Letters to Margaret, page 1
LETTERS TO MARGARET
ALSO BY HUNTER DAVIES
and published by Head of Zeus
Lakeland:
A Personal Journey
The Heath:
My Year on Hampstead Heath
Love in Old Age:
My Year in the Wight House
LETTERS TO MARGARET
Confessions to my late wife
HUNTER DAVIES
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2024 by Head of Zeus,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Hunter Davies, 2024
The moral right of Hunter Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781837931026
ISBN (E): 9781837931002
Cover design: Jessie Price
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
At the end of almost every day of their fifty-five years of married life, the author Margaret Forster would ask her husband, the naturally gregarious and outgoing Hunter Davies, to tell her about the events of his day: the gossip, the fun, the intrigues and the tribulations. In the years since Margaret’s death in 2016, Hunter has continued to keep in touch, at least in his head. Letters to Margaret comprises a sequence of letters he wrote to her, mainly in 2022 and 2023. They contain accounts of his recent experiences and relationships, reflections on health and family matters, and also shared memories recalled by ‘the one who should have died first’. Ultimately, they show how conversations with your loved one can, in a way, transcend death and continue to comfort the living.
CONTENTS
Also by Hunter Davies and published by Head of Zeus
Title Page
Copyright
1. Ashes to Ashes
2. Looking for a Chum
3. The End of the Affair
4. Meeting People
5. Walks Down Memory Lane
6. Get Back
7. Bypass
8. Student Daze
9. Granddaughters
10. Family Matters
11. We Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside
12. More Visitors
13. More Ops
14. Online Dates
15. Meeting Miranda
16. Discovering Miranda
17. Up the Spurs
18. Our First Row
19. A Trip to A&E
20. 2023 Happy Birthday, Hunt
21. Funeral Fun
22. Op-ortunity
23. Bequia Forever
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
LETTER ONE
Barbados, 1986. Our first trip to the West Indies. Margaret and I flew there on Concorde to celebrate my fiftieth birthday.
Ashes to Ashes
Hiya, pet! Long time no see.
That is not just one of my typical bad-taste, thoughtless remarks, when I think I am being funny but it comes out as hurtful and silly. The sort you said I was always making. This one has an element of truth.
When you died, in February 2016, I did keep seeing you for a year. I would come home from my walk on the Heath, or swimming, or shopping, letting myself in the back way, through the garage, which you always said was stupid as it only saved a few yards compared with going out of the front door. And I was always seeing you.
I would walk across the lawn, then look through the dining-room window, and imagine you were there, lolling on your sofa, your feet up, reading a novel. You read a novel a day, always a new one, usually by a new young female novelist. I knew it would always be a novel.
I would open the back door and say ‘Hi’, still half believing you were in the house because I had seen you through the window.
After fifty-five years of marriage, so many of them spent in this house since 1963, it was not surprising that I imagined you were still here. Your presence was ever-present. Now, six years later, I don’t have these imagined sightings as often as I did. But traces of you, evidence of your taste and decisions, are still all around.
I scattered half your ashes in Loweswater, where we had such a lovely rural life for thirty years. The other half is under the summerhouse at the bottom of this garden. You have probably forgotten that six weeks or so before you died, as you were on your last legs, unable to do any more of your enormous Heath walks, I suggested we have a summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. I wanted it in that dark corner, overshadowed by the ancient damson tree, where nothing ever seemed to grow. I said it would be a good place to have a summerhouse for you to use. It would give you an object, something to aim for as you staggered down the garden, somewhere to sit down in the shade. I thought it was such a Good Idea I contacted B&Q to see what they had. I was just thinking of an off-the-peg, simple, cheapo summerhouse, which I could probably erect myself.
‘NO, NEVER!’ you shouted. You were not having any work done in this house or in this garden, ever again. ‘Over my dead body are we having a summerhouse.’
So I did what you requested. Unlike me, don’t say it…
Six weeks later, you were dead. Six months later, I was walking down the garden and I thought, hmm, it would be a nice thing to have something in the garden to amuse the grandchildren. And when I get old and housebound, unable to walk on the Heath, or anywhere, I will be able to have a little toddle down the garden by myself and sit in my summerhouse.
So I bought one, off the peg. A nice Romanian lorry driver delivered it and kindly took it through the house and dumped it in the back yard. Took him ages as it was enormous. It was in a huge flat pack. I looked at it in horror. I am never going to assemble that, I told the man. Did he know anyone who erected summerhouses? He said he did, in his spare time, at the weekend, as a private job. He would put it up for me this Sunday, for £80. I agreed at once. He said his name was Arnold, which didn’t sound very Romanian. And I have been there. Come on, pet, you have ten seconds to remember. Sorry, time’s up. I went there in December 1971 for Spurs v Rapid Bucharest in the UEFA Cup when I was writing The Glory Game. Martin Chivers got three goals across the two legs. Now you remember.
When the summerhouse was erected, Flora put up sweet little curtains, and Richard connected electricity from the garage. I then had a street party, to officially unveil the summerhouse. All the local families with kids. The younger grandchildren, Amarisse and Sienna, and two of their little friends, did a dance to awful loud pop music and then acted out a play – which mainly consisted of them chasing each other round the corner – while all the adults sat drinking white wine. Chardonnay, I think. Quite smart at the time. Now I hate it. Everyone now drinks Sauvignon Blanc. Funny how times and tastes change. Remember when we got married and had friends in, we always gave them a glass of dry sherry. Sounds so quaint. Almost like something out of Jane Austen.
After the kids had entertained us, I made a speech. I always do these days, on any excuse. Just try to stop me. Not like when I was young. It comes with age and total confidence that I can ad lib and be awfully amusing. And if I am not, do I care? Do I heck.
In my speech, I revealed that half of your ashes are buried under the summerhouse. I then recalled what you had said – about how you were having a summerhouse over your dead body. Some of the older, stuffier neighbours made faces, but most people laughed. Yes, another bad-taste joke, I am afraid.
These days, walking up the garden and into the house, I don’t see you as often as I did back in 2016. But walking the other way, out of the house and down the garden and into the mews, I pass the summerhouse and I always think, I hope Marg is keeping an eye on me.
Today, in fact, I have three summerhouses. Daft, I know. And, oh God, I have bought another house. I can’t wait to tell you all the things I have done since you died – the places I have been, the ladies I have entertained in this very house, my various health dramas. I am sure you will be appalled by some of my behaviour.
But I hope you will enjoy it, my darling, when I tell you every little detail of what has happened to me since 2016. You always loved it when I came home and told you what had happened on the bus. ‘Guess what, coming home on the C2 today – no, hold on, it is now the 88, or was it the 214…?’ And you would shout at me: ‘I don’t care which bus it was! Just get on with the bloody story!’
You chose a pretty good time to scarper, back in 2016. You have missed very little since. You have avoided Brexit, Trump, Covid, Boris, Ukraine, Truss – don’t ask who she was, everyone has already forgotten – economic crises, political corruption, police misconduct, inflation, shortage of avocados, the UK falling in all the world leagues – we are now down to nineteenth in the 2023 World Happiness Report, behind Iceland! Oh God, so many awful dreary things. You have been well out of it.
I find it hard to think of many cheerful or uplifting national happenings and world events since 2016. The England women’s team winning the Euro football championship in 2022, that was good – and it certainly did cheer me up. You would have enjoyed the Queen s funeral later the same year. ‘Enjoy’ is perhaps not the word, but you know what I mean. You always found state occasions and royal pomp and circumstance entertaining. And you were an expert on the Royal Family, could spot and give the age of even the minor members, which always surprised some people, given your image of being a serious literary lady.
I hope by writing mainly about my life since you went, and about the family, and our friends, and the house, not forgetting the tortoise, I’ll be able to entertain and inform and amuse you. There have been some changes, and some surprises and unexpected turns of events. Perhaps some of my recent behaviour might even appal you, but I will take that chance. You do know me…
So, here goes… Please do concentrate xxx
LETTER TWO
Margaret as a little girl in Carlisle, aged five. Wistful, but doesn’t she look bright?
Looking for a Chum
Hi again, Marg.
You did like gossip and chat, which used to surprise some people. But I knew how you loved EastEnders and Casualty, which I have never watched in my life – and loved me going out and coming home with all the goss. You liked hearing it, but you did not like foraging for it. I was always the social one, talking to everyone. You were more private. I often observed what you did if you were walking down our street and saw a neighbour coming the other way. You would pretend to have forgotten something, and turn back the other way, or cross over the street. There was always enough going on in your head, imagining other lives, to keep you amused, occupied and stimulated. Unlike me. I need the stimulus of other people.
It was quite a help to you, I suppose, in your last couple of housebound years. You never complained, never said you missed company. All you really wanted was your family – and another new novel to read. I am so different. I yell and wave at people in the street when they are miles away and have not seen me yet. ‘How are you?’ ‘How are you doing?’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I like your new hairdo.’ If I see a hole in the ground, workmen digging, a crowd of people gathered, I rush to have a gawp and ask what’s going on. Then come home and give you the gen.
I suppose that is the biggest thing I have missed these last six years – having you to talk to, to tell things to, then listen to your reactions and opinions. I could never quite predict how you would react, but in those fifty-five years – sixty, counting our courting years – we never actually stopped talking. Who says ‘courting’ these days? The word feels positively archaic. Most evenings when I am here in this house on my own, having my lonesome meal, I look down on myself from the ceiling and I think: ‘How did this happen?’ How come I am on my own in this house? No one to talk to, walk with, cuddle in bed, moan to. I am not lonely, but I am alone. And I still don’t like it.
God knows, I have tried to get a companion, female of course, someone to share things with, possibly my life. And for a while, I got pretty near to achieving it. And perhaps I have now. To learn more about that, you’ll have to read on.
I remember saying to you in the hospice, when I was moaning on about being on my own in the house for four weeks, which had seemed like a lifetime, how lonely I was… You looked at me, through me, really, as you always knew me so well. And you sighed. ‘You will be fine. I have no worries about you at all, least of all about you being lonely.’
I have often thought of your words since. They cheer me up when nothing seems to have been happening, or I am bored, or my ideas and projects and approaches are being rejected. In your last six years, when you started all the awful treatment and drugs, after the cancer had got into your spine, you could not go on a plane anymore, but you encouraged me to go on my own to the West Indies each January, as we had always done since 1986.
We first went there on my fiftieth birthday: 7 January 1986. All my birthdays in my childhood and youth had been in the freezing cold of our Carlisle council house, which was so parky that if you put your bare feet on the linoleum floor, you could be stuck there till spring. As you will remember. I shared the bed with my younger brother Johnny, who did at least help to warm the bed a bit.
We went to the West Indies, to Cobblers Cove in Barbados, and then returned, year after year, for about a quarter of a century. ‘You must go,’ you said. ‘I don’t want to have your life ruined as well as mine. Please go. I don’t care what you do there… as long as you come back.’ So for six years I went to the Caribbean every January on my own. I had a good time as I knew so many of the regulars who always went for the same few weeks. They always invited me to their table for supper or to go on outings with them.
When you died, on 6 February 2016, I had not been that year, as I was visiting you every day in the hospice. I promised myself I might go later in the year. But I found I had so much to do – there was probate to organise, then getting all your manuscripts and diaries together to hand over to the British Library. Then I had the problem of Loweswater. What was I to do with the house where we had lived for several months every year for thirty years? We both loved it passionately. We felt at ease there, felt it was where we really belonged. You, at least, were a true-born Cumbrian. I was just pretending, having arrived there from Scotland when I was four.
I spent a summer there on my own. Which was a bit sad and pathetic, seeing you in every room. Every time I came in from a walk to the lake or shopping in Cockermouth, I would shout: ‘Hi, Marg, I’m home.’
The house was stunning but pretty isolated, surrounded by fields and fells, plus three lakes within walking distance. I offered it to the children, but none of them wanted to take it on. They loved the Lake District, and had enjoyed many holidays there in their childhood, but they are Londoners born and bred, with their own houses and families and friends who live and work in London.
So, after my stay there on my own in the summer of 2016, as I had no partner or friend I wanted to take there, I sold it. I gave all the proceeds to the children – who went on to buy a seaside home in Broadstairs. You would love it. It is called Tait Cottage – named after Archibald Tait, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the nineteenth century. It is in the grounds of what was once the Archbishop of Canterbury’s summer palace.
Archibald Tait was Scottish born, like me, and was a former Dean of Carlisle. In fact, there is still a Dean Tait’s Lane near Carlisle Cathedral and the library where we used to meet. We must have walked down Tait Lane hundreds of times. Once I discovered the Carlisle connection, I said to them: ‘That’s it, go for it.’ And we have all loved it ever since.
Around nine months after you died, towards the year end, I was beginning to think I wanted to find some sort of chum. I didn’t want to be on my own forever. I would like someone to do things with, go places with. In my fantasy, she would be sixty-five to seventy-five, single, widowed or divorced, with her own house, her own family, her own friends, having had her own career – and with her own teeth. This was really a euphemism. It meant she should be fit and well… and up for enjoying life to the full.
I wrote this, as a joke, in a column I was doing in The Sunday Times at the time, and it drew a few letters. One woman, who lived in Margate, said she owned a fish shop and could offer me fresh fish every day, if I was interested. I politely declined.
But there was a Brighton woman who had written to me earlier, out of the blue, to say we had met many years ago when she was in publishing. Would I like to meet for a drink some time? She had loved all your books and had just read your obituary. She sent her photo and looked quite attractive, but I could not actually remember her. I put her off, saying I was so busy at the moment, with probate and stuff, but might contact her in a few months. How kind.
You would not believe how much space your death got in the British – and American – press and I felt so proud. You would have just shrugged and dismissed it, said it must have been a quiet news day with nothing much else happening.
I was beginning to tell all my friends that I would now quite like a female chum, but I was also telling myself I did not want to get married again or even live with a woman. Just to have a regular companion. I considered myself to be married to you. And I still do. So why would I want to marry someone else? If I ever did, which I won’t, I am sure you would probably not mind. You would consider it natural for a gregarious, social person like me. But in my head, you will always be my wife. I will really always be married to you.
