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 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. She studied for a Cambridge degree in her late 40s and became a

university dawn and writer on education in her 50s. I come to everything late she

says. Now in her 80th year she's written her first novel about love in middle age and village life in the

fenlands of East Anglia where she was born, brought up and still lives today.

The novel of her old age reflects her devotion to

this part of England and her concern at its disappearing values. She is

Sybil Marshall. You're undoubtedly Sybil Britain's oldest living first novelist. Why did it take you so long?

Really because I was doing other things all the time.

Things that were important to me as a days past but I had conceived the ambition

when I was ten I'd had novels read to me and I wanted to be a novelist

took me 70 years.

70 years.

70 years to put your pen to paper in terms of fiction, anything.

In terms of fiction, yes.

But it's also quite a personal business.

I mean, your novel, The Nest of Magpies, is very much about you.

It's semi-autobiographical, isn't it?

I think so, yes.

I didn't realize how autobiographical it was until people began to point it out to me afterwards.

Because it is about a fictitious, albeit fictitious village,

...