Originally published July 21, 2012 by King’s River Life Magazine
by Christina Morgan Cree
“Few people have extracted more intense or more varied fun from life, and this book, above all, is a hymn to the joy of living” –Agatha Christie, An Autobiography
Thirty years after Agatha Christie’s death, her grandson, Mathew Prichard, was cleaning out one of his mother’s rooms shortly after she had passed away. In a cardboard box he found his grandmother’s dictation machine-an obsolete “Grundig Memorette” reel-to-reel. Agatha Christie preferred to “dictate” her books, instead of writing. In fact, her family never actually saw her write (from the official website-http://agathachristie.com/about-christie/how-christie-wrote/plotting-and-notebooks/ ).
There were only a few tapes, as she would tape over them once they had been transcribed. He called up a mechanical friend who was able to get the machine working. He describes what it was like to hear his grandmother’s voice again after all those years:
“I cannot tell you how evocative that moment was for me… She had little mannerisms, like a very slight cough in the middle of sentences, which I had forgotten about… And in the middle of these tapes suddenly you hear this little ‘woof!’ as her dog barks, and it’s just like being back at Wallingford… all this came flooding back to me.” –Mathew Prichard, Agatha Christie, An Autobiography
Agatha Christie started writing her autobiography in 1950 when she was 60 years old and finished 15 years later, saying that it felt like a good time to stop. She was satisfied that she had done what she wanted to do. She died the following year.
Agatha Christie (Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller) was born September 15, 1890. She was the youngest of three children; her sister Madge, born in 1879, and her brother Monty, born in 1880. Her mother Clara was clever, interesting and had a mind too quick to keep up with. She had an uncanny way of knowing exactly what a person was thinking. As her sister once said, “Anything I don’t want mother to know, I don’t even think of, if she’s in the room.” She loved to experiment with new ideas: she tried out different religions, diets, education philosophies and would quickly become bored with one and go onto the next. Agatha describes her father, Fred, as an “agreeable” man-charming, engaging and social. Those were the days of the independent income and he had been left a great deal of money by his father. Gentlemen didn’t “work”. By her own account her father was lazy and would not have been successful had he needed to work. But he was also kind, generous, funny and genuinely loved people.
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