‘Reading her books in lockdown made me feel safe’: Why I’m saving to holiday like Agatha Christie

 Laura Horton and her friend agreed to visit Burgh Island every five years to follow in the footsteps of their favourite author

A stay at Burgh Island Hotel feels like leaving the modern world behind and going back in time, says Laura Horton. “When you’re there it’s like you’re in a time warp,” she says.

The art deco hotel was hugely popular during the 1930s, with many famous visitors including Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Edward VIII, and Wallis Simpson. “It was very glamorous in its day,” Horton says.

Guests can only get to the tiny island – which is off the coast of South Devon – by water tractor at high tide, or by foot when the tide is out. The hotel sits up above the rocks, overlooking the sea, and rooms are designed with period furniture. Guests often wear glamorous clothes, such as flapper dresses or dinner suits.

Burgh Island Hotel is reached by a water tractor at high tide. Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

Horton has been saving for a return trip to the hotel with her friend Ella once restrictions are lifted. “When you’re there it feels like you’re existing out of time,” she says. “It’s nice when you’re talking to people, to imagine them as characters.”

Modern-day guests can sip 1920s-style cocktails over dinner, or bathe in big roll-top bathtubs with views of the sea. “I remember having a bath with a glass of champagne,” says Horton. They can then head to the beach, or take a dip in the mermaid pool, a natural sea lagoon nearby. “It was hot when we went before, so we sunbathed and sat outside and had crab sandwiches,” she says.

Burgh Island is a dream destination for anyone who loves Christie, and Horton has been a fan of the famous crime writer from a young age. “I found her books strangely comforting,” she says. “There’s always order resumed after the chaos and there will always be an answer at the end, which you don’t often get in real life.”

Horton says she’s found herself rereading Christie’s crime books during the lockdown. “While we were in this turbulent period I was looking to do things that made me feel safe and comfortable,” she says. “And I feel safe and comfortable reading Christie, weirdly, even though her stories are all about murder.”

Horton and her friend Ella bonded over their love of murder mysteries

Horton met her friend Ella several years ago and bonded over their mutual love of murder mystery. “At first, I didn’t think we had a lot in common. Ella works in gaming and is very tech-savvy and I’m absolutely not,” Horton says. But then the topic of Christie came up. “I said I love her books and Ella’s face lit up,” Horton says. “After that, we became really good friends.”

Christie’s books are often set in beautiful locations – from the Orient Express to the Nile River, or in old manor houses in the English countryside. The book Evil Under the Sun was even set on Burgh Island itself. “It’s the perfect place for a [fictional] murder,” says Horton.

The characters in Christie’s books are usually interesting and eccentric. “They always murder for love or money,” Horton says. And the big reveal at the end is always satisfying. “I love those scenes where they get everyone in the room [to reveal the murderer], it’s very theatrical.”

Horton says she can imagine Christie on Burgh Island, where the author used to come and write. “There’s a room with a big peacock glass roof and I like to imagine her sitting there,” Horton says. “I can imagine her being a bit like [her fictional detective] Miss Marple, keeping herself to herself.”

Every five years, Horton and Ella stay on Burgh Island together – they stayed there for their 30th and 35th birthdays. “You want to be there with someone else who’s enthusiastic about it,” Horton says.

Holidaymakers at the hotel in the 1930s. Photograph: Reg Speller/Getty Images

And now that travel is permitted, they’re hoping to go back. Horton is saving for the trip by selling clothes she’s collected over the years. “I’m selling old clothes on eBay,” she says. “When things open up, I’m planning on getting a stall somewhere.” She’s aiming to save £350 for the trip.

It’s been good to save for a glamorous trip during the lockdown, Horton says. “It feels really nice to be saving for an experience I’m going to enjoy,” she says. “Especially something as decadent and lovely as Burgh Island.”

Knowing you have savings ready to pay for a treat such as a holiday can be a great comfort, says Jill Waters, NS&I’s retail director. “Having a savings pot ready for the unexpected will also provide the assurance that you’re ready for ‘just-in-case’ days too,” she adds.

Horton says that Christie would have been a big people watcher, getting inspiration for characters from the guests. “To be a crime writer you need to understand people’s psychology,” she says.

This is why it’s her ultimate dream to spend a week on Burgh Island writing – just like Christie herself used to do.

(Source: The Guardian)

Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

 Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to tarnish the national myth – as I found when hosting a Cambridge debate about his murkier side

A baleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill “single-handedly” defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol.

In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who “saved our civilisation”, as Boris Johnson claims, or “humanity as a whole”, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: “Why do you live in this country?”

Winston Churchill speaking at Wolverhampton football field in 1949. Photograph: Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet because they would be “speaking German” if not for Churchill. Many people want to know more about the historical figures they are required to admire uncritically. The Black Lives Matter protests last June – during which the word “racist” was sprayed in red letters on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, were accompanied by demands for more education on race, empire and the figures whose statues dot our landscapes.

Yet providing a fuller picture is made difficult. Scholars who explore less illustrious sides of Churchill are treated dismissively. Take the example of Churchill College, Cambridge, where I am a teaching fellow. In response to calls for fuller information about its founder, the college set up a series of events on Churchill, Empire and Race. I recently chaired the second of these, a panel discussion on “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill”.

Even before it took place, the discussion was repeatedly denounced in the tabloids and on social media as “idiotic”, a “character assassination” aimed at “trashing” the great man. Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats. We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home.

The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events. After the recent panel, the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, which is influential in government circles – and claims to champion free speech and controversial views on campus – published a “review” of the event. The foreword, written by Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames, stated that he hoped the review would “prevent such an intellectually dishonest event from being organised at Churchill College in the future – and, one might hope, elsewhere”.

It’s ironic. We’re told by government and media that “cancel culture” is an imposition of the academic left. Yet here it is in reality, the actual “cancel culture” that prevents a truthful engagement with British history. Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side. The scholars at the Cambridge event – Madhusree Mukerjee, Onyeka Nubia and Kehinde Andrews – drew attention to Churchill’s dogged advocacy of British colonial rule; his contributing role in the disastrous 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died unnecessarily; his interest in eugenics; and his views, deeply retrograde even for his time, on race.

Churchill is on record as praising “Aryan stock” and insisting it was right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think “black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. He described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”.

Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat – and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill’s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.

It is worth recalling that the uncritical Churchill-worship that is so dominant today was not shared by many British people in 1945, when they voted him out of office before the war was even completely over. Many working-class communities in Britain, from Dundee to south Wales, felt strong animosity towards Churchill for his willingness to mobilise military force during industrial disputes. As recently as 2010, Llanmaes community council opposed the renaming of a military base to Churchill Lines.

Critical assessment is not “character assassination”. Thanks to the groupthink of “the cult of Churchill”, the late prime minister has become a mythological figure rather than a historical one. To play down the implications of Churchill’s views on race – or suggest absurdly, as Policy Exchange does, that his racist words meant “something other than their conventional definition” – speaks to me of a profound lack of honesty and courage.

This failure of courage is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today. A necessary national conversation about Churchill and the empire he was so committed to is one necessary way to break this unacceptable silence.

Priyamvada Gopal is an academic and author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

(Source: The Guardian)