Maeve Binchy

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 ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a writer. Brought up in a small Irish village, a devout Catholic girl, her childhood ambition was to become a saint. All adolescent problems were simply God testing her devotion.

Presenter0:42

The would be saint eventually found solace in journalism and then moved to London as a correspondent for the Irish Times. It was in her early forties that she finally sat down to write her first novel, a fat family saga about life in Dublin and in London. Called Light a Penny Candle, it was a huge success and has been followed by more, all translated into several languages and some of them onto the television screen.

Presenter1:06

Sainthood may so far have eluded my castaway, but success has certainly not. She is Mave Binchy.

Presenter1:13

It was, Mave, then, nothing less than a a saint you wanted to be, not simply saint Lee.

Maeve Binchy1:18

Yeah.

Presenter1:18

Yeah.

Maeve Binchy1:18

No, I'm afraid that I've always had a very ambitious attitude towards life and it wouldn't be just good enough for me to go to heaven like anybody else. I wanted to be at the top table. And I didn't want to be a martyr because that was what I'd often noticed that people who saw visions often became martyrs. So I didn't look up at trees in case I would see a vision. I looked down on the ground a lot. But I think a lot of this was my own idiocy and trying to interpret what I was taught about religion in a way that would glorify myself. But why? I mean, can you remember when the feeling first came upon you? I suppose it was listening to the lives of the saints at school. I wanted to think that someday people at school will be sitting down and listening to my life being read out. The whole thing was a part of monstrous selfishness and egocentricity. And it's something I'm deeply ashamed of and often very sorry that I once wrote about because everybody remembers it.

Presenter2:07

How did God test your suitability? What uh taught

Maeve Binchy2:10

Well, uh at school I was at a very nice school. I was at school in the Holy Child Convent in Killini and the nuns uh I must say I'm not just trying to pay them a tribute, it's true, they have always been very patient with me for the way I laugh at uh the the whole idea of a convent girlhood ever since. They've never ever criticised me, they've always remained my friends. But uh in that school um

Maeve Binchy2:32

They were not responsible for the fact that everybody thought people who were good at games were the leaders of women in those days. And to be good at hockey was terribly important in our school. And I was not good at hockey. I was terrified of hockey. So fortunately I discovered that being so tall, as I was very tall, netball was all right. I was able to stand in the circle at netball and dream of the future while I when if somebody threw a ball I would put it into the net. But it was definitely a test of my saintliness because I I remembered that whom God loves he persecutes and I thought he persecuted me by making me not good at games.

Presenter3:02

And making you what, six foot one?

Maeve Binchy3:04

Yes, I was ta always taught I was as tall when I was thirteen as I am now, so that always also seemed uh a big um kind of problem to have to face. I didn't realize that later it would become totally unimportant, but at the time it seemed definitely that God had big plans for me and major sainthood, and I was kind of half hoping that perhaps canonization in my own lifetime might be a possibility.

Presenter3:24

But now what about you in the desert island? I mean, I I can't help but think that you will bring life and energy to it, or will you simply wither away in the solitude?

Maeve Binchy3:32

I would find it quite hard to, I think, to live without friends and without family and without people I love. I'm not very good at managing things myself, except if I have a brochure. I believe that anybody could run anything. You could run any kind of a nuclear power station if you had a brochure telling you how to do it. But there wouldn't be a brochure on the desert island and I think I might find myself at a severe loss.

Presenter3:54

Yeah.

Maeve Binchy3:54

And music, how important is it to you and what would you play? The terrible temptation when you are invited on a programme like this is to pick six very, very classical records and two ones that nobody'd ever heard of at all. And people would say afterwards, My goodness, there is a very, very musically elite person. But in fact, once you start thinking about it, you think, What would you really like? And what I would really like on a desert island or anywhere when I'm away is some song that would remind me of home and of growing up in Ireland. And one of the songs I like best is the song called Carrick Fergus. And I like it sung in half in Irish and half in English by Sean O'Shea.

Speaker 34:31

The Vinci Comms of Beorcy and Town Will

Speaker 14:35

Ah

Speaker 34:41

The venge

Speaker 34:50

Up in each time shining long.

Speaker 34:55

It's gone for the lysogon.

Presenter4:59

The Venusul, or Carrick Fergus, sung by Sean O'Shea. Tell me more, Mave, about life at the Convent of the Holy Child Order. How strict was it? How extreme?

Maeve Binchy5:09

Yeah.

Maeve Binchy5:10

Not really straight and extreme at all. It was a day school. I lived at home with my family. I lived 10 miles from Dublin in a small place called Dorkie. Three miles away on the train was the convent that we went to as stay pupils. So it was wonderful to be able to go there and come back in the evening. And we were much envied by the boarders, you see, who had to stay there the whole time. It was a lovely part of the world. I still have a house there, at least we bought a house there again back in Ireland. And I can't believe every time I travel that little tiny five-minute rail journey between Dorky and Killani that we didn't know it was beautiful when we were young. But of course, children don't ever look out at a lovely bay and they don't look out at blue seas and mountains in the distance. They think about homework and about the crushes they have on other school teachers and best friends and mainly about getting out into the wild world afterwards. And they don't think at all about the lovely, beautiful surroundings we lived in. It was a happy time. I was happy. I often think about other writers who talk about their childhood and they say that they had to write to escape from it. I had an extremely happy childhood and I don't think I'm rewriting history because my two sisters and brother and I all agree we look back on our childhood and we always seem to think of it as a house full of friends. We were allowed to bring our friends home. My mother was very overprotective of us. She was always afraid what awful things would happen to us if we went out in the world and she so therefore she made our house a place where all our friends could come. And in fact, you know, when my parents died, I remember all my friends in the letters they were writing, they say we remembered your home as a place we were always welcome, which was true. And it was something that I always thought to myself, if I had had children, I didn't have children, but I thought if I had, it's something I would definitely give children a feeling that their home was somewhere they could bring people in. And also the other thing which was wonderful that my parents did, they thought all their geese were swans. They thought we were all wonderful and they gave us great confidence and they told us we were marvellous and they were so interested in everything we did. And I think that was a marvellous gift to have and that was one of the things that made my life so happy. I mean it wasn't gloriously happy, it would be ridiculous to pretend that every moment of it was. There were the bad bits, the feeling that you mightn't get danced with because you were taller than all the fellows or that you mightn't be able to handle all this incredible sexual activity that there was going to be once you left school. Is that what they taught you to believe at the convent? The way I remember it is that they were trying to prepare us for going out in the world. And this you see it's a very interesting notion when you think about it that if you believe that the world is full of men savagely wanting to procreate all around them and that this is the way the human race continues and that it's a woman's job to stop them doing this the whole time, can't you see what a fantastic sense of seething excitement there is going to be out there? So I must say I was rather dreading it once we left school and hoping I'd be able to cope with all this lust but I also was slightly disappointed when I did get to university and found that the lust was rather thinner on the ground than we had been led to believe.

Presenter8:06

And there weren't lots of men running

Maeve Binchy8:08

Rushing around trying to impregnate you. No, not at all. But there were a lot of men, which was a very pleasing thing, who were quite happy to be friends. And that's what I particularly remember about university. Who taught you the facts of life? My mother. She told me the facts of life. She was a nurse herself, and nobody had ever told her the facts of life when she was young. And so she took it into her head that we all must be told as soon as we asked the proper questions. And I'm not quite sure what age I was when I asked the proper questions, but I remember certainly thinking that she was mad when she told me, and I was very upset for her because I thought this could not possibly be so. And I remember walking with my father in the garden and saying, I think we have to face it that mummy has gone mad. And he very kindly said that he didn't think so. And I said, I couldn't tell you all the things she told me, Daddy, but it really is, her mind is disturbed. And he nodded sagely. I thought what a good, patient, kind man he was, not to worry about it.

Presenter8:58

Her loyal and loving husband.

Maeve Binchy8:59

But loyal and loving and of course uh as uh as the years went on and I told her that she just regarded it as hilarious.

Presenter8:59

Yeah.

Maeve Binchy9:04

Shall we have your second record? When I was at university, we were very interested in jazz, all of us. And this would, I think, remind me of those happy days in University College Dublin when we sat around in flats and thought we could solve the world and listen to jazz like Dave Brubick.

Speaker 39:32

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 310:03

Yeah.

Presenter10:18

The Dave Brubeck Quartet and Take Five.

Presenter10:21

So, May Finchy, you lived in in a house full of happiness, two sisters and a brother. You were the eldest. Father was a barrister. Was it a a literary family, or a musical family, or?

Maeve Binchy10:31

We weren't very musical. We didn't sit around like I hear so many other people talking about their families and they all made music themselves or they listened to a lot of classical music on record players. No, we didn't. The house was filled with books from floor to ceiling. My father's study was full of law books anyway, but there was also a great amount of fiction and biographies. And when I was quite young and most other people were reading Enid Blighten, I was taking Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spilan and others to bed with me. And I did well, we were encouraged to read everything.

Presenter11:03

So did you know?

Maeve Binchy11:04

Then

Presenter11:04

You wanted to be a writer, do you think?

Maeve Binchy11:06

Not really. I wanted to be a judge, not just a barrister, like the way I wanted to be a saint rather than just a holy person. I wanted to be a judge, probably the Chief Justice of Ireland. I thought that would be reasonably good jumping off ground. So I began to read law, but it didn't it obviously didn't make any sense. So I just did a degree in history and French in University College. And I became a teacher. And I love Yeah.

Presenter11:29

But did you find all of that time that that words flowed easily from your pen? Were you always good at writing essays at school and so on?

Maeve Binchy11:35

Yes, I think so. At school I was often told that I rambled on a bit too much and that brevity was better. And often when I think of those six hundred and fifty page books that I have in the bookshops, I wonder who was right. Were the teachers at school right, or was I right to ignore them?

Presenter11:53

Let's just nip back to that enormous happiness just for a second, because uh it's very difficult to believe. And indeed reading your books, you you must have suffered.

Presenter12:01

great dark passages in your youth,'cause some fairly miserable things happen to your character.

Maeve Binchy12:06

Yes, I wonder, am I glorifying my own youth too much? It's funny when you're asked to look back on it quite truthfully at a time like this. I know I was very self-conscious and sad, like a lot of teenagers were when you think you are the centre of the universe for yourself. And I do remember one particularly, my first dance going to it, where I thought I looked so beautiful. No dress in the shop fitted me, so my cousin's dress was brought and a big band of velvet ribbon was put down the front of it because I was much bigger than my cousin. And I wanted to wear blue Diamante earrings and to go with a dress. I thought I would be so dazzling. And I was practising them and I got sores on my ears. So then I had to put elastoplast on my ears. And then I painted the elastoplast blue and that came down my neck in great sort of dribbles. And I probably must have looked and nobody could have said, No, you looked lovely, maybe. I probably must have looked horrific because nobody at all danced with me at the dance. And I remember coming home and sitting in my house in Dorky and looking out the window, having told my mother and father, who were so eager that I had a good time, having told them a pack of lies and said I was the belle of the ball.

Maeve Binchy13:07

And I sat there and I watched the moon out over the bay and I thought, I'm so unhappy. And this is going to be my life. All over Dublin, people are going home to their houses and saying, nobody danced with Mayfield. That was a very low night. But I think, thank God, normality took over and I suddenly realized I was not the centre of the world. And they were all thinking about their own experiences and much more glamorous times at the dance than whether I was danced with or not. And very fortunately, those kind of lows, the self-conscious teenage lows that everybody has, were not great. I'm only really trying to resurrect one, you don't know, because there weren't all that many sadnesses. Record number three. I'd like that lovely stirring Jeuneau Regrett Rienne by Edith Piaf.

Speaker 313:49

No, no

Speaker 314:06

Usa Me Bianega.

Speaker 314:13

Yeah.

Speaker 314:16

No runaway.

Presenter14:19

Edith Pief, and non je regrette d'Orguillen. Suddenly, Mave, when you were twenty-two, you lost your faith, you lost God. How did it happen?

Maeve Binchy14:28

It was almost as dramatic as that because I was in Israel working on a kibbutz for the summer holidays of teaching and I went to see Jerusalem and Jerusalem was not what I expected it would be and the fault was not Jerusalem's or God's. The fault was mine because I had thought that it would be a Renaissance table set for twelve, thirteen. I didn't think the room of the Last Supper would be an old cave on the side of a mountain. I didn't think that this was, you see, before 1967 when Jerusalem was divided, when one side was in Israel and one side was in Jordan. And there were very little to be seen in the Christian sites.

Maeve Binchy15:05

And I really was so disappointed to d b because I was looking forward, I was so excited going on the bus there the whole time thinking I'm going to see the room of the Last Supper, and suddenly it was terribly empty and dead.

Maeve Binchy15:14

And because I have always been a total ridiculous extremist, I l and throw out the baby with the bathwater, I suddenly stopped believing in everything. And instead of those people who often are very glad that their faith is gone because then they feel liberated and free, I felt very lonely because all my idea of God was that he was Irish and He knew me personally and was waiting to make me a saint sooner or later.

Presenter15:40

But you can't blame it on simply the fact that the that the cave where the Last Supper um was supposed to have taken place was was dusty and not very impressive. It must have been something that was rising up in you.

Maeve Binchy15:50

It must have been. It seemed all to hinge on that. And if or what I would also admit is that my own faith must have been perhaps very ridiculous, rocky, and sentimental if it disappeared at a time like that. But I've never had, like many writers have had, and particularly often people who have been brought up in the Catholic faith, have never had any hatred of the Church or any anti-clericalism. I feel that it's done much more good than evil, and that a faith and a belief, and certainly a belief in an afterlife, must be one of the most comforting things in the world. I don't have that. Do you have no religion now at all? No, and I don't believe, you see, the sad thing is I don't believe that there's anywhere to go after here. So anything good that has to be done has to be done here. Any wrong that has to be righted must be done in this life, because I don't really see it all going on afterwards.

Presenter16:20

You have

Presenter16:35

And can you say all of that without fear, despite the fact that you were brought up in such a debate?

Maeve Binchy16:38

Yes, I can, because that I can. Brendan Behan once said this marvellous phrase, he said, I'm a daylight atheist. In other words, meaning that at night when the terrors came, he suddenly remembered God. But even when I was on a very, very rocky plane journey a few years ago, I heard myself everybody else was praying and

Maeve Binchy17:00

Clasping their hands together, and indeed the air hostesses and the stewards didn't look too cheerful either. And I heard myself saying, I will not ask God to take me out of this now. I haven't consulted him for 20 years, and there's no reason why I should suddenly believe in him in a rainstorm. I said afterwards to be, that means you must know he's there. Some more music. I'd like very much to hear the theme from the Brendan Voyage. St. Brendan discovered America long before Columbus did, and he went in this boat and he went to Newfoundland. And there's a wonderful piece of music, a wonderful suite, written about it called The Brendan Voyage. And it's played by the Irish piper Liam O'Flynn. And on a desert island, to believe that a man was able to get into a leather and wood boat and sail away all round the world would be the greatest bit of hope that any cast of wit could ever have.

Presenter18:46

The Brendan theme from The Brendan Voyage played by Liam O. Flynn on the Illin Pipes. How did you get into journalism, Maeve?

Maeve Binchy18:53

Because of my long school holidays as a teacher, I travelled a lot around the world and so I used to write travel articles about the various places. And in fact, it was when I was in Israel I wrote a long letter home from the kibbutz describing it to my parents and they thought it was so wonderful they got it typed out and all the personal bits taken out and they sent it to a paper. So when I came back it was in a paper and I realised I thought of course some had said more and then I was started. But gradually I got more and more articles into the papers and in Ireland and increasingly outside Ireland the Irish Times is a very respected paper and it was a delight to be asked to be the woman editor of that in 1968. I was an unusual choice really because I didn't know much about fashion and I knew nothing about fashion and I knew nothing about cooking. But those were the days when women's pages were starting not to be obsessed with either fashion or cooking and so there was plenty to write about. And so then I came to London in 1973. There was a job going in the London office of the Irish Times and also there was a nice Englishman that I fancied. So I decided that I would apply for that job as a feature writer and a London correspondent respondent in the Irish Times. So I came over here in 1973.

Presenter20:03

And you applied for the job of the wife of this rather nice man, please.

Maeve Binchy20:06

Yes, well, he didn't escape either. It was a marvellous time for me in 1973 because I'd been very low and sad for the year before. My father had died, and my mother had died also. I mean, they died so young, my mother in her fifties, and my father just over 60. And I'm really very sorry that they didn't live to see all their hopes come true for so all of all their children are now so happy, you know, in their lives and all happily married and with homes of our own. It would have been so nice for them to have known that that was all going that all the nice work that they put in was going to come true.

Presenter20:08

Uh

Presenter20:38

Nice for them to have known of your enormous success.

Maeve Binchy20:40

It would too. I mean I think and they would certainly have been very pleased about that and I often think that that is the only shadow in my life that they didn't know about that. But when I came to London first it was very strange, very different to Dublin. So I was a bit startled by the size of the city and I was quite old. I was 33. I should have have known. I wasn't like a little teenager coming over here. And then very fortunately I got to know Gordon Snell, this English broadcaster, he worked in the BBC then and I got to know him better and better. And he and I used to say how much we'd loved both of us to write fiction and both of us had

Maeve Binchy21:17

The slight reservation about writing fiction, which is that you're almost afraid to put yourself down there because you're afraid that it's almost affected and that people will laugh at you. At least if you're writing fact or you're doing interviews, that's a real job. But when you're writing fiction, that is entering into the realms of the art almost. So we encourage each other a lot. And then as we got fonder of each other and got married, we got the great pleasure of seeing our encouragement for each other's works really turn into what we'd hoped. And we have shelves full of his children's books and of my books. And that is the great satisfaction.

Presenter21:54

And you still write for the Irish Times, though, don't you?

Maeve Binchy21:56

Yes, I've instead of calling

Presenter21:57

In the Irish Times and work from their London office. But why do you need to go on working for the Irish Times? I mean, surely you you earn what the Americans call enough drop-dead money from your books. That's the so you can say to your employer.

Maeve Binchy22:08

Well the time is I do need them. I do need them because the kind of people that I want to talk to in a sense or ramble on at or give my views to are the people who read the Irish Times. Those are my friends. The thousands of people who read The Irish Times are much more important to me in a sense than the millions of people who read the books. Because I shouldn't say much more important but they're much more instant and immediate because I feel that these are the people who are the same kind of people as myself and who grew up and who have the same

Maeve Binchy22:34

If not attitudes, they'd have the same way of looking at things. And I would love to go on working for the Irish Times, you know, until they stop having me there, because it is a paper I read myself every day, wherever I am. I try to get it sent. I was out in Australia for two months and I found it very hard not to be reading the Irish Times. There are very good newspapers out there, but I missed the Irish Times terribly. Record number five. This record is one which I've which touched me to the heart when I heard it first, when I saw the show over the Lovely War. And it's the terribly moving song called They Didn't Believe Us, when the people are just going to describe the war, where they come home and people are going to try and ask them what it's like, and they say they'll never believe us.

Speaker 323:15

Uh

Speaker 323:16

Ask us how dangerous it was Oh, we'll never tell them.

Speaker 123:24

Oh yeah.

Speaker 323:28

No, we'll never tell them.

Speaker 323:33

We spent our day in some cafe and called wild women highlighted.

Presenter23:43

They didn't believe us from the film Oh What a Lovely War.

Presenter23:46

Tell me now, May Finchy, about that day eight years ago when you sat down to write your first novel. I mean, why then? Why did you choose that day and what happened?

Maeve Binchy23:55

Well, I had uh two books of short stories published before and

Maeve Binchy23:59

To say that they weren't successful would be wrong. They were successful, but nobody actually rushed out and looked for them. I was constantly dragging them from the back of shops to the front of shops if I could ever find them there.

Maeve Binchy24:10

A publisher uh said to me one day at uh said, You should really write a big novel, that's what people want from an unknown. And uh so I s didn't tell anybody about it, I just sat down and wrote it really.

Presenter24:22

But did it flow easily?

Maeve Binchy24:24

Well it did because the first book I wrote was about Light Ben and Kendall was about something I knew very much about, which was about one Irish girl and one English girl and I knew what it was like to be Irish in England and to be English in Ireland in in Ireland. Yes, I have that right. So I felt that's the first rule about writing that you must write about what you know. I don't really go into much boardroom sex and complicated banking and a lot of espionage. I don't know anything about those. It's fairly ordinary life that you write about. Well I think that there's two kinds of writing of fiction in a sense. You can either have escapism where people can read about people of extraordinary beauty and great wealth and amazing sexual virility and desires or they think gosh wouldn't it be nice to be like that or else they can read the the other kind of fiction in which they would understand the emotions and the the warmths and the needs and the reactions with that they would say yes I felt just like that and that's the one that I would feel more at ease in and that's the one that people seem to respond to.

Presenter25:25

But do you constantly bubble with ideas?

Maeve Binchy25:27

I'm not short of ideas. I don't think anybody is short of ideas if they if they pause and and think. They pause and think about the last

Maeve Binchy25:34

strong emotion that they felt of of envy or of friendship or pity or of uh regret, something like that. Then all of this can lead to to a story, you just put the characters into it then.

Presenter25:44

And how methodical about all of that are you? Do you think up your characters and and write out a family tree and a plan and a plot?

Maeve Binchy25:51

Yes, what I do now is I draw a map of a village, because I usually set places in a village or a small town, because it's easier in a sense, because there's a reason why they all meet each other. If you set them in a big city, you have to explain why everybody runs into anybody else. And I draw a map so that I don't have them walking the wrong way when they go out the door. I'll give them a house and I'll give them a birthday when I'm in when I'm in the middle of the day. It sounds like the archers. Well, I suppose tis is in in in an awful way. But the thing is that the reason why I have to give them a birthday uh is because when I was writing one book I forgot what age somebody was and I had him being expelled from school when he was twenty-eight. So therefore you have to make sure that you have the characters at the right time.

Speaker 126:10

Yeah.

Presenter26:10

Sounds like the arch?

Presenter26:27

They're all big uh fat jobs, as you were saying earlier on, five and six and seven hundred pages. Didn't you once get a letter from some woman who complained that she was getting flat chested, lying in bed reading your books?

Maeve Binchy26:30

Live

Maeve Binchy26:36

That's right, the book kept falling and thudding on her and flattening what little she already had, she said.

Maeve Binchy26:42

Let's have record number six. I'd like American Pie just for the sheer fun of it.

Speaker 326:46

I know that you're in love with him Cause I saw you dancing in the gym You both kicked off your shoes And I dig those rhythm in blues I was a lonely teenage bronkin buck With a pink carnation and a pickup truck But I knew I was out of our day

Presenter27:15

Don McLean and American Pie.

Presenter27:17

In practically every article one reads about you, Maeve, the question of your size comes up, not just your height, which we've mentioned six foot one, I think you said, but your weight, which is also presumably above average, and you're always quoted as saying that you genuinely don't care about it.

Maeve Binchy27:32

Is that surprising? I'm always surprised that people do comment on it actually, because it doesn't matter to me. You see, I think to be terribly conscious of any I wouldn't say the word imperfection because I wouldn't even call it imperfection, but any kind of change from the norm, to to be very self-conscious about that would be to destroy your your own attitude to life and and really to to misrepresent other people's attitudes to you. Because for after ten minutes when you've met somebody, if you like them, do you really remember how they look?

Presenter27:58

You obviously enjoy people very much, Mave, and you enjoy your fan mail, as you've said. Now there's going to be none of that on the Desert Island at all. There you are, all alone. How are you going to cope?

Maeve Binchy28:07

Well, I suppose a lot of it will be in memories of the good times I've had and hopes that I'll be rescued. And uh I suppose trying to plan for a better life when when I get when I get off and uh the island and and doing the things right that I hadn't done right beforehand. But are you practical?

Maeve Binchy28:21

No, not very, not very. And uh it would be really a question of sitting and looking into the sunset and and hoping.

Maeve Binchy28:28

Record number seven. Well, I'll tell you what I always wanted in another life. I would have liked, if I hadn't lived the life I have lived now, I'd like to have run a pub in Chicago during Prohibition. Now, a pub by which I mean I suppose a speak easy, and I would like to have been in charge of the door and pulled back a little shutter to let people in, and I would have run it beautifully, and there wouldn't have been much organised crime there. And I would have sat up on top of a piano and sang, and there'd have been lots of smoke and illicit hooch there, and people would have loved me because I would have had I would have run the place with a proper uh kind of right control and I would have been uh somebody that would have all said Maeve's a wonderful character, we'll go down to Maeves and I always think whenever I hear

Maeve Binchy29:07

Some of the blues numbers that El Fitzgerald and myself could have done a good rendition of St. Louis Blues. I'd like to see Ella do it on her own.

Speaker 329:17

Saint Louis Woman with all her diamond ring.

Speaker 329:24

Who's that man around by her apron strings? If it wasn't for powder and for store-board hair, The man I love wouldn't have gone nowhere, no way.

Presenter29:43

Edda Fitzgerald and Saint Louis Blues, and visions of Mave Binchy leaning on the piano, entertaining em all. It does sound, Mave, as if becoming a best selling author has really changed your life very little.

Maeve Binchy29:56

Well, I was fortunate that it happened when I was old enough to know what I wanted in life. I mean, I wasn't at the stage of thinking that I wanted yachts or jewellery or anything like that. And I was very, very fortunate in that I enjoy meeting customers in bookshops and I love to do a book signing. It's very nerve-wracking in case nobody comes, but I do love meeting people. And in terms of money, it's never quite as great as people say it is, but it's certainly much, much more than I ever thought I'd ever get in my life. But it must have enabled you to do something that you wouldn't have done otherwise. It has indeed. I used to.

Presenter30:27

Get an artist.

Maeve Binchy30:29

I always worry about the telephone bill because I just talk to my sisters and friends a lot on the phone. That is lovely not to have to worry about that. It is lovely to have to always choose your holiday as the cheapest one, you know, in the last week on the package tour, that you can actually maybe go somewhere you'd really like to, at the time you'd like to go. It's also nice if people are in trouble for them to know that they can ask you for something because you you'll either say yes or no, but you're not going to have to be scraping for it. I've been never one of these people who worried about it and wondered where you could get better interest or how to invest it. That's that is never.

Presenter31:03

We've never been to

Maeve Binchy31:04

I could go home and be a tax exile, and this sounds very moral.

Presenter31:07

The

Maeve Binchy31:10

But I just don't believe that people who are very rich should pay no taxes. And I would love to think that I would be generous enough to give away forty-five per cent of my earnings to charity, to a charity of my choice. I'd love to think I would, and perhaps I would for a year or two. But what would happen would be, I'm sure, that you'd suddenly discover you wanted a nicer car, or you wanted something else, and you wouldn't do it.

Presenter31:29

Finally, to the subject of happiness, because you do seem to be quite incredibly balanced and very happy.

Maeve Binchy31:38

Go on. I'm just very, very fortunate. I'm very fortunate. I mean, maybe awful things lie in store for me. I would very much hope they don't. But if they do, I would have to say in fairness that I've had fifty years, just fifty, of a very good life and a better deal of the cards than most people. I would hate that to sound smug. I would I would like to think it would sound appreciative. And if awful things were ahead now, I really would think that it was only fair for me to have them because so many people had them in the first half of their century.

Maeve Binchy32:07

Last record, please. The last record I'd like would be a very exciting Carmena Purana. These rousing, mad, secular hymns with the wonderful Karloff music have always cheered me up. And I think on Desert Island and the sunset to be leaping around the beach of this would be very, very exciting.

Presenter33:22

Part of Karl Orff's Carmena Burana, performed by the New Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, with the Wandsworth School Boys' Choir, conducted by Raphael Frubeck de Burgos.

Presenter33:32

Stirring stuff.

Presenter33:33

Which one of the eight, Maeve, is your is your uh special one?

Maeve Binchy33:37

If I could only have one, I think I would like the gentler Brendan Voyage. It would remind me of the best things about being Irish. And hope of escape. Indeed.

Presenter33:44

And a book? You've got the complete works of Shakespeare, you've got the Bible. What's your book?

Maeve Binchy33:49

I thought about this for a long time, as I suppose everybody in the world always thinks about what one book would they bring. And I decided I would actually bring one huge book on teaching yourself bridge, because I think traveller's tales are very often boring. People get very bored about travellers' tales. And I think your traveller's tales, if you came back from a desert island, would be astronomically boring. So I would need something that would stop me talking about it and get me down to something else. I would definitely learn how to play bridge. So you better have two sets of playing cards as well. Yes. And a luxury.

Maeve Binchy34:17

a photograph album, my own photograph album, filled with the photographs of the past. Because if I were to make any sense of being on a desert island, I would have to try and look back on my life and remember

Maeve Binchy34:29

The good and the good and the better, and look at people and think maybe how I might have been better to them or I will be better when I get back. And uh my photograph album is very much an overdocumented life, and uh it would give me very, very many happy memories, and I think that's what I'd like. That would be my luxury to thumb through that.

Presenter34:46

Mayve Binshi, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 134:57

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

Speaker 335:46

Uh