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.