[In the following positive review, Dinnage applauds the lucidity and honesty of Forster's writing in Precious Lives.]

Why need the annals of the poor be short and simple? If they are short, it is because (in Thomas Gray's time and often in ours) they live less long; if simple, because they leave little record, and have no one to write it for them. No family trees, obituaries, heirlooms, or even wills worth mentioning—certainly no biographies. But that the lives of the unrecorded are any less rich than those of their betters I have always doubted. Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor of 1851 was a revelation about the unimaginably poor; and, of course, there was Dickens. This century has opened up a crack through which writers can tell us about humble backgrounds they know at first hand: Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, Arnold Bennett in The Old Wives' Tale.

The more such books the better; which makes Margaret Forster's Precious Lives and her previous Hidden Lives (1995) worth any number of impermanent novels. In Precious Lives, she is writing about the deaths, and by implication the lives, of her father and her sister-in-law. One died too late, and one too early. Her sister-in-law Marion, a social worker and part-time journalist who had moved from the North down to London, might not have seen herself as one of “the poor.” But she grew up in a cramped household, her father crippled by multiple sclerosis and her mother heavily dependent on her. She was considered stupid at school, left early without qualifications and worked as a clerk. One day, she talked to her sister-in-law and good friend about the pointlessness of her life and work. As a result of the conversation, she eventually made a huge leap: qualified in social work and left her home town and husband to live in London with a lover. She was in her mid-fifties when she was found to have cancer.

The book interleaves Marion's dying with Arthur Forster's slow, slow fading-out from life at ninety-six. The former is the more brutally painful story, though Marion insisted that she had “had a life,” a reasonable slice of it, and that there was nothing special about her dying. Perhaps to have felt the bitterness of a bravely reconstructed life snatched away, a quarter of a century or so stolen, would have been unbearable. She died courageously—that is, making the least possible protest and causing the least possible nuisance to her relatives. This was the one attribute she shared with Arthur Forster.

Although Margaret Forster makes it clear that in a sense it was her sister-in-law she cared for most, that the loss of her was the more shocking one—indeed, she says firmly that she did not love her father, who had always been as brusque with her as with everyone else—it is Arthur's story that stays in the mind. Marion was a modern, one of us; she reacted to her ordeal in all the ways we can imagine ourselves doing. Arthur, who died only two years ago, was born on the cusp of the nineteenth century, and his wordless stoicism had something archaic about it. Though he was not quite of an age to fight in the First World War, he was virtually adult during those years, having left school at thirteen, in 1913, to go to work. For most of his life, he was an employee of the Metal Box factory in Carlisle. “Metal Box” sounds a good description of the rigid, restricted working life he entered at an age when most of today's boys are pre-occupied with computer games and brands of trainer. Adolescence, that time of sulks and sufferings and fearful experiments, had not been invented. Margaret Forster says that during her own adolescence she hated her father, not for anything serious but for his contempt for learning, his petty rules, his tactless criticisms.

What happened to Arthur Forster? An early photograph shows a cheerful lad, perhaps neither intellectual nor imaginative. Later ones show the man in the metal box, inconvenient edges knocked off, conventional citizen, hard worker, keeper of the rules. But when his wife died, even though since the 1930s he had been paying sixpence a week towards her funeral, he could not raise the necessary £455.12 and had to accept contributions from his children. He found this deeply humiliating, the crown of a lifetime's work. “Can't even pay for my own wife's funeral!”

He paid society back by becoming ever more taciturn (most of his quoted conversation here could be reduced to “Don't be daft,” “Champion!” and “Pity”), expressing a cynicism that hugely amused his grandchildren, though not his daughter (“Mother Teresa? She gets a rake-off somewhere along the line, likely”), and in very old age becoming something of a “character,” always an option for the working-class elderly. The outrageous opinions and rude comments that repelled his daughter, since she had grown up with them, amused the staff in the Home where he ended his days. The very old are allowed to be outrageous, because they don't matter any more; “Isn't he wonderful,” people say, relieved to see a spark of life in the worn-out body.

Arthur Forster kept a diary, in which he referred to himself as “A. F.” and recorded entries such as “Got out Bright and Sunny. Dismantled edge. Big job. Tidy up. 89 1/2 year old.” As the story of his long old age unfolds (surprisingly, it is not boring), the reader finds herself in the grip almost of a detective story: not “Who done it?” but “Who were you?” We get two clues. On his ninetieth birthday, in his best suit, with the remains of roast beef, vanilla ice-cream and iced birthday cake on the table, he cried. The family, as well as himself, were appalled, and the moment passed. On the other hand, there was his passion for “managing.” For asking for no help, for getting through the day, for keeping things trim, for making no complaint. Not a bad hook to hang a life on, when there were few hooks to choose from. “He's marvellous,” said Matron. “He just gets on with it, and the men don't usually—they moan and groan and don't settle like the women do.” Only towards the end, when his binoculars were too heavy for him to look at the sea, he said, “I don't know what's going to happen to me. It's got me beat.”

He did love the Cumbrian landscape (“Champion!”); he and Wordsworth might well have had an agreeable, silent walk (Wordsworth nevertheless preferring a blind beggar-woman to an employee of the Metal Box factory). When Margaret Forster tries to disentangle her feelings about her father, her lack of warmth but her distaste for the concept of duty, she comes up with gratitude: gratitude for the explorations of Cumbria by bicycle and on foot.

Many a child of a working man who had no car and little money never left Carlisle, never knew anything of the beautiful countryside around it. My father had made sure I did. He'd bothered. He'd shown me the glories of the Lake District without needing to say a word, and this was a gift more precious even than ensuring that I was adequately fed and clothed.

She remains, though, baffled by him; she so strongly wants to know his beliefs about life, death—but “He kept his thoughts to himself, either because he couldn't articulate them or because he thought that was where they belonged.” Before he has to move into the Home, she lies awake in his icy spare bedroom and thinks

how awful this was, a ninety-four-year-old man dragging himself round each day, trying to keep his routines going, living by them, battling all the time with the constant erosion of his strength. What kind of life was it for him? How could he stand it? But at the same time I knew this was how I thought not how he saw it. He didn't seem to look at his life as I did.

—certainly the understatement of the book. But Margaret Forster's writing is so lucid and so honest that through her own puzzlement a kind of picture emerges: the ordinary life and death of an ordinary man. Precious indeed.