On the track of a real Agatha Christie thriller
Hilary Macaskill arrives in style to explore the Devon home the author called ‘the loveliest place on Earth’
IT’S NOT quite the Orient Express, but the best way to travel to Greenway, the Devon home of Agatha Christie, is on the Dartmouth Steam Railway. The brown-and-cream coaches have wooden panelling and squishy, comfortable seats. As clouds of steam drift past windows that open, the train makes its leisurely way across a Brunel viaduct and along the self-styled English Riviera.
The name seems apt as we pass a sea of improbably deep blue and turquoise, and bright beach huts arcing around golden sands.
‘Trains have always been one of my favourite things,’ Agatha wrote in her autobiography. They provided ideas and settings for her stories: The 4.50 From Paddington, The Mystery Of The Blue Train, The ABC Murders.
But the Orient Express is the train for which she is best known: her ninth novel, The Murder On The Orient Express, published in 1934, was an immediate bestseller.
It was later turned into a film starring Albert Finney and Lauren Bacall, and another star-studded take on the classic starring Belfast’s Kenneth Branagh as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot was released in cinemas last month.
Agatha’s first trip on the Orient Express was taken on a whim in 1928 after a fellow dinner guest extolled its delights and its destinations. Further trips to Iraq led to her meeting her future husband, Max Mallowan, at an archaeological dig – and inspired her when her train was stranded for two days in the Balkans because of a flood.
She wrote to Max about the travellers – ‘an elderly American lady, a Hungarian minister and his wife, a large jocose Italian and a terrible man from Chicago’ – all material for her fertile imagination.
Closer to home, Agatha’s regular train was the Torquay Express, which used to run from London to Kingswear in Devon, with a stop at Churston, which was then the nearest station to Greenway. Agatha’s grandson Mathew remembers disembarking there for long summer holidays: ‘We’d steam into Churston station, which was about the size of a grasshopper.’ It retains its old-fashioned charm, with the original green-and-white wooden roof, trolleys piled with trunks, and suitcases on the platforms. Now there’s a shuttle bus to Greenway, and a new request stop at Greenway Halt, from where a footpath leads to the house.
But we stayed on the train to Kingswear and crossed to Dartmouth for a 30-minute Greenway Ferries trip upriver.
It’s a pleasing way to approach ‘the loveliest place in the world’, as Agatha called it: we glimpsed the creamy-coloured Georgian mansion high up through the trees, and passed close by its boathouse (scene of the murder in Dead Man’s Folly, whose setting is Greenway by another name). Greenway Quay is a busy little transport hub – there’s been a crossing here over the Dart river for centuries. And the ferry to the pretty village of Dittisham (which also features in novels) plies its trade every day except December 25, whenever summoned by a bell.
Shortly before Greenway was
opened to the public by the UK’s National Trust in 2009 and while I was writing my book Agatha Christie At Home, I visited Mathew and his wife Lucy, as he reminisced about the house. His favourite room was the library, its striking frieze painted when the house was requisitioned by the British Admiralty during the Second World War.
AFTER breakfast, his grandmother would sit in ‘the lovely deep chair in the corner and begin her reading for the day’. Despite its many visitors, the house still retains that sense of being lived in. I met Mathew again at Torre Abbey, venue for September’s Agatha Christie Festival, where he introduced Joan Nott, the guide who first led me along Torquay’s Agatha Christie Mile. The first person to research Agatha’s roots in Torquay after she moved there in the 1980s, Joan, now 97, shared some of her stories about Agatha’s life.
During the festival, I also met again John Risdon, an expert on the area’s heritage. He was especially pleased that the festival included a visit to his local church in Churston. Its stainedglass Good Shepherd window was commissioned by the author.
The rather beautiful Potent Plants garden at Torre Abbey was filled with the shrubs and flowers that produce the poisons so frequently used to dispatch victims in Agatha’s stories. Her medical knowledge stemmed from her work during the First World War in Torquay’s hospital dispensary.
Head gardener Ali Marshall, who researched and designed the garden (after reading all the books), recalls anxious visits by the council’s health and safety team at the outset. ‘And when I give guided tours, there’s often someone who knows which story featured which poison,’ adds Ali.
My final visit was to the whiteturreted Grand Hotel and a stay in the Agatha Christie Suite. This probably wasn’t where Agatha and her first husband Archie spent the one night of their honeymoon. The two-bedroom apartment has a sitting room suitably furnished with 1930s-style items, a typewriter under a portrait of Agatha, and balcony overlooking the sandy beach at Corbyn Head.
That evening there was a murder mystery dinner at the hotel, though the portly Poirot lookalike was not, disappointingly, the detective solving the mystery, merely one of the festival fans. Perhaps in deference to the diners, poison was not the cause of death. This time the weapon was a tray.