This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of desert island discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Were you born in Ireland? No, I was born in Portsmouth. My father was a naval officer. Did you go to school? Yes.

When did you decide that you wanted to write? I can't say that I ever decided I wanted to write. I've always written.

Before I could write, I used to tell stories and then as soon as I left to write, I wrote stories. Beginning with fairy stories and things like that and going on to more sophisticated sort of stories.

Such as who were the authors that interested you most as a youngster? As a youngster. Oh, I think all the usual children's books.

I particularly loved Hans Anderson and I think the fairy, the one about the snow queen and the one about the swamp.

They've always been enormously wonderful stories for me. And later on?

Later on, well, when I was beginning to learn more about life, I suddenly at a stage in my development discovered writer Haggard.

I think the first grown-up book, if I could call it that, that I ever read, was a novel by writer Haggard called Finished, which was about the zoolers.

Yes. And it was a revelation to me, even though of what reading could be and I became enormously excited about him.

He was the first adult writer that I ever read, I think. And from him, I then went on to people like H.G. Wells and Burnage Thorne and so on and the great writers of my day.

What did you do when you left school? Well, I had to earn my own living somehow. And I'd been taught to type very much against my will.

But I wasn't a typist for very long. I found it too boring. And I went to London and I got a job in furniture studios where I used to paint furniture.

Great days of regency, you know, when everything was covered with swags and earns and things.

Were you writing in your spare time? Oh, yes. I went back straight back to my room in Oakle Street and wrote.

Working by day and writing by night, this was the pattern until you were married.

Now, you were married shortly before the war, Olivia, to a man who was not a distinguished BBC drama producer, R.D. Smith. And you went off to Bucharest. What was he doing then?

He was lecturing in English for the British Council. And we had to go back because they were afraid that the war would cut us off, you know, that he wouldn't get back to Bucharest.

In fact, the war got you out of Bucharest quite soon. No, we were there for a whole year. And then we had to leave because the German army was coming in.

I went first to Greece, but my husband actually saw the Germans marching in.

Then you had a rather adventurous war being pushed around the war fence in the near east.

Well, we'd hardly arrived in Greece when the Italians presented an automaton with Greece and the Greeks decided to fight.

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