Redmond O'Hanlon

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.

Speaker 20:08

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

Speaker 20:14

Elements of this program may offend or upset some listeners.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is an explorer. He was brought up in blissful happiness in a Wiltshire vicarage, but at the age of fourteen discovered Charles Darwin and began to abandon his parents' religion. Indeed, Darwin and the spirit of nineteenth century scientific inquiry explains much of his approach to life. If it's remote and dangerous, he enjoys going there the Congo, Borneo or the Amazon jungle. He's nearly died of malaria and at the hands of hostile tribesmen.

Presenter1:03

His travelling companions never go back for a second expedition. They find the experience too frightening or too mad.

Presenter1:10

Serious in his pursuit of new discoveries, his sense of humour has never deserted him, and he's recounted his adventures in a series of highly entertaining books. I'm desperate, he says, to make up for all the time I've spent lying in bed. He is Redmond O'Hanlon.

Presenter1:26

That reason, though, Redmond, is not quite as flip as it sounds, is it? I mean, you do feel guilty about lying in bed, and you do become a different person when you get out there.

Redmond O'Hanlon1:34

Yes, absolutely.

Redmond O'Hanlon1:36

It's easy travelling in a way. All you have to do is decide you're not going to give up. That uh certainly you're not going to give up if anybody's looking. And if you walk eight hours a day trying to keep out the pigments, you become very fit. And

Redmond O'Hanlon1:49

in fact, very happy, no matter what's going on around you. The first time it happened to me, I woke up in the morning and thought, I'm really pleased to be alive And then then I thought, I must be getting a fever. But I think that's how fit people feel every morning.

Presenter2:02

Because they just feel better about themselves. That's the point, isn't it? You don't feel that at home in Oxford.

Redmond O'Hanlon2:05

That's the point.

Redmond O'Hanlon2:08

No, no, um

Redmond O'Hanlon2:10

Especially not at three o'clock on a grey afternoon. Depression's always waiting for one out there, I think.

Presenter2:17

But not in the jungle.

Redmond O'Hanlon2:18

Jungle. No, never, no. If I see a a harpy eagle, for instance, well that keeps on going for a month. But um it doesn't have to be a very rare bird. It could be happ happy for a week if you haven't seen it before in the tropics.

Presenter2:30

The birds, as you've indicated, are really I mean, ornithology is very important to you, isn't it?

Redmond O'Hanlon2:35

Well, it began very early, I really was. I was four years old. And a mistle thrush had been clearing out her nest, and she flew over me and dropped an eggshell in front of me, just on the Vicarage lawn by the sundial. And I thought, not knowing about the empty cosmos then, I naturally enough thought it was a message just for me. And this is the very first time this mistle thrush egg has ever been out of the fetish room, and here it is.

Presenter3:01

Your fetish room at home, and here it is appearing on radio.

Redmond O'Hanlon3:02

And here

Redmond O'Hanlon3:04

So that I kept that for forty six years.

Presenter3:08

And will it go to your desert island with you, or shall I ask you that later?

Redmond O'Hanlon3:11

Um well, I think no, one needs you can't have precious things with you.

Presenter3:15

Oh, not at all. You can secrete it as I can.

Presenter3:20

Bye, she.

Presenter3:22

Tell me about your first record.

Redmond O'Hanlon3:25

Well takes one in two.

Redmond O'Hanlon3:29

The stormiest part of my life, although it wouldn't have seemed to be from the outside, I was writing a manically committed thesis at Oxford. It was about Conrad and Darwin, about late 19th century ideas, scientific ideas, and how they'd affected literature. It was a very bad time to be alive if you were conversant with contemporary science, and almost everybody was. You thought of the sun as a ball of coal burning itself out, so the world was getting colder and colder and colder, and eventually all be covered in glaciers and everything would disappear. So that was the view of the universe running down before Einstein arrived. And then internally was almost as bad because Darwin's genetic theory, the last one that he had, was that pangenes went

Redmond O'Hanlon4:20

From the brain to the sex cells where they were stored. So, if you had a wicked thought, it went straight to the next generation. And not just that, but the world was parceled out into time zones which connected with your evolutionary position. That indeed it seems to be true that we all came from the centre of Africa. So, going back to Africa was a dangerous thing to do because you might be trapped. So, the subconscious, the brain would lock you in, and you wouldn't be able to return home and touch a reward with clean hands, as Conrad put it. And this I used to play over and over again, writing this thesis at night.

Presenter5:56

Part of Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyrie with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter6:02

So it was the nineteenth century idea that you'd be drawn back to Africa if you had this kind of inner weak spot. I wonder if yours is that really you want to recapture childhood, because it's you're quite childish when you're out there in in in the true sense of the word, aren't you?

Redmond O'Hanlon6:15

Yeah.

Redmond O'Hanlon6:18

Well, I think

Redmond O'Hanlon6:19

That's probably completely true, and that uh

Redmond O'Hanlon6:24

It's it's marvellous the way the world all feels fresh and new. You are returned to childhood. All your bodily sensations are different. You're certainly wet and rotting all day and uh

Presenter6:32

Yeah.

Redmond O'Hanlon6:34

Never quite know what's going on. You're in a childlike position. Some fear.

Presenter6:38

Some fear, of course.

Redmond O'Hanlon6:39

Oh yes, yes. Yes, and you have to trust the people with you.

Presenter6:40

Fear of the unknown.

Redmond O'Hanlon6:44

As if um they were in some parental role. Indeed they are. They look after you and you amuse them and they uh yes, they certainly do. In fact you're absolutely desperate for them to love you.

Presenter6:50

They laugh at you sometimes.

Presenter6:55

Hiya.

Redmond O'Hanlon6:55

Are you? Yeah, well, there was one um moment when I realized it might it might be too obvious that that that was how one felt. A wonderful old Indian called Chima in South America.

Redmond O'Hanlon7:07

And many months into this journey he well, we we run out of food and we're hungry. I'm afraid he shot a howler monkey. Anyway, when it he he gave me the mess tin with the soup in it, and the soup went down the

Redmond O'Hanlon7:20

Howler Monkey's skull came into view. He put it in the best inn. He said, No, no, don't don't look at it like that. It's a great honour in our country. Uh when we really like someone, we ask them to do this and then they can become one of us. You must suck out the monkey's eyes. So I picked up the skull and sucked and the the optic nerves gave way. The eyeballs down my throat. And then um yes, he he looked just like you're looking. He said, How could you do a thing like that? How disgusting. You white men will do anything to be loved. Horrival pick.

Presenter7:48

Yes, he he

Presenter7:52

Bye then.

Presenter7:59

You're also undoubtedly, um, in these inhospitable places, um, very preoccupied about nasty things that could happen to your penis.

Redmond O'Hanlon8:08

Oh, yes.

Presenter8:09

Um

Redmond O'Hanlon8:09

Well, that's where everything seems to want to get up your trouser leg.

Presenter8:12

Yes, and there are nasty fish that might swim up it.

Redmond O'Hanlon8:15

It's called the kanderu the toothpick fish.

Redmond O'Hanlon8:17

Say you've had too much to drink and you're with your friends and

Redmond O'Hanlon8:22

There's some good local beer, p polar beer it's called and you dive in and you've had too much drink, so you take a pee, and this little catfish locks on to a stream of urine and it swims very fast, straight up the urethra.

Presenter8:37

You made a um a contraption, didn't you, to protect yourself?

Redmond O'Hanlon8:39

Well, I thought that really was a work of genius. It was with a friend at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, this man's the inventor of the hemorrhoid gun, Donald Hopkins. We got a cricket box and on the front of it we put a tea strainer.

Redmond O'Hanlon8:56

And when I produced this, she fell around laughing and said, You don't wear those things in England, do you?

Presenter9:03

You were attacked by plenty of other nasties, weren't you? I mean, elephant ants with great tentacles that that climb up your arm and leeches in your boot. It is all part of being a boy again, isn't it?

Speaker 39:12

But you have

Presenter9:12

But you have no fear of it. I mean, what happened in these circumstances is your companions eventually got

Presenter9:18

Very upset, or very annoyed, or very depressed, or just couldn't take any more. But

Presenter9:23

It's just what you do, and you retain calm in the midst of all of this.

Redmond O'Hanlon9:27

Well, I think

Redmond O'Hanlon9:28

Two things, both perverted, that protect me. It's that growing up in a vicarage, you really.

Redmond O'Hanlon9:37

that kind of Protestantism anyway, uh and I can't get rid of this feeling that it can't really be real unless you're suffering. But the other the real answer perhaps um is simply that if you're going to write about it, everything's skewed.

Presenter9:52

Let's have some more music.

Redmond O'Hanlon9:53

This is the recording that Ludwig Koch, the the well, it was done by the BBC in nineteen thirty seven, and it's a recording of a mistle thrush. My grandmother gave them to me when I was six, but it was years before we actually could afford to get a machine to play it on, so I've handled it a lot but not played it much.

Presenter10:40

The Song of the Mistle Thrush that was recorded in 1937 by Ludwig Koch.

Presenter10:44

So you were born, Redmond, in a Wiltshire vicarage, where you caught minnows in the river at the bottom of the garden, and father's study was out of bounds.

Presenter10:53

Does that mean you made illicit visits to it?

Redmond O'Hanlon10:55

Oh I did, yes. Yes, it was wonderful and dark. Um and just behind the door on the right he kept his bird books, Bannerman's, Birds of Africa. And the most weirdest, most beautiful bird in the air was was in there flying across the moon. It's called the pennant winged night jar. And these pennants stretch way out behind it, its long plume.

Presenter11:15

So it was all idyllic and beautiful, but then suddenly at the age of seven

Presenter11:19

You were sent away to prep school. And that occurs a lot in your books. It's always as an analogy for being miserable, for being unhappy. You obviously hated it.

Redmond O'Hanlon11:29

Oh yes, the smell of polish and the bare floors and your little metal bed and your your rag at the end of it and suddenly forty boys in a room with you.

Presenter11:39

Awful homesickness.

Redmond O'Hanlon11:40

Oh, awful homesickness. I guess all little boys crying in the night. But I discovered.

Redmond O'Hanlon11:46

After a week or so, that if you actually jumped in the dark from one bed to another with a pillow, you could whop everybody on the head one after the other once you'd got the hang of how far apart they were. And then.

Redmond O'Hanlon11:57

This terrible night the the door the lights snapped on and and there was this man in tweeds, I mean, about eight feet tall he seemed to me. When you're singled out you know you're going to be beaten or something. But that's the same kind of um

Redmond O'Hanlon12:11

Horrible anticipation.

Redmond O'Hanlon12:13

That's when you think someone's going to burn the thatch in your hut.

Presenter12:16

You again, you seem to connect that period with your enjoyment of danger. You've talked about the rush of pleasure when you realize the danger is real and everyone around you is panicking.

Redmond O'Hanlon12:26

Um no, I'm not sure that I keep calm. With when people with you are the least bit frightened, I think you start to panic or think you might.

Presenter12:33

It doesn't read like that in your home

Redmond O'Hanlon12:34

Well, no, because you're hoping something's going to happen. There comes that awful moment when you think you might be able to prevent this happening, and you decide you you won't.

Presenter12:43

Because you just needed to roll on and to

Redmond O'Hanlon12:45

Yes, although actually you're fooling yourself. You think you can prevent anything happening when you're travelling in a place like the Cosmos.

Presenter12:51

So that's why you appear to be so passive, as it were, within it, just letting it happen around you.

Redmond O'Hanlon12:55

Letting it have

Redmond O'Hanlon12:57

But are you surprised?

Presenter12:58

But are you surprised when when your companion I mean, in the second book, Simon, your your companion, who was ill fitted, ill suited really, wasn't he, to to go on such a journey? I mean he just couldn't take it any more.

Redmond O'Hanlon13:09

Yeah.

Redmond O'Hanlon13:10

It was a joke, or meant to be, that um he'd he'd never been out in daylight in his working life.

Presenter13:17

'Cause he owned a nightclub or seamless.

Redmond O'Hanlon13:17

Double.

Redmond O'Hanlon13:22

But when he did come apart slightly that that was terrible. But then he had every reason to. I'd got I'd got the dry season and the wet season mixed up. The rivers rose forty feet. They rise forty feet. So we're camped on really very small little hilltops on the jungle floor. And all the animals from the jungle floor have gone up there to

Redmond O'Hanlon13:46

Escaped drowning and calculated that the little black scorpion under each eleventh leaf and the ventiquatra, the huge ants, really can knock you out, they're so poisonous. Tremendous bash. And they got him on the back of the neck and his neck was separating. He was he really was in in bad way.

Presenter14:06

So he went in and he quit.

Presenter14:09

Did it was it a long time before he spoke to you again?

Redmond O'Hanlon14:12

Um well, I'd forgotten. I was so pleased at the thought of going to see him when I did eventually get back see old Simon. But see, all day you hear this sound of the thing called the screaming pier, like a big thrush, as as you travel up river it goes.

Redmond O'Hanlon14:33

On and on. And then at night, if it's so.

Redmond O'Hanlon14:36

the particular season which this was, there's a bird like a very, very big pheasant, a turk bigger bigger than a turkey, uh called the nocturnal curacao. And the male calls

Redmond O'Hanlon14:50

All night long, so when I rang Simon up, he picked the phone up and said, Simon, yeah, I said, Mm, mm, mm, mm Down went the phone. But I see him every fortnight or so.

Presenter15:02

It's all right now.

Redmond O'Hanlon15:03

If he days and back fame I wouldn't have been able to finish the Congo book.

Presenter15:07

Tell me about record number three.

Redmond O'Hanlon15:11

Ah, well this this is to a little tribute to my pa and his job in the war. I think probably the most exciting time for him. He was the chaplain at Biggin Hill. He was there right through the Battle of Britain. And at the height of the battle the young pilots lasted three weeks was their life expectancy. And he'd sit out with them before

Presenter15:15

Huh.

Redmond O'Hanlon15:35

They were scrambled, waiting round these exhausted young men sitting in the deck chairs. And he had a a Spaniel, a young dog then, who would roll a tennis ball at each pilot, sort of perhaps relieve the tension. And they'd roll the ball back. And I remember the old dog doing it when I was little, um an old dog by then, and he would still be rolling the ball at the drawing-room wall. My pie says he's rolling the ball at the ghosts of all the dead pilots.

Speaker 216:10

For rights reasons, we are unable to bring you this choice.

Presenter16:13

Winston Churchill speaking to the nation on the eighteenth of june, nineteen forty.

Presenter16:18

So your parents, Redmond O'Hannon, were are.

Presenter16:22

Deeply committed Christians, but you've become, as I indicated in the introduction, a vigorous atheist.

Presenter16:29

You talk about people accepting a job lot of fairy tales in order to escape their fear of death and believing that even their favourite dogs are waiting for them fast asleep in heaven. Why do you feel so passionately against God?

Redmond O'Hanlon16:43

Um

Redmond O'Hanlon16:44

Again, I'm afraid it it probably just goes straight back to childhood. My part really did does believe that God put the eye spots on a butterfly's wing for our delight. But after Africa, I'm quite prepared to admit that it's in some ways a decadent view of things from Oxford to assume that people without access to the extraordinary expensive educational system could possibly get through their lives without some narrative structure.

Presenter17:14

And even those who have had that background succumbed to something, as did you, because you ended up, didn't you?

Redmond O'Hanlon17:21

Yes, this is the other uneasy part of the story why I'm facing away.

Presenter17:24

Yes, you went to a sorcerer or a witch doctor.

Redmond O'Hanlon17:27

Yeah.

Presenter17:27

And he gave you a fetish.

Redmond O'Hanlon17:30

Yes, he he gave me here it is.

Redmond O'Hanlon17:32

And he said then

Redmond O'Hanlon17:34

Exactly.

Presenter17:36

Looks like a little dead mouse.

Redmond O'Hanlon17:37

Yeah, a little dead mouse, and he said that um it had a child's finger in it, and that this child's finger would keep one's dreams fresh and one's thoughts from being sad, and that it was a fetish for one's protection only.

Presenter17:42

Yeah.

Presenter17:53

It would save you from death.

Redmond O'Hanlon17:57

Death sent by night by someone else who'd gone to a more expensive sorcerer, perhaps. Or maybe not if it had been more expensive.

Presenter18:04

But it's a load of hokeum, isn't it?

Redmond O'Hanlon18:05

Yes.

Presenter18:06

But you believe in it.

Redmond O'Hanlon18:07

But I think it plugs straight into the subconscious. No, I don't believe in this in any rational way.

Presenter18:11

But are you sure you don't? I mean, you take it everywhere with you.

Redmond O'Hanlon18:11

Are you sure you don't? I mean, you take it everywhere with you. Yes, again, it's on.

Redmond O'Hanlon18:18

on marshy ground here. It's actually it was just unfortunate that when I lost it in Rotterdam in a restaurant, my wife was with me. Uh and I said the fetish has gone and broke out in a sweat. So there was no way of pretending that it wasn't a serious matter.

Presenter18:29

Super ten

Presenter18:31

Record number four. Tell me about that.

Redmond O'Hanlon18:35

Oh, this is very special. This takes me to the heart of the Congo. People that I really fell in love with. And I'm thinking particularly the group we found way out in the jungle. Well, about two days' walk from the Earth river. And we stayed with them and went hunting with hunting nets. And it's a very, very efficient way of getting meat. So there's a lot of time for entertainment. And I think this is... this may well go back thirty, forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. It's it's not not silly to say something like that.

Speaker 319:16

Colour

Speaker 319:28

Um

Presenter19:42

The music of the Bacca Forest People of the South East Cameroon, recorded by Martin Craddock. I must ask you, Redmond, about uh two other seminal moments in your career. Well, they they sound as if they were seminal anyway. First of all, when you were sent down from Merton after your first r year reading English,'cause apparently you wrote some pornographic book, is that right?

Redmond O'Hanlon19:59

Uh yeah, that was certainly similar. No, it wa it wasn't um that pornographic. It was a description of a journey round Europe with a young friend on an enormous B S A seemed big then six fifty with a big side car on the side, but very difficult to control.

Presenter20:16

But

Presenter20:17

What was so bad about it that it got you sent down?

Redmond O'Hanlon20:20

Uh well there was just a little report in Charles in the student newspaper, saying Merton popporn and uh it had been passed around in TypeScript.

Redmond O'Hanlon20:28

And that that was enough to bring the college into disrepute.

Presenter20:31

But was it pornographic? Or w w were you into drugs? What was it that they didn't like about it?

Redmond O'Hanlon20:32

Was it poor?

Redmond O'Hanlon20:36

Oh well the great excitement of discovering hashish in Paris, yes. But I had a lovely letter from Tom Mashler at Cape about it, saying how much he lived loved the country, beginning and the birds and so on and uh that it he was sure it would come as a great surprise to me, but this was the fifty thousand boring book on on hashish that he'd had in his office and that it wasn't quite as exciting as I thought it was.

Presenter20:58

And then you you went to Hartford College, um but then you got well you kind of messed up there really.

Redmond O'Hanlon21:04

Oh, I did terribly badly, yes. Uh I'd think probably gross immorality would have been better. This was gross incompetence. I I hadn't opened a letter or it got lost that pointing out that the syllabus had moved right up to nineteen forty five. Never occurred to me Oxford would enter the twentieth century. I taught them the nineteenth century instead of the

Presenter21:25

English twentieth.

Redmond O'Hanlon21:25

Twenties, yes, it was English, right before their mods. So you could say, um, I ruined their lives. Um but then then I joined the TLS where it doesn't matter which century you're dealing with as long as you do it passionately.

Presenter21:39

Times literally something. Which you eventually left because Belinda, your wife, worked out you were only making seven P an hour.

Redmond O'Hanlon21:40

Which you eventually

Redmond O'Hanlon21:45

Well, I was putting in such a lot of

Redmond O'Hanlon21:47

Time because it was such a pleasure and because the natural history pages were mine and it was a big crusade to get as much natural history into the paper as possible. Great triumph. We had a long, long piece, marvellous piece on the sex life of the naked mole rat, for instance. This would give one sort of rush of pleasure, keep going for days. And how long did you stay there?

Presenter22:04

And how long did you stay there?

Redmond O'Hanlon22:05

Um, fifteen years.

Presenter22:07

Next record.

Redmond O'Hanlon22:09

Ah, well this this is what happened next. I was saved by well, first of all by the editor of the Times Literary supplement, Jeremy Treglone, but then um

Redmond O'Hanlon22:19

By James Fenton, who wanted to go on a snorkeling holiday to the north coast of Borneo.

Redmond O'Hanlon22:26

And this I would want to take to the island to remind me of um James. And this is a song from the first libretto he did, the great success of Verdi's Rigoletto.

Speaker 322:53

Women abandon us, why should it hurt them if we deserve them when it's all over? Women make fools of us, laugh in our faces, cover the traces, take on your lover.

Speaker 323:15

Women are liners, calling it to demons, what is our war?

Speaker 323:25

All the wise good men bird

Speaker 323:32

Why should men hurt?

Speaker 323:40

Are you sure?

Presenter23:41

Arthur Davis singing Women Abandon Us from Jonathan Miller's version of Verdi's Rigoletto with the orchestra of the English National Opera conducted by Mark Elder.

Presenter23:49

I suppose the impression one has I know the impression one has of Redmond O'Hanlon is that you know, he's a bit mad, vaguely dotty, as we say, his travels, his escapades, and the strange things that have happened to him in life.

Presenter24:02

But

Presenter24:03

Hasn't the whole business got a rather more serious intent than this kind of good mates up the Congo getting into a spot of bother?

Redmond O'Hanlon24:10

Oh yes

Presenter24:10

Oh yes.

Redmond O'Hanlon24:12

The aim is to write a perfectly structured travel book that's as good, say, as Goegles Dead Souls, I mean the nearest thing you could call a novel, which is also part travel book, and to produce an intimate portrait of a country with as long a reach as you can.

Presenter24:33

But you put yards and yards of dialogue into these books, and I think those who seek to criticise them say, Why don't you take yourself a bit more seriously? Because actually you have so much of serious intent to say. Can you you know

Presenter24:47

Cut the cackle and let's get into the into the meat that you

Redmond O'Hanlon24:49

Yeah.

Presenter24:51

Really care about.

Redmond O'Hanlon24:56

Quite dry, difficult information that you'd actually need before you get the full field of country.

Presenter25:01

But there's a lot of more common wise there.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:02

Oh yes, a lot of Morgan and Wise to um help it along too.

Presenter25:07

But you're obviously very proud of the last book, the the coin. Uh do you feel you've achieved in that what you set out to do? Um

Redmond O'Hanlon25:14

Yes, yes I do.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:17

I probably won't in a year or two, but yes, yes. Very pleased with it and disturbing to write.

Presenter25:22

Because it's it's interesting

Presenter25:25

Was it?

Redmond O'Hanlon25:25

Yes, deeply.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:28

I mean I hope it doesn't

Redmond O'Hanlon25:29

Come over us.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:31

Too jokey.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:34

It's a

Redmond O'Hanlon25:35

I mean the the persona in that is

Redmond O'Hanlon25:37

The narrator meant to be a sort of

Redmond O'Hanlon25:40

Fragile capsule takes you into this very strange, very strange world. And then eventually.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:48

Falls apart, I mean, as I did. And so the reader's just left all alone in Africa confronting this.

Redmond O'Hanlon25:55

Straight.

Presenter25:56

And the manifestation of your falling apart is that you you take to this baby gorilla.

Redmond O'Hanlon26:03

Oh, I fell in love with this gorilla. And you were debald, I'm afraid. Yeah. And you slept under trees and on a bed of leaves.

Presenter26:04

And you're debalded, I'm afraid.

Presenter26:11

And you slept under trees and on a bed of leaves with him.

Redmond O'Hanlon26:15

Yes, then we slept wrapped up in tarpaulin together.

Redmond O'Hanlon26:19

It's a very soppy story, and I'm afraid that a year later he he died. He got he had a burst ulcer. They get all our diseases very emotional, and he got jealous of incoming gorillas who, like him, had seen their mummies speared in front of them cut up into stakes. They're all very disturbed, the young gorillas. And he couldn't take this social pressure.

Presenter26:44

Record number six.

Redmond O'Hanlon26:46

Olis

Redmond O'Hanlon26:47

This

Redmond O'Hanlon26:50

Pipe music from the Andes, just something something to remind me of.

Redmond O'Hanlon26:54

In fact, the middle of South America, because this is this is kind of record that would be played for one hour a day, which is all the time and

Redmond O'Hanlon27:03

San Carlos to Rio Negro, that that the electricity generator was running, so the minute that a light came on, you'd also hear this kind of music.

Presenter27:41

Andy's flute music. We were talking about your fetish, the the the dead finger in the furry bag. You also keep another piece of dead flesh in a Maxwell House coffee jar, don't you?

Redmond O'Hanlon27:51

Ah, yes, yes, I do. I first like first travel book, he was the companion with me, all round Europe. He took his big motor bike out to Holland Park and uh

Redmond O'Hanlon28:04

drum of petrel and scraped up the leaves and poured on the petrel and lay down on it and uh burnt himself to death.

Redmond O'Hanlon28:11

And where he was lying uh there was a piece of flesh on the ground and it was where his foot would have been and picked it up and

Redmond O'Hanlon28:20

I took it home. What it really says is that, look, whatever happens, however bad things are, please don't do this thing. Don't kill yourself. There are other people who are never going to get over it for a start. And secondly, actually, when you have come very close to that kind of despair and thought of killing yourself and had a shotgun in your mouth.

Redmond O'Hanlon28:40

Afterwards.

Redmond O'Hanlon28:42

There really is that's, it seems to me, the only, as it were, eternal life, your second go at life, afterwards, and all kinds of things you'll find you're released from. If you can get through that bit.

Presenter28:51

Yeah.

Presenter28:53

You've you've been there, you've put the shotgun in your mouth.

Redmond O'Hanlon28:55

Yes, yes.

Presenter28:57

And you've come back.

Redmond O'Hanlon28:58

Yes, I never had the.

Redmond O'Hanlon29:01

Final conviction.

Presenter29:02

Record number seven.

Redmond O'Hanlon29:04

This very early Rolling Stones that Blyn and my wife liked and uh it would remind me of uh her early life too, life on the farm.

Speaker 329:18

I am the little red rooster.

Speaker 329:21

Two lays that I crawled for day.

Speaker 329:31

I am the little red rooster.

Speaker 329:34

Two lanes and a proper day.

Presenter29:43

Rolling Stones and Little Red Rooster. You're obviously, Redmond, a protected species. Belinda, your wife, must be so long summing. How does she cope when there's no word from you for weeks and so on?

Redmond O'Hanlon29:53

She's, as I said, farmer's daughter, tough, used to it all. Anyway, she has a big business to run, or her own business. So that I mean, her life is full, I like to think.

Presenter30:01

So she

Presenter30:04

But she keeps the whole thing running and

Redmond O'Hanlon30:06

I knew that she would do that the minute she walked into my room in Merton.

Presenter30:09

Uh

Presenter30:11

And the children of the family.

Presenter30:15

And the children are how old?

Redmond O'Hanlon30:16

Eleven and eight.

Presenter30:18

They must worry about you now going off on these journeys.

Redmond O'Hanlon30:22

Yes, well this time they'll be old enough to know what's happening. So the last time. Yes, but when Puffin should just been born and I got I got to Crackers and

Presenter30:27

Which means there'll worry more.

Redmond O'Hanlon30:34

I thought, well, I'll cheer myself up. Um hooking out all this wonderful twenty two SAS equipment. You know, all the the tough stuff will braced me. And so I pulled out the camouflage tarpaulins and Birmingham machetes and all kinds of wonderful water bottles. But

Redmond O'Hanlon30:50

Out came this little flutter of index cards, little white index cards, all over the room. On each one, Blinda, she should taken the.

Redmond O'Hanlon30:59

the baby girl's foot and stamped it in red ink on one side, and on the other it said on all of them, Remember me and Puffin in the garden in the summer. So I crawled to the fridge and emptied it.

Presenter31:10

So now you're off again. Where are you going to, New Guinea?

Redmond O'Hanlon31:14

Oh, New Guinea, I want to I'd just like to see a tree kangaroo.

Presenter31:18

But the big question is who's going to go with you?

Redmond O'Hanlon31:21

Um well look you need a break. How about it?

Presenter31:24

I'm on it.

Redmond O'Hanlon31:26

You've been working too hard.

Presenter31:26

You've been working too hard. It's true, isn't it? Everybody's turned you down.

Redmond O'Hanlon31:30

But yes.

Presenter31:31

Tell me about your last record.

Redmond O'Hanlon31:33

Ah, well.

Redmond O'Hanlon31:35

This this is Mozart quintet, a piece that my daughter Puffin, who's eleven, has just begun to play on her clarinet. And this is the record that I take with me, I'm afraid.

Redmond O'Hanlon31:48

I'd listen to this uh sitting under a palm tree and I'd I'd howl and I think that's what happened.

Presenter32:54

Part of the second movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet in A major, played by my castaway's daughter, Puffin O'Hanlon, aged eleven, accompanied by her teacher, John Melvin.

Presenter33:05

So which one of those records it's that one, isn't it? You've got to take that, she said. What about your book?

Redmond O'Hanlon33:08

Yes, that's the way I take.

Redmond O'Hanlon33:11

Well, I thought.

Redmond O'Hanlon33:13

might take proves to be a sensible thing, but it's much too introspective. So I'd I'd take the greatest novel ever written, I'd just go for war and peace, uh and those descriptions of battle would put any problem into perspective.

Presenter33:27

Annual Uxury

Redmond O'Hanlon33:29

Well, as as as you're as you're gonna pay, um I thought probably well a pair of like a trinovid binoculars insulated the eight pi twenties if you can manage it. Sort of things that you ring up and they say price on application.

Presenter33:44

Redmond Orhan, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island days.

Redmond O'Hanlon33:47

Well, it's been wonderful and thank you for agreeing to come to New Guinea with me.

Speaker 233:57

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