With an urbane irony and often surprising violence, she exposes the uneasy alliances that keep chaos at bay and provides a circumstantial account of the domesticated brutality at the heart of modern life.
Nina Mabey was born in London on 19 January 1925, the daughter of Charles and Ellalaine Ursula Mabey. She remained there until the outbreak of World War II, when her family was evacuated. They spent the war years in a South Wales mining village and on a farm in Shropshire. She lived with various mining families during the school year and learned during her summers on the farm to drive a tractor and care for farm animals. She even organized a group of Italian prisoners of war, conscripted as farm laborers. Her experience as an evacuee, which is reflected in her books Carrie's War (1973) and Keeping Henry (1988), may help account for her belief that children “are a kind of subject race, always at the mercy of the adults who mostly run their lives for them.” Following graduation from grammar school, Mabey was awarded a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied politics, philosophy, and economics.
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