A Corner of Paradise, by Brian Thompson – review

Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of stepchildren and then buy a derelict summer house surrounded by vast maize fields in the Charente-Maritime, but are no good at DIY, and they make friends with the locals who help them build a walled garden. They write books. Author is talkative and likes company; authoress prefers silence and solitude. They move from Harrogate to Oxford. One of them has to die first, and it’s the authoress, and it’s cancer, and the author is left bereft and describes the experience all too well.

That, in a nutshell, is this book. Good books about being old but feeling young are rare and this is one. Brian Thompson knows how to keep the reader reading. Don’t go on about anything for too long and be honest. The authoress is Elizabeth North, or ‘Liz’, and Thompson admits that this relationship was ‘an exercise in asymmetry’ — reminding us that there’s no need for people to be alike in order to be in love.

This is the third part of Thompson’s trilogy of memoirs, the first of which, Keeping Mum, won the Costa Biography Award in 2006. It does help to have read this first, because Thompson’s childhood explains his excessive awareness that he and Liz come from different social classes — she the beloved daughter of an admiral, he brought up in the back streets of Cambridge by bickering parents full of loathing for everything and everyone. Thompson was ‘rescued from actual ruination’ by passing the 11-plus and getting into the local grammar school. If you know about all this, you will excuse (almost) his multiple mentions of the fact that he went on to read English at Cambridge.