In a chattering class of their own

Margaret is a respected biographer of Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Daphne du Maurier but in recent years her subject has increasingly been her own family. In Hidden Lives, in 1995, she traced three generations of the Cumbrian working class through her mother's and grandmother's stories, and, in her hands, these ordinary, rather uneventful lives became utterly compelling. Three years later, in Precious Lives, she turned to her father and contrasted his death, at 96, with the early death from cancer of her sister-in-law, Marion, to whom she was very close. It is a raw, distressing book. Hunter, when he read it in Cumbria, left her a note: "Have read Precious Lives today. Have gone down to lake to drown self."

I ask if she felt intrusive, writing about her own family. "But I've never written about my family as of now, only the past. Only when it's history," she says.

"But you came into Hidden Lives, and you're still alive," says Hunter, devil's advocate. "Only as a sort of interpreter," she counters. But she is an interpreter who gives away a lot about herself. In Precious Lives she comes close to saying she loved Marion more than her own father.

"What I said in Precious Lives, which probably I shouldn't have said, but I was trying to be honest, was I hadn't loved my father as I should have liked to have loved him. I didn't mean I didn't love him at all. It's a common generational thing, and a class thing. I would have liked to have had

Continued from previous page the relationship with my father I think our children had with Hunter." She says, however, she held back the more "personal and harrowing" details. Such as, I ask greedily. "Well, going into my mother's exact psychological make-up. I held back from speculation which I don't like in biography anyway." "Depression, that's what you thought, wasn't it?" says Hunter. "Yes, I think she was clinically depressed and very, very unhappy." This is not the impression you get from Hidden Lives. Margaret's mother, Lily, academic at school and picked out as a high-flyer when she joined Carlisle Health Department, emerges as a victim of her times more than of her temperament. In a painful scene towards the end of the book, mother and daughter have lunch in a Carlisle restaurant. Suddenly Lily turns on her saying it is "nothing to her" because Margaret has lunch out all the time in London. She doesn't, but admits she could if she wanted. "It's wasted on you," her mother sighs. "All the opportunities you have and you don't take them. I wish I'd had your life."

MARGARET writes that she wishes her mother had enjoyed her own life rather than envy hers, but the implied criticism hits home. One of the surprising things about Margaret's life is that, after a brief stint as a supply teacher in Islington, she, like Lily, retreated indoors in her twenties not only to raise a family but to become her extended family's mainstay, convener and, in the case of poor Marion (who, after all, was Hunter's sister, not hers), nurse.

"In a way," she admits, "I am everything that's wrong with women. Why don't more women, now that they can, come to the fore in politics and really change things? The answer is they either get trapped or choose the domestic life. But it becomes seductive anyway. To battle it out in the public arena doesn't attract them. I chose this domestic life, although, of course, I wouldn't be happy if I didn't have a working life, as a writer, with it."

"Margaret flays herself for not getting involved in causes," Hunter says. "She actually does nothing, won't give anything to the community. Whereas in the Lake District ..." and he reels off all his good works. "You and Melvyn Bragg," says Margaret.

"She's a wash-out. All talk," responds Hunter, quite outrageously since he's hardly a firebrand activist himself. When I ask him about how being working class affected his career, he claims he hasn't given it a thought since the long conversations in which he chewed it over with Nicholas Tomalin on The Sunday Times 35 years ago. But his rise from northern grammar school boy to Sunday Times Magazine editor ("Conned again," he said, emerging, poison chalice in hand, from the editor's office) was itself an example of the social revolution of the Sixties. His pleb's progress did not go unnoticed by the public schoolboys on Private Eye who ridiculed him as "Oonter" or "Chunter Mavis".

As it happens, Margaret and Hunter are themselves sure their backgrounds counted for, not against them. "Any-way, Margaret was born middle-aged and classless," he says. "And," she says, "Hunter looks so foreign he would never have fitted into any class structure. He looks, as my dad would say, like a wog."

But maybe class is not an issue for them because they are both now so firmly part of that powerful caste, the chattering classes. In any case, their comparative affluence today makes it hard for them to talk about the deprivations of their childhoods without sounding like a Monty Python sketch.

"Technically we were poorer because my dad worked in a factory and his was a minor civil servant," Margaret says. "But his father had multiple sclerosis and was bed-ridden all through Hunter's childhood. His mother performed miracles, looked after four children with no help from anybody at all.

And she was never in debt. He had a much tougher time than I did."

"I wasn't aware of it at the time," says Hunter.

"That's because his mother always used to say, 'Oh, I've plenty of money.' She had no money at all. She was always determined that they were all happy. They weren't happy. But she wouldn't allow herself to think anything negative. Neither will he. Neither will his sister. They don't allow it."

So this turns out to be the source of the ceaseless good humour of Hunter's writing! In his Father's Day columns in Punch, Hunter turned his family into a subject long before his wife did, but, unlike her, he did not trespass beyond the tactful limits of domestic comedy. "Hunter," says Margaret, "has never written about anything private. It's essentially trivia, all on the surface."

"You miss out all my hidden depths. My cartilage; my bad knee; Jake not sleeping till he was five. Heartbreaking stuff."

"You have never exposed any nerve endings in your life," she insists. And in his life, as opposed to in his writing, does he confront things? "He deals with bad news by blanking it out," she answers for him.

"I don't think I blanked out Marion's death. I was involved in that. I went to see her."

"But for you that was not particularly terrible, Hunter."

"I was in tears. In fact, it's one of the only times in my life I was in tears."

"You've been in tears three times and the others were far more serious."

"You make it sound as if I go away and lock the door and refuse to see people or get involved."

"I say when there's a real tragedy that's precisely what you do, mentally."

"I'm a tower of strength! When you lost your Barclaycard last week I was a tower of strength."

"That's what he does, you see. Turns it to comedy."

So what were the other two occasions that made him cry, I ask. "They are absolutely private," Margaret says firmly.

"I'll have to ask you later what they were," he says. "Oh come on," she snaps, and, weeks later, I happen to learn what one of these must have been. I see why Margaret is cross that he dares joke about not remembering.

But by now Hunter has switched his attention from me to his family, which has gradually but noisily been filling out the house. Caitlin, who is visiting from Botswana, is here with her baby daughter. Soon Ruby is being passed from gran to grandad to Auntie Flora, who has also popped by. Anyway, it's 5pm and Hunter has to mooch out for his West End Final. I needn't be flattered, Margaret says. The token constitutional to the newsagent is the permission he gives himself before opening a bottle of wine.

His next book is a biography of the road haulier Eddie Stobart, also known as the greatest living Cumbrian. Hers is Good Wives, a study of the spouses of David Livingstone, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nye Bevan. Hunter is worried by her auto-biographical linking passages: "It'll be all about her bringing me my paper at 7.30 each morning." "No, I've not mentioned that at all," she corrects him. "He's a great expert on things he hasn't read."

And so their evening and their romance, founded on competing - or is that complementary? - sensibilities, stretches out ahead of them. Margaret and Hunter will have to make up for their depletion of the rainforests by donating their marriage to social science. Their one work of coauthor-ship is, surely, their finest achievement of all.