My hero: Margaret Forster by Valerie Grove

Margaret Forster was a cornerstone of my life for 40 years. Our first brief encounter was in 1970 at a George Weidenfeld party for her husband, writer and journalist Hunter Davies; she looked beautiful and bored. I’d just reviewed her latest book, Fenella Phizackerley, one of those light novels she effortlessly wrote every year: I’d loved it. “Did you?” she said scornfully. “It was rubbish.”

Flattery, to her, was “simpering”.

But six years later we met on Hampstead Heath as I was wheeling my first pram. And so I passed into her approved sphere of interest: a family, in the neighbourhood of NW5. Her curiosity about me and my eventual four children (and mine about her, and her three) forged a link that lasted until death. She was my confidante, and when she was in the Lake District, we were penfriends. She dedicated her novel, Lady’s Maid, about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Gateshead-born maid, Wilson, to me: “For Valerie Grove, another hard-working lass from the north-east.” I dedicated my first biography, Dear Dodie, to her.

Some found her intimidating, and she was: unsociable, solitary but intensely riveted by people. In the neighbourhood, she was the white witch to whom women came to confess: leaving a husband, having an abortion, a love child, a lesbian lover. Dramas happened, even at home. She never small-talked, often recoiled from kisses (except Hunter’s), could be crushing. When she was on the Arts Council, Richard Hoggart told her he was writing his memoirs. She asked “Why?”

She knew I preferred her biographies and memoirs to her fiction, and when I mentioned her latest novel, How to Measure a Cow, she hissed from her hospice bed: “Put. That. Down.” The last book I gave her was some JB Priestley essays, for a collection I’m editing. Within two days, she sent me, in a heartbreakingly shaky left hand, her favourites: two were “Old Age” and “Happiness”.