What do we know about... Nina Bawden?

The first, and most important, thing that I know about Nina Bawden is that she wrote Carrie's War. One of the many, many novels I read as a child which took place during the Second World War and focused on the experience of an evacuee. Indeed this book - along with Michelle Magorian's Goodnight Mr Tom and others - helped to sustain the particularly British idea of WWII as a kind of golden 'we didn't have much, but we were happy' epoch. Though I'm not actually going to admit to this myself, probably there were many comfortable middle-class children of around my age who read these books and thought 'it's not fair, why couldn't I have been born during wartime...' (More about this later.) 

This is not, however, to underestimate Bawden's books for children - in fact they were extraordinary in their complexity. She didn't so much rely on creating false environments in which adventures could occur (adults mysteriously spirited away, etc.). Rather she looked for the adventures, dramas and disasters of everday life. Margaret Clark, who worked for Puffin in the 1950s, likened Bawden's work to that of John Rowe Townsend and Robert Cormier because these writers 'weren't afraid to suggest that children, like adults, could have disappointments or do wicked things.' Margaret Drabble has also said of Bawden that: 

'She has an extraordinary recall of what it's like to be a child - the pretensions of being a child. She remembers the self-pity, the self-dramatisation. Actually it's quite Henry James - the adult reader feels sorry for the child caught up in an adult plot, so the child is seen at two levels.'

Not so very different, perhaps, from some of the more recent 'crossover' (adult/children's) fiction like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, or Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. If Bawden's books were published now, do you think they would appeal to a 'crossover' audience or be marketed - as the Harry Potter books are - to children & adults separately?

Nina Bawden was evacuated to Wales during the war and this event had an enormous impact upon her life. She read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Somerville College, Oxford and worked as a Magistrate for 10 years. An active member of the Labour party (and an advocate of the Welfare State) for most of her life, she felt deeply let down by New Labour and tore up her party card over the railways. In 2002 she was badly injured and her husband, Austen Kark, was one of seven people killed in the Potters Barn rail disaster. Bawden publicly campaigned for the government and the rail companies to take responsibility for the crash and she appears as a character in David Hare's The Permanent Way (which dramatised the experiences of the victims).

If you'd like to find out more about her, you can read this article from The Guardian. 

Did anyone else read any Nina Bawden books as a child? If so, what did you think of them? I'm tempted to go back and reread them having now read some of her adult novels.