IN early 1993 I was visiting a friend near Kettering when I realised that I was only a few miles from the home of one of my favourite novelists, York-born J L Carr.

I phoned him, wondering how Ian McEwan or Martin Amis would have reacted to such a call, and asked if I could meet him. After expressing some incredulity that I should want to do so, he suggested I come for lunch the following day.

I arrived with a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon which Carr put away rather gingerly in a kitchen cupboard.

Ten years later, when reading Byron Rogers' brilliant biography, The Last Englishman, I learned that Carr was a teetotaller who once handled a gift of a bottle of whisky as if it might explode in his hands.

Carr served me with a hearty three-course meal of the sort you'd have ordered in a 1950s' Lyons Restaurant.

He was wonderful company, and quixotically interested in all sorts of things, especially anything connected with Yorkshire.

Carr grew up in the area and taught in South Milford Primary School for a pound a week in the 1930s, and played for the South Milford Football team.

Villagers in South Milford will be celebrating his life with a host of activities culminating in the South Milford Fete next Saturday. This promises to be the revival of an old feast day tradition that faded away 20 years or so ago and that Carr wrote about in his book One Day In Summer. Other events will run this week, including the opening of a Reflective Garden, a community garden dedicated to Carr with a limestone sculpture featuring scenes of South Milford.

When I told Carr that my sister lived in Womersley (near Pontefract) he rushed off in search of an atlas.

All his eight novels, including the Booker-shortlisted masterpiece A Month In The Country, were published after he was 50, following a working life as teacher and primary school headmaster.

They are all quite different in tone and style and, while he was modest and utterly unassuming, he felt this might have counted against him with critics.

"I'm rather a specialist taste. If you really want to make a big reputation as a writer you need to keep on working in the same genre. If you chop and change, as I've done, you'll lose readers as well as gain them," he told me.

Carr was also a keen publisher of maps and small books as well as his own novels, for which he sometimes bought back the rights from the original publisher.

Before I left he gave me a copy of How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, his story of a freakishly successful village football team. In it he wrote quirkily: "On the first day of its re-publication as non-fiction."

As he stood waving me off, a couple of small children stopped to chat; he struck me as a contented member of the local community, known and respected by everyone, and someone who had fulfilled entirely his potential.