Virginia Ironside

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 seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a journalist, novelist and agony aunt. Her work reflects her life. A Londoner with artistic parents, one an alcoholic, she was a wild child in the sixties, has suffered from depression and been a single parent. These experiences she's turned to good account in more than a dozen books, the first written when she was twenty, and in columns for a variety of newspapers and magazines. These days her wisdom graces the pages of The Independent, but she's also written advice columns for Woman magazine, The Sunday Mirror, and The Today newspaper. She's realistic about the effect she has on people's lives. Most people don't need advice, she says. They need love. She is Virginia Ironside. So you don't think people take any notice of the advice that gets handed out on these pages, do you, Virginia?

Presenter1:19

I think they do take notice. I think they n take notice of a lot of the advice and self-help groups that one writes about. And I think they do take notice of the love that comes across with the advice. So that when you read an agony column page, you are aware of people in pain being answered with reassurance and kindness. Now what that reassurance and kindness and affection consists of, I think now, rather later on in my life, it doesn't matter.

Presenter1:49

Terribly. What matters is

Presenter1:51

Pain followed by comfort. Pain followed by comfort. But are those really the reasons that these magazines and newspapers have run problem pages? Surely the true reason is that they're good entertainment and they titillate us a bit. Or have done over the years. That's what's so wonderful about the problem pages. They have all these functions. They titillate, which is excellent for readership.

Speaker 22:04

done over the years

Presenter2:13

They inform, and there's no question that they do. A lot of teenagers get an enormous amount of sheer hard information from problem pages. And so you basically believe in them then. You don't think that they're entirely run by all these publications cynically?

Speaker 12:23

Yeah. Maybe

Presenter2:30

They may be run cynically, but they're never written cynically. I've never met an agony aunt who doesn't believe absolutely in what she's doing. Sometimes I think we may be a bit misguided, but we are very similar personalities and we have a slightly evangelical feeling about our work. And we do believe we help people. Otherwise, there'd really be no point in doing it. It's a deadly job. Without having that kind of inspirational, I'm going to save the world fire behind your pen. There'd be no point in it. You are, though, as I indicated in the introduction, ideally qualified because you personally have been through so much. Do you think, for example,

Presenter3:13

Life with an alcoholic mother prepared you for being a a a kind of one-woman support team.

Presenter3:19

Of course, and it's interesting again that other agony aunts often have similar backgrounds. I don't mean that their parents are all alcoholics, but they have often had quite difficult pasts and they've often been brought up to be the carers in their family. And so one has been trained by disaster and instability to be a rather controlling and caring person. You do sound as if you've been a very sensible child that

Presenter3:47

Really rather pre-echoes, if you like, of the daughter in Absolutely Fabulous, you know, that mother was always going off the rails, so you had to be the sensible one round here. How interesting you should say that, because I could hardly bear to watch that programme sometimes. I felt so much like that daughter. I could hardly stand it. It was a wonderful portrayal. And that's exactly how I felt that it my mother was the chaotic, brilliant, creative, drinking one, and I was always there having to say, Well, Mum, I think it's time you went home now. You've had enough.

Presenter4:23

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter4:25

So I just love this record for I think one reason and one reason only is which is that it's terribly sexy.

Virginia Ironside4:32

But I get that feeling I won't second

Virginia Ironside4:42

Ah

Virginia Ironside4:45

So fine.

Virginia Ironside4:48

Help the real

Virginia Ironside4:50

Mm-hmm.

Virginia Ironside4:53

Sexual

Virginia Ironside4:54

You miss baby baby, it's good for me, sexual

Presenter4:59

Marvin Gaye and Sexual Healing.

Presenter5:02

Um let's take another example of how your work has reflected your life, uh Virginia, because you've written recently about coping with death, and your father died a few years ago, aged seventy nine. You were obviously completely bowled over by his death, weren't you?

Presenter5:18

Yes, I was very upset. Um

Presenter5:23

and just thoroughly disorientated and wondering who on earth I am. Why did it hit you quite so hard, do you think?

Presenter5:31

I think it was because when I was young I was so very, very close to him. He was a mother and father to me, and in fact my mother left home when I was fourteen, and I was looked after by him completely and we were v he was a very, very

Presenter5:50

dominating character, very, very clever, very attractive, very attalented and we were exceptionally close almost too close.

Presenter6:03

And when you have a very dominating father who shapes your thoughts, who dies, you suddenly think, Well, hang on, who who on earth am I? And so you have to readjust enormously to find yourself rather late in life. You called him Christopher. I did call him Christopher, yes, which again was rather an odd thing. But my parents both had this very bizarre idea of encouraging me to call them Janie and Christopher when I was young.

Presenter6:31

Which is actually rather a cruel thing to do to a child, I think, because a child naturally wants to call her parents mummy and daddy, because this is how their mouths are shaped when they're tiny. I mean, all over the world people call m mummy, mamma, mamma, mamma. And Janie and Christopher really set the tone for my childhood, that they didn't really want, I don't think, to have a a a child or be mummy and daddy. Um there wasn't much sort of parenting went on in my childhood. They were two very creative people. You and we lived together in in South Kensington, very fashionable, you know, p post war and through the sixties and so on.

Virginia Ironside6:59

Anyway

Speaker 16:59

Two five

Speaker 17:01

You and me

Presenter7:08

I mean, you were absolutely where it was at, weren't you, in terms of fashion and style, and that w seems to me to have been the feel of your household. They style it. Yes, and it wasn't the place that a child ever wants to be at, is where it's at when it's young.

Speaker 17:17

Yeah.

Presenter7:23

Um

Presenter7:24

They weren't very I mean, they were so miserable together that we didn't have a very smart life, because my mother was always longing to go out and have fun and um meet famous people. My father always wanted to stay in and read books.

Speaker 27:37

Tell me about your second record.

Presenter7:39

Oh, this is a lovely record by Hoagy Carmichael, and my father used to play the piano,'cause he was a bit of an old Renaissance man, my dad, and he this was one of the things he really loved, and I just remember him sitting at the piano that I used to practise on at school, trying desperately to hammer out Hong Kong blues.

Speaker 18:00

It's the story of a very unfortunate couple of man who got rested down in old Hong Kong.

Speaker 18:09

Got twenty years privilege taken away from him when he kicked old Buddha's gone.

Speaker 18:17

And now he's bobbing a piano just to raise the price of a ticket.

Speaker 18:22

Let's see.

Presenter8:25

Hong Kong blues, sung by Hoagie Carmichael, and memories of your father, who you say looked like Rudolph Valentino. And your mother, of course, was very glamorous too. She was Janie Ironside. She was Professor of Fashion at the Royal College of Art in the sixties. Describe her to me.

Presenter8:41

She was very, very pretty, very amusing, and a lovely friend. Um she wasn't a mum at all. She was an extremely vulnerable woman, except in the at the college where she worked, where she ruled students with a rod of iron, and she was really responsible for

Presenter8:59

That whole gang of designers in the sixties, like Ozzie Clark, Xandra Red.

Presenter9:05

Janice Wainwright. Um, they all came out of her stable. And she looked very dramatic, didn't she? Yes, she had a skin disease, which meant that um she went blotchy, rather like Michael Jackson, when she went in the shea in the sun. So she kept her skin very white, had very red lipstick, and dyed black hair. She did look wonderful, and um she was attractive, and lots of men found her very attractive as well. How old were you when you became aware that she was an alcoholic?

Presenter9:36

I must have been aware at some point, without being able to put my finger on it, at at a very early age, I think. But when I really realized she was an alcoholic was just before she left home, when I realized that she was just getting squiffy every

Presenter9:52

Evening. Did you dread it? Did you know when you put your key in the door? Yes, and you can. You can almost smell the drink on their breath at the bottom of the street before you get in. It's extraordinary how intuitive one can be with an alcoholic around. And I would only have to hear her voice, just the word hello, darling, and you'd know at once, hello, darling. Just have that little slur, and you'd know and your heart would sink. Horrible feeling. Because alcoholics are never quite there when they're drinking. They're they're gone. They're absent. And it's It's horrid to be in the presence of a a shell who's not quite there. It's very unpleasant. How old were you when she tried to commit suicide? No, she tried a couple of times. That was after she'd left home. She was living with someone who was marvellous, but basically it was me who had to take the responsibility, and I suppose I was eighteen or nineteen then. And I was just too young, really. Well, we're all too young to look after alcoholics, I think. And I seem to remember endlessly dragging her from psychiatrist to drying out clinic, weekend after weekend, with her just sitting. This was after she'd left the college.

Presenter11:05

just staring into space full of antidepressants, um, just saying, Darling, will I ever get better? Will I ever get better? because when she wasn't drinking she was very depressed. And I would say, Yes, you will. I know you will and I was I was wrong. Um I mean, you try and you can't always help people.

Presenter11:26

Next piece of music.

Presenter11:28

Oh well this is my my um ode to drink because I felt I couldn't have a list of records without having one which was solely devoted to drink since it's been such a very big part of my life.

Speaker 111:39

Now she's gone.

Virginia Ironside11:41

And I'm to blame, too late, I finally see.

Virginia Ironside11:48

What's made Milwaukee famous?

Virginia Ironside11:52

Has made a loser out of me

Presenter12:04

Jerry Lee Lewis and What Made Milwaukee Famous?

Presenter12:07

So, Virginia Ran said you went on to have several relationships with men who were alcoholics. How does being the partner of an alcoholic differ from being the child of one?

Presenter12:19

Well it doesn't very much, except what really throws one.

Presenter12:24

is when you manage to succeed in getting an addict or an alcoholic to give up. And then something very strange happens, a sort of chemical reaction in the relationship.

Presenter12:36

Because you've been cast in the role of saint, the good carer, the sensible person, and they have been the crazy, batty, wicked, hopeless, destructive ones. And suddenly they become clean and sober. Often, because alcohol alcoholism is said to be a spiritual disease, they turn to God or they latch on to something else spiritual instead of alcohol.

Presenter13:01

And you are left, or what? I mean, let's be more honest, I was left.

Presenter13:07

Feeling

Presenter13:08

Absolutely redundant, because I had no one to care for. So all the saintly feelings are taken away from you.

Presenter13:15

And y you're left with your own craziness and depression that was always very conveniently lodged in the other person. It's a very interesting relationship, about which I know far too much.

Presenter13:28

Let's go back then in your life for a moment to the point at which precociously you wrote your first novel, aged eighteen. It was published when you were twenty. It was called Chelsea Bird.

Presenter13:36

Was it then all about you, this this London girl, into what, sex, drugs, rock and roll, the lot?

Presenter13:43

Yes, it was about the sixties and um

Presenter13:46

People were absolutely astonished by it because

Presenter13:50

It seems extraordinary now, but th s the it was extraordinary for a woman, a girl, to sleep with anyone or even smoke a joint. And to write about it was quite bizarre. So parents and young people alike fell on Chelsea Bird because I think there was the word reefer was in it somewhere and um

Presenter14:14

There was a bed scene, a dismal sort of five-minute, horrible bed scene, and nothing sexy or delicious about it at all. But that was thought to be highly shocking. But it had a promiscuous flavour, didn't it? Yes, because the sixties were full of people sleeping with everybody else. It was an absolutely ghastly time to be young, I think. I absolutely hated the sixties when I look back on them. And it's one of the reasons I haven't got a Beatles record in my list, because although I was actually working for the Daily Mail and interviewing all these rock stars, Beatles, Rolling Sands, Jimi Hendrix, and so on.

Presenter14:51

It wasn't a thrilling life for a girl at all, partly because the pill was just really coming in. And certainly for me I found it very hard. My mother was drunk and in her own flat. I was living with my father, who had no idea on what to say about what was going on at the time then. And so it was quite a hard time for me and a lot of other people. I think they just we didn't know any more than anybody else. But we were surrounded by men saying, oh, come on.

Speaker 115:22

Uh

Virginia Ironside15:22

Yeah.

Presenter15:25

sleep with me, and you couldn't think of any good reason really to say no. Um they'd say, Oh, there's nothing wrong, it won't take a second, they'd say I remember one saying that. It was a hopeless time. My head was completely I was completely round the twist then.

Speaker 115:28

Yeah.

Presenter15:38

But uh a lot of teenagers today hearing you say all that would would think that that you were describing paradise.

Presenter15:45

Well, I wasn't, I can tell them. And it's not nice, and it's an un it's a situation in which an an unhappy girl finds herself, really.

Presenter15:55

Record number four.

Presenter15:57

Ah, this is a lovely um

Presenter16:00

Choir from South Africa, and I went there.

Presenter16:03

last year to see my half-sister and I just adored this particular track because it's the sort of record I like dancing to in my car.

Virginia Ironside16:27

Missile Jon Bisolana.

Virginia Ironside16:30

It's really what the angel makes a man.

Virginia Ironside16:34

He said the birthday don't miss a mother.

Presenter16:41

Jelika and Ingishela Yavuma.

Presenter16:45

So as you said, Virginia, you were the rock correspondent of the Daily Mail. We must just talk about that for a second, because talk about being in the right place, the right I know you keep telling me it wasn't fun, but I mean to be interviewing the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, there must have been something exciting about it.

Presenter17:01

Well it was, but it wasn't a very good chance to be a good journalist, because the problem was that the Daily Mail wanted somebody very young, pretty and in a mini skirt, and I fitted the bill, but and they wanted a fan. But I was such a fan that I could never write about them very well. I remember meeting John Lennon and um I just couldn't think of anything to say to him. I just wanted to to say, um, can I have your autograph? Will you come home with me? Can I be your girlfriend? I mean, I didn't say it, but you know, it was very difficult to get out your notebook and start writing after that. Did you end up going out with any of them? No, no, none of them, no. And none of them's coming to the desert island. So that was it. Certainly not. I can't think of anything.

Speaker 117:34

No.

Speaker 117:38

That was

Speaker 217:39

Certainly not.

Presenter17:41

Worse than having one of those s awful old sixties hippies with me, anywhere near me. Now you got married at twenty six. You had a son, William, but by the time he was eighteen months old the marriage was over. So what kind of single mother did you make?

Presenter17:57

I was very, very depressed, like a lot of single mums, but

Presenter18:02

I've always

Presenter18:04

I think probably because of my past I've always thought that I must be there for my

Presenter18:11

Son, whatever. So I've never taken a full-time job. I've always been freelance.

Presenter18:17

And at that very early time I filled the house with lodgers, I remember. I r wrote the odd column, and I worked in a shop on Saturdays when my husband took Will out.

Presenter18:31

Anything really to keep me at home for him.

Presenter18:36

I simply can't understand women who have children and then go out to work.

Presenter18:42

full time and have nannies. I had no pair when I was young. Most horrible experience to get very close to.

Presenter18:50

a girl who then gets on an aeroplane after a year and you never see her again. I was really determined that this wouldn't happen to my

Presenter18:57

Sun, and we are very, very close and um

Presenter19:03

We are great friends as well as mother and son, and I just think he's so special and lovely and well, I adore him.

Presenter19:17

You better tell me about the next record. Well, this is him singing with the ukulele orchestra of Great Britain. He got very keen on the ukulele, and I read that this band was um playing somewhere.

Presenter19:30

And I remember thinking, Oh, I just wish Will could be a member of this band. It would be wonderful. And He did eventually join the band, and I remember getting to see him playing and you tears coming to my eyes. It was like him winning the swimming race at primary school. I just loved it.

Virginia Ironside19:48

Back to money's in the red owl, yeah that you gotta sell

Virginia Ironside19:52

Lots of money's and a red eye, yeah, you gotta sail Grandma lost now, grandpa too, well what in the world which you gon' do boy? Pots and money, then red eyes, yet you gotta sell dog, yeah, you gotta sell Potsa Molly, then red eyes, yeah, you gotta sail, lots of money, danny, red eyes, yeah, sail Punkin' out of bad boom, playing in the grass, Farm starts fingering at cook I

Presenter20:18

Hot tamales, sung by my castaway son, Will Grove White, with the ukulele orchestra of Great Britain. You were, Virginia Ranside, thirty-five, I think, when you were invited to become the Agony Aunt of Woman magazine. How did you react when they asked you? Did you say that's exactly the job for me? Absolutely, and it suited me down to the ground. I was

Presenter20:38

Gloomy old single parent and freelance, and I went out to lunch with the features editor of Woman. She said she had to leave early because Anna Rayburn had just left. And I said, What a wonderful job that would be. She said, Do you mean that? And I said, Yes. And when she looked at me with that kind of why don't you apply look in her eyes, I thought it was rather like somebody saying the queen is dead. And I replied, Wouldn't it be nice to have that job? And they'd actually said, Why don't you apply for it? I just thought it was wonderful. I'd come out of a period of terrible depression and I had been to group analysis, psychotherapists, counselors, analysts, pills, you name it, I'd done it. And I did have that slight feeling that I could save the world, that I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. And it was a job ideally suited to me. I was a journalist, which is what all agony aunts have to be, first of all. And yet, I also knew the tools of how to help people. So you stayed there for 10 years. It was a very happy time in a sense. And then you went to the Sunday Mirror.

Speaker 121:34

Yeah.

Presenter21:37

who after a couple of years sacked you. Word has it that Marge Proups had some hand in that. I was there for five years and adored Marge, who was um the agony out of the Daily Mirror, and she used to take me out to lunch and she had this wonderful capacity for making

Presenter21:54

Everyone she met feel good. You always went to lunch with Marge and you came away feeling absolutely lovely. She was a delight. So I was pretty put out when I found that she just snitched my job. Of course there was a lot of oh darling, I couldn't help it. Um they offered it to me um and I couldn't get hold of you to but it turned out it was all lies and I felt very upset and angry about this. She was an extraordinary mixture of absolute delight and ruthlessness.

Presenter22:27

That you survived and you went on to other newspapers and now The Independent, where problems are called dilemmas and readers choose the advice they want. Is that the way of problem pages these days?

Speaker 122:28

I did.

Presenter22:40

I give out a problem to readers. They write in with their answers, and about four of the answers get printed, and I also give my reply, which is an extremely nice way of doing it, because the readers always give the sensible ones, and I can go off on a kind of wild tangent, which I enjoy very much. I think it also reflects how things are going in society, in that I don't think people look up to agony aunts in quite the same way as they used to any more than they look up to doctors. They tend to go to the doctor, take the doctor's advice, but also ask their friends, read about it, perhaps try a homeopathic remedy as well. And I like this approach to problems that we all put in our two-penny worth, rather than it just being one humble creature writing to a holy agony aunt. Record number six.

Presenter23:29

Ah, Nina Simone.

Presenter23:31

And the other woman. Now, this doesn't mean to say that I've had millions of affairs with married men, because I've always been a bit stuffy about that. But what I love about this record is that it gives the feeling of being alone and on your own. And as an only child, I think I've often felt that. And I think this just always touches a spot within me of somebody on their own, and out there there's raucous jollity and fun going on.

Virginia Ironside23:59

The other woman will never have his love to keep.

Virginia Ironside24:06

And as the years go by, the other woman

Virginia Ironside24:13

Will spin her life

Presenter24:22

Hello.

Presenter24:25

Nina Simone and the Other Woman.

Presenter24:27

Um going back then to you, Virginia, you inherited not your mother's alcoholism, but certainly her her depressive streak, and you've said that you've tried all the classic remedies, pills and group therapy and shrinks and so on. Does anything work?

Presenter24:42

Oh yes, I think that um counselling and th therapy certainly

Presenter24:49

I don't know that it actually makes you feel much better, but what it does do is give you an understanding of what's going on, and that itself makes you feel better because you have an idea of how you tick.

Presenter25:03

But how does it help then if today you go into a depression, which you still do, don't you? Can you say to yourself,

Presenter25:10

Right, I know the way to get out of this, or come along. I mean, isn't that the whole point of depression, that you can't actually pull yourself out of it?

Presenter25:18

It takes a great deal of time before you can say to yourself when you're feeling very depressed or mad.

Presenter25:27

and I do quite regularly wake up

Presenter25:31

Screaming with terror or panic or fear. But literally screaming.

Presenter25:36

Not very loudly, but in my head I mean I ring the Samaritans quite frequently. I'm I'm often feel very unstable and unhappy.

Presenter25:46

and other days I'll feel perfectly sensible and normal, like to day.

Presenter25:50

But does all the therapy you've had get you out of it? That's really the point.

Presenter25:56

It it gives you a sort of structure, rather like if you were going along in a

Presenter26:01

bus which was rocking about all over the place, it gives you one of those straps to hold on to. There is usually a voice in one that says

Presenter26:11

It's not always going to be like this. It has happened before. Although of course the overwhelming voice is At last I know what's true. Life is hellish and not worth living at all, and I don't know how I'm going to get through another forty years of this, and it just the prospect seems agonizing and cruel.

Presenter26:30

Record number seven.

Presenter26:33

Ah yes, Leonard Cohen, the man I always used to cringe when I heard his name. I used to think he was ghastly with his awful gravelly voice and his dreadful poetry. And then I heard this particular tape and I thought, but he's wonderful. I love all this rubbishy poetry and I love his deep gravelly voice and this particular number I like because it signifies the end of something. And I feel that I have um quite recently come to the end of something. I'm middle aged, my son's no longer living at home. I've uh finished a long relationship and I love this. It's a goodbye to a past and you can't say hello to a future without saying goodbye to a past.

Virginia Ironside27:17

We're drinking and we're dancing and the band is really happening and the Johnny Walker wisdom runnin' high

Virginia Ironside27:27

My very sweet companion, She's the angel of compassion She's rubbing up the world against her thigh And every drinker, every dancer lives a happy face to thank her The fiddler fiddles something so sublime

Presenter27:46

Leonard Cohen and closing time. So what what chance Virginia Ironside on a desert island? You you're probably very practical, aren't you? I am very practical, yes. Mm. So I'd be very good at building my little nest and organising things, I think, yes. So that's all right. I wouldn't be very good at being on my own. I find being on my own extremely frightening and threatening. But this it might be a rather a good exercise to be on a desert island. I'd probably have to get to really get to grips with things.

Speaker 128:04

Noon I found

Presenter28:15

So as you sit there reviewing your life, would you look back across it and um be full of regret, or would you be quite proud that, you know, all things considered, you've survived really rather well?

Presenter28:25

I think the longer I live, the better my life seems when I look back on it, which is an uh a nice thing to happen. I I've made masses of mistakes, but I feel I've learnt from

Presenter28:39

or am starting to learn from them, so I'm I don't think I would look back with regret at all.

Presenter28:46

Last record.

Presenter28:48

I've always loved Georgia on my mind, and it's a record that I've always said that I wanted played at my funeral, because it it says I remember the pines and the wind whispering through the trees, and that's where I want to be, and that's where I hope when I die, that I will go back to my own personal Georgia.

Virginia Ironside29:09

Georgia

Virginia Ironside29:13

Georgia.

Virginia Ironside29:17

The whole day through

Virginia Ironside29:22

Just an old sweet song.

Virginia Ironside29:28

Keeps Georgia on my mind Georgia on my mind

Virginia Ironside29:37

Uh

Presenter29:37

Ray Charles with Georgia on my mind.

Virginia Ironside29:37

Yeah.

Presenter29:40

If you could only take one of those records, Virginia, which one would it be?

Presenter29:44

Oh, it would have to be my son, of course. How could it be any other? Will Grove White and his ukulele. What about your book?

Presenter29:53

Well, as I'll have the Bible and Shakespeare, I think I have quite enough to keep me going on the literary front. What I'd like to take is the Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peel. You may think this is rather an odd book to take, but I

Presenter30:07

Read it recently. It's the first of the self help books that ever came out. It's rather Christian, but he writes with such wonderful power and zeal and conviction.

Presenter30:23

And at the very end of the book there's a lovely bit, a little P S where he says We've met never met in person, but we've met through the pages of this book, and we meet in spirit. And I remember having read the book and read that last bit at the end, I had a real sensation of the man being there and with me. What about the luxury?

Presenter30:44

I th have thought long and hard about a luxury, and I think what I'd like to take is an enormous bag of plaster. I would assume that there's clay on the island, and I'd like to make'cause I'd have done a little bit of sculpting

Presenter30:59

heads of all my friends, and then cast them in plaster, and have them all over the island like a field, rather like an Antony Gormley installation, so that everybody's there and I can pretend that I'm surrounded by all the people who love me and who I love.

Presenter31:18

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

Speaker 231:30

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