Sybil Marshall

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 three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a writer. She studied for a Cambridge degree in her late 40s and became a university don and writer on education in her 50s. I come to everything late, she says. Now in her 80th year, she's written her first novel, about love in middle age and village life in the fenlands of East Anglia, where she was born, brought up and still lives today.

Presenter0:52

The novel of her old age reflects her devotion to this part of England and her concern at its disappearing values. She is Sybil Marshall.

Presenter1:01

You're undoubtedly Sybil Britton's oldest living first novelist. Why did it take you so long? Really because I was doing other things all the time, things that were important to me as the days passed. But I had conceived the ambition when I was ten. I'd had novels read to me and I wanted to be a novelist. It took me seventy years. Seventy years to put your pen to paper in in terms of fiction, anyway. In terms of fiction, yes.

Sybil Marshall1:22

Two.

Sybil Marshall1:26

Yeah.

Presenter1:27

But it's also a quite a personal business. I mean, your your novel, The Nest of Magpies, is very much about you. It's semi-autobiographical, isn't it? I think so, yes. I didn't realize how autobiographical it was until people began to point it out to me afterwards. Because it is about a a fictitious, albeit fictitious village, but nevertheless a village in the Thens, which is, as we say, where you go. An amalgamation, actually, of seven separate villages, not all in the Fenn, because they all have something in common.

Sybil Marshall1:46

In the famous

Sybil Marshall1:48

An amount of

Presenter1:55

But it's also about romance in middle age. Yes. Which is something that happened to you. Yes. Was that difficult to write about? Not at all. It was lovely to remember. I I gather also at one point there were some sex scenes in the book.

Presenter2:11

That was very funny, wasn't it? Because I thought the publishers would rather want them, but they took them out.

Presenter2:18

The publishers took them out. Were you disappointed? No, not at all. I thought they knew their business better than I did.

Presenter2:24

But but we shouldn't give the wrong impression. I mean, i it is it's it's it's not a a a romance, this book, as much as a book about village life. Yes, uh th they are you can't

Sybil Marshall2:30

Okay.

Sybil Marshall2:32

Yes, the

Presenter2:35

Paint a picture of life with all highlights. There have to be dark tones too.

Presenter2:40

I want to talk some more about it, in particular about village life, but uh tell me first about the music for your desert island.

Presenter2:47

At eighty, one

Presenter2:49

Doesn't necessarily have to look back. I think it's believed by the young that everybody spends their old age looking back. Obviously they can't look forward as far as they can look back, but Kierkegaard, I believe, said life can only be understood backwards.

Presenter3:07

And I think I'd begun to understand backwards, and I looked back on it when asked to do this programme with enormous pleasure and not nostalgia with any

Presenter3:18

Sorrow attached to it, but just how lovely it had all been. So, a lot of this music is memory. So, it's it's memory. Beautiful moments. Beautiful moments, yes. What's the first one?

Sybil Marshall3:25

Yeah.

Presenter3:28

Well, my very first memory is of waking up in my cradle and seeing the rest of my family. My father's back, and he was just pulling away from his knee a kitten that had climbed up his leg. And I cannot remember my father, or indeed any of my family, without a cat somewhere in the picture. And so my first record is Rossini's Cat Duet, also because I've spent a life in creativity. And I think here we have three great artists, all knowing that they may let their hair down and not lose any of their artistic quality.

Presenter5:10

That was Rossini's cat duet sung by Victoria de Los Angeles and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, accompanied by Gerald Moore.

Presenter5:16

Tell me then, Sybil, a bit more about why you care so deeply about village life. What do you feel are its strengths? There was this very

Presenter5:26

Gentle sort of slope of social standing that had the squire at the top before the First World War. It was that breed of village land owners whose sons went and were all killed, so they were wiped out, really, at the end of the First World War. But then there were the farmers, the rich farmers, and then the smaller farmers, and then the small holders, and then the labourers, and so on down to the people who served them. So what were the strengths then of that set up? That everybody was interdependent. And there was a sense of history, and everybody knew their place. Yes. And yet you were all part of a tribe, if you like. Yes, a Fenland tribe. There is a quite distinct dividing line between the Fens.

Speaker 46:14

Yeah.

Presenter6:22

and the fen lands right in the deep fens. For instance, where I was born at a place called Ramsey Heights, at six feet below sea level.

Presenter6:33

It's the lowest point in Britain, isn't it? Well, actually, the lowest point is Holme Fenn, but it's just across the Ravery Drain from Ramsey Heights. And that's where you were born? That's where I was born, yes.

Sybil Marshall6:33

The lowest.

Speaker 46:39

Hmm.

Speaker 46:40

Well that's

Presenter6:42

But but is is the tribe of the Fens, or the F the Fenland tribe, th this clan, uh consists of all of these classes, as it were. Yes, but completely interdependent, so that

Speaker 46:50

I agnostic, as it were.

Presenter6:55

There really is no great difference. The difference is own is more in the jobs they do and the sort of houses they live in than in any snobbery. Snobbery came after the war. And do they all speak in the same language?

Presenter7:11

They all speak in metaphor. They think in metaphor. Give me an example.

Speaker 47:15

Give me an ex

Presenter7:16

Well, my father made his own, he would say.

Presenter7:20

I don't think this is his own, because I believe it has been more general, but er oh, I don't know anything about that. I'm as bare a knowledge about that as a sow is of side pockets. Or well, I don't reckon much to him. He knows about much whether he's talking about as a cat does about Holy Communion.

Presenter7:37

But he would make them up on the spots, you see. Record number two.

Presenter7:43

Yes. My early life in this Fenland clan had been accompanied by music everywhere. I was brought up on music hall songs with Dad playing it, or on hymns, because we were great chapel goers, you see. So music meant

Presenter7:59

one or the other to me until I went to school, where we sang national songs, we sang folk songs. I knew every folk song that Cecil Sharp collected. I think

Presenter8:10

Especially the words which stayed with me. And then one day our our teacher said she was going to teach us a new song, and it was Haydn's My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair, and I can remember, I can fl I can smell the schoolroom, I can think it and know how it hurt me somewhere in my diaphragm. I'd never heard music like this before. I loved it so much.

Speaker 48:35

My mother bids me bind my hair with bands of rosy hue.

Speaker 48:47

And this my body spoke.

Presenter8:53

Yes

Speaker 48:59

I walk my sleeves with ravens of God and deliver and leave my body's pure.

Speaker 49:13

For while she cries, sit still and wink while others daunted fear.

Speaker 49:28

I scarce can go on a crap.

Presenter9:36

Haydn's My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair, sung by Ellie Ameling, accompanied by Jurg Deymus.

Presenter9:42

A custom of life in the early part of this century when a family was bereaved was of course that they laid out the body and kept it at home until the funeral was there. And that's what happened to your grandma, and as a result, something awful happened to you. Yes. Had great effect on me all my life still, in fact. Has left its effect to my eightieth year. My grandmother had come to our house. If it had been in her house, it would have been even worse because it was smaller.

Speaker 49:51

Goodness.

Presenter10:11

And um she died on a Sunday, a very wet February Sunday, and my aunt was fetched. They'd built a great fire in the bedroom fireplace, and I sat in front of this fire, not really quite knowing what had happened, was happening, until my aunt and uncle arrived, and then they were just in time. I stood up and actually watched my aunt fling herself on her knees and realised how this was uh some dramatic moment, and watched my grandmother die. You would have been what? I was must have been just past my fifth birthday.

Presenter10:48

And uh for the next two or three days there seems to have been a sort of amnesia hit me because I don't remember anything for the next three days or so, but on about the fourth day my mother had lost her nerve, my sister had lost hers, and they needed a handkerchief out of my uh out of the bedroom where the corpse still lay.

Presenter11:09

I didn't know, of course. They said Sibyl will fetch it. You'll go, won't you? Be a good black girl. Told me where to find it. Up I went, straight into the bedroom.

Presenter11:17

And I had to get the handkerchief from a dressing table which had a large triple mirror.

Presenter11:22

There was a candle burning, just one candle, in a dark room with the blinds drawn, and in the mirror I saw this long box on the bed, and wondered what on earth it could be, and what could be in it.

Presenter11:35

So I pulled up a chair.

Presenter11:37

and climbed on it because I wasn't tall enough, took hold of the side of the coffin, and pulled myself up and looked in. And there was my darling grandmam, and we always called her

Presenter11:47

Uh

Presenter11:48

Apparently asleep in this box, I leaned over and kissed her.

Presenter11:53

And of course she was very cold, and she sank.

Presenter11:57

I ca the horror of the moment I've got thrills going up my spine at the moment, and goose pimples, I can never really forget. I thought it was my fault.

Presenter12:09

I put the chair back.

Presenter12:11

And I never told anybody for years that I had done this. But didn't you suffer as a result of a of another kind of experience, although a very different one, much later in your life? I mean, again, because of a village custom tradition. Because uh b your baby, your first baby, was was stillborn.

Presenter12:31

And it just wasn't thought proper to talk to you about what had happened to you. I think the family were all trying to be very kind to me, but of course.

Sybil Marshall12:34

I feel

Presenter12:41

Being a reasonably intelligent woman, they wouldn't let me see him, you see, and I thought it was because I had produced some dreadful freak.

Speaker 412:49

And

Presenter12:50

Well, you thought the baby was deformed? I thought the baby was deformed and that's why it w had been born dead, you see.

Speaker 412:55

Oof.

Presenter12:55

It was uh only uh

Presenter12:58

four five years ago that I actually heard quite

Presenter13:02

By chance, I'd got a group of my contemporary Fenlanders sitting at my table, with a tape recorder in the middle, and suddenly the oldest lady of all, who was deaf and often struck into a conversation with something else, said, Oh, and that beautiful baby you had, Sybil. I've had six of my own, but I've never seen so beautiful a baby boy that that was. And you know, I helped your mother to put him in his little coffin. Bill Arye, that was my dad. She said, Bill Ary had a little white coffin made for him. And we put him in one of the embroidered night dresses you had made for him. And then Mrs. Edwards said to me, Come on, Dolly, let's go and fetch some scissors and come with me into the garden. She said, and we went and we picked every beautiful rosebud in the garden and we packed him round with roses. And then your dad and Maya, and that was her husband, who was my dad's horsekeeper, took him and buried him. But you'd never known. And I had never known all those details until she told me that day. And only then you realised that. And then, yes, and I'd had this beautiful boy, who would have been fifty-three now. But does that make you very angry? I mean, does that kind of, if you like, that kind of tight-lipped village propriety, I mean. Not in my family. I know it was only done because they loved me too much. They thought it would be better for me. I think if we'd had any claims to nobility at all.

Sybil Marshall14:08

And then

Sybil Marshall14:09

Yeah.

Sybil Marshall14:12

But

Presenter14:32

Our motto would have been Emerson's words Laugh often and Love Much.

Presenter14:39

Record number three.

Presenter14:41

Well, I was an afterthought in my family, very much simplecum lately.

Presenter14:46

And uh my brother was ten when I was born, my sister nine, and in the year before I had b was born she had been given a piano.

Presenter14:55

She was a born musician and uh

Presenter14:59

One of the things she used to play, and I used to ask her to play for me over and over again, was one called NOLA.

Presenter15:36

Yeah, but I'm sure wherever Lois's spirit is now, it must be looking down and laughing and playing on some celestial piano, let's hope. NOLA, and that was Kenneth Lewis playing it.

Sybil Marshall15:44

Yeah.

Presenter15:48

So by the time Sybil Marshall the Second World War broke out, you were a young woman and you got married on the spur of the moment, didn't you? Just before the war. Yes. Like so many young women.

Sybil Marshall15:53

Yeah, yeah.

Sybil Marshall15:55

Yes.

Sybil Marshall15:57

Say it just

Presenter15:58

Pressure.

Presenter16:00

That was put on all young people by the knowledge that the war was coming for at least two years before it did made you do things that you didn't really think carefully enough about. I suppose you thought you'd better cram everything into it. I think that was the feeling that you had to get everything into life before it was too late. And eventually you had a daughter, didn't you? Yes. But the marriage founded. The marriage founded, yes. Like so many. Like so many. Yes, men were away and yes.

Speaker 416:11

Yeah.

Speaker 416:12

Yeah, I

Sybil Marshall16:12

I

Sybil Marshall16:17

Mm.

Sybil Marshall16:25

Yeah.

Presenter16:28

But it was in those war years, wasn't it, in your late twenties and your early thirties, that you were asked to run a village school in Cambridge? Now tell me about that school. Well, it was a s very small village.

Sybil Marshall16:34

That's right.

Presenter16:39

with the usual social divisions in it.

Presenter16:44

And uh there was just a school, a building.

Presenter16:48

And nothing in it because the supplies were so short. They weren't just in short supply, they were non-existent. And thirty-two children and me. And it had a mixture of indigenous village children and evacuees. And they were all utterly apathetic and bored. And so I set out to change it. You invented a new teaching method. I I think it was new, yes. It was really relying.

Sybil Marshall16:58

Uh

Sybil Marshall17:10

You invented a

Presenter17:16

Very largely on my own reading, my own love of poetry, my knowledge of folk songs came in very useful, and relying really on the creative arts.

Presenter17:29

wholly in order to find something that these children had never had before. Which was pretty revolutionary in its time in the forty period r well, I suppose there had been the great names, Marion Richardson, Doctor Viola and so on, but

Sybil Marshall17:36

And

Presenter17:43

But basically in most schoolrooms across the land children would have been sitting in serried ranks learning by rote the three R's. Yes. But you were asking them to express themselves. I was asking them to learn to live. That's really what it boiled down to. And what sort of results did you get? Well, absolutely astounding, although I as we should say in the fain, although I say it is shunt.

Sybil Marshall17:44

School Rooms

Sybil Marshall17:48

Three R's, yes.

Sybil Marshall17:52

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter18:05

The more I asked, the more I got.

Presenter18:10

I could not ask those children to do anything that they wouldn't attempt. They put their trust in me absolutely, as, for instance, when we were spending a whole term with everything we did, including maths and science, based on Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

Presenter18:30

And I can remember the moment when we had done oh, we'd done wonderful pictures, we'd done everything, we'd danced, we'd even played it with our own little orchestra of violins and recorders, and uh we'd got rather stuck on the tune, uh the the little pretty tune. They'd sung it, they'd played it, they'd danced to it, they went about humming it, and I looked at them one day and said,

Presenter18:58

You know, you've been right through a day with those peasants in a musical fashion. You came out with them in the morning, you saw it through Beethoven's eyes, you went to the brook in the afternoon, you danced on the Village Green in the Third Movement.

Presenter19:12

lived with them through the thunderstorm, went to church to say your thanksgiving.

Presenter19:17

Now think Put your heads down cover your eyes up put your heads down.

Presenter19:22

Now you're just coming out of church, and you are going all by yourself you're yourself only, and you're going to your own home.

Presenter19:30

What'd you be thinking about?

Presenter19:33

sat and and looked at me, and I could see their minds almost, the wheels going round. Then I said, All right, pick your pens up. I want you to write a poem so that the words would fit that tune. And one called Jill clapped her hand to her forehead and said, Oh, what will she think of next? And they all burst out laughing, but they seized their pens and began. So you've got to take Beethoven's pastoral. So we've got to take that little bit of that.

Sybil Marshall19:59

Just say we

Presenter20:59

Part of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer. But in fact your pupils wrote words to it. Yes. And indeed you went down in education history because you wrote a a book about your method, didn't you call it an experiment in education, which became a classic of its kind.

Sybil Marshall21:12

Didn't you cause an

Sybil Marshall21:13

Education

Presenter21:16

Nevertheless, in the end, after eighteen years the school was closed down.

Sybil Marshall21:19

Peace out.

Presenter21:20

And you decided you had to get an education for yourself, as it were. Well, I I simply had to do something to earn a living, and uh what they offered me was a peripatetic head supply ship, only fifteen years to retirement, the man said to me. And so I thought, well, really, after having made the school internationally famous, at least I ought to try and get into a training college. And uh

Presenter21:47

I'd had heard in the literature cl classes I had been attending that the Extramural Board of Cambridge University had started their scheme of

Presenter21:58

Sending a mature student to Cambridge on a bursary, but it was competitive.

Presenter22:05

I wrote an essay on the decline of rural idiom and its effect on modern literature, and bunged it in. I knew that by mature they meant twenty five or so. I was forty seven. But I won the bursary and I went up

Presenter22:20

And how readily did you take to it? I mean, did it this was you, what, in your late forties, going up to Cambridge in the swinging sixties? Yes, well, again, it was a dream come true, you see. I

Presenter22:32

I'd always wanted to go to Cambridge and uh it had been ripped from me by the agricultural depression and I'd had to get on without it. But he

Presenter22:42

I was actually in my undergraduate gown with an extra width in it,'cause I weighed about fifteen and a half stones then.

Presenter22:49

And everything was absolutely wonderful, and the youngsters simply took me in their stride.

Speaker 422:56

Mm.

Presenter22:56

And you took the course in your stride because you within two years you got a 2-1. That's right, yes. Let's have your next record.

Presenter23:03

Well, before we got to that great day of becoming a student at Cambridge, of course, I'd been all my youth, just before the war.

Presenter23:13

I was taught the Charleston when I was twelve and uh I'd been dancing and I realised that I'd missed out on being able to play an instrument because everybody else almost could get a tune out of something and I couldn't, but I got it in my feet. It's a wonder I have any legs left. I danced my way through all my teens and right up to the time I was twenty five. Oh, the most lovely years. And when I think back to them

Presenter23:41

and the sort of general kind of feeling that was always in our house. I had to choose a tune that meant both, and so the thing that brings it back to me absolutely is Love is the sweetest thing.

Sybil Marshall23:55

Whatever a heart may desire, Whatever fate may stand.

Sybil Marshall24:02

This is the tale that never will tire This is the song without end

Sybil Marshall24:10

Love is the greatest thing, The oldest, yet the latest thing. I only hope that faith may bring Love's story to you.

Presenter24:22

Yeah.

Presenter24:24

Jack Hilton and his orchestra and Love is the sweetest thing.

Presenter24:28

So you went, Civil Marshall, to teach at Sheffield University, just coming up to the age of fifty, and there you met the man you've since spent the rest of your life with. Yes. Can you describe to me that moment of meeting? Well, it was the most extraordinary thing. THE most romantic novelist ever couldn't have really thought up the circumstances, I'm sure. The writer, Henry Trees, was coming to do a lecture for me, and he had to let me down.

Presenter24:54

And he said, Can I send the substitute? And he did. And by this extraordinary chance of sort of fish hooks, one thing catching on to another, we found ourselves that is, myself and the visiting lecturer, at a blind date at a university ball, and we had both been deserted by the people who'd taken us, and I uh hung about in the ladies' room, waiting for my lady escorted with whom I had gone.

Presenter25:25

And he was hanging about in the hall waiting for his escort. And in the end I thought, I'm I've had enough of this. I'm going down. So I went down the stairs, all in my evening gown. I happened to have one. That's a strange thing. And when I got about four steps from the bottom, he moved forward and put out his hand. And we just recognised each other. I put my hand in it. And there was a completely empty ballroom because the b the students were all having their supper. And there was the band. I said, I haven't been on the dance floor for twenty five years. He said, neither have I.

Presenter26:00

Let's go and see if we can still do it. And we had the Enterball room to ourselves, and they were playing all the silly songs. But it's a gorgeous thing to waltz to. I'm shy, Mary Ellen, I'm shy. And that was that. It was instant friendship. Instant friendship. As if we were emotional twins, as if we could read each other's thoughts at once. So, I mean, the cliché is love at first sight, but that's what you mean, you instantly knew you belong. Yes. Oh, Robert Graves has a wonderful poem called Friendship at First Sight, which leaves love at first sight a long way behind. You were long divorced now, but he was married.

Sybil Marshall26:18

As if we

Presenter26:41

However, time went on and eventually you set up home together and you've been together ever since, what, thirty years? Thirty years.

Sybil Marshall26:48

Send to you.

Presenter26:49

It's a relationship which, as I indicated, really is relived in your novel. Yes. Because there the couple are very conscience stricken about what they're proposing to you. Yes. Set up together, as it were. As we were. I was going to say, was that how you felt? Yes. In in a terrible do about it. You see.

Sybil Marshall26:57

Yes.

Sybil Marshall26:59

As

Sybil Marshall27:01

Yes, yes.

Presenter27:07

We had both been brought up before the war, all the social mores of pre-war England, and it was simply not done. But what could we do? It was.

Presenter27:21

Two lives are going to be ruined and a lot of potential creativity squashed if we weren't supporting each other. We don't just double each other. We square each other at the base of a geometrical progression.

Presenter27:35

Record number six, I think. Oh, well, record number six really is a memory of that enchanted evening some enchanted evening that really did happen to us.

Speaker 327:45

Sunshine good evening

Speaker 327:50

You may see a stranger

Speaker 327:55

You may see a stranger across a crowd and a road.

Speaker 328:03

And somehow you know

Speaker 328:08

You know even that.

Speaker 328:14

That's all

Presenter28:14

Giorgio Tozzi singing Some Enchanted Evening from the original soundtrack of South Pacific. Are you going to try and escape from this island, Sybil?

Presenter28:23

You know, I don't think I'd have to try. Looking back over eight years, I realize that I've been an

Presenter28:30

in desert island situations, let us say, several times, and luck has got me out. I think I'd just be fitting for crabs or something like that one day, and I'd fall over into the water, and being the shape and size I am, I would only have to turn over on my back and tie a handkerchief to my walking stick.

Presenter28:50

And I'd be floated off into uh I'd I'd find a a current that took me into a shipping lane.

Presenter28:57

It's been that kind of a life. Everything wrong that has happened to me, like having the cancer, for instance, has been compensated for over and over again. Looking back across eighty years of all sorts of things, I can only say I must have been born like Beatrice, born under a lucky star instead of a dancing one. You're retired now, of course, aren't you? But still obviously very busy writing your fiction. Do you write it on a machine of any kind? I wrote because I love calligraphy.

Sybil Marshall29:23

Yeah.

Sybil Marshall29:29

I wrote

Presenter29:32

I love a sheet of white paper and an italic pen in my hand. I wrote Nests of Magpies all longhand, but I have since taken to a word processor, learned how to use it. Because you rewrote it, didn't you? Yes, I rewrote it, and I rewrote it on a word processor. Next piece of music. This is just a gesture of gratitude.

Sybil Marshall29:43

Because you re

Sybil Marshall29:44

Yeah.

Presenter29:53

on my part for a really, really happy life with some very dark patches, but never enough to spoil it.

Presenter30:01

Exultate, ubilate, rejoice and be glad And of all that, Alleluia Alleluia for all the things that have happened and all the things still to come.

Speaker 430:17

Woohoo!

Presenter31:12

Kiri Takana were there singing the Alleluia from Mozart's Exultate Ubilate with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. And I absolutely love it, because another reason for loving it is that my daughter used to sing it my daughter Prue used to sing it so beautifully.

Presenter31:29

What ambitions have you got left to fulfil, Sylvia? Oh, at eighty, oh, so many. But I had three, and they were to be able to dance a Viennese waltz again, because I'd been eight years bent double on elbow crutches, and I wanted to be able to dance again, and I'm going to on my birthday this year. I'm going to achieve that one. Another one was to see my name on the novel, as I've told you, and I've done that. And the last one I fear is the one I probably shan't achieve, but I want to die in Cambridge Scarlet as a doctor of Cambridge University.

Presenter32:08

I know exactly what I would do for my thesis, but whether I can leave fiction writing to do it now, I don't know. What what would be the title of the thesis? I haven't actually worked the title out, but it would be about the great novelists of the twenties and thirties who were overshadowed by the giants.

Presenter32:30

people like Lawrence, for instance, and never had their

Presenter32:33

Need of praise, but were they marvellous novelists?

Presenter32:39

Let's have your last record.

Presenter32:41

Well, my last record.

Presenter32:44

I don't like the sound of the word last you see about anything, because I believe with Joyce Grenfell that life goes on. And uh though I'm not a Christian actually, but so it isn't that kind of going on.

Presenter32:57

But uh I think

Presenter33:00

I have to face the fact that there aren't all that number of years left, and that one day I shall be leaving the world behind me, and I'd like to think of it happening as sort of just going away from it, and sort of seeing it smaller and smaller and smaller in the distance, while I went higher and higher and higher and higher, like the lark ascending, still singing.

Presenter34:23

Part of Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, played by Iona Brown. If you could only take one of those eight records, Sybil.

Presenter34:30

Oh, it would have to be the Alleluia to rejoice.

Sybil Marshall34:33

Drinking.

Presenter34:34

For everything that's been. What about your book?

Presenter34:37

I shall have to take Huckleberry Finn, a book I could never get tired of, and a book in which I'd find something new every time I read it, and also I could hear Dad's voice reading it to me when I was only eight or so. What about your luxury?

Presenter34:56

An inexhaustible supply

Presenter34:59

Of beautifully laundered Swiss lawn handkerchiefs embroidered, without which I can't go to sleep. I have to have a clean handkerchief in my hand because I can't go to sleep without one. Do you ever blow your nose on them, or is it just that you like the handkerchiefs? I just love handkerchiefs. My friends always know if they really want to please me for a Christmas present, or they buy me a beautiful handkerchief. It doesn't matter how many I have.

Speaker 435:15

Yeah.

Presenter35:26

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

Speaker 435:38

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