Agatha's Haunts
By G.M. Malliet
In August 2009, my husband and I went to England on what
turned out to be a pilgrimage to many of the sites associated with the life of Agatha
Christie.
We started at Oxford
University, where we’d
attended the annual St. Hilda’s Mystery Weekend (highly recommended for serious
mystery fans—Marcia Talley
has a nice article about it on her Web site). We have friends in nearby Wallingford, where Agatha
lived with her second husband, archeologist Max Mallowan. Wallingford
is seen in some of the filming for Caroline Graham’s Midsomer Murders, used as a stand-in
for Barnaby’s murderous little village
of Causton.
Our friends, knowing my
passion for all things Agatha, had offered to drive us to the sites associated
with her life in the area, starting with Winterbrook House. Agatha purchased
this property in 1934. It is currently occupied and hidden from the curious by
a screen of trees, which is why I can only provide a photo of the front door, and another of the
roof of the cottage adjacent to the house.
It is said Agatha used this cottage as her office.
The next stop on our unofficial tour was the nearby Parish
Church of St. Mary, Cholsey.
Agatha and Max, who died about two years apart, are buried in
its churchyard.
Returning to Oxford, we traveled next by train to the
seaside resort town of Torquay, Devon, which is where Agatha was born—120 years
ago on September 15.
Our base camp in Torquay was the Imperial Hotel, which
Agatha used as a setting in both Peril
at End House and Sleeping
Murder, although I didn’t realize the connection to Agatha at the time
I made the reservation. We also had tea at the nearby Grand Hotel, where she
spent her honeymoon with first husband Archie. Unfortunately, Agatha’s
childhood home, Ashfield, on the outskirts of Torquay, was demolished long ago,
but Greenway, the nearby summer home she bought as an adult, had just been
opened to the public by the National Trust.
The next day we took a passenger ferry along the South Devon coastline and up the River Dart to Greenway. The scenery along the way was breathtaking.
She writes at length in her autobiography of her long
attachment to Greenway, and her joy in restoring the house, built in 1790. It
was requisitioned for use by the U.S. Coast Guard during WWII, and a lieutenant
staying there painted a frieze around the upper walls of the library. Agatha,
far from complaining about this liberty taken, let the frieze remain.
Visitors are encouraged to wander through the house, look at
the family scrapbooks, and marvel at the enormous, old-fashioned bathroom
across the hall from Agatha’s bedroom. Agatha and her descendants were
collectors, so the house gives you a real sense of who they were and what they
loved. You can also see the large studded chest that was the model for the one
used in her short story, “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest.” The beautiful
grounds and gardens of the property figured in some of her stories, like Dead Man’s Folly.
But Greenway is not where Agatha wrote; they say it’s where
she celebrated having written. I suspect that ingenious mind of hers was
percolating a new plot the whole time she was there though, don’t you?
Complete details about visiting Greenway can be found at the
National
Trust’s Web site—you can even stay overnight on the property. More photos can
be found at my Agatha
Christie’s Greenway album.
