This chapter deals with the formative years of Agatha’s adulthood, including her abrupt wartime marriage to Archie after a lot of on-again-off-again, training and working as both nurse and pharmacist, and eventually establishing herself as a housewife and an author.
She vividly describes the shock of learning to nurse wounded and dying soldiers, but also how canny she had to get, and quick. “[I]n a month or so I was quite adept at looking out for their various tricks,” as when a soldier claimed that the doctor had prescribed him a diet prominently featuring port wine!
Though married now, Agatha continued to live at home in Ashfield with her mother while Archie was gone for long tours of duty with the brand-new Air Force. During this time, her elderly Grannie, no longer able to care for herself, came to live with them. Just how unable she was to take care of herself became clear when they undertook the herculean task of emptying out her house at Ealing. The tragic specter of spoiled food pointed not only to Grannie’s growing dementia but also to the desperate search for foodstuffs in wartime. “Jams that had gone mouldy, plums that had fermented, even packets of butter and sugar which had slipped down behind things and been nibbled by mice… vast monuments of waste! I think that is what hurt her so much: the waste.”
Not to worry: some good things did survive. “Here were her home-made liqueurs—they at least, owing to the saving quality of alcohol, were in good condition. Thirty-six demijohns of cherry brandy, cherry gin, damson gin, damson brandy, and the rest of if, went off in the furniture van. On arrival there were only thirty-one. ‘And to think,’ said Grannie, ‘those men said they were all teetotallers!’” They’d have done better if they were in fact teetotallers who resold their absconded goods on the black market—financially, anyway, if not morally…
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