E-Matura | LiC | Multiple Choice | B2 | Agatha Christie’s private life

Some years ago, in a little market town on the cusp of Berkshire and Oxfordshire, a lady used to go shopping. Her house was (0) asideset backin frontset apart from a road just outside the town, and she used to take that road into the town centre.

She might stop at the Nag’s Head for a cup of tea, before visiting the department store and (1) consequentlyactuallyconstantlypossibly the chemist.

In the evenings, she might go to the Masonic Hall for a play or a pantomime; she had been (2) persuadedannouncedtalked overtalked about to become the President of the local amateur dramatic society,

as long as she didn’t have to (3) bring upmakeanswerset up any speeches.

If this doesn’t sound like the best-selling novelist of all time, you (4) may be overwhelmedmight be annoyedmight be surprisedmay be irritated. The lady in question was known in Wallingford as Mrs Mallowan; to the rest of the world, she was Agatha Christie.

In a pre- internet, pre-email, pre-Twitter world, Agatha found her perfect space a few miles from Oxford and some way west of London, with (5) a means ofeffectivelyrelativelya lack of poor transport connections,

meaning she was (6) not acceptingunlikely to receiverarely obtainingfailing to welcome many visitors. Here, where she bought Winterbrook House in 1934,

she could work on her (7) latestlastactualrecent murder mystery or romantic novel, and relax with her second husband Max Mallowan.

Max was already a well-known archaeologist and Agatha loved (8) moving withworking withassistingaccompanying him to digs in the Near East for several months each year.

But Wallingford was something else and, as Max acknowledged many years later, (9) officialfellowpeerrelated residents helped Agatha

to enjoy her new home by (10) treatingreferringcallingnaming her as Mrs Mallowan, respecting her privacy and enabling her to get on with writing. It’s hard to imagine, in our era when JK Rowling tweets her thoughts most days to millions of followers, that a famous writer could crave privacy, but Agatha did, and it’s to the great credit of Wallingford that she found it here. Agatha and Max lived at Winterbrook for 42 years and now share a gravestone in the church in nearby Cholsey.