An Autobiography. Agatha Christie
Everything cost eightpence a pound. I spent about fourpence a week–one pennyworth of four different kinds. Then there was a penny to be donated for the Waifs and Strays (money-box on the hall table); from September onwards a few pence were salted away to save up for such Christmas presents as would be bought, not made. The rest went towards the furnishing and equipping of my dolls’ house.
I can still remember the enchantment of the things there were to buy. Food, for instance. Little cardboard platters of roast chicken, eggs and bacon, a wedding cake, a leg of lamb, apples and oranges, fish, trifle, plum pudding. There were plate baskets with knives, forks and spoons. There were tiny sets of glasses. Then there was the furniture proper. My drawing-room had a suite of blue satin chairs, to which I added by degrees a sofa and a rather grand gilded armchair. There were dressing-tables with mirrors, round polished dinner-tables, and a hideous orange brocade dining-room suite. There were lamps and epergnes and bowls of flowers. Then there were all the household implements, brushes and dustpans, brooms and pails and kitchen saucepans.
Soon my dolls’ house looked more like a furniture storehouse. Could I–could I, possibly–have another dolls’ house?
Mother did not think that any little girl ought to have two dolls’ houses. But why not, she suggested, inspired, use a cupboard. So I acquired a cupboard, and it was a wild success. A big room at the top of the house, originally built on by my father to provide two extra bedrooms, was so much enjoyed in its bare state by my sister and brother as a playroom that that is what it remained. The walls were more or less lined with books and cupboards, the centre conveniently free and empty. I was allotted a cupboard with four shelves, part of a built-in fitment against the wall. My mother found various nice pieces of wall-paper which could be pasted on the shelves as carpets. The original dolls’ house stood on top of the cupboard, so that I now had a six-storied house.
My house, of course, needed a family to live in it. I acquired a father and mother, two children and a maid, the kind of doll that has a china head and bust and malleable sawdust limbs. Mother sewed some clothes on them, from odd bits of stuff she had. She even fixed with glue a small black beard and moustache to the face of the father. Father, mother, two children and a maid. It was perfect. I don’t remember their having any particular personalities–they never became people to me, they existed only to occupy the house. But it really looked right when you sat the family round the dinner table. Plates, glasses, roast chicken, and a rather peculiar pink pudding were served at the first meal.
An additional enjoyment was housemoving. A stout cardboard box was the furniture van. The furniture was loaded into it, it was drawn round the room by a string several times, and then ‘arrived at the new house’. (This happened at least once a week.)
I can see quite plainly now that I have continued to play houses ever since. I have gone over innumerable houses, bought houses, exchanged them for other houses, furnished houses, decorated houses, made structural alterations to houses. Houses! God bless houses!
But to go back to memories. What odd things really, when one collects them all together, one does remember out of one’s life. One remembers happy occasions, one remembers–very vividly, I think–fear. Oddly enough pain and unhappiness are hard to recapture. I do not mean exactly that I do not remember them–I can, but without feeling them. Where they are concerned I am in the first stage. I say, ‘There was Agatha being terribly unhappy. There was Agatha having toothache.’ But I don’t feel the unhappiness or the toothache. On the other hand, one day the sudden smell of lime trees brings the past back, and suddenly I remember a day spent near the lime trees, the pleasure with which I threw myself down on the ground, the smell of hot grass, and the suddenly lovely feeling of summer; a cedar tree nearby and the river beyond…The feeling of being at one with life. It comes back in that moment. Not only a remembered thing of the mind but the feeling itself as well.
I remember vividly a field of buttercups. I must have been under five, since I walked there with Nursie. It was when we were at Ealing, staying with Auntie-Grannie. We went up a hill, past St. Stephen’s Church. It was then nothing but fields, and we came to one special field, crammed with golden buttercups. We went to it–that I do know–quite often. I don’t know if my memory of it is of the first time we went there or a later occasion, but the loveliness of it I do remember and feel. It seems to me that for many years now I have never seen a field of buttercups. I have seen a few buttercups in a field, but that is all. A great field full of golden buttercups in early summer is something indeed. I had it then, I have it with me now.
What has one enjoyed most in life? I daresay it varies with different people. For my own part, remembering and reflecting, it seems that it is almost always the quiet moments of everyday life. Those are the times, certainly, when I have been happiest. Adorning Nursie’s old grey head with blue bows, playing with Tony, making a parting with a comb down his broad back, galloping on what I feel to be real horses across the river my fancy has set in the garden. Following my hoop through the stations of the Tubular Railway. Happy games with my mother. My mother, later, reading Dickens to me, gradually getting sleepy, her spectacles half falling off her nose and her head dropping forward, and myself saying in an agonised voice. ‘Mother, you’re going to sleep’, to which my mother with great dignity replies, ‘Nothing of the kind, darling. I am not in the least sleepy!’ A few minutes later she would be asleep. I remember feeling how ridiculous she looked with her spectacles slipping off her nose and how much I loved her at that moment.
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realise just how much you love them! Anyone can admire somebody for being handsome or amusing or charming, but that bubble is soon pricked when a trace of ridicule comes in. I should give as my advice to any girl about to get married: ‘Well now, just imagine he had a terrible cold in his head, speaking through his nose all full of b’s and d’s, sneezing, eyes watering. What would you feel about him?’ It’s a good test, really. What one needs to feel for a husband, I think, is the love that is tenderness, that comprises affection, that will take colds in the head and little mannerisms all in its stride. Passion one can take for granted.
But marriage means more than a lover–I take an old-fashioned view that respect is necessary. Respect–which is not to be confused with admiration. To feel admiration for a man all through one’s married life would, I think, be excessively tedious. You would get, as it were, a mental crick in the neck. But respect is a thing that you don’t have to think about, that you know thankfully is there. As the old Irish woman said of her husband, ‘Himself is a good head to me’. That, I think, is what a woman needs. She wants to feel that in her mate there is integrity, that she can depend on him and respect his judgment, and that when there is a difficult decision to be made it can safely lie in his hands.
It is curious to look back over life, over all the varying incidents and scenes–such a multitude of odds and ends. Out of them all what has mattered? What lies behind the selection that memory has made? What makes us choose the things that we have remembered? It is as though one went to a great trunk full of junk in an attic and plunged one’s hands into it and said, ‘I will have this–and this–and this.’
Ask three or four different people what they remember, say of a journey abroad and you will be surprised at the different answers you get. I remember a boy of fifteen, a son of friends of ours, who was taken to Paris as part of his spring holidays. When he returned, some fatuous friend of the family said, with the usual jovial accent inflicted on the young, ‘Well, my boy, and what impressed you most in Paris? What do you remember about it?’ He replied immediately: ‘The chimneys. The chimneys there are quite different from chimneys on houses in England.’
From his point of view it was a perfectly sensible remark. Some years later he started studying as an artist. It was, therefore, a visual detail that really impressed him, that made Paris different from London.
So, too, another memory. This was when my brother was invalided home from East Africa. He brought with him a native servant, Shebani. Anxious to show this simple African the glories of London, my brother hired a car and, sitting in it with Shebani, drove all round London. He displayed to him Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Guildhall, Hyde Park and so on. Finally, when