Voices in the next room

After his father died Blake Morrison wrote an emotive and bravely candid book about him, from which Morrison pŒre emerges as an ebulliently attractive man, but also as a domineering father and an unfaithful husband. Morrison showed the manuscript to his mother. She made no objections, and only one request – that he omit the fact that she had grown up a Roman Catholic. There were people who didn’t know, she said, who might be ‘shocked’. Morrison made the change, privately wondering why she thought it necessary. It was only when she, in turn, died and he read the letters his parents wrote each other during their wartime courtship that he realised how nearly his mother’s Catholicism had cost her her heart’s desire.

When Arthur Morrison and Agnes O’Shea met in 1942 they were both young doctors. She was newly arrived from Ireland. He had recently left the hospital in Salford where she had just landed her first job. A staff party to which he came to look up old mates, an assignation in the canteen, another party where she got a bit drunk (‘whistled’ they call it), a kiss on a sofa. Soon they were writing to each other, and they went on writing, as she moved from job to job around Britain and he was posted (as an RAF medical officer) to Iceland and the Azores, until the war ended and they finally married. Their letters – marvellously expressive of their two personalities – are the essence of this book. Morrison allows their voices plenty of room to be heard, but adds his own commentary, his own deductions based on what he knows of their later lives and selves, his own amazement at the strangeness of these people who were not yet his parents. He didn’t even know his mother’s name: by the time he came along she was called Kim.