I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

Nina Bawden

Categorized in : War Jobs Oxford

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

writing book children

I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor. by Nina Bawden

I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

angry survivor victim

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

tragedy liars people

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

age life-is writing

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade. by Nina Bawden

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

thieves tools writing

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

writing book children

I met my second husband on a bus. We looked at each other and that was it. We were both married to other people at the time and behaved badly, but we didn't seem to have any choice. We were very happy for nearly 50 years and would still be together if it wasn't for the bloody railways.

husband people years

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a far... by Nina Bawden

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

living-on hate country

But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run, which doesn't really change that much from one generation to another.

teenager running sex

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

care remember people

I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.

shoes track husband

The kind of response I hope for when I write my novels for children: to give them a chance to recognize something of their own feelings -- about themselves, their parents, their friends -- and their own situation as a kind of subject race, always at the mercy of the adults who mostly run their lives for them.

writing running children

Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose.

confused children thinking

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.

mother oxford school

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

girl college school

I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

mother war country

If you are going to make companies, corporations, actually responsible for the safety of other people's lives, then if they fail in their duty, the only thing to prevent them failing in their duty is the fear that they would be put behind bars.

safety would-be people

I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

cadets raf two

I like stirring the pot - I think it's part of my duty, to shake people up a bit - make them look at things in a different way.

people way thinking

I hope in my books I help children to see their strengths, and show them I have some idea of what they may occasionally be going through. Especially at tricky moments when it is easier to go back and evade things rather than go forwards and confront them.

book children ideas