Laura Thompson - Agatha Christie: a mysterious life

Contents

A writer and freelance journalist, Laura Thompson won the Somerset Maugham award for her first book, THE DOGS, and is also the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Nancy Mitford, LIFE IN A COLD CLIMATE.

A passionate and accomplished writer, Laura Thompson now turns her highly acclaimed biographical skills to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, thirty years after her death Christies books still sell over four million copies worldwide a year.

Thompson describes the Edwardian world in which she grew up, explores the relationships she had, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the mysteries still surrounding Christies life including her disappearance in 1926.

Agatha Christie is a mystery and writing about her is a detection job in itself. But, with access to all of Christies letters, papers and writing notebooks, as well as interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christies detective fiction, but the truth behind her private life as well.

This book could not have written without the infinitely generous support of Mathew Prichard, Agathas grandson. He has given every possible assistance, and my gratitude is boundless. I also met Agathas daughter, Rosalind Hicks, on several occasions before she died. I talked to her and her husband, Anthony, at Greenway House; I shall always remember those meetings with great pleasure.

I met Sue Dawson and Sheila Alexander on my subsequent visits to Greenway, and they could not have been kinder or more helpful.

I was deeply appreciative of Janet Morgans willingness to talk to me. I had much enjoyed her biography when it was published, and frankly admit that it was a wonderful source book. I also loved our stimulating and thought-provoking chats. Henrietta McCall, the biographer of Max Mallowan, was extremely charming and generous towards me.

Further thanks go to Mr and Mrs Archibald Christie; John Mallowan; Dr Joan Oates; the Reverend and Mrs Christopher Turner; Baroness James; Professor Harry Smith; Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop; Dr Julian Reade; Diana Gunn; Julia Camoys Stonor; Anne Sykes; Diana Howland; Lady Saunders; Brian Stone; Charles Vance; John Curran; Tony Medawar; Margaret Moore; John Neate; the owners of Winterbrook House, who took the time to show me round their home and garden; Tessa Milne and her colleagues in the Books and Manuscripts department at Sothebys, who most kindly accommodated me while I read much of Agathas correspondence; Dr Jessica Gardner at Exeter University, always so friendly and helpful; the Bodleian Library, which tracked down the relevant Bradshaw Railway Guides; Meg Rich at Princeton University; Els Boonen at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham; Jonathan Harrison at St Johns College, Cambridge; Bridget Gillies at UEA; the Public Records Office at Kew; the Newspaper Library; the London Library; the Surrey History Centre; the Surrey Constabulary; Torquay Library; and the writer Margaret Yorke, who was a wonderful friend to this book.

Finally I thank Val Hudson and Jo Roberts-Miller at Headline; David Godwin; my friend Dena Arstall, with whom I had some terrific talks about Agatha; my mother, as always; and my late father, who loved Agatha Christie, and who would have enjoyed this book.

Also by Laura Thompson and available from Headline Review

Life in a Cold Climate

Between the ages of 5 and 12 years old, I led a wonderfully happy life

(from a letter written by Agatha Christie in 1973)

I remembered another thing Robert saying that there had been no bad fairies at Rupert St Loos christening. I had asked him afterwards what he meant and he had replied, Well, if theres not one bad fairy wheres your story?

(from The Rose and the Yew Tree, by Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott)

I t is a steep climb up Barton Road in Torquay, and at the top there is nothing to be seen. Here stood the house in which Agatha Christie was born. Now only imagination can bring it back to life.

All her life Agatha was in love with her own childhood, and her family home Ashfield was the arena of her childhood dreams. She continued to dream about the house all her life. When it was demolished in the 1960s, twenty years after it had been sold perhaps as proof that she had finally grown up? she cried like a child.

Walking up the road it is hard to grasp the past, because there is so little of it left. Barton Road is out of the town proper, but this has not protected it from modern England: gimcrack college buildings, a wholesale and import warehouse, a school and a block of council flats now line the hill that led to Ashfield. A couple of bungalows stand on the approximate site of Agathas house. A path beside them leads to a secret triangle of earth, bounded by a rocky wall; might it once have been an edge of her garden? It is possible. Here, in the cool dark corner around a tree stump, may have been the Dogs Cemetery in which the family pets including Tony the Yorkshire terrier, Agathas first dog were buried beneath little headstones.

So imagination works on this hidden piece of Torquay, and on the scratchy cry of seagulls, which would have been as familiar to Agatha as her own name, and on the unchanged shape of Barton Road, the sense of her walking up and down with the breeze in her hair and her ribs heaving joyfully. As a child, hand in hand with her nurse; later, laced tight into corsets and trailing a handsome skirt whose hem was thick with dirt. To climb that hill, in a corset! It was here that her first husband, Archie Christie, came chugging on his motorbike in search of the cool, slim girl he had fallen for at a dance near Exeter; he sat and took tea with Agathas mother and waited for her to trip home from across the road. She had been playing badminton at Rooklands, one of the handful of houses that stood, like her own, within its own relaxed grounds. That was her world then. Those were the years of Edwardian serenity. Summer followed summer in a long haze: sloping lawns were shadowed with tea tables, with the arch of croquet hoops, with the soft droop of picture hats. The air smelled rose-sweet, and happiness was an easy business. Agatha Christie never lost the sense of those years; they always remained inside her.

From the top of Barton Road one looks down at Torquay, the rise and fall of its seven hills, the curved sweep of bay with the sea gleaming beyond. This is the view part revealing, part hidden that Agatha would have known and loved, so well that when she travelled the world with Archie, in the 1920s, she wrote back to her mother that South Africa was like all really beautiful places, just like Torquay!.

That place no longer exists. The Torquay of Agathas youth was configurative, complete; an elegant land of its own with its crescents and terraces, its huge pale villas shrouded amid trees and hills, its rituals and structures and distant wildness. It was a watering-place, gently restorative, the kind of town at which people arrived carrying letters of introduction. In summer the local newspaper published weekly lists of the names of holiday visitors, and it was said that these read like the Almanack de Gotha. The resident families were of Agathas own class: middle, tending towards upper. This homogeneity was precious. Around her, all was protection and stasis. Within, therefore, her imagination could go free.

Could it have conjured the Torquay of the twenty-first century? In the years after the war Agatha had a respectful terror of social change and, in some ways, she was as much of a realist about life as her old lady detective, Miss Marple, who always expects the worst and is usually right to do so. But Agatha was also a woman of deep faith, in God and human nature. Could she, then, have foreseen the gleeful rupture within England that would rip the heart from her birthplace?