In the first interview with authors featured at Benderloch’s Bookends Festival next month, we meet Graeme Pagan, co-author of a beautifully written book on bereavement called Don’t Mention The Coal Scuttle.
The two authors, old friends Graeme Pagan and Alison Pringle, met again by chance on a bus in Inveraray in 2010, three weeks after Graeme’s wife Heather had died of cancer aged 57, and three years after Alison’s husband Murray died aged 67. ‘We met, which kept us going a bit,’ the 81-year-old retired Oban lawyer recalled, ‘but then we decided to write a book together.
‘Heather was the love of my life,’ Graeme explained. ‘The first day of my retirement she found a lump and that was the start of a three-year struggle. It was a relatively peaceful end. She never complained.’