I Like Writing For Children. It Seems

I Was Cleaning Out The Pigsty At A Farm In Wales, Where My Mother Had Rented A Room, When The Results Of My Final School Exam Were Handed To Me By The Postman, Along With The News That I Had A State Scholarship To Oxford. I Had Waited For This Letter For So Many Weeks That I Had Abandoned Hope, Deciding That I Had Failed Ignominiously.

I Met My Second Husband On A Bus. We Looked At Each Other And That Was It. We Were Both Married To Other People At The Time And Behaved Badly, But We Didn't Seem To Have Any Choice. We Were Very Happy For Nearly 50 Years And Would Still Be Together If It Wasn't For The Bloody Railways.

Life Isn't So Complicated For Children. They Have More Time To Think About The Really Important Things. That's Why I Occasionally Moralise In My Children's Books In A Way I Wouldn't Dare When Writing For Adults.

The Kind Of Response I Hope For When I Write My Novels For Children: To Give Them A Chance To Recognize Something Of Their Own Feelings -- About Themselves, Their Parents, Their Friends -- And Their Own Situation As A Kind Of Subject Race, Always At The Mercy Of The Adults Who Mostly Run Their Lives For Them.

I Was Born In A Small Suburb Of Ilford In A Rather Nasty Housing Estate That My Mother Despised. She Had Grown Up In The Country, So When The War Came And I Was Evacuated To Wales She Thought I Was Much Better Off There.