Happy Hunter turns 85
At 85, widowed Hunter Davies is writing new books and finding young love. By Valerie Grove
‘When I turned 80, I started boasting about it. If I get to 90, I will be unbearable,’ Hunter Davies declares happily.
He is 85 on 7th January – so he is halfway to being unbearable. He is practising saying, ‘D’you know how old I am?’ to all and sundry – and he’s bound to tell his readers about it.
He is after all the inventor of solipsistic journalism. He invented ‘A Life in the Day’ on the last page of the Sunday Times Magazine. Another of his ideas – ‘Me and My Honeymoon’ in the Look! pages in 1969 – was the inspiration for Private Eye’s ‘Me and My Spoon’.
Hunter says, ‘Even as a little boy in Scotland, I was the same. I would stand at the front gate, aged four, and, when people came by, I would tell them who I was, and what was going on in the house. “My mummy and daddy are cooking chips!” And this has not stopped.’
His parents, Scottish despite the Welsh name, both left school at 13. His dad was an RAF clerk, and in 1940 five-year-old Hunter and his family were uprooted from Scotland to Carlisle.
The childish compulsion to share his life has persisted through his journalism: whether it’s buying a tent on ebay or being rushed to hospital (‘Oh goody – 2,000 words for the Mail’). Or frying his wife’s placenta when their second child was born. It tasted awful, he wrote in the Sunday Times.
He has retold his memoirs shamelessly. ‘I’m very thick-skinned,’ he says cheerily. ‘My theory is that every three years, readers forget things. So I can recycle all my stories.’
In his 2007 autobiography, The Beatles, Football and Me, and again in The Co-op’s Got Bananas! in 2016, he covered his youth: council house, dad bed-ridden with MS and saintly mum.
When Hunter left home for Durham University, his mother took a lodger – so when her boy came home at Christmas, he found another lad in his bed.
‘Durham,’ Hunter says, ‘is where I came alive.’ Like the late Sunday Times Editor Harry Evans before him – both natural-born hacks with insatiable curiosity – he edited the student newspaper, Palatinate.
That’s where he came up with ‘A Life in the Day’, starting with a typical Boat Club hearty, whose routine involved pub crawls and being sick. It’s still running in the Sunday Times Magazine, 50 years on. ‘In my obits,’ Hunter predicts, ‘that series will be my great contribution to British journalism.’
There was even a third memoir, A Life in the Day, in 2017, dedicated ‘to Margaret, so lost without her’: his late wife, Margaret Forster.
She was the brainiest girl in school, when they met: she 16, he 18.
‘I hate dancing,’ she snapped when he first asked: forthright as always.
When she won a history scholarship to Somerville and left for Oxford, he feared she’d be swept away by ‘some languid, fluent, floppy-haired public schoolboy like Oldie editor Harry Mount’, but that wasn’t her style at all. Like the Queen, she bonded once and for life.
Their 1960 marriage lasted, despite their differences – he so gregarious, she more contained – until her death from cancer in 2016, aged 77. For 56 years, they walked, talked, travelled and swam, scribbling away in their family house with three children near Hampstead Heath.
Books poured forth: Margaret’s yearly novels and painstaking biographies; Hunter’s 100 books on everything from Lakeland to his year following Spurs and biographies of Columbus and Wordsworth. He ghosted Gazza’s memoirs and Wayne Rooney’s.
In the late 1960s, they both had films made of early novels: her Georgy Girl; his Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. Hunter asked his friend Paul Mccartney to do his title song. Macca suggested Hunter write a biography of the Beatles. It sold so well that he took the family to Gozo to avoid 98 per cent tax – the Mccartneys joined the Davieses later in Portugal (pictured) .
He has the originals of nine Beatles lyrics ( I Want to Hold Your Hand, Ticket to Ride, Michelle, The Fool on the Hill, Yesterday, Help!, She Said She Said, In My Life and Here, There and Everywhere). He later donated his Beatles memorabilia – one of his many manic ‘collections’, from footie programmes to suffragettes – to the British Library.
The songs are displayed along with the Magna Carta. The Queen was fascinated by them – as Hunter reminded Her
Majesty when she bestowed the OBE on him in 2014. (‘For services to what?’ I asked him. ‘To literature, my pet.’)
He is great company – an unstoppable raconteur; incorrigibly nosy. Having told us a million times what his house cost in 1962 (£5,000), and what it would go for today (£3m), he expects everyone to tell him about theirs. Also what they get paid, what school they went to and how they met their spouse.
He’s applied this candour-swapping technique in interviews with every famous person since 1964, starting with John Masefield and W H Auden. His ever chattier pieces are spattered with asides – ‘Heh-heh’, ‘Oh yes’ and ‘Yer what?’ – as parodied by Craig Brown in his incarnation as ’Oonter.
At Hunter’s 80th-birthday celebration at the Groucho, we all got a mug featuring his portrait, and danced to
the Beatles, and Melvyn Bragg sang Twist and Shout. Margaret, absent but gossip-loving, relished hearing all about it. On the next day, she went into a hospice.
After Margaret’s death, Hunter couldn’t bear to keep on their beautiful Lakeland house. Margaret always said, ‘Over my dead body,’ when he suggested a summerhouse in their London garden. So he built one after her death, scattering half her ashes under it.
But he was lonely. Suddenly, a pseudonymous magazine column – ‘Old Romantic’, by ‘William Luck’ – appeared in the Sunday Times: ‘Mr Luck’, widower, needed a new companion, to share intimate holidays. She must be 65-75, with her own house, family, interests and teeth.
Over lunch, Hunter made several offers to singleton ladies, including old chums Jilly Cooper and Joan Bakewell, who both said, ‘No thanks, darling.’
His quest unearthed Claire, the former showbiz PR who had arranged his 1993 interview with Jack Nicholson. (Despite Hunter’s late arrival – he’d gone to Claridge’s instead of the Connaught, and poor Claire was ‘hysterical’ – the interview was brilliant, once he’d got Jack ‘to remove his stupid Ray-bans’.)
Re-meeting Claire in 2017, he’d forgotten how pretty she was: a pencilslim blonde with a gleam of mischief in her sparkling green eyes.
‘She’s 72 but everyone thinks she can’t be a day over 59,’ he says with pride. He took her straight off on his annual trip to the Caribbean.
Claire became his hostess at long, boozy garden lunches. Like his late wife, Claire is chef de cuisine and lets Hunter do zilch domestically. She’s ‘a heroine’, who’s already nursed him through a triple heart bypass and a hernia.
He’s bought them a love nest at the seaside: a pink-washed Victorian villa, minutes from the beach at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Their address card bears the lyrics to When I’m Sixty-four, written in Paul’s hand in 1967: ‘Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear.’ Not dear at all: a snip at £310,000.
He will write about all this – ‘New stuff, at last’ – in a new Saga column in 2021. And he has two more books coming: A Year on Hampstead Heath – about the people he accosts with restless curiosity on his daily walks; and London Parks.
Lucky old Hunter, eh?
The Oldie
He asked Jilly Cooper and Joan Bakewell, who said, ‘No thanks, darling’