Penelope Lively

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

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And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a novelist. It was as a mother who enjoyed reading to her children that she discovered her passion for writing, and she published her first children's book in her late thirties. Six years later she wrote her first novel. She's now recognised as one of Britain's leading writers. She's published eight novels, two of them have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and one, Moon Tiger, won it in nineteen eighty seven. But she is no literary elitist. She also writes short stories for popular magazines like Woman's Own, Good Housekeeping, and Cosmopolitan. She is Penelope Lively.

Presenter1:05

The demand then for women's magazine stories is as great as ever, is it, Penelope? It is, but the interesting thing is that it's a different kind of demand. Nowadays magazines like this, Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping, are publishing what are called literary stories, which I don't think they would have done fifteen years or so ago. Then the idea was that women only wanted to read romantic fiction, and patently it isn't true. But of course, short story writing is an art in itself, isn't it? There are many novelists who simply can't do it. That's absolutely true. It it's different. It's a way of using an idea. It's a way of

Presenter1:39

doing something that that presents, I think, a sort of flash of life rather than the great exploratory business which is a novel. I I love doing it, but again it's it's a frustrating process because you can't just go out and find the short story. They either arrive or they don't. The working at them process is completely different from working at a novel. Have you ever written a short story about loneliness or life on a desert island?

Presenter2:04

I can't say I have, not exactly. No, it it's it's actually it's not a bad subject, but of course it has been done.

Presenter2:10

So are you going to enjoy yourself, do you think, on the island, or or would you hate that whole idea? I'd enjoy it for about forty-eight hours, I think. I'd I'd I rather like solitude, and forty-eight hours would be would be wonderful. After that I'd I'd get frantic and I'd panic and I'd do all the wrong things. So escape would be high on the agenda? It certainly would. But you're a a nature lover and a gardener, aren't you? I would have thought to an extent you would have been in your element. I might, yes. But as I as I said, I'd it would paw because of all the other things that are necessary. As I'd start, I imagine, trying to grow the garden and plant the things for next season, but then I'd panic because I hadn't got any books to read.

Presenter2:46

Let's hear some of your music. What's the first piece you'd like to take? I'd like an aria from Mozart's opera Zaida, which is an opera that's not nearly as well known as it should be. And this is partly in honour of my daughter, who's an oboeist. And some while ago she played the oboe part in this, and there's this wonderful aria, which is a duet between oboe and voice.

Penelope Lively3:13

God's the Lord as near to

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This bright wish, we stridely rested on.

Presenter4:09

The aria Ruhr Zanft meinholdes Leiben from Mozart's opera Zaida, sung by Edith Matthis, with the Berlin State Orchestra conducted by Bernhard Clay.

Presenter4:19

Do you believe, Penelope, that that writers are are born rather than made? I ask that because, as I said in the introduction, you never wrote a thing until you were well into your thirties, a comparative late comer. I don't think that you can.

Presenter4:30

Teach yourself to write or learn to write, but at the same time I think that that writers are in a constant state of learning and improvement, as it were. I think you start to write probably because there's something in you, there's some innate passion to do it. What you then spend the rest of the time doing is honing it down, is learning how to do it. But why did your innate passion take so long to emerge?

Presenter4:57

Goodness knows. I think probably partly diffidence, I imagine. I I when I look back I can see in a sense the germs of it. I I've always been an an absolutely avid reader since childhood and and having had a rather odd childhood without much formal education. But that went on and on and I think that in a curious way

Presenter5:20

The reading was a kind of preparation. There was certainly a a way of discovering style and discovering taste, which eventually started to burst out, but as you rightly say, extremely late. But were you an avid letter writer, or were you aware that you had a way with words, as they say? Not particularly, no. When I was a student at Oxford, I didn't find writing essays difficult. The writing part, I remember, came easily, but I wasn't a very assiduous student. And I do remember, in fact, one tutor saying to me in despair, this is an extraordinarily elegantly written essay, but it says nothing at all.

Presenter5:57

So by the time you started to write you were you were married uh to a university lecturer. Uh you had two children and you'd been very busy rearing them.

Presenter6:06

Were you one of those housewives who was determined you were going to do something?

Presenter6:10

In a sense I was yes, I I I can see that what I was doing in a way was preparing myself for something. I was a a a passionate reader, as I've said, and I'm one of the many people who who owe

Presenter6:21

An enormous debt to the public library system. When the children were small, at least twice a week, I used to be trundling the pram along to our local branch library. We were living then, first of all, in Swansea and then in Sussex, and there were small branch libraries, that kind of library that's about the size of a large room. And I just read my way round these libraries, so that the memories of those years are very much of keeping the baby quiet with one hand and turning the pages of a book with the other. So, is that the image that your children would have of you, that you were constantly book in hand, stirring the soup? I wonder. I wonder. I don't know. They may well remember as passing clouds of irritation because they interrupted me reading. And I read with them and to them a great deal because I'd by then become very interested in children's literature and also felt passionately this is something I wanted to share with.

Presenter7:15

with children, so there was a good deal of reading with them and to them also, as well as reading to myself.

Presenter7:21

Shall we pause there for your second record? My second record is is a piece of vicarious anguish. It's um a part of Schutz's Christmas story. And when my son was

Presenter7:33

A boy, a small boy, he had a treble voice and he was at a at Maudlin College School and at one point was a member of the choir and he sang the angel part in this at a I think it was the school Christmas concert and I I can't hear it ever without that feeling of awful sort of sinking in the stomach of you know would he would he get through it or not because his his voice was about to break.

Penelope Lively7:56

You stand by feast, you step by feast.

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This morning

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Rosa and Rosen Rider, Rosa and Rosen Brider.

Penelope Lively8:52

Was it mine?

Presenter8:57

Part of Heinrich Schutz's Christmas story sung by Adela Stalte with the Schwarbischer Orchestra conducted by Hans Grischkat.

Presenter9:05

How did you come then, Penelope, to to write your first book? Was it a case of reading them to children and thinking I can do better than that?

Presenter9:12

Well, I think it was a case of thinking I could have a go at it at least. And the first one I wrote was an absolutely appalling short historical novel which mercifully never found a publisher.

Presenter9:23

The next one was um a book called Astacote, which is still in print after all all this time. I I must say I don't much like to look at it now. I don't think many writers um like to go back to their first book.

Presenter9:34

But that did find a publisher. And then the children's books came one after another, really, all in a great rush, I now realise, perhaps making up for lost time. The Ghost of Thomas Kemp was perhaps one of the most successful of your children's books. That was 1974, so four years after the first one was published. You won this award for that, didn't you? The Carnegie Medal, very prestigious. Can you remember your reaction? Were you shocked or surprised? Oh, I was awfully thrilled. Yes, I was thrilled. It was the first prize I'd won since being at school, as it were. So it seemed

Presenter10:11

Extraordinary. I don't I don't otherwise remember very much about it. But even when you wrote that, your own children were in their early teens, I think. What what did they think suddenly to have this literary figure in the household?

Presenter10:24

Well, I doubt if they thought about it like that. I think subsequently I've learned that they were quite glad that it sort of kept me off off their backs, as it were. It it meant that I was beginning to be busier and busier, and so instead of hanging round their necks telling them what to do and what not to do, I was only too glad to leave them to get on with it and shuffle off to my study and get on with something.

Presenter10:46

They they've both said subsequently that that having a working mother is a very good thing, and I've I've come to feel that too, I must say. Shall we have some more music?

Presenter10:54

My next piece of music is is Some Country in Western. I'm rather partial to Country in Western and I have a particular taste for George Jones, so this is George Jones howling at the Moon.

Speaker 411:05

No there's never been a man in the awful shape of man.

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I can't even spell my name, my head's in such a spin.

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Today I tried to eat a steak with a big old table spoon. You got me chasing rabbits, walking on my hands, and a howling at the moon.

Speaker 411:30

Will Suggard took one look at you.

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Uh

Presenter11:36

George Jones howling at the moon. Tell me, Penelope, about winning the the booker prize. You'd been shortlisted twice before, I think, haven't you?

Presenter11:44

Yes, I had. And the first time was a a long time ago, about ten years ago, when there was far less commotion about it. It was all rather low key and and

Presenter11:53

Tranquil then. And indeed, you were told beforehand that you hadn't won. I was told with a certain satisfaction by my publisher that I hadn't won, because in fact one of his other authors had won. Who was that? That was Paul Scott. That was the Raj Quartet. That's right, yes, it was for one book of that. And yours was The Road to Litchfield, which was your first novel. It was. So that, yes, it was very exciting to have it recognised in this way. Incredible, really, for a first novel, wasn't it?

Speaker 112:20

It's incredible.

Presenter12:23

Well, it was encouraging. That that really though is a love story, isn't it? About this married woman who journeys to Lichfield to be with her dying father and happens to meet a a sympathetic schoolmaster. It's about love and it's also about memory. I mean it was it was I was working out the the strain that I still

Presenter12:43

um have and had then about the function of memory, the ways in which we use and abuse memory. It's it's something that's very much, I suppose, run through the the children's books, and and then I was looking for a

Presenter12:55

Another way of talking about it. Now I've I've moved it, I think, into all sorts of other and different ways of talking about it. Because of course Moon Tiger, which did win the Booker Prize a couple of years ago, is again very much concerned with time. As you say, it's about a a woman lying, dying in hospital, revisiting her life through through memories and voices. Did you feel when you wrote that that there was something special about it? Did you think, ah, this could be it?

Presenter13:22

It was a book that in a way I'd been waiting to write for a long time because part of it, the central part, is set in Egypt where I'd

Presenter13:30

been born and grown up, um or at least spent most of my childhood until I was thirteen.

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During the war, and I'd always wanted to write about this, but had never seen any way of writing about it that wouldn't be some.

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boring, totally autobiographical novel about somebody growing up in Egypt.

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And it wasn't until I went back there with my husband and some friends.

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For the first time

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Since I was a child, that I suddenly saw a way of doing it, that I saw a way of using.

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the sort of things that I wanted to write about anyway.

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and building them around that place and also specifically using my own memories, using my own experience of that time and that place to inform the structure of the book. It all came within a few months of coming back from Egypt after that that package holography.

Presenter14:21

A friend of mine, a male friend, says that he finds your leading females extremely sexy. How do you react to that? Oh, that's interesting. Certainly.

Presenter14:31

Claudia in Moontiger provokes violent extremes of feeling in people and men do react very strongly. Either they can't abide her or they think she's marvellous. Yes, they have that response and they find her very sexy, which I think probably says more about them than about her. What does it say about you?

Presenter14:49

Well, that again would be be hard for me to say. I I like I enjoyed writing Claudia because she's she's a a a strong

Presenter14:56

And powerful woman. I'm always being asked if she's in any sense autobiographical. She certainly isn't.

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She's she's not like me. On the other hand, I I respect her and admire her. I I rather like women like that. I'm less less forceful, I think, than she is, and and less combative.

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But may maybe she's the kind of person I would have liked to be.

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Shall we have your fourth record?

Presenter15:20

This is a piece of, in a sense, nostalgia. This was a piece of courtship music for me. It's one of Richard Strauss's four last songs. And when my husband was courting me, he quite properly in the conventional way used to ask me up to hear his records, and at that point he was deeply into Mahler and Strauss.

Penelope Lively15:41

More near to

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Why bless the lost in heaven as far?

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Build and be stored on

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What a mistake

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Crystal Goltz singing by M Schlaffengen, one of Richard Strauss's four last songs, with the Pro Musica Orchestra of Vienna, conducted by Heinrich Hollreiser.

Presenter16:51

Penelope, we seem to have cast chronology aside ourselves here, because I haven't yet asked you about your childhood. You said it was it was rather strange and and you had no formal education.

Presenter17:01

I didn't go to school in Egypt. There allegedly there was no school for me to go to, so I w I was educated at home entirely by

Presenter17:08

um a sort of governess who um

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Did it through a kind of

Presenter17:14

Do it yourself education kit, which was sent out from England, which which sent out the books and the time tables, which frequently didn't arrive. They went to the bottom of the Mediterranean, along with rather more vital water and supplies. And these were then administered in a in a very kind of haphazard way.

Presenter17:31

with sort of lessons in the mornings if we felt like it. But the curious thing is that that haphazard as it was, in fact for me it was just the right thing, because it was a an education

Presenter17:41

Based entirely on narrative, the idea was telling a story, so that it was the Bible, Greek and Norse mythology.

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And

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The form was that um you read to the child and then the child told the story back before they could write, and then when when they could write they wrote back. So that it was the emphasis was very much on narrative and on language. And I think it probably did a great deal for me, in fact. It taught me to to listen, to read, to

Presenter18:09

to control language. It was profoundly short on

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Science, there was no science at all except something called nature study, which we kind of went out and did by fishing things out of Nile-fed canals and looking at them.

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And there was very little mathematics. I remember the timetable said for Wednesdays it said arithmetic or handicraft, so we opted for handicraft. So when I did eventually get to a to a proper school, to a boarding school, I was

Presenter18:40

technically, as it were, behind, but in a curious way also advanced in that that I was very good at reading and writing. But it was also obviously, from what you say, really rather a a solitary business, your childhood? It was extremely solitary because I was an only child anyway.

Presenter18:56

And I communed with with animals and wi with nature. I had guinea pigs and a dog and this kind of thing, and these these were companions. And told myself stories, I realize, now, without writing them down, but I do remember being in a state of kind of continuous narrative.

Presenter19:12

and indeed have done so ever since. But I I've always thought that everybody did that. I I now realize that perhaps they don't. So where were you when war broke out?

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In England, in fact. I was then six and I was staying with with my grandparents in Somerset, and my parents had already gone back to Egypt, and so I was sent with um

Presenter19:33

This nurse governess and a whole group of other women and children with spouses in in the Middle East, sent back on a kind of um train caravan of these people across France in late September of nineteen thirty nine to catch a boat at Marseilles and and thence be shipped to to Egypt. The only thing I can remember about all this is is my constant anguish and panic about the gas mask. We each had to have a gas mask with us and we'd been sternly told that if you lost your gas mask the Germans would come and gas you. Well, I had no idea what either Germans or gas were, but I remember clinging to this thing frantically and yes, eventually losing it in a train.

Presenter20:12

But but you came home to England after the war, didn't you? Um, feeling, you said, rather like a a refugee, a foreigner. I felt totally and utterly displaced, and and I was about twelve, going on thirteen.

Presenter20:25

And

Presenter20:26

felt totally like a refugee and was sent immediately, or almost immediately, to boarding school, which was a fairly uh brutal experience for a child who hadn't been to any kind of school. In fact, it was completely horrific. It was a a very um

Presenter20:42

Well, a a boarding school of unremitting Philistinism. It seems to me extraordinary. I wonder if there are still such places. It was in Seaford on the south coast.

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One of the punishments at this school was to go and spend an hour in the library reading.

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I can also remember being sent for by the head mistress and one went, of course, quaking, knowing that you must have transgressed in some fearful way and finding her sitting at an enormous desk with my copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse in front of her, which, she explained, had been confiscated from my locker by the matron, because, she said, there is no need for you to read this kind of thing in your spare time. You are here to be taught all that.

Presenter21:21

No wonder you were a late comer to writing. I mean you obviously felt somehow it was some kind of crime. Oh, yes, I I went underground in a sense. I mean

Presenter21:29

The whole ethic being put into at this school was that affection for literature and enjoyment of literature, or indeed of learning really, was a perversion and that a nice girl and a healthy, decent girl got out and played lacrosse. This was what the heroines at this school did. So that someone like me was a a total and complete misfit. And I thought, well, yes, obviously I am perverted, I am some kind of freak, so that the only thing is just to go away and do it in private.

Presenter21:59

Let's have your fifth piece of music, shall we?

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My fifth piece of music is again more oboe music. Josephine, my daughter, played this the Haydn Oboe concerto.

Presenter22:11

when she was sixteen, in a school concert in Saint Mary's Church in Oxford, and again I can still remember the the vicarious anxiety of sitting there listening.

Presenter23:20

Part of Haydn's Oboe Concerto in C played by Heinz Holliger with the Concert Gebar Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by David Zinnmann.

Presenter23:30

Well, now we were saying, Penelope, you've written eight novels, grown up books, as it were, and countless children's books. Where do all the ideas come from? You say that they're in your head and you pluck them out, but where do they come from?

Presenter23:43

I don't go out and look for a novel, in a sense. It seems to arise from the things that I've been thinking about and the way that I'm looking at the world. But often the

Presenter23:52

The structure or or the subject or the um the story even is prompted by something seen. The book that I'm working on at the moment, which is a a London novel,

Presenter24:03

Was in one sense sparked off by a painting. In fact, it's a painting by my aunt, Rachel Reckitt, that she.

Presenter24:11

Painted from a drawing that she'd made during the early years of the Blitz in 40 and 41, and it's a very

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Disturbing and powerful oil painting of a blitzed building in Queen Victoria Street and

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I've looked at this a lot and and it it

Presenter24:28

acted in a sense as a prompt. You don't believe then that you, as many writers say, have to have experienced that which you're going to write about. Certainly not. In one way you do, of course, yes, but I think that that the the limitation for every writer is of course personal experience. We only live one life under one set of circumstances. And what you're forever trying to do is escape this

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this prison of experience and

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Be able to change your own reality, as it were, into.

Presenter25:00

the rather different reality of fiction. So how do you actually set about doing the writing? Do you write a certain number of words every day in a set place? First of all, there's just a great deal of what I would call moving around and thinking.

Speaker 125:10

Festival.

Presenter25:16

And then there's a note taking process when for months I just put things down in a note book, scraps of dialogue that will eventually go into the book, instructions to myself of one kind or another. And only when there's quite a lot of that am I ready to start writing.

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And then how many hours a day do you write, and where do you do it? When I'm actually doing it, I would write a sort of office hour day from about nine till five, and on the whole, probably in in our our Oxfordshire home.

Presenter25:47

At the moment, because of the way life is, I don't get enough weeks for doing that. There tends to be sort of a couple of weeks when I can do that, and then there's a week when I have other things that I must do. So there aren't long.

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Stretches of time when I'm just sitting doing nothing but write any more.

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And is it all enjoyable?

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What is enjoyable is is when it's going well. Yes, there's nothing like it. There's there's nothing so heady as as knowing that you've you've done a good day's work and then looking at it the next morning and it still looks good.

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There are points when it's it's dispiriting, is when you get stuck. I mean, this thing that's called writer's block, which I I think is just what it means is simply that you've got stuck. You don't see where the book

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goes next, you cannot see how it how it ever will.

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But the one thing you do learn of after a number of books is that it does somehow unhitch itself, or so far it has done.

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Another record, please.

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This is A Schubert Leader, Shepherd on the Rocks, sung by Margaret Price. I have a passion for the human voice. I think a lot of people.

Presenter26:49

most admire the thing that they know they couldn't possibly do, and I have no voice at all. I ha I can't sing in tune, so I I'm very, very fond of hearing other people able to do so.

Penelope Lively27:00

Its teeth apart and in sea.

Penelope Lively27:20

To see a home, to see you.

Penelope Lively27:34

House empties of God.

Presenter27:59

Schubert's The Shepherd on the Rocks sung by Margaret Price accompanied by Wolfgang Svalisch and Hans Schoenberger.

Presenter28:06

You obviously now, Penelope, lead a a really very hectic life, promoting your books here and abroad, and indeed presenting Treasure Islands on Radio four and thinking about your new novel, as we've been saying. I presume you're busier than you've ever been.

Presenter28:20

I am busy, yes. I last year I I travelled an enormous amount. This year I'm not doing so much deliberately because I I'm trying to write this book, but I I do

Presenter28:30

Work for literary organisations like the Society of Authors and at the moment for the Arts Council.

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I mean, I do it, I hasten to say, because I enjoy it, partly because it gets one away from the desk. Writing is a solitary occupation. I'm a fairly gregarious person. And I don't think I could any longer sit behind a desk for five days a week. It it would drive me distracted. But is there perhaps a an irony in the fact that that as a writer you must have time to stand and stare, and your success, the recognition of Penelope Lively, has robbed her of that?

Presenter29:05

Standing and staring is important, and that is in fact what I'm not getting, because I think I've rather ceased to write short stories, because they do very much arise from

Presenter29:15

Periods of fallowness from periods of tranquillity. That's when the ideas suddenly come. And I'm not getting that at the moment. So I think it would would be no bad thing, in fact, to have a fallow year or so. How has your husband, who is a professor of politics, how has he reacted to all of this? In the s I ask that in the sense that for the first sixteen years of your life, as we've heard, you were the mother of his children and you were there at home, although you had the odd academic job. Now, the second sixteen years of marriage, you have become this prominent public figure.

Presenter29:48

We well, we we've learned to sort of adjust to each other's lives because he's also extremely busy. And so we we are operating in completely different areas and we're we're together as much as we possibly can be within that context.

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But he's had, yes, this problem that he married one person who then turned into another and he's gone along with it magnificently. But I suspect for you you've led your life the right way round, that your family came first and always would have done. And now you're enjoying the success.

Speaker 130:16

Maiden

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They probably would, I think. Yes, I I enormously enjoyed the children. I have to say I felt as as exasperated and frustrated and and shut in as any anyone does when there were small children. But I I'm very glad that I had that period of

Presenter30:32

Doing nothing but look after them when they when they were really small, yes.

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Shall we have your seventh record? My seventh record. I think I would need something soothing on this island, so this is a Chopin nocturne.

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Chopin Nocturn Opus Nine, number one in B flat minor played by Arto Rubinstein.

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One wouldn't call you a a feminist writer, Penelope. Um do you care to be pigeon-holed? Would are you happy to be called a woman writer? Not particularly, no. Uh I think this is a fairly meaningless expression. After all, one doesn't talk about men writers. I'm I'm simply a novelist, and and and that's it. Except that if one picked up one of your books and didn't know uh who had written it, and I'm sure that after I feel sure that after a few pages one would know it was a woman writing. I agree with you. I think that's true, and I would say the same of other kinds of writers, both

Presenter32:20

Men and women. I don't know what it is, what particular

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gender quality it is that makes itself apparent in in fiction, but it it certainly does. I mean at ludicrous extremes, of course. The the female novel, as it were, is is romantic fiction and the male novel is maco stuff of of one kind or another. But one would feel that in the middle in in and in literary fiction there shouldn't be this definable gender distinction, but patently there is. I wish I knew what it was. Who who do you read? Who do you admire? I suppose I go back a lot to old favourites. I think I I'm always going back to the Russians, to Turgenyev particularly.

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And Dickens, I mean the the books that I reread every few years, there would always be a Dickens on the boil.

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I'm very partial to a number of American writers, and actually women writers particularly, say like Edith Wharton or Willa Cather. But it's an eclectic list and one that there are constantly additions to and constantly changing. I be for instance Henry James at the moment. I'm suddenly finding a violent antipathy to Henry James. I always thought I liked him.

Presenter33:26

But do you read any of of The Blockbuster Gang? Do you read Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins or Jeffrey Archer? I never have done, no. I I tried a Geoffrey Archer once, and uh with the best will in the world, yes, I couldn't get very far. And you haven't tried a Jackie Collins? I haven't, no. I'd be fascinated to know what you thought.

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So they're not going to be your chosen author on the island. Who who is? What is the book you've chosen to take with you? Oh, that really was an immense problem, but after

Presenter33:53

Considerable thought. I think I would take Moby Dick.

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Because obviously one would need a large book in every sense. And Mobedick is an immensely long book. It's also one of the largest novels in scope that there is. It's something that would give me.

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A vast amount of food for thought, and I would never get to the bottom of it, so that it would bear the number of re-readings that it would have to have.

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Let's hear your last record, shall we? My last record would be

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Uplift that one would definitely need on this island. So, Purcell's come ye sons of art.

Penelope Lively34:27

Come come ye sads of Artem Come away, come come ye sads of Artem.

Penelope Lively34:38

Good all your voices and instruments play To celebrate, to celebrate this triumphant day.

Penelope Lively34:49

Tune all your voices and its true and pay To celebrate, to celebrate this triumph day To celebrate, to celebrate this triumph

Penelope Lively35:06

And don't be so busy for away.

Penelope Lively35:12

This song

Presenter35:27

Purcells come ye sons of art with the Monteverde choir and orchestra conducted by John Eliot Gardner.

Presenter35:34

So now, which of those records, Penelope, would give you best comfort on the island?

Presenter35:39

I'd take the Zaida, I think, because that would both give me the the marvellous beauty of it, and also it's it's uplifting, it's enhancing music, it would cheer me up.

Presenter35:49

And your luxury.

Presenter35:51

I've always assumed that this island is in the South Pacific, so presumably it's bird infested, and I've always been a an enthusiastic amateur bird watcher, so my luxury would simply be a pair of binoculars.

Presenter36:04

Penelope Lively, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 136:16

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.