ITV.Perspectives.2013.The.Mystery.of.Agatha.Christie

you caught me in my trailer it to me it's more like a caravan near an airport uh but i should explain because i'm half in and half out of character you've caught me during my lunch hour here i've just taken my moustache off and with it on of course i would be here i know this man agatha christie's famous creation i know him so well i could take him shopping but how well do i david suchet no puerto's creator agatha christie is the best selling novelist of all time only the bible and shakespeare have been more widely read so i wonder what is it about her that makes her so good and so enduringly popular i'm on my way to greenway the country retreat in devon where agatha spent most of her summers until her death in 1976. i first came here 25 years ago to meet agatha's daughter rosalind to celebrate me playing quarrel today i've come to see agatha's grandson and my old friend matthew pritchard and matthew has offered me a rare peek into the treasure trove that is the christie family archive welcome to greenway thank you thank you great to see you great to see you after so many years a lot of lovely things to show you good yes i'm looking forward to it going to the library so i tell you what i'm really excited about this and you've got all these fantastic photographs which you're going to tell me all about in a minute but you see for 25 years i have been playing that iconic character that your grandmother agatha christie wrote and because of that my whole life and career has changed but i've never met the lady who was responsible for my my life really in such a big way so i want to get to know her through you yeah what sort of person she was not the writer but your grandmother the what sort of lady was she well we've we put aside a few things here which may give you at least a little clue um particularly one item but we'll leave that one till last night yeah i mean this is i mean you don't you said you didn't want to know the writer but this is the sort of picture that um everybody sees on the back of books yes and this is the first one we have of her this is christmas 1895 and there she is sitting um by a pile of wood with her first little dog who was called george washington and she had this extraordinary curiosity and huge appetite to learn nobody's nobody's ever seen this before outside the family i think i'm right insane it's called the cow slip so this is a poem there was once a little cow slip and a pretty flower too but yet she cried and fretted all for a robe of blue now a merry little fairy who loved a trick to play just changed into a nightshade that flower without delay the silly little nightshade thought her life a dream of bliss yet she wondered why the butterfly came not to give his kiss she wrote that april 1901 agatha miller aged 10. upstairs matthew had another treat for me home movies never before seen outside the family oh look there's there's rosalind there is agatha yes wonderful picture of her it is wonderful picture and i think a little bit of bathing is about to take place yes there we go she's always said she loved bathing and i think that is probably at a place called mead foot near torquay's near torquay but she always loved immersing herself in the water that's my mother i think yes i died if i'd even arrived in the world then no it's great footage yeah of your family as i watched i wondered how had this reclusive lady grown from a curious child into the queen of crime matthew had something for me that might provide a few clues well david they always say that if you really want to understand about a person and they've actually written something serious you should read what the person says themselves yes and i have here a manuscript of agatha christie's autobiography um hand corrected and i think um you of all people should read that in its original form oh my goodness so there you are wow oh what a what a privilege thank you very very much keeping a tight grip on the precious manuscript i headed down to greenway's old boathouse by the river and began to read one of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is i think to have a happy childhood i had a very happy childhood i had a home and a garden that i loved i had a very wise and patient nanny and i had as father and mother two people who really loved each other dearly and who made a success of their marriage and the success of parenthood i read on there were many stories of a carefree childhood but then one tale stood out all children have nightmares my own particular nightmare centered around someone i called the gunman the dream would be quite ordinary a tea party or a walk with various people usually a mild festivity of some kind and suddenly a feeling of uneasiness would come and then i would see him sitting at the tea table walking along the beach joining in the game his pale blue eyes would meet mine and i would wake up shrieking so was this i wondered the first clue to explain the origins of her dark side this is blackpool sands in devon one of agatha's favorite spots i've come here to meet her biographer laura thompson because agatha loved the sea um and she loved to swim even when she got quite an old lady she really got a kick out of swimming yeah matthew showed me some wonderful home movie of her running into the sea and having a terrific time swimming and floating hello hello sweetheart hello darling and she love dogs having played poirot for so long i know how agatha's novels were inspired by the devonshire landscape with real villages and hidden coves becoming fictional places of murder and intrigue and i'm sure these idyllic settings have always been a part of her appeal we headed off to torquay it was here in this genteel town on the english riviera that agatha miller was born in 1890 she grew up in this house ashfield the youngest of three children if her nightmares about the gunman had been unusual i needed to know whether there was anything else about her childhood that might have influenced her life and work she was a an interesting child she was a complicated child inevitably because she was so clever and she was hugely imaginative the house of ashfield which was a lovely house she would dream that the gardens were infinite or she would dream that there were rooms in there you would open a door and there were all unknown rooms in there she always had that sense of a world beyond and i think that worked very well for developing her particular gifts people often ask me what made me take up writing many of them i fancy wonder whether to take my answer seriously although it's a strictly truthful one you see i put it all down to the fact that i never had any education although i was gloriously idle i found myself making up stories and acting with different parts and there's nothing like boredom to make you write her mother clara you know they had a fantastically close relationship i think she was the most important person in agatha's life but she decided that agatha shouldn't read shouldn't be allowed to read until she was eight that's extraordinary it was a weird today i know it was mad it was a whim it was just something she decided that was what she was like she was sort of impulsive and of course agatha being incredibly bright took no notice taught herself to read did she have a class i mean in the sense that there was a class system where would she find herself the interesting thing about agatha is that she she was innately cosmopolitan and she was half american her father was born in new york she had a she had a side to her that wasn't what we think of as this very english supremely english being we think her don't we yes and actually she wasn't quite like that in her autobiography agatha writes that her father's death when she was 11 symbolized the end of her childhood and it also brought considerable financial strain to the family i wonder if that's why in over half her novels money is the prime motive for murder i learned that despite the hardships society demanded that life went on finishing school in paris was followed by a whirlwind of invitations and social engagements in torquay and her official coming out in cairo which inspired a first attempt at a novel snow upon the desert but more important was the promise of romance i think the phrase she used we were like phillies phillies kicking up our heels in a field she had about five proposals and then archie christie came into her life in 1912.

there was a dance near exeter anyway this gorgeous man comes up to her you know how you had a dance card and you mark you don't cut that cut that cut that dance them all with me you know quite sexy really and um she yeah and very good looking her mother didn't want her to marry archie you know she said he's ruthless he won't treat you well and he's very attractive to women it's a bit like romeo and juliet you know the feud pumps up the romance yes and i think theirs was pumped up by a the fact that agatha's mother didn't want them to get married and b the war the first world war began in august 1914 by then archie had joined the fledgling royal flying call and was convinced he was going to die so while on leave he and agatha got married in secret she would live with the consequences for the rest of her life in 1914 the newly married 24 year old agatha christie hadn't published a single novel but what was happening to this young woman's life at the outset of war was to lay the foundations of her future literary career from the photographs that we have of agatha christie the famous one is that of of an elderly lady and one always imagines agatha to always have been an elderly lady but it's lovely to read this time of her life when it was all beginning as a young woman in torquay before she became a writer with her husband archie fighting in france agatha volunteered as a nurse in torquay treating wounded soldiers brought back from the front and helping out in the operating theater for a well-to-do young woman it was an often shocking experience first time i went it was a stomach operation and it was made you feel very ill to look at it and i began to shake all over but everything in life what gets used to it was during this time that agatha came into contact with belgian refugees and it was an encounter that sparked her imagination leading to the creation of her character erculu it was in 1916 that poirot made his debut on the page when agatha began writing her first detective story she called it the mysterious affair at styles i've come to dartmoor with agatha's biographer laura thompson to find out more so dartmoor i mean agatha used to come an awful lot as a young woman young girl and also this is hugely important because this is where she worked out an awful lot of her first book really mysterious affair styles yes her mother sent her to stay here she said unless you go away you won't finish the book so she went and she just walked across these moors for like six hours at a time speaking the dialogue out loud so some of the words that you would have said she would have been through yes do you know when i learn my lines i always have to speak them out loud as well well there you go which it was rather brave of her to come out to an area like this because the the climate can change in a second can't you it really can you can feel the sort of sinister lowering waiting to happen yes but she liked that she she liked that that fed her imagination as well as the beauty of devon the sinister side yes after several rejections the mysterious affair at styles was eventually published in 1920 to enthusiastic reviews in the book are many of the traits for which agatha would later become famous there's a country house setting a closed circle of suspects under death by poisoning the method of murder she would employ in around half of her novels she did i've read that it was while working in a hospital dispensary during the war that agatha developed her passion for poison has created a poison garden dedicated to agatha and her work so tell me all about these poisons when everything looks so harmless it looks like a lovely garden but it's not is it but it is a lovely garden a lot of these plants are common or garden plants really which just goes to show you how dangerous it all is but this section here this is where i've put the majority of my really really potentially very dangerous plants yes yes but it all looks so innocent but then a lot of them are instant for example do you know where cyanide comes from cyanide is found in the kernels of cherries apple pips um peaches that's where you get cyanide from hydrocyanic acid right which of course was agatha's um favorite poison so there you go she had an amazing knowledge didn't she she did and i mean that you know training as a pharmacy assistant gave her so much more background knowledge and i think the first novel um mysterious fairy styles which she wrote while she was working as a pharmacy assistant her favorite review was from the journal of pharmacology and they they credited her with you know being very accurate because it was a very accurate description and the technical background of it knowing that the salt sink and all the rest of it you need a certain amount of knowledge to be able to get you know to talk about that and to write about that this ability to draw on her own experience to shape and inform her stories would become another enduring trait in agatha's work you see already the strict meaning is beginning to precipitate and fall to the bottom in a few hours it'll form colorless crystals which remain at the bottom of the liquid which remain at the bottom the end of the wall ushered in a period of great happiness for agatha archie returned home and they moved to london where agatha gave birth to her daughter rosalind and signed the publishing deal that launched her career she also accompanied her husband on a 10-month tour of the dominions and in hawaii became one of the first europeans to learn to surf standing up then in 1925 they left london for sunningdale where agatha bought her first car a morris county it was she later wrote an experience as fulfilling as meeting the queen this adventurous period in her life culminated in a story i know well in the poiro novel the murder of roger aykroyd her decision to cast the narrator of the story as the murderer broke all the rules of crime fiction cementing her at the heart of the golden age of the genre and so it would seem that at this point in ancient christie's life everything was going absolutely wonderfully but in her autobiography we learned that everything was about to change the next year of my life is one i hate recalling as so often in life when one thing goes wrong everything goes wrong i needed to know what had gone wrong in agatha's life so have come to the golf course at sunnydale to meet historian and agatha christie fan bethany hughes i'm hoping she has some of the answers on the face of it things are going very well her books are published she's got money coming in she's got this lovely young daughter rosalind she's got archie but you just get the sense that beneath the surface there are cracks beginning to develop i think i think archie was probably very damaged by the great wall you know physically and emotionally and then his eyes start to wander and there's this very attractive curvaceous dark young woman called nancy neal who crosses arch his path and he starts to spend a lot of time with her on the golf course actually they come and play golf together and then she has a terrible time her mother her darling mother who dies she was so fun so attached to him and it's agatha's job to clear out the old house so you have to imagine her there dismantling her childhood really all those childhood memories that she's she's wrapping up or having to throw away and she's down there on her own and then archie turns up and announces that he's having an affair and he wants a divorce agatha was devastated what happened next was so extraordinary it was like the plot from one of her own novels on the evening of friday the 3rd of december 1926 agatha said goodbye to her sleeping daughter rosalind then drove off into the night the following morning her maurice cowley was found abandoned at a spot called newlands corner near guilford her coat and driving license were on the back seat but agatha was nowhere to be seen in a near identical come we've come to see the place for ourselves so we know that she she got this far because uh the police report the following day reported having found this this car yes um but abandoned i mean can you imagine it's bleak enough as it is now isn't it yes and so remote is not near anywhere no bethany had unearthed some early police reports that i hoped would shed some light on her disappearance the lady disappeared under circumstances which opened out all sorts of possibilities she might have been wandering around with lots of memory over that vast open country around newlands corner or she might have fallen down at one of the numerous gravel pits that are bound here because there's little tons just a bit further down the lane there and lying helpless in agony or she might as was strongly suggested to the police have been the victim of a serious crime oh my goodness me yeah this is an extraordinary place to come it is i mean you do cut don't you think coming here this feels like a chosen place i mean it doesn't feel like she's ended up here it doesn't seem random no at all i mean you can hardly see you can't see this from the road so no it must be for knowledge yes i mean you can imagine it caught the public imagination almost immediately it became headline news airplane search for missing it's on page three plane scours downs for lost woman novelist all day hunt by 300 men with dogs yeah this is huge it's huge it's huge and look silent pool dragged again they've got actually i think i've got i think we've got some pictures of that so they they they look at them they're all searching i mean i don't know whether the numbers are right but they some people said that there were 15 000 who came to look to look for her you know because because my if anybody knows that people like a mystery it was agatha christie but then i discovered the truth they'd lay in a hotel in the spa town of harrogate and so now i find myself on the train going to harrogate and hoping to find some answers to the mystery of her disappearance on the 4th of december 1926 agatha arrived at this hotel and signed in under the surname neil the same name as archie's mistress and here she remained for the next 10 days in the meantime the search for her continued unabated biographer janet morgan is here to tell me what happened next janet we're not talking about a minor occurrence we're talking about a major man hunter looking for the body of agatha christie and the murderer and the murderer it was an extraordinary story airplanes special constables bring your boots bring your bloodhounds but for the public that didn't know her and they only knew her as a crime writer uh writing these mysteries um huge theories developed so what were some of the theories after her disappearance that here was a woman who wanted to publicize her books another theory was that this was a very complicated sort of revenge so if she disappeared it might be thought that her husband and had intended to murder her and then he'd be tried for attempted murder and possibly even in those days that would be the end of him so how was she discovered two of the men who played in the band identified her who rather wonderfully didn't go to the press and claim the hundred pound reward but went to the police and said that they thought that this might be agatha christie mrs christie the press quickly got wind of the story and photos of agatha leaving the hotel hit the front pages archie told journalists his wife was suffering from amnesia but there was public outcry from those who continue to see her disappearance as nothing more than a publicity stunt the repercussions would continue to haunt agatha for the rest of her life but it was a subject she refused to discuss and i could find little mention of it in her autobiography i needed to see laura thompson again to see if she could shed any light on the mystery i began by reading what little agatha had written but life in england was unbearable from that time i suppose dates my revulsion against the press my dislike of journalists and of crowds i had felt like a fox hunted my earths dug up and yelping hounds following me everywhere i had always hated notoriety of every kind and now i had had such a dose of it that at some moments i felt i could hardly bear to go on living poor woman i mean what is this well what an honest thing to yeah to actually write yeah but that's all yeah so can you help me anyway well where she really wrote about it is as mary west mccott and this book so well so you're saying she let it out in a novel she did she did she really did these mary westmacott novels which are not particularly well known there are six of them she wrote them between 1930 and 1956 so when she's at the peak of her powers as a detective fiction writer she's writing the absolute opposite of those books you know which are neat and tidy everything's resolved everything's you know that little catharsis at the end of the world respond to itself yeah these western cuts are the exact opposite everything's churned up everything's emotional everything's unexplained she's she's digging deep into herself trying to understand everything that puzzles her in real life and she's writing these really rather they're not they're not as accomplished as the detective fiction but they're incredibly powerful and they are probably the best clue to her that you're going to find under a pseudonym yes protected by the pseudonym so her disappearance will always remain a mystery or not it's a mystery in the sense that we would never know what was going on in the poor woman's head what anguish she went through it it's not a mystery in the sense that in in the emotional context we kind of know and of course everything she did to get that man back determined that she would never get him back because a private tragedy became this public sensation and i think that's as good as explanation as you're going to get really agatha and archie were divorced in 1928 in harrogate's turkish spa i reflected on what i'd learned it must have been a dreadful period in agatha's life i imagine most of us have got to the stage where you can't think straight anymore and you get that tight band around the head i know i have i don't think we'll ever know what really happened but what we do know is that this whole painful experience was to be the beginning of a new phase in the life of agatha christie it's as though she wanted to just slam the door on it all and well she describes it quite vividly in her autobiography i knew that the only hope of starting again was to go right away from all the things that had wrecked life for me there could be no peace for me in england now after all i had gone through on the next leg of my journey i'd have to go further afield to find out what happened when agatha left england on a voyage that would change her life in more ways than one istanbul a city where it said that east meets west in 1928 following her divorce from archie agatha christie was craving adventure so on a whim came to istanbul on the orient express on route to baghdad it marked the beginning of a love affair with the east that would last for over 40 years one which would have a profound effect on her life and writing and it was her use of exotic locations and stories like death on the nile and murder on the orient express that really set her apart from her contemporaries i'm meeting barbara nadel otherwise known as the queen of turkish crime writing though born in london most of barbara's stories are set in istanbul and her novels have been strongly influenced by agatha christie station where both agatha and puerto once boarded the orient express i wanted to know more about this period in agatha's life and the effect it had on her readers back home what was your introduction to agatha christie we had her books at home so i just picked them up when i was a kid and started reading them oh these are good and when you're quite a young child you don't think too much about it but as i got older i started reading more crime fiction but i always went back to agatha christie because i think apart from anything else one of the extra dimensions that she brings to crime fiction that was so extraordinary at that time was you've got this sort of english coziness about it but you've also got this edge not just in terms of the plots but and her sort of psychological development of the characters but also the edge of she went abroad you know she set mysteries in places like iraq and egypt and these were places that i mean at the time britain had an empire so british people were aware of these places but they didn't go to these places unless they went with the army but i mean that was a different thing so interesting yes yes it is yeah she's a lot more she's a lot more fascinating than you know i think people get this idea oh little english lady she was a hell of a lot more than that yes she was a real adventurous it was on that trip that agatha went to her first archaeological dig and she was fascinated by it and it was through this new interest that she was introduced to a young archaeologist called max malowin who became the love of her life this is how max remembered their meeting the woolies who wrote imperious people ordered me to take her on a conducted tour over a large part of iraq and this i did with pleasure but it was on that journey that i realized that she would make as i thought a wonderful companion in life was stuck in the sand and she took it all in her stride with the utmost good humor agatha and max were married in september 1930 and throughout her life she regularly accompanied him on digs to the east the sights and sounds ever inspiring the plots and locations of her stories poor little beggar he's about six years old i'd say sent into the next world with nothing but a little pot and a couple of bead necklaces now perhaps that is all any of us need mosel johnson having come to istanbul i could understand why agatha had been so drawn to the east and why it had left such an indelible mark on her heart but home for agatha was in england by the time of her marriage to max she had already had over a dozen books published then came the murder at the vicarage the first novel to feature her new creation an elderly spencer called miss marple whose shrewd intelligence and ability to see the worst in everyone she based upon her own grandmother it's my palm did you know that mrs estrange visited the colonel on the afternoon before the murder dr haydon drove her up now i find that very interesting don't you i think it would be a good idea miss marple if i'd drop around later and had the whole story from you oh sure you're far too busy to listen to my little ideas inspector no one can accuse me of not being thorough indeed in the late 1930s agatha's work began to develop a new emotional complexity drawn from personal experience like the poirot story sad cyprus which i remember touched on themes of love and adultery that decade agathera max bought several properties including their beloved greenway in devon but for them like for so many people peace was about to be shattered i have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with germany along with other country houses greenway was requisitioned during the war max was sent to north africa with the raf so agatha went to london and worked once again in a hospital dispensary she turned down an offer to write wartime propaganda for the government but instead amidst the air raids wrote more crime fiction than ever before and in stories like evil under the sun the reassurance the good would prevail inspired her readers she was like the vera lin of the literary world i've come to watch a wartime propaganda film with one-time air raid warden elaine kidwell does this bring back memories for you yes yes apparently i was the youngest warden in the united kingdom but that's because i lied about my age they said how old are you elaine i said 17 and two months right he said you're in your 18th year and then in the wartime we bend the rules what did you do to have some form of escape for yourself during the war i used to read and i loved agatha christie and her oh her books are wonderful because although there were crimes to what was going on in the world they were gentle and i know what was so funny was um if little boys got to know about um poirot they would be trying to walk like him you know because he was a hero you know because he he worked things out and he had justice for everyone she had justice for everyone in every one of her books didn't she by 1950 it was estimated that agatha christie had sold over 50 million books worldwide but still there was no slowing her down that decade saw the opening of her most famous play the mousetrap on the play's 10th anniversary in 1962 she gave this rare interview do you think the mars trap is the best play that's ever run in london mrs christie oh i'd hardly say that no not by a long way why has it been so phenomenally successful then well dad again i don't know people like it but who can say why how many years would you give the mousetrap yet i wouldn't like to prophesy i wonder what she'd think if she knew it was still running today the 1960s were the age of the paperback writer and in a highly competitive market cover design was becoming quite literally a work of art in 1962 artist tom adams entered into a unique creative partnership with agatha christie that resulted in over 100 paperback cover paintings david hello hello come in come here thank you very very much david come and see some of my pictures you probably recognize most of them oh that one halloween party halloween party yes oh my goodness look what you've done though that almost looks photographic that girl when you compare it to the pumpkins yes there and the witch yeah i enjoy doing that one house tom could you explain to me your process of developing an image what the publisher in fact wanted was to take the cover more seriously uh and i would read the book at least three times i would actually make notes do sketches underline certain passages certain objects which if possible would be true to the story but not necessarily illustrate the story an object which would be which would symbolize or represent a theme in the book and so the first one i did uh was a murderers announced that was in 1962. so and i've been doing them well up to the last one which was miss markle's final cases about 20 years later wow but you obviously love it don't you i do love it and i do the extraordinary thing is that i really love agatha christie's work i mean when i first started doing her covers like everybody else you know we all have read agatha christie's from time to time but i didn't think too much she never herself never claimed them to be great works of literature but as i got to read more and more of them i realized what in fact what a great writer she is did you ever meet agatha christie no i didn't but in in retrospect i'm quite glad i didn't meet her because i then got to know her more intimately through her work yes whereas if i'd met her she would have had to say well i don't like this cover very much and i would have had to you know either defend it or else um be in be worried that she didn't like some of them yes so i think in the end it was quite a good thing that i didn't meet her i think i have a very similar reaction yes i've always said i wished i had met her and on so many many levels i do wish i'd met her yeah but uh my own vanity as an actor would have been terrified to me and most upset to have been told i didn't like you in that story well i think you would have found that she would have been absolutely amazed and and in great wonder it's your interpretation of choir no question about that it's been a wonderful experience not only to do the covers but to to talk to you who are so as intimately connected to this grand old lady as we as i we're very linked very linked yeah indeed since the publication of her first book back in 1920 agatha christie has remained enduringly popular so i wondered finally what might have been the secret of her continuing success the answer may lie in the notebooks that she used to plutter stories books that were only discovered in 2005. to find out their secrets i'm going to burr island to meet the man who has a detailed knowledge of their contents lifelong agatha christie devotee john curran john having studied these books in such a forensic manner you told me you were going to bring one for me to see i did have you now this is one of the more impressive notebooks as you can see because it's quite substantial and it has a and it has a black a hard cover and this is the notebook for the the book that we now know as and then there were none because it went through quite a few title changes before the age of political correctness and this is an example of one where i think she did a lot of the plotting beforehand because the plot runs quite smoothly so here we have vera claythorne she's a character in the book we have the judge he's a character we have a doctor and here we have captain and mrs linyard now they're not in the book so this they were a couple that she toyed with including in the book and the interesting thing about it is because as everybody knows there are ten characters in this book but at some stage in the notebooks she has either eight or twelve characters for whatever reason but the the the plot of the of the book is followed fairly closely by the plot of the in the notebook then she turned every notebook upside down and wrote from the back so here we have household accounts and as you can see she has more household accounts bus and tube clothes and then we have more notes for books this is actually part of the dramatization of chimneys because of chimneys so you can see the notebooks were completely random i think the reason for the random note and for the illegibility is because she had so many ideas running through her mind she just had to get them down as fast as she possibly could and it suddenly made me realize this woman who wrote all these books that everybody finds so easy to read actually worked really hard to create books that are simple to read she's the perfect example of the art that conceals art why then does she outshine nearly every single other contemporary crime writer well i think he can omit nearly she does outshine and i think if you have to boil it down and just confine me to one word i think it's because her plots when you analyze them are simple so everybody can understand that doesn't matter about your level of education whether you left school at 14 or whether you're a nuclear physicist you can understand where she's coming from and i think that is really the secret of her success her simplicity day magatha christie died peacefully at home in 1976 at the age of eighty-five as hercules i've sold many of her mysteries but there are so many conundrums in her own story that she's been the most difficult of characters for me to unravel sure most people when they think of christie what comes to their mind is one of the most successful english crime writers in history whose books are sold in over a hundred countries films made television series made and so forth but making this program has allowed me to go into my own terms backstage and enter another world so what what do i come away with a very warm person who loved her family who was enormously positive a person above all a person who was very thankful and grateful for her life if i'd met her would i have learnt any more i wonder i think i would have come away thinking she was still very much a mystery i don't say i don't want to live longer because anyone who enjoys life who has a strong feeling for the pleasures just to be a life of waking up knowing it's another day welcoming son or wind or even a nice hot breakfast from the smell of coffee you can't want to die when you feel like that and perspectives continues next sunday when actor warrick davis tells the true story of the seven dwarfs of auschwitz well with st patrick's day nearly over for another year we keep the celebrations going tomorrow night with a brand new series james nesbits ireland at 8.