How to Measure a Cow review – Margaret Forster’s compelling final novel

A compelling portrait of a headstrong, fractured woman, who has taken on a new alias after being released from prison

“Measure from the shoulder to the second joint on the tail,” Nancy Armstrong tells her enigmatic new neighbour Sarah Scott, as they drive past Sellafield, in the final book from the novelist and biographer, who died last month. “Multiply five times the length by 21 to get the weight.” This offbeat information sticks oddly in Sarah’s mind, signalling one authentic exchange in a life that is mostly a lie. For Sarah Scott exists only as the alias of Tara Fraser who, having served an 11-year prison sentence for a violent crime, has come north to escape her past. Nancy is the curmudgeonly widow across the street, a curtain-twitcher, patrolling her boundaries. “I keep myself to myself” is Nancy’s stock phrase. She makes an exception for Sarah.

Forster’s readers will have met versions of Nancy before: for instance, choleric Rose in her 1974 novel The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury, another unlikely befriender of a young newcomer. “There were no events in her life … only with very few did she have any truck.” Both Nancy and Rose hunger for friendship and nourish rage, like Forster’s own aunt Nancy, memorably depicted in her family memoir of three generations of women, Hidden Lives, living in “a panic of reproach” for “the emptiness of her days”.

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