Peter Hall
It’s been…a month. I’m writing this from the seventh-floor of a Slovakian tower block, on the last night of a holiday that I arranged several lifetimes ago. It’s been a lovely trip (both here and in Hungary), but I’ll be coming back tomorrow to the UK, and there’s no sorrow in that. It will be good to be home again.
My grandfather died this month. He was called Peter, and we were very close. I’ve written a lot about Peter since it happened — primarily for his own website, where I contributed a biography, drawing on family discussions and a number of audio recordings he and I made over the last five years. It is available here if you are interested.
Peter was — to understate things somewhat— a well-respected maker of English wine. That description gives the wrong impression, though. He wasn’t from some huge wine dynasty, or anything like that. He didn’t grow up with all the tools and trappings at his hand. He was a man who read a book about grapes in the early 1970s, and decided to try it in two empty fields, and it went so well that it was what he did for the next fifty years.
Personally, I think that’s much more exciting.
His death has been a pretty surreal experience for all of us, both on a personal level and a practical level. I’ve never had cause to wonder how obituarists work before, and now I have. I’ve had some amazing insights in the last month, speaking with journalists and helping contribute what I can. One of the biggest achievements in that was getting Peter onto the radio show Last Word (he shared his edition with Diane Keaton, amongst others) which is available now on BBC Sounds.
I also contributed a brief obituary to the ‘Other Lives’ series at The Guardian. I think this is pretty much the first, last and only time my byline will be on a major news site. As I said, surreal.
It hasn’t really fit into any of the above articles, but Peter was of course a huge inspiration to my work. His father was a short story writer, and Peter always loved literature. We spent most of the last decade playing a sort of chess game of buying each other unlikely but well-suited books. He wrote me beautiful email essays about Piranesi (‘an amazing achievement’) and The Haunting of Hill House (which he thought he hated, until he found himself immediately reading it again).
Ever since I was a child, he was pushing me into writing, rather than just talking about writing. When I got a new job in 2022, before I'd even started any short stories, he gave me a concerned phone call. Did I not think maybe part-time work would be best? Otherwise, I might be too tired to really give the writing a shot…?
I’d be very surprised if this is the last thing I write about Peter, directly or indirectly. He’s a character like any other — one who might wander in, take over a chapter, start a vineyard, light a cigarette.
So for now I’ll say goodbye, and wonder where it is he might pop up again.