Nina Bawden

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 1995

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is the novelist Nina Bawden. She'll be talking to Sue Lawley about the autobiographical aspects of both her adult books - such as Afternoon of a Good Woman and Circles of Deceit - and her children's books like Carrie's War and The Peppermint Pig. All contain tales with twists and turns from her own experience - evacuation during the war, her years as a magistrate and the tragic death of her schizophrenic son. She'll be talking to Sue Lawley about her life and books.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Record: Symphony No 9 In D Minor Final Movement Book: The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Luxury: Plain paper, plastic folders and ballpoint pens

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1995 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a novelist. She published her first book more than 40 years ago and has produced them at the rate of nearly one a year since then.
0:39.0	She describes her work as a kind of coded autobiography and her readers can try to trace her life in
0:45.9	children's books such as Carrie's War and the Peppermint Pig and in adult
0:50.4	novels like Afternoon of a Good Woman and and circles of deceit for which she was shortlisted for the booker prize.
0:57.0	All writers are liars, she said. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story. She is Nina Borden. A lot of us are
1:06.1	guilty of that, of course, Nina, we exaggerate things that have happened to us in order to make
1:10.2	them more interesting. We embroidered the story. The price you pay is you lose touch with the truth.
1:15.2	Is that what's happened to you in your life? Do you cease to know what's true?
1:19.2	I think usually I know when something is developed from a story, the truth has got a bit twisted if you like, but I don't always.
1:29.0	But what you also have to have 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.
1:42.0	Oh I think you file away but I think also you see as
1:45.0	you do right of course what you're doing is mining if you like your own childhood
1:50.6	your own past so that the more you do it the more you can do it and the
1:55.2	more you find I mean it's all practice in a way because the peppermint pig was
1:59.5	something your grandmother told you about wasn't it? Well Well, yes it was, that is a true story.
2:05.0	But of course my grandmother told me the story and my mother told me the story,
2:08.0	and in doing so, they probably changed it a little.
2:11.0	But there's no question that there was a pig that was a pet and his name was Johnny.
2:17.0	There's also no question that my grandmother's mother's neighbor was a lady called Granny Greengrass who had her finger chopped off at the butcher.
2:27.0	You could tell me again how that happened. It's a very good story.
	...

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