Low life | 15 November 2008

Last Thursday I was volunteer driver for the day for a Heartbeaters’ outing. Heartbeaters is a local exercise and social club for people recovering from heart attacks that meets weekly (and perhaps weakly) in the Baptist church hall for an hour of gentle physical jerks. We went to Greenway, Agatha Christie’s house on the east bank of the river Dart in Devon. She bought Greenway and its 33 acres in 1939 for £6,000, and the National Trust has just spent £5.4 million doing it up, in the words of its website, ‘to retain the spirit of the place, its almost wayward character, its atmospheric beauty and its timeless qualities’. Solar panels, a ground-source heat pump and sheep-wool insulation testify to the restorers’ sensitivity not just to the memory of the best-selling author, but to the future of our planet. A colony of Greater Horseshoe bats living in the cellar has been persuaded to move out to a specially constructed bat roost nearby. Although the gardens have been open to the public each summer for several years, the newly restored house and contents won’t be open to the public until next spring. But Heartbeaters were vouchsafed an exclusive escorted tour of the house by the National Trust in recompense (after a protracted exchange of emails and letters) for an earlier, bitterly disappointing river cruise and garden visit that had to be aborted due to foul weather.

Before going in, we were taken to a Portakabin and made to put on bright-yellow hard hats and fluorescent-yellow safety vests. There we were given a speech of welcome by the project leader, the perfunctory, even unfriendly, tone of which suggested that she would rather have been getting on with her work of national importance than showing around a party of old crocks killing time between their lunchtime and evening tablets.