Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and illustrator. Her childhood in Manchester was rather lonely, but her life as a young woman

after the First World War in London was full of incident and excitement. Often penniless,

yet always fascinated by the artistic world,

she lived the Bohemian life, at one point as secretary to the painter Augustus John.

In 1926, marriage brought her stability,

but 12 years later boredom awoke her talent and

she published her illustrated story about Orlando the Marmalade cat.

Altogether she wrote 18 Orlando books, beautifully illustrated, charmingly written and regarded by many as the epitome of good children's literature.

Their creator, now 96, would like to be remembered for her serious work, but admits somehow Orlando took over.

She is Kathleen Hale.

Why was Orlando created out of boredom, Kathleen, boredom of whom or what?

When my son, the elder son was four and a half, there was just Bertrix Potter and Baba

the elephant and Ardichoni and really though they're superb and

always will be I got awfully bored repeating these things and then I was talking to my friend

C.K. Ogden and I said the trouble about having

children, I said there are no good children's books to read. And he said, well, who better than the mother

to write children's books?

So I felt right.

And we had a cat called Orlando, and of course, to a small four-year-old a cat is another person

So I started telling him stories which I made up

...