by Sally Bayley
I am fortunate to have nurturing literary friends. I want to thank Dennis Harrison, Ben Morgan, Will May, Thalia Suzuma, Sunetra Gupta, Laura Ashby, John Hood, Kelsey Finkel, Stephen Pickles, Charlie Lee-Potter, Adam Swift and Tom MacFaul especially for encouraging me to write this book and for reading it during its lumpen days. Dennis, I followed your instructions. Tom, I listened to your advice. Will, you are the best reader anyone could ask for: thank you.
Thank you again to Dennis and the Albion Beatnik Bookshop for offering me somewhere to read and write.
Thank you also to ‘Ticci’ Randall and Sally Turner too for being kind early readers, and to Emma Hagestadt for her sensitive reading and rallying of my sentences and for her consistent warmth as a reader. Thank you to Frankie Henderson, Lucie Richter-Mahr and Jessica Tomey for being loyal girl-readers and advisers.
Many thanks to Robert Lacey for offering such consistently fine judgement during the final phases of editing. Thank you for all your patience and care.
Thank you to Agatha Christie Limited for granting permission to use material, and especially to Annabelle Mannix for her sensitive handling of my young relationship to Miss Marple. My eight-year-old self is very grateful.
I owe a lot to my dear friend and literary sister Paula Byrne, who has been such a champion of my lived and creative choices. ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will’ (Jane Eyre). You have shown me this. I will never forget what you have done to help me and I always be grateful.
Thank you to my editor Arabella Pike, who has been so generous, supportive and trusting of my methods. Thank you for allowing me to follow my intuition and for your wisdom, knowledge and kind guidance. Thank you for sharing books with me. You are a writer’s true champion.
Thank you also to Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency for her commitment to my work and progress in the world. I am a young pilgrim, so thank you Sarah for your loyalty and faith in me. Thank you too to Alba Ziegler-Bailey for your warmth and kind intelligence and your extraordinary gift for listening.
Thank you too to dear friends who have lived with this project for a long time: Nasir Khan, Marc Lafrance, Julie Sutherland, Monika Class, Andrew Blades, Matt Hill, Nadia Hilliard, Ray Hilliard, Nigel Bowles, Gerard Whyte, Christy Edwall, Angie Johnson, Alexandra Harris, Amy Winchester, John Warriner, Una Eve. Thank you to Jemima Hunt for being an early reader and supporter of this book.
I want to thank my former student and friend Andrew Hay for sharing Agatha Christie with me. Andrew, I will always remember you singing the theme tune to the Margaret Rutherford versions. ‘Very jaunty,’ you said. Andrew, you are very missed. Rest in Peace.
Thank you to Suzie Hanna for all the years we have shared film and poetry together; your imagination and filmic methods are part of this book. I owe you a lot.
Thank you to Liz Marchbank for providing me with an essential part of my story. Most of all, thank you for being Somebody’s Mother.
Thank you to Rosemary and Eric Thompson, and Suzie, Richard and Catalina for all your love and support; thank you for including me in your family.
Thank you to my brothers for your continued love and support; I am so glad to have you still.
Thank you to West Sussex County Council Social Services and their social workers for ‘redoing the paperwork’; and for supporting me financially during my first years at university.
Finally, I want to thank the Littlehampton Town Library for providing me with a free education from the ages of five to fifteen. Without those books I could never have found my way past the curtains.
Credits
Lyrics from ‘Up, Up and Away’, words and music by Jimmy Webb © 1967, reproduced by permission of Jonathan Three Music/EMI Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD
Extract from ‘The Conversation of Prayer’, © The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, published in The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Centenary Edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd
Extracts from the following reproduced by permission of Agatha Christie Limited:
Sleeping Murder © 1940 Agatha Christie Limited
The Murder at the Vicarage © 1930 Agatha Christie Limited
Nemesis © 1971 Agatha Christie Limited
A Murder is Announced © 1950 Agatha Christie Limited
A Pocket Full of Rye © 1953 Agatha Christie Limited
The Body in the Library © 1942 Agatha Christie Limited
4.50 from Paddington © 1957 Agatha Christie Limited
AGATHA CHRISTIE and MISS MARPLE are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere. All rights reserved.
Also by Sally Bayley
Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (with Kathleen Connors)
Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan
Representing Sylvia Plath (editor, with Tracy Brain)
The Secret Life of the Diary: From Pepys to Tweets
About the Author
Sally Bayley is a Teaching and Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, and from September 2018 she will be teaching writing in Oxford as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She is the author of The Private Life of the Diary (Unbound, 2016) as well as other work on Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. Sally put herself into care when she was aged fourteen and is the first person from the West Sussex County Council care system to study at university.
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