Anne Fine

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. Her readers are children, so much so that this year she was appointed the Children's Laureate. In the past twenty years she's written forty books for children, won every important children's literary award, some of them twice, and enjoyed the supreme accolade of having every one of her books remain in print. Her writing is comic but with serious themes, family, relationships, divorce, child abuse, and through it she hopes to inculcate a culture of reading. The book, she says, is not going to go away. She is Anne Fine. But the book can be made into a tape or a film, Anne, and so avoid being read. Famously, of course, your Madame Doubtfire was made into Mrs. Doubtfire, that wonderful vehicle for Robin Williams, which you didn't like very much, did you? Well, no, but I was polite enough at the time to lie low and say nothing.

Anne Fine1:17

Well, no

Presenter1:21

But isn't it the nature of films that they will always be slightly less than the book? They're far more than slightly less, I think. I think tapes are fine, because there you've got the whole words. But I think what's wrong with film is that all you see is what happens next, and you see it, as Joe Queenan says, at the producer's speed, and what people say. But you don't actually get underneath that. You don't see what they're feeling, what they're really thinking, what

Anne Fine1:26

Oh I think then.

Presenter1:48

They might think they think something, but actually be feeling something underneath that they don't even know about. Sure, but do you fear that?

Anne Fine1:54

Uh

Speaker 21:54

Two.

Anne Fine1:54

But

Presenter1:56

People can't be bothered anymore because they can they don't have to read Jane Austen, they can see the films. Well, every time I get really, really depressed about this, I remember that, you know, more copies of Thackeray's Vanity Fair are sold in a year now than were read in his whole lifetime, and I try and cheer myself up. So, what would you say to a child who said, I don't really need to read, because I see lots of stories on the television and I can see them on the films, and I can have them read to me by Stephen Fry. Well, you don't lecture them, obviously, that's the biggest turn-off of all. But I think if you can only get the right book to the right child at the right time, you often can make them realize just unconsciously that there's some depth in them, something that fulfils some need they have, and they do become passionate readers. Tell me about your first record.

Presenter2:47

I love opera, I love Mozart, I love Don Giovanni probably more than any. And I think when when you're a writer you're constantly dealing with writing about quite deep emotions and

Presenter2:59

One of the things that comes out in all the books I write is that there are people who use the word love and and then there is the action that shows w whether or not you really do. And I think that here we have Donna Ottavio basically singing about the fact that if she's not happy, he's not happy. And I think that that is the root of love, that you care.

Presenter3:22

So much about the other person that it isn't just a word, it's a way of making the world right for somebody.

Speaker 33:30

Swastika

Presenter4:26

Luigi Alva as Don Ottavio singing Dalla suapace, Mine Be Her Burden, from Act One of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. Certainly family love, Anne Fine, is very much tested in your books and doesn't always win through. I get the impression that your view is that every family is dysfunctional. No such thing as a happy family. I doubt if there is any such thing as a truly happy family. I think it's the sort of mythology we all cling to. I just think life is so complicated and it is so difficult.

Speaker 24:58

No.

Presenter4:59

This business of you sort of try and cram all your kittens in a basket and one's still popping out the other end. I mean, there's nothing to be done about families except sort of grit your teeth, get through and do your best. Well, you say get through, and usually that means cover up and come back together again and spend Christmas together, even if you don't like Auntie Mabel or whatever it is. But in in your books they tend not to, I'm thinking, and this is an adult novel, Telling Liddy, which is a story of four middle-aged sisters who seem to be close and affectionate, but they fall out disastrously over a family issue and they don't come back together again. I mean

Presenter5:32

It seems you don't actually subscribe to the idea that blood is thicker than water. Well, I look around me, I talk to people. I I think it's quite interesting that, you know, sort of people decide that they're going to give up cigarettes and they fail over and over, and people decide that they're going to stop drinking, and they're having a drink the very next day, and people say, I'm never going to speak to her again, and no problem. They they never speak to her again. So obviously underneath even the closest relationships are these things boiling up and and some one tiny thing will be the last straw and and and and everything falls apart. I suppose that's okay with your siblings, but it's when it comes to your parents and again you dealt with that issue in in All Bones and Lies, this pitiless portrait of this old mother, Nora, who's

Anne Fine6:08

Nice.

Presenter6:20

Completely dreadful person, and yet her son is trying to be nice to her. But what you're saying is you don't have to be nice to your ageing parents if you don't like them or if they're nasty. Oh no, that's absolutely not the moral of the book. I would have thought that the moral was more that you must find a way of doing what you feel is the right thing to do and make it somehow fit in with your own way of viewing yourself. I mean, Colin takes his mother home to look after her. But he stops feeling guilty about not liking her. Yes. That's the point. Yes. And you're giving people licence to relieve themselves of guilt. I would hope so. And I think when people talk very honestly about their feelings, these are the things that people will say in private. I mean, in a way, I feel you can't be judged for your feelings. You can only be judged by your actions.

Anne Fine6:51

But he's still

Anne Fine6:54

Yes, that's the point you're going to have.

Presenter7:14

Second record. Talking about families, I mean I have do have four sisters. I look back now and I can understand how my dad went grey at thirty because there were always boys in the house. In those days they always had motorbikes.

Presenter7:31

I just don't know how he stayed sane, waiting for the last

Presenter7:36

Harvey Bonneville or whatever they were called, to come home at night. I mean, I would have gone mad. I mean, only have two children, and I go mad worrying about them. So this is sort of really reminds me of teenage at home.

Anne Fine7:52

That's what we

Anne Fine7:55

That yellow dress you wore when we went dancing Sunday nights.

Anne Fine8:00

I thought you could be in the movies when they didn't believe that

Anne Fine8:05

Right.

Anne Fine8:07

To wash the memory for I'm afraid I can't forget you and there to walk the

Presenter8:15

Joe Brown and the brothers and that's what love will be like. Takes you right back there in there.

Presenter8:21

You say you were one of five sisters, but the truth is you were the second of the five and the other three were triplets. That's right. My my parents were trying for a boy.

Presenter8:31

All in one go. But I defy that not to have had some effect on you. You must have been quite squeezed. You know, we're we're we're taught that middle children often squeeze, but to be squeezed from below by triplets must have been quite an experience. Well, the story in the family is that I was uh a very good little extra mother and of course y y you would have needed one. And I know that I was packed off to school a little bit early. But you liked school. You were obviously happy then in that case, weren't you? I think so. I think so. I always enjoyed it. Do you remember learning? We always hope that our writers remember the moment when they read their first song. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean I've always said I can't remember not to be able to read.

Anne Fine9:03

Absolutely.

Presenter9:09

But I I can remember actually learning to read. I mean, w we we had these big alphabets and we had to use our pointy finger and touch the letter and make the sound. And I remember just dreading getting to V because I loathed the vibration on the bottom lip when you do that v and and it just used to drive me mad. I dread it coming. And did you go home and teach the triplets or?

Presenter9:33

I think I did constantly make pretend books and run schools. I was probably the most awful elder sister in in that respect. I mean, we had a a sort of garage in the garden and I seemed to remember roping them in to play schools with them quite often. And you were the teacher? Oh, yes. And you went on to teach uh after university, I think, and didn't last very long, was it? No, I didn't last very long. Well, for one thing, I looked younger than most of my pupils. I was sort of quite tubby and with a little round face.

Anne Fine9:48

And you would

Anne Fine9:49

Oh, yes.

Anne Fine9:55

No I

Anne Fine9:56

What?

Presenter10:03

And I remember on Parents' Evening people were quite scathing. And the line is that you were on Valium by Christmas and you'd resign by Easter. Absolutely. Absolutely. Never, ever.

Presenter10:13

remembered a day with so much pleasure as the day I dared give my notice in to um Mother's Superior. But you you say you have a low boredom threshold, but you've kind of been bored by them, just challenged in a way that they're just terrified, very harrowed.

Anne Fine10:22

Weren't they just terrified?

Presenter10:25

And you like being on your own, don't you? Yes, I do. I think probably I found that even the the staff room, you know, you just come out of of of one draining experience and you go into a staff room and then it's sort of having to remember whose cat has had a hysterectomy and whose granny's ill and who takes sugar in their tea. It was just exhausting. I came home with a splitting headache every day. I would never, ever do it again.

Presenter10:50

Stand by for the letters from staff rooms across the land. Record number three. You can answer them, by the way.

Presenter10:57

Well

Presenter10:58

I got married at twenty. I mean, it seemed old enough to me at the time. Now I realise it was practically a child bride. And I married a man who was a philosopher by trade, but had always wanted to be a musician. And every night he played the piano for hours and hours and hours. And he was an owl, and I'm a lark. And at a certain point, I would burst out of the bedroom and I would berate him and say, You have to stop, you are absolutely driving me mad. And that is the point at which, realizing the game was up, he would play this.

Presenter12:34

Prelude number nine in E major from book one of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Friedrich Gulda. Very calming. Memories of your first marriage to the father of your two daughters. I think it was when the first of those girls was born that you wrote your first book, wasn't it? It was certainly in in the sort is now a sort of grey period, I can't really um disentangle, but after she was born I I was at home.

Presenter13:00

and couldn't get to the library one day because of a blizzard and sat and wrote the first book. But you must have written something before that, because you'd have been about m well, early twenties anyway, somewhere around there, twenty two, twenty three. I'd written a lot in school. We did an awful lot of writing in school. And I know that I did once ask Miss Sinton in a rather bad-tempered English lesson. I stopped her when she was marching up and down the aisles and I said to her, Could I be a writer? and she said to me, Oh, yes, you could, in a tone of voice that implied it was no great compliment at all.

Speaker 313:29

Ten of

Presenter13:33

And I remember feeling a sense of satisfaction, but then the whole idea went under again and I did politics at university. Not English. Not English. But you wrote this book, The Summer House Loon, it was called. And in fact, it's it's it's very sweet really, isn't it, in the proper sense of the word. It's very sunny, very light. People are very nice in it. Um it's without a doubt the only nice book I've ever

Anne Fine13:54

Yeah.

Speaker 213:54

Impact.

Anne Fine13:55

Ah

Presenter13:59

You've said that y your books tend to start with a kind of image, a detail that you fasten on, and then the process is like scraping the sand away from that image. Can you give me an example of that? Would you elucidate that? Sometimes it's just a sentence. Martin Amos describes it best. He he says it's like a nudge. You feel this nudge and you think, Oh, that's what I'm going to write about next. Well, yes, he says they're actually in his head. They're just waiting to come out, that he's the sort of conduit. Is that how you feel?

Presenter14:26

In a way, yes. I feel y I mean I I do subscribe to that you don't choose the book, the book chooses you uh theory. And it just seems to be that when I sit down at the desk and and I use a pencil and a rubber, so I'm sort of quite quiet, it just seems to work the way it did back in primary school.

Presenter14:49

I you talk about collecting details, but do you ever do any formal research? Yes, I do. I tend to read a lot. If I'm writing about something like divorce or separation or step families, I will read a lot of social work reports. I will read a lot of work about actual case studies. What about the Tulip Touch, which is again a a children's book. It's about a little girl and a an award-winning one. A little girl called Tulip who obviously suffers at the hands of her father. He's violent towards her. And she's very manipulative in her relationships with other little girls and she ends up

Presenter15:21

um, in her jealousy and confusion, I suppose, becoming a narciss.

Presenter15:25

Did did that, for example, have any root in reality? Did you read about a a child arsonist in a social report? I think everybody remembers that about two years before that book w w was written, about ten years ago, there were a couple of really, really horrid murders in which very young children were implicated.

Presenter15:44

And we all had a great social shock, and a lot of writers at that time wrote books about the dark side of childhood. And I think that although the murders themselves were shocking, what what was particularly shocking for me was the completely extraordinary response of Derray you know, mostly the tabloid newspapers of this sort of lock em up and throw away the key and they're born evil and it it just struck me as so unthinking and so uncompassionate and I was sh really shocked by it. It as if people really did not realize that children

Presenter16:21

are not born one way or another, they become one way or another. And I wanted to show that. But your detractors would say that in doing that you reinforce the negative images. You actually say n not that you condone arson in this in this example, but that you

Presenter16:38

So you suggest that it can be explained, that there can be reasons for it, so it's sort of justified, and children are reading that. No, I don't think that that comes through in the book at all. I think what does come through in the book is how many people have looked away, how many people have just pretended that it doesn't matter. And that is something I feel very strongly about. I feel that we are a society that abandons an awful lot of children to an awful lot of stress and difficulty and poor supervision and poor education. And then, when one or two of them fall through the net, there's nothing there to catch them when they fall. And when they've really fallen, we sit and blame them.

Presenter17:17

And when they read a book like yours, how does it help them?

Presenter17:21

Well, I suspect that what happens with fiction is that it increases the sense of the complexity of things. And so it is very difficult after you read a fine piece of fiction to say something like, It's perfectly simple, you just and normally when you hear somebody say the words it's perfectly simple, you just you're about to hear an idiot speak.

Presenter17:43

Record number four.

Presenter17:45

When we lived in the States, which we did, the the children were young. Th America is a lovely place to bring up children when they're young because you never have to carry anything, you can park next to everything, everything's always open and and w they had such merry times and this is a record that reminds me of them dancing about the house for hours.

Anne Fine18:07

Oh, I can't keep it in

Anne Fine18:09

I can't keep it and I've gotta let it out.

Anne Fine18:13

I've gotta show the world, world's gotta see See all the love, love that's in me I say to why walk alone, why worry when it's warm over here?

Anne Fine18:25

You've got so much to say, say what you mean, mean what you think and think anything awhile

Presenter18:34

Kat Stevens and happy memories of living in America where you went for six months because of your husband's job and stayed for years. Seven years. But you didn't like it and you weren't happy there. Well, I would never have wanted to emigrate. I mean, I missed the countryside. I missed the weather so much. I mean, we were in California for five years, and that relentless blue and gold just drove me mad. Oh, no, I woke up craving for mist and drips and rain and oh and snow. I just wanted it so much. And poor Kit, he was desperate to stay in the States because he just adored it. For him, it truly was a newfound land. And so he moved me across still hoping that it was weather. And we ended up in Michigan, for heaven's sake, which is like nine months of snow on the ground.

Anne Fine18:57

Yeah.

Speaker 218:57

So do that thing.

Presenter19:23

Oh, Grim. And that was where I cracked. And I just said I've had enough. This is not my country. And I'm going home. And you've got a year and a half to find a job. And he filled in all these application forms. He couldn't bring himself to sign them. And in the end w we just sort of

Presenter19:41

Well, we went on to a half time marriage for a while. He went on to half salary and only taught one semester and was in Edinburgh, back in Edinburgh for six months of the year and then out for six months of the year. But of course in the long run it became obvious that I didn't know who he was talking about. He'd have a new colleague. I hadn't even met them. And so in the end we just packed it in.

Presenter20:03

Don't be sad. Well, awfully sad. I think it's a geographical thing. I think so. I think that, you know, the wedding c ceremony I think is a truly beautiful and wise

Anne Fine20:05

I feel

Presenter20:14

Ceremony, but I do think it should include in all those promises at home and abroad as well as for richer, for poorer, and all those. Because actually I think homesickness is a horribly underrated emotion. And it affected your writing, didn't it? I think it did. I think because I was away, I mean, one of the good things about being away is that you can slip off all these skins of earlier selves. You don't constantly have somebody holding this mirror up to you saying, This is, you know, who you are. Every time you move, you can be a different person. You can leave something behind and become more something else. And so it's a huge opportunity for changing. And I did benefit from that enormously, I think. How old were your daughters when you came back? When we came back, they were eleven and

Anne Fine20:57

But we can

Presenter21:00

9. Divorce is something that often crops up in your books, and the loudest message I hear coming across is that children understand much better than we think they do. Oh, I think they do. I think so many parents comfort themselves with this old canard. I don't know how it started. Children blame themselves for the divorce. You hear it.

Presenter21:22

Over and over and over. I personally have yet to meet the child who blames themselves for the divorce. Most children know exactly where to place the blame. They're just too polite or too anxious to say a word about it.

Presenter21:36

Next record.

Presenter21:38

The next record is dire straits. I mean, one of the things that children's writers have to do is be on the road constantly sometimes. You you feel you might as well be running a an opera touring company or something. And I have I'm a speeder. I mean I'm going to say it fearlessly. And I try and calm down. And so when I know that I'm going to be in trouble soon, I put on this.

Anne Fine22:06

Never lasted lie.

Anne Fine22:12

We gotta ride all the way.

Anne Fine22:16

Edad.

Anne Fine22:19

Got my ticket to hell.

Anne Fine22:22

The everlasting love

Speaker 222:29

On the way to paradise

Presenter22:33

Dire Straits and Ticket to Heaven and the image of Anne Fine speeding around the country talking to children in schools, bookshops, town halls. What they like about you, I would suspect, I mean, can you confirm this, is your lack of sentimentality, the fact that you're not patronising, then you're not rushing around reassuring them, you're saying this is how it is.

Presenter22:57

I think so. I I think the secret of dealing with children is to remember that um they might be half size, but they're not not half brained. I just treat them as if they were small adults. You only need to notice that if if your best friend comes round to complain about her marriage,

Anne Fine23:09

Yeah.

Presenter23:15

your children cannot sit quietly enough in the kitchen earwigging away and you send them off to do this and they're back for a drink of water. I mean, you know, adult conversation has always fascinated children. Yeah, it's riveting.

Anne Fine23:28

Uh

Speaker 223:28

Yeah.

Presenter23:29

But but there there is a kind of moral approach, nevertheless. You're not, as we've said, as harsh in your children's books. And take, for example, Goggle Eyes, My War with Goggle Eyes, which is the one that that deals with divorce and the new partner in the mother's life. And it's one child reassuring another that it'll kind of be okay in the end, and this goggle eyed person

Presenter23:48

can be quite a nice guy, really. So you you know you are giving them some optimism there. No, well I don't know. I try and be honest. I try and offer them something hopeful, some way to go at the end. But I might say that Goggle Eyes is one of the very few books that I've ever had complaints about. I've actually had letters from children who who have said, well, I liked your book.

Speaker 323:53

I had to force

Presenter24:13

But I have a stepfather or mother or brother or what have you, your mum's boyfriend or dad's girlfriend, and I will never, ever, ever get to like him or her. And that was in fact the reason why I went back to write Step by Wicked Step, which is a series of short stories about reconstitutive families. Now, of course, I'm in one, so I know that, you know, I know the added pressures of them, but I only wrote Step by Wicked Step because the complaints about goggle eyes. So maybe I am too optimistic with the children's stuff sometimes. But that's been your experience. Yes, well, my experience has actually been a pretty good one. But I have not had any of the extra pressures that many, many of these families have, of pressures of housing, pressures of finance, pressures of job. I couldn't have had it more easy. I also have a gem of a partner. And here he is, I think, mirrored in this next record. Is that right? Yes. Tell me about it.

Anne Fine25:11

Okay.

Presenter25:13

Well, I'd never really met somebody like Dick Warren before. I mean, I met him on a train and watched him all the way from London up to Edinburgh, playing that awful game where you add a side to a box and the person who finishes the box puts their initial in it. A game of toe-clenching, staggering boringness. And I watched this man play this game with his six-year-old daughter for thirteen hours. I mean, I was sort of lost in admiration for his patience. It turned out later I was completely mistaken. He actually enjoys this game.

Presenter25:48

which I think speaks volumes. But I had fallen in love with him by the end of the train journey and now do live with him. He's just so considerate and so courteous and so kind and I am none of those things since I'm continually lost in admiration and this always makes me think of him.

Speaker 226:08

Sweet Sir Galahad came in through the window in the night when the moon was in the yard

Speaker 226:21

He took her hand in his and shook the long hair from his neck. Then he told her she'd been working much too hard.

Presenter26:33

Sweet Sir Galahad, sung by Joan Byrse. Well, Dick's ears will be burning, won't they? Nice tribute. So now you're children's laureate, Anne. Um you're the second. The first was Sir Quentin Blake, post created by the suggestion of of Ted Hughes, I think the former poet laureate. Two year post, you get a small payment.

Presenter26:54

But you have to make something happen. You have to criticise somebody. And you've been quite critical of publishers, I think, for them allowing too much on to the market that wasn't good enough.

Presenter27:05

Well, I think I've always criticised publishers for over-producing too much rubbish. It's the same problem of over-publishing and schlocky writing as you get in the adult world. But it doesn't matter so much in the adult world because either you are a reader or you aren't. And if you know that you're a reader and you enjoy books and you don't like five books in a row, you don't presume that you're not a reader. You just presume you read five bad books. And the problem with children is, of course, that they could wade their way through this sort of morass of toshy literature and never come across a single book in a whole year that actually spoke to them or enchanted them or worked for them. But it's a heretical suggestion for a writer, isn't it? That fewer books should be published. Oh, I don't know. You've just got to improve the filter, haven't you? You've got to choose better books to publish. Well, I don't know. Sometimes you feel I mean, I know that they've become I mean, they're not books anymore, they're almost become gifty things. But if you took out all the telety I mean, I know you're not going to, I know this is a dream world, but but if you took out all the Disney and and the Teletyans, you you could be left with some really fine books written by s and we have some really fine writers in this country, and it's almost it's almost criminal, isn't it, that so many children have missed so many of them.

Presenter28:27

at a time when they could have meant so much.

Presenter28:30

Record number seven. This is from Bach's B minor Mass. It's um Domine Deus. And I've chosen it just because I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces of music and I think it would be a great comfort to me on my island.

Speaker 229:19

Uh

Speaker 329:19

Yeah.

Speaker 329:26

Yeah.

Speaker 229:26

Uh

Presenter29:42

Rotrod Hansman and Court Ekvilot singing Domine Deus from Bach's B minor Mass with the Concentus Musicus Veen conducted by Nicholas Arnoncourt.

Presenter29:53

And find from everything you've said you're going to be okay on this desert island. I mean you don't like too many people around and uh you're not into new technology. You write with a stubby old black pencil. Yes, you would think so, wouldn't you? But in fact I'm going to be so miserable you wouldn't believe. The more I think about it, the more horrific I find the idea. Why? I don't know. I think

Anne Fine30:03

Yeah.

Presenter30:14

I mean, I suppose I can't help but feel it must be sunny and I don't like the sun very much. Well, even that's true.

Anne Fine30:19

Go to a

Anne Fine30:23

Uh

Speaker 230:23

Yeah.

Anne Fine30:23

That's true.

Presenter30:24

But it's all in your mind. I mean, you can have the climate like you want it. I think I'll be miserable. I think I'll hate it. I think it's probably because I have such a low boredom threshold and you're only allowing two books and ten records and I'll be just screaming by lunchtime. Or even eight records. What's the eighth and the last one?

Presenter30:49

It's from Handel's Messiah, which, like everybody else, I love. I have absolutely no religious beliefs at all, but I do think that you can't go through life without knowing that the world is full of people who do somehow feel that they can make a difference and make a difference for the better. And it seems to me that this piece of music encapsulates that.

Speaker 331:19

We deal with the

Speaker 331:32

Uh

Speaker 331:33

Bitches.

Speaker 332:06

In earth, and that he shall

Presenter32:14

Heather Harper singing I Know That My Redeemer Liveth from Handel's Messiah, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davies. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Anne, which one would you take?

Presenter32:25

I think it would be.

Presenter32:27

Domine Deus, the Bach.

Presenter32:31

Because it's so beautiful.

Presenter32:33

And what about your book? You get the Bible, you get the complete works of Shakespeare. What about one book? I would take Philip Larkin's collected poems. I I think

Anne Fine32:39

I should

Presenter32:45

In some ways we share the same dark view of the world.

Presenter32:49

And I also think he is.

Presenter32:51

Probably.

Presenter32:53

one of the finest, if not the finest, poet of the last century.

Presenter32:57

And what about your luxury? I wanted clean sheets, but that presumed that I was staying and and and then I thought, well, you know, I could write, it would be peaceful, I would be able to write, so I thought I should have paper and pencils.

Presenter33:10

And then I thought, well, if I'm not rescued, it would make me so miserable to write a book that no one would ever read. So then I thought, well, I would do something plungent. You know, I'd learn to play the oboe or the core anglais or even the tuba if it wasn't such an effort. You know, I had sort of memories of tubby the tube and I could play. So if I was going to be rescued,

Speaker 333:20

I hope.

Anne Fine33:21

Uh

Presenter33:30

I would like paper and pencil.

Presenter33:32

And if I was not going to be rescued, I would like a teach yourself the oboe book and an oboe. So which one are you going to take? Well, this actually has been a real problem because it really shows, doesn't it, whether I have an optimistic personality at root or not.

Presenter33:48

I think I'll take the pencil and paper and hope.

Presenter33:53

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

Speaker 334:04

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