Joanna Trollope

Joanna Trollope0:00

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.

Joanna Trollope0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is a novelist. Born in her grandfather's rectory in Gloucestershire, she went to Oxford and then to the Foreign Office before becoming a teacher.

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Her first books were historical romances. It was not until nineteen eighty seven that, encouraged by her husband, she wrote her first contemporary novel, The Choir.

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She's since written six more, including The Rector's Wife and A Spanish Lover, becoming in the process one of this country's most successful writers.

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She deals in the everyday round of marriage, divorce, and good and bad behaviour, and claims to be a writer for the nineties. She says, I write about how much of England lives. She is Joanna Trollope. What's different about the nineties, Joanna? Do we require something different from our contemporary fiction than we required in the eighties?

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I think the nineties are more sober. I think if my novels had appeared.

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Ten years ago, at the beginning of the eighties, they'd have sunk without trace. Well, the choir did on its first appearance in nineteen eighty seven.

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But this is the end of a century, you know, this is a reflective time and we've got over that rather greedy decade of the eighties. The Thatcher decade. Yes, yes, that one. So so we're not in need of are you saying the blockbuster and the the the sexy romps and the the mad dreams and dreams beyond avarice? Well that there'll always be a place for those. We'll always fantasise about those, but those aren't in the forefront of our minds any more because they don't seem to work any longer.

Presenter1:58

We we've just had to become a bit more reflective. So y your novels, you would say, are more sober, more realistic. They're sort of back to basics novels, eh? Oh, if you must. They they do, I hasten to add, have jokes in them. They sound too sober to be true, but but they do. Yes, th they are, I hope, a mirror of this sort of reality, where even if your heart is broken or you've lost your job, you still have to take the children to school, you still have to go to Sainsbury's.

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And one of your characters, uh Miss Batchelor in The Men and the Girls, she tells uh um gives some advice to a young man to value dulness, she said. I mean, what does she mean? She does she mean mundane things, look after detail. Yes, to look after the detail. She of course has has wit and says this slightly tongue-in-cheek. But she means that life cannot be all sensation, dear. It is Monday to Friday as well, and that's the Monday to Friday is what you have to live with. But at the same time, your characters are always attempting to break out of some kind of cosy conformity, aren't they? Oh, surely. But I mean what is so fascinating for a novelist is the moment when a character turns protagonist, instead of just reacting to what life throws at them.

Speaker 42:36

Yeah.

Speaker 42:37

Yeah.

Joanna Trollope2:37

Uh

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They take charge, they grasp the steering wheel, and it may be a very uncomfortable one.

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But they do grasp it, and of course for me that's a marvellous moment to describe. Do they take you by surprise when they grasp it? Yes, they often do. Sometimes I plan it. I planned that the rector's wife might do it, but other characters

Joanna Trollope3:19

These untapped

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Do it when I'm not looking.

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You know, I might be out walking the dogs and I suddenly think, oh, that's it, that's what he or she should be doing now.

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Okay. Let's break you out of your conformity and cast you away on a desert island. What's the first record that you'd play? Oh, it's the first C interlude from Benjamin Britton's Peter Grimes.

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Because of its Englishness it it really reminds me of all those endless childhood holidays, standing on a pebbly beach somewhere looking at the ginger beer sea. It wouldn't look like that anywhere else in the world.

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The first C interlude from Benjamin Britton's Peter Grimes, played by the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Colin Davis. You say, Joanna Trollope, that you write about how much of England lives. But your books are essentially about middle class people, aren't they? Vicars and Doctors and a television presenter. People have called them Arga Sagas. You don't like that. They have.

Joanna Trollope5:14

Very high.

Presenter5:15

Well, the joke's worn a little thin. I think it's rather an urban joke, and I think it's a rather patronising one. And like all tags, you know, it only tells part of the story. I suppose it it signifies green wellies and augers and range rovers and and country people.

Joanna Trollope5:27

Yeah.

Presenter5:30

And I think I write about the provinces. Some of the novels are set indeed in villages, but quite a lot of them are not.

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And this middle class thing always troubles me a bit. Of course they are set in the middle class, but the middle class these days seems to me so huge, and I would prefer something like the striving classes, you know, people who are interested in education, in improvement in life, in

Presenter5:53

better social welfare in culture, you know, people with aspiration, because I find them not only interesting to write about, but they are articulate. I don't mean that anyone else doesn't feel life as keenly, but at least people who are interested in language and are used to talking can explain their feelings to me, as it were. But your rector's wife m makes a bid for freedom by taking a job stacking shelves in a supermarket and the local parish disapprove. I mean

Presenter6:22

Would that happen any more? Do you think do people really disapprove? Nothing nothing that happens to Anna in the Rector's Wife have I invented, except the character herself. I interviewed an enormous number of country priests' wives before I wrote the book. And all Anna's escapades are real life escapades. And so there are places, you're saying, across the nation, in whatever class, country, provincial, town, in which women in which I suppose feminism hasn't percolated through. Absolutely. And I I often read the beautifully written metropolitan press, particularly the stuff written by women, for women.

Presenter7:01

And I think, you know, these people haven't been out to look at provincial England and how little the benefits, you know, the equality of opportunity has has filtered down. Provincial life is still very provincial, despite communications. And there's still an enormous number of people live out there. Still women out there whose husbands might forbid them to go to work. Oh, certainly, certainly. No, I mean, I know of a rector's wife near us in the Cotswolds who is much frowned upon for being a physiotherapist of all things. But not just rector's wives. Oh, exactly, exactly. Who reads your books, to your knowledge, and who writes to you? Who reacts to them? Well, it's rather interesting because, again, you know, people think of me as a women's writer, but over a third of my letters now come from men. But what are they saying?

Joanna Trollope7:16

And then still.

Presenter7:47

They are the men are saying, It's such a relief to read fiction where we are allowed to have feelings too, because one of the aspects of feminism they found so disconcerting was the capturing of the high emotional ground.

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By women

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And of course women are so wonderfully unafraid to talk about their feelings that they were on the high ground before the men even realized there was any. But are they recognising themselves in these books? They are recognising people they know or their relations? Both, and that's what they want to talk about. They want to say, Have you just got a minute because I'd like to tell you about this or that.

Joanna Trollope8:11

They are recognizing

Joanna Trollope8:13

Yeah, but

Presenter8:19

That I identify totally with that character who feels repressed or confined or whatever it is. Yes, or unable to speak a lot of them. You know, men I did have a hero once who who said to

Joanna Trollope8:21

Yeah.

Joanna Trollope8:24

Yeah.

Presenter8:31

His mistress at one point, you know, stop talking about feelings. I'm going to talk about feelings, and you're going to listen. I'm going to turn the tables.

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Record number two.

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Now this is the opening of Vivaldi's concerto in D.

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And this is really in honour of Venice. I was taken to Venice very, very late in life, in my mid-forties, and also shown the world of the Italian old masters, and it was an absolute revelation. And we played this on a tiny tape recorder in our hotel bedroom. This is you and your second husband? It is. Ian Curtis. It is.

Presenter10:09

The opening of Vivaldi's Concerto in D, played by E. Muzzici. It was apparently Joanna your husband, Ian Curtis, who's a a writer himself, who encouraged you to write contemporary fiction instead of historical romance. Now, why and how did he do that?

Presenter10:24

Well, he he was really very patient about it. I was continuing to write my historical fiction and these rather worthy novels were appearing, you know, to resounding silence and no response. But beautifully researched. Yes, but there's a sort of swatty element to that that I don't in retrospect that much admire. Anyhow, I said to him one day, you know, I feel I'm absolutely up a cul-de-sac and can't think, can't turn round, and can't think where to go next. I know I want to write still.

Presenter10:54

And he said to me, Well, I've been longing for you to say this, because what I wanted to say in return was, I think it's time you came out of the historical cupboard and went to the supermarket. It's time you wrote about contemporary life. And I immediately said, I can't possibly do that. What'll I do without the crutch of all that research to lurk behind?

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And he sighed patiently and said, Well, you choose a subject you know very little about, and you research that in modern life. But you didn't. I mean, you chose you chose a rectory, you chose cathedral close to the music. I did. I knew about church social life from my childhood, but I didn't know about the politics of the close, and riveting they are, and I didn't know anything at all, really, about sacred choral music, or or how the music fits into a cathedral.

Joanna Trollope11:23

I did.

Presenter11:37

So there was quite a lot of work to be done. But had you always written, I mean, as a child? Yes, always. What sort of thing did you write? What was the only stuff you wrote? Always narratives. I I still will send myself to sleep by telling myself a story. I can't resist a story, ever.

Joanna Trollope11:42

What sort of

Joanna Trollope11:44

What was the early story?

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And you still have those very early ones, you must have. Under lock and key, lest the children find them. Are they too awful to be read? Yes, much too awful. The first one, you see, was written when I was

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Fourteen. All about people of my own age, who of course ruled the world, as you may remember fourteen-year-olds do when you're fourteen. Was the fact that you were distantly related to a distinguished novelist, Anthony Trollope, any influence at all? Did you sort of feel perhaps you ought to write because you bore the name Trollope? No, no,'cause I didn't really read him, I'm ashamed to say, till I was in my early twenties, which was then an instant addiction. But the addiction earlier was words. I mean, I have this feeling that we all of us have a kind of personal filter through which we see the world. You know, it could be music, it could be the visual arts, it could be sport, it could be numbers. It doesn't really matter what it is, but for those of us for whom it's words, the words are of consummate importance. I mean, I

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I read the caption at the bottom of a cartoon before I look at the picture.

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But he, of course, Anthony Trollope, wrote about the church and church community and impoverished rectors. I mean, one thinks of the rector of Puddingdale when one thinks of your rector and Oh, certainly, with his fourteen children. So that there was no no influence there at all, do you think? Or because you used to use a another name, Caroline Harvey, you came back around to Trollope.

Presenter13:12

No, I I'd always written my early novels were always written as Joanna Trollope because it was what I was born. I mean, there was no other reason than that.

Presenter13:20

And also, I suppose, with the church connection, there was a there was a little collision in my head of ideas, but n no no more than a fleeting one. So where did Caroline Harvey come into it? Well, she came into it a bit later on. Um she is an amalgam of my Trollope grandparents' Christian names.

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And she was invented partly because I'm an enormous admirer of romantic fiction, which gets such a rotten press. But I think it's a wonderful

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sort of torch for the splendid emotional ambitiousness of most women. You know, how they think that every relationship in their lives might well be better, and that, you know, their right to strive.

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And I also needed the money to help make a barrister out of our eldest daughter, who'd already got one extremely respectable degree and then wanted to read for the bar. So the first Jana Trollops had met this resounding silence, so you invented Caroline Harvey, who might have been a very good person. And she she's lighter. She is very much more in the romantic genre where you don't tease the characters, you know, you don't have irony.

Joanna Trollope14:17

And she she's light.

Presenter14:24

And you needn't have quite so much realism. You're in a more operatic mode altogether.

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Record number three.

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This is a post war memory.

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Those years after the war which should have been so full of relief, and I just remember them being dark and cold and unhappy and going on forever. And my mother played this over and over again, and it's Jean Sablon singing Jetire ma reverence.

Speaker 414:49

Ja vais sa pré févance, j'aites sens sal bonné.

Joanna Trollope14:53

Tell me.

Speaker 414:55

And apparently.

Speaker 414:58

Ila sor sentre.

Speaker 415:00

An otra prima plaza?

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Too fast, too fast, too last

Speaker 415:07

The grandma aux bourquis, no literally, au jour pour moi.

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Jean Sablon and Jutier Marie Varence.

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What did your father do for a living, Joanna?

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Well, he started life as a classicist and after university went into the railways, which are an abiding passion. I mean, they still are, and he's eighty.

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And then he went out to India as a as a sapper during the war, and he didn't come home till I was nearly three in nineteen forty six.

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And then he worked for a bit for the National Coal Board, and then he ran a very characterful little building society in the city on the principle that you lent money to ho on houses you liked and to people you liked.

Presenter15:49

Would he were there still What a nice robe going on But your mother didn't work.

Presenter15:53

No, she didn't work. She didn't work. Is there a source, I wonder, of a theme there? I mean, would your mother have liked to have worked? Yes. Something that crops up in your books. Very much so. I think.

Joanna Trollope15:55

Well is the

Joanna Trollope15:59

Yeah.

Presenter16:04

She in common with a lot of

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Fiercely talented women of her generation would love to have worked.

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And she was also of the kind of upbringing where the boys certainly went away to school, and the girls didn't always, and she shared a governess with a grand little girl in Gloucestershire.

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And although she's she's an extremely talented pa painter, and like lots of self educated people, much better read than most of us who have been through a formal education, she's been left with this sort of hunger.

Speaker 316:35

Yeah.

Presenter16:35

But you personally were surprised apparently to get to Oxford. Amazed. So was everybody round me. I mean the school had a day off. Everyone was so amazed. I think so they could all go and lie down in a darkened room. But you loved it. I loved Oxford. It was it was taking off. It was the first time I'd been very soundly educated before, but on that principle of education where you're told things. And this was the first time anybody'd asked me anything.

Presenter17:00

And you were married straight out of university. You spent a couple of years in the Foreign Office and then into teaching and then the children came along. All very conventional stuff. Now, did you too hanker to branch out? Yes. What did you want to do? Did you always know you wanted to do it? I wasn't at all sure, but I felt in a kind of life way rather than in a career way that I hadn't found my voice. I just felt there was something there waiting to happen. But you did write? I I wrote.

Joanna Trollope17:14

Yeah, you've gone.

Joanna Trollope17:15

You always know you weren't.

Presenter17:28

A novel while I was pregnant with my first daughter, who is now twenty five.

Presenter17:34

And I read ferociously all the time, and I kept a kind of it wasn't a daily journal, but I kept a book that was a sort of scrap book of things I'd observed and noticed. I suppose it was all a kind of training. And you wrote I read in long hand on a wobbly table? Yes. I still write in long hand, but the table's improved. Let's have record number four.

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Now this was I was never in the musical forefront among my contemporaries. I was always the one on Three Fashions Ago, but this was the only time I was out ahead of the pack. I went to America when I was nineteen.

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and heard Joan Baez in concert, and was absolutely bowled over. And it was before she really became rather political, and this was in the days when she was singing these beautiful pure ballads. And this is Plaisier d'Amour.

Speaker 418:31

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 418:37

Chagram.

Speaker 418:41

Do I do that?

Presenter18:52

Joan Byers singing Plaisière d'Amour

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You said, Joanna, that the most unconventional thing you ever did was to get a divorce, was to be divorced. Is that true? I mean, was it a shock when it happened to you? Yes. I I mean, I think it's right it should be a shock. It's you know, as everybody listening who has been divorced will confirm it

Presenter19:12

It throws your world completely, and it's a long time before you find equilibrium again. But if you're going to do anything as serious as that, it should have shock waves as great as that. It is like a death, isn't it? It is a death. It is a death. And all relationships, even if they were never very good or they've gone wrong, have something in them that has to be grieved for. And, you know, grief is an unpredictable thing. But again, it's something that comes through in your novels. Obviously, what's happened to you informs your writing. You understand that misery that surrounds it. But your characters often have, it seems to me, a struggle between disillusionment with their marriage or the situation in which they find themselves and a sense of responsibility towards it. And that's the dilemma that you write about. Was that what you felt? Very much so. Very much so. I mean, it is an incredibly serious decision.

Presenter20:04

And so no wonder it has the effect it does.

Presenter20:08

And I d I do write about it

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about that sort of dilemma, because I think it preoccupies everybody, you know, nobody's free of it. And I write about it in very ordinary circumstances, because

Presenter20:22

I think that for each one of us our own life, however humdrum it looks from the outside, is of high drama and consequence to ourselves. It has to be. You wouldn't go on living it if it wasn't. But there are some romantic events in your books. Um I mean it's not just divorce and misery and breaking out and so on. Um but and again, is it real life, your life, informing your writing? Because your meeting with your second husband was quite a romantic business, wasn't it? It was very romantic. It certainly was. I mean it was falling in love. No no holds barred.

Presenter20:53

I don't write about burgeoning and eternal happiness because it makes for very boring fiction. I mean, we you know, we only turn the pages of a novel because we really want to see a dilemma solved. Because we're worried about somebody and we want to know what happens to them. Precisely, precisely. But I I mean, a lot of what I write about must be, must come from my own life, whether I want it to or not. I mean, that's what happens to

Joanna Trollope21:07

Present.

Speaker 421:07

Uh

Joanna Trollope21:07

Dice

Presenter21:17

Creative people.

Presenter21:19

But an awful lot of it now is observation.

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But you don't go in for lengthy descriptions of sex, either, do you? I mean, you you you do go beyond the bedroom door, but you stop very shortly afterwards.

Presenter21:29

I'm more interested in writing about sexual psychology than about sex, and I have personally yet to read a sex scene that I found in the least stirring. I also think it's slightly patronising to the reader. I always feel the reader has their own sexual fantasy. And if I lay out the ground work, if I lay out

Presenter21:47

the sexual psychology, and they know the characters. They can take them into the bedroom and do with them what pleases them to do. But isn't it a challenge if you say you've yet to read a a description of a sex scene that's stirring? I mean couldn't you write it?

Presenter22:02

I might one day. I might might wait till I'm eighty. It seems to be rather successful, you know. It's not that you don't think you should. I certainly wouldn't do anything'cause I thought I should. I'll only do it if I instinctively feel it's the right thing to do in a book. You've become so unconventional.

Joanna Trollope22:13

Do you

Presenter22:17

Jolly late in the day, and only in a minor, minor way. Next record.

Presenter22:22

Now I've I've had my pop passions over the years. I mean the children would tell you exhaustedly about the summer of Norwegian wood or the winter of something else but one great has endured through them all, which is Elvis Presley. And I have a double tape of his on cassette in the kitchen, and occasionally

Presenter22:40

The dogs and a saucepan and I have a little bop to Elvis on our own in the kitchen.

Speaker 422:46

Oh and then as a fool sucked her hand over you You caught me to love her You say like we are

Speaker 423:01

I'm a fool.

Speaker 423:03

But I'll have you give on to

Speaker 423:07

They are done now and then

Speaker 423:10

The dot com

Speaker 423:12

So what did I do for

Presenter23:17

Elvis Presley and a fool such as I. You write in long hand, Joanna. Yes. Yes.

Speaker 423:22

Yes, d

Joanna Trollope23:22

It's a

Presenter23:23

A set number of words a day.

Presenter23:26

No, I mean I have goals which I sometimes reach and sometimes don't. But if the engine's running well I can write a thousand words an hour in my large time. Yes, yes. And you go back over it? The next day. It's the way to get the engine started from cold again, is to go back over what you wrote the day before and tinker with it. Do you feel guilty if you don't fulfil your objective? I feel grumpy.

Speaker 323:33

And you can

Joanna Trollope23:34

And

Presenter23:50

And restless. And your husband is a playwright. Is he good at helping you with the plots? I mean, does do you discuss it?

Joanna Trollope23:53

Is he good at

Presenter23:58

Yes, it's it's more the psychology. I mean, uh sometimes I have got stuck and said

Presenter24:04

As I did when writing a village affair, I had to say to him, you know, if you found I was in bed with another woman, could you please, without any holds barred, describe your reaction to me? And he is um a Celt and has no trouble in describing this sort of thing, so he did, most most eloquently. And that sort of thing was very useful. That was very successful, wasn't it? It was a lesbian affair. Yes, in the village affair. And and that's had quite an effect on people, hasn't it? I presume that the uh the lobby has written in to you. Yes, it it writes very, very nicely, ve very um sympathetically on the whole. Because you put lesbianism into the mainstream. Yes, which is where I think it belongs. I mean, I'm always rather sad that that gay fiction is in such a sort of literary ghetto.

Presenter24:49

I'd like it out. What about the the the male homosexual lobby? Didn't you?

Joanna Trollope24:55

Well I've not

Presenter24:59

such a book for them, as it were. And I shrink from that a little. There's a kind of um

Presenter25:05

Predatory.

Presenter25:07

instinct in men, and if you multiply it by two men together, it gives relationships a different quality which I can't

Presenter25:15

quite get my entire sympathy round. I can get it round intellectually, but not with my heart. And I I may get to feel more sympathetic as I get older. So you've got to feel it to write it.

Joanna Trollope25:25

See guys.

Joanna Trollope25:27

I beg.

Presenter25:29

Utterly benevolent and understanding to write something well. And I'd love to be able to do this.

Presenter25:36

A lot of the women in your books do break out, as we we've mentioned.

Presenter25:41

Or perhaps when you write about them, one senses that you like them when they've become a bit more unpredictable, a bit bohemian, a bit more relaxed, a bit untidy. Is that what you'd like to be? Yes. I would like to have an untidy car. I would like not to fuss about unloading the dishwasher. I despise this in myself, but there it is.

Speaker 425:48

A bit more relaxed.

Presenter26:02

And you do have an auger.

Presenter26:03

I do. I love it dearly.

Presenter26:06

We inherited it, and it's you know, so much rubbish is talked about ought to

Presenter26:12

And are you on the church flower arranging rota? No, I'm no good at arranging flowers, but I do clean the church. You're on the church scrubbing rota? Yes, yes. I'm quite good at that. You should see my brasses. So there's a lot of you in the books.

Presenter26:25

In in in sort of moments there is. But that you have to realize that I'm sending myself up in quite a lot of these aspects.

Presenter26:35

Let's have some more music.

Presenter26:37

Number six, I think we are.

Presenter26:39

We are. We're on to Ella Fitzgerald, who, in my view, can do no wrong.

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And I've chosen this song because I have lived in the country.

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Really, all my life I've never lived in a city.

Presenter26:51

And I started playing this record quite early on in my life.

Presenter26:55

It's Manhattan.

Presenter26:56

Because it seemed to epitomise for me the absolute glamour of city life, and I have to say it still does.

Speaker 327:04

And tell me what street compares with Mutt Street in July. Sweet push carts gently glide ding by The great big city's a wondrous toy Just made for a girl and boy We'll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy

Presenter27:36

Ella Fitzgerald and Manhattan. You've been a successful novelist for

Presenter27:41

I was going to say seven years, because that's how you keep thirty two.

Joanna Trollope27:42

Is that turning?

Presenter27:45

We date life before and after the rector's wife, rather, you see. That was the watershed. And she hit number one. She did. Topple Geoffrey Archer.

Speaker 327:49

And that was the watershed.

Presenter27:54

Yes, yes, she did. She did.

Presenter27:57

So it's taken you, what, twenty-one years? Yes, I wrote the first of this long.

Presenter28:04

Sequence of novels. When my younger daughter, who is now rising twenty-three, was two. I started then. So it's a long apprenticeship. Writing and now your success in writing must have changed your finances. I mean, may I ask? It's just that every time one reads an article about you, one reads some story that you don't own the house you live in and the lease is running out and one has this terrible fear that Johanna Trollope is going to be homeless. This disgusting picture of phony poverty, yes, I'm not surprised if it sticks in lots of people's gullets. The thing is, we are.

Joanna Trollope28:26

I

Speaker 428:26

Yeah.

Joanna Trollope28:26

But has

Presenter28:38

Coming towards the end of a lease on a perfectly lovely house we've had for a long time and there's no reason to move yet.

Presenter28:45

I once said this, you know, and now it gets disseminated from piece to piece. Do you think success your success is a transient business? Do you think that people will go away from you as quickly as they came? Or do you think you are a

Presenter28:58

Reasonably important part of the development of the novel at the end of the twentieth century.

Presenter29:03

I don't really think either of those things. I have uh quite a dollop of Scott in me, so I'm extremely realistic. And I think that

Presenter29:10

Most of us who are lucky enough to have this kind of success have our decade.

Presenter29:16

And this might be mine with any luck. It it might vanish, it might not, it might develop into something else. But I wouldn't reckon on being around at this level this time in even in ten years. I mean, it'll it'll be wonderful if it happens, but I certainly wouldn't count on it.

Presenter29:33

And do you worry about running out of ideas?

Presenter29:36

No, I don't.

Presenter29:38

Now those happen all the time, you see, because of human life surging and swelling round me.

Presenter29:42

Record number seven.

Presenter29:44

Now this is Scotland, really. My grandmother and my mother were both born in Glasgow, which is a city I absolutely adore. And in addition to my passion for Glasgow I made a wonderful friend who in fact types all my books about twenty years ago, who introduced us to

Presenter30:01

the joys of a wonderful Loch in Argyle. She also sings, and when you wake up in the morning on the shores of Loch Fein and you hear this coming out of the kitchen, you know that all is well downstairs as she clashes the saucepans.

Speaker 430:16

Bunny boat like a bud on the wing One of the sailors crew

Speaker 430:27

Harry the Lad was born to be king over the sea to sky

Speaker 430:38

Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar, Thunderclaps rend the air.

Speaker 430:49

Baffled of hosts, stand by the shore, Toly will of day.

Speaker 431:00

Each body both like a bird on the wing on the sailors

Presenter31:09

Kenneth McKellar and the Sky Boat Song. You're an unashamed home bird, Joanna, a nest builder, so you'll be fine on this island, won't you? I think so. I I think so. I'm I'm worried about having sort of nobody to look after, but I expect I could find a turtle or a lizard quite quickly and adopt it.

Joanna Trollope31:15

Yeah.

Presenter31:26

What do you think the first thing you'll do when you get there would be?

Presenter31:30

Oh, find somewhere to sleep, you know, make a nest. And and just create a whole life around you. And would you be able to write with nobody around you, no people to observe, nobody to report to, nobody to say, Hey, I've done my thousand words.

Presenter31:45

It would be harder, but I mean there's sort of half a century under my belt now, so I think it would last for a bit. H'm. And you're used to being solitary. You were quite a solitary child. Yes, I was. And I didn't really seem to cultivate much of an aptitude for friends. I longed for them, but I wasn't very good at them until I was at university.

Presenter32:03

And I think that in the long term has been quite productive for me as a writer. But I am good at being on my own, yes. But it made you quite observant, you mean? Very. And being short-sighted makes you observant too,'cause you have to stare at things so hard to see if they're really what you think they are. So you'll see this island business through, will you? You won't sort of fade away or splash out and try to escape. Oh, no, no. I I I loathe boats and sea and stuff. I'd stay there till I was rescued.

Joanna Trollope32:23

Oh, no, no.

Presenter32:28

What's your last record?

Presenter32:30

Now the last one is a most marvellous bit of Mozart I first heard as the theme music for Alan Plato's Wonderful A Very British Coup.

Presenter32:42

Out of Mozart's Great Mass in C minor.

Presenter32:45

And this record seems to symbolize for me this amazing thing that's happened to me in the middle of my life. This sudden.

Presenter32:53

flowering into

Presenter32:55

a career and a and a communication and a

Presenter32:59

a satisfaction that I never dreamt of having.

Presenter34:02

The Laudamus Te from Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, sung by Diana Montagu, with the English Baroque soloists conducted by John Elliott Gardner. If you could only take one of those eight records, Joanna, which is. The Mozart, the last one.

Joanna Trollope34:14

Which amaze?

Presenter34:16

And what about your book?

Presenter34:18

The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Helen Gardner, who I heard lecture when I was at university.'Cause you see I can read poems to my lizards, can't I? And I can learn a bit of poetry every day.

Presenter34:30

And it's a whole cantor through English literature. I mean, what more could one ask for? And what about your luxury?

Presenter34:36

Oh

Presenter34:37

This is without question a perfectly wonderful bed, and if I am allowed it as well, an unlimited supply of white Egyptian cotton sheets. Am I allowed both?

Presenter34:49

Yeah, oh, you've got to have some sheets on the back. I think so. Why not Egyptian cotton, I think? How often will you wash and iron them?

Joanna Trollope34:50

I think so.

Joanna Trollope34:52

Thank you.

Presenter34:54

Oh, no, just an unlimited supply, so they could perhaps be stored in a cave until the navy, dressed in white ducks, rescue me. Joanna Trollope, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Joanna Trollope35:13

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