I was the fifth of eight children so nobody took much notice of me. My parents were mainly interested in politics; my mother, for instance, wrote her first book only when I was 20. But my uncle, Anthony Powell, was a real writer.
We were a very bookish family, but we weren’t artistic or literary so it’s a bit of a mystery that when we grew up four out of eight of us became writers.
One of my children is a professional trumpeter, another works in the literary world but does not actually write, and a third works in computing.
In what ways did your upbringing impact your art?
I wrote as a child, but I did not think of myself as a writer because it was something everyone in the family did. I was assuming that later in life I would get a normal job. My family life as such did not really have a big impact on my art and creativity, however, in my novels I often write about families. Lies and Loyalties, my latest novel, is about a rather disastrous family. If you are interested in people there’s nothing more exciting and emotional than the set up within families.
Both my parents were serious about the purpose of life. In particular, my father’s work as a politician and then as a social reformer had a strong influence on me, and his work was rooted in his Catholicism. My interest in prison reform was inherited from my father.
My parents were both converts; my father converted first, but without telling my mother. She vaguely knew he was under instruction, and was horrified by it because she had been brought up as a Unitarian, and she personally disliked all religions. But my mother followed him into the Church after 6 or 7 years, and when she did we all became Catholics too. I was 5 or 6 at the time, so I am not a cradle Catholic.
My Catholicism is a difficult inheritance as a novelist. It makes me feel different to other writers of my generation because it is unusual to find English novelists who have any beliefs at all.
What tends to unlock your literary creativity?
People, that is, something about a person that I want to uncover or explain. I am very struck by the gap between very rich, successful people and the downtrodden, who are also more likely to end up in prisons, which have seen a doubling of their population in a very short time.
London is jam packed with this mix of very ambitious and highly successful people alongside those who are overlooked and suffering. In Lies and Loyalties, which is set in London, I wanted to highlight this contrast, so I made up a story about a family with very different attitudes and ambitions.
Who are some of your literary heroes?
I have many from the 19th century. My writing is in the 19th century tradition in which the story is important, even though I am led by my interest in people. I do not think novels should be about elegant writing and fine sentences, but have good stories centred on people.
The Russian novelists were the greatest influence on me, particularly Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev.
I like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy because I appreciate drama and melodrama. In fact we bought a house in Dorset, the setting of many of Hardy’s novels.
Some of my favourites are also Evelyn Waugh, the Catholic novelist, and my uncle, Anthony Powell. I like my uncle’s writings; they are not my sort of novels, but they are brilliant in their own way. Iris Murdoch makes an interesting read too; there is something about her gloominess that attracts me.
In 2008 you wrote Emma & Knightley: The Sequel to Jane Austen’s Emma. Why does Jane Austen enjoy so much success in our unsentimental society?
First of all she is a brilliant drawer of character. Her characters live just as well now as they did then. She also writes about the basic things of human life, like love, money, organisation, etc; and she writes happy endings, whereas modern novels usually don’t end happily. My mother always used to ask me if what I was writing would have a happy ending; the strange thing is that after she died, I did write my first novel with a happy ending!
You have written a number of books for children. What inspired you to write them?
I started writing children’s novels to entertain my children as well as myself. They had a lovely time listening to them and illustrating them.
Later I was asked by a publisher to write a series of religious books for children: The First Christmas, The First Miracles, The First Easter, The Life of Jesus and The Life of St Francis. In these books I simply tell a story in a non-didactic way. It was a very moving and wonderful experience.
Which of your works would you like to be remembered for?
As a writer you are always obsessed with the work you are working on at the moment, so I would tend to say that I would like to be remembered for Lies and Loyalties.
Bodily Harm is another of my works that I particularly like. Unfortunately it is out of print at the moment. The novel is about an aggressor and a victim, where the victim, a girl, suffers a very violent attack. The man, the aggressor, eventually goes to prison, but the story is really about the man’s moral recovery, and their being subsequently drawn to each other, so in the end the story is about reconciliation. Now a lot of people hated this ending, apparently they simply wanted the girl to get her own back on the man and end the story there.
Your father, Lord Longford, was a passionate prison reformer. You have taken up his mantle, and are part of the team behind Inside Time, the United Kingdom’s first prison newspaper. Do you believe it is possible to build a more humane prison system?
It is certainly possible! It is very mysterious, upsetting and dreadful that here in England we are so bad at rehabilitating prisoners. I feel quite angry that our politicians and the Ministry of Justice have not really taken this in hand. However, it’s not just them. We are living in a very punitive period in which people feel that the answer to everything is punishment and vengeance, and the result is that our prisons are overflowing and we can’t properly rehabilitate prisoners anymore. For instance, the weekend lockdown for prisoners is now extended from lunchtime on Friday because there are no resources to get them out of their cells.
I believe prisons should be run separately from politicians because politicians always have to think of their voters, and the voters are readers of the popular press, and the popular press takes a very simplistic view of life; it thinks that the answer to crime is simply to land criminals in jail. The popular press doesn’t make the very simple follow up thought about what happens when these criminals come out. The worst mistake is to hand down short sentences to people who should never have gone to prison in the first place. Community sentencing, for instance, would be much more effective in these cases, and there are plenty of charitable organisations pushing for this reform. Now the government only pays lip service to these reforms because it doesn’t provide enough money for them.
Did the Catholic fervour of your family foster your religious development?
My Catholicism came from two very special people, my parents, and from friends at the Catholic school I attended, many of whom were from other countries, so I had a sense of belonging to an international religion.
Even though at university I began to question Christianity, in the end it always seemed to me that one cannot do much better than to follow the New Testament.
What is your idea of God?
I cannot give a contemplative answer here. For me it is difficult to think of God, but I don’t find it difficult to think of Jesus, Mary or the Holy Ghost for that matter.
I am a visual sort of person so I can picture God as something circling the world; I think of him as harmony or a huge completing circle for which we all yearn.
Somebody wrote, “You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something. How true is this?
It is very true. You just have to see what happens to those who try to pursue happiness to be convinced of it. It is weird that people in England do seem to think that happiness is something which is your right, and that if you work hard enough to get slim, look pretty etc., then you will automatically be happy, but you realise from reading the papers just how unhappy most of these people are.
If I try to pinpoint the moments of extreme happiness in my life they could probably consist, for example, in looking at a plant or at something as simple as that. That is the sort of happiness that comes to you which you haven’t worked for.
Then there is the satisfaction, for example, that comes from your job, or from looking at a picture of my latest grandchild, the purity and innocence of this child, but in any case you cannot pursue happiness. You can look out for it, be aware it’s out there, and if you’re lucky you might receive some happiness. It is interesting that some people are born with happy natures while others are born with unhappy natures.
What are you currently working on?
I am worried about the breakdown of family life so I am writing a story about a 14-year-old boy who runs away from his home in London. He gets on a train and has a rough life in the countryside. So the novel is not only about family life, but the countryside as well, but I haven’t got very far with it yet. I am finding it more difficult and painful to write than with my pervious novels – maybe because it is about a child.
Do you remember any particular episode of devotion to Saint Anthony?
I have spent my entire life praying to Saint Anthony for lost objects, but I have always reward him with money for the poor. In fact, the moment this interview ends I will pray the Saint for my husband’s car keys; he can’t find them!
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BORN IN Oxford in 1942 Rachel Billington worked in television in London and New York before taking up full-time writing in 1968. Her first novel All Things Nice (1969) was set in New York; her latest is Lies and Loyalties (2008).
Rachel’s parents were Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham, who later became the Earl and Countess of Longford. She has seven siblings, including writers, Antonia Fraser (married to the late Harold Pinter), Thomas Pakenham and Judith Kazantzis.
Rachel was educated at day school convents in London and Sussex, and has a BA in English Literature from London University.
She has written nineteen adult novels, four children’s novels, five religious books for children, three non-fiction books, and plays for radio and television, as well as contributing to several film scripts. She has also contributed to major newspapers in the UK and the US like The Sunday Telegraph.
Rachel was President of English PEN, the writers’ organisation from 1998-2001 and remains a Vice-president.
She is also a Trustee of the Longford Trust which was set up in memory of her father, Lord Longford. The Trust organises a lecture each year on the subject of social or penal reform, gives a prize for those working in these areas and awards financial scholarships to ex-prisoners in university education. In 1991 she became a member of the editorial team of Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners, and now writes a monthly page.
In 1967 Rachel married the film and theatre director, Kevin Billington. They have four children and five grandchildren, and live in London and in the oldest continuously inhabited house in Dorset.
Updated on October 06 2016