Nina Bawden

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a novelist. She published her first book more than forty years ago and has produced them at the rate of nearly one a year since then. She describes her work as a kind of coded autobiography, and her readers can try to trace her life in children's books such as Carrie's War and The Peppermint Pig, and in adult novels like Afternoon of a Good Woman and Circles of Deceit for which she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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All writers are liars, she said. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story. She is Nina Borden.

Presenter1:05

A lot of us are guilty of that, of course, Nina. We exaggerate things that have happened to us in order to make them more interesting. We embroider the story. The price you pay is you lose touch with the truth. Is that what's happened to you in your life? Do you cease to know what's true?

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I think usually I I know when something is developed from a story. The truth has got a bit twisted, if you like, but I don't always.

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But what you also have to have is is a very acquisitive memory, isn't it? You have to be the sort of person who files away and perhaps you have done all of your life, even as a child, all the little details and little tales that you're told. Oh, I think you file away. But I think also, you see, as you do write, of course what you're doing is mining, if you like, your own childhood, your own past. So that the more you do it, the m the more you can do it, and the more you find. I mean, it's all practice, in a way. Because the peppermint pig was was something your grandmother told you about, wasn't it? Well, yes, it was. It's a that is a true story. But of course, my grandmother told me the story, and my mother told me the story, and in doing so they probably change it a little. But there's no question that there was a pig.

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that was a pet, and his name was Johnny.

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There's also no question that my grandmother's

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Mother's neighbour was a lady called Granny Greengrass, who had her finger chopped off at the butcher.

Presenter2:27

Tell me, tell me again how that happened. It's a very good story. Well, she had her finger chopped off the butcher when she was buying uh a leg of lamb.

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and she put out her finger to show where she wanted the joint to be cut.

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But then she decided she wanted the bigger or a smaller piece, and pointed again.

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Unfortunately, mister Grammit the butcher was bringing his sharp chopper down.

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And he chopped straight through her finger, my grandmother said, and it flew like a snapped twig into the corner of the shop.

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My grandmother was a little girl when this happened. So it did really happen. It did really happen, and it had a terrible sequel.

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because she wanted to see the chopped off finger.

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But old misses Greengrass always kept it in a glove or hidden by her skirt. But then old misses Greengrass died, and my grandmother's mother

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or sitting not by the corpse, but downstairs. And my grandmother went upstairs, hoping she could see the chopped off finger, because the woman would be dead now, and she crept into the room, and she turned the bedclothes back.

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And there this woman lay, cold and white.

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And so my grandmother was terrified, and ran down again.

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But her mother knew where she'd been.

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And she said a little later, Now, Edith Emily, you must go upstairs to the front room, and bring me my thread that is on the chest of drawers in front of the window.

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And so she had to go into this room again, where she'd left the cook. It was a terrible, terrible punishment.

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I thought that the poor old woman also had the best uh pay off line herself, though, didn't she say it's all my fault'cause I changed my mind about which bit of the meat I wanted. That's right. I mean it I could never make up my mind and stick to it, she said.

Presenter4:17

But does that mean, you know, because you use all of these stories, that you can sit down at your typewriter, because as I s as I've said, you write children's books as well as adult books. Can you travel at will up and down through your life? Yes. I didn't realize it was what I was doing for ages. Then suddenly I did realize that it i in fact I moved about in time continuously.

Presenter4:40

Let's move you off to a desert island. Tell me about the uh first record that you'll play there.

Presenter4:45

Well the first record I would like would be one of the poems of A. E. Hausmann set to music, because when I lived in Montgomeryshire during the war for a while, I used to walk across the the hills well ride across the hills actually uh and shout the A. Hausmann poems aloud because, you know, they're perfect for that area.

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I was one and twenty, I heard a wise man say

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Give crowns and pounds and give

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But it brought your heart away.

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Bose away and movies, but keep your fancy free.

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But I was one of twin

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No use to talk to me.

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When I was one and twenty, I heard him say again.

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The heart of the woman was never given in when She spaid with signs of lenty and sold for endless rule.

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And I am a true man.

Speaker 36:09

Oh, yes.

Presenter6:17

George Butterworth's When I Was One and Twenty, sung by John Cameron, words by A. E. Housman.

Presenter6:23

Nina Borden, Carrie's War is arguably your most famous book. It was dramatised by the BBC in the seventies about two children who were evacuated to Wales during the war. It's a it's a magical story, semi-autobiographical. But your own experiences, it seems to me, uh when you were evacuated were really rather harsher. I mean there was one very sinister place you were in where you were locked in by a sort of ball and chain. Yes, it was sinister I suppose, but you see, I was fourteen and I had my best friend Jean with me and she was fourteen too. And you can put up with an awful lot when there are two of you and and you're that sort of age. And it was very strange to be living with these rather s peculiar people who locked the front door with about nine bolts, I think, and who wouldn't let us eat with them and served us separately. And we had to be terribly quiet on Sundays. And then there was another billet,'cause you had a lot of billets. Seven. Seven billets. There was another one where you had to wash their dirty handkerchiefs. That was very disagreeable, and that was the first one. And I was on my own there, which made that really quite uncomfortable. But on the other hand, again, you know, you thought this is what you have to put up with. And because my father was on North Sea Patrol.

Nina Bawden7:16

Seven.

Nina Bawden7:20

That was very difficult

Presenter7:34

I felt that one shouldn't make any complaints anyway. In Carrie's War itself, I mean, again, i i it's it's a much lighter business, it seems to me. Uh but again part of it is reflected in in in the reality in what of your experience that you couldn't run up and down stairs because you might wear out the stair carpet in the middle. Well that was absolutely true. That happened in another billet, where my friend and I were not allowed to go upstairs to the bathroom in the middle of the day in case it wore out the stair carpet. And the woman used to rush about like a frenzied ferret, saying

Nina Bawden7:51

Yeah.

Speaker 37:51

Total

Nina Bawden7:51

That was it.

Presenter8:07

Messing and humbugging about, up and down, in and out, wearing out the stair carpet, messing and humbugging about, like a kind of mantra.

Presenter8:15

But you say you took it all in your stride, aged fourteen. We wouldn't expect fourteen year olds now to take it in uh in their stride. It does seem to me to

Presenter8:22

Been quite a dramatic experience. To be sent somewhere, away from your parents, to be stood in a hall, to be chosen by local people, or perhaps not chosen, is is more painful. A very, very dramatic experience.

Presenter8:35

Well, it it was quite an adventure at our age. And I lived in a in a suburb of London that I thought I'd been brought up to think was rather dull, and indeed it was. And this was a tremendous excitement. And when you saw it all recreated by the BBC on television, what did that make you feel? Did it make you feel you were back there again, or did it?

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Well, it was strange in a way it sort of took away my own memories, because it ma it made concrete something that I'd written.

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I had the town in my mind's eye.

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and the children in my mind's eye. And now there were the different children, actors. And the town was different. Actually the town wasn't different. The town was the one I was thinking about. But it does look different from my memory.

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Record number two.

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Well, record number two is the Welsh National Anthem.

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When we were living in Aberdere,

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We used to walk across the mountains and go and listen to political speeches in Merthyr Tytville, and once I heard Anaren Bevan speak, and he was wonderful. And we were all tremendously fired with the wickedness of the Conservative rule in the thirties, you see, and we were all very idealistic

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keen for things to be put right later, and we walked back over the mountains and we sang.

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I can't say it in Welsh any more. I could then, land of my father's, and it was the most uplifting sound.

Presenter11:12

Land of My Father's sung at the first festival of one thousand Welsh male voices in nineteen sixty nine.

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Tell me, Nina Borden, about life in Essex before and after the war. Um nothing to compare with evacuation. A dull business, was it? Well, it wasn't dull when I was young, because then when you're young, nothing is dull. I mean, the ordinary suburban streets are full of excitement and strange people, and you live an inner life, in any case. At least I did, I think. And we didn't have much chance to listen to music, so I mean some of my choices are not

Presenter11:44

Very musically educated. Perhaps that's why we didn't have a radio. My mother thought it would interfere with our homework. And so we used to sit sometimes with our ears pressed against the dividing wall between our house and the next door one, so that we could hear things like the boat race, which, of course, not knowing about Oxford and Cambridge, we were still very devoted to. My mother bought a radio in the end so that we could hear Edward VIII abdicate, because she said that was an important historical moment. And all we knew was the song that we used to sing at school, which was Hark the Herald Angels sing Mrs. Simpson's Pinched Our King. But my mother thought more

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Highly of it than that.

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What did you then have in mind for yourself when when you were a girl in the thirties? Where did you intend life should lead you? Do you think you thought it through? You did intend to avoid the local secondary mod at all costs. Well, my mother made quite sure I did. I hadn't got any high flown ideas for myself.

Nina Bawden12:33

Well, my mother

Presenter12:37

I used to write plays for my toy theatre, and I think I thought I'd like to write something, but what I'd thought I'd really like to do would be a famous journalist, possibly a foreign correspondent.

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You know, crawling through enemy lines with my camera. Perhaps I wanted to be a photographer as well.

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Some more music. What's this? Number three.

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Ah was his L'Acci darem la mano.

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When I went to Oxford, unexpectedly, and really at the behest of my best friend's mother, I didn't, as I say, know much about music, but one of the things that everybody sung, including one young man I was very much in love with, was L'Achi d'Arm la Mano, and I didn't know what it was, I thought it was a love song. And then when I got married for the first time and went on honeymoon to Zurich, we went and watched Don Giovanni, and I discovered it was really a dreadful seducer who who was trying to drag this poor girl off to his castle.

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Yeah.

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How we delight we see failed on air.

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Havert Jammer Miodok.

Nina Bawden14:00

Bye.

Speaker 314:46

Hold her hands on some you fall, not sound you fall.

Presenter14:59

Thomas Hampson and Barbara Bonnie singing the duet L'A chi darem la mano from Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the Royal Concert Gabar Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Nicolas Arnancourt.

Presenter15:10

So on we move through your life to your Oxford interview at Somerville and a story I don't think you've used in your books. You were intimidated from the start by the other applicants, I think. Well yes, they were very grand girls, you see. I mean they came from somewhere like Cheltenham Ladies' College I would imagine. And they all had best clothes on. You know, peop things wore people wore them with sort of gory skirts and little edge-to-edge jackets and and they had rather sort of smart shoes. And I was wearing my school uniform because Reddit was all I had. Your Essex Gimsley. My Essex Gimsley. And I felt really rather sort of out of it. And they all spoke in these high, clear voices, and they went in one after the other to see Helen Derbyshire, who was the principal. And they came out and said to each other, My dear, wasn't she too dreadfully awful? I don't think I could bear it. I must go home. I must go and have a cup of tea and things like this.

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Well, I was rather terrified, really, because it seemed to me that nothing could be worse than these dreadful girls, and if they were frightened, then I was going to be petrified.

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And I went in, and there was nobody in the room at all except a nice little lady who sat by the fire with a rather red face, and she got on her feet and put out her hand and said,'Come in, dear child I've been looking forward to meeting you.

Presenter16:24

So I thought, well, this is very nice, and I sat down, and she gave me some tea and a chocolate biscuit, and then she asked me about myself, and she asked me about the farm where my mother was living, and how I knew about farm subsidies, which was something I had written about in my entrance exam.

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And then she said, Was I interested in poetry? and I told her all about A. E. Hausman, and I thought he was the most wonderful poet in the whole world.

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And she said, Had I read any Wordsworth? and I said, No, no. Well, I'd read some, I said, but I thought he was really rather sort of dull, pompous.

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Romantic romantic Tosh, I think, I said. And she heard me out very patiently, and she smiled, and said, Well, of course he was a r an acquired taste, and perhaps I would come to Wordsworth when I was a little older.

Nina Bawden16:55

Imagine

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Take caution.

Presenter17:07

And then she kissed me on both cheeks, and said, I think you will enjoy being here with us, dear girl.

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And I went. And it wasn't till long afterwards well, not actually, it was my teacher at school, as soon as I got back and reported, who said, But didn't you know she was a great Wordsworth scholar?

Presenter17:23

Well no one had told me. And you got your place. I got my place.

Nina Bawden17:25

I got my

Presenter17:27

Let's spood on through Oxford to your meeting there with two contemporaries. Richard Burton first. He he asked you out, I take it. Oh, yes, yes, he asked me out to tea.

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which may sound strange coming from him, but he was only seventeen.

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I thought he invited you away for the weekend. Yes, he did, on that occasion. He said he knew Emlyn Williams, which I knew was a dead lie. I thought I could spot a lie when I saw what I was doing.

Nina Bawden17:50

So this was

Presenter17:56

Really no idea. Uh he uh asked me to go and spend a weekend with him in Emnin Williams's flat. So I didn't get beyond I didn't think about his motives. I merely thought to me he wouldn't know Ed Emnin Williams, which of course was very stupid of me. But why didn't you go?

Presenter18:14

Oh, well, he was a bit young, and he had boils one boil on the back of his neck. Anyway, he was too young anyway. People didn't do that sort of thing, you see, because you might get pregnant.

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And then there was a a plump, neat, solemn girl with a pretty china doll smile.

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Oh, that was Margaret Roberts.

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Who was to become Margaret Thatcher? Oh, yes, she did become Margaret Thatcher, but that was yes. And how did you get on with her?

Nina Bawden18:34

Okay.

Presenter18:38

Well, we didn't, to speak, really get on, because I mean, we weren't didn't know each other, we didn't mix in the same areas and that sort of thing. But we did Fire Watch together once, and uh I had an argument with her about politics, which I pointed out to her, that she would uh

Presenter18:54

have a jollier time if she joined the Labour Club than she was having in the Conservative Club, because clearly she wasn't going to be won over by my Socialist talk.

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And she said,

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I'm not playing at politics like you, Nina. I intend to get into Parliament, and this is the best way to do it.

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Let's have record number four. Well, this is Bob Dylan and the times they are are changing. Really, because this this was the sixties when my children were growing up, sixties and seventies, when they were growing up into a slightly different world the one I'd grown up with when you where you didn't go up to London to stay in Emily's Williams' flat with anyone.

Presenter19:32

I suspect they all would have.

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And this does seem to me an appropriate song.

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Come gather up

Nina Bawden19:40

People, where are you from?

Presenter19:41

Yeah.

Nina Bawden19:44

And admit that the waters around you have grown, And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.

Nina Bawden19:54

If your time deal is worth saving

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And you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, Or the times are the higher change

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Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen.

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And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again And don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin!

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And there's no telling who that it's naming.

Nina Bawden20:34

But the loser now will be later to win for the times of the irregular

Presenter20:41

Uh

Nina Bawden20:41

Yeah.

Presenter20:42

Yeah.

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Bob Dylan and the times they are a changing.

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Having said that you have taken many of your fictional situations from your own life, your first novel, which was published when you were twenty seven, Who Calls the Tune, is written in the first person as a man who has murdered his twin sister.

Presenter21:01

Which is, you know, an extraordinary subject, an extraordinary technique for a first novel. It was very difficult.

Presenter21:07

I think, because of the war, one didn't really feel that one had anything important to say if you hadn't been a fighter pilot or or an air aid warden or or something at least to do with the war. All I'd ever done was to help on the farm, which is not quite the same thing.

Presenter21:22

And somehow it was embarrassed to write about oneself or about things that one knew about, and so also because I was serious about being a writer, in the same way that Margaret Roberts was serious about being a politician, I thought the thing to do was to learn one's craft.

Presenter21:39

and do it inside a convention.

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So that you could then do the things you wanted to do, with sort of guardrails on either side. Yes, I can see that it would be a a good disguise, as it were, but for someone who was essentially quite timid about writing. But at the same time you've got to have a certain assurance to write about these things about which you know nothing. Well, of course I'd read Graham Green.

Nina Bawden21:50

Yeah, for six.

Presenter22:01

He had a way of of making one feel one knew all sorts of seedy things that one didn't actually know. And by the time you had finished it, were you proud of it? Were you convinced people would want to read it? I just didn't know. I hadn't told anybody I was writing it, you see. When did you do it?'Cause you had two small children both. Well, I I wrote it when I was pregnant for the second, actually. I wrote it at night.

Nina Bawden22:18

What I I

Presenter22:23

I wrote it when I got up to see to them. I wrote it when my husband was at work. I think I did tell him at the end. And then I packed it up and sent it off to Collins. But you were quite ruthless about needing to write, wanting to write, and were determined to fit it in at every odd cost.

Nina Bawden22:33

But you were so you were quite different.

Nina Bawden22:39

Oh yes.

Presenter22:40

I mean, I didn't want to do anything else, really.

Presenter22:43

So you sent it off to Collins? Yes. And then I had a letter back almost at once from George Harding.

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who who was the ran the crime club, who invited me up to see him. And this was the most one of the most exciting days of my life.

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What did he offer you? Well, he offered to publish it.

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uh wh which was amazing to me and and and and money too and money too not very much money you know how much seventy five pounds

Nina Bawden23:05

And

Presenter23:10

Which was of this was 1953, wasn't it? Yes, it was a reasonable amount of money. And in fact, it sold out, and so I got some more money, which was really rather delicious.

Nina Bawden23:11

This was 19

Nina Bawden23:12

Yeah, it doesn't look good.

Presenter23:19

And they called you their new find? William Collins called me his new find. Hetty stuff. Very heady stuff. Yes. Nancy Spain said things like Move over, Agatha Christie.

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How wonderful.

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Record number five.

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Well record number five is Beethoven's Symphony No. Nine, The Bit Before the Choral, which I think is now the European anthem, and I'm a convinced European.

Presenter25:08

Part of the final movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. Nine, played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joseph Cripps.

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It was in the early sixties, Nina Borden, when by then you were an established writer, that you began to notice that your son Nicky, by then an adolescent,

Presenter25:24

wasn't functioning properly. What what were the first signs of his problems? He became woolly minded.

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He didn't get up in the morning.

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He was very difficult.

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Be clean.

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And having his hair cut, you know, was was was was beyond.

Presenter25:43

All diplomacy. But beyond all the normal problems. Beyond the normal problems, I think.

Presenter25:48

Well, we thought so, in any case, and so did the school.

Presenter25:51

And so we went uh to a psychiatrist who said that he had a ordinary adolescence depression, no more. And how long was it before you realized it was rather more than that?

Presenter26:01

quite some while. I mean, he was obviously finding life extremely difficult. He he'd been expected to get a scholarship to Oxford, but originally he didn't. He went instead to Kent and seemed to have really quite a happy year. I mean, he made friends and and and

Presenter26:18

But it was obviously

Presenter26:20

We thought he must be on drugs, and at the end of the first year he instead of going off with his friends, he he went and worked in um Whitbread's Brewery in London.

Presenter26:30

And he was obviously extremely withdrawn and strange. And we went to see him and we were anxious to find out whether he was taking drugs or not. And when we sort of half suggested it, he lectured us at great length on the evils of L S D. He knew people who were taking L S D and how foolish they were. But he was conning you, wasn't he? He was conning us completely.

Nina Bawden26:48

Connie

Presenter26:51

We had always believed him. You know, he was the most truthful person. And eventually he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Not until he landed up in prison.

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He had a breakdown. He tried to kill himself. He went to a local hospital.

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Well, they weren't sure what was wrong with him. And then he got picked up by the police who said he'd

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been dealing in drugs, which I don't think in fact was true.

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But anyway, he was sent to prison because he wouldn't appeal against uh his sentence. Then he was sent from the prison to a secure mental

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Unit at the Westminster.

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and after that he seemed to get quite a lot better.

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We lived with a girlfriend.

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And then he came back to live with us.

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And then he went off to a crisis centre.

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because he was feeling so very ill that he thought they might help him, and from there he killed himself.

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And how did he kill himself?

Presenter27:50

He took the taxi to Putney and I suppose he jumped in the river, uh and he was disappeared for three months, I think. Um and then I wrote to the duty officer at Scotland's Yard uh and said

Presenter28:03

Would they please look for him? I knew that they had got him on the computer, but people don't always look at the computer.

Presenter28:09

And within two days, the inspector from Wapping was round at the BBC to tell my husband that that they had fished him out of the river two months before.

Presenter28:18

Hmm.

Presenter28:19

And obviously I you know, it's the most painful experience that that any parent can can go through.

Presenter28:25

But I presume you also inevitably feel a kind of guilt that you didn't spot it earlier, or could you have done this, or should you have done the other? Is it do you do can you come to terms with that? Well, it's not spotting it. It's kind of little things that you feel might have made a difference, like being able to send him to America when he wanted to go with his girlfriend and only asked us the day before if we could give him the money. Sort of things that if you disappointed a person who grew up perfectly normally

Presenter28:51

You you wouldn't think twice about, but it it's little things that always make one feel badly, and not being there, not being able to help him further.

Presenter28:59

And also but the dreadful thing was is is to see someone suffer that you love.

Presenter29:04

And uh he he died 13 years ago now, yes. Perhaps the cruelest thing of all, it seems to me reading about what you've written about him, i is that that you you couldn't be allowed to see his body or photographs um and so you could never be completely sure, I suppose. And so you went on for some time thinking that maybe you saw him.

Nina Bawden29:17

London

Nina Bawden29:20

That's right.

Nina Bawden29:22

Yeah.

Presenter29:23

You still do, partly. We were we were at the airport last year, my husband and I, and there he was I mean, not as he would be now, but as he was when he died. Exactly the same person with his slightly sloping shoulders, and his hair was the same, and the look on his face was the same. And people say it's like being dropped into cold water. Well, it was like that. Both of us stood, actually f frozen.

Presenter29:48

But of course it wasn't him.

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Record number six.

Presenter29:54

One of the things my husband's always complained about my lack of musical understanding was that I wouldn't when he commissioned things for the proms I wouldn't enjoy the modern music. So I have seriously tried to enjoy modern music. And this is a piece I like, which is by my first husband's son from his second marriage, who writes modern music but is still linked to the past, I think. And also it is lyrical.

Presenter31:32

One of Rupert Borden's two studies for orchestra on scenes from Bayreux's Romance of Tristan, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Rupert Borden. And we should explain that your second husband, Nina Borden, Austin Carke, was managing director of the BBC's World Service.

Presenter31:50

There's um a schizophrenic boy in Circles of Deceit, your novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in in'87, which proves, I suppose, that that no personal experience is sacrosanct to the novelist. What happened was that he crept into the book without my he was dead by then. He crept into the book without my intending it. It just seemed tasteless to dismiss him. It would have been a dreadful thing. I mean, it does happen just occasionally to writers, sometimes, that something happens they hadn't quite intended. But the difference is he just doesn't die. He doesn't die because I couldn't bear to kill him off for the sake of the story.

Nina Bawden32:21

He does

Presenter32:26

You've written too going back to the point that you write about your own experiences, you've written uh about your experience as a magistrate on the bench in An Afternoon of a Good Woman. What about family money, which is about the greed of families to inherit their aged parents' houses? Is is that something

Nina Bawden32:40

Its houses

Presenter32:42

That you felt for your mother, or that you fear your children feel for you? No, no, no. It arose really from something quite else, going to a party where there were lots of people in their forties and they were all talking in the in the eighties about the amazing amounts of money they were making as the values of their houses rose and rose and rose. I mean, they spoke about nothing else, not books, not music, nor nor nor politics. It seemed to be rather dreadful. It doesn't happen in my family like that. And I had no direct experience of something like this happening. But I could see that it could, and it was a lovely fun to do.

Presenter33:17

CANBER seven.

Presenter33:18

But this is something I heard in Dubrovnik, before that lovely city was bombed, before all the dreadful things that happened to Yugoslavia.

Presenter33:27

We were staying near Dubrovnik in a in a hotel that was frequented much by diplomats, and this was the time of Watergate, and it was August, and we were s lying on the rocks by the sea.

Presenter33:41

listening to Nixon resign.

Presenter33:44

And Austin thought perhaps he ought to go and tell the American Ambassador, or his deputy it may have been, that his President had resigned, and so he did so. And after that, all the time we were there, people came up doffing their caps, and it gave one a wonderful feeling of power.

Presenter34:01

And in the evenings we went off to Dubrovnik, which, as I say, was beautiful and unbombed. And one evening we sat and heard this lovely cello.

Presenter34:10

It was in the cloisters somewhere, and it was a magical, wonderful sound, and it mixed with the with the holiday, with the Brovnik, with this feeling of being able to tell ambassadors things.

Presenter35:26

The Boure from Bach suite number three in C major for cello, played by Paul Tortellier. Have you an image of how it would be for you, Nina, on this desert island? I mean, in the deeper sense of of coming to terms with a solitary existence?

Presenter35:39

I like to think I like my own company, but uh I'm not sure. I suppose I would just go round talking to the crabs in the end. I mean I would address culls. Oh, gull things like this. I think I'd have to talk to the other living creatures and maybe they would talk to me eventually. Plenty of material in it though. I mean you've you've talked about not wanting to waste any bit of your life, any corner of your life. You want to use it all in your writing, so there's plenty of I suppose it depends how comfortable I am. If I've got to sort of make my own food and my own fires and and that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I

Presenter36:12

I would have much time for communing with myself. Can I ask you for any idea?

Presenter36:17

How proud you are. Difficult question, this really, but you've written, I think, nineteen novels and twenty, I think. Twenty novels and an autobiography and eighteen children's books. And you're not finished yet. Um do do do you

Nina Bawden36:31

Yeah.

Presenter36:33

Do you feel you've done yourself justice? Do you feel rightly proud of yourself, I think is what I'm asking? I don't know. I don't think it ever occurred to me to ask myself that question. But you feel pleased when a book does well, and and of course I'm proud of them.

Nina Bawden36:42

Would you please

Presenter36:46

I'm proud of them rather than me.

Presenter36:49

Last record.

Presenter36:51

The last record is a Greek one, because we have since Ossyd retired we have a house in the Peloponnesus, and we go there for five months of the year, and of course Greek music is very much a part of life in Greece. This is a a song about Smyrna.

Presenter37:06

And I like this one because it reminds me of Nathphia.

Speaker 337:27

Mest being one fi zuna lulodiyahiya sa mikaras and fises puden dislai losa oses mi karasen fimises pudan dislai losa zmir ni padridamuhi kyo karitami kwaro janna sevaro potonu pota dan tarfiora janna sevaro potonu pota dan tarfiyo.

Presenter38:31

A Greek song called Smyrna. Which of those eight records, Nina, would you take if you could only take one? I think I'll take The Beethoven.

Presenter38:39

Because there's quite a lot in that, and there's voices as well as music, isn't there? So I could play which bit I wanted. Symphony number nine. What about your book?

Presenter38:48

Well, I think perhaps there's no question I shall have to take The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I've been trying to read it for many years and I would manage it at last. Is there a sense of shame there that you haven't got to it? A certain sense of shame. I have read it in an abbreviated edition, and I gather there's another abbreviated edition that is better. But we gi we give you the whole volume. You'd give us the whole eight volumes. Yes, absolutely. Good. Oh, yes, well that's fine. I should be very much more educated when I'd finished. What about your luxury?

Nina Bawden39:07

Beautiful

Nina Bawden39:09

Yes, good.

Presenter39:15

I should like an unlimited supply of nice plain paper, and an unlimited supply of very good pilot.

Presenter39:26

Ball points.

Presenter39:27

And I would will need some kind of plastic folder to keep the perhaps several plastic folders. It depends how long I'm going to be there. You're expecting rain, are you? Well, you never know. Always rain, it's dust, it's sand.

Presenter39:40

Nina Borden, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Well, thank you for letting me come.