A S Byatt

Speaker 30:00

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 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.

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And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is a novelist and a critic. She was brought up in Sheffield in a family so clever that her mother and father would think nothing of reciting Wordsworth as they served the Sunday lunch. Hardly surprising, then, that she should have picked up a first-class degree from Cambridge and become an academic. But she hasn't hidden her depth of learning behind university walls. In short stories and novels, she's kept herself at the forefront of British literary life, and last year was rewarded with the Booker Prize. The novel with which she won it, Possession, is the story of the secret love affair of a distinguished Victorian poet, and combines her academic erudition with her creative vision. She is A.S. Byat.

Presenter1:08

How much effect has winning the Booker Prize had on your life, Antonia?

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Extreme pleasure. I have had hundreds of letters from all sorts of people who have enjoyed the book.

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And

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considerable irritation because of being constantly interviewed and the phone never stops going and

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People offer one goodies. It's not that one doesn't get offered nice things. People ring up and say please come to Yugoslavia, please come to Turkey, please spend three weeks in Australia, please come out to California. And all this is very, very exciting, but I feel I'm middle-aged and want to write another book and another book and another book. And it's rather horrid to have nice things appearing to be like persecution. But has it had an effect on your work, winning the prize, i i in the sense that you now know you can write a best-selling prize-winning novel?

Presenter1:57

I think it has, yes. I think probably everybody who wins it.

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feels a bit inhibited because

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You think, can I do it again? Or will they be annoyed with me if I now do something

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Of less general appeal.

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What about the desert island, then? Does it hold any attractions for you at all? Oh, yes. I I am a person

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Addicted to solitude. I'm a person who, if I love talking.

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But if I talk

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for three days flat without a longish period of solitude, I begin to feel ill. So I think I could stand about sort of nine or ten months of the desert island without turning a hair, as long as I could be fed and have something to drink. And what about the music? Uh what does it mean to you, music? Anything?

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Some music means a very great deal. I always tell people I am not a musical person.

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I can't sing a note in tune, and this is actually very important because it makes you feel humble and miserable about music.

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But there are certain pieces of music that have gripped me and moved me and twisted me about.

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And those perhaps mean an awful lot more to me because

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I don't have a general musical culture very much. So what's the first one you'll play on the island?

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Um the first one

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I think is very fitting because it's part of Handel's Messiah.

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Which is good for me because I come from Yorkshire from the background of the big choirs that really belted out.

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This joyful music

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And I wanted the He Shall Feed His Sheep, because my father, who also couldn't sing a note in tune, though he had a beautiful voice, used to sing it while the dishwasher was going, which is how both of us used to sing, because nobody could hear us because of the noise.

Speaker 33:55

And what with his

A S Byatt3:56

What we're

Speaker 34:14

I shall like this.

Presenter4:37

Hannah Schwartz singing part of He Shall Feed His Flock from Handel's Messiah with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

Presenter4:45

Tell me, Antonia Byat, about this family who recited Wordsworth over the Sunday lunch. I mean, was that a typical scene?

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Not wholly typical. I mean, there was a lot of grumbling

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And

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Irritability. But every now and then it all came together. I I what I really remember is once

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Just after the war, when we'd moved back to our house in Sheffield, which we'd left because of fear of the bombs, and my father had come out of the Air Force and he was carving a huge great joint. And he suddenly recited the whole of Keats' Ode to the Nightingale, and my mother kept putting the odd line in. And I think I remember it because we weren't always that happy, and we didn't always have this sense of a family occasion. So you and your brother and two sisters enjoyed all of that, did you? Oh, yes. I think I don't know what my mother would have done if we had not come out naturally bookish, but we did come out naturally bookish. And is that something that you've tried to continue with your own family? Do you?

A S Byatt5:37

And is that

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make literary allusions as you go about the ordinary domestic business. I do indeed, and it annoys almost all of them. One of my daughters at a party opened the front door to the guests and said, um

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I am the youngest daughter of this house. I do not read books. There are too many books in this house. Excuse me, I will take your coat.

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Um, I think I'm a bit too intense about books. So going back to to your childhood, it was your mother, wasn't it, who was the the driving force behind all of this, behind this sort of intellectual rigor?

Presenter6:14

Both my parents really, they both went to Cambridge and my mother used to say I would have been top of the class if he hadn't been. But she personally was very bitter because she'd had to give up any kind of job, hadn't she? Because she was a housewife and a mother, and if that's what you were, that's what you did, and you did nothing else.

Speaker 36:29

That's what you would do.

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Well, I used to think that, and I used to think that she should have had more courage, and that she should have actually gone on teaching, or gone on doing something with her mind, because I could see that not using her mind was torturing her.

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And she told me very late in life what I should have known anyway, which was that

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The State prevented you from teaching the moment you got married in her day.

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She couldn't have gone on. I mean, it was a flat, clear, clean choice between husband and children and work. So she was she was trapped into staying at home and mangled the shirts. I think she would have stayed at home and mangled the shirts anyway because she felt that, you know, a respectable gentleman's wife didn't.

A S Byatt7:01

Yes, I think it's shirt.

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need to go out and work for a living. But she therefore took that out on you.

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Yes, oh yes, she did. She was very, very angry, and all her daughters learnt the lesson.

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That if you need to think, you better make provision for working and having a life of your own. You you've talked in in various articles over the years about her making you feel utterly inadequate and and horrible. How did she do that?

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Hmm

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Really with noise.

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She had a sort of capacity for making a loud complaining noise.

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And anything that wasn't just as she had somehow envisioned it was going to be made her feel very nervous and hysterical.

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And you knew when you came downstairs that she would have found something that you hadn't done.

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which she didn't even really want you to do, but she would start to shout about it.

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Um

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That isn't all that she was. I mean, she did give us a great many books and she did, um

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There was a sort of warmth in her as well. I've talked about this because of course you can't talk about it when people are alive.

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Can you remember how you felt when you heard that she died?

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It was about eight or nine years ago, wasn't it?

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Yes. I felt an immense space. I felt a huge amount of sort of brilliantly coloured air coming in through the window, if I'm going to be truthful.

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And I also felt

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that she could stop

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hurting herself. I sort of felt that there was peace in a corner of my mind in which I always felt there was turmoil.

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And

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After that I started thinking about her.

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as a young woman, and I started mourning.

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Not for my mother.

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But for the girl who had gone to Cambridge.

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and have been so brilliant.

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And I began to be able to imagine her because she wasn't there shouting at me and grumbling about my father's socks being in the wrong place. I began to imagine what she was like when she used to read Keats to herself. And I do grieve a lot for that woman. I I miss I miss her, you know.

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Shall we have your second record now? Um the second record is Reginald Kell playing the adagio from Mozart's clarinet concerto.

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And I wanted this because as a little girl

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Largely for health measures to cure my asthma, I was encouraged to play the clarinet and was taught by a teacher who.

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His claim to fame was that he had taught Reginald Kell.

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And this adager is one of the pieces of music that twisted itself round my insides. I tears always come to my eyes when I hear these notes.

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Reginald Kell and the Tzimbla Sinfonietta playing part of Mozart's clarinet concerto in A major. If you suffered at home, Antonia, was there salvation for you at school, where you could shine?

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Um, I didn't like school, I think largely because I am a person who couldn't bear

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Being at boarding school.

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Among other girls. I really do need to be alone for large patches and

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I'm not good at group life.

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But if they were asked to describe you, those those peers of yours when you were aged fifteen or sixteen, what would they have said? How would they have described you? They would have said she is little and small.

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and arrogant.

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Why arrogant?

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Probably I was in a way.

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I used to say what I thought.

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I mean, I used to say what I thought in class. I never spoke outside class. I never spoke to anybody. I was extremely lonely.

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But in class I would sort of say what I thought, and after a bit I would see that everybody had just given up.

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Saying anything themselves now would stop.

A S Byatt11:51

Say

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Why didn't you speak to anybody outside class? Um

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I had no social graces. I had no

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capacity to make friends, I think. But didn't the teachers take any pride in you this this year? It was a very good Quaker moral school. And the one thing you mustn't do is shine, except at things that anybody could do.

A S Byatt12:05

Chinese colour.

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The the night before I did my A levels the headmistress made a very long speech saying that some girls thought that this was of importance.

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but that she would like to tell the school that she had written books and that she had made tablecloths and that in her view making tablecloths was a more satisfactory occupation and that these things didn't really matter and that the girls who couldn't do the exams shouldn't care. And I see what she was trying to do and it was a good and kind thing, but it meant that the one thing I could do

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was not valued. Did you intend then even then to become a writer?

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Yes, though I think if you'd have asked me I wouldn't have said I did. I've never really said this before, but from from being quite little

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I started thinking, how can I do it? What shall I do? And when I read Milton's sonnet,

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about how fast time had stolen.

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his life from him and he'd reached three and twenty without achieving anything. I thought and I mean I must then have been about thirteen. I thought, yes, that's exactly how it is, that's exactly how it is. Time is just taking my life and I haven't done it. And what I wanted to do

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was not

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be famous or achieve things in the world. It it was make something, it was make a work of art, it was do something like Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. I wanted to make something like that.

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And and did you feel then when you won a scholarship to Cambridge, as you did, that that was a a move in the right direction, that suddenly you were achieving some kind of freedom that was going to enable you to do these things? Yes, and it was a freedom because everybody there

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wanted to talk about

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the life of the mind in one form or another. And you didn't have to trouble with people who

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thought that you ought not to do this. Everybody did want to, and so suddenly you were just in a world where it was all all right and you could be who you were. And you weren't classed as arrogant anymore. No, nor elitist, because we were the elite, if you like, yes. Record number three. This is Alfred Della singing a poem by Thomas Campion.

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Della was another thing that hit me.

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I had never heard of the idea of a counter tenor.

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And a man at Cambridge put this record on.

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And there were these wonderful Elizabethan words, and here was this sort of uncanny, haunting sound.

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It still sort of goes through my mind, you know, when I'm lying in bed, it's suddenly I I hear Della's voice.

A S Byatt14:47

Help a charming spree.

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Peace on all walls Brother of death, sweetly yourself disclose

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On the list of white fall black o'clock.

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And you can't see it.

A S Byatt15:32

Even nothing that is allowed or a prayer.

A S Byatt15:40

Yeah.

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Alfred Della singing Thomas Campion's Care Charming Sleep.

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You wrote the first draft of your first book, I think, at Cambridge Shadow of the Sun, didn't you? What what was it about?

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It was about a woman, a girl.

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who was afraid that her life would take on.

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A fixed shape

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by making decisions which seemed to be temporary and just to deal with the moment. And this was what I was trying to think out myself. I was I was the fiftieth generation of women for whom there was still a fairly stark choice between work and marriage.

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So you were writing in a in a semi-autobiographical sense at university, and the of course the other personal problem that you faced there was that your sister was coming after you, your sister three years younger. who um was is Margaret Drabble, who was also to become a well known novelist. She infuriated you, didn't she? Because everything you achieved she did one better. Yes, she did. Um she wished to.

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which is natural. And did because I'm

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Very powerful and very clever and very brilliant person.

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Looking back on it now from comfortable middle age, it seems to me that, you know, it was clear what was going on and it was perfectly natural that we should both feel

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as we did.

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From my point of view it was simply very frightening.

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You suffered a lot from all that.

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I was afraid. I think I suffered in the abstract.

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And applied it to a person who was actually rather a nice person who was just fiercely coming along behind. But why do you use the words frightened and afraid? I don't qu quite understand. Um.

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I was frightened there was no room for me, that I wasn't a real person, that there was somebody coming who was the real person, and everybody would see that I hadn't been there.

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So that although you got her first and everybody thought you did terribly well, she would then come along and get a starred first. Yes, well that was what did happen. And did did you feel that your your mother, as it were, were on was on her side too? Yes, ver very strongly. To whose advantage this was is another matter. I don't think it was entirely

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I mean, I don't think my sister would claim that this was awfully good for her that

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that my mother was on her side.

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And and what about now, from, as you say, the comfort of middle age, is there still friction between you? Or is that overstated by gossip columnists? Oh, it's terribly overstated by gossip columnists. I I think we like each other, and I think we always have.

Presenter18:13

liked each other on the bottom line and on several other lines, in the sense that if I meet my sister at a party, the one person I know who will know what I'm talking about, if I really explain some literary point, is her.

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And we will stand in the corner of a party and say, Did you notice this? Did you notice that? And have you read this?

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and we will smile at each other.

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But what I do not like is being interviewed by journalists who say what does it feel like to be Margaret Drabble's sister? That's what I'm frightened of, of not being anything.

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Um, of being simply my position in the family, not

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Not a person. But isn't that an advantage of having won the booker that you are now absolutely no longer, in quotes, Margaret Drabble's sister? Yes, it is. It it it has given me that. I mean, I feel I should have had that anyway. But, um

A S Byatt18:47

Isn't Welsh

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But now it's come in. I mean, I think that's a good idea.

A S Byatt19:03

Blessed relief.

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Shall we have record number four?

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It's Wallace Stevens, the American poet, reading The Idea of Order at Key West, which is a poem about what art does to the world, how art transfigures the world. And again, I heard it through a door.

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A man I knew was playing it because he was about to go out and teach a class of painters, American Poetry, and I heard this voice, and it was exactly like the Deller experience. It was something I hadn't known existed that became central in my life.

Speaker 219:36

Sung

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And water were not medlied sound,

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Even if what she sang was what she heard,

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since what she sang was uttered

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word by word,

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It may be.

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That in all her phrases stirred

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Grinding water and the gasping wind

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But it was she.

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and not the sea.

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We heard.

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Wallace Stevens reciting part of his poem The Idea of Order at Key West. Obviously you take a a great pleasure in words, Antonio. Is that pleasure as much in their sound as in their meaning? Yes, I love words the way I love paint and bright colours. I love Wallace Stevens's singing words the way I love Matisse's bright colours on shining paintings. I think of them as being rather the same as each other. It's a sort of intense sensuous pleasure. But I mean obviously enjoying the the cadence and and rhythm of words makes you a a natural poet and indeed in possession you not only invented your Victorian lovers, a poet and and a writer, you gave us the works, as it were. Now you didn't have to do that. Why did you choose to do that? I didn't mean to do that really. The first idea of the novel was that it should be a kind of text that ran between what the academics wrote about the poets, because I knew I could write parodies of the academic jargon.

Presenter21:05

And then I talked to Denis Enright, the poet, at a party, and said I've got to put some bits of poetry in. And I think I might use one of Ezra Pound's poems that's like one of Browning's. And he said, Nonsense, Antonio He said, Write them yourself And this was like somebody opening a door to me. I went home and I thought, Dammit, I will

Presenter21:24

At least try.

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Possession uh the book i it's it's a romance, but it's also a detective story, isn't it? It's a literary detective story. You've said before now that it's the book people used to enjoy reading when they enjoyed reading. What exactly do you mean by I think I know what you mean, but but tell me what you mean.

Presenter21:41

People

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throughout the centuries have read for formal pleasure and read to find out about the world they live in, but they've also read for the very deep pleasure of

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ancient narratives and narratives of discovery, narratives of discovery of lost children, narratives of lovers coming together. And my book isn't a naïve one of those.

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But it has learnt a lot from Georgette Hare.

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Because I've thought ever since I started reading Georgette Hare at the Mount School, York, why does she give me such intense pleasure? And part of the pleasure is that she's very good tempered.

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She writes a kind of comedy in which she gives you a blessed space in which people can be nice to each other.

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And because she has perfect narrative pace, which I decided was a basic human need. So there's some um thought gone into the formula behind this prize-winning novel, is that? Oh, yes, there is. It wasn't designed to win a prize exactly. It was designed to bring my life together. I'd given up teaching, and it was designed to bring together everything from Browning to Georgette Hare that I really cared about.

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and have fun all the way along and it it I think it worked.

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Some more music.

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The next record is the Diez Eere from Verde's Requiem. I like this simply because I I like the noise. I like it because it's an apocalyptic vision of terror and I like it because it's Latin, medieval rhyming Latin. I actually like the sound of the words in this. I like it because I have trouble with Christianity and I live in a world that has been Christian for centuries and centuries. And this is one place when this loud noise of terror of death is going on, when I can actually feel part of the Christian world.

Presenter24:27

Part of the Dieziere from Verdi's Requiem with the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.

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You were on the Kingman committee, Antonia Byrd, weren't you, looking into the teaching of English in schools? Did did that depress you?

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The arguments depress me about whether or not we should teach grammar, because most of them are completely unreal, in the sense that people seem to form up themselves in huge political rages.

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What about the argument that rages now about whether children should learn poetry by rote or should be exposed to more or less Shakespeare? Where do you stand on all of that? I feel that the human mind actually likes to learn things. It likes learning verbs by heart. It loves having its mind sort of tracked and tracked with all these bright lights of singing words. And in fact, you don't speak your own language properly if you haven't got this storehouse of singing things in it.

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But it the the other argument is, of course, that that um

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Children should be able to understand what they're studying, and if they can't understand it easily, it's not going to be of any use to them. This brings up the whole problem of mixed ability teaching. I think if you've got a large mixed ability class, some of which are having trouble reading at all, of course they can't read Shakespeare.

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Um though they could act it and and indeed do. I mean, they they do sort of

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Put pieces on.

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So how much do you fear that um

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We're in danger of bringing up a a really rather illiterate generation.

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If we are, I actually don't blame the educational system at all, I blame the television.

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I don't think it's a bogey, and I don't think it's wicked. I just think purely practically it is much simpler for a child to come home from school tired, and turn it on.

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And be given what I've already said, every human being needs, a narrative.

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To be given a few bright colours. To be given a bit of music, a bit of language. My generation.

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got all that out of books, and we got all sorts of other things while we were getting that. They can get that out of the television, and therefore the book becomes a bit more of an effort for them.

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And of course this is producing illiteracy. Record number six.

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Um record number six brings together all sorts of things I care about. It's Cleo Lane singing Shakespeare.

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And she's singing my very favourite Shakespeare song, When That I Wasn't a Little Tiny Boy from Twelfth Night, which was my A level Shakespeare. And she's singing it with bounce, and she comes out of the jazz world that I grew up in.

Speaker 327:01

When that I was a little tiny boy, With hay ho, the wind and the rain A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain up raineth every day.

Speaker 327:16

When I came at last to wide with hay home the wind and the rain By swaggering could I never fright For the rain and rain at every day

Speaker 327:31

But when I came to man's estate with hay, Oh, the wind and the rain gates, knaves and foolsmen shut their gate, For the rain it raineth every day.

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Uh

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Uh

Speaker 327:46

But when I came unto my beds with hair,

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When I

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Mm-hmm.

Speaker 327:50

All the wind and the rain with tortspots still had drunken hedge for the rain it rained every day.

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Cleolane singing When That I Was a Little Tiny Boy. You have three daughters, Antonia, and you had a son who was killed in a road accident in the week of his eleventh birthday. How old would he have been by now? He would now, I think, be twenty nine.

Presenter28:14

My daughter, who is a year older than him, is yes, would be twenty nine. I I presume that that's um a tragedy, the death of a child that a parent just simply never gets over.

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No, you don't get over it.

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And

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You suffer greatly from people supposing you will, I think.

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You suffer

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from people not understanding

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The pace of grief.

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Most days, I think

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about him.

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And most days I still undergo the shock.

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of realizing I hadn't remembered.

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Not to think about being told that he had been killed because.

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If you remember.

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By accident.

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without preparing yourself, you start panicking again and you start feeling

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that you would rather be dead.

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And

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What I do think is that if a child is killed when they're at that sort of age, the actual symbiotic bond is still not broken. I thought that child was almost about to become separate from me, but he still wasn't quite.

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I remember thinking if he'd been ten years older I could have borne this.

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What sort of effect did his death have on your writing, on your work?

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Writing does have a large element of being done for pleasure in it, and I lost that completely for a very long time, I think.

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Did you ever write about him?

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I wrote a ghost story once, and I wrote

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Last week, the first poem I've ever written under my own name

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was published.

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In the TLS and that was about him.

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And were you in doing that, in writing about him when you wrote the sh short story?

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You must have been worried in case you were in a sense using and using his death, using your grief.

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Yes, I was. I wrote the story, really, in order partly to stop.

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Living only in that.

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And in a sense although it's a story which.

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moves people, I think, because it's an account of a woman grieving for a son who is lost and

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Her lodger can see the ghost, and she can't.

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The writing of it was actually rather brutal because, of course, it distanced it and

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And one did feel one might be exploiting something.

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And why can't she see him, the mother?

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Because she's too realistic. She knows that he isn't there. And she's taught herself.

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But he's not there.

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I know a lot of women whose children have died who do really believe that they're children.

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Speak to them in some ways.

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But I myself feel that the dead are gone.

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and that this is a lesson

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One has to learn. This is the way my moral temperament takes me. But it was an extremely painful lesson.

Presenter31:00

Um there was a sentence the woman in the book speaks she says there is no boy.

Presenter31:05

And the ma'am

Presenter31:07

In the story I see is the boy all over and is very beautiful boy.

Presenter31:10

The most brightly colored thing in the story.

Presenter31:14

Um but that was something I used to say to myself, you know, waking up in the morning, there is

Presenter31:19

No boy.

Presenter31:21

Um

Presenter31:25

But you you learn it very, very slowly, in fact, you

Presenter31:30

I worked it out with my intellect very quickly that you had to learn that somebody was gone.

Presenter31:35

But actually

Presenter31:37

It takes you years and years not to wait for them to come round corners and

Presenter31:42

and look down the street and see a child.

Presenter31:46

you know, small blonde boy dancing. It it's not a good thing, really.

Speaker 331:50

I recognize them.

Presenter31:51

Um

Presenter31:53

Record number seven is from

Presenter31:57

Wagner's Rheingot, which I discovered late in life, unlike all the others.

Presenter32:03

And

Presenter32:04

Is the giant Fafna singing about

Presenter32:10

The Golden Apples in Freyr's Garden, which is the Paradise Garden.

Presenter32:15

This one moves me terribly because it's something that's lost and always there.

A S Byatt32:22

See here and garden, see a line, by siepend, a fruit from here and zip turn. So a vigilant

A S Byatt32:42

Blind, thou sing'st here a blade.

A S Byatt32:49

Good evening.

A S Byatt32:52

This and friend as he may send.

A S Byatt32:58

You're the beat at Romsian Field!

Presenter33:05

Cord Burma, singing the Goldener Epfel Aria from Wagner's Rheingalt with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir George Schulte. What are you working on now, Antonio? Another novel? A book of short stories, half of which is written. Then I'm going to write a novel called Babel Tower, which is the third one in the series that began with The Virgin and the Garden. And I've got another two novels in my head.

Presenter33:27

And another book of short stories. So all I need is time. And how regular are you in your writing habits? I mean, do you procrastinate or do you and do you have superstitions before you can sit down and start to work? Starting is always awful. I think all writers find this. I walk up and down the stairs a lot. I I work in the attic and make the coffee on the ground floor and

Presenter33:48

This gives me a bit of exercise. And and as you go round the house, I mean, do do you have reminders for yourself that you really ought to be getting back to work? Are you making excuses as you go round the house?

Presenter33:58

Yes, I do a bit. My publisher has sent me these wonderful

Presenter34:02

I don't know quite what you call them. They're like what you have in front of you in conferences on glossy white paper with your name.

Presenter34:09

But these say Antonia writing time exclamation mark and she says please put these all over the house. Do not answer the telepho

Presenter34:17

And so there is one glaring at me whichever room I go into, and when I see this, I rush upstairs and start again. Last record.

Presenter34:25

The last record is um Dietrich Fischer Diskow singing a very sinister little German lyric, which is written by Eichendorf, one of whose books I studied for my A level, though that's um that's accidental. I like this simply because the last line is so sinister.

A S Byatt34:47

Last hoi degree

A S Byatt35:08

Yeah.

A S Byatt35:21

Turich Seivach und Munter.

Presenter35:32

Dietrich Fischer Diskar singing Zwelicht from Schumann's Liederkreis, opus thirty nine. And the last line is what, Antonio? Hutters dicht sei wach und munte. Look after yourself, be careful and wary. It's a twilight song, and things are coming out of the forest.

Presenter35:48

I have a Germanic imagination. Now is that the one or is it one of the others, the one of the eight that you'd keep?

Presenter35:55

As each of them was played, I decided I wanted that one, but I think what I want is the Wagner, particularly if I can have the whole opera. And with the whole four operas, of course, I would like even more, but I I won't put you on the spot. Pushing it a bit here. So you get the Shakespeare, the complete works, you get the Bible. Only if it isn't the New English Bible. I want the King James or nothing. Right, you can have that. And uh and your book?

Presenter36:20

Um am I allowed

Presenter36:22

Um, Proust in French, a la recherche du temp pè dieu, all of it, because in that way I read so terribly fast it would take me quite a long time, and I would have forgotten the beginning of that a bit by the end. And also I could use it to translate Shakespeare into French and it into English, and in this way I would be usefully occupied. A whole new translation of Proust. Yes. And and your luxury. What I want is a large filing cabinet absolutely full of A four paper narrow feint and black and white felt tip pens. And the filing cabinet has to be totally weatherproofed. If this is regarded as a necessity and not a luxury, I want Botticelli's Primavera.

Presenter37:07

My goodness, you confuse me. I I I think you should just have that as your luxury. I think I should stick to the rules, yeah. I I have to have my filing cabinet. I would rather have the filing cabinet than botticelli, which says something.

Presenter37:20

AS Byrt, Antonia Byrt, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 337:32

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