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. Nina Bawden Read Quote
I’ve never found it made the slightest difference being a woman – though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you’re not so interesting. Nina Bawden Read Quote
I wanted to be a war reporter – scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn’t want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford. Nina Bawden Read Quote
I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right. Nina Bawden Read Quote
Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth. Nina Bawden Read Quote
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. Nina Bawden Read Quote
If you are going to make companies, corporations, actually responsible for the safety of other people’s lives, then if they fail in their duty, the only thing to prevent them failing in their duty is the fear that they would be put behind bars. Nina Bawden Read Quote
At 11, I passed the scholarship – only just; I wasn’t very good at maths – to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales. Nina Bawden Read Quote
One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you’ve forgotten what happened. Nina Bawden Read Quote