Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (22 page)

Encouraged by Nan, Agatha broke what would otherwise have amounted to a lifetime’s silence on her disappearance to give an interview to the
Daily Mail
on Wednesday 15 February 1928 which was published the following day. Her fictionalized account of her movements on the night of the disappearance naturally excluded all references to Nan. Agatha claimed to have developed amnesia after unsuccessfully trying to kill herself, and she confused matters further by inaccurately stating she called herself Tessa Neele. She gave the impression that she had developed a case of secondary personality as well as amnesia. Her claim that she pointed out to several people at the Harrogate Hydro that she looked like Mrs Christie was false and intended to transfer to others the blame for having failed to recognize her sooner. Contrary to what she told the
Daily Mail,
Agatha had not left home at ten o’clock on the night of the disappearance, and the
Daily Mail
was quick to point this out. It also commented on the fact that she was living in Chelsea with her daughter and was ‘once again in excellent health’.

What Agatha’s explanation did not take into account is that one cannot suffer from loss of memory and secondary personality at the same time. Medical experts are united on this. Agatha’s disingenuous explanation, reproduced here in full after more than seventy years of obscurity, is all the more revealing because she unwittingly confused the symptoms of the two very different psychological conditions. Understandably there was no mention of an alleged encounter between her and Edward MacAlistair in Trodd’s Lane at 6.20 on the morning of Saturday 4 December since he had either fabricated the story or helped another woman whom he mistook for her.

‘I thought everybody had forgotten about the affair, but the reference to the libel suit shows that many people still think I deliberately disappeared. Of course I know that at the time a large number of people thought I had gone away to seek publicity, to carry out a stupid hoax, or to have a subtle revenge on somebody.

What actually happened was this. I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate. I drove in my car over the crest of the Downs in the direction of a quarry. The car struck something, and I was flung against the steering wheel and injured my chest and my head. I was dazed by the blow and lost my memory. For 24 hours I wandered in a dream and then found myself at Harrogate a well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa.

The trouble really began with the death of my mother in the spring of 1926. That affected me very deeply, and on top of this shock there came a number of private troubles, into which I would rather not enter. Instead of sleeping well, as I had done previously, I began to suffer from insomnia, and slept on average only two hours a night.

On the day of my disappearance I drove over in the afternoon to Dorking with my daughter to see a relative. I was at this time in a very despondent state of mind. I just wanted my life to end. As I passed by Newlands Corner that afternoon I saw a quarry and there came into my mind the thought of driving into it. However, as my daughter was with me in the car, I dismissed the idea at once.

That night I felt terribly miserable. I felt that I could go on no longer. I left home at 10 o’clock in my car with a few articles of clothing in a suitcase and about £60 in my bag. I had drawn some money from the bank shortly before as I had decided to go that winter to South Africa with my daughter, and I wanted to make preparations.

All that night I drove aimlessly about. In my mind there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove automatically down roads I knew, but without thinking where I was going. As far as I can remember I went to London and drove to Euston Station. Why I went there I do not know. I believe I then drove out to Maidenhead, where I looked at the river. I thought about jumping in, but realised that I could swim too well to drown. I then drove back to London again, and then on to Sunningdale. From there I went to Newlands Corner.

When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near the quarry I had seen in the afternoon, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. I was flung against the steering wheel, and my head hit something.

Up to this moment I was Mrs Christie. I was certainly in an abnormal state of mind, and scarcely knew what I was doing or where I was going. All the same I knew I was Mrs Christie. After the accident in the car, however, I lost my memory. For 24 hours after the accident my mind was an almost blank. Since I recovered my health I have managed to recall a little of what happened in those 24 hours.

I remember arriving at a big railway station and asking what it was and being surprised to learn it was Waterloo. It is strange that the railway authorities there did not recall me, as I was covered with mud and I had smeared blood on my face from a cut on my hand. I could never make out how this had been caused. I believe I wandered about London and I then remember arriving at the hotel in Harrogate. I was still muddy and showed signs of my accident when I arrived there. I had now become in my mind Mrs Tessa Neele of South Africa.

I can quite understand why I went to Harrogate. The motor-accident brought on neuritis, and once before in my life I had thought of going to Harrogate to have treatment for this complaint. While I was in Harrogate I had treatment regularly. The only thing which really puzzled me was the fact that I had scarcely any luggage with me. I could not quite make this out. I had not even a toothbrush in my case, and I wondered why I had come there without one.

I realised, of course, that I had been in some kind of accident. I had a severe bruise on my chest, and my head was also bruised. As Mrs Neele I was very happy and contented. I had become, as it were, a new woman, and all the worries and anxieties of Mrs Christie had left me. When I was brought back to my life as Mrs Christie once again many of my worries and anxieties returned, and although I am now quite well and cheerful and have lost my old morbid tendencies completely I have not quite the utter happiness of Mrs Neele.

At Harrogate I read every day about Mrs Christie’s disappearance and came to the conclusion that she was dead. I regarded her as having acted stupidly. I was greatly struck by my resemblance to her and pointed it out to other people in the hotel. It never occurred to me that I might be her, as I was quite satisfied in my mind as to who I was. I thought I was a widow, and that I had had a son who had died, for I had in my bag a photograph of my little girl when young with the name ‘Teddy’ upon it. I even tried to obtain a book by this Mrs Christie to read.

When I was finally discovered it was not for some time that doctors and relatives restored to my mind memories of my life as Mrs Christie. These memories were drawn from my subconscious mind slowly. First I recalled my childhood days and thought of relatives and friends as they were when children. By gradual steps I recalled later and later episodes in my life until I could remember what happened just before the motor accident. The doctors even made me try to recall the events in the blank 24 hours afterwards, as they said that for the health of my mind there should be no hiatus of any kind in my recollection. This is why I can now recall at the same time my existence as Mrs Christie and Mrs Neele.’

Of course a person with amnesia would have no difficulty in recognizing her true identity on seeing herself in the newspapers. A distinguished London psychiatrist consulted in the research for this book has confirmed that if Agatha had incurred a blow to her head her memory loss would have been most unlikely to last more than three or four days. The fact that she signed herself into the hotel register as Mrs Teresa Neele from Cape Town on Saturday 4 December 1926, burrowed library books under the same name on Monday the 6th, then later that week placed an advertisement in
The Times
using the name and answered to the same name throughout her hotel stay is not consistent with amnesia. The actions are the hallmarks of someone who has assumed a secondary personality or, alternatively, fashioned a new identity for an ulterior motive. Another eminent psychiatrist commented: ‘An amnesiac wouldn’t invent another name for themselves because they would be too busy trying to remember their own.’

Agatha’s story also fails to account for the fact that it is impossible to see the chalk pit, into which her car almost crashed, when driving past Newlands Corner, because the brow of the hill obscures the pit, which is some three hundred yards further down the hill. Furthermore, if her car had been deliberately driven off the road at high speed the gearstick would not have been found in neutral.

Fortunately for Agatha most readers of her explanation were not medical experts, nor were they familiar with Newlands Corner or the circumstances in which the car was found, so her version of events had the effect of reaffirming the official explanation by her family and the two doctors.

On Friday 20 April 1928, dressed in a brown tweed jacket and skirt, cloche hat and marten fur stole, Agatha faced a further ordeal when she testified in court that she wanted to divorce Archie. She abhorred the intensely personal questions put to her in the witness stand. Worst of all, she hated colluding with Archie, whose lawyers had presented evidence fabricated on his behalf, claiming that he had committed adultery in London’s Grosvenor Hotel with an unnamed woman. The judge, Lord Merrivale, was not deceived by Archie’s evidence, and in granting a provisional divorce and giving custody of nine-year-old Rosalind to Agatha his concluding statement implied sympathy for her: ‘When a gallant gentleman frequents hotels with a woman in order to secure release from a marriage he dislikes I have no course but to grant a decree.’

Agatha had to wait six months before the divorce was finalized. Owing to the furore over her disappearance, producers of silent films were drawn to her crime stories, and that year saw the release of
The Passing of Mr Quinn
, a British film that was a grotesque travesty of Agatha’s original story, and the following year the release of a German-made film
Die Abenteuer GmbH
based on
The Secret Adversary.
There was, however, a successful stage adaptation of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Michael Morton
,
which opened under the title of
Alibi
in April 1928 at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. Reviews of the opening-night performances mentioned that when the time had come for Agatha to take a bow with the rest of the cast she had remained hidden at the back of her box, denying the audience the opportunity of seeing the woman who had become so famous.

Agatha was understandably at a low ebb as she waited for her divorce papers, and she spent much of her time writing her first non-crime novel.
Giant’s Bread
, which was the first of her books to be published under the secret pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, contained a number of autobiographical touches. The childhood of the protagonist, Vernon Deyre, has much in common with Agatha’s own. He plays with the same imaginary characters as she did and develops a fanatical love for his child hood home. He also has disturbing dreams of ‘the Beast’, reminiscent of those Agatha had of the Gun Man.

When Vernon reaches adulthood, he discovers a latent artistic talent for musical composition. His wife Nell experiences poverty in the early stages of their marriage, just as Agatha did with Archie. Nell’s experiences as a nurse during the First World War are based on Agatha’s. The other woman in Vernon’s life is his unacknowledged mistress, Jane, who strains her voice and is forced to give up her career as an opera singer. After becoming a prisoner of war Vernon is presumed dead. He escapes and discovers through a magazine article that his wife has remarried. The shock results in him stepping in front of a lorry, being knocked down and developing amnesia for nearly four years.

Many have assumed that Agatha was imbuing Vernon with aspects of her own experience of memory loss, but nothing could be further from the truth: in a wholly unrealistic scenario he simultaneously assumes the ‘secondary personality’ of an ex-deserter Corporal George Green of the London Fusiliers. Agatha had the valuable knack of perceiving life as did 99 per cent of her reading public, and her lack of specialist knowledge about amnesia was not radically different from the overblown imaginings of her fellow writers; nor was it challenged.

After ‘recovering’ his true identity, Vernon finds himself travelling on a ship when it collides with an iceberg. When the boat lists dangerously and the two women he loves most slide down the deck towards him on their way to an icy death, he has only one free hand with which to reach out to save one of them. Vernon instinctively saves his former wife, because he has known her longer than his mistress. In her way Agatha was reconciling herself with the belief that it would take a similar melodramatic scenario for Archie to choose her over Nancy.

While
Giant’s Bread
has an undeniably unrealistic and melodramatic story-line, it is none the less very readable. The novel explores the inequality of love between the sexes, and what remains striking about the book is that love and happiness elude all the main characters. The book ends, like a reflected image of Agatha’s circumstances in 1928 when it was written, with the anti-hero Vernon, who has suffered the most in love, deciding not to risk future heartbreak by avoiding relationships, immersing himself instead in his art.

Agatha’s divorce was finalized on 29 October 1928. Less than three weeks later Archie married Nancy on 16 November at London’s Prince’s Row register office. Charles Neele was one of the witnesses at the wedding. The newspapers got hold of the story and took the opportunity to remind the public of the disappearance. Although the couple’s marriage went a long way towards pacifying Nancy’s parents, it was always a matter of regret for them that their daughter had married a divorced man.