'I met Agatha Christie – she told me all about "her" Egypt'

Agatha Christie was inspired by travel. She told me so herself one glorious autumn day in 1969 when I was 26 and was sent to interview her for the Observer colour supplement. With my shorthand notebook at the ready for a most secretive interview, I rushed round to what was possibly the most exclusive private garden square in London: The Boltons, Kensington. I was under strict instructions not to describe the house, its site, its interior or any furniture, object or picture within: total privacy was paramount. She opened the door to me herself. ‘You rather miss servants,’ she remarked.

At that point in her life she was not yet Dame Agatha, but Lady Mallowan, her husband Max having been knighted the previous year. An impressively upright figure in her eightieth year, she wore a brown woollen dress with a necklace of plump pearls. The iconic grey waves were firmly hair-netted, a single old-fashioned hairpin escaping. Her watch was large, masculine, while two large rings were jewelled, ornate. Her welcome was professionally charming but guarded: this is a woman of legendary shyness.

Agatha Christie, Granger/Shutterstock

When she was getting ready for a trip, the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria was a favourite destination, one she used to visit as a girl with her grandmother who lived in Ealing, west London. ‘We came up to town in a four-wheeler; she didn’t trust herself in a hansom. We’d go to the Army & Navy for a splendid lunch, then buy a half-pound box of coffee creams in the grocery department and get another four-wheeler to the theatre.’

Christie’s second husband Sir Max was a well-known archaeologist and Oxford Fellow. As they planned their yearly archaeological expeditions to the Middle East, she would find that the previous year's summer clothes were always impossible, shrunk and faded – and too tight everywhere. So, to the Stores.

'You were of ample proportions, so you wanted washing silk or cotton, but they were never in your size, so you settled for shantung coats and skirts suitable for an Empire Builder’s wife. Max would say, "You can’t wear that, take it off". But I must wear it, I say. He says, "It’s frightful. You look like the most offensive kind of memsahib". I tell him I suspected as much, but I’ve bought it now...'

Delightfully, she would also wear her pearls, even when they were camping. It’s worth noting that in photographs Max Mallowan also dressed with English formality on his digs: pale summer suit, white shirt, knotted tie, wide-brimmed felt hat, laced shoes.

Their journeys started at Victoria, on ‘the wonderful Continental platform. The sulphurous smells, the clouds of steam, the grand, stuck-up Pullman'. The Simplon Orient Express at Calais became a familiar friend. ‘The blue coach with the words CALAIS-ISTANBUL. The thrill, the mad haste…’ Murder on the Orient Express is one of her best – and most filmed – novels. ‘I was able to check on the way back what I’d been thinking about on the way out. I had to see where all the switches were. One reader took the journey especially to check it up.’

Agatha Christie was to set several books in Egypt, which she first visited as a 19-year-old, taken by her mother for the three-month winter social season at the Gezira Palace Hotel in Cairo. Polo games every afternoon, shopping, dances every night. ‘The wonders of antiquity were lost on me then,’ she said with a smile. ‘Then twenty years later I met Max when I was staying with friends in Ur in Iraq. And the rest, as they say…’

The 46-year marriage enriched both their careers, Christie’s writing funding Mallowan’s expeditions, which in turn inspired her books, many having archaeological themes and characters. It was cruising on their way to join a dig on Elephantine Island in Aswan that provided the impetus for Death on the Nile, another of her best. She wrote most of it in the Old Cataract Hotel, a Moorish fantasy built by Thomas Cook - ‘on the terrace they had basket chairs painted scarlet’ – where they spent six months: her suite with its balcony overlooked Max’s site, and her writing desk and chair are, famously, still on show.

Sacred Lake at Karnak temple, Luxor

The world of Middle Eastern archaeologists was a tight one: Howard Carter of Tutankhamun fame became a friend when they were in Luxor: ‘We all played bridge at the Winter Palace Hotel’. It’s still there, on the east bank of the Nile, and in 2004 was a location for ITV’s series of Death on the Nile with Sir David Suchet.

Not all their expeditions were as comfortable. Agatha Christie found the landscape of 1930s Egypt ‘frightening and fascinating, this vast world without vegetation’ and recalled – with a shudder – the pitfalls of newly installed but haphazard plumbing during that era. She travelled with tins of flea powder – ‘Fleatings and Flit and carbolic soap. Mosquitoes! Flies! And then at night the mice! The bats! Cockroaches! Snakes in the bedroom! Desert dogs howling!’ But she always took ‘one good soft down pillow – it makes all the difference between comfort and misery'.

Her role on excavation sites became increasingly important, only partly that of ensuring domestic order and adequate meals for the team. She bought local lamps and rugs to add comfort to near-empty rooms in basic rented houses, and paintings for her own pleasure. ‘I once spent £3 in a bazaar on a table for my typewriter. That caused a terrible fuss – so much money! Surely I could have used a crate! I’m a three-fingered typist, very tiring.’ (Collins, her publishers, gave her a dictaphone for her eightieth birthday.)

Photography, undertaken initially to record the progress of research, became a passion: ‘I took the photographs and developed and printed plates, but would do so practically asphyxiated with heat. I had to start around six in the morning before it became too hot to use the chemicals.’ She also labelled the daily finds – shards of pottery, amulets, tiny ivory carvings of sphinxes and flowers. Is it true, I asked, that you used your own expensive face cream to clean these? She waved a hand. ‘Innoxa. Lovely. Their salon was in Bond Street.’ I said I remembered their lilac-coloured jars and she added, ‘I used their perfume in those days too. Mmmmm...Fleurs des Bois?'

Her first novel, written when she was very young, was set in Cairo. Snow upon the Desert was a romance destined never to be published but she used it in Death on the Nile where she gives a wickedly funny self-parody of the ‘famous authoress’ Salome Otterbourne with her black ninon draperies and turban of native material draped round her head: Mrs Otterbourne gives ‘a little self-conscious laugh’ as she assures Poirot that ‘Strong meat – that is what my books are. Libraries may ban them – no matter! I speak the truth. Sex – ah! Monsieur Poirot – why is everyone so afraid of sex? The pivot of the universe!’

Agatha Christie is very much back with us at the moment. Thanks to the wonders of AI and a brilliant actor, she is currently teaching her craft on television, giving eleven lessons in the BBC Maestro series. And Sir David Suchet is following her travelling footsteps in his More4 series Travels with Agatha Christie.

Given the qualities of such as extraordinary woman none of this comes as a surprise. Her final words to me 56 years ago now seem – hilariously – almost prophetic.

It was late in the afternoon – we’d been talking for hours – when the Queen of Crime patted the gold and blue brooch on her bosom. ‘You must do what you can,’ she remarked, ‘not what you can’t. Unless you have a terrific will. Then I expect you could.’

Marcelle Bernstein, photo by Maddie Ralph

© Marcelle Bernstein

Top image credit: Getty

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