Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl

Margaret Forster (Chatto & Windus, £10.99)

GOING Through his wife’s belongings in chests of drawers after her death in 2016, hunter Davies came across, as he puts it in his introduction, ‘a million words’ —her diaries, kept over a lifetime. one of the many pleasures of reading this little facsimile of Margaret Forster’s complete 1954 teenage diary is imagining the delight, and the rush of fallingin-love-all-over-again, that this discovery must have brought to the grieving husband.

anyone interested in the daily life and thoughts of an ordinary Carlisle grammar-school 16 year old in 1954 (who isn’t?) will adore this diary and be fascinated by the world it re-creates. I love the fact that it’s not abridged: no selection of ‘the best bits’, but the whole thing, including the endless washing of hair (‘the mop’), the trying out of new shampoos (sunsilk and White rain) and the grappling with physics (‘I don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and all this tommy rot passes over my head about Light’).

Margaret might be ‘ordinary’, but she’s also adorable and full of zest for life. she takes huge pleasure in long walks, reveres the new Queen Elizabeth, reads a book a week and listens to the radio play every evening until her father comes home and tells her to ‘knock it off’, so she can’t hear the end.

she’s oddly fascinated by plane crashes. she loves going to Binns in Carlisle for meringue glacé and fruit sundae—‘scrummy’. she can’t bear recorder and takes against the dance mistress Miss ralph: ‘she had us doing one of those soppy English country dances pretending we were windmills!!’

The wonderful thing is, Margaret did get herself into oxford on an open scholarship and went on to become a successful novelist. she had a happy 56-year-long marriage. one would have wished nothing less for her.