Agatha Christie: An autobiography – Agatha Christie
Nimrud is the modern name of the ancient city of Calah, the military capital of the Assyrians. Our Expedition House is built of mud-brick.
It sprawls out on the east side of the mound, and has a kitchen, a livingand dining-room, a small office, a workroom, a drawing office, a large store and pottery room, and a minute darkroom (we all sleep in tents).
But this year one more room has been added to the Expedition House, a room that measures about three metres square. It has a plastered floor with rush mats and a couple of gay coarse rugs. There is a picture on the wall by a young Iraqi artist, of two donkeys going through the Souk, all done in a maze of brightly coloured cubes. There is a window looking out east towards the snow-topped mountains of Kurdistan. On the outside of the door is affixed a square card on which is printed in cuneiform BEIT AGATHA (Agathas House).
So this is my house and the idea is that in it I have complete privacy and can apply myself seriously to the business of writing. As the dig proceeds there will probably be no time for this. Objects will need to be cleaned and repaired. There will be photography, labelling, cataloguing and packing. But for the first week or ten days there should be comparative leisure.
It is true that there are certain hindrances to concentration. On the roof overhead, Arab workmen are jumping about, yelling happily to each other and altering the position of insecure ladders. Dogs are barking, turkeys are gobbling. The policemans horse is clanking his chain, and the window and door refuse to stay shut, and burst open alternately. I sit at a fairly firm wooden table, and beside me is a gaily painted tin box with which Arabs travel. In it I propose to keep my typescript as it progresses.
I ought to be writing a detective story, but with the writers natural urge to write anything but what he should be writing, I long, quite unexpectedly, to write my autobiography. The urge to write ones autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later. It has suddenly overtaken me.
On second thoughts, autobiography is much too grand a word. It suggests a purposeful study of ones whole life. It implies names, dates and places in tidy chronological order. What I want is to plunge my hand into a lucky dip and come up with a handful of assorted memories.
Life seems to me to consist of three parts: the absorbing and usually enjoyable present which rushes on from minute to minute with fatal speed; the future, dim and uncertain, for which one can make any number of interesting plans, the wilder and more improbable the better, sinceas nothing will turn out as you expect it to doyou might as well have the fun of planning anyway; and thirdly, the past, the memories and realities that are the bedrock of ones present life, brought back suddenly by a scent, the shape of a hill, an old songsome triviality that makes one suddenly say I remember with a peculiar and quite unexplainable pleasure.
This is one of the compensations that age brings, and certainly a very enjoyable oneto remember.
Unfortunately you often wish not only to remember, but also to talk about what you remember. And this, you have to tell yourself repeatedly, is boring for other people. Why should they be interested in what, after all, is your life, not theirs? They do, occasionally, when young, accord to you a certain historical curiosity.
I suppose, a well-educated girl says with interest, that you remember all about the Crimea?
Rather hurt, I reply that Im not quite as old as that. I also repudiate participation in the Indian Mutiny. But I admit to recollections of the Boer WarI should do, my brother fought in it.
Agatha Christie: An autobiography – Agatha Christie 2/308 | Previous page | Next page |