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| Standing up in the amphitheater, gazing down at Beacon Cove |
There's a simplicity of style to Agatha Christie's books and short stories that belies the deep structure she built into her fiction. Sadly, that easy readability does not apply to her autobiography. Instead, Christie wanders along, relating reminiscences as she saw fit, whether they followed or backtracked in time. This is a real shame, as unlike her mysteries, it makes the narrative more difficult to follow. I started her autobiography a year ago, and enjoyed the portion I read. Then life through me a curveball, as it always does, knocked me out of the book for one reason or another, and I never came back.
Google "Agatha Christie Beacon Cove" and you'll find photos of this beautiful beach from a hundred years ago. Do a little digging, and you'll realize that Beacon Cove was a Women's Only beach during the author's childhood. She would have used one of those Victorian wheeled bathing machines to enter and exit the water! It's hard to imagine a bathing machine rolling up and down Beacon Cove without constantly breaking a wheel or axle on the boulders. Perhaps the city regularly trucked in sand to make the beach flatter back then. Either that, or Beacon Cove has suffered a great deal of erosion since Christie's childhood. But alas, that was over a century ago.
Do a little more online investigating, and you'll discover that, as a child, Christie didn't just wade into the water and squeal. She didn't just splash around with her friends. She liked to swim, really swim in the ocean. She saved her young nephew from drowning once, when he got into trouble at Beacon Cove. Later, during her world travels, she even took up surfing, and became one of the first British women to do so. When a particularly strong wave ripped off her swimsuit once, she crept out of the water when no one was looking. After she dressed, she went off to the shops, bought another swimsuit, and got back on her surfboard.
I admire Christie for the way she wrote her fiction. Even if her autobiography has proven a tougher sell, what I've learned online has made me want to delve back to it. She seems like a writer who didn't just sit back and observe life going on around her, but one who continually tested her limits.
I wonder if she ever surfed at Beacon Cove?
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