w with of your teachers give you help with examinations? not my teacher. where is it happening? why is it happening? if it is, it is about performance tables. where is this happening? are they allowing children to see copies of state examinations? how do you do it? it is evidently happening if they have to have a clamp—down. is evidently happening if they have to have a clamp-down. are they getting results and thinking why are so getting results and thinking why are so many people... ? an indication of the questions so when you do your revision you know what to prepare for. if you are a parent and desperate for your child to get through these exams, would you be happy with that? no. we are really ha rd happy with that? no. we are really hard line. i would not. happy with that? no. we are really hard line. iwould not. it happy with that? no. we are really hard line. i would not. it is a bad example to set for your child and i would be crying my eyes out. also, life is not easy. there is a lesson

to be learnt at school. you have to work for what you want. you will be coming back after 11:30pm. you can join anne and bonnie and myself at the top of the hour. next on bbc news — meet the author. two children are inseparable. they're torn apart by an accident. late in life they meet again. then we're taken into a parallel world, where they meet in middle—age and have a passionate affair. then another, in which they marry young but confront unhappiness. they are ivy and abe, and in elizabeth enfield's novel, each of these stories reveals a part

of their character as if all of us aren'tjust who we are here and now, but are always carrying with us the weight of the oldest question of all — what if? welcome. in this book, we are reminded that life and your fate can change in the blink of an eye. do you think of that as being reassuring or alarming? i think it's both, but i think it's one of those tantalising thoughts that people have a lot, that sort of "what if i'd done this" and "what if i'd done that," and i think the thought is very alarming, especially if you've based your whole life or you've lived your whole life dependent on one route you've gone down. but i actually think

the exploration of it, which i've tried to do in the book, is less alarming because i think that life... there are a lot of themes to the book, notjust the issue of the relationship between the two people, but i think life has a habit of turning out as it's going to turn out, and those paths not taken have a sort of way of rejoining almost, so that you can look back and think, "if i hadn't done, that my life might have been very different," but very often it's not. it's similar. that is the reassuring answer, but what's interesting about ivy and abe of course — the couple we follow and then go backwards with in this book — is that it's not so much what they have done, decisions they've made, it's about things that have happened that are beyond their control, an accident for example when they are children, that throws them apart. a lot of it is accidental, so they're not to blame, or it is not something they have done that's produced good or bad, it's just stuff that happened.

i've tried to work in... there's something else in that, that there are two things in the book that abe's life... so the two people have different things going on in their lives and abe's life, as you said, there's an accident which happens in each of his parallel lives and it always has a different effect. so it's a completely random accident. whenever it happens, the effect of that accident plays out differently. and against that, i wanted something that was more sort of set in the stars, if you like. so ivy has something which is — when i was writing it, i was thinking what can she have that's just almost immutable, that's not going to suffer the same random effects, so she has something in her genes which also plays out, which i don't want to give too much away, but that was my thing of what can you have in your life that is absolutely set that you can't affect, and that seemed to me like it's something you're born with, your cards are marked, your genetic card is marked,

and that's going to play out no matter what happens really in the rest of the world, the way that it will. we don't want to give too much away but we can say that we see them operating in parallel worlds. i mean they're children, then they meet when they are much, much older, elderly really. then there are two other episodes when they're in midlife, and we see these things almost acting simultaneously. it is inevitable when this book is reviewed that people will look back to that film sliding doors and say, "oh, that's the kind of thing we are talking about here." people will remember that movie. as you say, ivy and abe meet again and again, and it's like sliding doors but not in that it's not that same time that might have gone differently, it is at different times of their lives. they are children, they're in their 70s, in their 60s, in their 50s, 40s, 30s. we go right through, and within those chapters we have a little bit of background and a bit of information so we know

what that particular life to date, how it's been slightly different than it was to another version. you are writing a fascinating story, because it's absorbing, you know, what will happen in this circumstance and how does it compare with what's happened before or what's to come. were you conscious at all, when you were writing the story and as the novel developed, that you wanted to say something about the nature of life oi’ oui’ own experiences, or how we look at our emotional lives, or were you just saying i want to tell a good story? both. ithink... you know, one of the premises of this novel was i gathered a lot of stories of, a, people who'd had relationships that they had thought maybe if i'd met someone at another time it might have played out differently. so the circumstances of their life at that particular time had affected a particular relationship. and, b, that almost everyone,

i suppose, especially as they reach the end of their lives, and it starts at the end of ivy and abe's lives has a sort of slight... not really a yearning but a wistfulness. and i don't mean a deep, sad wistfulness but a slight nostalgic "i wonder what might have happened." a natural curiosity. yes, a natural curiosity. "what if i hadn't done that?" i think generally people think, "i'm glad that i didn't because my life has turned out fine." i'm interested in the names, ivy and abe. both very simple and almost very intimate. you know, my friends, ivy and abe. you can think of them. there's nothing artificial about them. it's the kind of question readers always want to know. how did you come to ivy and abe? well, i started actually, and there are traces of this this still in the book, i started with robert and eleanor because i wanted names that i could change and give a variation of. and then when i finished the book, i decided it was too confusing

and ijust wanted names that were easily recognisable, not unusual, not "how do you spell that?" but also unusual so that each time you met them it was obvious it was them. it wasn't another tom, dick or harry, or sarah or kate. it was like, "oh, it's ivy." then actually on the page, they look... they look nice together. they look sort of right. i like the way that words look on a page. i love the way they look on the cover of the book. you talk about the cover, it's interesting because you've got the names on scrabble tiles and a heart on another tile. it's a lovely idea because we all know how infuriating and how wonderful that game is according to how the tiles fall. exactly. it's a lovely analogy for the story really. exactly, and you can, you know, if you were playing scrabble, they might land anywhere on the board, they might repeat themselves on the board, so it is a great sort of metaphor for what the book is about.

i come back to the idea of alternative lives, which were always waiting out there for us and we could have taken. how did the idea come to you? it came... i mean, i'd love to say there was a eureka moment but there wasn't. it came... i sort of am constantly collecting people's stories so from reading the paper, from listening to the radio, listening to television, talking to people, and i sort of ended up with this collection of stories, which was the sort of theme running through them all was, you know, is there a right person or a right time? you've written a lot of short stories so your mind, in a way, you know, for some years, has been used to that idea of taking a lovely little episode and constructing a beautifully chiselled story. and this book, it seems to me, has a lot of that skill in it. you've put a lot of these things together and say, hang on a minute, there's a big mosaic

here which hangs together. it was lovely to write from that point of view because it did feel much more like initially i'm writing a series of short stories but there is a thread of a lifetime and of similar circumstances which runs through them all. but i was almost able to let the characters live their life at a particular moment without worrying about the before or after, and then thinking about that afterwards. elisabeth enfield, author of ivy & abe, thanks very much. thank you. part one of our weekend was pretty disappointing. a lot of rain moving across the country with dire conditions on the roads too. things will quiet down for a while. tonight it's going to be quite

a wild one with strong gale force winds, some rain and snow in the forecast as well. this is the band of rain spreading east during the course of the day. this starts to bring some heavy rain to northern ireland. it's this developing area of low pressure continuing to move east and tightening isobars meaning winds will continue to pick up across england and wales. gales developing inland. 50—60 mph near the coast. it looks like there could be very strong winds over north wales, north—west england and in towards northern england. maybe gusts of 70 mph for a time. rain in the south, snow in the north. southern scotland could see pretty heavy snow. a chilly night too. as we head into sunday morning, it's going to be a windy start, certainly across the east and the south—east of the country.

the gales will ease off. actually it's looking better than on saturday. many central, southern and eastern parts of the uk should see plenty of sunshine. further west, blustery showers and wintry in nature. further accumulations of snow across much of western scotland. temperatures 3—7 celsius. there will be some sunshine to compensate. on monday, we are in the blue colour, so it stays cold with the winds coming in from the west. always off the atlantic our weather fronts will be bringing a few showers at times. many across the north—west of the uk. for much of the country on monday it should be quite a decent day with lengthy spells of sunshine. it's going to be a cool one, 5—8 celsius at best. tuesday...

there will be a spell of wet and fairly breezy weather. dryer before another spell of rain before wednesday, and slightly milder too. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11: haiti has accused 0xfam of covering—up allegations that aid workers helping earthquake victims in the country paid for sex. the fact that those folks were allowed to leave the country without any punishment without even informing the haitian authorities about that, it was a cover—up. cross—border confrontations between israeli warplanes and iranian—backed forces in syria have triggered concern in both moscow and washington. a five—year—old boy who was pulled out of a river in ballymena, county antrim has died in hospital. also coming up: a tough match in the six nations,

where england hang