Naomi Mitchison

Speaker 40:00

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 40:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 40:12

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a writer. Radical, energetic, and versatile, she's led a life as rich as the century itself. Brought up in a privileged academic environment before the First World War, she married at eighteen, and from then on devoted her life to new ideas. She helped pioneer birth control, owned a deep sea fishing trawler, and became the adviser to an African tribal chief. But it's through her books, her family, and her friends that she has achieved her reputation. The daughter, sister, and mother of distinguished scientists, she mixed in the thirties with people such as WH Orden, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, and Aldous Huxley. Today, with more than ninety books to her name, she's changed her recreation in Who's Who from A Little Danger to Keeping Up with the Family a gentle indication that at the age of ninety three the whirlwind pace of her life is beginning to slacken a little. She is Naomi Mitcheson.

Presenter1:27

You've written, Naomi, novels and children's stories and poetry, and as many books, I think, as you are years old. You must have spent your whole life writing. I yes, I think that's just about it.

Presenter1:40

But how have you found time producing a large family and entertaining a social circle at the same time? Because I can write anywhere.

Naomi Mitchison1:44

Well it's hard because

Presenter1:48

and on any bits of paper, with any pencils or pens which are about.

Presenter1:54

I used to find that going round in the the circle in the underground was a very good way of not

Presenter2:02

Being interrupted. What's sitting on the circle line? On the circle. Endlessly going round. But I do write very quickly when I I get going. Um it comes very easily. I mean I think I'd be able to write if I was hanging off a cliff by my feet. So presumably writing for you, unlike for so many writers, is a very happy business. There isn't any pain attached to it.

Presenter2:26

Well, there are always painful bits.

Presenter2:29

And then quite often, of course, one reads what one's been writing and thinks, Oh, my goodness, how awful How could I have written like that?

Presenter2:41

But quite often when I r wrote them again, they are much better and shorter, too. Do I suspect then that there can only be one luxury on your desert island, and that is an endless supply of something to write on? That would be wonderful.

Naomi Mitchison2:54

That

Presenter2:56

And then anything was over I'd make into nice paper animals.

Presenter3:02

What about music now? Wh what would be the first piece of music that you would like to put on your record player there? I'd love to hear a piece from Sebelius, because i it it takes one straight out into another world.

Presenter3:19

A dark, cold, beautiful world.

Presenter3:23

And it's so exciting to get into another world and then perhaps write about it.

Presenter4:30

Part of Sibelius Finlandia with the Berlin Philharmonica conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

Presenter4:36

Why, Naomi Mitcheson, did you put your recreation in Who's Who as a little danger? What dangers have you courted in your life?

Presenter4:44

Will

Presenter4:46

I suppose when I look back at my life, I have been in various near dangers.

Presenter4:56

not necessarily physical ones, but perhaps about the people I was with. And sometimes one finds one's among people who are quite different from oneself and yet

Presenter5:14

One m must get inside them and understand them.

Speaker 35:19

Uh

Presenter5:19

And one can't usually do that without getting at least a few scratches.

Presenter5:25

You've courted literary danger, though, yourself, haven't you, by um not least writing a a very sexually explicit novel in the mid-thirties, didn't you? Well, yes, and it all seemed to me to be quite uh cleanly and decently done. It was called We Have Been Warned. Oh, yes. What didn't they like, the publishers then? The publishers got frightened. It was a a bit of of straight sex. It was that they they couldn't bear. How straight?

Presenter5:58

Well, yeah, it w it w one bit

Presenter6:02

was um about um the heroine being well, f it ended by her being raped, but uh she'd been sort of drawn into it by trying to be kind to somebody, and I wanted to be m made sure that she wasn't afraid of being made uh pregnant, because I I can't remember now that that he'd b uh put on something.

Presenter6:31

A condom, yes.

Presenter6:32

That was quite avant-garde in the 1930s to the 19th century.

Naomi Mitchison6:35

I write it was.

Presenter6:37

And Victor Golanx, I think, um said when he read the book that it was magnificent but filthy, and he refused to publish it, didn't he? Yes. Were you very cross? Um well, I was w was was cross because uh it was part of a whole book, and I thought that the the book was was good. I wouldn't now put that book as one of my my better books. But, you know, it's a time one thinks that one's one's baby is just w best of all.

Presenter7:08

Shall we have your second record?

Presenter7:10

Well, now I'd like to take to my desert island, a Glasgow street song.

Presenter7:16

Cheer me up.

Speaker 37:20

Dory me, when I was weeded to peel tatties, knew I'm begging I can jigg and I can kiss the lasses. Once upon a time when the birds chewed lime and the monkeys chewed tobacco, my weed dog put on his boots and paddled through the water. Splish splash here, splish splash, tail, his boots went splatter, splatter. He put his foot on the weed black fish and made a teeth clatter. Dory me when I was weed to feel tatties. No I'm begging I can jigg and I can kiss the lasses.

Presenter7:53

They are good songs.

Presenter7:55

Very good.

Presenter7:57

That was Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor with a Glasgow street song called You Canna Shove Your Granny Off a Bus. Why did you want that one, Naily?

Presenter8:06

Just believe it.

Presenter8:08

In such pure Glasgow Just tears you up, as you say.

Presenter8:12

Well now, tell me about your early life as a child before the First World War. Now, home was Oxford, wasn't it, where your father was a professor. That's it that's it.

Presenter8:24

Though of course we went to Scotland a good deal, and I stayed with my grandmother.

Presenter8:31

When I was quite a small child it was Edinburgh where my mother's people came from. But then later on it was in Perthshire clone.

Presenter8:41

where my father's people were.

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and a lot of cousins and uh

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There's a burn down there where I just used to go down by myself in g b to make

Presenter8:55

Consoles and

Presenter8:57

Gardens of fairies and

Presenter9:00

Then of course one would go and be be grown up and w w w we'd we'd go and swim in the in in a pond. Any meadow in those days would have oh twenty or thirty kinds of flowers and at least oh e perhaps even more kinds of grasses.

Presenter9:22

Well, it's now they're very dull, because uh all the weeds have been been taken out.

Presenter9:27

But in those days meadows and hedges were just full of delights. So these were huge, happy family holidays with the grandparents. Did you have a huge number of servants, servants to do everything for you? Yes, indeed we did, and of course I had a nurse and so on.

Presenter9:45

In the kitchen we just couldn't get in unless we were behaved very well, and if we behaved sufficiently well, we'd get some delicious thing to eat. And equally the butler would be doing the silver. And if one came in and helped him, he would tell one all sorts of exciting stories. But, oh dear, it was so exciting for me to go b around in a rail car and sitting next to driver.

Presenter10:14

And that was very exciting. Shall we pause there for your next record?

Presenter10:20

Well, you see, I I went to th this very good boys' school, and most of the time I was the only girl. But I must say I didn't think of myself as a girl, I thought of myself as a dragon, and uh, like the rest of us, I was an extremely good headmaster.

Presenter10:40

of Lynham.

Presenter10:41

And uh we would go into his special study and there would be a lovely fire and uh he would say, Now, do you think you'd like to make some some toffee? And uh we had a lovely time making toffee while he sort of up asked us questions and talked about things. I expect he asked us how what we do on a desert island. He was always doing this kind of thing.

Presenter11:09

So you'd like the Dragon School song to remind you of those happy times?

Speaker 311:36

A farm and a boy, the ragged seat round the woods on that skin behind

Speaker 311:46

My goodness, ready to be

Speaker 311:51

Talk with rain.

Speaker 311:54

And two and a swing!

Speaker 311:58

The dragon of love is the dragon we love.

Speaker 312:04

So to the dragon we sing!

Presenter12:09

The Dragon School Song

Presenter12:12

Well, now you met your husband to be Dick Mitcheson when you were sixteen years old, Naomi, and you you married him when you were eighteen. Um that was awfully early. Oh, of course. But uh this was just because of the war. And already right from from the autumn of nineteen fourteen, all our friends were were getting killed.

Presenter12:37

You've no idea what the first war was like and people rushed into it and uh they felt it was uh it was uh all going to be over in a few months and they didn't realize at all what it was going to be like and uh how horrible it was going to be.

Presenter12:59

And what a what a trench would be like after people had been in it for a few weeks.

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And

Presenter13:08

But wh when people began to see, well, the only thing to do was to get married and hope for the best. And did you take to marriage easily? Was it a happy business?

Presenter13:19

Aye.

Presenter13:22

I mean I

Presenter13:30

romantic in a c kind of way that I I I thought. And I was so alarmed wh when I realized what it was, but

Presenter13:41

What do you mean you were alarmed when you realized what it was?

Presenter13:45

Well, I'd never been kissed like that before. I remember my first sort of proper kiss, and I was sort of staggering at the end and saying, Oh, do let me go, I can't bear this and I thought it was rather frightening.

Presenter14:01

Neither my husband nor I.

Presenter14:04

had anything to go by. Nowadays it would have been quite funny that they knew so little. But we did know very little. But patently you came round to it in the end. Well, of course one came round, but

Presenter14:18

It was all mixed in my mind with

Presenter14:22

The war

Presenter14:24

and feeling one must do something.

Presenter14:27

To help with the war and being rather miserable about the sex.

Presenter14:34

Who's part of it?

Presenter14:36

Part of the price you had to pay. Exactly.

Presenter14:39

So you you set up house I mean your your husband obviously survived the war and you set up house first in Chaney Walk, I think, on the Thames embankment and and then afterwards overlooking the river at Hammersmith. And by your early twenties you were producing babies really quite frequently, weren't you? Well, yes. But the thing is, in those days one had a a nurse.

Presenter15:01

And though I breastfed all my children,

Presenter15:06

They went as

Presenter15:07

As cosy and near to oneself as a modern baby is as my great grandchildren are to their fathers and mothers.

Presenter15:16

And uh

Presenter15:17

Dick really didn't see much of them till they were

Presenter15:22

at least sort of running around and talking and so on.

Presenter15:27

How did you manage, being, as you say, the the wife and the mother and the writer, and also running a very complex household, again full of servants? You had no experience of that at all, did you, Trayton? I couldn't cook myself.

Naomi Mitchison15:40

Yeah.

Presenter15:45

Very little other things. And of course it was much more complicated in a way then. For I mean, for instance, all baby clothes had r blue ribbons sort of running through them that had to be taken off w when they were washed and then put back again. Awful lot of washing and ironing and yes, yes. So it must have been fairly chaotic with you in charge? I think it probably was.

Presenter16:10

Let's have your next record.

Presenter16:13

Uh later on

Presenter16:15

I got much more into the writing.

Presenter16:20

And there was um a magazine and they asked me to f find some m really modern poets. And so I said yes, yes and um I pro provided Alden.

Presenter16:35

And I just got some of his early verses when the the magazine collapsed. So they never got published by that. But it got me in touch with this lanky young man.

Presenter16:51

who w who come to London and and hadn't got a job. So I got him to come in and teach my second son Latin. So he came f for three afternoons a week or something like that. And I did see that he got plenty to eat and he loved cakes. So that I would always see that I was a cake with a lot of sugar on the top. And he was very nice and he helped me to decorate for the Christmas tree and so on.

Naomi Mitchison17:22

This is the nightmail crossing the border, Bringing the check and the postal order Letters for the rich, letters for the poor The shop at the corner and the girl next door Pulling up beatock a steady climb The gradients against of a cheese on time

Naomi Mitchison17:34

Past cotton grass and moorland boulder, Shovelling white steam over her shoulder, Snorting noisily as she passes, Silent miles of windbent grasses Birds turn their heads as she approaches, Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches, Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course, They slumber on with paws across

Presenter17:51

NIGHT MAILE BY WHARDEN, read by Patrick Wymark. So you were really the first person to give Auden a professional helping hand, weren't you, Nahi? Yes, I think so. You you reviewed him before anybody else? Yes, and he was such a nice boy. What did you think of your poetry?

Presenter18:10

He didn't really think that women should write verse.

Presenter18:14

He thought women were there to give him food.

Presenter18:18

They were a an inferior class. He was always terribly nice to me, but he had some pretty awful friends that he used to bring, many of whom thought they were splendid brighters and so on, and they weren't, and occasionally I would say so.

Presenter18:36

And, um, well, we jumped on run and out on it.

Presenter18:40

Another splendid writer who was a friend of yours, I think, was EM Forster, wasn't he? Oh, yes.

Presenter18:47

Dear Foster, I so well remember the first time he came, he came to tea, and I was so thrilled that have somebody like him should visit me, and apparently had read my book with care. I just felt it it was like for a Christmas coming in.

Presenter19:06

Now, when you weren't entertaining these literary luminaries, you you might have been, I think, down the road helping run a birth control clinic with Marie Stopes, is that right? Well, yes, but not with Marie Stopes, because she didn't like anyone to run anything of hers except herself.

Naomi Mitchison19:15

When

Presenter19:22

But we have started another one, and it went on very well for a long time. We started with um a committee of local people who would stand up to a certain amount of horror by the most respectable. They felt that we were spending money on and helping the ragtag in of London.

Presenter19:49

And we felt that these were the people who wanted most help.

Presenter19:54

Let's have some more music. One of the other things was, of course, in London that one had all the theatres and opera if if we wanted it. And though I didn't really start liking opera,

Presenter20:11

until I saw it much later on on telly.

Presenter20:15

But uh I do like this heavily romantic stuff, and you can just bathe in it.

Speaker 320:48

His walk is made.

Speaker 320:53

Uh

Presenter21:24

Part of Wagner's Goethe Demerung, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter21:30

Naomi Mitchison, you've always described your marriage as an open marriage, and that meant, didn't it, that you and your husband allowed each other to have affairs? though not of course at first.

Presenter21:40

But uh gradually it was what became very much that. Why did you feel you wanted to do that?

Presenter21:49

Well, you know

Presenter21:51

We were very fond of one another, and we trusted one another deeply.

Presenter21:57

And each of us wanted the other one to be happy. So, how did it work? Did you tell each other about your lovers? We we yes.

Presenter22:08

And uh you see, fortunately it coincided. You mean you each had a a lover at the same time. But wasn't it very painful to hear about what your husband had?

Naomi Mitchison22:14

Yeah.

Naomi Mitchison22:19

No.

Presenter22:20

I rarely felt but I was so glad that that he was happy. But would you therefore have been seen as a very avant garde couple, really rather fashionable?

Presenter22:31

Very modern.

Presenter22:33

With for a few people, no doubt. Your husband, of course, became an MP, didn't he? The Labour MP for for Kettering and Corbyn in nineteen forty five. And oh dear, that was very exciting. Did you make a good MP's wife, do you think? Yes, I was a very good MP's wife.

Naomi Mitchison22:40

Yeah.

Naomi Mitchison22:41

And oh

Presenter22:48

He had to be at the constituency every weekend.

Presenter22:51

But it was quite interesting and every now and then I would whisper to him, I think I'm could help this person if I could just take her away and have a little talk.

Presenter23:03

And could you help them in any practical way? Oh, yes, constantly. What did you do for them? Well, uh one thing I did quite often was to explain to people about easy birth control.

Presenter23:17

And how they could go on

Presenter23:19

loving their husbands.

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without being terrified of uh yet another baby.

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And for a lot of people, it was news then that you could do this.

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Record number six.

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Oh, yes. W in our especially in our first sort of ten, fifteen years in London, we went a great deal to all sorts of things, but especially w when the Russian dancers came. This was

Presenter23:52

between walls and it was this wonderful dancing that we'd never seen anything like before.

Presenter23:58

And I remember we went to a writer's spring

Presenter24:50

Part of the Adoration of the Earth from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and that was recorded in nineteen twenty nine in Paris by the Orchestre Saint Phonique, conducted by Igor Stravinsky.

Presenter25:01

Well, politics have played a very large part in your life, Naomi Mitcheson, not just because your husband was an MP, but but you and your husband were really in that that vanguard of upper class socialism, weren't you, in the nineteen thirties? What were its attractions for you?

Presenter25:17

Well, I think we all felt a bit guilty.

Presenter25:21

First of all, we'd survived the war.

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And then we were having such a much more comfortable life.

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And I used to go down to the constituency.

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And tried to to feel what it was like.

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and to stay with people and talk to people.

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And

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You know, one felt that

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it was possible to to to

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to make things a lot better.

Presenter25:55

But it it could only ever be for you, couldn't it, a an intellectual commitment? A uh you went on after all enjoying all the privileges. Yes. Was it something that you you sat with your friends and talked about over? Oh, enormously.

Naomi Mitchison26:04

Uh

Naomi Mitchison26:07

Don't

Presenter26:09

And we went to Russia and so on.

Presenter26:12

Shall we pause there for your next record? Because that that's a story in itself, isn't it?

Presenter26:17

Yes.

Presenter26:18

Every year people in in Argyle used to give uh parties to groups that were brought over from people from other countries, and we gave them a sort of picnic tea and so on. And usually there were groups of people, so many Japanese, so many Spaniards, so many so on. And one of these there was one lad who obviously hadn't um got any particular friends.

Presenter26:49

and looked rather lonely, so I said to him, Come and look at the sea. Have you ever seen the sea? No, he hadn't. So went out to sea. And can he touch the water? Yes, yes.

Presenter27:03

And he stayed, and that was the beginning of it. And then we gradually found out who he was. He was the young chief of a tribe in Botswana, the the Makatla.

Presenter27:17

and he was sent by the elders of that tribe, paying for it themselves.

Presenter27:25

Because they wanted to have an educated chief.

Presenter27:29

Having had a few rather uneducated and difficult ones. So you're now an honorary member of that. Well, yes, I just became so.

Naomi Mitchison27:35

Yeah.

Presenter27:38

I helped him through his time in England and suggested that he read quite a number of things. And I put him up into a room at the top of the house and said, Now you can come down when you've read three chapters. But you've been out to Botswana, too. And then I started going to Botswana.

Presenter27:57

And uh from the sixties I think this was about sixty-three from then on I've been there every year.

Naomi Mitchison28:19

Yeah.

Naomi Mitchison28:21

Whatever I'm

Naomi Mitchison28:23

Hane, Hane, Hane, Kolme.

Naomi Mitchison28:28

Uh

Naomi Mitchison28:30

I'm in.

Naomi Mitchison28:41

Hanji Hanya Han

Naomi Mitchison28:54

Hiya, you're a good idea.

Naomi Mitchison28:56

I

Presenter29:05

A tribal song from Botswana sung by Naomi Michesen's tribe, Kgatla.

Presenter29:10

We seem in our conversation, Naomi, to have missed out vast chunks of your life owning a trawler and farming in Scotland, and you were driving a tractor until a few years ago, I think. Oh, yes. I mean, I've I've did pretty well everything.

Naomi Mitchison29:15

Coding a

Naomi Mitchison29:20

Oh yes.

Presenter29:24

And I mean, I I started with horses and I remember getting the first second hand tractor and how exciting it was. It's the only engine I've ever really got on with. This is all near your your large house on on the mull of Kintyre, where you really spent the second half of your life. Is is Scotland really your life spring?

Speaker 329:42

Yeah.

Presenter29:46

Well, I feel

Presenter29:49

much more Scottish than English, though I have a an English accent and so on. Well now, on your ninetieth birthday a few years ago, I gather that you made a speech inviting everyone back to your hundredth birthday. You obviously have no thought at all of being cheated of your century, do you? Yes, I think I'm pretty well on the slope now.

Presenter30:12

I doubt if I'll write anything more.

Presenter30:15

Though I've said that once or twice.

Presenter30:18

And uh

Presenter30:20

I can't do a lot of the things that I used to do.

Presenter30:25

And I don't feel that I could knock somebody out if we had a fight.

Presenter30:30

But is is the end something that you contemplate? Something that

Presenter30:35

Oh, considerably, and and I find it quite interesting, but I don't find any of the ideas about it at all plausible.

Presenter30:46

It's not something that it's e it's easy to to to think about.

Presenter30:53

Because one just doesn't know.

Presenter30:55

But you once wrote that you thought that death might be the most exciting thing that ever happened to you.

Presenter31:02

It might, but I d I think it won't be. I think one will probably just

Presenter31:08

one day not wake up, which isn't very exciting.

Presenter31:12

Well, with five children, nineteen grandchildren, and sixteen great grandchildren at the last count, you'll hardly be forgotten, will you? No and I think they will f remember me.

Presenter31:22

Reasonably kindly.

Presenter31:25

Shall we have your last record?

Presenter31:27

This is Cashmore's Gairle.

Speaker 331:38

I am a bad day.

Speaker 331:43

O'Day old days, see what I gave, Watching Teeswolves galley sailing for he oh.

Speaker 332:05

Oh walk, she bravely battles'Gainst the hurtling waves, All of the yards anchor the cable of Pike O'Hashy, for he o'ho fall.

Presenter32:28

Kishmaul's Galley, sung by Kenneth McKellar. Well now, Naomi, which one of those eight records do you hold most dear?

Presenter32:36

I think I like a small scale because it's it's outgoing.

Presenter32:42

And we know that your luxury is an endless supply of writing material, so you've got that already. A book we need from you. You already have the Bible, and you've got the complete works of Shakspere waiting for you.

Presenter32:53

Well, that takes you a long way.

Presenter32:57

But I would like a book of mostly modern poetry. It hasn't yet appeared, but it will just have all the modern poetry which I I most like. You shall have it. Naema Mitchison, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 433:21

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