The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Lynne Reid Banks
Author of the gritty The L-Shaped Room and the children’s classic The Indian in the Cupboard
LYNNE REID BANKS, the writer, who has died aged 94, was for most of her career primarily associated with her first novel, The L-Shaped Room (1960), which was made into a successful film by Bryan Forbes; in later life, she became better known as a children’s writer and as the author of The Indian in the Cupboard (1980), adapted into a film in 1995 by Frank Oz.
Lynne Reid Banks was working as a television scriptwriter when she got the idea for The L-Shaped Room. Fed up with the “nasty ephemeral little scripts” she was being asked to write, she sat down at a company typewriter and wrote a novel.
The L-Shaped Room tells the story of Jane, a young single woman who becomes pregnant as the result of a casual tryst with an old flame, a pregnancy that rips apart her life. She refuses to have an abortion and, thrown out by her family, loses her job and ends up in a slum boarding house in Fulham.
The novel explores how she comes to terms with her new status and her relationships with the other occupants of the house, including several prostitutes, a black homosexual and a struggling Jewish writer who becomes her lover.
Lynne Reid Banks considered the novel “nothing spectacular”, but it appealed to a new appetite for “social realism”, exploring previously taboo subjects such as sexuality, racism and illegitimacy. Reviewers admired her economy of style and the truth and originality of her observation. “She can suggest all the indignity of being sick in the Tube in half a sentence,” enthused one critic.
Lynne Reid Banks sold the film rights for £25,000 to the American producer Walter Wanger. The L-Shaped Room (1962), directed by Bryan Forbes and starring the French-American actress Leslie Caron as Jane, played to packed audiences, although some critics regretted that the screenplay (which dispensed with several characters and changed the heroine’s nationality from English to French, despite the author’s stipulation that the film should be made by a British producer with a British cast) had not been more faithful to the book.
Though she continued to write prolifically, for 20 years Lynne Reid Banks failed to find a theme that caught the public mood so well, possibly because the majority of her books in this period were the spin-offs of her decision in 1963 to go and live on a kibbutz and (though she was not Jewish) to devote herself to the cause of Zionism.
By the time she resurfaced in the 1980s, she was married to the Jewish sculptor Chaim Stephenson, with whom she had three sons, and was struggling to make ends meet.
She wrote plays and stories for her sons and the idea for The Indian in the Cupboard (1980) came from a little bathroom cupboard which her son Omri (named after an Old Testament character) thought looked shabby and wanted to throw away. His mother told him that it was a magic cupboard and told him a story about it instead.
The book tells the tale of a magic cupboard where plastic Red Indians come alive and cause no end of mischief for Omri and his friend Patrick. Lynne Reid Banks wrote four sequels and all became bestsellers, their popularity owing much to her cheerful indifference to concerns about violence in children’s literature. In The Return of the
Indian (1986), for example, she imported a tiny plastic marine corporal to teach the Indians how to use machine guns (which they do to devastating effect) and a tiny hospital matron to patch them up again.
The Indian in the Cupboard won many prizes for children’s literature, and the 1995 film of the book, directed by Frank Oz and starring Hal Sardino as Omri, proved popular with children on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lynne Reid Banks was born on July 31 1929 in Barnes, then in Surrey, the daughter of a doctor. Her mother, Muriel Alexander, was an actress and Lynne’s schoolgirl ambition was to follow her on to the stage. After attending various schools in England and Canada, she trained as an actress at the Italia Conti Stage School and at Rada.
She played in rep, though she was soon forced to admit that she was a “dismal failure” as an actress. At about this time she met the playwright John Osborne, then working as an assistant stage manager in a local repertory theatre. Osborne, who generally hated everyone he met, conceived a particular aversion to Lynne Reid Banks, and on one notorious occasion gave her a used condom in a sandwich.
At that stage she thought of writing as a means of expression rather than a means of earning a living, though she wrote plays for repertory companies to perform. One was bought by the BBC, put on at peak time and universally panned by the critics. But failure did not put her off and she decided on a career in television, becoming ITN’s first ever woman news reporter.
A few years later she was sacked from the newsroom and fobbed off with a backroom job as a scriptwriter. Then came The L-Shaped Room and fame, and a new interest in Zionism.
She first visited Israel in 1961 to research her next novel, An End to Running (1962), in which an English girl finds love on a kibbutz. On her return to England, she met Chaim Stephenson who, though Liverpool-born, had been living as a shepherd on a kibbutz for 20 years, and was on a one-year release to study sculpture in London.
“I needed to marry not only somebody Jewish but somebody actively involved in Israel,” she recalled, “so it was a very happy meeting. He strengthened my commitment through his own strong convictions.”
After their marriage, they returned to the kibbutz, where she taught English for the next eight years. Though they eventually came back to live in England, most of her books over the next 20 years reflected her new-found commitment to Zionism. Among these, Children at the Gate (1968) tells the story of a half-Jewish Canadian woman living in the Arab quarter of Acre after she has lost her child in an accident and has been abandoned by her husband. She adopts two Arab refugee children, passes them off as Jewish and takes them to live on a kibbutz, but after their brother turns up all is discovered and she loses the children who love her.
In One More River (1973), a Canadian girl is shattered by her parents’ decision to sell up and move to a kibbutz but gradually becomes converted; Sarah and After (1975) looks at the lives of some of the leading Old Testament women to show how women are exploited by God-driven men.
Lynne Reid Banks also wrote two books on the history of Israel, Letters to my Israeli Sons (1979) and Torn Country: an Oral History of Israel’s War of Independence (1982).
But as time went by she became increasingly disenchanted with “the religious restrictiveness that is increasing in Israel and the recrudescence of Jewish terrorism”. She began to champion the cause of Palestinians “in the way General de Gaulle espoused the Algerian cause, not for the sake of the Algerians, but for the French”.
Defy the Wilderness (1981) seemed to indicate that her centre of gravity had moved elsewhere. In the novel, a middle-aged English female Zionist falls for a man who admits to having been involved in killing raids on Arab villages and starts to doubt her commitment to the cause.
Lynne Reid Banks wrote several more novels of low life and social realism set in Britain (including a sequel to The L-Shaped Room), but none was as successful as her first.
In My Darling Villain (1977), a well-brought-up middle-class teenage girl becomes involved with an aggressive working-class boy who challenges her
values. In The Warning Bell, an aspiring actress fails in career and marriage then achieves success as the first woman television reporter and finds love at the expense of her best friend.
Casualties (1986) charts the lives of four people who are changed by wars of different sorts. The Dark Quartet (1976) was a fictional biography of the Brontës.
She also wrote several plays, of which the most successful was The Gift (1965), a thriller set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a living room of a lower-middle-class household. First staged at the Mermaid Theatre, the play transferred to the West End and was screened for ITV in 1975.
Her first book for children, The Adventures of King Midas (1977), was reissued in 1993. Among other successes, Harry and the Poisonous Centipede (1996) won the Smarties Silver Medal; Angela and Diabola (1997), the story of twin girls, one a child without fault, the other a fiend, was chosen by Waterstones as its book of the month. A play for children, Travels of Yoshi and the Tea-Kettle (1991) won the Polka Theatre 1991-92 Fringe Award. Her last book, The Red Red Dragon, was published in 2022.
Lynne Reid Banks was a forceful woman with passionate opinions about everything. Though severelooking, with plaited dark hair swept back into a bun, she had a robust sense of humour.
In 1992 she objected to a piece in The Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column, which described her as a “faintly dowdy earth-mother”. If she had ever been dowdy, she wrote, “I would have been good and dowdy; nothing ‘faint’ about me.” Moreover, she always wore bright colours as “your wretched little columnist... would know if he had ever set eyes on me”.
Lynne Reid Banks’s husband, Chaim Stephenson, died in 2016. Their three sons survive her.
Lynne Reid Banks, born July 31 1929, died April 4 2024