LITMIR.BIZ

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when, trying to impress her, the pharmacist took from his pocket a lump of stuff and asked her whether she knew what it was: ‘It’s curare,’ he said. ‘Know about curare? Interesting stuff, very interesting. Taken by the mouth, it does you no harm at all; enters the bloodstream, it paralyses and kills you … do you know why I keep it in my pocket?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ It seemed to her an extremely foolish thing to do. ‘Well, you know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it makes me feel powerful.’ The pharmacist was to reappear in Agatha’s life: as Mr Zachariah Osborne, in The Pale Horse.

      The Red Cross record card showed that during the war Agatha worked a total of 3,400 hours, unpaid from October 1914 to December 1916 and, thereafter, as a dispenser, at an annual rate of £16 until the end of her service in September 1918. Her unofficial record was a sixty-page hand-made volume, illustrated with coloured drawings, bound in card and tied with pink and gold ribbon, which she and Eileen Morris devised between them. The contents of What We Did in the Great War included an opera, The Young Students, by ‘AMC’, complete with score, an ‘Agony Column’, ‘Hints on Etiquette’ (‘Sister: “never omit to say ‘Doctor’ at least once after every third word …”’), and a parody, ‘The Chemist and The Pharmacists,’ by ‘AC’, after Lewis Carroll:

      … The centrifugalizing force

      Was whirling fast on high,

      No leucocytes were there, because

      No leucocytes were nigh;

      But many epithelial cells

      Were passed up high and dry.

      The Chemist and the Pharmacist

      Were writing their reports,

      They wept like anything to see

      Such quantities of noughts –

      (Correct to seven places too!)

      Percentages of sorts.…

      Archie’s preoccupations were more serious; one of the letters he sent in 1917 gives some indication of his duties:

      My darling Angel

      All is activity for the moment. I was glued to a telephone till 11pm last night and my temper is not so sweet today in consequence. I sentenced a man to 28 days of what the Daily Mirror used to call ‘crucifixion’ i.e. being tied to a tree and undergoing other punishments and fatigues because he refused to work, went absent without leave and pretended to be sick when he was not.…

      At the beginning of December Archie was mentioned in despatches for the fourth time. On New Year’s Day 1918 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and became a Companion of St Michael and St George. There was one more leave, in June, and then, to Agatha’s joy, in September he was posted home, as a Colonel, to the Air Ministry. She left the hospital at once, joined him at an hotel and began to look round for a furnished flat.

      Archie was just twenty-nine and Agatha twenty-eight. They had both grown used to tiredness, pain and grief, seen suffering and death, and were in different ways more mature. But for most of those crucial four years they had been apart and, while they had learnt how to sustain each other in difficult and precarious times, they were used to meeting and parting rather than being together for weeks at a stretch. The beginning of Agatha’s married life – for when she left Ashfield she felt it had really begun – was not what she would have envisaged five or six years before. The country was still at war, and they and their microscopic flat at 5 Northwick Terrace, in St John’s Wood, were looked after not by a maid but by Archie’s batman, Bartlett. Archie worked long hours at the Air Ministry and Agatha, missing the hospital and her friends, filled in her days with a course of shorthand, where she struggled, and book-keeping, which she enjoyed and did well. It was as she left the secretarial school that she saw one of the most curious sights she had ever seen:

      Everywhere there were women dancing in the street … laughing, shouting, shuffling, leaping even, in a sort of wild orgy of pleasure, an almost brutal enjoyment. It was frightening. One felt perhaps that if there had been any Germans around the women would have torn them to pieces. Some of them I suppose were drunk, but all of them looked it. They reeled, they lurched, shouted.… I got home to find Archie was home from his Air Ministry. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, in his usual calm and unemotional fashion.

      It was November 11th and the Armistice had been declared. The Great War was over.

       7 ‘… menace and murder and sudden death …’

      It was in the middle of the War that Agatha had first tried her hand at a detective story. In retrospect an important moment, it did not seem significant at the time. For one thing, writing crime fiction was far from being her main preoccupation. The War, Archie’s survival, her mother’s and grandmother’s failing health, the difficulty of keeping up Ashfield and the demands of the dispensary were such serious matters that, by comparison, writing a book was no more than a trivial pastime. Writing was in any case neither a new nor a surprising hobby for Agatha. Clara and Madge had written stories; so had she. For a long time she had been interested in the mysterious and sinister, as she showed in one of her earliest poems, ‘Down in the Wood’, of which the second verse ran:

      Bare brown branches against a mad moon

      (And Something that stirs in the wood),

      Leaves that rustle and rise from the dead,

      Branches that beckon and leer in the light

      (And Something that walks in the wood).

      Skirling and whistling, the leaves are alive!

      Driven by Death in a devilish dance!

      Shrieking and swaying of terrified trees,

      A wind that goes sobbing and shivering by …

       And Fear – naked Fear passes out of the wood!

      The dispensary, moreover, encouraged thoughts of murder and malpractice, inspiring the poem ‘In a Dispensary’, published in 1924 in The Road of Dreams, (but not reprinted). The potions on its shelves were enough to cause a shiver:

      From the Borgias’ time to the present day,

       their power has been proved and tried!

      Monkshood blue, called Aconite,

       and the deadly Cyanide!

      Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain

       and courage and vigour new!

      Here is menace and murder and sudden death

       in these phials of green and blue!

      There was more than the contents of the dispensary – and the unnerving habits of the local pharmacist – to incline Agatha to write a murder story. The Victorian and Edwardian press had always relished a mystery and every opportunity was taken to place before the reading public the details of sensational murder trials, with ingenious solutions propounded by special correspondents and lofty summings-up from moralising editors. These were the items Auntie-Grannie liked Agatha to read to her. Agatha herself may not have enjoyed these reports but she was certainly fascinated by problems and puzzles, by aberrant behaviour and the reasons why people departed from normal routine. Perhaps, too, she liked to learn how people kept their secrets hidden, for she herself was secretive. As a child she had been teased about her frosty proclamation, ‘I don’t care for parting with information,’ when asked why she had not reported that a parlourmaid had been seen tasting soup from the tureen before her parents came into dinner. It was the sort of phrase Agatha must have heard from some adult and, although she admitted it was pompous, she was proud of the fact that it stuck. Unlike Madge, who could and would make a good story of anything, Agatha resembled Frederick, who, when asked what he had done with his day, would say ‘Oh, nothing.’ She kept her own counsel

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