A Hunter's instinct for a good story

by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Peter Elson meets the humorist and biographer who has brought us intimate portraits of the icons of our age

HUNTER DAVIES makes much of the fact that his wife, award-winning novelist Margaret Forster, tends to hog the lion's share of housework, cooking and other domestic delights.

So when I arrive at their beguiling Lake District summer home - a whitewashed 1860 former carpenter's cottage at Loweswater - it was no surprise that Margaret Forster was heard, but not seen.

The sound of vigorous vacuuming interspersed by various crashes and bumps floated downstairs to where the men were discussing the important issues of life as Carlisle's greatest living belle lettriste got on with her physical chores.

Either that or the acclaimed authoress was torturing her word-processor with the Hoover for perhaps refusing to regurgitate a potential Booker prize passage.

Meantime, in spite of self-proclaimed shortcomings in the domestic god department, Davies efficiently creates a cup of tea for me and we retire to the conservatory.

There is a slight autumnal heatwave and our man has a very deep tan, dressed in open-necked safari shirt, shorts and sandals. Has elephant hunting not yet been banned in the Northern Lakes?

Overall, he's in a jolly good mood. In spite of being 70 and muttering about his health and operations (bad knees finished his amateur football career), he is working at full throttle and looks in great shape.

Far from this being a Lakeland summer sojourn, before the couple return to their Hampstead villa in a week's time for six winter months, Davies must write two newspaper columns.

On my arrival, the work very much in progress is his Bumper Book of Football for Boys. Never a slouch when a writing opportunity arises, he noted the best-selling success of The Dangerous Book for Boys (a sort of pastiche 1950s Eagle Annual) and embarked on this variation, which boasts a soccer club serial and all the gubbins of an old-fashioned football annual.

"I've had a life-time of rejected ideas and suggestions," he grumbles. Yet his study bookshelves buckle under the weight of his published oeuvre (more than 40 books), hardly an epitaph to his suggestion of enduring nearly five decades of lost opportunity and failure.

Davies is one of our most successful feature and biographical writers. True to his North Country roots, he has written a clutch of thoroughly readable, well-researched biographies about a disparate set of his high-achieving local heroes, such as George Stephenson, Paul Gascoigne, Wayne Rooney and the doyen of Lake District guides, Alfred Wainwright.