My 40-year friendship with Margaret Forster began on Hampstead Heath on Maundy Thursday in 1976. I was wheeling a pram containing my firstborn, Lucy, when I met Hunter Davies, walking with his wife, as they did every day. Hunter, who had once offered me a job on the Look! pages of the Sunday Times in 1970, which I had foolishly turned down, made admiring noises over the sleeping infant. Margaret, his wife, looked pointedly the other way and said: “Babies don’t interest me, not until they can talk.” (Cumbrians do not show false sentiment, or welcome new friends; Margaret’s dad would cross the street rather than engage in idle chat.)
But what did interest her were families in her neighbourhood. Ten days later, we met again by chance at the shops on Swains Lane and I was invited back to tea. Her curiosity about me and my eventual four children (and mine about her and her three) forged a link. We talked fast and furiously, often across each other, shrieking with derisive laughter, demolishing pompous reputations. We were both reconstituted northerners, both mothers who wrote for a living; but it was the contrasts that intrigued her. Hunter did nothing to help at home, whereas my husband took command of the cooking and shopping, even when he edited a newspaper. I still went out to a Fleet Street office – “How can you stand it?” she wondered – leaving our nanny at home. Sometimes Margaret would look after a child or two for me, at weekends. She never forgot their birthdays – or anyone’s birthday. She sent cheering postcards, consolation letters, replies to readers, all handwritten.
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