Margaret Forster died in February 2016 at the age of 77. A year on, this commemoration fronted by Roger Bolton (7 February) was resolutely informal, and consisted mostly of her husband and fellow writer, Hunter Davies, roaming through the houses they had shared in London and the Lake District, reminiscing about the six decades they had together and grimly setting about, as he put it, “dismantling a life”.
All this came interspersed with archive interviews in which his wife talked of her other half’s stubbornness, and, with characteristic realism, of what might happen were he to survive her. “The chances are that he could be consoled,” she remarked at one point. But how had it all begun? Hunter recalled “picking her up” in a Carlisle cinema queue when both were teenagers, after which “we didn’t stop talking for 60 years”.
09 February 2017, The Tablet
A writer and a wife
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