Parents or guardians are absent or do not want to be bothered, leaving the children to their own devices. To balance out some of the more serious problems her characters face, Jones uses humor in many of her stories.
Jones was born on August 16, 1934, in London, England. In August 1939, her father bundled five-year-old Diana and her three-year-old sister, Isobel, off to his parents home in Wales for safety due to the impending war. Although their grandparents and other relatives spoke to the girls in English, they reverted to Welsh when talking to each other, which was quite confusing for the children. Jones's grandfather was a famous Welsh preacher who tended to speak in blank verse. As the author recalls in her Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS) essay, "[The] splendour and the rigour of it ... went into the core of my being.... I still sometimes dream in Welsh, without understanding a word. And at the bottom of my mind there is always a flow of spoken language that is not English, rolling in majestic paragraphs and resounding with splendid polysyllables. I listen to it like music when I write."
After giving birth to another daughter, Ursula, Jones's mother returned to Wales to see her other children.
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