I greatly enjoyed Adèle's post today on her recent stay at Agatha Christie's house Greenway, and it prompted me to look up Laura Thompson's biography, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery,
"Greenway House, that magical white box set above the gleaming River Dart; Greenway with its wild romantic gardens; Greenway, rooted in its Devon history and yet, with its ghostly pallor, looking as if it might at any moment vanish into the air. 'I sat on the seat overlooking the house on the river,' wrote Agatha to [her husband] Max in 1942. 'It looked very white and lovely - remote and aloof as always - I get a kind of pang over its beauty ... "Too dear for our possessing" but what excitement to possess it! I thought tonight, sitting there - it is the loveliest place in the world - it quite took my breath away.'
The house she had dreamed into life [in her childhood home] - the river at the end of the garden, the vast unknown rooms that opened out from familiar doors - was now a reality. Agatha bought Greenway in 1938 for six thousand pounds: an unbelievable sum, it would seem, equivalent to not much over £200,000 in today's values, but not everybody wanted to take on such a property and its thirty-three acres. (...) The main rooms opened out from a central hall: library, dining room and sitting room, which itself led to a drawing room with long, white windows, giving on to a small secret lawn. (...) Everything was high, deep, rightful. Everywhere was secrecy, enchantment, mystery."
Doesn't that last sentence make you want to find out more? Time for me to read the book, I think.
