West

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay and admired the house, Greenway.

In 1938 it came up for sale and in Agatha's own words "…so we went over to Greenway and very beautiful it was.

A white, Georgian house of about 1780 or 90 - woods sweeping down to the Dart below with lots of very beautiful flowers and shrubs.

"The perfect house."

Her husband Max said "Why don't you buy it?" so she did - and the family spent many happy holidays there.

Idyllic family holidays

Her grandson, Matthew Prichard remembers idyllic family holidays at the house.

He recalls Agatha reading him stories in her bedroom in the mornings and has fond memories of walks down to the boathouse to watch the steamers coming up river.

Another favourite pastime was listening to Agatha read the family her latest 'whodunnit' so that they could guess who the murderer was.

Matthew remembers Agatha always being infuriated when her husband came up with the right answer - as he nearly always did - because he had often dozed through most of the reading!

Wartime retreat

After Agatha's death, her daughter, Rosalind continued to live at Greenway until her death in 2005 but the house was not always just a family home.

During the war, Greenway was taken over by American troops, in the South West of England to practice in secret for the Normandy Landings.

During rehearsals on Slapton Sands German torpedo boats attacked the flotilla hitting three landing craft and killing over 700 men.

Agatha Christie inside her dream home.

For those surviving, Greenway became a refuge and they left an amazing souvenir - a remarkable frieze detailing their wartime exploits - which Agatha chose to leave in place as a piece of the history of the house.

When the National Trust started restoration in 2007, project manager Robyn Brown found that parts of the house were on the verge of collapse.

The Trust put up scaffolding and covered the building so that they could open up the final part of the roof to discover the full extent of the damage.

They had already found a huge crack, the width of a fist, running down one end of the building and the architect had warned them then that the work was going to be expensive.

Now though the structural engineer looked at the remains of the roof and told Robyn he couldn't understand how the building was still standing.

All the joist ends supporting the roof had rotted so there was nothing really holding it up but gravity.

Restoration secrets

As work on the £5.4m restoration has gone on, Greenway has been revealing all sorts of secrets about its famous owner.

There's proof of Christie's talents as a concert class pianist who also composed her own music, some of which was actually unearthed in a crate under the piano.

Inside the house - Greenway.

The most fascinating discovery of all though was found tucked away in an upstairs cupboard.

It was an old tape recorder and a box of tapes of Agatha dictating her autobiography, recorded over a period of about 10 years.

As Agatha was so shy there are very few recordings of her available - probably no more than two hours worth other than these tapes.

The old tape recorder had seized up but an expert was brought in to help and it has been restored to working order so he was able to listen to the tapes.

"Fairytale house"

The more famous Agatha became, the more she loved Greenway - "this fairytale house" as she called it - and the tranquillity it offered her.

"If I were to have any of the houses around here, I would rather live at Greenway, on the Dart," she remarked.

Very soon, with thousands of hours of restoration work nearing completion, the National Trust will open Greenway's doors to the public so they will be able to share this very special place.