Andrew Eames - The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie and the Orient Express

This book is not all my own work. Besides the considerable contribution of one Agatha Christie, several key people helped it out of the authorial sidings. In the UK I am grateful to Flora Turner at the Croatian embassy, Julia Berg of Charisma PR, the Slovenian tourist board and Agathas grandson Mathew Prichard, for his green light. Henrietta McCall at the British Museum generously shared her knowledge of Max Mallowan and Mesopotamian archaeology. For railway expertise I am indebted to the trusting team at Orient Express, to George Behrend, and to the Man in Seat Sixty-One. Julian Alexander deserves credit for waving the agents flag with such conviction, as does Doug Young of Transworld for taking heed. John Quick and Mark Perrow tightened up crucial nuts and bolts to make sure the text didnt get derailed.

Particular thanks are due to Ivan and Darya in Zagreb and Boyan and Marinko in Belgrade for opening up to a stranger and telling it like it is. I am grateful to Armen and Sally Masloumian at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo for unwittingly setting me on my way, and to Geoff Hann at Hinterland Travel for shepherding me into Iraq and out again.

And finally particular thanks go to Susanne, stationmaster and controller of my network, in the knowledge that sometimes the hardest part is staying home.

Ill tell you everything I can

If you will listen well:

I met an erudite young man

A-sitting on a Tell.

Who are you, sir? to him I said,

For what is it you look?

His answer trickled through my head

Like bloodstains in a book.

He said: I look for aged pots

Of prehistoric days,

And then I measure them in lots

And lots of different ways.

And then (like you!) I start to write,

My words are twice as long

As yours, and far more erudite.

They prove my colleagues wrong!

But I was thinking of a plan

To kill a millionaire

And hide the body in a van

Or some large Frigidaire.

So, having no reply to give,

And feeling rather shy,

I cried: Come, tell me how you live!

And when, and where, and why?

He said: I hunt for objects made

By men whereer they roam,

I photograph and catalogue

And pack and send them home.

These things we do not sell for gold

(Nor yet, indeed, for copper!),

But place them on Museum shelves

As only right and proper.

I heard him then, for I had just

Completed a design

To keep a body free from dust

By boiling it in brine.

I thanked him much for telling me

With so much erudition,

And said that I would go with him

Upon an Expedition

And now, if eer by chance I dip

My fingers into acid,

Or smash some pottery (with slip!)

Because I am not placid,

Or if I see a river flow

And hear a far-off yell,

I sigh, for it reminds me so

Of that young man I learned to know

Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow

Whose thoughts were in the long ago,

Whose pockets sagged with potsherds so,

Who lectured learnedly and low,

Who used long words I didnt know,

Whose eyes, with fervour all a-glow,

Upon the ground looked to and fro

Who sought conclusively to show

That there were things I ought to know

And that with him I ought to go

And dig upon a Tell!

(From A-Sitting on a Tell, by Agatha Christie, with her apologies to Lewis Carroll)

When Agatha Christie met Max Mallowan at Ur she was a single mother and celebrated crime novelist. He was a serious-minded dig assistant whod read Classics at Oxford and spent the last five years grubbing around among ancient civilizations in the Middle East. She was thirty-nine, he was twenty-six. Their mutual suitability was not obvious.

Max had been recommended to Leonard Woolley straight out of Oxford University. The Dean of Divinity at New College, which had also been Woolleys alma mater, had encountered the student one morning crossing tie quad and asked, What are your plans, dear boy?

In the true string-pulling tradition of the time an appropriately worded letter of recommendation secured Max a place in the Woolley team and at Ur he was proving a diligent assistant, learning a great deal about ancient civilizations. His experience of the rest of the world, however, was limited particularly as far is women were concerned. His family life had been centred around his two brothers, his boarding-school had been single sex and his university college was all male. His only close experience of the opposite sex was his mother, an emotional, mercurial Frenchwoman, and the volatile Katharine Woolley. He was probably still a virgin.

Iraqis were delighted to be photographed with an Englishman, despite the imminence of war.

The site of the supposed Garden of Eden, a flyblown place where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet.

Max and Agatha didnt actually meet on Agathas very first visit to Ur, because Max was away on leave recovering from appendicitis at the time. But Agatha was exhilarated by the success of her lone journey across Europe and shed resolved to return again the following season. In the meantime shed kept in good contact with the Woolleys, encouraging them to use her London house over the summer. In response they had invited her back out to Ur in 1929, suggesting she travel back home with them at the end of the dig season. She wanted to widen her experience of the archaeological treasures of the area by travelling in their company. She certainly wasnt expecting to find a second husband.

It was by no means love at first sight. Max later wrose that he found her immediately a most agreeable person, but for her part Agatha felt slightly nervous of the thin, grave-looking young man. In fact it was Katharine who threw them together. She assumed Max to be safely loyal to her own cause, and instructed the young dig assistant to take Agatha on a tour of other sites in the vicinity while the Ur dig was being wound down and packed up. Agatha had deep misgivings at the thought of being sent off with a young man who was probably yearning for freedom and some fun in Baghdad after the strain of a three month season at Ur, but they soon started to enjoy each others company in a way for which neither was quite prepared.

Their itinerary was never easy, but they made light of in. Out in the wilds by AlUkhaidir castle they went swimming at Agathas suggestion in Lake Razzazeh, even though neither had appropriate swimming wear and she had to improvise with a silk vest and double knickers. In Kerbala, the Shia holy city which was supposedly full of dangerous dissidents, they spent the night on rolls of bedding on the floor of a cell in a police post, and she had to summon Max in the middle of the night to escort her to the evil-smelling hole in the ground that was the lavatory.

As they walked around the archaeological sites he talked earnestly of ancient civilizations, and as they bumped across the desert between stops she taught him songs which they then sang together to pass the time. They ate dinner under the moon, picked wildflowers and listened to an Arab policeman repeat part of the opening section of Shelleys Ode to a Skylark.

It was heaven. The world seemed perfect, Agatha noted later in her autobiography. As for Max, hed decided this woman was the right life-partner for him from the moment when the car they were travelling in got bogged down in the sand and she had made absolutely no fuss, but simply settled down in the shade to wait while a passing member of the camel corps went to get help in digging it out.