Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley

Author:Lucy Worsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

PART SEVEN Wartime Worker – 1940s

27 Beneath the Bombs

In the autumn of 1941, Agatha was once again back at work in a wartime hospital pharmacy.

The tall, red-brick University College Hospital was in Gower Street. The library opposite had been bombed, and 100,000 books destroyed. ‘Hospital still standing,’ Agatha noted, ‘though flattened buildings all around.’1 140 beds of the 500 in the hospital were kept free for air raid victims, such as the seventy who’d been admitted in a single April night.2

The worst months of the Blitz were now over, but Londoners still sometimes had to brace themselves for the air raid warning. And the USA had still not entered the war against Germany. Agatha’s American publishers wanted photographs to publicise that autumn’s novel. Images of the parlous state of the hospital might serve the purpose well, Agatha thought, both for publicity, and to make the case for supporting Britain: ‘if they must have some kind of pictures, let them have that.’3

Leaving the hospital at the end of her shift, and walking uphill towards Hampstead Heath, Agatha would head home to begin what was now her second job as an author. She was also doing war work in her books. Her new novel N or M? featured spying, unpacked wartime paranoia, and – most famously – mocked the Nazis.

Agatha’s current home, on the face of it, was an odd choice: the white-painted, startlingly modern-looking block called Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park. It looked ‘like a giant liner which ought to have had a couple of funnels’.4 The other tenants found their matronly neighbour, just the wrong side of fifty, a little incongruous. One, a Hungarian architect, ‘used to pass her in the corridor, a cuddly-looking, comfortable lady who one felt was much more likely to grow roses in her back garden than write detective novels.’5

Agatha was living here alone, separated from Carlo, from Rosalind, and – most importantly – from Max.

For the fêted, well-paid author of the 1930s, with her younger husband and glamorous second life in West Asia, the wartime world looked very different. Working harder than ever before, she was dangerously close to sinking into depression.

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