was also good at history and woodwork. It was later found that Christie had an IQ of 128. Christie also attended Boothtown Council School (also known as Boothtown Board School) in Northowram. He sang in the church choir and was a Boy Scout. After leaving school on 22 April 1913, he entered employment as an assistant projectionist. During his later life, Christie's childhood peers described him as "a queer lad" who "kept himself to himself" and "was not very popular". His problem with impotence began in adolescence; his first attempts at sex were failures, and he was branded "Reggie-No-Dick" and "Can't-Do-It-Christie" by his peers. Christie's sexual difficulties were life-long; most of the time he could only perform with prostitutes. (A post-mortem report found that Christie's genitals were physically normal.) In September 1916, during the First World War, Christie enlisted in the British Army; he was called up on 12 April 1917 to join the 52nd Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment to serve as an infantryman. In April 1918, the regiment was despatched to France, where Christie was seconded to the Duke of Wellington's (West Riding) Regiment as a signalman. During the following June, Christie was injured in a mustard gas attack and spent a month in a military hospital in Calais. He later claimed this attack had rendered him blind and mute for three and a half years, and permanently impacted his ability to speak loudly. Ludovic Kennedy wrote that no record of Christie's blindness has been traced and that, while he might have lost his voice when he was admitted to hospital, he would not have been discharged as fit for duty had he remained a mute. His inability to talk loudly, Kennedy argued, was a psychological reaction to the gassing rather than a lasting toxic effect of the gas. The reaction, and Christie's exaggeration of the effects of the attack, stemmed from an underlying personality disorder that caused him to exaggerate or feign illness as a ploy to get attention and sympathy. Christie was demobilised from the army on 22 October 1919. He joined the Royal Air Force on 13 December 1923, but was discharged on 15 August 1924. Marriage Christie married Ethel Simpson, from Bradford, at Halifax town's Register Office on 10 May 1920. His impotence remained, and he continued to visit prostitutes. Early in the marriage, Ethel suffered a miscarriage. After four years of marriage the couple