My former partner Christopher Hood, who has died aged 80, had five comic novels published between 1979 and 1990, including The Other Side of the Mountain (1979), which was shortlisted for the 1980 National Book award. He also wrote the TV film Pleasure, which starred Jennifer Ehle and Adrian Dunbar and was shown on Channel 4 in 1994.
However, despite having a degree of success as a writer, Chris became dispirited by the publishing industry’s lack of care for mid-level authors, and he stopped writing novels in his 50s, around the time he stopped drinking. He never regretted either decision.
He did, though, continue with his writing in one way or another, and wrote a number of plays, including The Treasure of the Puta Madre, which made it to the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2005.
More privately he also crafted fantastical, sometimes scurrilous, letters, poems and stories for his children and friends. He was a wonderful comic writer, combining acute observation of human absurdities with syntactical elegance.
Chris’s other main creative focus was music, in particular as a frontman for various local blues bands, including in the 1990s with Gutbucket in Swansea and then the Hood in Cumbria. With his gravelly vocals and the charisma of a ruined rock star, he looked most at home behind a mic stand.
Chriswas born in St Helens, Lancashire (now part of Merseyside), to George Hood and Evelyn Hamblett, both teachers. He had an unhappy childhood and found relief in the freedom offered by the independent Burgess Hill school in West Sussex, which followed AS Neill’s principles of self-governing education. Even so, he nurtured a strong aversion to institutions for the rest of his life.
He wandered in and out of a multitude of occupations over the years, including, as he detailed in the blurb on the back of one of his books, as “a messenger boy, railway porter, tea boy, tramp, gravedigger, ice-cream salesman, factory hand, birthday-card poet, decorator, warehouseman, artists’ model, forest worker, shop assistant and window cleaner”. It was the last job that gave him his break, as one of his clients was the mother of the novelist Iris Murdoch. Iris got to see his work, liked it, and persuaded her publisher to take him on.
We were together from 1997 to 2009, and when he was not living with me in Cumbria or Leeds he had a place in Barcelona, where he was active in amateur dramatic groups, including a period touring schools as part of an educational project.
Always restless, he made his home in many places, and aside from Swansea – where he was a noted character in the city’s cultural life during the 80s and early 90s, organising the Swansea fringe – he also lived on a canal boat near Oxford and, latterly, in Glastonbury, where he continued with his amateur dramatics and met Lisa Hellier, with whom he was together until his death.
A habitual burner of bridges, Chris spent his final months repairing rifts with grace and humour.
He is survived by Lisa, his son, Jules, from a short marriage to Masha Kolomeitz, which ended in separation, three children, Jasper, Chloe and Clancy, from his long-term partnership with Jenny Caryll, from whom he separated in the 90s, his grandchildren, Jordan, Holly and Dylan, and his sisters Ella and Alison.
