Dr Jane Goodall

Speaker 30:00

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 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a naturalist. When she was twenty six, she travelled to Africa to fulfil a lifelong dream and study animals. At a place called Gombe on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, her dreams became reality. From her observation of the chimpanzees who live there came the realization of how close we humans are to our animal ancestors and a life devoted to man's relationship to the planet he inhabits. Her critics have called her anthropomorphic, unscientific, but she is unrepentant. I've tried to assuage some of the guilt we all must feel for our inhumanity to man and beast alike, she says, and I shall go on trying to the end. She is Jane Goodall. Jane, yours really is a story of a dream coming true. Can you remember when you first arrived in the Gombe, did you know instantly that this was the place you were going to be happy in?

Presenter1:26

I knew from the moment that I went along the lake shore, looking up at the rugged mountains, that this was going to be a challenge.

Presenter1:33

But that I was going to just have an amazing, extraordinary adventure. And I couldn't actually believe that it was happening. It was very hard for me to think that this is me and this is really real and not a dream anymore. Because it was where you'd always intended to be. Yes, it was Africa, Africa from the time when I was eleven. It had to be Africa. And, you know, eventually through thick and thin, I got there, and this amazing opportunity came. Can you describe it to me? Describe the place, first of all.

Presenter2:03

Looking from the shores of Lake Tanganika, which is the longest freshwater lake in the world, you look up, and the sky's usually blue, and there's the mountains of the rift escarpment, with the steep forested valleys and the rather more open slopes and peaks in between.

Presenter2:19

And when you get in there, when you walk up the valleys, it's a whole new world, a forest with dim light and little flecks of sunlight coming down from the canopy and dancing on the floor. And it's quiet and it's it's my idea of heaven on earth. It's your garden of Eden. It's my garden of Eden with bright butterflies and birds calling and little rustles. And then the chimpanzees.

Presenter2:42

How long did it take you to be accepted by them? Were you ever totally accepted?

Presenter2:47

The chimpanzees at first just ran away. I mean, even if I was on the other side of a valley, a steep-sided valley, they would take one look at this weird white ape and flee, they're very conservative. And it was because I just sat and didn't try and get too close too quickly and wore the same coloured clothes every day and pretended not to be interested in them. You know, eventually they realized, well, she's not as terrifying as we thought. So all those years ago, when was the moment that you knew now they've accepted me?

Presenter3:18

I think well there were two moments actually. The first was when I came by accident too close to a group and instead of running away they looked at me and went on grooming and one of the chimps in that group was David Greybeard who lost his fear before all the others. And the moment that I can never forget was when I was following him and I thought I'd lost him. I was pushing through these thorny undergrowth and there he was sitting by a little stream and near him was a ripe red palm nut. So I picked up that nut because they love them and held it out to him and he looked deeply into my eyes and he took that nut and dropped it. But at the same time while he still looked in my eyes he gave this gentle reassurance, the squeezing of his fingers on my hand and it was like going back into the distant mists of the past to a language which our ancient common ancestors must have used.

Speaker 14:11

Use.

Presenter4:11

Mm.

Presenter4:13

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter4:14

The Dvorak cello concerto is one of my favourite pieces of music. It has it has a very um lamenting quality to it, and I've always loved it. And I had one friend who was very special.

Presenter4:29

And he was a person that maybe we could have made a go of it, but it didn't work out that way, and anyway he was married. But we played that on the last evening we were together, and decided that when we heard that we would think of each other.

Presenter5:40

Jacqueline Dupre, playing part of Dvorak's cello concerto in B minor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barrenboyne. It's um a remarkable thing, Jane Goodall, that that a nicely brought up girl from Bournemouth in the nineteen thirties without any qualification should find herself in the middle of Africa studying chimpanzees. Who sent you there? Who gave you the commission?

Presenter6:02

It was the late Louis Leakey, that giant of a man, and you know, I was working for him in Nairobi as his secretary assistant, and he began talking about these chimpanzees. Well, because that was exactly the kind of thing I'd always wanted to do. But he was a paleontologist, wasn't he? Yes, but he was also fascinated by animals, and he felt that if we understood something about the behaviour of our closest living relatives in the natural habitat. It would help him to have a better feeling for how our own earliest ancestors may have behaved.

Presenter6:33

At that point, as I understand it, it was believed that only man used tools, that animals didn't. We were defined as man, the tool tool user and tool maker. And you turned that one on its head, didn't you? Well, I'll never forget seeing it was David Greybeard again, and I was pushing my way back through the rain, through the tool grass, and David wasn't yet completely habituated, and I saw this dark shape crouched on a red termite mound.

Presenter6:58

And I peered through my binoculars, you know, and I could see that he was using a grass and pushing it into the termite mound and picking something off. It wasn't until sometime later, when I'd seen this again and again, that I realized, you know, these really were deliberately picked tools. Sometimes a leafy twig was stripped of the leaves, that's the beginning of tool making. And this was to get the termites from their underground passages. Sort of fishing down the hole for them. Fishing down the hole, and sometimes for as long as an hour or more at a time, working away like this. And it really did. I mean,

Presenter7:31

Lewis was just so excited and and he said now we have to redefine man, redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as humans. And that enabled him to get money for me to continue the study. It's a a lot of effort for very little, one would have thought. I mean termites are very tiny. But they're very, very nutritious. They're very filled with fat and lipids apparently.

Speaker 17:47

Very fine.

Presenter7:51

on a good day you get a a long piece of you know, you can push it down a long way if you're a chimp. So you can have sort of nearly a foot of tull coated with clinging termites. You've never tasted one, I tasted. Oh, I tasted almost everything the chimps eat. They're actually very good cooked.

Presenter8:07

How do you termites? You fry them.

Speaker 18:07

How do you cook

Presenter8:11

Good heavens. And what do they taste like? Can you describe it? It's a little bit like those prawn crisps that you have with cocktails. Bit more tasty.

Presenter8:21

So everything then had to be reappraised, as you say, the way in which we we understood human nature and the way man works. One of the great achievements of twentieth century scholarship, I think that discovery was called. And you, as I said at the beginning, have no

Presenter8:35

academic qualifications whatsoever, in a sense may be

Presenter8:39

Was that why Louis Leakey wanted you to go, that you were more open minded? Yes, he he wanted someone whose mind, as he put it, was not cluttered up by the reductionist thinking of the animal behaviourists of the time.

Presenter8:55

And he felt that somebody like that would be more open to actually recording what's there in front of them rather than trying to go out and prove or disprove some hypothesis. And you did. And I did.

Presenter9:06

Tell me about your second record.

Presenter9:09

The moonlight sonata, I suppose, has been one of my favourite pieces of music since I was a tiny child, because when I was growing up in England in Bournemouth, in this lovely old red brick house, the Birches, which is still ours today, my grandmother used to play the piano. She never had a lesson, but she had this wonderful feeling and heart and she taught herself. And she used to play the moonlight sonata, and I'd be upstairs in bed with my sister. And in the summer, I can remember this music coming in through the open window, along with all the insects, the moths, and things that were in the garden at that time.

Presenter10:47

Daniel Barrenboim, playing the opening of Beethoven's Sonata No. fourteen, The Moonlight. Were you always fascinated by animals? Yes, I was fascinated by animals apparently even when I was, you know, a year old.

Presenter10:58

And I know mum has all these amazing stories like finding earthworms in my bed when I was one and a half and not being mad, but saying, They need the earth and I running back into the garden. But you take them to bed with you? I take them to bed'cause I perhaps I was curious as to how they could walk without legs. She said I was watching them really intently as they wriggled about the bed.

Dr Jane Goodall11:09

Yeah.

Presenter11:16

And didn't you spend many hours in the hen house at one point? Yes, I was four and a half, and we'd gone to spend a holiday in the country with my father's family's farm. So, you know, this little girl loving animals. At that time we lived in London.

Presenter11:29

And there were the cows and the pigs and the horses, and my job was to collect hens' eggs and, you know, the egg, you know, the size of an egg, and I kept looking and looking and couldn't see a hole big enough for the egg to come out. Apparently I asked everyone and nobody told me, so I hid in a hen house four hours. Four hours. They called the police, they didn't know where I was. Well, to see how the egg came out. To see how the egg came out. So I can still see it. Now that's a long time for a four-year-old to wait. And again, my mother was, you know, desperate with worry, but

Speaker 111:51

Okay.

Presenter12:00

When she saw the shining eyes, instead of getting mad at me, she sat down to listen to the story. She obviously as well was very patient with you. I mean, there are so many stories, aren't there? She certainly came with you out to Africa when you first went. She had to come, didn't she? Well, Lewis Leakey finally got the money for me, and that was hard since I had no training at that time. But then the British authorities, because Tanzania today was Tanganika, British protectorate, a young girl in the bush on her own, preposterous, impossible. But you know, he never gave up. And in the end, they said, all right, but she must have a companion. So mother went too. She volunteered and came for the first four months. And it was marvellous, because one, she was a wonderful person to share all the excitements and the frustrations with every evening when I exhaustedly trailed down the mountain. But secondly, she set up a little clinic with very simple aspirins and

Speaker 112:35

She

Presenter12:51

plasters and things and became known as a white witch doctor. So she established this wonderful relationship with all the local people. But again that patience, I've seen photographs of her standing there with a walkie-talkie in hand because you would be off and away, as you say, for hours somewhere in the bush and it it was dangerous. Well it could have been dangerous but for her too. I mean you know uh sort of I accepted the fact that she was down there on her own and she felt that she would impress me by following steaming buffalo pats and I said no please don't

Presenter13:22

But she was a fabulous companion, and it was pretty sad when she had to go. Record number three.

Presenter13:28

The hoodie manuin playing the

Presenter13:31

Violin concerto

Presenter13:33

That was the first piece of music I think that really got to me because it was my sister who was the musical one. She was doing music lessons and always going down to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. And I went to fetch her one day to meet her. And I got there early and I heard this Yehudi Menu and was inside and it just went straight into my soul. And that, I think, was the beginning of my real love of classical music.

Presenter14:52

Ehudi Menoun playing part of the opening of Mendelssohn's violin concerto in E minor with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwengler.

Presenter15:00

We talked um about your mother worrying about you in the bush, but h how dangerous has it got on occasions? You must have, you know, been frightened of leopards and lions, for example. I was frightened of leopards when I first got to Gomby, and you know, I'd sometimes hear them when I was sleeping out at night, but I thought, well, you know, it's my fate to be here, so I just pulled a little blanket over my head and tried to ignore them. Well, yeah, but they aren't really that dangerous, you know. And yes, you can be unlucky with a poisonous snake, but

Speaker 315:24

Well, yeah, but they found really that.

Speaker 315:26

Yeah.

Presenter15:30

Usually if if they hear you coming they glide out of the way. You know, most animals are pretty decent. It's human animals that are the danger. But you've been threatened by those, of course, in the bush too. I've been threatened by humans in the bush.

Presenter15:42

Probably the most dangerous could have been the chimps in the early days when they lost their fear they became rather belligerent, treated me a little bit as though I was a leopard, and tried to drive me away. No, they're so much stronger than we are.

Dr Jane Goodall15:53

Mm.

Presenter15:54

But, you know, they they in fact never have really attacked her.

Presenter15:59

You mentioned danger from man in the bush. Of course, your camp over the years has been attacked by hostile humans. Weren't some of your student helpers, your researchers, once in fact taken hostage? Yeah, they were taken hostage by a rebel group from Zaire, actually headed by the man who's now President of Congo, Lauren Kabila. He took them hostage. And that was probably the worst time of my life, that time when those students were held hostage. How long were they away? Well, the longest was two months. One of them came back after two weeks, and the others were rescued after about a month or a month and a week or something like that.

Speaker 116:24

How long were they?

Presenter16:37

But that was a terrible, terrible time. You had to pay a ransom in the end, didn't you? A ransom was paid by one of the parents, yes.

Dr Jane Goodall16:42

Yeah.

Presenter16:43

Terrible anguish, as you say. And yet you both bore and brought up a child in that environment. Brave, foolhardy? What is it? Neither, because Grubb was brought up in Gombe long before this happened, when it really was idyllic. There was no danger. He had danger from the chimp, so we had to watch him. But the beach he could swim like a little fish in the lake. It was clean, pure water. I mean, really an idyllic way for a child to grow up. And a lot of time on the Serengeti, where again you had to make sure he didn't get eaten up by lions and things. But so clean, so free from pollution.

Presenter17:19

Just a wonderful place to bring up a child.

Presenter17:22

No worries.

Presenter17:23

Some worries. He could get malaria and but, you know, think of the worries in a city to day.

Presenter17:29

Tell me about your next record.

Presenter17:31

Under Milkwood, Dylan Thomas, the students at Gombe loved it. We often used to play it during suppers in the big mess we all shared. And then my second husband, Derek Bryson,

Presenter17:43

Sometimes we couldn't sleep and we would put this tape on and

Presenter17:47

I particularly like the part where Bessie Bighead is bringing the cows in in the evening for the milking, the way cows ought to be brought in, milked by hand.

Speaker 117:58

The coming of the end of the spring day is already reflected in the lakes of their great ice.

Speaker 118:04

Bessie Bighead greets them by the name she gave them when they were maidens.

Dr Jane Goodall18:14

But don't have

Dr Jane Goodall18:17

Marl

Dr Jane Goodall18:20

Fan from the Castle, Theodosia and Daisy.

Speaker 118:27

They bow their heads.

Speaker 118:29

Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Tharegib.

Speaker 118:33

and you will find the few haggard rags and the one poor glittering thread of her history laid out in pages there.

Speaker 118:40

with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first lost love.

Speaker 118:45

Conceived in milk wood, born in a barn, wrapped in paper, left on a doorstep, big headed and bass voiced, she grew in the dark

Speaker 118:54

until long dead Gomorrowing kissed her when she wasn't looking.

Speaker 118:58

Because he was dead.

Presenter19:00

Richard Burton reading from Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood about Bessie Bighead Counting in the Cows.

Presenter19:06

Yours is also a very romantic story, Jane, because you worked in the bush and you hadn't been there very long when this visiting photographer from the National Geographic Magazine, very handsome, aristocratic young man, was sent along and you fell in love with him and got married. I mean Paradise got even better. I know, Hugo van Laueck. It did seem a marriage made in heaven. Did it? Yes. And then you had your baby, baby Hugo Grubb, as he called it.

Speaker 119:30

Yes.

Presenter19:31

You said that you learned a lot about motherhood from the chimpanzees. How so? Well, I was watching the old matriarch Flo and the wonderful old female Melissa, and I saw how they loved their infants and had fun with them. That was what I noticed. You know, they had fun. But it also became apparent how tremendously important for the child it was to have a good mother, an attentive, protective and supportive mother. And gradually we realized that those who grew up with a rather more harsh, less supportive, less affectionate mother, they didn't do so well as they became older. You sure you got this from the chimpanzees and not from your own mother? It's a mixture of both.

Presenter20:12

And father chimps actually don't subscribe much to this family set up, do they? They play a very important role actually. They have to protect the territory for the females and young, and they have to protect that territory from incursion by other males. And so we now know that they patrol the boundaries and can be pretty savage in their defence of those boundaries, or even enlarge them and get more resources for their own females and young. And it turns out that males can, when occasion demands, show really good paternal behaviour and care for orphans and save their lives. Really? You've seen that happening? We've seen it several times. Usually it's an older brother who takes on a baby when the mother dies, but we even had a completely unrelated adolescent of 12 years old who saved a little three-year-old's life.

Presenter21:01

You obviously, as we've said, you've given them all names, you recognise them. I mean, they become as recognisable to you as human beings, do they? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And when you were criticised for giving them names, and people said it was anthropomorphism, did that hurt? Did that sting? No, because, you know, when I went out there, I didn't realise I shouldn't have given them names. I didn't realise they weren't supposed to have personalities or emotions or rational thought. And I learned from my dog Rusty that all these things were, you know, boulder dash. As I never had wanted to be a scientist and only did a PhD to make Louis Leakey happy and make him proud of me, I didn't really mind what people said. So I was really lucky. I didn't have to bother. Record number five.

Presenter21:46

The Bach de Cartran Fugen G minor marks a turning point in my life. It's a very, very important piece of music for me. And it just flooded out into the Cathedral of Notre Dame the first time I ever went into it. I've been longing to go there ever since I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And it was a difficult time of my life. I was having a divorce from Hugo.

Presenter22:08

And

Presenter22:09

There was this amazing cathedral, the sun pouring in through that great rose window, this incredible music.

Presenter22:16

And as I listened to it, I thought, you know, why am I here? What is the purpose? Is there a purpose to life on this planet? What am I meant to be doing? It was a sort of call to action, although I didn't really understand at the time exactly what it would lead to.

Presenter23:26

Helmut Wacher playing part of Bach's Dakarta and Fugue in D minor.

Presenter23:31

So, Jane Goodall, that was nineteen seventy four when you heard that in Notre Dame. You'd have been forty years old. You were just divorced from your husband, and your little boy would have been about seven.

Presenter23:42

and you describe it as a call to action.

Presenter23:45

I mean, tell me more, what did you actually hear?

Presenter23:48

It's not really clear to me looking back why I felt the way I did. It just it seemed to take me back to my earlier preoccupation with religion, with God, with you know, is there a purpose to life, or are we an accident? And when I heard that piece of music, it was as though some voice said, It isn't an accident, it couldn't possibly be an accident, it couldn't be just chance gyrations of bits of matter that's created this glorious cathedral and the music and the mind that can encompass all this and ask these questions. There has to be some kind of

Presenter24:23

Plan. And what did you feel you had to do as a result of that? What was the action that you were being called to? The actual.

Presenter24:31

The meaning of the call to action came much, much later in 1986, when I went to a conference. And we had sessions about conservation, where it became apparent that the chimps were disappearing across Africa. We had sessions showing chimpanzees and medical research in these tiny five-foot by five-foot cages. And I thought the time's come when now I must use the knowledge I've gained and try and do something to help. But what it meant, of course, if you were going to do that, was you had to quit your paradise.

Presenter25:01

I had to quit the paradise, but you know, once you realize that the paradise is threatened, then it becomes a necessity to quit in order to try to save. But in order to do it, you have to go and do all of the things that are the complete antithesis of that paradise. You know, climbing on

Presenter25:18

Planes and trains and travelling and being surrounded by people, oppressed by people, crowds everywhere. How can you bear it when you enjoyed all those years of that peace? I think it's because I feel that there's a mission. I just feel that I'm being pushed in these directions and I have to do it. And I do keep some of the peace of the forest within. And yes, I do. And you know, I had all those years. I mean, how many people are lucky enough to live their dream for so long, to be in paradise? And, you know, life goes through phases. And I just suddenly knew that the next phase was to begin, which is the sharing and the trying to help.

Presenter25:57

So it's a sort of voluntary exile. It's a sort of

Speaker 325:57

So it's

Presenter26:01

Paying back, really, is it? It's a paying, it's very, very much a paying back. And once you know that you're supposed to be doing something else, you're not happy in your paradise anymore. You can't kick against the bricks. I think of it as the St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I went into that conference as a scientist, planning to write volume two of this big book, The Chimps of Gombi, and I came out as an advocate or something. It was really literally, yeah, sort of just like that. It was absolutely extraordinary.

Dr Jane Goodall26:10

It wouldn't

Speaker 126:10

Uh

Speaker 126:26

Trilly.

Presenter26:30

And since that time I haven't been more than three weeks in one place ever.

Presenter26:35

Record number six.

Presenter26:38

Well, memory from Cats. I never liked musicals and I was taken to Cats in New York and I met the cast. In fact, I'd been photographed with them. And I just fell in love with this particular song. And there is another special person in my life. And that was his favourite song too. So it's something that we share and play to each other sometimes. And I think it's very, very beautiful.

Dr Jane Goodall27:07

I must wait for the sunrise I must think of a new life

Dr Jane Goodall27:15

And I mustn't give in

Dr Jane Goodall27:20

When the dawn comes

Dr Jane Goodall27:23

Tonight will be a memory too.

Dr Jane Goodall27:28

And the new day

Dr Jane Goodall27:32

Yeah.

Presenter27:37

Elaine Page singing memory from the original London production of Cats.

Presenter27:42

At the turn of the century, Jane, there were two million chimps in Africa, and now they're an endangered species. What has happened? How has it happened? Why has it happened? It's happened partly because of the relentless destruction of habitat as human populations grow and need more and more and more land, cutting down trees for firewood and building poles and so forth. And the real danger now that threatens the last of all big animals in the African forests, the remaining forests, is the bushmeat trade. And that is the logging companies make roads into the forest, and even the responsible logging companies that do care for the forest

Presenter28:19

The roads are used by hunters. So where subsistence hunting was practised for hundreds and hundreds of years, feeding your family, now the hunters are commercial and they go in from the towns. But the first time they have roads and transport, they ride on the logging trucks. They shoot everything. They sun-dry it or smoke it, load it on the trucks, and take it back to the towns. They sell chimp meat. They sell chimp, gorilla, bonobo, elephant, everything down to birds and bats. Everything is shot. And so the forests stand there and they're dead. And you make it your business, I know, to rescue a chimpanzee whenever you can. If you see one.

Presenter28:57

For sale, you can see them, can't you, in cages in Central African towns and who would buy them and why?

Speaker 129:00

Yeah.

Presenter29:02

They're tied up in the markets. They are the byproduct of the bushmeat trade. There's no meat on a baby chimp. So try and get a few extra shillings and people buy them because they're sorry for them or to attract visitors to their hotels. And, you know, once you've looked into those pleading eyes, you feel, I feel that I can't turn away. So we've established these sanctuaries, which are a nightmare. They're terribly expensive. We can't release the baby chimps because they don't know how to behave, because wild chimps are territorial and aggressive. So we have to care for them. But, you know, we do use the chimps to educate the local people. We've also built a dispensary, a little school. We employ as many of the local people as we can. So we've boosted their

Presenter29:47

their um economy.

Presenter29:50

You remain nevertheless incredibly optimistic about it all, don't you? I mean, one can see that, one can see the kind of light in your eyes about it. Is that

Presenter30:00

Is that because you believe, because you have faith in God, or you believe?

Presenter30:05

That somehow it will happen anyway. Well, this is why I wrote this new book, you know, Reason for Hope. And I think that the hope lies in each one of us. And we have to realize that we as individuals matter. And we've got to stop leaving all the decisions to the governments and the industries. Because as individuals use collectively, as we become increasingly aware of the problems of the world, the environmental and the social ones, you know, if we act together, we can make change more quickly than having laws introduced from the top. And indeed, those laws often don't work. I mean, people will collect together at Earth summits and say they're going to do all sorts of things, and then some nations simply don't do them. That's exactly right. So, you know, this is why I've developed this Roots and Shoots programme for young people, which is hands-on action to make the world around you a better place. Roots make a firm foundation, should seem tiny, but to reach the light they can break open brick walls. And if we see the brick walls as all the problems inflicted on the planet, the pollution and the spreading of the desert and the hole in the ozone layer and all these other environmental problems, overpopulation, overconsumption, crime, cruelty, what a mess we've made.

Dr Jane Goodall30:37

Uh

Dr Jane Goodall30:44

Um

Presenter31:16

We have been terribly bad stewards, and so we have to wake up. Record number seven.

Presenter31:21

Walking in the air. Well, the snowman. I mean, to me, that's Christmas. And Christmas has always meant an enormous lot to all of my family. I've only missed about two Christmases being at home with my mother ever. And since I saw Snowman, I think when it first came out, Christmas isn't Christmas without the Snowman.

Dr Jane Goodall31:43

We're walking in the aisle.

Dr Jane Goodall31:47

We're floating in the moon, it's come

Dr Jane Goodall31:54

The people far below are sleeping as we fly.

Speaker 131:58

Or sleep

Dr Jane Goodall32:05

I'm holding very tight.

Dr Jane Goodall32:10

I've been hiding in the big night before

Dr Jane Goodall32:15

I'm finding I can fly so high above with you

Presenter32:42

Peter Orty singing Walking in the Air accompanied by the Sinphonia of London from the soundtrack of The Snowman.

Presenter32:48

You'd be very well trained, Jane Goodall, for life on a desert island, wouldn't you? I suppose I would, yes. And creature comforts are not particularly important to you? No, they're not. I mean, am I allowed trees on my island, or does it have to be sand and rocks? Well, I think it's as you imagine it to be. You tell me, what does your island look like? Well, if I can have one of these wonderful little islands, like, you know, Hawaiian islands and things like that, where there's lovely forests and waterfalls and mountains and bits of mist and beautiful flowers and things like that, I'd I'd be totally happy, I think, for quite a long time. People often say that you have a a kind of peace about you. Do you think that would remain intact in that situation, or would you begin to panic?

Presenter33:31

Well, you know, it was Eleanor Roosevelt who said you can't tell how strong the tea bag is until you put hot water on it. I don't know how s how long I would survive, but I think quite a long time.

Presenter33:44

Last record.

Presenter33:46

Pavarotti. A lot of the music I've chosen has been a bit sort of.

Presenter33:51

heart-tugging for me, but Pavarotti just makes me swell with uh joy and life and um

Presenter33:59

I see him with his hanky, which he waves around, and his little thank you when people applaud him, and he's larger than life, and he's got a wonderful voice, and I just he just fills me with joy.

Dr Jane Goodall34:12

Scott Uuuu.

Dr Jane Goodall34:27

La rivar sava la sain sième conform.

Speaker 134:30

Yeah.

Dr Jane Goodall34:41

Really?

Dr Jane Goodall34:49

That's it!

Dr Jane Goodall34:50

Yeah.

Presenter35:07

Luciano Pavarotti singing Recondita Ammonia from Puccini's Tosca, with the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra del Teatro del Opera di Roma, conducted by Zubin Meta. If you could only take one of those eight records, Jane, which one would you choose?

Presenter35:25

Am I allowed to take the entire thing with me? Well, that's a question we don't answer really.

Speaker 135:30

The Molly

Presenter35:37

What about your book? You've got the Bible and you've got uh the complete works of Shakespeare waiting for you.

Presenter35:42

Lord of the Rings.

Presenter35:44

And what about your luxury?

Presenter35:45

Well, is paper and pencil a luxury? Yes, it is. Then I would take a paper and pencil.

Presenter35:51

Jane Goodall, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Presenter35:55

Thank you.

Speaker 336:03

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