People's Lives Are In The

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.

But I Don't Write About Sex For Today's Teenagers. Or Doc Martens Boots Either. I'm More Interested In Exploring How Exactly The World Is Run, Which Doesn't Really Change That Much From One Generation To Another.

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.

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.

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.