I Would Hate To Live In The

Margaret Thatcher Was In My Year, And Our First-year College Photograph Shows Us Standing Side By Side In The Back Row. We Were Both Grammar School Girls On State Scholarships.

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.

All Writers Are Liars. They Twist Events To Suit Themselves. They Make Use Of Their Own Tragedies To Make A Better Story... They Are Terrible People.

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 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.