Pat Barker

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.

Speaker 10:08

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

Presenter0:31

My Costaway this week is a writer. At the age of eleven, she dropped a penny in a wishing well and asked to become a novelist. Nearly thirty years later, the wish came true. She published a book called Union Street, a brutal picture of the North East in which she'd grown up, a world inhabited by poverty, child rape, wife beating, and neglect. It was a great critical success, and other novels with similar themes followed. But worried about being pigeonholed, she turned away from her roots to write about something quite different, the First World War, and she produced a famous trilogy, the third of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.

Presenter1:07

Her books are strong and they're plain speaking. Her themes are trauma and survival, the influences, she says, that continue to haunt, distort and occasionally redeem the present. She is Pat Barker. It was obviously a penny well spent, Pat, that penny you put down the wishing now. It certainly was. Did you know that you could write, or did you just like the idea of being a writer?

Pat Barker1:26

As such

Pat Barker1:33

I loved reading, I suppose. I regularly got through a book a day at that stage of my life, all kinds of different books. And I suppose it was natural when I thought about what I wanted to do in the future. You know, I enjoy this so much, why don't I do it too? But there was nothing in my family background really which would have encouraged me to think that writing was a possible career.

Presenter1:52

Well, quite. How did you think you were going to do it? How did you think you were going to make a living? Because that's what your life would have been geared for.

Pat Barker1:57

Well, when I told my grandmother, who basically brought me up that I was going to be a writer, she was very, very skeptical and quite rightly so, and said, Yes, but you've got to earn your living as well, you know. So I thought about that. And we lived quite close to a factory at the end of the street, so I thought, okay, I'll work in the factory, and then in the evening I'll write.

Presenter2:17

But you obviously I mean, you did write in the end, but you wrote and you wrote and nothing was published. Um, you must have given up all hope of being published because uh, as I said,

Pat Barker2:26

I I did give up hope of being published, and I always made it an inflexible rule that whenever my agent rang and said that another publisher had refused another book, I would go straight back upstairs and I would finish

Presenter2:26

I did not know.

Pat Barker2:38

to the end of the sentence I was writing at that time. And even if I jumped up and down with rage and frustration, you know, immediately after the sentence, I would always finish the sentence first.

Presenter2:48

But you you weren't published because apparently you were writing the wrong thing. What

Pat Barker2:53

Rewriting.

Presenter2:53

Yeah.

Presenter2:54

Uh

Pat Barker2:54

I think I was deserved not to be published, I have to say, because I think I was not writing sincerely. I was not writing out of my own voice. I was writing sort of slim, sensitive novels, the kind of novels which I saw being admired. So I tried to do that.

Presenter3:10

Difficult to imagine now, because when your voice is so strong, it's so earthy, bawdy even on occasions, that that you should have been writing something refined.

Pat Barker3:20

Oh yeah.

Presenter3:20

Yes, it was true.

Pat Barker3:21

dreadfully refined and and because of that it was dead because actually I am not

Pat Barker3:26

In that ob obvious sense, a refined person, there is a baudiness uh about my sense of humour, I think, which is.

Speaker 13:32

Uh

Presenter3:32

Shit.

Pat Barker3:34

And if you're not in touch with your sense of humour, you're probably not in touch with anything else either.

Presenter3:38

And it took going on a writer's course, and in your case meeting Angela Carter, the novelist, to tell you that you should write about what you knew about, which is all I mean, it's a cliche. We all know this. How come you had to be told?

Pat Barker3:49

You'll know this.

Pat Barker3:51

Uh

Presenter3:51

Yeah.

Pat Barker3:51

Yeah, why did I have to be told? Why did I have so little self confidence? I don't really know, except that what I wanted to write about was so unfashionable at the time. I think a more aggressive or a more self assertive person

Presenter3:55

Ah

Pat Barker4:03

Might have got there on her own, but I didn't, so I'm very grateful to Angela Carter. And do you remember?

Presenter4:08

The moment that the call came that said, We like what you've sent us, we are going to publish it.

Pat Barker4:14

Yes, because after all these years of dreaming about it, it happened right in the middle of my daughter's sixth birthday party, and I had thirty screaming kids in the living room.

Pat Barker4:26

All I could really say was, Oh, yes, that's nice, and put the phone down and go back to rescuing the furniture. So it was very, very strange.

Pat Barker4:35

Tell me about your

Presenter4:35

The first record you want on your desert island.

Pat Barker4:37

Um well this is uh Kathleen Ferrier.

Presenter4:37

Uh

Pat Barker4:40

And it's a a voice with a lot of poignancy, a lot of tragedy seems to be built into it. But I thought I would like the the other Kathleen Ferrier, the lighter hearted one, the you know, the robust, raunchy, down to earth northern lass. I thought I would like that.

Speaker 24:58

I know where I'm going.

Speaker 25:02

And I know who's going to with me.

Speaker 25:07

I go hard

Speaker 25:11

To the dear those who I am married.

Speaker 15:12

Yeah.

Speaker 25:20

I have stockings of seal.

Speaker 25:24

Shoes are fine and green and red

Speaker 25:28

Learns tobacco me

Speaker 25:32

And a ring for everything.

Speaker 25:42

What must say his blood

Speaker 25:47

But I've saved spot

Speaker 25:52

The fair host over

Presenter5:56

Kathleen Ferrier singing I Know Where I'm Going and she was accompanied by Phyllis Spur. She didn't sound very raunchy, Pat.

Pat Barker6:02

She didn't, I must admit, but still it was from the lighter end of her repertoire.

Presenter6:07

Yeah.

Presenter6:08

So you wrote, as we've said, about what you knew, the working class women predominantly that you knew, and then about ten years in, you took a a large and very conscious switch, I think, of subject matter, because you changed to the First World War, to history, and predominantly men.

Presenter6:24

It looks in hindsight like a desire to sort of throw off the feminist label really and then get out into the wider, more competitive world.

Pat Barker6:32

Now I was starting to feel like one of those suitcases that you see going round and round the carousel and nobody comes to collect it. Absolutely labels stuck all over it. Because I was not only feminist, I was northern working class and gritty as well, and the grittiness always was very much emphasized. And I thought, okay, but you know, I can actually write about other things as well.

Pat Barker6:55

And in particular, no, I I've always liked men, I've always got on pretty well with men. Do you know, I think you do, I think you do.

Pat Barker7:04

even the ones who are behaving in ways which you might not

Pat Barker7:08

ideally approve of, I still think I has there has to be a basic sympathy for me with the character in order to bring them to life.

Presenter7:16

But you weren't entirely without qualification when we're saying write what you know about for writing about the First World War, because of course you were brought up, as you've said, by your grandparents, and your grandfather well, he was your step grandfather, wasn't he? had fought in that First World War, hadn't he?

Pat Barker7:29

Yes, and been very badly wounded in it. I always remember seeing his bayonet wound when I was a small child,'cause he used to get uh washed at the kitchen sink, and it was a a sort of tunnel in his side,'cause he'd been a very thin young man when it was done, and uh he was a very large uh middle-aged man when I remember him. But he'd survived it. He'd survived it, and he survived it, in fact, because what you do with the bayonet apparently is to stick it in, twist and withdraw.

Presenter7:47

But he survived.

Pat Barker7:56

And he survived, really, because he was an officer's servant and his officer shot the man who had bayoneted him. It was very close combat. So the the famous twist and withdraw bit wasn't done, and that probably saved his life. And did he talk to you about it? Did you touch it? Could you I touched it, yes, but he didn't talk about it. So in a sense, there was this wound and there was also a silence. I think he was an absolutely typical veteran of any war in that he didn't want to talk about the trauma. It was too bad to revisit, I think.

Presenter8:28

Which is of course very much the theme of the first book, Regeneration, o of the trilogy, and which is set in uh an army psychiatric hospital, Craig Lockhart, which did exist just outside Edinburgh, didn't it? Yes, it's now a part of Napier.

Pat Barker8:41

University.

Presenter8:41

And there was a silence on these matters and the effect of shell shock was to silence men and the psychiatrist there performed the talking cure. He was a real Captain Rivers was

Pat Barker8:53

Captain Rivers was a real person. He was a neurologist. He was also before the war a psychologist. And most famously he was an anthropologist. And going back to medicine and treating shell shocked soldiers was his war work. He was too ill to fight, so he did that instead.

Presenter9:08

It was

Presenter9:10

But that was very avant-garde, wasn't it? Because you also describe in the book some horrendous treatment. I mean, you do describe e electrodes put to the larynx that cause such pain that

Pat Barker9:15

Describe

Presenter9:20

somehow there is a shock into speech for these people who are rendered mute. Yes.

Pat Barker9:26

It's whatever you believe in, really. They believed that the electric shocks would cure their muteness, and therefore it did. It wasn't a form of torture, that to us it seems like that. It was actually a respectable treatment. And they did get better. But of course, they got better in the sense that they recovered their speech. They were still depressed, suicidal, anxious, suffering from nightmares. And very often, I think that these symptoms they were left with were not treated.

Presenter9:54

I say that you turned away from that which you knew, you know, the the the the sort of modern day then, well, nineteen seventies version of the working class women that you knew. Um but there are common themes with what we've just been talking about, aren't there? Because it is the dealing with traumatic experience, and they are

Presenter10:11

Two sets of people without a voice, you felt. You gave them a voice, yes?

Pat Barker10:16

Yes. And what I say is that the the common factor is that each group of people, the young officers and the mothers of large families, are totally responsible for the lives of people whom they have no real power to help or protect.

Pat Barker10:33

Record number two.

Pat Barker10:35

Um this is Judy Garland somewhere over the rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, and I think just as Kathleen Ferrier has an absolutely amazing voice, so too does Judy Garland.

Speaker 210:58

A land that I heard of once in a lullaby

Speaker 211:08

Sorry.

Presenter11:15

Judy Garland and Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, and you remember your mother singing that, you say, Pat?

Pat Barker11:20

Yeah.

Pat Barker11:21

Yes, I associate this song very much with my mother. And sh you know, she was.

Pat Barker11:28

Marvellous in this way, in that she was always singing, she was always playing the piano, she was always telling stories. I wasn't read to as a child, but I was told stories by my mother every night.

Pat Barker11:39

I'm always dreaming of a better life. And I think she was. I think she'd she'd come out of the war with.

Pat Barker11:46

me, and with no husband. Um s so life was not very easy for my mother, and I think the great thing that everybody had dreamt of, a better life after the war, just hadn't happened for her. She was working very hard, she had no partner.

Pat Barker12:03

And I s I hear a sort of wistfulness in this song which I also associate with her. Though she was a very cheerful woman, a very brave woman, she would have been the last person to pity herself or complain.

Presenter12:09

Boosh.

Presenter12:15

And you and she lived with her parents, your grandparents, as we say. And and and obviously, as you said, you you didn't have a father, she was an unmarried mother. Was there must have been a stigma attached to that?

Pat Barker12:17

Yes.

Pat Barker12:26

At the time there was a gigantic stigma, and there was also, of course,

Pat Barker12:30

It was no light matter, really. It was a real serious inconvenience for a girl to come home wi with a baby like that. And it didn't really help her enormously that she was coming home to a stepfather, not to her own father. I was her wartime mistake, and it was a great pity in a sense, because I think up to that point she was rather

Speaker 212:44

Yeah.

Pat Barker12:53

Enjoying the war, as a lot of women did. I mean, she went away from home, she joined the forces, she was with a lot of other women, she was enjoying herself.

Pat Barker13:03

She fell in love with one young man who was killed.

Pat Barker13:07

And who I think was in a way the love of her life. And who my father was was a bit of a mystery.

Pat Barker13:17

You know, I'm content to leave it a mystery now. I think she was allowed to take her secrets to the grave with her. But we all are.

Presenter13:22

But you you suggest that that you s your coming, as it were, your conception spoiled her fun, really. Wa was that a sort of feeling that you had as a child? darkened her life.

Pat Barker13:31

If certainly, for a time. Yes.

Presenter13:34

But then she did get married, and she moved on, but you elected to stay with your grandparents.

Pat Barker13:40

So she couldn't really offer me a home at the time because uh they were living in the back bedroom of a pub. She she got she was given this room rent free in return for doing doing the cleaning in the pub.

Pat Barker13:52

So it wouldn't have been possible for me to live with them. And it was a long struggle for her to get a cancel house. And at that point, she could get my stepfather's two children out of care and give them a home. And by this time, she also had two children of her marriage to my stepfather. And at that point, I could have gone to live with her, but I was so settled with my grandparents at this time that actually I chose not to.

Presenter14:17

So you were brought up by your grandparents, which must make you have made you a different person, because to be brought up by an older generation I don't know what how can we say what the difference is, but you must have been a fan of the parents.

Pat Barker14:30

I think you are affected, because I think what to most people is comparatively distant history does seem a lot closer to you than perhaps it does to other people. My grandmother was one of a large family of girls, and that these sisters would all have get-togethers from time to time. And it would all go very well. They'd have a great time, and then somebody would say something about something that happened on a day in 1908, and they would all start sort of disagreeing about what precisely it was that had happened, and get really passionate about it. So you had a real living sense of the past as a continuing force in the present.

Presenter15:05

I mean, I can see that and you I can hear your enjoyment of that experience. But again, they were much older than your parental generation. You must have therefore been quite an old fashioned little bit, as they say.

Pat Barker15:18

I think like most I was growing up virtually as an only child in one house. There was what the middle one of five in the other house. I think like, you know, there used to be a saying, didn't it? Little pictures, big handles or something. Anyway, it meant that children listen to things that they're not supposed to be hearing. I certainly did that, and I was certainly confided in.

Speaker 115:36

Yeah.

Pat Barker15:39

By adults from an early age. And I think I became very, very much aware of people's voices and the stories they were telling and the memory and the unreliability of memory. So I think, yes, all that sort of seeped into me. I think novelists are really made under the table, you know, under the table when they're children listening to the things the adults don't know they're listening to. Echo number three.

Pat Barker16:09

Well this is Keep Your Feet Still Geordie Hinney which is a very famous Tyneside folk song which I remember singing this as in family parties when I was a little girl. And for a long time I thought this was quite an erotic song. I imagine this sort of really hard up Tyneside couple in bed at night trying to get a decent night's sleep and the husband is sort of wriggling around and the wife is getting fed up. And it's not like that at all of course, it's actually two blokes sharing a bed in a lodging house because if you were only paying a penny a night you didn't get a bed to yourself.

Speaker 216:49

What I drapped I nailed him heavy, and I blacked a big fuel size If I'd slept, it's hard to tell what I'd have done.

Speaker 216:58

So keep your feet still joy, let's be happy through the beach

Speaker 217:03

Yeah.

Speaker 217:05

Uh

Speaker 217:09

Yep, it's still Jordan, and never drive me body dreams over here.

Presenter17:16

Keep your feet still, Geordie Hinny, performed by the high level ranters down the pub by the sound of us. Um just give us a bit more flavour, Pat Barker, of your youth, because you uh eventually as a child were working in your grandparents' fish and chip shop, I think, and and and reading the newspapers that you wrapped the chips in. Presumably the news of the world.

Pat Barker17:32

Presumably the new

Pat Barker17:34

The News of the World, of course, was a great educator for urban girls of my generation, you know. This sort of mysterious thing that went on, he was intimate with her. Intimacy took place. Yes, I read The News of the World, I read all the papers. And it was great because you were also meeting everybody in the locality coming in for their fish and chips and waiting for them to be fried and talking while they did it. So it was it was more talk, more more voice.

Presenter18:02

More more voices. And You obviously have vivid memories of that. We none of us leave our childhood behind in that sense. How much of it?

Presenter18:10

Informs you still to day in the way you think

Pat Barker18:14

I think almost totally. I don't believe that, um

Pat Barker18:18

that a grammar school education or um university actually divorces you from your um upbringing in the way that people uh sometimes imply that it does. Because I think the family is so powerful and those early voices and those early experiences, I think you are shaped by them and negotiate with them for the rest of your life.

Presenter18:40

So you did pass the eleventh class, you did go to the grammar school, which was, you know, a a bit of a leap for someone, I think, from your background at that point, wasn't it?

Pat Barker18:48

Nobody'd ever in my family had ever been to grammar school before, no.

Presenter18:51

And certainly nobody had been to university and you went to the other side.

Pat Barker18:54

That was like going to the moon.

Pat Barker18:56

I think it was. My grandmother was very good,'cause I think she got a lot of pleasure out of my education, because she would read my set books and things like that. So that was good. It was

Presenter19:06

But they were your aspiration she was living out. It it wasn't that she told you to go and do this, it was you led the way.

Pat Barker19:11

Oh, you led the way. No, she was uh

Presenter19:13

She wouldn't have known you could.

Pat Barker19:14

I don't know. She never discouraged me, you see, and this is something that surprises me, because I now know people who came from backgrounds much more privileged than mine in the economic sense. And the girls were told, It's no point sending you to university, you're only going to get married. There was no breath of that in my house, which was by the time I was in the sixth form, we were living on a very, very low income. But for my grandmother, the idea that because I was a girl, I couldn't go to university was anathema. Record number four.

Pat Barker19:48

Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind, and this is because once again I love his voice, but it's also because it seems to typify my university years, where I shared a flat at one point in Crouch End with somebody who was an enormous Bob Dylan fan, and this was very, very frequently played to the certain amount of distress and irritation to the old couple downstairs who were our landlords.

Speaker 220:15

How many seas must the White Dove sail?

Speaker 220:19

Before she sleeps in the sand

Speaker 220:25

Guessn't how many times must the cannon balls fly?

Speaker 220:30

The four therefore banded.

Speaker 220:36

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Speaker 220:41

The answer is a blowing the

Presenter20:43

And the wind

Speaker 220:44

Uh

Presenter20:45

Bob Dylan and Blowin' in the Wind. Um you went back to Teesside after University Pat Barker, various jobs and so on, writing as we've heard, but not writing the right thing.

Presenter20:54

The sort of thing you write about probably does take a longer view, doesn't it? Because it's pretty serious stuff and it seems to me, if I can try and sum up part of it, is that what you're trying to do is set issues before the reader in a very clear way, in a very direct way, but you're not always taking a view. You're almost giving us a balanced view and say, here you are, think about this and sort it out for yourself.

Pat Barker21:20

I certainly don't give any easy solutions because I don't think there are any for the kind of issues I tackle. And I'm always very keen to embed the issues completely in a character, or rather, for me the characters come first, the characters and their voices. And because the characters are living complicated, difficult lives very frequently, the issues come out of the character.

Presenter21:42

I mean, let's take the more recent issue you've tackled in more recent books like Border Crossing and Double Vision, that of the child killer. And there you have a young man, a boy.

Pat Barker21:50

You have it

Presenter21:52

Aged eleven, who killed an elderly woman, and it suggested pretty grotesque circumstances. And now he's a young man, and it is whether.

Speaker 121:58

Yeah.

Presenter22:01

We should allow him to redeem himself, whether the system should allow him to be redeemed or whether or whether he's

Pat Barker22:09

Capable of doing it. I think there is a kind of conclusion there because I think.

Presenter22:09

I'm doing it.

Pat Barker22:14

The young man in those in the in those two books is actually rehabilitated in the sense that he is no longer a criminal. But that strand in human nature is there and it can't be easily wished away.

Presenter22:26

But there's another thought on this that you offer up, which is that

Presenter22:31

You seem to me to be suggesting that that any of us might have committed as a child some terrible deed.

Pat Barker22:40

I think this is true. Yes, I think this is true. And I think if you look at the behaviour of children in playgrounds and you imagine all supervision being withdrawn for a long time, I think some pretty terrible things would happen. It does depend on the adults to supervise and guide children. It's Lord of the Flies, really, is what you're saying. It's Lord of the Flies. And the only mistake Golding made, I think, is to think that you have to put them on a desert island first. All you have to do is just leave them to themselves, not supervise them at all, so that neither the school nor the parent is exercising any real responsibility. And yes, unpleasant things will start to happen.

Presenter22:58

Which law of the flies really is what you're saying.

Pat Barker23:21

Next piece of music.

Pat Barker23:23

This is Dawn, the first of Benjamin Britton's sea interludes from Peter Grimes. And I want this because it gives me a very, very strong sense of place. When my children were young, we used to go to Alderborough and stay in a caravan. But what this mainly evokes for me is a very, very happy time in family life and the incredibly atmospheric fishing village where the action of Peter Grimes took place.

Presenter24:51

Part of Dawn, the first of Benjamin Britton's C interludes from Peter Grimes, played by the City of London Sinfonia, conducted by Richard Hickox. And memories for you, Pat Barker, of holidaying with the children in Alborough. Um they apparently, um, when you were writing and they were quite small, used to take the Mickey out of you because you sort of muttered your bits of dialogue while you were stirring the soup or something.

Pat Barker25:13

But they were they were basically very, very good.

Pat Barker25:15

Also, because bits of work in progress were left lying all over the house, they became extremely good at not reading what I had written, you see, to the point where when I was actually published and they were grown up, they still find it really very difficult to read you. Yes. My son says it's like reading a diary or a letter. It's so personal to me.

Presenter25:32

What trade you?

Presenter25:39

But your husband reads you he's your first reader.

Pat Barker25:41

He is my first and best reader. You know, he is not commercial, he is not aware of that side of it, he is not particularly literary, he just knows does he believe in the characters? Does he does he want to follow the story? And that is exactly the kind of I wouldn't say unsophisticated reading, but intelligent layman reading that you need.

Presenter26:00

But just on your husband, it was he in the beginning, wasn't it, who who encouraged you to do it? I mean, you said earlier on that you really lacked all confidence in yourself.

Pat Barker26:07

Oh yeah, yeah.

Pat Barker26:08

Yes, totally. I mean, at one point I got so depressed with Union Street that I threw it into the bin and potato peelings on top of it. And my husband came in from work and sort of excavated the dustbin and rescued the manuscript. So yes.

Presenter26:27

And he put you, I think, on the other hand.

Pat Barker26:28

I owe everything to him really because he and there were you know throughout really that it would always have made sense for me to go back to teaching.

Presenter26:30

Ran

Pat Barker26:37

or to become a secretary or something like that, and get some money into the house, because there wasn't a lot of money around when the children were small. And he always said, No, we're going to back your writing. And um, you know, some people might not have done that.

Pat Barker26:52

It's John Shirley Quirk singing the part of the priest in Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. We used to play this a lot, and we still do sometimes, and it gives you a guaranteed lift every single time you play it.

Speaker 227:40

Mr. Soul.

Presenter28:05

Part of Profiscare Anima Christiana from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, sung by John Shirley Quirk with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britton.

Presenter28:13

Mm.

Presenter28:14

What about money, Pat Barker? I mean, obviously you you've implied it was never very plentiful. I'm sure you were taught a lot of thrift by that war generation that you were brought up by. What about when you won the Booker? Did that make a huge

Pat Barker28:27

I'm afraid, yes, it well I'm afraid, I know, no, I'm not afraid. It does make an enormous difference. It's um much more like winning an Oscar than winning any other literary prize.

Presenter28:27

I'm afraid yes.

Pat Barker28:36

And really the check you're given on the night is the tip of the iceberg, though it's very nice to have it, of course, but it's the subsequent deals which um actually transform your situation.

Presenter28:50

But what comes with it, of course, is is having to m be a public persona, which you don't care for very much.

Pat Barker28:58

Yeah.

Presenter28:59

Yeah.

Pat Barker28:59

I find some of it very difficult, yes, because I think there is an increasing tendency for interest in the writer's life to overshadow the work, and I don't believe that any writer really wants that to happen.

Presenter29:13

Record number seven.

Pat Barker29:14

Guests last night from the original cast recording of Oh, What a Lovely War

Pat Barker29:19

And it brings once again the voices of the men in the trenches, the voices that are not the voices of the war poets, but of ordinary men and the words they used.

Speaker 229:30

Gassed last night and gassed the night before. Gonna get gassed tonight if we never get gassed anymore. When we're gassed, we're sick as we can be. Cause phosphine and mustard gas is much too much for me. They're warning us, they're warning us.

Speaker 229:50

One respirator for the four of us. Thank your lucky stars of three of us.

Presenter29:57

Gassed last night from the original cast recording of Oh, what a lovely war. Am I right in thinking that you've turned to the Second World War for your latest inspiration? Or does that look on your face mean you're don't want to talk about it?

Pat Barker30:10

Well, I'm very tall. I've got several ideas for books at the moment, but what I'm doing.

Pat Barker30:18

At the moment he's writing short stories and thoroughly enjoying it. It's absolutely marvellous to be able to work hard at something for three weeks, and at the end of it it's finished. And after all these years of running marathons, which is really what a novel is, it's very nice to be doing a few sprints.

Presenter30:37

It's a bit like a marriage, is it? You've got to make sure it's right before you make this major commitment.

Pat Barker30:41

Yeah.

Pat Barker30:42

I think it is, you know. I d I don't know that it's quite as bad, because you can change. I think a biographer has that problem. I mean, to get two years into the research and then realize that you absolutely hate this person must be hell. Whereas at least if you hate a character in a novel after you've been writing about them for six months, you can change them or kill them off.

Presenter31:01

Come on.

Presenter31:04

Okay, let's um just hear a bit about your vision of your desert island. Uh uh as far as I can tell, but there's so much weather and environment in your novels that it's and it's savage stuff. It's not a bit benign. Is that how your island's going to be, do you think?

Pat Barker31:18

Absolutely not. I'm not going to I'm not prepared to put up with a lot of cold, rain, wind, etcetera. It's a coral island and I shall do a lot of swimming,'cause it's also a very small island, I think. Small coral island, and I shall get fit by swimming. And um your

Presenter31:33

As I said at the beginning, you're a sort of no nonsense, straightforward person, um, obviously capable of psychoanalysing yourself, because you write so much about psychoanalysis, so you're not going to go under mentally.

Pat Barker31:45

I wouldn't be too sure about that. I mean, I I you know, it's no accident that almost all my choices are human uh the human voice at its best. Um I do work by myself, so I can I'm very tolerant of my own company to a great extent. On the other hand, there's also the moment when you close the door and go downstairs and there's somebody there to ask give you a glass of wine and ask you how it went. I think I'm going to miss that a lot. Fast record.

Pat Barker32:12

It's a gift to be simple from Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring, and no reason except that it's an absolutely marvelous

Pat Barker32:23

tune, I think. And it's to me it's sort of got the essence of sanity about it. So I think that would come in very handy.

Presenter33:31

Part of Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring, played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. Now, Pat, you have to boil it down to one now. If you could only take one of those records, which one would you take?

Pat Barker33:43

I think it would be Dawn from the Sea Interludes by Benjamin Britton, because it would recall a particularly happy time. And what about your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Pat Barker33:54

Ah, well, you see. Um I c I can see a deal coming on. I uh I would like to take uh a book about tropical fish.

Presenter33:56

I can't see a deal coming on.

Pat Barker34:03

But it it would be a reference book, you see, because I would be actually identifying the tropical fish. Not as to whether they were edible or not. Not as to whether they were edible or not, just to identify them. Do you think that would be allowed? Of course, just sort of academic exercise. That's right, yes. And your luxury. Snorkeling equipment. Oh, I see. To go and look at the tropical fish in the first place. I would need a project, you see. I would definitely need a project. And I do keep semi-tropical fish at home. So that would also be a link with home. I'd be going and looking at their big brothers and sisters. Pat Barker, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island.

Presenter34:15

Just sort of

Presenter34:17

That's right, yes.

Presenter34:21

Oh, I see.

Presenter34:39

And disks.

Speaker 134:47

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive.

Speaker 134:51

For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Speaker 235:37

Uh