Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
A novelist who published her first book at 70 and went on to write six bestsellers, often featuring strong-minded, unconventional women.
Eight records
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92Favourite
Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of New York conducted by Arturo Toscanini
First record is the first thing that made me aware of classical music, which was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And I used to play that over and over again. And during the war I had I used to go to bed, because I was in a very, very cold house in the second half of the war, and I was pregnant, and I used to go to bed with my gramophone and my records and my books, and also try and write. And I used to play the Seventh Symphony and one or two other things, but that rarely stuck in my mind. And I had that illusion that if I played enough good music to the baby inside me, he might appreciate music sooner than I had in my life.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051
English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Leppard
My second record is the Brandenburg concerto, number six, which is extremely joyous and which reminds me of my husband, who used to whistle it in his bath.
Christmas Hymn from the Christmas Day Mass
Monks of St. Peter's Abbey, Solesmes
This is the monks of St Peter's Abbey at Soleim singing the Christmas Day Mass. When Erik and I became Catholics thirty years ago, more than thirty years ago, we both adored the the Latin and you could no longer only get it at places like Coe Abbey and in Solem. And it's very beautiful and moving, I think.
Dirge from Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31
After an operation before penicillin. … I was alone in a nursing home and the door opened and my children's beloved rosy cheeked nanny came in to see me. And she suddenly went white as a sheet. And I thought, uh oh, I'm off I'm dying and I can't die and so I had the most appalling reaction. … So I managed to hiss at my doctor that I wanted a second opinion, and I had an instant operation and recovered. But that was quite a near miss, and I was young and didn't realize about death. It was about that time, a little later perhaps, that I heard Benjamin Britton's the Dietrich Dirge, which makes you think about death, and the hairs on the back of your neck go up and you're afraid, as you are afraid of death when you're young.
Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-flat major, K. 495
Dennis Brain with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan
I should like to take Dennis Brain playing Mozart Horn concerto number four, which is really glorious and joyous, and it reminds me of when I first lived on Dartmoor with my husband second husband with Eric.
Oh, the Beatles, just just for the hell of it, and for fun. And my husband and I thought it was funny. And it's just lovely and sentimental. … My husband was sixty-four and we enjoyed that.
This is my idea of heaven, which is waking up to hear the dawn chorus of birds, which is, I think, almost the most important music in my life and the most lasting.
Double Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043
Yehudi Menuhin and Georges Enescu with the Paris Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteux
My last record is If You Can't Hear It Dawn Chorus and have reached … you know, manager of Evade Hell, in which I don't believe because I think we make our own here is Johnuin and Georginesco playing Bach double wadin concerto in D minor, and that to me is absolutely wonderful. … It's like two really wonderful people talking to each other. One of those unearthly brilliant conversations which one seldom hears.
The keepsakes
The book
Gabriel García Márquez
it's got everything in it. It's the most wonderful book that I've read in years. I thought about this a lot. It's got every form of love and every weakness and strength in humanity in it, and a great deal of humour.
The luxury
A large double bed with lots of pillows
couldn't I have a large double bed with lots of pillows and I could sit in bed and work?
In conversation
Presenter asks
Has eight years been long enough to come to terms with fame and fortune, or do you still have to pinch yourself to believe it?
No, it's all a very big surprise and goes on being an enormous surprise. Same old me inside. People say, Oh, you must be feeling so wonderful, you know, so successful and so on and I even occasionally trip over a sort of note of awe in people and I say, For God's sake, shut up, it's the same old me in the size, no difference.
Presenter asks
You sold your first book just before you were seventy. Why had you left it so late?
I hadn't left it so late. I'd written the book and it had been refused by quite a number of publishers. … I didn't think I had any education, which is true. I hadn't any proper education, and I thought you had to go to Oxford or studied English literature or whatever, to be able to write.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 1
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 1
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
MY CASTAWY this week is a novelist. Throughout her life she has written prose and poetry which was consigned to the waste paper bin or simply lost with the passage of time. It wasn't until she was seventy, a widow struggling to make ends meet, that she finally found a publisher and her first book, Jumping the Queue, went into print. That was eight years ago. She's written another six bestsellers since The Camomar Lawn, Harnessing Peacocks, Not That Sort of Girl. Stories of strong minded, often well bred women who are unafraid to defy convention. A description, perhaps, of their creator. She is Mary Wesley.
Presenter
Mary, has eight years been long enough to come to terms with fame and fortune, or do you still have to pinch yourself on occasions to believe it?
Mary Wesley
No, it's all a very big surprise and goes on being an enormous surprise. Same old me inside. People say, Oh, you must be feeling so wonderful, you know, so successful and so on and uh
Mary Wesley
I even occasionally trip over a sort of note of awe in people and I say, For God's sake, shut up, it's the same old me in the size, no difference.
Presenter
So has it made no difference to you as obviously financially?
Mary Wesley
Financially it's made a difference. I no longer cringe at the sight of the electricity bill.
Presenter
But what about you a as an individual? If it hasn't changed you fundamentally, has it made you more confident or more relaxed?
Mary Wesley
No, I don't think I'm any more confident than I ever was. I'm an absolute snail. I'm terrified inside.
Presenter
Well now writing is is a lonely business, so I dare say to that extent you will relish being alone on the desert island, will you?
Mary Wesley
Iran Lovett, yes, absolutely love it.
Presenter
Do you do you need music to write to or or silence?
Mary Wesley
No, no, I don't. I write in silence, or what I hope will be silence.
Presenter
Well you get a a bumper bundle really of both music and silence on the island, so let's find out what's in your musical package. What's the first record you got?
Mary Wesley
First record is the first thing that made me r aware of classical music, which was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And I used to play that over and over again. And during the war I had I used to go to bed, because I was in a very, very cold house in the second half of the war, and I was pregnant, and I used to go to bed with my gramophone and my records and my books, and also try and write. And I used to play the Seventh Symphony and one or two other things, but that rarely stuck in my mind. And I had that um illusion that if I played enough good music to the baby inside me, he might appreciate music sooner than I had in my life.
Presenter
Part of the final movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. seven, played by the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of New York, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty six.
Presenter
Mary, you sold your first book just before you were seventy. Well, now, why? Why why had you left it so late? I hadn't.
Mary Wesley
Hadn't left it so late. I'd written the book and uh it had been refused by quite a number of publishers.
Presenter
But you had been writing all of your life.
Mary Wesley
Well, on and off all my life I wrote, and I used to I suppose I was teaching myself to write. I wrote poetry, a lot of poetry in the war, and I read nothing else. I was absorbed by poetry, and I threw all that away. And then I started writing novels, and I my husband was a writer, and I used to write to keep him company, and I threw those away. And I didn't really ever consider getting published.
Mary Wesley
Because I s
Mary Wesley
Didn't think I was had any education, which is true. I hadn't any proper education, and I thought you had to go to Oxford or
Mary Wesley
I've studied English literature or whatever, to be able to write. And so you had no confidence.
Presenter
So
Presenter
So if you hadn't tried to be published before, what was it when you were well into your sixties that made you try then?
Mary Wesley
Well, I had had two children's books published. I'd been encouraged to get published by Antonia White, who at last saw something I was writing, because we were talking about her writing and her how she gets blocked. And she said, But you write, don't you? and I said, Yes, and I chuck it away. And she said, Do let me see something you I'm interested, do let me see something you write. So I sent her s one of the children's books, and I said, No, I haven't shown it to anybody. And she was a very tough critic.
Mary Wesley
And she wrote back enthusiastically and said, You've simply got to stop fooling about and get yourself published, because you write very well.
Mary Wesley
When I found myself that I was writing an another book, which was a children's book, and then I wrote Jumping the Queue and having written them, I thought, Well, perhaps they're publishable. And that's how it came about. And then I came in one day and the telephone was ringing, and it was my agent who said, He wants to see you on Monday, and I said rather crossly, Who's he? And she said, Um
Mary Wesley
It's it's James Hale, who's head of of fiction at Macmillan.
Mary Wesley
And I said, Well, you'll have to have to wait. I'm coming up to London at the end of August,'cause I'm being taken to Venice as a birthday treat by a friend, and one of my sons is paying the f the fare.
Mary Wesley
And she said, But he wants to see you on Monday. And I said, Well, he wants to be his master. I haven't got the fare.
Mary Wesley
And she said, Oh in that sort of tone of voice people adopt when they suddenly realise you haven't any money. And she said, I'll ring you back. Then she rang me back, and she said, Do be sensible, you're getting a nice you'll get a good advance. Go and borrow the money. And I I came up.
Presenter
But were you really so poor that you didn't have the choice?
Mary Wesley
I was. I was I was literally calculating I was living on a widow's pension and about fifty or sixty pounds a month else, and doing everything on that. And I had the kind of mentality then that I'd say I won't post this letter till Monday when I've drawn my pension, then I can buy more stamps, which was as tight as that.
Mary Wesley
Good heavens. I I owned my house and I owned my furniture and that was about it. But nobody was more surprised than me when Macmillan took it.
Presenter
Can you remember that moment?
Mary Wesley
I can remember every moment I went in to see James Hale, who has is has become a very dear friend, and I didn't know what to expect. And uh I said How do you do? and so on, and we s I sat down, and I said, bristling with terror, I suppose you ought to want a whole lot of alterations, and he patted the manuscript and he said not a single word.
Mary Wesley
And I adored him from that moment on it for this marvellous sort of relief.
Mary Wesley
And then he discussed the book a little, and there was no word altered in that book, except I had sent some people to have dinner at Prunier's, which no longer existed, so we changed that and said,
Presenter
He never changed a lot, but he he's changed a lot of punctuation, I think.
Mary Wesley
Well, yes, he had he's always had to correct my punctuation,'cause I I have no grammar, I never learnt it.
Presenter
Shall we have your setting record then?
Mary Wesley
Yes.
Mary Wesley
My second record is the Brandenburg concerto, number six, which is extremely joyous and which reminds me of my husband, who used to whistle it in his bath.
Presenter
Part of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. Six in B-flat, played by the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Raymond Lepard.
Presenter
Bringing back memories of your husband, Mary Wesley, Eric Siepman. You said he was a writer.
Mary Wesley
You said he was
Speaker 1
Uh
Presenter
I wonder how he would judge your books. What do you think? Is it possible to say what he would think of some?
Mary Wesley
I hope he'd think that uh some of it was good.
Mary Wesley
I know he'd laugh at the jokes,'cause that's something we had very much in common. And what I miss most about him ever since he's died is the things we can't laugh at together.
Speaker 4
Uh
Mary Wesley
I still come into the house and all think I must tell Erik that he's not there to tell.
Mary Wesley
How long ago is it since he died?
Mary Wesley
Uh
Presenter
Your first book, of course, Jumping the Queue, was about a woman whose husband had just died, wasn't it?
Mary Wesley
Well, it was about despair. When Eric died I had uh I was terribly depressed and um very, very unhappy. Uh I think all widows are. And I felt all the things all widows feel, guilt. Why didn't I do better? And why didn't why did I say this on that occasion and why didn't I do the other. And I felt very despairing and very unhappy, but I was in no way suicidal because I had all the hooks which are necessary to hold you on to life. I had a child still at school whom I had to look after and a dog and a cat, you know, and things in the garden. But I was extremely unhappy and down. And it was
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Mary Wesley
Some years after he died, that I started writing again, I blocked.
Mary Wesley
Couldn't write.
Presenter
But your your heroine in that book, Matilda, indeed does commit suicide. Actually, she commits suicide rather happily, doesn't she?
Mary Wesley
Well, she had nothing left to live for, you see. She had beast of children, which I have not got. Her dog, she had been run over or killed, or had died, and she had no longer got a cat. And she her goose, which she knew would live for about forty years if she left it alone, she found it a good home because she really felt she had nothing left to live for. And she had often discussed with her husband you know, that uh it would be quite a good thing to opt out before you got too creaky and ancient and ill. Is that something that I've seen? It's not my theory, but it was hers. And I get rather annoyed when people think that's uh an autobiographical book. It isn't.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
But is is suicide, though, something that that you could do if you so chose?
Mary Wesley
Well, if I was so ill and tiresome and a nuisance to other people and had nothing left in me to contribute to life, yes, I think it's a sensible opt. I think I would push off to Holland, where it's nicely arranged, and you can euthanase yourself out.
Mary Wesley
Let's have your third piece of music.
Mary Wesley
This is the monks of St Peter's Abbey at Soleim singing the Christmas Day Mass. When Erik and I became Catholics thirty years ago, more than thirty years ago, we both adored the the Latin and you could no longer only get it at places like Coe Abbey and uh in Solem. And it's very beautiful and moving, I think.
Speaker 1
I know who's been
Mary Wesley
Uh
Speaker 4
Tristur Natum Avi
Speaker 1
Please
Speaker 1
Uh
Speaker 1
I didn't
Speaker 1
The anusa.
Speaker 1
Something like
Speaker 1
We have
Speaker 4
If the live warmest come
Presenter
The monks of St. Peter's Abbey Soleim singing the Christmas hymn from the Christmas Day Mass.
Presenter
How do you write, Mary, and when and where and with what?
Mary Wesley
I've got my desk. I've got a very funny cottage in Tottenham with an enormous wide corridor outside my bedroom, which is almost a room, and I've got my desk in there, and w sun streams in through a window, and I've have my desk there, and as I live alone, I can work in a corridor, not in necessarily shut up in a room.
Presenter
And a typewriter or a word pressure.
Mary Wesley
I can't type, I can't WordPress says, I don't want to. I write everything long hand on fool's cap paper and um over and over again, lots of scratchings out, and then I make eventually make a fair copy, and I have a splendid girl who's learned to read my awful handwriting, and she types it.
Presenter
How much do you plan your novels and construct them beforehand? Or do you simply let them know?
Mary Wesley
Well, roughly I know the beginning, the middle and the end, and it's all the filling in. And also
Mary Wesley
It's a curious occupation. It's it's a very mysterious one. I may go to bed wondering what the hell's happening now, and am I stuck? I've learned not to despair. And I wake up in the morning and that's what happens That's what she did or he did.
Presenter
What about your characters? Do you spot them as you go about your life, or do you study them with the money?
Mary Wesley
No, I don't. They pop up. Um.
Mary Wesley
Or events which I've seen. I've got one in A Sensible Life of the beastly mother having her face scratched by a kite who snatches an oyster from her hand. I saw that actually happen in India. I had a cousin I was very fond of, and he was sitting talking to his beautiful wife, and they were eating oysters, great risk in India in those days. And he had an oyster at the end of a toothpick, and he was talking to his wife, and suddenly this bird swooped down and snatched the oyster. And that has remained in my mind for, whatever, forty years more.
Mary Wesley
As something to happen, but you see, I've used it out of context, and that's what happens.
Presenter
You are, as I pointed out, incredibly prolific seven novels in eight years. Can you keep up that pace?
Mary Wesley
Well, each time I start a book I see, I'm seventy seven now, I'm seventy eight in June. I just pray.
Mary Wesley
that I'll live to finish the book.
Mary Wesley
'Cause if you're my age, you're much nearer death than anything else, and you have to be ready for it.
Presenter
Is that really how you think?
Mary Wesley
Yes, I do.
Mary Wesley
No, four score three score years and ten or whatever, or anything after seventy is a bonus and to be enjoyed.
Presenter
Verna
Mary Wesley
We're back to
Presenter
Yeah.
Mary Wesley
Talking about death again. I think we'd better have some music. What's the next person?
Presenter
I didn't mind talking about death. You do. You're young. I
Mary Wesley
After an operation before penicillin.
Mary Wesley
and I was alone in a nursing home and the door opened and my children's beloved rosy cheeked nanny came in to see me.
Mary Wesley
And she suddenly went white as a sheet.
Mary Wesley
And I thought, uh oh, I'm off I'm dying and I can't die and so I had the most appalling reaction. The first thing I thought was, I've bought a new coat and I've never worn it.
Mary Wesley
And the other was, Who the hell's going to look after the children? I've got to, and I've got to get well.
Mary Wesley
So I managed to hiss at my doctor that I wanted a second opinion, and I had an instant operation and recovered. But that was quite a near miss, and I was young and didn't realize about death. It was about that time, a little later perhaps, that um I heard Benjamin Britton's the Dietrich Dirge, which makes you think about death, and the hairs on the back of your neck go up and you're afraid, as you are afraid of death when you're young.
Mary Wesley
But I don't have that fiar now.
Speaker 4
Is a night, ever in light of love Fire and fleet and cavalite And Christ receives
Speaker 4
Oh the Lord for us all standing.
Speaker 4
Empure thou corps that dust, and Christ will see thy soul.
Speaker 4
Gaze towards a marriage.
Presenter
The dirge from Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, sung by Peter Peirce with the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britton.
Presenter
Can we talk for a moment, Mary, about your childhood? You came, I think, from a well, you come from a rather military
Mary Wesley
Extremely military. My father was a colonel, his father was a general, one of his brothers was a general, my mother had a general brother and I had various admiral uncles. It was awfully military. And um in that way constricted in that we were always moving house to follow my father's army families do.
Presenter
What about your education? You you said that there wasn't a lot of it.
Mary Wesley
There wasn't much of it. It was a curious education, which was done in those days for girls. Um there were other families like the Mitfords who only had governesses. We had strings and strings of French or Swiss or Italian or Danish governesses who talked to us in French or Italian or German so that we could learn languages.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
But why so many strings of the
Mary Wesley
Well, there my I once asked my mother why we'd had so many, and she said they didn't like you, darling, which is qu quite likely, because the first one came when uh to take the place of my nanny, whom I worshipped. And I remember my nanny leaving. I was three, and I remember what I was wearing and how she wept. And
Mary Wesley
Curious thing was that although she stopped working for us, she never lost contact with me. She only died two years ago at the age of a hundred.
Presenter
Did your parents like you?
Mary Wesley
Uh
Mary Wesley
I don't think my mother wanted me. She once told me she didn't want another child, and if she had to have another, she wanted a son. And, um
Mary Wesley
My p she was a very good mother, according to her likes. We always had messies to eat and were beautifully looked after and our teeth straightened and all that kind of thing. But I think she preferred my brother and sister. And I didn't fit into what she would have liked me to be, or my father would have liked me to be, which was a a nice, good, conservative girl who would marry a nice, good conservative and live
Mary Wesley
That sort of live.
Presenter
Why didn't you fit into that?
Mary Wesley
I don't know, I just didn't. I always felt rather revolutionary. All my
Mary Wesley
I expect I was a very tiresome child. I I never spoke about anything that mattered to me, to my mother or my brother and sister.
Mary Wesley
And uh
Mary Wesley
I just brooded.
Presenter
But you got married very young, didn't you?
Mary Wesley
I was about twenty three. By that time I had collected a lot of boyfriends and uh they they educated me. They were great. They used to Guy God, you're ignorant and they used to thrust Bertrand Russell and Shaw and you name it, all the highbrow writers at me and tell me to get on with the reading.
Presenter
But you you married a a young Irish peer.
Mary Wesley
He wasn't Irish, he was English. Uh there's a misconception that he was Irish because he happened to die in Ireland and he he married an Irish uh woman after me.
Presenter
But what did he do when he was a little bit of a drink?
Mary Wesley
He was a barrister, and he had um not much to do. He was rather idle, very nice man, very kind, and right to the end of his life we were great friends. He was the kind of person I shu should have kept as a friend and not married.
Presenter
What did you do while he was sitting there?
Mary Wesley
What indeed did we do in those days? I had a house with several servants and nothing to do except go out to lunch and shop and go to exhibitions and things of that kind. I often wonder how I passed my days.
Mary Wesley
I didn't do anything important.
Mary Wesley
Until the war, when which was a sort of release, I could go find myself a job, and I did.
Presenter
So, was it really in the war that you began really to grow up, to mature?
Mary Wesley
Yes, jolly late maturity, yes. And uh I re I enjoyed having a job and being able to uh you know pop off in the morning and work and reappear in the evening like normal people do.
Presenter
Let's pause there and then and have your fifth piece of music.
Mary Wesley
I should like to take um Dennis Brain playing Mozart Horn concerto number four, which is really glorious and joyous, and it reminds me of when I first lived on Dartmoor with my husband second husband with Eric.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Presenter
Dennis Brain playing part of Mozart's Horn Concerto No. Four with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrion.
Presenter
So by the end of the war, Mary, you had two young children, but your marriage was breaking down, wasn't it?
Mary Wesley
Yes, it was sort of coming apart.
Mary Wesley
But no divorce. And we were divorcing. In those days you could only divorce for adultery and there wasn't any adultery and you could divorce for desertion, which took a very long time. You had to desert for three years and we rarely sort of colluded and deserted. Um my husband rather wanted to marry somebody else and I I had nobody but I just didn't want to stay married to him and we divorced
Presenter
But no divorce.
Mary Wesley
for desertion. We were just finishing our divorce when, by chance, I met Eric.
Presenter
The man you were to spend the next twenty-five years. Yes. Um, but you were, I suppose, technically, when when you moved in with him, living in sin, as the
Mary Wesley
Well, we lived in Sin because he had a wife who he hadn't seen and didn't know where she was, who he had married because she'd asked him to, because she understood that she'd get a good he was on his way to Crete and everybody who went to Crete in the war got themselves killed. And he said it was quite sort of businesslike arrangement that she'd get his widow's pension. But he didn't get to Crete and he didn't get killed. And but when I met him he hadn't uh s didn't really didn't know where she was.
Mary Wesley
And she had written to say she wanted a divorce, and uh eventually they did. But was that was that then very daring of you? When I divorced, my family were outraged. They A didn't want me to divorce, so they hadn't particularly wanted me to get married, and um they certainly didn't want me living with Erik in so-called sin.
Presenter
But because the characters in your books break the rules too, don't they?
Mary Wesley
Yes, well, I think rules are made to be broken if they're silly that one should break them.
Presenter
Your latest heroine, um, in a sensible life, I think, falls in love with three men at the same time, doesn't she?
Mary Wesley
Yes, I think she's poor child, she's puzzled because she falls in love. I mean, she knows nothing about sex, she knows nothing about anything, but she's under the impression that love is forever with one person, which I think uh perhaps a lot of little girls have.
Presenter
What about Rose Peel in Not That Kind of Girl, who leads an extraordinary double life?
Mary Wesley
Rose Peel did what I think must be extremely difficult. She managed to live a dual existence and not betray either her lover or her husband in in the sense that she um made her husband happy. She she was rather an Edwardian character. I've uh read a lot about Edwardian people who had sort of respectable and rather boring husbands, but kept a lover as well.
Presenter
A sort of secret passion. The critics are agreed that you're very good at uh writing about love and sex. I think they say that you're you're passionate but not prurient.
Mary Wesley
Well, they go boring on about sex because I'm in my seventies and I think they think that if uh after all, any book I pick up is all about sex, sex, sex the whole time, and nobody lifts an eyebrow, it's just'cause I'm so very ancient. They think I should have forgotten about it.
Mary Wesley
But you haven't. No, I haven't.
Presenter
Uh
Mary Wesley
Yeah.
Presenter
No.
Mary Wesley
Oven the
Presenter
The afternoons really has a rather different meaning for you. It means you're writing about it.
Mary Wesley
Well, I'm writing about it or remembering it or or knowing that it happens.
Mary Wesley
Your next record.
Mary Wesley
Oh, the Beatles, just just for the hell of it, and for fun. And my husband and I thought it was funny. And it's just lovely and sentimental.
Speaker 4
When I get old I'll lose my head Many years from now
Speaker 4
Will you still be sending me Valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine, If I be out till quarter to three?
Speaker 4
Would you lock the door?
Speaker 4
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?
Mary Wesley
My husband was sixty-four and we enjoyed that.
Mary Wesley
The Beatles when I'm sixty-four.
Presenter
Now, the the feature writers and the critics also write about uh what they
Presenter
seem to call your fundamental insecurity. Not about your your grammar or your punctuation, which you admit to about yourself, but
Presenter
Where you belong in society, they say. Now does that ring true at all? Do you find yourself a bit of a misfit?
Mary Wesley
I don't know. I d I people have to put up with me as I am now, and probably they always have had to.
Presenter
What about the the rest of your family? What about your children and your grandchildren? How about that?
Mary Wesley
Well, my parents are long dead. My children and grandchildren, I think, have come to terms with the fact that uh I am writing and they're very pleased. They'd enjoy it. They ring up at intervals and say you are now being read in the tube or we have seen you in the airport or whatever.
Presenter
What do you mean when you use the phrase come to terms with it? Did they not like it at first?
Mary Wesley
I think they were so surprised uh that um
Mary Wesley
Quite little mamma should certainly produce that it hadn't known I was writing these books, Susie, I never told anybody.
Mary Wesley
Do you find you have become altogether more popular with friends and family as a result of your success?
Mary Wesley
I don't think so. I think they think, Oh gosh, there's my aunt, she writes, you know.
Presenter
But do your family descend on you more? Do they want to know?
Mary Wesley
No, they don't, and they know when they come and descend that I can't wait for them to leave after we've said everything we it sounds an awful thing to say, as if I didn't love my family, I do. But when we've said everything that is to be said, and they're busy people, and I am a busy person, the time is to get on with our respective jobs.
Presenter
But you're you're not a p
Mary Wesley
Yeah. No, I don't think just because somebody's a relation you should necessarily like them. And I was brought up that was one of the things I objected to in my upbringing, that because somebody was a cousin, however distant, you automatically like them. Well, I don't. And I like them like people as people.
Mary Wesley
Do you
Presenter
Do you like do you like your children?
Mary Wesley
I love my children deeply.
Presenter
But you like them.
Mary Wesley
Yes, I do like them.
Mary Wesley
And I like my grandchildren.
Mary Wesley
And I love talking to them, but because I'm a solitary person, I like also to be alone, and they know that.
Mary Wesley
So that
Mary Wesley
Knitting them socks. Yes, well it doesn't exist.
Presenter
But do you find your do you find your image goes before you, that that people have an expectation of who and what they're going to meet?
Mary Wesley
Yeah.
Mary Wesley
Well, people are rather apt to say in a sinister way on not what I expected, and then they won't l say what they expected. So I'm left in the dark. Perhaps they expected a sweet old lady. Perhaps they expected a sweet old lady or some tough old boot, I don't know. Right, what's the next piece you'd like to take with you? Where have we got to? Number seven. Number seven. This is my idea of heaven, which is waking up to hear the dawn chorus of birds, which is, I think, almost the most important music in my life and the most lasting.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Presenter
A dawn chorus, and uh you get a cuckoo in there as well.
Mary Wesley
Yes, well knocks for the cuckoos.
Presenter
So you'll be a willing castaway, Mary, unafraid of the unknown on
Mary Wesley
I shall be very willing. I am greatly looking forward to this island.
Presenter
No, I should
Presenter
You're you're a survivor, really, aren't you?
Mary Wesley
Oh yes, I'm well able to make myself a shelter and to make paper out of palm leaves and burn something to m scratch away with.
Presenter
How many books how many more books have you got in you, do you think?
Mary Wesley
Oh, that I've never known. I'm amazed each time one pops up to be written. I don't know. I might be s I'm so lazy anyway by nature, I might as well do no writing at all.
Presenter
But you're not lazy about your writing, are you? Isn't isn't it a passion for you?
Mary Wesley
It's a terrible grind, and it's a very painful occupation, and it then suddenly it all flows and goes well, and its absolute joy makes up for this hard labour.
Presenter
So there are times when it
Mary Wesley
There are times when it's a terrible chore and I get thoroughly stuck. But then there are times when it goes well, then it's a reward and worth it.
Presenter
Just one more question. Do you like the Mary Wesley that you've created? This strong and very successful 77-year-old? Do you like her?
Mary Wesley
No, not very much. I don't I don't know. I've never met myself, who see. I c I catch glimpses of myself in the looking glass sometimes. I think who's that old woman?
Mary Wesley
I don't think about myself very much. I don't like my voice. I particularly hate my voice. And I'm not very keen on my appearance.
Mary Wesley
But you like your achievement? I am amazed and delighted by it. Yes. It's it really is something uh it's interesting. I feel quite apart from it.
Mary Wesley
I don't think it's part of me.
Mary Wesley
I wonder who it is.
Mary Wesley
Second half of me, perhaps, or some something that's taken over. It's quite mysterious.
Mary Wesley
Shall we hear your last record? What is it? My last record is If You Can't Hear It Dawn Chorus and have reached uh
Mary Wesley
you know, manager of Evade Hell, in which I don't believe because I think we make our own here is Johnuin and Georginesco playing Bach double wadin concerto in D minor, and that to me is absolutely wonderful.
Mary Wesley
That's wonderful. It's like two really wonderful people talking to each other. One of those unearthly brilliant conversations which one seldom hears.
Speaker 4
Can I
Presenter
There's an a
Presenter
It was Yehudi Meluin and Georgian Esco playing part of Bach's double violin concerto in D minor with the Paris Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteu.
Presenter
Which of the records, Mary, of the eight, is the one that you prize more than any other?
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Mary Wesley
Yeah.
Mary Wesley
I think it will have to be the Seventh Symphony, because I would have the whole of it. And that is reminds me of a period of my life when I was both extremely happy and extremely unhappy, and I think it encapsulates all my memories.
Presenter
And your book you have the complete works of Shakespeare, you have the Bible.
Mary Wesley
I would like um
Mary Wesley
Garcia Marquez's Love in a Time of Cholera, it's got everything in it. It's the most wonderful book that I've read in years. I thought about this a lot. It's got every form of love and every weakness and strength in humanity in it, and a great deal of humour. That is what I'd love, Love in a Time of Cholera. And a luxury.
Presenter
And a luxury. Are you in need of a luxury?
Mary Wesley
I was wondering if you could sparkle Dennis Healy onto my island, because he makes me laugh, whether Mrs. Healy would lend him to me.
Presenter
Even if she would, we wouldn't be willing to smuggle him.
Mary Wesley
Oh well, if I can't have Deadosena, couldn't I have a large double bed with lots of pillows and I could sit in bed and work?
Presenter
Of course. You shall have that in the lunch. Mary Wesley, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Mary Wesley
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
Were you really so poor that you didn't have the choice [to come up to London for the meeting]?
I was. I was literally calculating I was living on a widow's pension and about fifty or sixty pounds a month else, and doing everything on that. And I had the kind of mentality then that I'd say I won't post this letter till Monday when I've drawn my pension, then I can buy more stamps, which was as tight as that. Good heavens. I owned my house and I owned my furniture and that was about it. But nobody was more surprised than me when Macmillan took it.
Presenter asks
Is suicide something that you could do if you so chose?
Well, if I was so ill and tiresome and a nuisance to other people and had nothing left in me to contribute to life, yes, I think it's a sensible opt. I think I would push off to Holland, where it's nicely arranged, and you can euthanase yourself out.
Presenter asks
Did your parents like you?
I don't think my mother wanted me. She once told me she didn't want another child, and if she had to have another, she wanted a son. … My mother was a very good mother, according to her likes. We always had messies to eat and were beautifully looked after and our teeth straightened and all that kind of thing. But I think she preferred my brother and sister. And I didn't fit into what she would have liked me to be, or my father would have liked me to be, which was a nice, good, conservative girl who would marry a nice, good conservative and live that sort of life.
Presenter asks
Do you like the Mary Wesley that you've created – this strong and very successful 77-year-old?
No, not very much. I don't know. I've never met myself, who see. I catch glimpses of myself in the looking glass sometimes. I think who's that old woman? I don't think about myself very much. I don't like my voice. I particularly hate my voice. And I'm not very keen on my appearance.
“No, it's all a very big surprise and goes on being an enormous surprise. Same old me inside. People say, Oh, you must be feeling so wonderful, you know, so successful and so on and I even occasionally trip over a sort of note of awe in people and I say, For God's sake, shut up, it's the same old me in the size, no difference.”
“No, I don't think I'm any more confident than I ever was. I'm an absolute snail. I'm terrified inside.”
“Yes, well, I think rules are made to be broken if they're silly that one should break them.”
“I love my children deeply. Yes, I do like them.”
“No, not very much. I don't I don't know. I've never met myself, who see. I catch glimpses of myself in the looking glass sometimes. I think who's that old woman? I don't think about myself very much. I don't like my voice. I particularly hate my voice. And I'm not very keen on my appearance.”