An Autobiography. Agatha Christie

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      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 they had arrived home, he said to Shebani, ‘What did you think of London?’ Shebani rolled his eyes up. ‘It is wonderful, Bwana, a wonderful place. Never did I think I would see anything like it.’ My brother nodded a satisfied head. ‘And what impressed you most?’ he said. The answer came without a moment’s thought. ‘Oh, Bwana, shops full of meat. Such wonderful shops. Meat hanging in great joints all over and nobody steals them, nobody rushes and pushes their way there and snatches. No, they pass by them in an orderly fashion. How rich, how great a country must be to have all this meat hanging in shops open to the streets. Yes, indeed, England is a wonderful place. London a wonderful city.’

      Point of view. The point of view of a child. We all knew it once but we’ve travelled so far away from it that it’s difficult to get back there again. I remember seeing my own grandson Mathew when he must have been, I suppose, about two and a half. He did not know I was there. I was watching him from the top of the stairs. He walked very carefully down the stairs. It was a new achievement and he was proud of it, but still somewhat scared. He was muttering to himself, saying: ‘This is Mathew going down stairs. This is Mathew. Mathew is going down stairs. This is Mathew going down stairs.’

      I wonder if we all start life thinking of ourselves, as soon as we can think of ourselves at all, as a separate person, as it were, from the one observing. Did I say to myself once, ‘This is Agatha in her party sash going down to the dining-room?’ It is as though the body in which we have found our spirit lodged is at first strange to us. An entity, we know its name, we are on terms with it, but are not as yet identified fully with it. We are Agatha going for a walk, Mathew going down stairs. We see ourselves rather than feel ourselves.

      And then one day the next stage of life happens. Suddenly it is no longer ‘This is Mathew going down stairs.’ Suddenly it has become I am going down stairs. The achievement of ‘I’ is the first step in the progress of a personal life.

      PART II

      ‘GIRLS AND BOYS COME OUT TO PLAY’

      I

      Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has. The angle of vision is entirely different to that of the adult, everything is out of proportion.

      Children can make a shrewd appraisal of what is going on around them, and have a quite good judgment of character and people. But the how and the why of things never seems to occur to them.

      It must have been when I was about five years old that my father first became worried about financial affairs. He had been a rich man’s son and had taken it for granted that an assured income would always come in. My grandfather had set up a complicated series of trusts to come into effect when he died. There had been four trustees. One was very old and had, I think, retired from any active connection with the business, another shortly went into a mental asylum, and the other two, both men of his own age, died shortly afterwards. In one case the son took on. Whether it was sheer inefficiency or whether in the course of replacement somebody managed to convert things to his own use I do not know. At any rate the position seemed to get worse and worse.

      My father was bewildered and depressed, but not being a businesslike man he did not know what to do about it. He wrote to dear old So-and-So and dear old Somebody Else, and they wrote back, either reassuring him or laying the blame on the state of the market, depreciation and other things. A legacy from an elderly aunt came in about this time and, I should imagine, tided him over a year or two, whilst the income that was due and should have been paid to him never seemed to arrive.

      It was at about this time, too, that his health began to give way. On several occasions he suffered what were supposed to be heart attacks, a vague term that covered almost everything. The financial worry must, I think, have affected his health. The immediate remedy seemed to be that we must economise. The recognised way at that particular time was to go and live abroad for a short while. This was not, as nowadays, because of income tax–income tax was, I should imagine, about a shilling in the pound–but the cost of living was much less abroad. So the procedure was to let the house with the servants, etc., at a good rent, and go abroad to the South of France, staying at a fairly economical hotel.

      Such a migration happened, as far as I remember, when I was six years old. Ashfield was duly let–I think to Americans, who paid a good price for it–and the family prepared to set off. We were going to Pau in the South of France. I was, of course, very much excited by this prospect. We were going, so my mother told me, where we should see mountains. I asked many questions about these. Were they very, very high? Higher than the steeple of St. Marychurch? I asked with great interest. It was the highest thing I knew. Yes, mountains were much, much higher than that. They went up for hundreds of feet, thousands of feet. I retired to the garden with Tony, and munching an enormous crust of dry bread obtained from Jane in the kitchen set to work to think this out, to try to visualise mountains. My head went back, my eyes stared up at the skies. That was how mountains would look–going up, up, up, up, up until lost in the clouds. It was an awe-inspiring thought. Mother loved mountains. She had never cared for the sea, she told us. Mountains, I felt sure, were to be one of the greatest things in my life.

      One sad thing about going abroad was that it meant a parting between me and Tony. Tony was not, of course, being let with the house; he was being boarded out with a former parlourmaid called Froudie. Froudie, who was married to a carpenter and lived not far away, was quite prepared to have Tony. I kissed him all over and Tony responded by licking me frantically all over my face, neck, arms and hands.

      Looking back now, the conditions of travel abroad then seem extraordinary. There were, of course, no passports or any forms to fill in. You bought tickets, made sleeping-car reservations, and that was all that had to be done. Simplicity itself. But the Packing! (Only capital letters would explain what packing meant.) I don’t know what the luggage of the rest of the family consisted of; I do have a fair memory of what my mother took with her. There were, to begin with, three round-top trunks. The largest stood about four feet high and had two trays inside. There were also hat boxes, large square leather cases, three trunks of the type called cabin trunks and trunks of American manufacture which were often to be seen at that time in the corridors of hotels. They were large, and I should imagine excessively heavy.

      For a week at least before departure my mother was surrounded by her trunks in her bedroom. Since we were not well off by the standards of the day, we did not have a lady’s maid. My mother did the packing herself. The preliminary to it was what was called ‘sorting’. The large wardrobes and chests of drawers stood open while my mother sorted amongst such things as artificial flowers, and an array of odds and ends called ‘my ribbons’ and ‘my jewellery’. All these apparently required hours of sorting before they were packed СКАЧАТЬ