Margaret Forster - Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl

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Epub ISBN: 9781473552555

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Copyright Margaret Forster 1954
Editorial material Hunter Davies 2017
Designed by Anna Green at siulendesign.com

Margaret Forster and Hunter Davies have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

MARGARET FORSTER was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Ladys Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want?, Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses and biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

In 1954 in Carlisle lived an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl called Margaret. She would go on to become an acclaimed writer, the author of the novels Georgy Girl and Diary of an Ordinary Woman as well as biographies and memoirs. But this is her diary from that year; her life. Hers might be a lost world, but her daily observations bring it back in vivid, irresistible detail.

FICTION

Dames Delight

Georgy Girl

The Bogeyman

The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

The Park

Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

Fenella Phizackery

Mr Bones Retreat

The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

Mother Can You Hear Me?

The Bride of Lowther Fell

Marital Rites

Private Papers

Have the Men Had Enough?

Ladys Maid

The Battle for Christabel

Mothers Boys

Shadow Baby

The Memory Box

Diary of an Ordinary Woman

Is There Anything You Want?

Keeping the World Away

Over

Isa & May

The Unknown Bridesmaid

How to Measure a Cow

NON-FICTION

The Rash Adventurer

William Makepeace Thackeray

Significant Sisters

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Daphne du Maurier

Hidden Lives

Rich Desserts & Captains Thin

Precious Lives

Good Wives?

My Life in Houses

POETRY

Selected Poems of

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(editor)

My wife Margaret Forster, novelist and biographer, wife and mother, died on 8 February 2016. It was a year before I got round to clearing her writing room. It wasnt superstition, romance, ghoulishness, fear, respect. I just never got round to it. I was so busy. I did tell our two daughters to clear out all her clothes, which they did, a week after the funeral, quite forgetting Margaret had a wonderful pair of Biba boots, purple canvas, laces tied right up to the knee, awfully fashionable in 1965 and now a collectors item. Some lucky Oxfam shop got them.

Then at Christmas I started to go through her desk and files. I found 60 pages of an unfinished novel, marked 27, as it would have been her 27th novel. It was on the top of her desk, so I could hardly miss it. I should have moved it in February after she died, put it in a drawer, as all summer the sun had rained down through her window at the back of the house and the top pages had curled and the ink fast faded. She wrote in ink, all her life.

I eventually put it away safely, then I opened her two top drawers and found one million words. These were her diaries, which I had never read. They start with three schoolgirl diaries, one when she was eleven in 1949, then at the ages of fourteen and sixteen. From 1973 until not long before she died she wrote a massive diary for a year every five years, filling a whole page every day, all in her immaculate handwriting, each diary coming to about 100,000 words.

They were not a secret. Our children and I knew she kept a diary, but she always dismissed it, saying it was purely family trivia, only about the children, as they were growing up, their funny little ways, not about herself. Now and again over the decades, during our fifty-five years of marriage, if we were arguing about what age Jake could read and write, or when Flora had her first tooth, Margaret would go up to her room and check her diaries. With a bit of luck, the answers would be there.

Slowly I began flicking through. I quickly discovered that though the diaries were indeed mainly about the children, as she had always told us, they were more than that. They were also about her struggles trying to fit in her work, observations and thoughts about our relations, neighbours and friends, the world outside, about herself and me.

Her adult diaries begin when Caitlin, our oldest child, was nine, Jake six and Flora just a newborn baby. They had me laughing with tears in my eyes. They brought it all back.

Margaret, in all her novels, did not really do humour, play things for laughs. Her books were almost always about women, their relationships with each other, or with their parents and children, fairly serious, sensitive stuff, though she was very good on dialogue. Sometimes, as in