Agatha Christie loved Devonshire. Her first home was Ashfield – an ordinary enough villa, she called it, on the edge of Torquay – and it remained with her always, though she finally moved out of it in 1938. Even towards the end of her life, she dreamt of Ashfield, “the old familiar setting where one’s life first functioned”.
As Agatha’s grandson Mathew Prichard explains, “Devon was the place where, with the encouragement of her mother, she learned to write. It was also where the idea of the detective story first emerged. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Hercule Poirot’s debut, was born at Ashfield, and finished off in a hotel on Dartmoor. So, Poirot too started his life in Devon.”
Agatha had connections with Devon all her life, spending summers at Greenway on the River Dart from the late 1930s up until she died in 1976. According to her grandson, “Greenway was the reward for completing the annual Christie for Christmas. When that was finished, she could sit in her boathouse and watch the tourist boats pass by; she could enjoy picnics on Dartmoor; she could swim in the sea, or even occasionally in the River Dart; she could eat lashings of Devonshire cream!”
Apart from providing a refuge, Devon was the cherished location for highlights in Agatha’s life: for example, it was at Ugbrooke House, a grand mansion in Chudleigh, halfway between Torquay and Exeter, that she met Lieutenantgarrison. At a ball held there in October 1912 by Lord and Lady Clifford they danced together for most of the evening, and then, shortly afterwards, he rode over on a motorbike, unannounced, to visit Agatha. It was the start of an overwhelming romance.
