Ursula Owen

Speaker 10:00

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 an editor and publisher. Twenty-five years ago, she and two others founded Virago, the feminist publishing house which promoted the work of women writers, Forgotten and Undiscovered. Enormously successful, it was eventually sold after she and one of her original partners, Carmen Khalil, fell out in a spectacular public row. For the past four years, she's been the editor of Index on Censorship, which champions the cause of persecuted writers, transforming it into a glossy and distinguished publication.

Presenter1:02

Brought up as a complete Englishwoman, she is in fact the daughter of a German Jewish family who fled here to escape from the Nazis. She took some time to come to terms with the contradictions of her unique upbringing. To begin with, she says she tried hard to belong. Today, she enjoys being something of an outsider. She is Ursula Owen.

Presenter1:23

You were, in fact, Ursula, born here in England, weren't you? Although you were taken back to Germany as a child. Was that incredible foresight on your on your parents' part?

Ursula Owen1:32

It was incredible foresight. A friend of theirs actually suggested to my mother, even in nineteen thirty three, just after Hitler had got in, that my brother should be born in England, that it would be useful, that this was all going to end badly. So when I was born in nineteen thirty seven, she came to Oxford, where she had relatives.

Ursula Owen1:51

And I was born, and she remained six weeks, and went back. I then left Germany eighteen months later.

Presenter1:58

In fact

Ursula Owen1:58

Do not

Presenter1:58

Uh

Ursula Owen1:59

And she had to smuggle you out, I think, in 1938, wasn't it? No, the the story is stranger than that in a way. My parents left Germany, leaving us, the two children, with British passports and a little exit visa saying single German only with my grandparents. Then Munich happened.

Ursula Owen2:19

And they got panicky. And we were then taken across the Dutch border by.

Ursula Owen2:25

the maid of my grandparents, who was not Jewish, who was the only person who could cross the Dutch border, and my father scooped us up, so it's a very strange sc

Presenter2:34

But but importantly, once the family was here and and you lived in in Putney, your parents, it seems, attempted to to reinvent the family, to make you very English, didn't they?

Ursula Owen2:47

Well, they did what I think probably, you know, was the only thing to do. They remained utterly themselves. They were German and they spoke German to us and we spoke English to them, so we're curiously bilingual.

Ursula Owen3:00

And they never tried to be what they weren't or whatever. But they converted to Christianity. They converted to Christianity, and it's true you could argue that was partly an assimilatory thing to do, but it was also they were very

Ursula Owen3:12

They were very interested and concerned about the Christian opposition to Hitler in Germany. They went to Pastor Niemeller's sermons in their their suburb of Berlin. They did convert to Christianity, and they did want us to be English, which in a way

Ursula Owen3:27

I suppose was completely understandable. They wanted us to belong.

Presenter3:31

But the result was that you, it seems from what you've written, felt under enormous pressure. You were trying so hard to be a kind of Joan Hunter Dunn, you know, the star of the tennis club, you said.

Ursula Owen3:40

Of course, that's partly to do with the part of London I grew up in where to be a star of a tennis club and to go to dances with boys was what seemed the starry thing to do. I was a complete and utter disaster at it. I was quite good at tennis, but I was never

Ursula Owen3:55

I could never do that stuff.

Speaker 43:57

Hmm.

Ursula Owen3:58

You said at the beginning that I was comfortable with being an outsider. I think the truth of the matter is I've never been totally comfortable with being an outsider, and I

Ursula Owen4:06

I think also lots of people feel outsiders, people who seem like insiders. But I think I have eternal longings to belong and I'm sure I never will, not properly.

Ursula Owen4:19

Tell me about your first record.

Ursula Owen4:20

My first record is uh really connected with my family's musicality. We were a very musical family and we all played. Um my father played the flute, my mother played the violin.

Ursula Owen4:32

My brother played the cello and my sister and I both played the piano, and we played a lot together. And I the the thing I perhaps most remember is playing these Bach flute sonatas with my father.

Presenter5:42

Alexandra Magnin playing part of the first movement of Bach's flute sonata in B minor with Robert Hergrove at the piano.

Presenter5:49

It it was, Ursula, in you say, a very musical family. You played on your grandfather's Bechstein, which was smuggled out somehow. You know, one often hears these stories of of pieces of furniture or pianos com getting out of Nazi Germany in the late thirties. How did it happen?

Ursula Owen6:05

Well, I think the strange thing about all these events, i these exiles, these these throwings out, is that they always have aspects that you you don't understand. I mean, in fact, my family, my my immediate family, was lucky and we came out with a lot of things, including this wonderful Best Strain Grand, but also

Ursula Owen6:24

you know, china and crockery and silver.

Speaker 16:26

Silver

Ursula Owen6:27

I mean, other people were not so lucky. My aunt and uncle, who stayed longer, were rung by the police and told that they they'd be coming in two hours, and they got out with nothing. So the stories of these ex exits and exiles are very, very various and uh

Ursula Owen6:43

I don't know. There the piano is, sitting in my living room, safe and sound. I don't think it's a piano.

Presenter6:45

Yeah.

Presenter6:47

And you played it a lot as a child. You were very musical at school. You played in the Wigmore Hall, I think. Were your ambitions musical?

Ursula Owen6:54

For a while I played in the Wigmore Hall with a whole lot of other people who were my wonderful piano teacher's pupils. We she had a concert once a year. I was always completely terrified. If I had been anything, I would have been an accompanist, which um I really loved the thought of, and I sometimes wish I had been.

Presenter7:13

But other than that, you were apparently very shy, very quiet. You didn't have much to say, you didn't really have any opinions. You obviously

Presenter7:22

One has the impression again that that at home, you know, things were quite rigid. I think your father would often say das Tutmannich, you know, that's not what's done, it's not the done thing, you know. Obviously quite a

Ursula Owen7:33

A conformist.

Ursula Owen7:34

Well, I was certainly a very conformist child. Um my parents were quite German and quite into order.

Ursula Owen7:43

And I think that I was quite an anxious child, and I certainly was a very silent child. It's interesting, therefore, then, isn't it?

Presenter7:48

It's interesting

Presenter7:50

That you should end up, I mean, it's a conundrum, really, that you should end up being a prime mover in two of.

Ursula Owen7:51

You should end

Presenter7:56

You know, two incredibly outspoken enterprises, which is Index Against Censorship and Vironco. Does does it doesn't quite add up?

Ursula Owen8:03

No, it's curious. I think probably the women's movement had a good deal to do with

Ursula Owen8:08

Um the women's movement was a lot about people women starting to talk. My daughter would say too much talk, but anyway, I think I learned a lot from it.

Presenter8:15

But when did you feel then the first stirrings of all of that? Because you went off to Oxford to read medicine, although you didn't complete that course. I mean, was it when you got to Oxford that you suddenly thought, I've got a voice?

Ursula Owen8:20

Yes, and all the

Ursula Owen8:24

That you have to do.

Ursula Owen8:27

Yes, it was. And it was partly because I I went to a school where politics was not much part of life. I think there was one child whose parents were voted Labour and we all pitied her. It was a very conservative with a small and rather a large C school. And I went to Oxford at the time of Suez and Hungary.

Ursula Owen8:49

And I got there, and within three weeks there were people were talking this language that I'd never heard before, and I was incredibly excited by it. And I suppose that was the first stirrings of Socialism actually.

Presenter8:59

But it it

Ursula Owen9:00

Uh

Presenter9:00

Nevertheless, you went on behaving really quite conventionally in the sense that you

Presenter9:05

You seemed to have believed in the happy ever after scenario of marriage and children, and you got married quite young at Oxford, didn't you?

Ursula Owen9:11

Yes, I don't know that I believed in happy ever after.

Ursula Owen9:15

But you thought that's what you did? I thought I would be a wife.

Ursula Owen9:20

with ta with some talents and some abilities and I would work, but I would fundamentally be a wife and mother and that would be my main role in life. This was the late fifties. You know, I come from a generation where that was perfectly normal. I mean, many of my friends ended up Oxford being engaged to people and getting married. It was very, very commonplace.

Ursula Owen9:40

Tell me about your second record.

Ursula Owen9:42

My second record, I ma I married a Welshman who I met at Oxford, Roger, who was a h is was and is a historian, and he came from a Welsh family. He they didn't live in Wales any more, but he his background meant a great deal to him.

Ursula Owen9:58

And I love male voice choirs, they give me goose pimples.

Speaker 410:08

Yeah.

Speaker 410:10

Oh my god.

Speaker 410:17

But I hear on me.

Speaker 410:51

King come like a yacht for the

Presenter11:00

Mavanwi, sung by the Morriston Orpheus Choir, directed by Alwyn Humphreys. You seem, Ursula, to have tried quite a a few different jobs in those early years of marriage as you travelled around following your husband's job, which is again what one did. You you taught English in Cairo, you went into market research in New York and you tried becoming a sculptor in Lebanon. It's quite interesting though, isn't it, that that life then meant being an appendage of your husband. That was the woman's role.

Ursula Owen11:29

Yes. I must say I didn't feel it. Uh consciousness had not arrived. Not for me anyway.

Presenter11:35

Uh

Ursula Owen11:35

Uh Did you have a

Presenter11:35

The b

Ursula Owen11:36

Uh

Presenter11:36

The s Yeah. Hey.

Ursula Owen11:36

Yeah. I mean it in a positive sense. I think I did feel that very much that I could be experimental. I think, you know, I.

Ursula Owen11:43

We we neither of us made much money, but I was because my husband had a sort of career trajectory, I could experiment, and I did. I mean, I always did jobs, but they were jobs that I could try out. And indeed, I was I certainly hadn't worked out what I wanted to do in life, and I was still a fairly confused person in my twenties.

Presenter12:04

But don't you think that's something that the feminist movement failed to spot really early on, that that if you want equality, you've got to accept all the responsibilities that go with it. And actually to try and have family and work

Ursula Owen12:16

Yeah.

Presenter12:16

And freedom is in

Ursula Owen12:18

Incredibly difficult.

Presenter12:19

Yeah.

Ursula Owen12:19

It is incredibly difficult. I mean, I think the feminist movement

Ursula Owen12:23

came out of another notion.

Ursula Owen12:25

It came out of lots of different things, but one of the things that was very striking for me was that women in the fifties who grew up in the fifties

Ursula Owen12:34

You can't believe the isolation they felt when they had children and felt they were out of things. They felt they ought to be good mothers, they ought to be happy, and they weren't. And people describe this isolation very powerfully. And the other was that we thought the marketplace was where life was at, and there's a sense in which that's true. And we felt, and certainly we middle class feminists felt, we had to be in the marketplace in order to be part of life. I felt that very strongly.

Ursula Owen13:03

I felt quite scared about being marginalised.

Speaker 113:05

Yeah.

Ursula Owen13:06

And I think we got I think we We what we didn't predict and what we didn't predict for ourselves was the incredible conflict we would feel about if we had children as well as worked.

Presenter13:13

Yeah.

Presenter13:15

Because I think when you and Carmen Khalil and Harriet Spicer eventually started to try and set up Virago in the seventies, I think you were the only one with a child. You had to do the juggling.

Ursula Owen13:20

Trying to set up Virago.

Ursula Owen13:24

Do you have to

Ursula Owen13:26

I was the only one with a child at Virago for for about ten years. I mean, there were lots of very talented women at Virago who later had children.

Ursula Owen13:34

But we all felt this terrible conflict, and indeed I I would go further, I'd say

Ursula Owen13:39

You know, that that was then, and now I think the whole issue of whether you should work

Ursula Owen13:44

Certainly full time and have children is a very difficult and debatable one, and I I don't have nearly as many answers as I did have then.

Ursula Owen13:53

Record number three.

Ursula Owen13:55

Record number three is um The Foggy Foggy Dew, sung by Burlives. Um quite simply, it's a song I sang to my daughter to to help her go to sleep, and a song I still sing to my granddaughter to help her go to sleep. She's a lot less good at sleeping, and it's a song I love.

Speaker 414:13

When I was a bachelor I lived all alone.

Ursula Owen14:14

Hey with

Speaker 414:17

I worked at the weavers' trade And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong Was to a fair young maid

Speaker 414:31

I

Speaker 414:34

We're in the wintertime

Speaker 414:40

Part of the summer

Presenter14:41

Burlives and Foggy, Foggy Dew. Let's then talk about the founding of Virago, a publishing house to to resurrect and repackage a whole heritage of female writers, Rosamond Lehman, Vera, Britton, Antonia White and so on, and to provide opportunities for new ones, of course.

Presenter14:58

The the conventional wisdom is that Carmen Khalil had the idea that she spotted the gap in the market, had the kind of business contacts, and you brought the intellectual rigor to it. You came out of the feminist movement. Is that fair?

Ursula Owen15:12

No, I don't think it is fair. I think that uh

Ursula Owen15:16

I I came from somewhere very different from Carmen. I um I was by then very much part of the women's movement. I was in a group that met once a week for seven years actually.

Ursula Owen15:27

And I sort of and Carmen c came from publishing and had a different background. But I think it was actually a very fruitful professional relationship.

Speaker 415:37

Hmm.

Ursula Owen15:37

We had certainly had and have always had our personal difficulties, there's no question.

Ursula Owen15:43

But I think the the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I mean the early list virag the early lists of virago which we put together.

Ursula Owen15:50

And it was Marie's.

Presenter15:53

And it was an incredible success, wasn't it? In the sense that it it became a brand name, as only Penguin and Mills and Boone have been. Otherwise you don't remember the name of the publisher, do you?

Ursula Owen16:00

Penguin and milk

Ursula Owen16:01

Otherwise you

Presenter16:04

But they do with Virago, and what is a brand new

Ursula Owen16:04

But they do

Ursula Owen16:06

It was a brand name. And what was very extraordinary was that in some ways our readers made us. I mean, our readers went to the bookshops rather like they used to do with early penguins and said when's the next Virago coming out. And I remember at a press conference somebody asking Carmen and I whether w are on the fer when we first published our first book saying how are we going to find enough books to do for the second year is a wonderful moment.

Speaker 416:17

Um

Presenter16:30

But you're you're suggesting that the seeds of destruction were always there in that relationship between you and Carmen.

Ursula Owen16:37

I'd call it the seeds of destruction. Um, there were we had uh there were there were things, you know, we there were ways in which we did get on and there were ways in which we didn't get on, and in the end, uh

Ursula Owen16:48

In the end we didn't get on. But I it was I mean I think I think Virago Virago, you know, was Carmen was a very significant figure in Virago, and then I was a pretty significant figure there too. But there were lots of people that made Virago. I think one of the mistakes people make is to say that, you know, the whole thing was about Carmen and me. Certainly we created those early lists together.

Presenter17:10

But in i in the end she impugned your your business and editorial abilities, didn't she? Famously. She made a statement to an AGM and she rubbished you patiently.

Ursula Owen17:17

She made a statement to

Presenter17:21

Basically.

Ursula Owen17:21

Basically, didn't you? Well, I actually by that stage I thought it was quite funny'cause it was so evidently not true that uh and I by then I

Ursula Owen17:30

I was a burnt out case about the quarrels, really, and I

Ursula Owen17:33

I just thought it was absurd.

Ursula Owen17:36

Record number four.

Ursula Owen17:38

Um I've chosen the opening movement of Haydn's Sunrise String Quartet. This has to stand in for a great deal of chamber music as far as I'm concerned. I didn't know how to choose it, but I love this particularly because I suppose there was a moment in my life when I I was quite a melancholy child, where I thought one can choose to be happy. It's the sort of life is a glass of water half full or half empty proposition really. And I think this is such a most most wonderfully tender and optimistic piece of music.

Speaker 418:22

Uh

Speaker 419:03

Uh

Presenter19:13

Part of the opening movement of Haydn's Sunrise string quartet in B flat major, opus seventy six, number four, played by the Codi Quartet. We can't

Presenter19:23

Chart the rise and the falls of Virago here, Ursula, but

Presenter19:28

It was a brilliant idea of its time. It made a lot of money. It went on to loose some, but it made a lot of money.

Speaker 119:29

Yeah.

Ursula Owen19:29

Yeah

Ursula Owen19:32

Yeah.

Presenter19:35

Um, is it true that that Carmen, because it was her idea, it was hers in the f first place, that she she gave you thirty percent of the company in the beginning?

Ursula Owen19:43

Yeah.

Presenter19:44

Yeah.

Ursula Owen19:44

When when I joined her, she we we s she gave me fifty percent. We we we divided it equally and then Harriet joined on the share the share front and uh that this was in the early days. Things got more complicated later as we brought in other shareholders.

Ursula Owen19:59

But this is no, this is absolutely true.

Presenter20:00

But in the end it's effectively been sold three times, hasn't it, to Chatto, Random and and now little brown. So that that percentage, whatever size it was, that she gave you must have turned out to be incredibly valuable.

Ursula Owen20:13

Well, we we all yes, we all three of us made made money out of it uh out of Virago, that is quite true.

Presenter20:18

Do you think that's why there's been such a sort of public hoo-ha about it? Is is money at the base of this dispute?

Presenter20:27

Yeah.

Ursula Owen20:27

Yes, I mean that I think that it's perfectly true that like all businesses, especially ones where there are a lot of there's a lot of passion involved, a lot of politics, a lot of passion, a lot of feminism,

Ursula Owen20:39

all the old human attributes of

Ursula Owen20:42

Envy, greed, ambition are bound to come up, and I think.

Ursula Owen20:47

In Virago, we

Ursula Owen20:49

We struggled with it, but, you know, we were all human.

Ursula Owen20:53

I don't think we're different from any other human beings in that respect. I can see why people are much more intrigued by it because

Ursula Owen20:59

We're women.

Ursula Owen21:00

Now that may be because it's more unusual for women to run businesses. It certainly was when we started. It was pretty unheard of in publishing that women run businesses. And it may be simply that women are more interesting because they say more or they they're more open about their their arguments. I think I I don't know. But th these are just this is just the argy bargie of, you know, business life.

Presenter21:24

But what people cottoned onto, as you've indicated, is that it was a very good story, you know, what went on and the argument between you and Carmen and so on. And indeed it's now being dramatized. I think Faye Weldon's writing a a four-parter for for television about it and it's it's got all the ingredients of soap opera, hasn't it?

Speaker 121:31

Yeah.

Presenter21:42

Rivalry and ambition and

Ursula Owen21:42

Rivalry

Ursula Owen21:43

Of course it's hugely telescoped, this rival this argument between Carmen and me. I mean as I say there were at one point there were twenty people working at Pirago, talented women. The interesting thing is now I've become a journalist in my late to middle age. The fact that this group of women did this rather interesting thing and were rather interesting people and had big quarrels at the end.

Ursula Owen22:04

Does seem to me the stuff of drama. So why not why not do it?

Ursula Owen22:08

Yeah. Record number five.

Ursula Owen22:10

Um I remember going to this concert at the festival hall with my mother and an aunt.

Ursula Owen22:16

of Dietrich Fischer Diska singing a very rather unknown song cycle by Brahms, Dishona Margalona. And I remember being absolutely riveted. I was sitting in the back of the hall. We sat in the back of the hall and thinking I would love to accompany a singer like that.

Speaker 422:55

The society of the mat.

Speaker 423:05

Especially underschland.

Presenter23:34

Dietrich Fischer Diskau, accompanied by Gerald Moore, singing part of Ruer Zus Liebschen, the ninth song of Brahm's Die Schoene Magellone.

Presenter23:42

Um we talked earlier on, Ursula, uh about your otherness, your your being two different people and being this foreign person too. And you've written about going to Prague and holing up in a flat with a forty watt light bulb and feeling at home. What does that mean?

Ursula Owen24:01

It means I'm I feel at home in Central Europe, um, somehow.

Ursula Owen24:06

Just the way people behave and the furniture. Um

Ursula Owen24:11

In my forties I was living for some years with a journalist, Bill Webb, who

Ursula Owen24:18

knew a great deal about Eastern Europe and knew a great deal about Berlin. In fact, he knew I had never been back to Berlin.

Ursula Owen24:26

And this totally English person took me back to Berlin, which was an extraordinary experience. I went back to the house where I lived, which actually had been bombed and it was now a laboratory. And I walked down the street past the post office and past the church where Niemilla preached. And then I stood by the house and I found myself weeping. And I it was the first time I really sort of

Ursula Owen24:51

dug into my roots and also uh sort of saw

Ursula Owen24:55

saw my parents, these young people, living in this house, having to deal with all this terrible stuff and m

Presenter25:00

Making these enormous decisions.

Ursula Owen25:01

making these enormous decisions and got you know not I I was very I felt very sort of a huge amount of s burst of sympathy about it.

Presenter25:12

And and you've written since, you know, that that as well as that, a huge amount of sympathy for your parents that in contradiction to LP Hartley, I suppose, the past feels like home, you've written.

Presenter25:24

Yes.

Ursula Owen25:24

Yeah.

Ursula Owen25:25

Well, I think

Ursula Owen25:27

I think that

Ursula Owen25:29

I because I was trying so hard to belong when I was a child, and because I

Ursula Owen25:36

I suppose I had to believe I was English and I think

Ursula Owen25:39

The life we were having was totally German. I mean, the the household was German, the food was German, the music was German, the culture was German.

Ursula Owen25:47

But

Ursula Owen25:48

In a way, very late on, I'm a late developer, I think.

Ursula Owen25:52

Um, I when I got to Berlin I started to be able to acknowledge that I was both and that that's where I had to live.

Ursula Owen26:01

Next piece of music.

Ursula Owen26:03

On that same visit to Berlin, um, we crossed over to East Berlin. It was um

Ursula Owen26:09

in the late seventies. And we went to the Kumashu Opa, where there was the Breci Company was performing, and they were absolutely wonderful. I always remember it vividly because there was this extraordinarily lively performance.

Speaker 426:27

Ich var jung goddess sechtzen jare, du kamest von purmah rauf, du sag des dich solemit der kain, du chemest viral.

Speaker 426:43

I fraught neine Stellung.

Speaker 426:47

Du sagda sovari hirste, du hekta so to mitza.

Presenter26:53

Lotta Lenia singing Surabaya Johnny from Courtwaal's Happy End with the male quartet and orchestra. These days, Ursula Owen, your editor of Index on Censorship, which has recently celebrated its twenty fifth anniversary, you're its sixth editor. How did it come into being in the first place?

Ursula Owen27:11

It was uh it began in nineteen seventy two when um

Ursula Owen27:15

A a Soviet dissident wrote to The Times asking the West to support the dissidents against Chautraz in Moscow.

Ursula Owen27:25

and Stephen Spender and a whole group of people wrote a letter.

Ursula Owen27:28

To the Times saying they would support them, W. H. Orden, and Michael Tippett, and Yehudi Menu, and Cecil Day Lewis.

Ursula Owen27:36

And Steven Spender wanted to take it further.

Ursula Owen27:39

And so he decided to help start a magazine with a market.

Presenter27:43

So to bring attention to their plight as much as to publish them, as it were.

Ursula Owen27:46

It was both. It was both. It was it w it was the w it was Stephen Spender's passionate belief, and it is mine too is that

Presenter27:47

Both

Ursula Owen27:55

If people's words are heard, it gives them hope in a sense, so Index has always done a mixture of monitoring.

Ursula Owen28:03

And publishing people's censored writers' work, and also.

Ursula Owen28:08

writing about what is going on

Presenter28:11

But how much has it changed since since the end of the Cold War and the coming down of the Berlin Wall? I mean, i the focus of it must have altered considerably.

Ursula Owen28:18

Yes, I mean that's partly what fascinated me about the job is that nineteen eighty nine I mean I think the focus has changed. Certainly the geographical focus, although that is not to say there isn't censorship in those old empires, but this I think things have changed hugely. I mean there's still the old style assassinations, you know, blue pencils, places like China, places like Burma, places like North Korea, Turkey, etc. There are plenty of places.

Ursula Owen28:42

But I think it's become much more complex, and things like the rise of nationalism, the rise of religious fanaticism.

Ursula Owen28:49

I'd say concentration of the media.

Ursula Owen28:52

all do things to censor and silence people. I mean, my belief is that the magazine has to be as much about unofficial silencing as censorship. And I think it's very important that there are a lot you know, that this is discussed as much as official censorship.

Presenter29:00

The censorship.

Presenter29:06

But what about if you don't believe in censorship? What about the words that are written that can foment war and hatred, as in Rwanda and Yugoslavia? I mean, are there do you believe situations in which freedom of speech shouldn't be allowed? Because those words bring about such terrible events?

Ursula Owen29:25

Well I think that's also some one of the interesting things about doing this job at this moment in time is that I think these debates have to be had now. And my own view of that is that it's a very tricky business to ever say that absolute right of freedom of expression should be curtailed, but

Ursula Owen29:46

I my view is that if hate speech

Ursula Owen29:49

Gets to the point where a culture of hatred is created.

Ursula Owen29:54

and people feel there's permission given to hate, which I think Yugoslavia is an example of, and Rwanda is important is another example of, and even perhaps Israel and the assassination of Rabin.

Ursula Owen30:06

I think we have to talk about whether there may be some way in which we ought to censor.

Ursula Owen30:14

Record number seven.

Ursula Owen30:16

Record number seven, my mother wa was ill some of the time in my teens and

Ursula Owen30:24

We used to visit her in hospital on Sundays and then come back and I

Ursula Owen30:28

Always remember the feeling of

Ursula Owen30:30

Sadness and sort of pit of the stomach, and going back to the house when she wasn't there.

Ursula Owen30:36

And

Ursula Owen30:37

I think I thought I was the only person in the world who felt gloomy on Sundays. And then of course later I discovered that everyone feels gloomy on Sundays at about between four and six in the afternoon.

Speaker 430:49

Sunday is blooming

Speaker 430:54

My hours are slumberless.

Speaker 130:54

Uh

Speaker 431:00

Dear is the shadows I live with unnumbered.

Speaker 431:08

Little white flowers will never wait for you.

Presenter31:16

Billy Holiday and Gloomy Sunday, and that was recorded in nineteen forty one with Teddy Wilson and his orchestra.

Presenter31:23

So we now um ship you away from all of this to your desert island, totally foreign territory. Are you looking forward to it? Will you

Ursula Owen31:29

Would be all right. Not much, no. I think I'd

Ursula Owen31:32

I mean, I think I li I like being alone sometimes, but I definitely would miss I not being at the end of a phone or at the very least, let alone meeting people.

Presenter31:43

But are you resourceful enough now? Are you self-confident enough? Have you stopped?

Ursula Owen31:43

Yeah

Presenter31:47

apologizing, which is what you spend a lot of your early life doing.

Ursula Owen31:51

To cope alone. Yes, I can cope alone. I'd cope alone. I don't think I'd.

Ursula Owen31:56

I don't think I'd love it to go on for very long, but I could curve, and I think I might be rather interested for a while.

Ursula Owen32:02

Last record.

Ursula Owen32:04

My last record is um, I suppose a record of reconciliation. Um it's the third act of Rose and Cavalier, the trio with Marshaline and Sophie and Octavian. And I suppose it once again it has to represent

Ursula Owen32:23

Opera, which is ridiculous. I mean, I love Mozart, I love Verdi, and I just didn't have space for them all. So this represents opera, but it also represents quite one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and a kind of reconciliation and a kind of acceptance that love ends and life goes on, and also, I suppose, perhaps slightly sneakily, that, of course, much the most interesting relationship of those two was the older woman with the younger man rather than the two young ones together.

Presenter33:48

Krista Ludwig, Gwyneth Jones, and Lucia Pop singing the trio from Act Three of Richard Strauss's Der Brausen Cavalier, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter33:58

This is the most difficult question of all, Ursula. If you can only take one of those eight records with you, which one are you going to choose?

Ursula Owen34:03

Yeah.

Ursula Owen34:04

Well, it was the most difficult question. It is the most difficult question, and I think probably the last one, because um

Ursula Owen34:12

Oh, that sweeping emotion. I think I'd need it on the Addison Islands. Reconciliation in the end, you said. What about your book?

Ursula Owen34:21

Well, this is a hard one, too. I think in the end I'd like to take the collected works of Chekhov, because each time I see the plays and each time I read them, ah, I find something new in them. They're extraordinary. And what about your luxury?

Ursula Owen34:35

I ought to have a piano, because I feel I ought to practise the piano and become a brilliant pianist on the island, but actually what I want, I realise, is a large photograph album filled with my family and friends and people I love.

Ursula Owen34:49

I'm afraid I will miss people a lot on this island.

Presenter34:53

Ursula Rowan, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, Row.

Speaker 135:05

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

Speaker 435:55

Uh