In 1973, Brian Thompson kissed the impossibly glamorous Elizabeth North for the first time, in a busy supermarket car park along the Leeds ring road. This is the story of the unexpectedly joyous consequences – ones to baffle many, not least themselves – until her death, aged 78.
Both were writers, though very different in ambition and achievement. They came from opposite ends of the social register – she an Admiral’s daughter, he the descendant of unruly Cockney eccentrics. She was by nature a solitary (though one with four children). He was loud, incurably facetious – and needy.
‘It’s you and me, girl. It’s only ever about you and me,’ he once told her much too fervently.
‘Yes,’ she replied with her biting honesty. ‘Yes – with the usual reservations.’
From a tiny Harrogate terrace, to the deeply un-picturesque French farmhouse where they spent their summers, Brian and Liz battled their way to a heartrending goodbye in an Oxford hospital ward. In many ways, their partnership was ‘an exercise in asymmetry’ – yet, despite the conflicts, they emerge in this deeply-felt memoir as a couple who were lucky enough to find their corner of paradise in one another.
- ISBN10 0701188022
- ISBN13 9780701188023
- Publish Date 4 July 2013
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 November 2014
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Chatto & Windus
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 224
- Language English