Fay Godwin

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a photographer. It's her love of landscape which made her reputation. But her career began with portraits of famous literary figures such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, whom she'd met through her work in publishing.

Presenter0:44

In nineteen seventy nine she collaborated with Ted Hughes on a book about the valleys of West Yorkshire where he'd spent his childhood, and really from then on land and its relationship to man became the central theme of her work.

Presenter0:57

A passionate walker, she also became President of the Ramblers' Association, using her photographic skills to campaign for walkers' rights of way. Determinedly unromantic, her dispassionate lens has created a truthfully evocative picture of Britain at the end of the twentieth century. If people look closely at my pictures, she says, they might possibly see something else as well. She is Faye

Presenter1:22

I'm looking, Faye, at a picture you took some twenty years ago of Dover, the Eastern Docks. It's taken from up on the cliff, um, looking across to the docks, where a ferry is coming in and a ferry is going out. It's a heavy winter's day, and the cliffs are coated with snow. It's full of chilly atmosphere, and I know it's a picture that you're particularly proud of.

Fay Godwin1:41

Can you tell me why? Well, I was interested in that because I'd been to the White Cliffs of Dover about five times and hadn't ever even got the camera out. And then I woke up in London and it had snowed, so I thought, well, I'll try. The usual way, half an inch of snow meant it took several hours to get down to Dover. And I had just a few minutes to take pictures. But there was the snow and the white cliffs of Dover. And what's so interesting is that I got it with a couple of ferries doing their stuff. That was luck, was it? That was absolutely. Well, I didn't have much time to do it. Well, I may have waited, probably took two or three exposures. But what was very interesting

Presenter2:10

Okay.

Speaker 12:10

Well, I may have waited.

Fay Godwin2:16

Is that later on, when the Council for the Protection of Rural England

Fay Godwin2:21

came on the scene to campaign against the Channel Tunnel.

Fay Godwin2:25

That picture became extremely resonant because

Fay Godwin2:28

Those ferries may become redundant. Folkestone has already gone into total decline. So there are often things like that that happen with photographs, which are very interesting.

Presenter2:33

Yeah.

Fay Godwin2:37

But that

Presenter2:37

That kind of campaigning element of your work was something that developed much later, wasn't it? In the beginning, that wasn't what you were doing at all. You were taking them for the beauty of the landscape. Absolutely. But not beautiful Britain. You are not a a photographer of beautiful Britain.

Fay Godwin2:50

No, no, if there was a nuclear power station there, I photographed it too. If there was a caravan site.

Presenter2:50

No, I'm just

Fay Godwin2:56

It got photographed along with the others, but I wasn't making any particular point. Somehow, something came through what I felt about it.

Presenter3:02

And indeed, when you say, as I quoted you in my introduction as saying, you know, if people look closely at my pictures, they might see something else as well, do you then go out looking for that? Or is it something that happens? Or is it your instinct? What would you put it down to?

Fay Godwin3:16

I absolutely don't go looking for it. I know that I wanted a picture of Dover Cliffs, for instance. And then what happens is that I look uh at the pictures. For me, the blood is on the cutting room floor. Some people edit before they take the pictures. I take a lot of pictures and then spend an awful lot of time editing very carefully.

Presenter3:35

And when you say editing, what do you mean choosing which ones? Choosing which ones. Or do you mean exactly how you print it? What do you mean?

Fay Godwin3:37

Choosing which ones.

Fay Godwin3:40

No, no, no. I I virtually never crop my pictures. And to me, making a meaningful a sequence that has some kind of meaning is the really important part about it.

Presenter3:51

And what about this one? I'm looking now at a you you call it Large White Cloud near Bilsington. And again, it's it's it's very dramatic. It's black and white. They're all black and white, the ones we're talking about. In fact, mom. Most of your work has been black and white until last year. But this is this is burnt corn, isn't it? It's the great furrows of it undulating across into the distance. And then

Fay Godwin4:02

And then the line and everything.

Fay Godwin4:04

Until the last ten years, yeah.

Presenter4:13

Up on the horizon, dominating the top half of the picture, this is an enormous kind of blob of cumulus, this very dramatic cloud.

Fay Godwin4:19

It certainly is, and the sort of thing one usually sees while driving along a motorway or in a train, when you can't photograph it. And for once, I had my tripod set up, exposures worked out, and I was photographing the monument, Bilsington Monument, which was just off to the left. And the large white cloud came along and completely upstaged the monument. So in the end, I used it in my book, and I just said large white cloud near Bilsington. Poor old monument got left out. Tell me about your first record.

Fay Godwin4:47

I very much like Britain's cello suites, like cello for starters, but they had a feeling of being about the landscape for me. They probably were more about the East Anglian landscape, but the Romney Marsh landscape isn't so different. And there's a sort of mournfulness in the kind of minor keys in the music. There is a sense of desolation, but it's also extremely beautiful. Reediness, stretches of water, whole flocks or single birds flying over. And I feel that this music really gives me the feeling of that landscape.

Speaker 45:57

Mm-hmm.

Presenter6:18

Part of Britain's Suite for Cello, Op. 72, played by Ross Tropovich. I mentioned, Faye Godwin, that you collaborated on a book with Ted Hughes back in'79. One of your earliest books. A huge opportunity great opportunity for you really to make your name. All about his birthplace in the Calder Valley. He wanted to show. How it had changed in his lifetime, I think, didn't he? How the the mills and the chapels had died in that middle section of the twentieth century.

Speaker 16:38

Yeah.

Fay Godwin6:41

Yeah.

Presenter6:43

How did you set about it, the two of you? Did your pictures inspire his poems, or vice versa?

Fay Godwin6:49

Well, typical Ted Hughes, he said there is this area. I met him in 1970 when I did his portrait.

Fay Godwin6:55

And he asked me whether I was doing landscape, and I said, Well, I do go for a walk with a camera, but I'm quite interested.

Fay Godwin7:01

Then I didn't hear from him again till nineteen seventy six. Well, I had been going up to Yorkshire, so I'd already taken quite a lot of the pictures. Oh, so you'd been there? Oh, yes, I'd been going up. I decided it was a project uh because I'd suddenly been left alone with my

Fay Godwin7:15

Two children.

Fay Godwin7:17

But I became very fond of the area, so when Ted Hughes came back in in nineteen seventy six and said, I'm ready now, are you?

Fay Godwin7:23

I said, well, I'm ready but ready to start all over again, apart from just a few which I put forward, and he started writing poems with those few. And then they those poems triggered off new photographs for me, and we very much did not want to illustrate each other's work.

Presenter7:39

Um

Fay Godwin7:40

This is Mount

Presenter7:41

John, the

Fay Godwin7:41

Diane the

Presenter7:41

Wesleyan chapel with a snowy graveyard full of these kind of gravestones leaning one way or another.

Fay Godwin7:44

Yeah.

Presenter7:48

Very evocative, actually, though.

Fay Godwin7:50

Well, you see, uh it was very evocative, A, of Hughes's poetry, but also for me, it was my first experience of uh somewhere in England which wasn't the soft south. And I went up there at night and there were these switchback roads and these amazing chapels, you know, which were really quite scary and the light was very scary, very forbidding and very scary. And in I went to Hawarth, where the Bronte parsonage is, and stayed overlooking the parsonage. And when I woke up in the morning, there were these moors, and I began to see the countryside that I'd been traversing in the car, and it was a total revelation to me. It was so different. It was gritty, it was dark, because every time I went up there it'd be nice bright sunshine on the M1 as I went up, and then I'd turn left and go into very black it was always raining, it was millstone grit, the walls were black, the s the towns were still black.

Fay Godwin8:42

So it was my first experience of exploring the British landscape in a different way.

Presenter8:47

You've worked with quite a few writers, I think John Fowles, Alan Sillitow, Richard Ingrams, as well, on various as aspects of our landscape and shores and marshes and so on.

Fay Godwin8:49

Yeah.

Fay Godwin8:51

Mr. Dingham's as well on

Presenter8:56

Were they all such relaxed and easy collaborations?

Fay Godwin9:00

No, Ted Hughes was the only person I coll collaborated with closely where there was real give and take. Because there's one, I'm just looking for it now.

Presenter9:07

There's a wonderful picture that occurred in your book with Richard Ingram about the Romney Marshes, which is a very witty picture. This is the Royal Military Canal in East Sussex, and standing up on top of the bank, you've just got a whole audience, a row of sheep, just sort of staring at you as well.

Fay Godwin9:12

Oh yes.

Speaker 49:13

Yeah.

Fay Godwin9:21

Decode

Fay Godwin9:23

Just sort of staring at one that doesn't quite line up.

Presenter9:28

Yeah, it's just falling off the end there but it's not a problem.

Fay Godwin9:29

Well I'd taken that years before we did the book. I mean like ten years before. But um how did I do it? Well, when I used to buy a new lens I'd go out with only that lens and it was a wide angle lens. Otherwise I'd never have got it. By the time I'd changed the lens to a wide angle to accommodate all the sheep.

Fay Godwin9:46

The sheep would have fallen apart bleating, as the poem says. Tell me about your second record. When I escaped from my rather miserable teens, where I'd been living with my father for four years after my mother died, I went off to England and then I travelled a certain amount. And eventually rock and roll came along and I really enjoyed the music. I always loved dancing.

Fay Godwin10:09

And I love the sheer exuberance of tutti frutti.

Speaker 410:13

Wa-bam-ba-loom-bam balam-bom-bom to the food over to the food over

Speaker 410:21

Oh rude, to the food, oh rude

Speaker 410:25

Rooty booty, oh hoodie

Speaker 410:28

Oh, my baba, my ball, bum, bum, I got a girl. Her name's Sue.

Speaker 410:33

She knows just what to do.

Speaker 410:35

I got a girl named Su

Speaker 410:38

To know that's what to do

Presenter10:41

Little Richard and Toottie Fruttie, and um memories of your your wildish early adulthood, really. It seems reading about you, and it's kind of proof that life is a lottery, that you mightn't have picked up a camera if you hadn't broken your leg skiing at some point in this wild youth.

Fay Godwin10:58

Well, I'm not sure whether the skiing was the thing, but I did buy a camera then,'cause I had six months in plaster and I was in hospital for weeks as well.

Fay Godwin11:05

But I I I really got going on photography when I had children, because um for some reason my husband wasn't awfully good at handling a camera, he couldn't tell which side was which.

Fay Godwin11:15

And it seemed to come naturally once I started. But these were snaps of the children? They were snaps, family snaps. I see. Out walking or or mostly at home. No, no, there virtually nothing was the landscape.

Presenter11:21

Alex Walkie.

Presenter11:23

No one works mostly at home.

Presenter11:27

But did you immediately feel at home? Did you think this is

Fay Godwin11:29

Yeah, this is good. This is what I

Presenter11:30

This is what I can do this.

Fay Godwin11:32

All my early work was people photographs. I did a huge amount of documenting people.

Presenter11:37

Before all of that, you you'd painted, hadn't you? You'd done pictures.

Fay Godwin11:40

I had been to s art cla evening classes in painting and um of course my mother was an artist, so I'd painted a bit with her. But um unfortunately she died when I was still too young for her to have take me through th the feeling, oh, well, I'll never be

Fay Godwin11:54

any good because she was so good. When we went together I could see how awful mine was. But you lived abroad a lot. I mean, did your mom

Presenter12:00

Mother take you'cause your father was a a diplomat. Did your mother or he your father take you to art galleries? Did you?

Fay Godwin12:02

Yeah.

Presenter12:07

Uh did you see pictures of any

Fay Godwin12:09

Any kind?

Fay Godwin12:10

Oh, yes, we did go to some galleries in Italy, in Rome. Then that was during the last two years of her life. She was living there and I was able to go out to for a summer holiday there, and we did go to galleries then. So maybe that started the interest.

Presenter12:13

Then

Presenter12:21

Mm-hmm.

Presenter12:23

She died on your seventeenth birthday. Yes. We were you were here at school at that time, then.

Fay Godwin12:27

No, I I was mm in London. She was in she died in London in the end.

Fay Godwin12:33

I think she tried to prepare us for it, but I think children just don't believe their parent is going to die. I certainly didn't until.

Fay Godwin12:41

the day before she died, and um then I could see and she said, I can't bear to see you because she saw my distress. It's something that has been a a great sorrow to me ever since. I still can't think about it without

Fay Godwin12:55

a tremendous feeling of loss, which I think has reinforced some of the my my sort of losses and bereavements in my life have been all to do with family.

Fay Godwin13:05

And I think that that early loss has made me much more unable to cope with terrible feelings of loss when they happen.

Fay Godwin13:13

Next record.

Fay Godwin13:16

Well, this is a rather more cheery one. My mother used to play records when we went to bed, but she used to play things like The Nutcracker Suite and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and they they became hackneyed by the time I was about three. And the first record I sort of really consciously remember was in Greece called At the Balalaika. And I wonder whether at ten it was my first sort of latching on to pop music of some kind. It was from a film track.

Speaker 413:48

And then batches in the sparkling wine, And more music in the condo shine, I have a roundable

Speaker 414:01

Let the ball of our cry.

Speaker 414:05

What altful ecstasy the light may bring, what lovely melody my heart may sing.

Presenter14:13

At the Balalaika, sung by Ilona Massey from the original sound track of the film Balalaika, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty nine. So, Fay Godwin, you lived in all sorts of varied and exotic places as a child with your diplomat father from Athens to Cairo to South Africa, Crete and Rome.

Speaker 114:28

Are it

Presenter14:31

When you eventually came here, you must have found the Eng English landscape very dull in comparison, perhaps.

Fay Godwin14:38

Yeah.

Fay Godwin14:39

So you must have viewed us as

Presenter14:43

So you must have viewed us as a foreigner, really. You know, your view of England was what I think.

Fay Godwin14:49

I think that that's what's been behind a lot of it, because I've called several of my books on exploration and I feel I was exploring this country which is supposed to be mine, but to which I didn't really feel I belonged. I had been to a a miserable boarding school for three years, but I I'd never lived in England at all.

Presenter15:07

Never, presumably, therefore, at at that stage, in the early years of your marriage, you would never have thought that you were going to spend your life, your career, photographing this place, which was, as I say, as we say, very tame in comparison with what you'd known.

Fay Godwin15:20

Not in a million years, no. I w I was a typographer at that time, book designer and that sort of thing. So how had you gone into publishing?

Fay Godwin15:27

Well, I was a passionate reader from under the bed clothes at age about four, and always was. So when I'd had enough of bumming around in my twenties, I decided to come back to England and get into publishing,'cause books was where my great love was.

Presenter15:41

And and it was through your job in publishing that you met your husband?

Fay Godwin15:44

Yes. Well, I was secretary of the Society of Young Publishers and we invited speakers once a month. And he came and talked to us, and he then offered me a job after that.

Presenter15:55

So it was through him really that you began to meet these literary figures that you went on to to to photograph?

Fay Godwin16:00

Yes, I'd well, I'd met a few of them before, like Betramen and people like that. But I hadn't photographed them. But how did you they and and your camera come to meet at the They came to meet because I photographed my children endlessly and uh eventually I photographed anything that moved in the house and they were in the house sometimes. So I'd take a photograph of them and eventually they'd say, Do you remember that photograph you took of me? Can I use it on the book jacket?

Fay Godwin16:26

So when my marriage broke up, I thought, well, maybe I can develop on this, because I by this time had developed a passion for photography.

Fay Godwin16:34

I published a tiny leaflet with six of the portraits and sent it round everywhere. And Faber in particular were wonderful and sent me a lot of their poets to photograph during the early years.

Presenter16:45

But the trigger for that was the break up of your marriage and the need to learn you had

Fay Godwin16:48

Yes, you had two small children. Well, I I was also fairly devastated because uh my husband left me rather unceremoniously, so it

Presenter16:49

I had two

Fay Godwin16:57

I kind of I felt like he'd walked out over the doormat and I was never going to be a doormat again. I was perfectly happy being married, had no uh ambitions, but after that I thought, never gonna do this again.

Presenter17:09

So you are thirty-eight and about to launch into this career. Let's pause there for record number four.

Fay Godwin17:11

Yeah.

Fay Godwin17:15

In my mid-teens, from about twelve to fourteen, when my mother went to Italy after the war.

Fay Godwin17:21

I was sent to a boarding school in Berkshire, which I absolutely loathed, and it was like being in prison.

Fay Godwin17:27

Suddenly along came Bing Crosbie, singing Don't Fence Me In.

Fay Godwin17:32

And that has great re resonance for me. And also later on, of course, when I was President of the Ramblers' Association working to try and open up Rights of Way, I was very interested in this having this song in very much a part of my life.

Speaker 417:54

Oh give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above.

Speaker 418:01

Don't fence me in

Speaker 418:05

Let me ride through the wide open country that I love

Speaker 118:05

Let's

Speaker 118:08

I don't think

Presenter18:09

Country that I love

Presenter18:13

Fince me in.

Presenter18:16

Bing Crosby and Don't Fence Me In with the Andrews Sisters and Vic Schearn's orchestra. We can't really mention your portraits of literary figures without quoting uh Philip Larkin's reaction to his. It's not your fault, he wrote, if I look like a cross between an egg and a bloodhound on some of them. And he does too, really, doesn't he, leaning on his bookshelf there with his sort of domed forehead and fleshy jowls.

Speaker 118:32

The

Speaker 118:34

Uh

Speaker 418:34

Yeah.

Speaker 118:38

Yeah.

Presenter18:39

Better.

Presenter18:40

All of these people you photographed here, Kingsley Amis, um they're all people in context. Kingsley Amis has got the sort of typewriter and the bot empty bottles of bells down there. Oh, yes. There's Frank Muir with his Afghan hound. You your portraits are not

Fay Godwin18:48

It's Frank Meal.

Fay Godwin18:52

Yeah

Presenter18:53

What we consider tr you know, classic portraits close-ups, are they?

Fay Godwin18:57

Well, I never having not been to college, I didn't know how to use lighting, so all these are are what they laughingly call available light, which wasn't sometimes all that available. So I didn't do particularly stagey portrait. I didn't think before what I was going to do. I'd just see what was there.

Presenter19:13

Well, as long as you were at home with them then, you could find the context. You've got a a very young Salman Rushdie here.

Fay Godwin19:16

Yeah.

Fay Godwin19:19

Yes. Well, I've got the two of Rushdie because the early one he was still in advertising and he'd written a novel, a sci-fi novel, which didn't do very much. But later on, a few years later, he won the Booker Prize with Midnight Children. And I remembered I had a photograph of him that I really liked, so I got it out. And later still, I took this other photograph of him. And that is another of the extraordinary things that happens with photography. He had written satanic verses, and he said he thought it would upset a few people, but he had no idea what. And looking at it now after these years, or looking at it soon after, I thought how extraordinary, because he's much sterner, but over his head is a fan on the wall, which actually has the shape of a sort of hatchet. And it even has a glistening one of those mosaic inlays which looks like the evil eye.

Fay Godwin20:14

And of course I had no feeling about any of that at the time I took the photograph.

Presenter20:19

The one portrait, and again we come back to him, that that is a portrait, it seems to me, although it's natural light, is of Ted Hughes. There's nothing else except the face there.

Fay Godwin20:30

Oh, there's a good reason for that.

Presenter20:32

You get the leather jacket of the poet there and the the the bits of hair hanging down over the face, but it's a great picture, isn't it?

Fay Godwin20:33

Jacket of the poet there and that

Fay Godwin20:36

Cooler.

Fay Godwin20:39

Well, he was in my garden, and it's the only way I could do him. I just had an operation on my knee, so I couldn't walk anywhere, and I had to sit in a in a chair with him walking around me. So obviously background was irrelevant. So they were all just uh s uh straight up pictures of his face.

Presenter20:57

Actually, we just passed one of Seamus Heaney, very again, very young, and a lot of hair there, lying in the grass, I think. That was us.

Fay Godwin21:00

Yeah.

Fay Godwin21:03

That was out on Hampster Teeth. Yes, yes, he looks beautifully windblown. Doesn't he? Very handsome.

Presenter21:04

Yes, yes.

Fay Godwin21:09

Next record.

Fay Godwin21:11

For me, a cello is one of the nearest things to a human voice that I find instrumentally. I've always been profoundly moved by the cello, and I think Bach's cello suites are particularly marvellous.

Presenter22:24

Paul Tortellier playing the beginning of the fourth movement of Bach's cello suite, number six, in D major. So the camera was the key to success, Fay Gotten, but of course so was your walking. You must have walked the length and breadth of Britain a few times over, uh doing all of these pictures, inspired not least, I gather, by the great Lakeland walker, Wainwright.

Fay Godwin22:44

I'd been going on holiday with my sons up to the Lake District, and I thought it'd be really nice to do a book like that round London. Then I found London transport had done them, and out of that idea came the first of my Walker's hand books, The Oldest Road, which was an exploration of the Ridgeway.

Presenter23:00

Hmm.

Fay Godwin23:00

And it all went on from there.

Presenter23:02

You mentioned the Ridgeway, and of course that that I think you began at Avebury with the great standing stones. You seem to have

Presenter23:08

done standing stones everywhere, from the Scillies to the Orkneys. I mean, that that you have that sense of history. There's a sense that you've done the Saxon shoreline. This i it it's very it's is it something you knew about all of this or something you learned as you went?

Fay Godwin23:19

Yeah.

Fay Godwin23:21

I learned it as I went, and that's why I say I've learnt about Britain through the sole of my foot.

Fay Godwin23:26

in a sense through walking, because with the Ridgeway there were a lot of m burial mounds, and I coined the phrase that every bump is suspect, because I began to look at bumps and s all over Scotland, is that a burial mound? And and of course lots of times there were.

Presenter23:42

Dude.

Fay Godwin23:43

Yeah.

Presenter23:43

developed obviously a passion for what you saw, a deeper understanding of it. And your passion for it bred your campaigning spirit really because you've used your work to fight for the countryside, as we've mentioned, as a walker and as a conservationist.

Presenter23:57

Access is an issue I know you felt very strongly about, and there's a lot of Stonehenge in one book you've done, Our Forbidden Land, which you dedicated to the Ramblers Association.

Speaker 124:00

Uh

Speaker 424:04

We can dedicate.

Speaker 124:05

Uh

Speaker 424:05

Yeah, sure.

Presenter24:07

Why do you think it wrong that English Heritage should attempt and these photographs show barbed wire and fences and so on why should they not attempt to protect it from endless feet and endless people who could

Fay Godwin24:20

possibly destroy it.

Fay Godwin24:21

Unfortunately, it isn't quite as simple as that because they tend to advertise uh the thing to death and bring all the people and then fence it off. It's happening with the remoter stones up in in Orkney and Shetland uh and Calonish and places like that.

Presenter24:37

in in that particular book, of course, is of the Duke of Westminster's estate, The Forest of Moreland. This tiny little, very discreet, perfectly decent little sign, I would have thought there just says private. It's very small in this sort of great vast Moorland.

Fay Godwin24:40

Yeah, the forest and both.

Speaker 124:41

And this

Speaker 124:42

Very discreet, perfectly

Speaker 124:45

Yeah.

Presenter24:51

It's a great picture, but are you saying this is wrong?

Fay Godwin24:55

Well, you see, I didn't necessarily always go out exactly to ma I don't really like making polemical points. I think they come through. And again, when I was looking at that picture as I did during the editing process, I had wanted to get a huge wham bam, you know, private keep out, all this sort of thing.

Presenter25:01

So I've

Fay Godwin25:13

Oh, I've got this little thing. And I eventually, the more I looked at it, I realized it was in the sign of a cross, and it was fairly elegiac. And then someone from an audience, when I was giving a talk, said, And do you realize what the French for private is? And I said, yes, privé, but it has another meaning and it says de deprived.

Fay Godwin25:33

So we're deprived of all that land so that people can go grass shooting or whatever they're doing there. But now of course

Presenter25:39

Of course the right to roam has been won. I mean do you feel that you were very much part of of winning that battle? That that ramblers can go much further than they ever can.

Fay Godwin25:47

I don't th feel that I was. There were people who worked really hard on that.

Fay Godwin25:52

But I think every bit helps and I d I think the uh Forbidden Land probably did its little bit.

Fay Godwin25:59

Record number six.

Fay Godwin26:00

I didn't know Maxwell Davis's work until later on.

Fay Godwin26:04

But An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise is the most delightful collection. Here, the beginning has a feeling of early morning, and it takes me back to that sort of very happy time when my

Fay Godwin26:16

Children used to wake up and they didn't howl to be picked up. They used to chirrup to each other and I've always enjoyed that early morning feeling.

Presenter27:23

The beginning of an Orkney Wedding with Sunrise played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Presenter27:30

These days, fair, you're not as nimble as you were. Um are your days of long walks humping your camera and all those lenses over?

Fay Godwin27:39

Yes, unfortunately they ended in 1992 when my knee said, Sorry, can't do any more. This was after the operation to remove the cartilage, which was when I met Ted Hughes. Now, I'd walked all over Britain with a very heavy rack sack full of medium-sized cameras. They were big and heavy, tripod protective clothing with no cartilage, and eventually the knee joint just wore out. So I hadn't been able to do any long walks since then. So what effect does that have on your work? Well, I was ready to move on anyway. I was sick of travelling all the time. I was never in my own home. And it just happened I was already getting very interested in the colour work.

Fay Godwin28:15

which much of it I've done from quite near where my home is, where I now live down in the country.

Presenter28:20

You live and very near the sea. It's in Sussex, isn't it?

Fay Godwin28:22

It's in Sussex, isn't it?

Presenter28:23

Uh the sea and the beach and the sky and actually the things on the beach, which is what you're now photographing in colour, very important to you, that whole landscape.

Fay Godwin28:27

Yeah.

Fay Godwin28:31

Well, I've photographed them endlessly in black and white as well. I did a whole book called The Edge of the Land.

Presenter28:31

Well I've

Fay Godwin28:36

But I'm now photographing very close in. So they're they're bits of what jets are made of. It's still they're things uh they're still things that human beings have uh allowed to get into the sea. It's like the netting and all the amazing things that catch on to netting.

Presenter28:41

It's still

Presenter28:45

Yeah.

Fay Godwin28:51

And and this one I could see

Presenter28:52

Yeah.

Fay Godwin28:53

Yeah.

Presenter28:54

This is through the groins from the vision. You're looking through some old wooden groins. There's a little bit of.

Presenter28:59

Yeah, I think it's a little bit.

Fay Godwin29:00

Yeah, netting.

Presenter29:02

And then I'll go to the next one.

Fay Godwin29:04

This man just came into view and it was little autofocus uh amateur sort of type camera and I just took the photograph and he looks like a little Giacometti man, yes.

Presenter29:13

And the little stick breaks. Yeah.

Fay Godwin29:15

Yeah

Fay Godwin29:17

Beethoven's late quartets have always seemed to me very introspective, and this particular bit I just find so moving that I I'm very happy to hear it again.

Presenter30:28

The Lindsay string quartet playing part of the fifth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet No. thirteen in B flat. So your Desert Island Beckons, Faye. Um I should think you're going to be entirely at home on it, really, aren't you?

Fay Godwin30:41

Yeah.

Fay Godwin30:42

Well, I am a solitary person, but I like to be solitary with sounds of human voice around me. So I need the music which has got some human voices in it. I'm fairly adaptable because of the sort of life I've had. I've had to become a bit of a chameleon.

Fay Godwin31:00

I'm also reasonably practical.

Fay Godwin31:03

But I haven't a clue which plant is poisonous and which isn't.

Presenter31:06

And and mightn't you be restricted by an island? Wouldn't it be too small for you? You're used to your freedom. It comes through in everything you've said about your life.

Fay Godwin31:14

I've I've never been an island person at all. Large islands, fine. I mean, I went to Hawaii a number of times, but I always went to what they called the big island. I'm not one of those people who likes to go onto a tiny island and feels that's very exciting.

Fay Godwin31:28

Tell me about your last record.

Fay Godwin31:30

I know that my mother did say, and I didn't get much family history, that John Brown, whose body lies a mouldering in the grave,

Fay Godwin31:37

was an ancestor on the American side. She was part American from Old Stock American and her father was a first generation Maclean from Scotland. So I liked the idea of although the body may have given up, the soul goes marching on, because I feel her soul goes marching on in me.

Speaker 431:56

Glory, hallelujah.

Speaker 432:00

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Speaker 432:04

Glory, hallelujah, is solo marching on.

Speaker 432:11

John Brown died before the war began John Brown died before the war began John Brown died before the war began But his toll was marching on

Presenter32:25

The Wayfarer's Trio and John Brown's Body. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Faye, which one would you take?

Fay Godwin32:32

It would absolutely have to be the Beethoven. The late quartet. Yes. And your book?

Fay Godwin32:38

I decided that I'd like to have The Rattle Bag, which is an anthology of poems by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. And although it is primarily intended for young people, there are so many lovely things in there. I haven't had time to really read them properly. And I think that being all alone on a desert island, I'd rather keep dipping into the poems.

Fay Godwin32:59

than reread a novel endlessly or something like that. I decided that what I'd like is a luxury set of egg tempera paints and some boards to paint on and the brushes, of course, that's all one one package.

Speaker 133:12

Um

Fay Godwin33:13

Because I u used to love painting and I still find it one of the most profoundly satisfying things. Except I never want to show the pictures to anyone on a desert island. That would be the great place to do it.

Fay Godwin33:25

Fay Godwin, thank you very much.

Presenter33:26

Thank you for letting us hear your desert island is.

Speaker 133:36

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