A LIFE IN THE DAY

(Simon & Schuster £16.99) IT’S Christmas, so here is our Ebenezer Scrooge. Hunter Davies delights in being a tightwad. ‘Something I never do, being mean,’ he says, is hail a taxi. He shared his wife’s bath water.

His Christmas tree last year cost £15. The previous year his wife had paid £50 ‘at a posh shop’. He stopped going to a regular literary lunch because when they split the bill, Kingsley Amis had unfairly inflated the booze component by drinking whisky. Hunter’s wife’s use of first-class stamps ‘made me scream at the expense’.

Meanwhile, Hunter has written more than a hundred books on everything from Lakeland walks to London parks, stamp collecting, football and Eddie Stobart. He has ghost-written the memoirs of Gazza, Wayne Rooney and John Prescott. He made so much money from a book about the Beatles in 1968 ($150,000 from America alone) he had to go abroad to avoid the taxman.

Hunter’s wife ‘much preferred being at home on her own . . . She hated meeting people’, and refused to go to parties, book launches, film premieres or literary festivals. Just about everything you can think of that was vaguely convivial, his wife condemned as ‘showing off’.

The thing is, Hunter’s wife was Margaret Forster, one of the greatest and most undervalued novelists and biographers of the last half-century. In my view she is far greater than Iris Murdoch or Doris Lessing. In 1975 Margaret fell ill with cancer. It recurred, each time more painfully, until her death in 2016.

Because of the grudging, facetious way he writes, the emotion that comes through when Davies describes the death of Margaret is hard-won and very moving.