Margaret Drabble

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

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a writer, one of three very clever daughters of very clever parents. She went, like her mother and sisters, to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she graduated with a starred first. Her immediate ambition was to be an actress, and indeed she did join the Royal Shakespeare Company. But her first novel, The Summer Birdcage, had been published. It was a triumph, and then another, and then a prize winner, The Millstone. There followed a steady stream of subtle, stylish books firmly rooted in her own experiences: motherhood, divorce, families, English society in the late 20th century. Established now as one of our most important modern writers, she's pleased to have reached a wide audience. I've been lucky, she says. I seem to have struck subjects which got into people's minds, so I've had a larger audience than I might have had. She is Margaret Drabble.

Presenter1:19

I can't really believe, Margaret, that you put your success down to luck.

Presenter1:23

I think I was writing in a very fortunate period that there seemed to be a lot of women like me who were discovering the same kind of problems, the same kind of doors were opening for them. So I

Presenter1:34

came to feel that I was writing for a generation and having been quite lonely and feeling that my experience was isolated, I realized that it did link up with a lot of other people. So your luck was timing, really? It was the timing of the century, really.

Margaret Drabble1:45

It was

Presenter1:48

In the sort of early sixties the women's movement hadn't really got going, but obviously the people who were going to move within it were already thinking the things that they were thinking. And of course it was very avant-garde to discuss abortion at the stage that you did in The Millstone, which is as we know about a young girl who finds herself pregnant. She's unmarried and she does consider abortion and drinks the gin, but in the end it doesn't happen and she goes through with it. You got into some trouble for that, I think. It was 65, a year before the Abortion Act. Yes, I didn't get into very much trouble. I think that there was some criticism when it was read on the radio and there was a certain amount of indignation, which rather surprised me because she hadn't had an abortion. Of course, she'd had the baby. But maybe that was considered offensive too, because she was a single mother. But you apologised on Women's Hour, then? I did apologise on Women's Hour. I don't think I apologise. No, I didn't apologise. I explained that she had behaved perfectly responsibly. And of course, now on that programme, you can hear people discussing anything under the sun.

Margaret Drabble2:36

On women's art

Margaret Drabble2:47

So

Presenter2:49

But I wonder how easily it came'cause you were busy having your own children at the time you wrote that. It was your third novel, The Millstone, wasn't it? And you had did you have three children or two by then? I wrote The Millstone while I was expecting my third child. In wedlock, it has to be said. Yes, indeed.

Margaret Drabble3:00

In went

Presenter3:03

Did it come easily? Did you just sit down and it it flowed out of you? Yes, I wrote very easily. I had a kind of fluency on the page, which rather surprised me.

Presenter3:14

And I was constantly interrupted by children, but as soon as I had a spare hour I would get back to my typewriter. And after that, when it went on, when you got to novel number ten and eleven, was it much harder work? Was it much more pushing boulders up hills? It became much more difficult because I think I set myself

Presenter3:32

more and more difficult objectives. It's also the responsibility of perhaps of being the established author. Yes, I sometimes think of publishing anonymously because it would be so much um quieter and pleasanter, but I suppose that's a cowardly thought. You might have done so, we never know.

Presenter3:48

Yes, I wouldn't admit to it, would I?

Presenter3:50

Tell me about your first record. My first record is A Brahm Serenade, which I love. It's the first C D I ever bought. I bought it at the beginning of this year and I played it to myself endlessly in Italy when I was alone for a month avoiding publication and sitting in Venice in a beautiful flat over a little canal. And I played this Brahms Serenade to myself every morning to start work.

Presenter5:14

Part of the first movement of Brahms Serenade No. One in D major, played by the BRT Philharmonic Orchestra of Brussels, conducted by Alexander Rachbaris, and the first C D you've ever bought earlier this year, Margaret Trouble, you say. That's a surprising statement.

Presenter5:28

Yes, well I came from a very unmusical background and we didn't go in for buying music at all. No music at school, teaching? There was some music at school, but it wasn't very well taught. I was supposed to be learning to play the flute. I was completely hopeless. I used to pretend to be practising the flute, but really I was reading a book. Not a lot of science there either, I gather. Not well, there was science, but again, not very well taught. The maths were badly taught, and I dropped maths at the age of twelve because I preferred to learn German. But there's science in in your later novel, certainly. There's a geologist in in one of these Realms of Gold, there's a geologist, and there's a physicist somewhere and of course the latest one, The Peppered Moth, is about DNA. So have you mugged it all up since? Yes, I think that I really missed out not learning these things earlier. It was very much the two cultures when I was young. You were either the arts or the sciences. And I think most of us have learnt that that was a big mistake. Your mother, as I said, was very clever. She'd gone to Newnham College herself, which was really quite something for her age group, wasn't it, for her generation.

Presenter6:30

It was something for her generation. It was even more something from for someone from her class background in that she came from a fairly ordinary family in South Yorkshire. She was the first person in her family ever to have any higher education. But your latest book, The Peppered Moth, is very much about your mother. It it's your attempt, you said, to try to understand her better. And it is is painfully frank. You you've written that she was

Presenter6:54

A a woman who was angry, manipulative, difficult. How how painful was it for you to write all of that'cause it's so close to home?

Presenter7:01

It was very difficult. It was an attempt to

Presenter7:05

Understand the kind of woman she was before she became the woman she was at the end of her life. And we all begin in gladness and sometimes end in bitterness and sadness. And I was trying to get back to the person she was before we were born, before all the things that went wrong for her went wrong for her. So in your childhood, what do you remember of her? Why was she so awful? She was very bitter to my father and she complained a great deal about everything. She felt that life hadn't given her what she

Presenter7:35

deserved, whereas in fact life had given her a great deal. She had a comfortable house, she had a caring husband, she had dutiful daughters and a son to be proud of. But sh it was as though nothing was ever quite enough

Presenter7:49

She was bitter. And was that because she fought to get out of of her northern birthplace, as it were, and indeed had won the scholarship to Newnham College, and then had come back and been, again to use your phrase, just a wife? Yes, except that's what she seemed to choose to be, so it was very hard to know what she was so angry about. I think that women of her generation simply didn't have the opportunity to have a career, and she would have had to have chosen in the

Presenter8:18

nineteen thirties between being an English mistress in a school, and I'm sure she'd have been a very good head of an English department, and being a wife and mother. She was a good mother in some ways. She was very keen on being a mother. But then she saw other doors opening for my sisters and myself, and she wanted to go through them too, and it was too late.

Presenter8:38

Tell me about your second record. My second record is from Bach Saint Matthew's Passion. This is a piece that I found particularly moving and beautiful. It was about the only music at school that I really enjoyed, and the tragic drama of the Passion I I find quite overwhelming.

Presenter9:01

Be thy mind and free

Margaret Drabble9:05

Uh

Presenter9:05

Yeah.

Margaret Drabble9:05

Yeah.

Presenter9:05

It is love.

Margaret Drabble9:06

Uh

Margaret Drabble9:07

Uh Shall I move sad?

Presenter9:15

In my mind and gas will thy mind and easel far.

Speaker 39:22

Oh, finish me by mine and gaze over.

Presenter9:50

Ernst Heffliger singing Ich Ville by meinem Jesu Wachen from Bach St. Matthew Passion, with the Munich Bach Orchestra and Choir conducted by Karl Richter.

Presenter9:58

Very beautiful Margaret Drabble, as you say, but a very tragic piece of music which you heard performed at your Quaker boarding school. You said that when you were a child you liked things that told you life wasn't all fun. That that makes you sound as if you were a very unusual child.

Presenter10:14

I think I didn't like the sort of forced jollity of hockey and netball and sports, and I quite liked the tragic dramas, the tragic novelists. I do remember being ticked off at school for my great admiration for Thomas Hardy. And my the scripture teacher, not the English teacher, pointed out to me that Hardy's view of life was not considered completely normal, but I thought it was wonderful to have somebody telling me that things were really, really awful. But your mother obviously was a huge influence on you, as you say, and she was bottom line, she was a depressive, wasn't she? She certainly became labelled as a depressive when she was in her fifties. And I think she probably was a depressive most of her life. And how did that rub off on you? Were you depressive as a child, or did you suffer from depressions? Yes, I think I suffered deeply from depressions. And one thinks of children as being cheerful and happy little things. But in fact, I went through periods of of intense depression. And and how did it manifest itself? Did you take to your bed or what did you do? Well, bits of my hair dropped out at one point, but I I I had a stammer which I'm sure was a manifestation of of anxiety and stress of some sort.

Presenter11:25

I worried that I was going to go to hell. I thought I'd done something terrible wrong and I didn't know what it was. And can you explain that to yourself? What would have brought that about in you? Was it do you blame your mother for that? Well, retrospectively, I think living with a depressive mother makes you depressed yourself. But of course you blame yourself because you don't know what you're being depressed about. And you've also said that she was manipulative, and it's very much in the public domain that there's been a kind of rivalry between you and your sister, Antonia Byat. Known to you as Sue, interestingly enough, not Antonia at all. Do you think your mother

Presenter11:59

brought that about, manipulated you both into that situation because she wanted you to escape in the way that she hadn't.

Presenter12:06

Well, that's a very interesting and kindly interpretation of her behaviour. I think she was ambitious for all of us. She never told us we looked pretty, she never told us we were nicely dressed, or that our clothes suited us, or that our hair looked nice. It was always a push towards examination success. You don't think she divided to rule, perhaps?

Presenter12:26

I can't remember her doing that. I mean, I I do remember that my elder sister was very ill as a child at one period and she sent her to my grandmother, and I think that my sister felt anxious about that, that she'd been sent away to

Presenter12:42

her grandmother, whereas I was still at home, and I now see it sort of in Freudian terms that she felt.

Presenter12:48

driven out, whereas I'd been left at home. I but I really don't know how all these things played out, because at the time I wasn't aware of them. I was just aware of my big sister who I admired. And did your father have a favourite?

Presenter12:59

I don't think he had favourites at all. He was very gentle and tender to each of us and would take each of us aside individually and try and comfort us when we were distressed. Which was quite often by the sound of it. I'm afraid it probably was, yes. So what happened when you you did succeed in achieving exactly what your mother wanted you to succeed to? As I say, you all three girls went to Newnham, but certainly you and Antonia did incredibly well and became literary stars, our literary stars. Did she?

Presenter13:26

Did she show her her delight? Did she congratulate you? What happened? How did she react? She did congratulate us. She very conscientiously and sweetly wrote me a letter about each book until about the twelfth novel, and then she said, Look, I'm giving up now. I can't keep on writing you letters like this. Sort of criticism, I mean lit crit, as it were. Appreciation. No, saying I liked this bit and I didn't like that bit. I mean in my first novel the thing that she really took exception to was there's um a parent who goes to the s school speech day in furs that smell of mothballs. And my mother said, You should not have put that in because everyone'll know it was me. But I think in those days the fur wrap came out on speech day and everybody smelt of mothballs. But that's the only thing she really disliked. But otherwise she was quite appreciative.

Margaret Drabble13:43

So

Margaret Drabble13:46

Yeah.

Presenter14:12

Record number three. Record number three is from Carmen Jones, which I thought was the most wonderful and amusing movie.

Speaker 214:20

There ain't but one big heart.

Speaker 214:23

In all the world Beat out that rhythm of the drum Beat out that rhythm of the drum Beat out that rhythm of the drum There's one big heart in all the world Beat out that rhythm

Margaret Drabble14:39

Uh

Speaker 214:39

Yeah.

Speaker 214:40

Uh

Margaret Drabble14:40

Beat up that rhythm on drum. Beat up that rhythm on drum. There's one big hot for the world.

Presenter14:49

These are dad rhythm on a drum sung by Pearl Bailey from the original soundtrack of Com and Jones and and memories for you, Margaret Apple, of sneaking out from school, you say, to to see it. Yes, we weren't allowed to go and see it. We put it down on our list of films and we said it was a classic by Pise, but no, no, no, we weren't allowed to go, so we sneaked.

Margaret Drabble15:06

Yeah.

Presenter15:08

So then you went off to college in Cambridge, as we say. Antonia had gone first, and your younger sister Helen came afterwards. All three of you.

Presenter15:16

trotting along, as it were, in your mother's footsteps and in each other's footsteps. You all got scholarships and off you all went there. So this this mitochondrial D N A that you talk about, the the female inheritance was working well at this point. Was it frustrating, did you feel, or were you just being desperately obedient?

Presenter15:33

No, I wasn't conscious of any sense of frustration at all. I absolutely loved my time at Cambridge. I was very, very happy there. I didn't feel I'd been programmed to go there, although I now see that I had.

Presenter15:45

Looking back retrospectively, I should have gone to Oxford, I was offered a place in Oxford, it would have been much more sensible if I'd gone to Oxford. Why would it have been more sensible?

Margaret Drabble15:52

Why

Presenter15:53

Well, it would have removed me from the sort of the family nest in a much more dramatic way. But by that time I was completely in love with the idea of Cambridge. When did you conceive of the notion of getting out of the family nest, as you put it? I think when I got married, and that was sort of um at the end of Cambridge. But during Cambridge

Presenter16:13

Well, I wasn't with my family in Cambridge. I was entirely with my own circle of friends. I was reading English and in Cambridge the terms are quite short and the vacations are quite long and during the vacations I just read my way through the entire required reading. But in term time you you developed a strong line in playing tragic heroines, I guess. I spent all my time with the various amateur dramatic companies, which I loved and I was quite keen to play all these dramatic. What did you play and who with? Who were your contemporaries? Ian McKellen and Derek Jacoby and Eleanor Braun and Clive Swift, my first husband. So you had a wonderful time. And the depression, did was that dormant then? Were you had you broken out?

Margaret Drabble16:41

How did you play?

Margaret Drabble16:44

Uh

Presenter16:57

My depression had totally evaporated. I won't say I didn't have moments of of misery and um feeling that I had turned up at

Presenter17:07

The wrong party in the wrong dress, but this was as nothing compared with my earlier childhood. I was I was very happy.

Presenter17:14

Record number four. Record number four is from Bernstein's Candide and it's a wonderful song called The Best of All Possible Worlds.

Presenter17:23

It was very much a cult piece when I first knew my first husband, Clive Swift. And I've always been a bit of a a doctor Pangloss myself, thinking that all is for the best in of all in the best of all possible worlds at certain moments.

Margaret Drabble17:37

Why do married people fight? I cannot comprehend it! She cannot comprehend!

Speaker 217:42

The private strife of man and wife is useful to the nation. It is a harmless outlet for emotions that could lead to war or social agitation. I'll bring you explanation.

Margaret Drabble17:52

Explanation!

Speaker 217:54

Wherefore it's true, no man may doubt it. Wherefore it's true, no doubt about it. Marriage is blessed in this best of all possible worlds.

Presenter18:07

Max Adrian as Dr. Pangloss singing the best of all possible worlds from Bernstein's Condide with members of the original Broadway cast. So, uh, Margaret, you came straight out of Cambridge and and married Clive Swift, I or within the week, I think, didn't you? Within the week, yes. Daring stuff. Yes, it was quite adventurous. You w it was, what, nineteen sixty, you'd have been twenty-one? Yes, that's right. How did your parents react?

Margaret Drabble18:26

Yeah

Presenter18:29

They said, Are you sure? and we said we were sure and then they said yes, that's fine. But was that part of you breaking out of the mould, do you think, the drabble mould? I think very much. I now think that I was in love with Clive's entire family. I loved the Swifts. They were so unlike the Drabbles. They were so generous and sweet and warm-hearted and noisy and loving. And Clive was such fun to be with. And did you change, therefore?

Margaret Drabble18:53

Yeah.

Speaker 318:53

Yeah.

Margaret Drabble18:53

Here

Presenter18:55

Yes, I tried very hard to be a swift and there was always something in me that was dragging me back to being a drabble. But it was it was a a great leap and I've never regretted making it. And you did eventually join the Royal Shakespeare Company, as I said in the introduction. You you were a fairy at one point in the dream, I think, weren't you? I was indeed a fairy.

Margaret Drabble19:13

Big one?

Presenter19:23

And didn't you understudy for her and for Vanessa Redgrave at one point? I did indeed, but they were never ill. They're the strongest actresses in the world. They were never ill.

Presenter19:32

But in the meantime you had a baby. I mean, within the first year of marriage, I think you had your son, Adam, and and then another, and then another, Becky and Joe, sort of having one a year, really, weren't they? They were quite quick, yes. Yes. But then you'd had

Margaret Drabble19:42

Yeah.

Presenter19:44

Two novels published and you are having the third, as you said at the beginning.

Presenter19:48

So why did you then it it does seem that the depression then came back in, because you you got desperate at one point and swallowed a lot of paracetamol, didn't you?

Presenter19:56

Well, it wasn't depression, it was it was rage, which is a slightly different emotion. I didn't get deeply depressed. I really did feel quite cornered, and I think mothers of small children know the kind of terrible stress you go through. And I think I did feel desperate intermittently. I never went

Presenter20:15

into a deep depression, a sort of prolonged depression as I'd been through in childhood. So I think I swallowed those pills out of bad temper, and I'm very, very sorry about it now. I apologize. Apologize to your children and to everyone else. I apologize. The children didn't even know about it till they read about it in the newspaper twenty years later.

Presenter20:32

But I wonder, of course, whether

Presenter20:33

It it wasn't because you despite the fact that you'd broken out, you did end up being your mother. I mean, maybe we are all our mothers. You ended up at home looking after children despite everything that you'd achieved and your academic distinction.

Presenter20:47

There's an element of truth in that, but also I think that the the conditions were different. My mother really had too little to do in that she did have a lot of domestic help and she wasn't trying to write books at the same time. I had very little domestic help and was trying to write books, so I was trying to do too much.

Presenter21:04

Next piece of music.

Presenter21:06

Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear, sung by Alan Price. Why? Because this is a record that I used to play the children to cheer ourselves up and it reminds me of when they were little and they were so sweet and this is such a sweet song.

Margaret Drabble21:25

Oh, who needs? Money

Speaker 321:29

When you're funny.

Speaker 321:32

A great attraction everywhere with Simon Smith and his dancing bear It's Simon Smith and the amazing dancing bear

Presenter21:48

Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear, sung by Alan Price. You were married fifteen years, Margaret Trabble, and and five novels I worked out, something like that, until about nineteen seventy five, and then you and Clive were divorced. The children would have been, what, about ten, eleven, twelve.

Presenter22:04

How hard was it, or were you sufficiently established and had a decent enough income to to weather that kind of thing?

Presenter22:10

Yes, I I was fine. I was um perfectly viable as a single mother, and Clive remained an attentive father. It was difficult, but it wasn't all that difficult. It was possible. How long were you on your own?

Presenter22:25

For ten years or so. And then you and your now husband, the biographer Michael Holroyd, became, as they say, an item and famously kept separate houses and all that. But not least because you were editing the Oxford Companion to English Literature and you needed space. A five year

Margaret Drabble22:27

Do so?

Presenter22:41

Labour of love or was it hard graft? It was both. It was like assembling a huge jigsaw mosaic. And you did feel that you're you were building something. And I quite like the physical labour of seeing at the end of the day so many more entries had gone into the book. It was satisfying. And satisfying it would appeal to the the kind of neat and tidy, dare I say, housewife in you.

Presenter23:06

Yes, you wouldn't have said that had you seen the absolute chaos in the house with all the. But it wasn't chaos for you, I'm sure. You knew I knew on the whole I knew where things were, but it was a very expanding volume, this. It filled up a lot of the rooms of the house, and the floors, and the shelves, and the desk surfaces. It was a very, very big book. And of course, we didn't have a word processor in those days. The whole thing was done on paper. It meant you couldn't write novels. You wouldn't have had time, and indeed you wouldn't have had space. Did you feel that as a deprivation, or were you pleased to be released from your task? I was too busy to think about it. I knew I'd given myself these five years, and I was busy during the entire five years. What I did worry about was would I be able to get back to writing fiction when I got to the end? I didn't miss the writing fiction. I'd come to a sort of halt in what I was doing, and I was quite glad to have a change. Because they'd started to criticise your novels, hadn't they, the critics? They'd started to say you were kind of middle-class hamster novelist, and that was a pejorative term, I think. But did you feel perhaps that you'd lost your touch in some way? I did think that I was in danger of repeating myself. The last novel I wrote before The Oxford Companion was a novel called The Middle Ground.

Margaret Drabble23:10

But it wasn't chaos for you, I'm sure. You know, I was.

Presenter24:16

Which I thought was a complete mess. I still think it was a novel without any plot. And I thought, no, I I won't write fiction at this stage. I'll do something else. Now, of course, you and Michael do live together, in London and in Somerset. Have the frissons of living apart been replaced by frictions of living together?

Presenter24:34

We get on very well, but that's thanks to Michael, who is a very patient, good, kind man and puts up with anything. Though I'm not too bad myself. We've just grown up and we behave quite courteously, I hope. And you have a butler to do the dirty work, I get up. Yes, we have this wonderful butler called Peel. We often call for him, and then Michael will shuffle in pretending to be Peel. We have this wonderful fictional butler. He's very helpful to us both. Number six. Sibelius is about the only big symphonic composer that I understand. And I understand Sibelius because it's landscape, it's outdoors, it's wordsworthy. And when people say, doesn't that remind you of mountains and lakes? Usually I have absolutely no vision of mountains and lakes. But if it's Sebalius, yes, I do. I do know that this music is inspired by a certain kind of landscape, and I love it.

Presenter26:28

The beginning of the fourth movement of Sibelius's symphony number four in A minor, played by the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstan.

Presenter26:36

Um you've banned your work, as I understand it, Margaret Travel, from being entered for any literary prizes, and you've won many in your time. But but when did you do that, and why?

Presenter26:47

I think it dated back to the middle ground, which I refused to put in for the Booker Prize because I knew it wasn't a very good book. And I don't like winning and I don't like losing. And I thought that the proper thing to do was to just not enter at all. In fact, my books do go in for other things. It's the Booker Prize that has become this huge symbol of something that I won't put my books in for. And it's very annoying to my publishers. But on the other hand, it's a relief to me to avoid the whole issue. I've never judged it, and I don't put my books in for it. So, in a way, again, that's a bit of you taking your fate in your own hands, if you are still. And I suppose I'm painting you now as struggling against your mitochondrial DNA, struggling against being your mother. Do you think.

Presenter27:31

Do you think that is what you've tried to do along the way? Because after all the bottom line of this latest novel is Do We Become Our Mothers? and have you avoided becoming yours?

Presenter27:42

I don't know whether I have or not. I think I have in some directions. And she tended to retire from things.

Margaret Drabble27:45

We hope you have.

Presenter27:51

What about your daughter and your DNA then? Because the third generation woman in in your novel is quite different from the the the second. She's much freer, she's a much more liberated character.

Presenter28:02

Yes, I think my daughter and my sons lead very different lives from anything that we could have imagined, and I think I hope that my daughter and I can discuss things in a way that my mother and I couldn't.

Presenter28:18

Do you mean is it easier for me to love her, for her to love me, for to be love?

Margaret Drabble28:21

But

Presenter28:26

picks up from your book is that

Presenter28:29

You've tried very, very, very, very hard, but you can't really love your mother, and you can't love her memory either.

Presenter28:36

I think that's true, and I would like to think that um my children could love me, but of course inevitably parents love their children more than children love their parents. I think that's a fact of life.

Presenter28:48

And it's possible that my great love for them may not be returned. But I hope it is, and when I see their smiling faces I think that we have moved on.

Presenter28:59

Record number seven. My seventh record is from Handel's Messiah, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth, because it's joyful and triumphant and when I hear this music it is so beautiful that I sometimes think that perhaps my Redeemer does live.

Margaret Drabble30:05

Uh

Presenter30:13

I know that my Redeemer liveth from Handel's Messiah, sung by Isabel Bailey with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Um what about you on a desert island, Margaret Drabble? You're very hard working and you enjoy housework and you enjoy cooking, so it's sort of all all right at that level, isn't it?

Presenter30:31

I might get a bit lonely and miserable. It would be very nice if there were nice fish around, because I quite like watching fish, and if there were some fish to watch in the shallows, I'd be very happy watching them. Could you sort of catch them and cut them up? No, I wouldn't be very good at that. I'd be living on cocoanuts, I think.

Margaret Drabble30:32

Levin Lee.

Margaret Drabble30:40

Watering them

Presenter30:47

As I understand it, quite an anxious person. You've confessed to being worried about little things, so that doesn't bode well, really, for such an existence, does it? But I wouldn't have anyone else to worry about there. I think I worry about other people and annoying and offending them. And I wouldn't have any of that anxiety at all. I'd only have myself to annoy and worry. So I I think I I do like my own company. I used not to, but I do quite like being alone now. I've become more solitary as I've got older. And do you find peace in the in that solitude?

Presenter31:16

I find peace in nature.

Presenter31:19

And I like walking, I like looking at the sky, I like looking at flowers, I like hearing the birds sing and I do find that quite peaceful, yes. Last record. My last record is the duet of Nero and Poppea from Monte Verde's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, because it is such wonderful, pure, beautiful music and these two lovers, who are really terrible people, are having this beautiful, pure love duet.

Margaret Drabble32:05

Pretty cool.

Margaret Drabble32:07

Purdy fear, for the gold.

Margaret Drabble32:11

On this day

Margaret Drabble32:19

For this

Presenter32:46

Daniel Borst as Poppea and Guillemette Laurence as Nerone singing their love duet Porti Miro Portigodo, I gaze upon you, I desire you from Act Three of Mondeverde's Lincolnazione di Poppea, with the concerto vocale conducted by René Jakobs. If you could um only take one of those eight records, Margaret Drabble, which one would you take? Rather to my surprise, I think I would take the Messiah, because it is full of

Presenter33:13

Joy and triumph, and there's a lot of vocal choruses with a lot of people singing. I actually think that I would listen to that and feel uplifted. What about your book?

Presenter33:25

I would like to take The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett, an old favourite of mine.

Presenter33:32

I thought of taking some poetry, but I know all the poetry um off by heart that I love best. So Arnold Bennett I can reread and reread, and it's a book that takes me back to my childhood and to the regions, and it's just an endlessly interesting story. And your luxury.

Presenter33:50

My luxury would be a painting, if I'm allowed a painting. And I would like a painting by Maurice Cockrell. I have a painting by him, which I might take, but I would really like to take a painting called Ariadne's Thread, because it's too big and I can't afford it. And I would like to look at this vast painting which wouldn't fit in my house, and I would be happy gazing at his wonderful use of oil. It would cheer me up also.

Presenter34:16

Margaret Trable, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 334:27

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