Amanda Adams (18 page)

Boyd Hawes concluded her thoughts on the decision to be a wife and mother by saying that a woman’s “happiness in accepting this interruption will depend largely on her having anticipated it as part of the Good Life.”
³¹
An “interruption” it may have been, but Harriet Boyd Hawes embraced as much living as any person, man or woman, ever could. Never a second wasted, her life was a good one. She died in March
1945
, recipient of the first honorary doctorate for her work at Gournia, awarded by her alma mater Smith College, and hero to the multitude of women archaeologists who would follow in her rumbling wake.

1890 -1976

AGATHA CHRISTIE

ARCHA EOLOGY’S
Big Detective

“‘A
ll by yourself?’
said Carlo, slightly doubtful. ‘All by yourself to the Middle East? You don’t know “‘ anything about it.’

“‘Oh, that will be all right,’ I said. ‘After all, one must do things by oneself sometime, mustn’t one?’”
¹

Agatha Christie, the world-famous mystery writer, then thought quietly to herself: “It’s now or never. Either I cling to everything that’s safe and that I know, or else I develop initiative, do things own my own.”
²
She chose the latter path and booked a train ticket on the Orient Express. It was a journey that would lead her to two new loves: her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan, and archaeology.

This new chapter in Christie’s life began when she was forty years old. The woman with a detective’s heart brushed herself off after the loss of her mother, an unwanted divorce, and a spell of illness that she believed was the precursor to a nervous breakdown and an episode of amnesia. Always a dreamer, and always on a path closely wrapped around family, Christie broke free from an environment of long-standing familiarity to try something new. Her career as an internationally acclaimed mystery writer was still in its early stages. She was writing her first books, and they were selling well, but it was only when she lost nearly everything dear to her that she realized her desire for adventure and was able to reach her full potential.

Her autobiography begins in the field. She anchored the first page of her six-hundred-page meandering life story in the place she loved best: a canvas tent beside the excavation trenches. With a handmade sign written in cuneiform posted to the door, her tent was called
BEIT
AGATHA
(Agatha’s House) and was located at an archaeological site in Nimrud, Iraq. Only ten feet square, the floor was covered with rush mats and coarse rugs. From the window she could see the snowy mountains of Kurdistan. Tucked into her private abode, she could focus on her writing. But as she described it, once “the dig proceeds there will probably be no time for this. Objects will need to be cleaned and repaired. There will be photography, labeling, cataloguing and packing” of artifacts.
³
For the famed author with more books sold and translated than any other author in the world (except the Bible), archaeology came first. She loved it.

Christie lived and worked in the East, particularly in Syria and Iraq, between
1928
and
1958
. Thirty years spent in the field! Captivated by the natural similarities between a detective’s work and archaeology, she wrote three crime stories infused with the flavor of her travels and archaeological prowess:
Murder on the
Orient Express, Death on the Nile,
and
Appointment with Death.
Another autobiographical work,
Come, Tell Me How You Live,
chronicles three seasons spent excavating a number of tells in Syria. The tagline hollers:
BOARD THE ORIENT EXPRESS FOR
SYRIA
—
AND ENCHANTED MEMORIES OF EXOTIC LANDS
! Light, humorous, and self-deprecating, the book is also a testament to Agatha’s real understanding of the archaeological process and her own contributions to it.

Christie discovered archaeology through her own initiative— she boarded the train to visit acquaintances at the site of Ur—but it was romantic love that brought her much closer to it. While at Ur, she was introduced to the young Max Mallowan, fourteen years her junior and an assistant to the site’s lead archaeologist. The two quickly became friends and were sent off together, he as her appointed guide, to see the sights. Against a backdrop of desert sandstorms, flashfloods, crushed potsherds, and late trains the duo enjoyed an unusual and unsuspected courtship.

“I AM TODAY
the same person as that solemn little girl with pale flaxen sausage-curls” wrote Christie in her seventies.
⁴
That little girl was born September
15
,
1890
, in the seaside town of Torquay, off the Devon coast in England. The sausage curls eventually grew out into hair so long she could sit on it, and the little girl became a bit less “solemn” as she matured. Christie’s childhood days set the stage for a life filled by wild imagination and the propensity to get lost in fictional worlds. It started with invisible kittens and horses and hula hoops cast as swirling sea dragons in the early years and was later followed up with murderers, victims, scheming plots, and a legendary Belgian detective by the name of Hercule Poirot.

Christie had by her own account been privileged with the greatest streak of luck life can afford: a happy childhood. Her father, Frederick Alvah Miller, was an American; born into money, he was “lazy” because he didn’t work but loved because he was so unconditionally pleasant and full of easy humor. Her mother, Clarissa Margaret Boehme, was a trickier creature, whom Christie described as having an “enigmatic and arresting personality— more forceful than my father—startlingly original in her ideas, shy and miserable about herself, and at the bottom, I think, a natural melancholy.”
⁵
Together, though, the two had a happy marriage, something that Christie recognized even as a child, and ultimately something she would want very much as a woman.

There were two other Miller children. Christie’s brother, Monty, was a livewire, capricious and difficult, unable to reach any social milestones of success (in his day that was marriage and money), but he served in the military abroad, settled in Uganda, had a thunderously good time all the way through, and died of a bad leg when he was middle-aged. Christie’s sister, Madge, was beautiful and had sparkling conversation. It was always Madge who wrote the best stories, did well in school, and had every boy in town smitten with her. By contrast, Christie was secretive and shy.

Both her siblings were sent away for an education, while Christie was left to roam about Ashfield, the family home, raised by her mother, gossipy grandmothers, nurses, and a team of cooks and servants who coddled her. As the youngest, Christie was given free reign because her mother had concluded that “the best way to bring up girls was to let them run wild as much as possible; to give them good food, fresh air, and not to force their minds in anyway.”
⁶
This thinking only applied to girls. Boys needed a real education. But Mrs. Miller didn’t think that girls or boys should learn how to read until they were eight or so—it would spoil their minds, hamper their development. In love with books and impatient to understand the words they were made of, Christie taught herself to read. This was one of the ways she entertained herself: lost in her father’s library, absorbed by the musty pages of his leather bound books.

Her upbringing was very Victorian; she was taught to be a delicate thing or at least to pretend she was. Her grandmothers would hammer it home that fainting fits, extreme sensitivity, lack of appetite, and an early onset of consumption (a chronic bloody cough now commonly referred to as tuberculosis) were fashionable. Love and romance were bound up in tragedy and the potential for premature, and therefore gut-wrenching, death. Girls should always be on the brink of perishing.

From most people’s point of view, Victorian days were a dark time for women’s rights. In Christie’s eyes, however, the ladies were having a laugh. In establishing themselves as the “weaker sex,” Christie said, “[Victorian women] got their menfolk where they wanted them. They established their frailty, delicacy, sensibility— their constant need of being protected and cherished. Did they lead miserable, servile lives, downtrodden and oppressed? Such is not
my
recollection . . .”
⁷

Her outlook harkens back to Jane Dieulafoy’s view of marriage wherein a woman’s happiness and purpose is achieved through selfless devotion to her spouse: “A woman, when she marries,” explains Christie, “accepted as her destiny
his
place in the world and
his
way of life.” She concludes, “That seems to me sound sense and the foundation of happiness.”
⁸
Coming from the pen of one of the world’s most professionally successful women, a lady who has sold something like four
billion
books in her career, the view is a curious one. Christie could hardly be corralled into anyone’s definition of a supposed “weaker sex.” Then again, she cheerfully likened her own disposition to that of a loyal dog, and dogs rarely mind the master’s leash if it means they’ll get a good walk.

The Miller family hit difficult times when Christie was eleven. Her father died, and because his estate had been poorly managed by the banks, money was suddenly scarce and the upper-class comforts of lavish meals and domestic servants took a hit. Things were scaled back. Christie’s mother navigated the family through these challenges with her common sense, and Christie made clear that while the Miller family was always comfortable, they were not rich. She and her sister rarely attended a party if it was too far to walk to because carriages and horses were expensive. A girl could have beautiful silk evening dresses, but she would have only two or three at most, and those would have to last at least a year. Butlers and doormen were nice but far from necessary. A cook and a maid, however, were as essential as bread and milk on the table; they would be the last things to let go of.

When Christie had reached the age of seventeen, her mother was obliged to arrange the season of her “coming out.” Normally, a girl’s first season was hosted in the parlors and at the parties of London—a family would demonstrate its wealth, social standing, and all-around good graces through the charm of their daughter. She would be entertained and toured or whirled and wooed by men seeking a wife, and her parents would scrutinize the options. Christie’s sister, Madge, went out in fine style when the family had more money, but left to her own resources, their mother had to devise a more affordable season for her second daughter.

She decided that Christie would go to Cairo. Unlike Madge, Christie was shy and far from fluent in the art of flirtation. In Egypt she would be “familiarised with dancing, talking to young men, and all the rest of it,” and Christie thus arrived, quickly enchanted. She said Cairo was a “dream of delight.” Outfitted in a dress of shot pale pink satin with a bunch of pink rosebuds gathered to one shoulder, Christie went to five dances each week. She and her mother stayed “on tour” three whole months.

Christie’s confidence grew in Cairo; she nabbed one marriage proposal that her mother declined for her, and she arrived at the conclusion that she was a good-looking and desirable young woman. Her coming-out season had made her blossom, and she’d been introduced to society with all the bang and buck a girl could want. What she had
not
been introduced to was all the Egyptian archaeology around her.

Her mother tried coaxing her out to see the museums and nearby ruins, but Christie protested and fussed. Her mind was on piano music and picnics. In hindsight, she was relieved to have missed the antiquities of Egypt as a girl: “I am very glad she [Christie’s mother] did not take me. Luxor, Karnak, the beauties of Egypt, were to come upon me with wonderful impact about twenty years later. How it would have spoilt them for me if I had seen them with unappreciative eyes.”
⁹
Egypt ushered Christie out of her shell and into a new phase of life as a young woman with options and appeal. In time, she would return the favor.

IN THE MEANTIME,
Christie had a heavy set of domestic duties to attend to. Come
1914
, like nearly all the young women of the time, she became a nurse during World War
I
. She wasn’t especially ambitious about pursuing a career, and in between her days of bandaging the wounded, she broke a few hearts. Several marriage proposals came her way, but she turned them down. The first one she accepted was from a man named Reggie. He was significantly older than her and managed to attract the fickle Christie through a kind of reverse psychology, intended or not. Instead of pleading that she accept his offer, he suggested that she take her time to think about it and encouraged her to keep going to parties, keep meeting other men, keep her mind open. His patience made Christie very impatient and more determined than ever to marry him. He left for service (a two-year stint), and although they wrote letters constantly, her desire for someone inclined to act with bit more passion and even a dash of jealousy grew. Her wish was soon granted by the arrival of the stormier Archibald (Archie) Christie, who flew airplanes for the Royal Flying Corps. His approach was more intense: I love you; I must marry you,
now.
She liked it. Her engagement to Reggie was called off, and her engagement with Archie was on, if protracted, for he had no money. Although both of their parents blessed the couple’s intention to wed, it was agreed that Archie had to fluff up the nest and earn at least some of his fortune first. They were separated by the war, jobs were tough to come by, and they were victims of a capricious game of love: could they succeed against the odds? The back-and-forth was grueling—there were constant breakups and makeups—until one day just before Christmas in
1914
they ran off to the equivalent of city hall and got hitched in the afternoon. Enter Mrs. Agatha Christie.