Nina Bawden: writer for adults and children, inspired by her own experiences

The Islington resident once tried to recruit Margaret Thatcher to the Labour Party.

The plaque outside Nina Bawden's former home

An award winning novelist and children’s writer, Nina Bawden also unexpectedly became a railway safety campaigner after suffering a personal tragedy in her latter years.

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Walks available for booking

Nina Bawden is one of the subjects of my Groundbreaking Women of Islington walking tour, which has its next outing at 11am on Saturday 9 August. For a full schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.

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Nina was one of a number of well known people in the literary and artistic world to have lived in Noel Road in Islington. Others include novelist George Gissing, artist Walter Sickert and playwright Joe Orton.

Nina lived at 22 Noel Road from the 1970s until she died in 2012, for most of that time with her second husband, Austen Kark. The couple also had a home in Nafplio, Greece.

I have not found a free licence photograph of Nina Bawden to include in this post, but you can see a picture of her here.

Nina Bawden's former home on Noel Road, Islington

Nina Bawden wrote 23 novels and 20 children’s books in a career spanning five decades. Her 1987 novel Circles of Deceit was short-listed for the Booker Prize, while her 1970 novel The Birds on The Trees was short-listed for the so-called Lost Booker Prize in 2010. She was awarded the CBE in 1995.

Perhaps her best known children’s book is Carrie’s War, a story about children evacuated to Wales in World War II, an experience she knew first hand. In 1993 it won the Phoenix award, which is given annually to recognise children’s books published 20 years earlier that did not win a major award.

She was born just over 100 years ago on 19 January 1925 in Goodmayes, Essex, as Nina Mabey. Her father was an engineer in the merchant navy and was frequently away from home. Absent fathers later featured in the stories she would write. Her mother, a teacher, encouraged her daughter’s education and Nina won a place at Ilford County High School, a selective grammar school for girls.

In 1943 Nina won a scholarship to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Somerville College, Oxford, where she met a fellow undergraduate named Margaret Roberts.

As women from lower middle class backgrounds, both were battling the odds to make the most of their academic abilities and Nina tried to persuade Margaret to follow her in joining the Labour Party. Nina felt that they had been lucky to get into Oxford and “it would be despicable to use our good fortune to join the ranks of the privileged”.

Moreover, Nina told Margaret, Labour party members were much more intelligent than the Conservatives. However, Margaret argued that the Tories were less fashionable and so there would be less competition to make it into Parliament if she joined the Conservative Party. Later, under her married name of Margaret Thatcher, she became the UK’s first female prime minister.

In 1946 Nina married Henry Bawden, a scholar and ex-serviceman, who was much older than her. They bought a house in London with money left by his mother, who had committed suicide. This was not to be her last encounter with personal tragedy.

Nina wanted to work in journalism, but turned down a job offer with the Manchester Guardian after becoming pregnant. She worked for a while at the Town and Country Planning Association and began writing books when her two young sons, Niki and Robert, were asleep.

She married her second husband, Austen Karr, in 1954 after a chance encounter on a bus and after both had secured divorces. He worked at the BBC, eventually rising to be head of the World Service, and had two daughters. Nina and Austen had one child together, a daughter named Perdita.

Nina’s first novel, published in 1953, was Who Calls The Tune? and her first children’s book was The Secret Passage (1963).

As a child, she felt the children in the books she read were all so good that they made her feel wicked. She was one of the first writers to create child characters who could be jealous, selfish and bad tempered. She received grateful letters from children for her more realistic portrayal of them.

By the late 1960s, Nina was enjoying a happy life with Austen and their children in a large house in Weybridge, when tragedy struck the family.

Her elder son, Niki, now a teenager, had been experiencing mental health difficulties and was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Nina and Austen struggled to understand, but did their best to support him.

He turned to drugs including LSD, was arrested and imprisoned for drug offences and then incarcerated in a mental hospital. Nina later found out, months after the event, that Niki had drowned himself in the Thames.

The experience, as with many of her own experiences, made its way into her writing.

Her 1970 book The Birds on The Trees features a young man who is expelled from school for taking drugs and is hospitalised for mental illness, although Nina said that she had not really planned the character. She decided to keep him in the book, but she found that she could not bear to let him die in the story.

She wrote in In My Own Time: Almost an Autobiography (1994): "darkness and chaos threaten us all, lying in wait at the bottom of the garden, lurking outside the safe, lighted room". This was a theme that ran through her work.

She experienced further personal tragedy in 2002, when she and her husband were on board a train that derailed at Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. Austen was killed, together with six others, while Nina and around 70 others were injured. The crash broke every bone in her body and her family feared she might not survive.

Yet, one month later she was on Radio 4’s Today programme, demanding a public enquiry. She led a campaign that forced Network Rail to admit liability for the badly maintained points that caused the accident. She won compensation for all the survivors, but could have lost her home to pay legal costs if the case had gone to court and lost.

In 2005 Nina published Dear Austen, her account of the incident, written as letters to her deceased husband. She wrote about a fellow passenger, Martin Rose, who kept her alive.

“He could see I was broken and bleeding. He made me as comfortable as he could and talked to me. He said I told him I didn’t want to stay, I was in too much pain, but he was determined I should. He talked to me to keep me breathing. And my treacherous body – this temporary habitation – made its own perverse decision and conspired with him against me.”

Nina recovered from the crash to live another decade in Noel Road and continued to work right up until her death there at the age of 87 in August 2012.

The back of Noel Road, seen from the Regent's Canal

She died only five months after yet another personal tragedy: the death from cancer of her daughter Perdita.

Her son Robert wrote in an article in The Guardian about Nina:

“She used to say, “Well this is a very poor final act and I really don't want to be here any longer" – but she would say that while holding court in her chair with a glass of champagne in one hand and smoked salmon in the other, and she'd have a smile on her face. She was a great survivor.”

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Nina Bawden is one of the subjects of my Groundbreaking Women of Islington walking tour, which has its next outing at 11am on Saturday 9 August.

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Walks available for booking

For a full schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.