back, that Monty was a very interesting person. A slightly different arrangement of genes and he might have been a great man. He just lacked something. Proportion? Balance? Integration? I don’t know.

      The choice of a career for him settled itself. The Boer War broke out. Almost all the young men we knew volunteered–Monty, naturally, among them. (He had occasionally condescended to play with some toy soldiers I had, drawing them up in line of battle and christening their commanding officer Captain Dashwood. Later, to vary the routine, he cut off Captain Dashwood’s head for treason while I wept.) In some ways my father must have felt relief–the Army might provide a career for him–especially just at this moment when his engineering prospects were so doubtful.

      The Boer War, I suppose, was the last of what one might describe as the ‘old wars’, the wars that did not really affect one’s own country or life. They were heroic story-book affairs, fought by brave soldiers and gallant young men. They were killed, if killed, gloriously in battle. More often they came home suitably decorated with medals for gallant feats performed on the field. They were tied up with the outposts of Empire, the poems of Kipling, and with the bits of England that were pink on the map. It seems strange today to think that people–girls in particular–went around handing our white feathers to young men whom they considered were backward in doing their duty by dying for their country.

      I remember little of the outbreak of the South African War. It was not regarded as an important war–it consisted of ‘teaching Kruger a lesson’. With the usual English optimism it would be ‘all over in a few weeks’. In 1914 we heard the same phrase. ‘All over by Christmas.’ In 1940, ‘Not much point in storing the carpets with mothballs.’–this when the Admiralty took over my house–‘It won’t last over the winter.’

      So what I remember is a gay atmosphere, a song with a good tune–‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’–and cheerful young men coming up from Plymouth for a few days’ leave. I can remember a scene at home a few days before the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Regiment was to sail for South Africa. Monty had brought a friend up from Plymouth, where they were stationed at the moment. This friend, Ernest Mackintosh, always called by us for some reason Billy, was to remain a friend and far more of a brother than my real brother to me all my life. He was a young man of great gaiety and charm. Like most of the young men around, he was more or less in love with my sister. The two boys had just got their uniforms, and were intensely intrigued by puttees which they had never seen before. They wound the puttees round their necks, bandaged their heads with them and played all sorts of tricks. I have a photograph of them sitting in our conservatory with puttees round their necks. I transferred my girlish hero-worship to Billy Mackintosh. A photograph of him stood by my bed in a frame with forget-me-nots on it.

      From Paris we went to Dinard in Brittany.

      The principal thing that I remember about Dinard is that I learnt to swim there. I can remember my incredulous pride and pleasure when I found myself striking out for six spluttering strokes on my own without submerging.

      The other thing I remember is the blackberries–never were there such blackberries, great big fat juicy ones. Marie and I used to go out and pick baskets of them, and eat masses of them at the same time. The reason for this profusion was that the natives of the countryside believed them to be deadly poison. ‘Ils ne mangent pas des mûres.’ said Marie wonderingly. ‘They say to me “vous allez vous empoisonner’.’ Marie and I had no such inhibitions, and we poisoned ourselves happily every afternoon.

      It was in Dinard that I first took to theatrical life. Father and mother had a large double bedroom with an enormous bow window, practically an alcove, across which curtains were drawn. It was a natural for stage performances. Fired by a pantomime I had seen the previous Christmas, I pressed Marie into service and we gave nightly representations of various fairy stories. I chose the character I wished to be and Marie had to be everybody else.

      Looking back, I am filled with gratitude at the extraordinary kindness of my father and mother. I can imagine nothing more boring than to come up every evening after dinner and sit for half an hour watching and applauding whilst Marie and I strutted and postured in our home-improvised costumes. We went through the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and so forth. I was fondest of the part of principal boy, and borrowing my sister’s stockings in an attempt to produce tights I marched around and declaimed. The performance was, of course, always in French, as Marie could not speak English. What a good-natured girl she was. Only once did she strike, and that for a reason I simply could not fathom. She was to be Cinderella, and I insisted on her taking her hair down. One really cannot imagine Cinderella with a chignon on top of her head! But Marie, who had enacted the part of the Beast without murmuring, who had been Red Riding Hood’s grandmother–Marie, who had been good fairies, bad fairies, who had been wicked old women, who had enacted a street scene where she spat into the gutter in a most realistic fashion saying in argot ‘Et bien crache!’ which incidentally convulsed my father with mirth–Marie suddenly refused with tears to enact the part of Cinderella.

      ‘Mais, pourquoi, pas, Marie?’ I demanded. ‘It is a very good part. It is the heroine. It is Cinderella the whole play is about.’

      Impossible, said Marie, impossible that she should enact such a role. To take her hair down, to appear with her hair loose on her shoulders before Monsieur! That was the crux. To appear with her hair down before Monsieur was to Marie unthinkable, shocking. I yielded, puzzled. We concocted a kind of hood that went over Cinderella’s chignon, and all was well.

      But how extraordinary taboos are. I remember one of my friends’ children–a pleasant, amiable little girl of about four. A French nursery governess arrived to look after her. There was the usual hesitation as to whether the child would ‘get on’ with her or not, but everything appeared to be perfect happiness. She went out with her for a walk, chatted, showed Madeleine her toys. Everything seemed to be going perfectly. Only at bedtime did tears arise when Joan refused firmly to let Madeleine give her her bath. Her mother, puzzled, gave in on the first day, since she could understand that the child was perhaps not quite at home with the strangers yet. But this refusal continued for two or three days. All was peace, all was happiness, all was friendship, until bed and bath time. It was not till the fourth day that Joan, weeping bitterly and burying her head in her mother’s neck, said, ‘You don’t understand, Mummy. You don’t seem to understand. How can I show my body to a foreigner?’

      So it was with Marie. She could strut about in trousers, show quite a lot of leg in many roles, but she could not take her hair down in front of Monsieur.

      I imagine, to begin with, our theatrical performances must have been extremely funny, and my father at least got a great deal of enjoyment out of them. But how boring they must have become! Yet my parents were far too kind to tell me frankly that they couldn’t be bothered to come up every night. Occasionally they let themselves off by explaining that friends were dining and so they would not be able to come upstairs, but on the whole they stuck it nobly–and how I, at least, enjoyed performing before them.

      During the month of September that we stayed in Dinard my father was happy to find some old friends there–Martin Pirie and his wife and two sons, who were finishing off their holidays. Martin Pirie and my father had been at school together at Vevey, and close friends ever since. Martin’s wife, Lilian Pirie, I still think of as one of the most outstanding personalities I have ever known. The character