Agatha Christie's Greenway, House and Gardens

Dame Agatha Christie is on the top left.

Heard of Agatha Christie?  No?  Still fumbling along in a first grade primer?  She’s only the most popular novelist of all time, her books having sold over four billion copies.  The Bible and Shakespeare have out sold her, but no one else.

Greenway, in Devon, England, overlooking the picturesque Dart River and city of Dartmouth, was Christie’s holiday home, purchased in 1938, her ‘getaway,” to relax with family, away from public pressures. It’s now part of the National Trust, including the extensive grounds and gardens.

To get there from Dartmouth is an adventure in itself, much like one of Dame Agatha’s stories.  First you catch a ferry across the River Dart.  Then you hop on an ancient train, pulled by an historic steam engine.  

Some twenty minutes later, you get off (alight, as Agatha would say) at a stop that appears to be nowhere.  A couple of small, low buildings to protect travelers from any sudden shower, an iron fence and a sign mark the landing.  Steps lead steeply through the trees to a tarmac road that winds along the side of a hill.  Ten or fifteen minutes of walking and you’re at the entry to Greenway.  It’s not a bad stroll amid the verdant grasses, flowers, and huge trees rising like giants to embrace the sky.

Greenway House is white, Georgian, boxy and large, but without much character aside from the pillared portico.  

Inside is another matter.  Agatha Christie and her husband, the archeologist Max Mallowan (1904-1978), were great collectors and the rooms are tastefully filled with every collectable knick-knack imaginable. Teapots, walking sticks, archeological momentos. Evidently, the house was not always so orderly.  The story goes that when the house, which fell to shambles sometime after Christie’s death in 1976, was restored in 2008, mountains of ‘stuff’ had to be sorted and disposed of.

The restorers did a fab job.  The rooms seem much lived in.  Homey. Normal. The perfect place for a couple, their children and grandchildren to calm themselves and wander blissfully into family life.

Yet, it couldn’t have been normal, as you and I think of it.  Such a spacious home must have required servants, even if just for the dusting and cleaning.  That wouldn’t even count routine maintenance on the structure itself.

As any homeowner knows, houses and grounds are not inexpensive in their upkeep.  Besides the 18^th Century house itself and surrounding buildings, the garden and grounds must take a massive amount of money and work.  No wonder it was best for the remaining family members to turn it over to the National Trust.

Each room in the house has a different personality, from the very plain bedroom, where you will hear a recording of Agatha’s own voice discussing her methods of writing, to the small ‘fax room,” where Max worked, to the map and archeology room, to the expansive library, whose walls hold a decoration dating from World War II, when American forces used the house to plan for D-Day. A young Coast Guard artist left a panoramic graphic of his ship’s journey from America to England.  Dame Agatha left it, believing it to be part of an historic undertaking.

A tea-totaler, Dame Agatha drank double-cream with her meals.

Novelist.  I routinely get a blank stare when I say the word.  So, just to clear things up:  Novels are books of fiction, fanciful tales written by a novelist, and meant to entertain.  They come in many forms:  Romances, Histories, Sci-Fi, Mysteries, and while they may be based on truth, or contain historically accurate settings and characters, the stories are completely constructed in the author’s imagination.  They are not true stories.

In Agatha’s Christie’s case, she wrote 66 novels under her own name, as well as several using a pseudo name, Mary Westmacott. She also penned plays and short stories.  The Mousetrap still runs in London’s West End. It’s the longest running play in history.

Several of Christie’s novels use all or parts of Greenway as their setting:  Five Little Pigs (1942), Towards Zero (1944), and Dead Man’s Folly (1956).

Her two most famous characters?  Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple.   Even an illiterate couch potato knows those two names.  The last of the Hercule Poirot stories was just on TV, starring David Suchet, who played the part for twenty-five years.

Something you may not know.  She wrote none of her books at Greenway.  However, she often sat in the living room (also called the library) and read completed novels to her family.  I’m sure they tired of this.  grumbled and complained, no doubt.  Families are like that.  It is said her husband sometimes closed his eyes and nodded off.

As a writer, I enjoy seeing firsthand how other writers lived.  You somehow getting a feel for the kind of person they were.  I had not read an Agatha Christie mystery in ages, but I quickly grabbed a copy of Dead Man’s Folly.  Dame Agatha certainly lived an upper crust sort of life, yet her concerns seemed very down to earth, almost elegantly normal, and Greenway, with its comfortable couches (which you’re allowed to sit on), the subdued colors, and the room decorations, make it a place where anyone could spend a holiday.

Agatha in her twenties.

Travel is like that, isn’t it?  Allows you to effortlessly expand your horizons, pick up threads of interest, and encourages you to explore possibilities.  Greenway does it all.  When I hopped on that old train and listened to the whistle of the steam engine, I stepped into the time and tone of a Christie novel.  Getting off at the Greenway train stop continued the plot, tangled and enhanced room-by-room, acre-by-acre.  This was Agatha Christie country and I loved it.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/greenway/facilities-and-access/