No photographs were allowed in the house
so I've taken this description from Agatha Christie,
by Laura Thompson.
Greenway House, that magical white box
set above the gleaming 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 air.
Agatha Christie wrote to Max in 1942,
"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.
Agatha bought Greenway in 1938 for six thousand pounds...
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.
The first floor had five main rooms,
with a large handsome master bedroom
and a vast lavatory with a wooden surround,
the kind that Agatha favoured.
Above were more bedrooms
and a bedsitting room for Rosalind;
behind was a complexity of servant quarters,
a pantry downstairs and a huge
high-ceilinged kitchen.
Everything was high, deep, rightful.
Everywhere was secrecy, enchantment, mystery.
A strange thing happened.
A false door, put in by Agatha to balance the real door
on the other side of the fireplace in the drawing room,
has been opened up by the National Trust
to facilitate the flow of visitors.
As I walked through it I heard something fall,
seemingly at my feet,
clattering loudly onto the floorboards.
The people just ahead of me turned sharply at the sound
and we all looked to see what had been dropped.
I checked - it wasn't my lens cap which has
an annoying habit of popping off the camera,
it wasn't my glasses. I carried nothing else.
In any case, it sounded heavy and had bounced noisily.
Did the couple in front drop anything?
No. They were mystified.
We all looked carefully
to see if anything had rolled away,
but there was absolutely nothing there.
