Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For tonight's reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter... Sue Lolly. 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. She describes her work as a kind of coded autobiography and her readers can try to trace her life in children's books such as Carrie's War and The Peppermint Pig and in adult novels like Afternoon of a Good Woman and Circles of the Sun.

Of deceit for which she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. All writers are liars, she said, they make use of... Their own tragedies to make a better story. She is Nina Borden. Guilty of that of course Nina we exaggerate things that have happened to us in order to make them more interesting we embroider the story the price you pay is you lose touch with the truth is that what's happened to you in your life do you cease to know what's true I think I think usually I know when something is developed from a story. The truth has got a bit twisted, if you like. Always. 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. Oh I think file away but I think also you see as you do write of course what you're doing is mining if you like.

Your own childhood, your own past, so that the more you do it, the more you can do it, find. I mean it's all practice in a way. Because the peppermint pig was something your grandmother told you about, wasn't it? Well, yes it was. That is a true story. But of course my grandmother told me the story and my mother told me the story and in doing so... They probably change it a little, but there's no question that there was a pig that was a pet and his name was Johnny. There's also no question that my grandmother's mother's neighbour was a lady called Granny Greengrass. Who had her finger chopped off at the butcher. - Tell me, tell me again how that happened. It's a very good story. - Well, she had her finger chopped off at the butcher. And she was buying a leg of lamb. And she put out her finger to show where she wanted the joint to be cut. Then she decided she wanted the bigger or smaller piece and pointed again. Unfortunately, Mr. Gromit

The butcher was bringing his sharp chopper down. And he chopped treat to her finger, my grandmother said, and it flew like a snapped twig into the corner of the shop. My grandmother was a little girl. When this happened. So it did really happen? It did really happen and it had a terrible sequel Wanted to see the chopped-off finger, but old Mrs. Greengrass always kept it in a glove or hidden by her skirt. But then old Mrs Greengrass died and my grandmother's mother... Sitting not by the corpse but downstairs. And my grandmother went upstairs, hoping she could see the chopped off finger because the woman would be dead now. Into the room and she turned the bedclothes back. And there this woman lay, cold and white. My mother was terrified and ran down again. But her mother knew where she'd been, and she said a little later.

Now, Edith Emily, you must go upstairs to the front room and bring me my thread that is on the chest that draws in front of the window. And so, I'm going to end this video here. So she had to go into this room again, where she'd left the court. It was a terrible, terrible punishment. I thought that the poor old woman also had the best pay-off line herself though, didn't she say it's all my fault because I changed my mind about which bit of the meat I want? That's right, I mean I could never make up my mind and stick to it, she said. But does that mean, you know... Because you use all of these stories, that you can sit down at your typewriter, because, as I've said, you write children's books as well as adult books. Can you travel... At will up and down through your life? Yes, I didn't realise it was what I was doing for ages. Suddenly I did realise that in fact I moved about in time continuously. Move you off to a desert island. Tell me about the first record that you'll play there. Well, the first record I would like would be...

One of the poems of A.E. Housman set to music because when I lived in Montgomeryshire during the war a while. I used to walk across the hills, well, ride across the hills actually, and shout. The A Houseman poems aloud because they're perfect for that area. When I was one and twenty I heard a wise man say, Give crowns and pounds and guineas, but not your heart away. Give pearls away and rubies, but keep your fancy free. But I was one and twenty, no use to talk to me. When I was one and twenty I heard him say again

♪ And all is true, is true ♪ ♪ Is true ♪ Yes. George Butterworth's When I Was One and Twenty, sung by John Cameron, words by A.E. Housman. Nina Borden, Carrie's War is arguably your most famous book. It was dramatised by the BBC in the 70s about two children who were evacuated to Wales during the war. It's a magical story, semi-autobiographical. Your own experiences, it seems to me, when you were evacuated, were really rather harsher. There was one very sinister place you were in where you were locked in by sort of ball and chain. Yes, it was sinister I suppose, but you see I was... And I had my best friend Jean with me and she was 14 too and you can put up with an awful lot when there are two of you and you're that sort of age and it It's strange to be living with these rather peculiar people who lock the front door with about nine bolts, I think.

And who wouldn't let us eat with them and served us separately. Be quiet on Sundays. And then there was another billet because you had a lot of billet's. Seven billet's. There was another one where you had to wash their dirty handkerchiefs. That was very disagreeable and that was the first one and I was on my own there which made that really quite uncomfortable but on the other hand again you know you thought this is what you have to put up with it because those on North Sea patrol, I felt that one shouldn't make any complaints anyway. In Carrie's War itself, again, it's a much lighter business it seems to me, but again part of it is reflected in the reality of your experience that you couldn't run up and down stairs because you might wear out the stair carpet in yet another village. Oh that was absolutely true, that happened in another village where... My friend and I were not allowed to go upstairs to the bathroom in the middle of the day in case it wore out the stair carpet.

Was to rush about like a frenzied ferret, saying, messing and humbugging about, up and down, in and out, wearing out the stair carpet, messing and humbugging about, like a kind of mantra. But you say you took it all in your stride, age 14. We wouldn't expect 14-year-olds now to take it in their stride. It does seem to me to have been-- Quite a dramatic experience to be sent somewhere away from your parents, to be stood in a hall, to be chosen by local people or perhaps not chosen is more painful. A very, very dramatic experience. It was quite an adventure at our age. I lived in the suburb of London that I thought I'd been brought up to think was rather dull, and indeed it was. There's a tremendous excitement. And when you saw it all recreated by the BBC on television, what did that make you feel? Did it make you feel you were back there again? Or did it...

When it was strange in a way, it sort of took away my own memories, because it made concrete something that I'd written. The town in my mind's eye and the children in my mind's eye. And now there were the different children, actors, and the town was different. The town was the one I was thinking about. But it does look different from my memory. Record number two. Well, record number two is the Welsh national anthem. When we were living in Abadere, we used to walk... Cross the mountains and go and listen to political speeches in Merford-Titville. And once I heard Anaren Bevan speak. And he was wonderful. And we were all tremendously fired with the wickedness of the Conservative rule in the '30s, you see, and we were all very out of control. Idealistic and keen for things to be put right later. Over the mountains and we sang. I can't say it in Welsh anymore, I could then.

'Land of my Fathers', and it was the most uplifting sound. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Land of the Wild.

My father's, sung at the first festival of 1,000 Welsh male voices in 1969. Tell me, Nina Borden, about life in Essex before and after the war. Nothing to compare with evacuation, a dull business, was it? dull when I was young because when you're young nothing is dull. I mean the ordinary suburban streets are full of excitement and strange people and you live an inner life in any case. At least I did I think. Have much chance to listen to music, so I mean some of my choices are not very musically educated. Perhaps that's why we didn't have a radio. My mother thought it would interfere with our homework. Who sit sometimes with our ears pressed against the dividing wall between our house and the next tall one, so that we could... Things like the boat race which of course not knowing about Oxford and Cambridge we were still very devoted. My mother bought a radio in the end so that we could hear Edward VIII's abdicate, because she said that was an important historical...

And all we knew was the song that we used to sing at school, which was Hark the Herald Angels sing, Mrs. Simpson's pinched our King. But my mother thought more highly of it than that. What did you then have in mind for yourself when you were a girl in the 30s? Where did you intend life should lead you? Do you think you thought it through? You did intend to avoid the local secondary mod at all costs? Well, my mother made quite sure I did. I hadn't got any high-flown ideas for myself. I used to write plays for my mother. I think I thought I'd like to write something, but what I thought I'd really like to do would be a famous... Journalist, possibly a foreign correspondent. You know, crawling through enemy lines with my camera. Perhaps I wanted to be a photographer as well. Some more music, what's this, number three? Ah, this is La Cidarem La Mano. When I... Went to Oxford unexpectedly and really at the behest of my best friend's mother.

I didn't, as I say, know much about music, but one of the things that everybody sung, Including one young man I was very much in love with, was L'Aci d'Arem L'Almano. And I didn't know what it was, I thought it was a love song. Got married for the first time and went on honeymoon to Zurich. We went and watched Don Giovanni. It was really a dreadful seducer who was trying to drag this poor girl off to his castle.

Thomas Hampson and Barbara Bonney singing the duet La Chi D'Arem La Mano from Mozart's Don Giovanni with the... Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Nicolas Hernancourt. So on we move through your life to your Oxford interview at Somerville and a story I don't think you've used in your books. You were intimidated from the start by the other applicants, I think. Many grand girls, you see. I mean they came from somewhere like Cheltenham Ladies' College, I would imagine. And they all had best clothes on. You know, people wore them with sort of gory skirts and little edge-to-edge jackets. And they had rather sort of smart shoes. And I was wearing my school uniform because really it was all I had. Your Essex Jimsley. My Essex Jimsley. And I felt really rather sort of out of it. And they all spoke in these high

clear voices and they went in one after the other to see Helen Derbyshire who was a principal and they came out and said to each other my dear wasn't she too dreadfully awful I don't think I could bear it I must go home I must go and have a cup of tea and things like this. Well, I was rather terrified really because it seemed to me that nothing could be worse than these dreadful girls and if they were frightened then I was going to be petrified. And I went in and there was nobody... Except a nice little lady who sat by the fire with a rather red face, and she got at her feet and put out her hands and said... Come in, dear child, I've been looking forward to meeting you. So I thought, well, this is very nice. And I sat down and she gave me some tea and a chocolate biscuit and then she asked me about myself and she asked About the farm where my mother was living and how I knew about farm subsidies which was something I'd written about in my entrance exam and Then she said, Was I interested in poetry? And I told her all about A.E. Halsman, and I thought he was the most wonderful poet in the whole world.

And she said, Had I read any Wordsworth? And I said, No, no, well, I'd read some, I said, but I thought he was really rather sort of dull pompous. He's a poor romantic tosh, I think, I said. And she hurt me out very patiently and she smiled and said, Well, of course he was a required taste and perhaps I would come to Wordsworth when I was a little older. On both cheeks and said, I think you will enjoy being here with us, dear girl. And I went. And it wasn't too long afterwards, well not actually, it was my teacher at school as soon as I got back and reported, who said, But didn't you know... Who was a great Wordsworth scholar. Well, no one had told me. And you got your place. I got my place. Let's spool on through Oxford to your meeting there with two contemporaries. Richard Burton first, he asked you out, I take it. Oh yes, yes, he asked me out to tea, which may sound strange coming from him, but he was only 17.

I thought he invited you away for the weekend. Yes he did on that occasion. He said he knew Emlyn Williams, which I knew was a dead lie. I thought I could spot a lie when I saw him. So this was definitely a euphemism for taking you off to bed somewhere, was it? No, no, no, I don't know, I really don't know. Why dear, he asked me if I could spend a weekend with him in Emlyn Williams's flat. But, Yawn, I didn't think about his motives. And Mirioka thought to me he wouldn't know Edmund Williams, which of course was very stupid of me. - But why didn't you go? - Oh, well, he was a bit young and he had boils, back of his neck. Anyway, he was too young at any rate, people didn't do that sort of thing, you see, because you might get pregnant. And then there was a plump, neat, solemn girl with a pretty China doll smile. Oh, that was Margaret Roberts. Who was to become... Margaret Thatcher. Oh yes, she did become Margaret Thatcher but that was, yes. And how did you get on with her? Well we didn't, to speak, really get on with her.

Because we didn't know each other, we didn't mix in the same areas and that sort of thing. But we did firewatches together once. And I had an argument with her about politics, which I pointed out to her that she would have a job. Time if she joined the Labour Club than she was having in the Conservative Club because clearly she wasn't going to be won over by my socialist talk. And she said I'm not playing at politics like You, Nina, I intend to get into Parliament, and this is the best way to do it. Let's have record number four. Well this is Bob Dylan and the times they are changing. Really because this was the 60s when my children were growing up, 60s and 70s, when they were growing up into a slightly different world, the one I... Up with when you where you didn't go up to London to stay in Emdyn Williams flat with anyone I suspect they all would have and this does seem to me an

Song. Come gather round, people, wherever you roam. And admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth saving, then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin'. Some writers and critics will privatize with your pen. And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again. And don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin. And there's no telling who that it's naming. 'Cause the loser now will be later to win. For the times they are a-changin'. Bob Dylan.

And the times they are a change in. Having said that you have taken many of your fictional situations from your own life, your first novel, which was published when you were 27, Who Calls the Tune, is written in the first person as a man who has murdered his twin sister, which is an extraordinary subject, an extraordinary technique for a first novel. - It was very difficult, I think, because of the war. I didn't really feel that one had anything important to say if you hadn't been a fighter pilot or... Or an air raid warden, or something at least to do with the war. All I'd ever done was to help on the farm, which is not quite the same thing. And somehow I was embarrassed to write about oneself or about things that one knew about. Also because I was serious about being a writer in the same way that Margaret Roberts was serious about being a politician. The thing to do was to learn one's craft and do it inside a convention.

That you could then do the things you wanted to do with guardrails on either side. Yes, I can see that it would be a good disguise, as it were, but for someone who was essentially quite timid. About writing but at the same time you've got to have a certain assurance to write about these things about which you know nothing. Of course I'd read Graham Greene. He had a way of making one feel one knew all sorts of seedy things that one didn't actually know. By the time you'd finished it, were you proud of it? Were you convinced people would want to read it? I just didn't know. I hadn't told anybody I was writing it, you see. When did you do it? Because you had two small children by the time. Well, I wrote it when I was pregnant for the second, actually. I wrote it at night. I wrote it when I got up to see some. I wrote it when my husband was at work. I think I did tell him at the end, and then I packed it up and sent it off to Collins. So you were quite ruthless about needing to write, wanting to write, and were determined to fit it in at every odd corner? Oh yes, oh yes. I mean I didn't...

Want to do anything else really. - So you sent it off to Collins? - Yes, and then I had a letter back almost at once from George Harding. Who was the, ran the crime clubs, who invited me up to see him. This was one of the most exciting days of my life. And what did he offer you? Well, he offered to publish it. Which was amazing to me. And money too? And money too. Not very much money, you know. How much? 75 pounds. Which was 1953 wasn't it? Yes, it was a reasonable amount of money and in fact it sold out and so I got some more money which was really rather... And they called you their new find? William Collins called me his new find. Heady stuff? Very heady stuff, yes. Nancy Spain. And sings like Move Over Agatha Christie. How wonderful. Meckel number five.

Well, record number five is Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, The Bit Before the Choral.

Which I think is now the European anthem, and I'm a convinced European.

Part of the final movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Joseph Cripps, it was in the... Early sixties Nina Borden when by then you were an established writer that you began to notice that your son Nicky by then an adolescent was Functioning properly, what were the first signs of his problems? He became really minded. Didn't get up in the morning. He was very difficult to keep clean. And having his hair cut was beyond all diplomacy. But beyond all the normal problems. Beyond the normal problems, I think. Well, we thought so in any case, and so did the school. And so we went to a psychiatrist who said that he had an ordinary adolescent's depression no more. And how long was it before you realised it was rather more than that? Quite some while.

I mean he was obviously finding life extremely difficult. He'd been expected to get a scholarship to Oxford, but originally he didn't. He didn't. He went... Instead to Kent, and seemed to have really quite a happy year. He made friends and... but he was obviously... He thought he must be on drugs. And at the end of the first year, instead of going off with his friends, He went and worked in Whitbread's Brewery in London, and he was obviously extremely withdrawn. And strange. We went to see him and we were anxious to find out whether he was taking drugs or not. When we sort of half suggested it, he lectured us at great length on the evils of LSD. Who were taking LSD and how foolish they were. But he was conning you, was he? He was conning us completely. We had always believed him. You know, he was the most truthful person. And eventually he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Not until he landed up in prison. He had breaks.

And he tried to kill himself. He went to a local hospital where they weren't sure what was wrong with him and then he got picked up by the police who said he'd been... Dealing in drugs, which I don't think in fact was true. But anyway, he was sent to prison because he wouldn't appeal against us. Then he was sent from the prison to a secure mental unit at the Westminster. And after that he seemed to get quite a lot better. We lived with a girlfriend. Then he came back to live with us. And then he went off to a crisis centre because he... Was feeling so very ill that he thought they might help him. And from there, he killed himself. - And how did he kill himself?

He took the taxi to Putney and I suppose he jumped in the river and he was disappeared for three months I think and then I wrote to the duty officer at Scotland Yard and said would they please look for him I knew that they had got him on the computer but People don't always look at the computer and within two days the inspector for whopping was... The BBC to tell my husband that they'd fished him out of the river two months before. Obviously, it's the most painful experience that any parent can go through. I presume you also inevitably feel a kind of guilt that you didn't spot it earlier, or could you have done this or should you have done the other. Can you come to terms with that? Well, it's not spotting it. It's kind of little things that you feel might have made a difference, him to America when he wanted to go with his girlfriend and only asked us the day before if we could give him the money.

If you disappointed a person who grew up perfectly normally, you wouldn't think twice about it. But it's little things that always make one feel badly. And not being there, not being able to help him further. It's a dreadful thing, to see someone suffer that you love. And he died 13 years ago now. Yes. Thing of all, it seems to me reading about what you've written about him, is that you couldn't be allowed to see his body or photographs and so you could... Never be completely sure I suppose. That's right. And so he went on for some time thinking that maybe you saw him. You still do partly. We were at the airport last year, my husband and I, and there he was. I mean, not as he would be now, but as he was when he died. Exactly the same person with his...

His sloping shoulders and his hair was the same and the look on his face was the same. And people say it's like being dropped into cold water. Well it was like that. Both of us stood, actually frozen. But of course it wasn't him. Number six. One of the things my husband always complained about my lack of musical understanding was that I wouldn't when he... Commissioned things for the proms, I wouldn't enjoy the modern music. So I have seriously tried to enjoy modern music and this is a piece I like, which is by my first husband. Son from his second marriage who writes modern music but is still linked to the past I think and also it is lyrical.

One of Rupert Borden's two studies for orchestra on scenes from Berul's Romance of Tristan, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Rupert Borden. And we should explain that your second husband, Nina Borden, Austin Kirk, was managing director of the BBC's World Service. Schizophrenic Boy in Circles of Deceit, your novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in '87, which proves, I suppose, that no personal... Experiences sacrosanct to the novelist. What happened was that he crept into the book without my... He was dead by then. He crept into the book without my intending it. It just seemed tasteless to dismiss him. It would have been a dreadful thing. I mean, it does happen just occasionally to writers, sometimes, that something happens and they're not. Hadn't quite intended. - But the difference is he just doesn't die anymore. - He doesn't die because I couldn't bear to kill him off for the sake of the story.

You've written too, going back to the point that you write about your own experiences, you've written about your experiences as a magistrate on the bench in An Afternoon of a Good Woman. What about family money, which is about the greed of families to inherit their aged parents' houses? Is that something that you've... For your mother or that you fear your children feel for you? No, no, no, it arose really from something quite else, going to a party where there were lots of people in their 40s. And they were all talking in the 80s about the amazing amounts of money they were making as the values of their houses rose and rose and rose. I mean, they spoke about nothing else, not books, nor music, nor politics. It seemed to be rather dreadful. Happen in my family like that and I had no direct experience of something like this happening, but I could see that it could and it was a lovely fun to do.

Well, this is something I heard in Dubrovnik, before that lovely city with bomb, before all the dreadful things that happened to Yugoslavia. We were staying near Dubrovnik in a hotel that was frequented much by diplomats. And this was the time of Watergate and it was August. And we were lying on the rocks by the sea listening to Nixon resign. And Austin thought perhaps he ought to go and tell the American ambassador, or his deputy it may have been, that his president had resigned. And after that, all the time we were there, people came up doffing their caps. It gave one a wonderful feeling of power. We went off to Dubrovnik, which as I say was beautiful and unbombed, and one evening we sat and heard this lovely cello. It was in the cloisters somewhere and it was a...

Magical, wonderful sound and it mixed with the holiday, with the Brovnik, with this feeling of being able to tell ambassadors.

Thanks. The

Our of how it would be for you, Nina, on this desert island. I mean, in the deeper sense of coming to terms with a solitary existence. I don't think I like my own company, but I'm not sure. I suppose I'd just go around talking to the crabs in the end. I mean, I would address culls. Oh, gull! Things like this I think I'd have to talk to the other living creatures and maybe they would talk to me eventually. Plenty of material in it though, I mean you've talked about not wanting to waste any bit of your life, any corner of your life, you want to use it all in your writing, so there's plenty of... I suppose it depends how comfortable I am, if I've got to sort of make my own... And food and my own fires and that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I would have much time for communing with myself. - Can I ask you finally? How proud you are, difficult question this really, but you've written I think 19 novels? 20 I think.

Twenty novels and an autobiography and 18 children's books. And you're not finished yet. Do you feel you've done yourself justice? Do you feel rightly proud of yourself, I think is what I'm asking. I don't know. I don't think it ever occurred to me to ask myself. Such questions. I'm always pleased when a book does well and of course I'm proud of them. I'm proud of them. Rather than me. Last record? The last record is a Greek one because we have, since Austen retired, we have a house in the Peloponnesus and we go there for five months of the year. And of course, Greek music is very much a part of life This is a song about Smyrna. And I like this one because it reminds me of Nath.

Called Smanna. Which of those eight records Nina would you take if you could only take one? I think I'll take the Beethoven because it's... Quite a lot in that and there's voices as well as music isn't there so I could play which bit I wanted. Symphony number nine, what about your book? Well I think perhaps Question I shall have to take the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. I've been trying to read it for many years and I would manage it at last. Is there a sense of shame there that you haven't got to it? A certain sense of shame. I have read it in an abbreviated edition and I gather there's... Another abbreviated edition that is better. But we give you the whole lot. You'd give us the whole eight volumes. Yes, absolutely. Good, oh yes, well that's fine, I should be very much more educated when I've finished. What about your luxury? I should like an unlimited supply of nice plain paper and an unlimited supply of very good pilot.

Wall points. And I will need some kind of plastic folder to keep them, perhaps several plastic folders. It depends how long I'm going to be there. You're expecting rain, are you? Well, you never know. Always rain. It's dust. Nina Borden, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Well, think of letting me come.