Margaret Forster, who died of cancer last month aged 77, made her name when her 1965 novel Georgy Girl became a hit movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Forster went on to write 25 novels, mostly intense studies of women’s lives, as well as biographies, social history and acclaimed memoirs. Days after her death, her husband, the writer Hunter Davies, wrote movingly in this newspaper that Forster “didn’t care whether the books were published or not. Her fun was in writing them, and if the publisher didn’t want to publish it, so what?” Forster did not live to see the publication of How to Measure a Cow but you can be sure of one thing: she would not give a hoot what I, or any other critic, makes of it.
Despite the rather mawkish title, this is, in fact, a quietly compelling read. There is an uncomfortable feeling throughout that something nasty might happen — or has happened, or perhaps is happening. Nothing much does. The book begins with Tara, a single woman in her forties, wandering through a London park, “untethered, floating”. A stranger falls into step, hissing: ‘‘Are you her?’’ Shaken, she wonders if the man has recognised her. “It was 10 years ago,” she thinks. It will take almost the entire book to discover what heinous thing Tara did then (though it is clear that she has been in prison).
She decides to start a new life, puts a pin in a map of the British Isles and ends up in a small Lake District town where she rents a house, changes her name, dresses in grey and gets a nondescript job. Her aim is anonymity, but she has not bargained for the elderly neighbour, Nancy, who has lived alone in the street for decades.
Curtain-twitching Nancy is brilliantly drawn: prickly, practical, nosey, both intensely lonely and utterly self-sufficient. Tara and Nancy develop a sort of friendship that preoccupies them both, even though it only consists of a few cups of tea and a drive in Tara’s car. At one point, Nancy tells Tara that she grew up on a farm, and knows how to measure a cow. “It is the sort of arcane knowledge,” Tara thinks, “utterly useless in normal life, which had always appealed to her.”
As the book’s central metaphor this works rather well: Forster’s characters each possess pockets of experience that the other can never possibly understand or use, but is somehow drawn to for deeper, more complex reasons.
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Tara’s new life is derailed when her three best friends from childhood plan a reunion in London. She goes and confronts them about why they turned their backs on her during her trial. With these old friends, her isolation feels more dangerous and fragile than ever; the discomfort intensifies.
Forster is a resolutely unflashy writer, interested in nuances of character and the fraught energies that run beneath interactions. Nothing sensational happens — she would never be so obvious — but the atmosphere and characters linger long after the novel ends. This is why her writing career lasted more than 50 years, and this is why the publisher continued to print her books, whether she cared or not.
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Chatto £16.99 pp250
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