Susan Hill

Speaker 20:00

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

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is a writer. An only child, absorbed into an adult world, she published her first novel when she was nineteen. The critics thought it surprisingly mature, but after an unsuccessful second novel, its author fell more or less silent for five years. But then the books came thick and fast. Between 1968 and'74, she produced many of her best-known works, including I'm the King of the Castle, Strange Meeting, and The Bird of Night, collecting three prestigious awards as she did so and becoming one of the country's best-known novelists. More recently, she published Mrs. DeWinter, an acclaimed sequel to Daphne Dumurrier's Rebecca. Many of her books contain echoes of her childhood. Loneliness and isolation are two of her strongest themes. I've always been incredibly secretive as a writer, she says. If it's seen by anyone else, it's gone and I'm not interested. She is Susan Hill.

Presenter1:20

Why is your writing such a secret process, Susan? I mean, you know you've got to go public in the end. Why don't you share it along the way?

Presenter1:27

I don't know, some writers do.

Presenter1:29

I prefer the word private to secret. Secret implies something guilty. I just cannot bear anyone to know anything at all about what's going on between me and the paper. While it's happening, it kills it. But you have to have great self-confidence to do that, don't you? I mean, other people would want to be reassured along the way by somebody whose judgment they trusted that that, you know, you were writing something interesting worth reading. Yes, they do. I know. And I think it's just just different. I don't. I have to have rock-solid confidence, which I always have during the writing. Absolutely. And the minute it's finished and I read it, it evaporates totally down a black hole. And I lose confidence in it entirely. I feel that it's the worst thing ever written.

Presenter2:14

I wonder though if you're so private as as you call it about that writing because that's what you did as a child when you wrote because your your parents, your mother in particular, didn't appreciate what you were doing. So you were kind of closed in and private about it then, almost writing metaphorically under the bedclothes, weren't you?

Presenter2:29

Yes, I think one bi got used to being like that. I think only children spend a lot of time inside themselves anyway, and small children do have a very private world going on. And I did, and I suppose writing fiction is only an extension of that. What you also say, refreshingly, is that you you couldn't bear to teach creative writing, that you'd rather take your clothes off in front of a class than than teach them how to write. I mean again that's part of the same thing, isn't it?

Presenter2:56

I couldn't teach it because I couldn't share. I could never have gone to any writing class where I had to read things out to other people. I I really would curl up and die in a corner.

Susan Hill3:04

Yeah.

Presenter3:08

Don't tell me that you don't get a thrill then, even if you do think it's the worst thing you've ever written. Seeing it, feeling it between two hard covers, seeing it propped up in the bookshop. Oh, is it always a thrill? Doesn't never, never fails. You see your book in a bookshop on a shelf, and you see somebody reading it. The biggest thrill of all, actually, is meeting a reader who comes up with a rather battered copy of a book, which you know has been loved and read, and says rather shyly, Would you sign it? Because I've loved this for so many years. That's what it's about.

Presenter3:36

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter3:38

This record is Mozart. It has to stand for all of Mozart.

Presenter3:42

Probably the greatest composer ever, I beg a question. It's just the trio from Cosy Fantote when the young men are going off to do war.

Susan Hill3:59

Oh praise.

Susan Hill4:02

A sea.

Presenter4:50

Suave si el vento from Mozart's Cosi fantute, sung by Montserrat Caballe, Janet Baker, and Richard Van Allen, with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. Susan Hill, you wrote the sequel to Rebecca, Mrs. DeWinter, of a few years ago.

Presenter5:05

A challenging project I would have thought to be. I mean, you could be quite audacious to agree to do it, haven't you? I did it because Rebecca has always been a favourite book of mine. Because I think it's a much better novel than a lot of people made it out to be. People tend to dismiss it as a romance that they read when they're fifteen.

Presenter5:21

I love a challenge. I'd always wondered what happened to those people afterwards. It was magical. I could decide where they'd gone and what happened to them.

Presenter5:31

When you say magical, it it just flowed, did it? You say you wrote it very quickly. It it was an easy exercise in the end, was it? Um, easy, perhaps not, but it certainly flowed. All the best things do. I'm just asking you really about things mystic. Did you feel Daphne Dumurier around you as you wrote?

Speaker 15:46

Yeah.

Presenter5:47

No, I don't think I did that. Um again because you're mistress of the ghost story, so you you you you there's there's part of that in you, isn't there?

Speaker 15:51

Yeah.

Presenter5:54

I wrote it very quickly. I read Rebecca again and then put it away and wrote my own book. But her cadences were certainly in my ear. I think I'm always a haunted writer in the sense that I do hear everything I'm writing.

Presenter6:08

In my ear as if it were being dictated before I write it down. Now, by that I don't mean anything spooky at all. There is a sort of dictating machine that comes out, and when it's going really well, I I can't catch up with it. This voice is is saying. I suppose this is what some people have meant by automatic writing in that rather wicked way that they try to um convince people that it's by some discarnate spirit. I don't do that at all. But do you believe in ghosts?

Presenter6:31

I do feel that places have a presence in them which can often be unpleasant, as well as recorded. I think sometimes.

Speaker 16:38

I think so.

Presenter6:39

A lot of the stories are fanciful, but I do actually feel that there are some instances where people have seen what we call ghosts.

Presenter6:46

but which you can't explain by any

Presenter6:48

Other means? I suppose there must be. Yeah, a lot of it is just fun, though, isn't it?

Presenter6:53

It was said you were paid a million pounds for writing, misses DeWinter, which would be another good reason for not refusing to do it. Can you confirm that? Oh, it's complete nonsense. I occasionally read reports in the newspaper about my bank balance, and they seem to know rather more about my bank account than I do myself.

Presenter7:07

I have not earned a million pounds from misses DeWinter. I never did. I've never been a millionaire, or anything approaching it.

Presenter7:13

Because my salary, if I were, let us say, a civil servant, would be a matter of public record, I see no reason whatsoever to not make things a matter of public record. I had one bumper year of earnings, I suppose about 193 to 4 tax year, when after 40% tax, after everybody's share of what I was earning from various sources, I mean agents and whatever, after paying 50%, remember, to the Daphne de Maurier estate.

Presenter7:39

As with the earnings from the woman in black, I share fifty fifty with the person who made the play out of it. In that one glorious year, after all these deductions, I earned approaching four hundred thousand pounds, which is a very great deal of money.

Presenter7:52

And I'm not complaining, I've never earned anything remotely like that before or since. Record number two.

Presenter7:58

Record number two is to remind me of my mother.

Presenter8:02

When I was a child I spent a lot of time alone with my mother and my mother was a great goer to the theatre in Scarborough and to the cinema and we regularly went to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and I inherited from my mother an absolute passion for Fred Estaire who's a genius. And this is Fred Estaire singing and dancing.

Presenter8:22

Pick yourself up. It's partly because I imagined myself as a child dancing across those wonderful futurist cinema marble floors as we came out of the cinema and my mother secretly doing the same.

Presenter8:33

And because I love the sentiments, I mean, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again, it can't be a bad motto.

Speaker 18:40

When I remember the famous men who had to fall to rise again, I take a deep breath.

Speaker 18:46

Yeah.

Speaker 18:49

Dr. Salv Ball.

Speaker 18:51

And start all over again.

Presenter9:11

Frederister and Pick Yourself Up and Memories of Your Childhood, Susan Hill. You were not, you've said, the kind of child my mother had in mind. How did you fall short?

Presenter9:21

I think she wanted a very different daughter. She was a dressmaker of great talent, dress dress designer, very smart, neat, organized person. And she got this daughter who wasn't interested in clothes, who didn't want to be dressed up, who was bookish, solitary.

Presenter9:39

solemn, serious, rather balshy, strong minded. She didn't know how to relate to me, except, of course, as a as a mother. She didn't understand me, I didn't understand her.

Presenter9:51

We spent too much time locked together, which wasn't good for either of us. If I'd had siblings, it would have been easier. Yes, my father was not very well educated uh left school relatively early, but very intelligent and read a great deal a deep thinker, a serious man. I didn't see a lot of him.

Presenter10:12

Very dominated by my five-foot fiery little mother, and he was a six-foot gentle.

Presenter10:19

Completely hopeless man, really, of whom I was enormously fond. So she and you spent a lot of time without him, as it were, in this rather strange house in Scarborough, full of old and rather sad people, is my impression of it. Yes, Scarborough at that time was full of retired old ladies. Old ladies, of course, because often their sons and brothers had been killed in the First World War. This was in the Second World War. Um lots of old ladies eking out small amounts of income in circumstances where they tried to keep up appearances. Lots of old ladies with very old daughters locked together, and I observed them. Small children, young children.

Presenter10:55

especially ones like me, um, as I was.

Presenter10:58

Do see and think

Presenter11:00

a lot about adult life and how curious it is. So when you went out from that to school or out into the world a little further, what what kind of image must you have presented? What what must people have thought about you, the product of this rather strange background? I don't know. I think people thought of me as slightly apart because I was bookish and

Presenter11:21

Solitary and serious. And I think that stayed with me in that.

Presenter11:26

You see yourselves sometimes as others see you. I believed that I was.

Presenter11:30

And I've never lost this feeling of being just not quite at one with everybody else.

Presenter11:37

It's probably not surprising, therefore, that when you wrote your first novel, and you started writing it when you were really quite young, sort of early teens.

Susan Hill11:43

Hmm.

Presenter11:44

It's not surprising then that it was about

Presenter11:47

Some rather

Presenter11:48

sad, miserable people and the the the break up of a marriage. It was about adults. It certainly wasn't a children's story. Uh you obviously didn't have to use a lot of imagination. You felt you knew all about it, did you?

Presenter11:58

Yes, it was also what I thought that adult novels ought to be. People would want to publish a book about grown ups, not about children. And it was an extension of telling myself stories, having imaginary friends as a child. It just seemed natural to do it with a pen in my hand. Always have.

Presenter12:13

More music.

Presenter12:15

More music, yes, the oboe. I'm not really um musical in the sense of being able to play anything, but I did take up the oboe.

Presenter12:24

It's the instrument where if ever I hear it, my lip starts to twitch and I pick up the oboe in my hands.

Presenter12:30

This is uh the jolly part of Bellini's oboe concerto in E flat major. Um the downside of being a very serious, reflective person who likes

Presenter12:41

embraces solitude and silence.

Presenter12:44

It's easy to get melancholy.

Presenter12:45

and I could see me on the island tipping over into the serious melancholia.

Presenter12:50

So let's have the jolly bit of the Bellini.

Presenter13:46

part of Bellini's Oboe Concerto in E flat major, played by Nicholas Daniel and the Peterborough String Orchestra. You got a degree in English, Susan, from London University, and then took half a job as literary editor of the Coventry Evening Post, and another half job

Speaker 113:54

Yeah.

Susan Hill13:54

Uh

Speaker 113:54

Yeah.

Presenter14:00

in the library of the cathedral. And you didn't really write anything other than stories for women's realm for for years then, until you were in your late twenties. Why did you suddenly dry up like that?

Speaker 114:06

Until you renew it.

Presenter14:10

Oh, I d I think I had to try up, because I was earning a living, running a double books page of a provincial newspaper every week, reading and reviewing absolutely everything, from mountaineering and gardening to children's books and novels.

Presenter14:22

I hadn't got the creative energy and the time. But you were also in love, weren't you, with a man called David, who was the organist in the cathedral. Do you think the two things b being in love and and not writing are connected, that the one saps, as you put it, the creative energy required for the other?

Presenter14:38

I think there's something in that. I don't think, though, that there's quite as much in it as

Presenter14:42

Having children drawing on the same creative energies. But I was indeed completely absorbed in this love of this particular person, yeah. But you also had uh another silence, as you say, in in really during motherhood. A sixteen year silence later on when you when you married and had children. And uh you were writing during that time, but it was mainly uh short sprints, I think you've described it as non-fiction, really about the country or the kitchen or whatever and and articles and broadcasting and so on, but no marathons, no novels for sixteen years.

Speaker 115:00

It is good.

Speaker 115:04

The end.

Presenter15:09

Again, it is just this being used up emotionally. Do you think it's a particularly female condition that?

Presenter15:15

I think it is. Just inevitably, biologically, you are uh the person who is by nature required to devote all your energies to bearing and having your children.

Presenter15:27

Writing serious fiction for me comes out of the same well.

Presenter15:30

As the emotions I put into having my children, and you I couldn't do both together.

Presenter15:38

He died.

Presenter15:39

David died very suddenly.

Presenter15:43

completely unexpectedly.

Presenter15:45

Yeah.

Presenter15:47

He went for a walk with a friend just before.

Presenter15:50

Easter.

Presenter15:51

Felt unwell.

Presenter15:53

Went into a small church in Gloucestershire, not far from where I now live.

Presenter15:58

He lay down on the bench and died, while his friend who was with him went off to try and get the car.

Presenter16:03

We'd had a very stormy and difficult eight years of relationship.

Presenter16:07

both very independent and fierce people.

Presenter16:09

Um, I think it was just about to come right.

Presenter16:13

It was

Presenter16:14

I think the blow in life.

Presenter16:16

and the shock in life.

Presenter16:18

which I

Presenter16:19

They've never got over, really. Nothing's ever

Presenter16:23

Been quite so.

Presenter16:25

Rending, as that was.

Presenter16:27

How old was he?

Presenter16:30

No age.

Presenter16:32

Record number four.

Presenter16:35

Record number four really links me very much to that time with David and the time I spent at Coffin Cathedral.

Presenter16:41

I was down in the library, which is in the Undercroft, or was, one afternoon.

Presenter16:46

And upstairs I knew there was a big rehearsal going on for a huge concert uh that was taking place, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with John Barbara Ollie.

Presenter16:54

and a young cellist I didn't know much about called Jacqueline Dupre.

Presenter16:58

And David came downstairs and came into the library and said, If you want to hear greatness being born.

Presenter17:04

Creep upstairs.

Presenter17:07

Hide yourself under a chair at the back. He's rehearsing the algar.

Presenter17:10

With Dupre. Don't let him see you. He doesn't like visitors. Doesn't like people listening. I did as he told me.

Presenter17:17

and I sat in the dark looking at Jacqueline Dupre's golden hair streaming and flying like angels' hair.

Presenter17:26

Playing her cello like a demon.

Presenter17:30

hearing the orchestra who were only rehearsing

Presenter17:32

Make music that I think I've never heard the like of before or since.

Presenter17:36

And not only

Presenter17:38

Watching Barbarolli is an electrifying conductor.

Presenter17:42

But watching him watch her with such pride and tenderness as she played this Elgar Jellkachi.

Presenter18:50

Part of Elgar's cello concerto played by Jacqueline Dupre with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli.

Presenter18:57

You had a kind of golden period, Susan Hill, between the ages of about twenty six and thirty one. You produced about eight novels, including your bestseller, I'm the King of the Castle, and the novel Many Say is your best work, Strange Meeting, about two young officers in the First World War.

Presenter19:12

And you made your name, really.

Presenter19:14

Now Strange Meeting and several others were written in Alborough in Suffolk, which we connect very much with Benjamin Britton, and it was because of him that you went there, wasn't it? Can you explain that?

Presenter19:24

Yes, it was. I'd go back to school.

Presenter19:27

I was sitting in the music room at school.

Presenter19:30

One afternoon, and the music mistress said, Now you're all going to listen to this and then tell me what you think.

Presenter19:36

and I never, so far as I know, heard any Briton.

Presenter19:38

And she turned on the gramophone and out came the C interludes from Peter Grimes.

Presenter19:43

Britain's opera and I was

Presenter19:45

Absolutely.

Presenter19:47

bowled over and carried away by this music, I went out and found

Presenter19:51

every record of Britain that I could borrow, and played it, and I began to read about him and to hear about him.

Presenter19:57

In a way this was the key to opening the door to my own great

Presenter20:02

um burst of uh my best work. I can't explain how or why. He influenced me, he stimulated me, he inspired me.

Presenter20:13

And of course, I had to go to Walborough. I wasn't sure that this place really existed except in one of those marvellous landscapes of the imagination. So it was a kind of pilgrimage when you went there. Complete pilgrimage. And you met him?

Speaker 120:23

And you

Presenter20:25

Oh, yes.

Presenter20:26

I suppose the most exciting moment of my life. I mean, after all, you put him on such a pedestal. Can anybody have lived up to it?

Speaker 120:29

And it's easy to diswap.

Speaker 120:31

The

Presenter20:36

Oh, absolutely, yes, of course he did. I know that he was a very difficult man, and I think he could be very tricky.

Presenter20:41

I had nothing but admiration for him I still don't while recognizing the the other side. I think he was a genius thing I've ever met.

Presenter20:49

A genius, perhaps, perhaps one or two, but not like that. Oh, completely, yes. And I've never again I've never lost that. I only have to turn on Britain.

Presenter20:59

To want to write again, which is very strange, perhaps. So you would go to Alborough and rent a cottage eventually, did you, and just write and write? Yeah, I rented a house by the sea, always in the winter.

Speaker 121:01

Yeah.

Presenter21:08

When it was bleak and grey and the sea was stormy, it's how I still love it best. I love that coast. And I would sit in the window, with the window open sometimes, in mild days of February and March, hearing the sea.

Speaker 121:21

Yeah.

Presenter21:22

Hearing the music of Peter Grimes coming across the sea, sometimes seeing Ben walk across the beach with his little dog.

Presenter21:28

And it just flowed out of me in the same way, this this outpouring of my best work, and I I owe him everything.

Presenter21:35

Record number five. Well, yes. I decided I wouldn't have the formative bit from Peter Grimes. I can hear that in the sea all around me on this island.

Presenter21:44

I must have Peter Peirce's voice, which I do think is one of the greatest tenors ever, and is my favourite singing voice, male singing voice and the two had this perfect collaboration musically. And in the end I've chosen, perhaps surprisingly, one of Ben Britton's settings of a famous English folk song.

Presenter22:02

Tom Bowling, and this must just stand for

Presenter22:05

All Britain, all peers, and all that time.

Susan Hill22:08

Fear a sear heart.

Susan Hill22:11

I spool on board.

Susan Hill22:16

Dali or cool.

Susan Hill22:23

No more he'll hear the trembless howling.

Susan Hill22:30

For death hath brought him

Susan Hill22:38

His form was of the merlest beauty, his heart was kind and soft.

Susan Hill22:53

Faithful belong, Tom Disjoy.

Susan Hill23:01

And now he's gone.

Presenter23:08

PETER PEERS, accompanied by Benjamin Britton and Tom Bowling.

Presenter23:12

You married in the mid-seventies, in your early thirties. You produced your daughter, Jessica, when you were 35, and then you suffered a series of miscarriages. And you seem, and you've written about this in great detail, which is why I can say what I have to say, you seem to have become desperate to have a second child. You talk about begging, praying for a baby. It became a complete obsession, didn't it? I think it does. I think it takes you over, in a way. You have no con no control over it. And you can't see things in perspective. I couldn't have stopped, couldn't have given up. It's nature, I suppose, saying, come on, you're going to do this thing, and I'm going to make you. So you were eventually 42, having had Jessica, as I say, when you were 35. You were 42 when you became pregnant, but the pregnancy only continued 24 weeks and your waters broke and eventually Imogen was born, only to die tragically five weeks later.

Presenter24:05

Again, it's an experience you've written about in great detail. Can I ask you why?

Presenter24:10

Again, because we were talking earlier on about

Presenter24:13

things being so private, and this was so deeply private, so harrowing. Wh why did you want to write about it and make it public?

Presenter24:21

I think the writing of the book was for me. It was cathartic. There's no doubt about that.

Presenter24:27

Having done it, I know absolutely certainly

Presenter24:31

that the book was for other people. Simply my file of letters proves that to me. The letters came from women who said not just this happened to me and twenty four pages later they had poured out their own story and said I feel better um the letters came from the women who said forty years ago I had a stillborn child or a premature baby who died.

Presenter24:53

I had forgotten about it, pushed it away. I knew that I had to read your book to help me deal with it. There's that kind of altruistic part of it, but there's also the selfish part of selfish in its strict sense of letting your grief out in the writing, as you say. And I mean, again, that was something you'd done about David, wasn't it? The death David's death. You'd written in the springtime of the year about David. That's very much through fiction, of course. Yes, but a a woman coming to terms with the grief of the death of her husband in that case.

Speaker 125:15

That is very much.

Speaker 125:16

Yeah.

Speaker 125:20

Uh

Presenter25:22

And then there's an echo of that theme as well in The Woman in Black, isn't there? It's a piece of.

Speaker 125:25

Yeah.

Presenter25:26

Genre writing, but it's about grief for a child which hasn't been released. Is that what you're saying to people? Let it out?

Speaker 125:29

Yeah.

Presenter25:33

Yes, when people say, Are your novels autobiographical?

Presenter25:37

No, of course they're not. I don't write directly about my own life and what happened, or take people out of real life and put them in books. But emotions are emotions, and until you've experienced them you can't transmute them into fiction. So of course all that, every emotion, felt by a character.

Presenter25:54

But the writing of of what happened over uh Imogen and the loss of Imogen was something that ultimately helped you come to terms with it all.

Presenter26:05

No, it helped me get it out of my system and put it down, and I think it helped a lot of other people when they read it.

Presenter26:12

You never come to terms with it. Um

Presenter26:15

You don't accept the death of your own small child, your baby.

Presenter26:20

Yeah.

Presenter26:22

You don't want it to have happened.

Presenter26:24

A long time afterwards

Presenter26:26

You you see this curious pattern in the carpet, and I think you always do see it, that it was a sort of landmark on the journey, but

Presenter26:34

Um

Presenter26:35

And you say things like

Presenter26:36

If I hadn't if she hadn't died, I wouldn't have had the next one, and how can life be without her? Um

Presenter26:42

But you can't say that was for the best.

Presenter26:45

No, you just try and make some sense out of the mess, really?

Presenter26:49

Record number six.

Presenter26:51

This is very special, talking of children.

Presenter26:54

Both my children were at Greycoats School in Oxford.

Presenter26:59

And I've chosen?

Presenter27:01

A favourite assembly hymn. It's called One More Step Along the World I Go. I've chosen it to remind me of those years. It encapsulates that time, and that place where

Presenter27:11

Parent star

Presenter27:13

Children, everyone were incredibly loving and supportive during all those years and during Imogen's birth and death. The whole school sort of put its arms round us really in a way. I I can never describe adequately.

Presenter27:28

It's been recorded specially for me to take on my Desert Island, sung for me, by the children of Botley Primary School, Oxford, whose head teacher and music teacher taught my own children when she was at Greycoat, so it's doubly special.

Susan Hill28:00

Okay, so

Susan Hill28:03

He's having a load.

Susan Hill28:33

The old lights travel to the new. He's having the long.

Presenter28:40

One More Step Along the World I Go, sung by the children of Botley Primary School, Oxford.

Presenter28:45

I'm the King of the Castle. Susan Hill is your bestseller, often a set text for school exams. It's about two eleven-year-olds thrown together in the school holidays by their parents, terrible hostility between them and ultimately the gentler character is driven in the face of the other's evil to suicide. There's an awful darkness in that novel. It's often compared to Lord of the Flies. Where does that come from in you, if all of these things begin somewhere in a novelist's experience?

Presenter29:12

I think as

Presenter29:14

We said when I was

Presenter29:16

A child I felt separate and apart, and occasionally was treated as such.

Presenter29:21

I'm not going to say that I was severely bullied, but there were nasty moments.

Presenter29:25

Probably every child has those nasty moments at the mercy of another child.

Presenter29:30

There is a darkness at the heart of things.

Presenter29:33

Um I believe that ultimately the light triumphs.

Presenter29:37

But there is evil in us all, I suppose the Christian view of fallen man and original sin and so on.

Presenter29:45

Uh it's interesting about that book, I'm the King of the Castle. It is set for GCSE regularly, all the time.

Presenter29:52

Eleven two fifteen year old sixteen year old boys.

Presenter29:56

All say, Yeah, that's true, it's like that.

Presenter30:00

The parents of

Presenter30:02

Young boys say, That's appalling, it isn't like that at all. How could you write that wicked evil book?

Presenter30:06

Um I think the young people know the truth, really. So and the young people write to you saying that they identify with Kingshaw, the suffering, the the the victim. Yeah, I've never had a single letter telling me that I identified with the Wheat Pooper, the bully, the evil one. But it's interesting that that that the novel prompts letters, that it touches people in that very personal way. Do you think that's part of the function of of your fiction, apart from to entertain, to to let people know that there are other people who feel like them?

Presenter30:33

I suppose it must be.

Presenter30:35

Um, at the time, of course, you don't think about anything other than

Presenter30:38

Writing about these people in this situation. Writing a good story. Yeah, and writing a good story, though the plot is the least of it. But you never think of the audience out there. That comes later. Then I suppose, yes, it is part of it. It has become part of it. Number seven.

Presenter30:55

Ah, all Britain. Um we had Peter Peirce's voice, which to me is the voice of of of of the century. I think the young man singing this Briton song, Ian Bostridge, is going to be the tenor of of the future, as as Peirce was of his generation.

Presenter31:13

It's Benjamin Britton's setting of a poem by W H Auden.

Presenter31:17

I didn't know much about poetry at all until I started to do A Level and we were given WH Auden.

Presenter31:24

To study. I never read any Orden, and it opened up this world of rather sinewy, knotty, modern poetry.

Presenter31:32

In in a way I appreciate it greatly. So to remind me of that, it's Britain's setting of Night Falls on the Rigid Land by WH Orden.

Presenter31:42

It encapsulates a whole lot of other things too.

Susan Hill31:48

Night covers up an aged land and ocean's quay

Susan Hill32:01

And shadows with the tortund and the ark

Susan Hill32:15

The wounded pride for which I weep

Susan Hill32:20

You cannot touch, nor control, The moments of your sleep.

Presenter32:41

Benjamin Britton's Night Covers Up the Rigid Land, sung by Ian Bostrich, accompanied by Graham Johnson.

Presenter32:47

You're now fifty four. You're married to a man who's been described in print as a saint and his unflinching support for you doing all all of it, who also happens to be an expert cook and and a Shakespeare scholar. How how can you bear to go to a desert island and leave him, I think is the question.

Speaker 132:59

A desert island and leave him, I think.

Presenter33:02

This has never got ever been called a saint. I think the trouble is leaving everything.

Presenter33:08

is is difficult, but I'm somebody who has

Presenter33:11

As I get older, silence and solitude

Presenter33:15

become ever more important.

Presenter33:17

And to have silence and solitude you have to do without the family, the friends, the companionship. But

Presenter33:24

Curiously, it just gets to matter more and more and more.

Presenter33:27

So you're looking forward to it?

Presenter33:30

Yes, I am. I am. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

Presenter33:33

Um and I will have to battle with the melancholia.

Presenter33:36

But I just feel that if I'm ever going to have another great

Presenter33:40

Flowering

Presenter33:42

Towards the end of my life goodness, I hope I live till I'm a hundred and two, but I think you know what I mean. I I will have to have it on my own in this desert island. Maybe then I can, in the sand, anyway, write another six books.

Presenter33:52

in a row, but they've got to be born out of what's happened to me.

Presenter33:56

Plus the silence and the solitude, I'm afraid.

Presenter33:58

For someone who professes to like all this silence and solitude, you're an incredibly warm, talkative, gregarious person. How do you how do you combine the two?

Presenter34:08

People always expect you to be like your books, I think. Somebody said to me not long ago, Oh, but you're quite cheerful. Um yes, one has a, of course, a the the public side, the social side. I hope I am.

Presenter34:19

sometimes at least, cheerful company. I'm not very cheerful company for myself, I think. But that's all right, I can deal with that.

Presenter34:27

But you're not your own books, except deep down.

Presenter34:30

Deep down you are.

Presenter34:32

I hope so.

Presenter34:34

Last record

Presenter34:36

Well, in the course of cheering myself

Presenter34:38

This is the Beatles. I thought that I might have chosen the Beatles in their philosophic mode.

Presenter34:44

But I decided the best of the Beatles in those early sixties was when they

Presenter34:50

jumped on to the stage vibrating with energy and youth and vigour and cheerfulness, with their shiny beetle haircuts flopping and those funny collarless suits banging on their instruments and their drums. And they they bounced us all into modern living, didn't they? It's it's Love Me Do.

Susan Hill35:08

Love, love we do

Susan Hill35:10

You know I love you.

Susan Hill35:14

I'll always be true.

Susan Hill35:17

Go

Susan Hill35:25

Uh

Susan Hill35:29

Love me too.

Presenter35:32

Beatles and Love Me Do. Now the difficult one. Which of those eight, if you could only take one?

Presenter35:37

It's impossible, but I cannot do without hearing Britton and Piers, so I'll take Tom Bowling, please. It's very English, too, and I suppose I am really, though not particularly flag waving, Luco.

Presenter35:48

What about your book?

Presenter35:49

I'm going to take a book which unfailingly makes me laugh.

Presenter35:54

He's been a good companion to me in

Presenter35:56

tight corners and at dark moments for thirty odd years.

Presenter36:00

It's Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love: The Great English.

Presenter36:04

Humorous novel, but there's more to it than just a good laugh. Wonderful.

Presenter36:09

And a luxury.

Presenter36:11

Ah.

Presenter36:12

I'd like to take the Barnes collection, please, um the great collection of Impressionist and Modern Paintings.

Presenter36:20

a small fraction of which were brought to Europe and which I saw at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris a couple of years ago.

Presenter36:27

Um but I want the whole Barnes collection from America, crated and shipped over. I think perhaps may I have one to arrive per day in a crate floated ashore by the time I got off the island if ever I do.

Presenter36:41

I will have seen at close quarters more great pictures than anybody except Mr Barnes.

Presenter36:48

Susan Hill, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Oh, it's been huge fun. Thank you.

Speaker 237:01

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