Ruth Padel

Presenter0:00

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 nine.

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is the poet Ruth Pardell. Critically acclaimed, her poetry brings the natural world into sharp focus, all the better to describe and document it.

Presenter0:38

If her clear vision and eye for detail sound methodical, it's little surprise she comes from a long line of botanists and scientists indeed, her great great grandfather was Charles Darwin.

Presenter0:50

Wildness and wild animals lie at the heart of what I feel about writing, she says. And of her childhood, looking at nature properly, knowing the names of plants, seeing how the petals worked, observing animal behaviour, was just there that was what you did that was what being a person was.

Presenter1:08

So, Ruth Pardle, on the origin of poems, then for a moment you yourself have gone, have you not at times to extraordinary lengths to understand the world, and then to make poetry out of it. Tell me about some of the the biggest journeys that you've made.

Ruth Padel1:23

Yes, well I suppose the biggest one is the tiger journey. In two thousand and two I I started to go to India and Bhutan and Nepal and Sumatra and Laos to find what was happening to wild tigers. I I grew up with scientists, so I'm at ease with scientists and and I like the way they think. And so I went into the forests in the Far East of Russia or

Ruth Padel1:46

up volcanoes in Sumatra with brilliant field zoologists looking for what was happening you know, for for the for the signs of taiga, for a hair here, a footprint there, a scratch or a sort of marking on a tree.

Presenter2:01

Uh

Ruth Padel2:02

And and I was trying to understand. What was happening?

Presenter2:04

Your great great grandfather wrote famously, of course, of these endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful. Is there a a little part of that spirit that travels with you, then, when you go?

Ruth Padel2:15

Very, very much. And it was actually during that tiger journey that I began to feel most kinship with Darwin because, you know, I I remember feeling it on um on the way down in in some terrible kayak in in Laos. I didn't I'm I'm not a water person, I'm not a sporty person and um I didn't realize that I was going to have to go in a kayak for three days down these little um tributaries to get to the Mekong River.

Ruth Padel2:38

But in the good bits, when there weren't rapids and things, I looked at this forest going by, and the lianas and the green and the sparkles, and and I kept expecting to see golden leopard cats in the trees. Of course I didn't.

Ruth Padel2:51

And then I realized that, you know, he, my great-great-grandfather, a hundred and fifty years ago, had gone on this sort of sea voyage.

Ruth Padel2:58

learning to understand how species came to be.

Ruth Padel3:02

And here I was,

Ruth Padel3:03

Tragically, in a way, a hundred and fifty years later,

Ruth Padel3:06

understanding, learning to understand how they were disappearing, because that's what I was seeing. There were no leopard cats or birds in that forest. The people who lived there had eaten them.

Ruth Padel3:15

Tell me about the first piece.

Presenter3:16

That we're going to hear today, then.

Ruth Padel3:18

Yes, this is the recordare from Veri's Requiem.

Ruth Padel3:22

This is a piece that I've loved in lots of ways. I learned to sing in choirs at school, and I continued it in Oxford.

Ruth Padel3:29

And um I love this piece. And actually, some mad reason, when I drove to Turkey once with a boyfriend in the little little car was made of fiberglass and the top fell off on the way to Dover, so we did not have a top for this damn thing, and the clutch fell out in Bulgaria. Anyway, we got ourselves to Turkey on no clutch, and then we had to go into a garage to have it fixed. But while it was there, somebody whisked us off to a Turkish nightclub and had heard me singing in the car, and I'd been singing this piece, the Recordari. So they suddenly said, Ruth, you're going to sing in this nightclub. And there was a poor Turkish accordionist who'd stumbled through trying to accompany me with Verdi's key changes on the recordari for Verdi's Requiem.

Presenter4:57

Joan Sutherland and Madeline Horne singing the Recordari from Verdi's Requiem with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir George Schulte. Ruth Partle, I mentioned that you came from this long line of scientists. In terms of your lineage, I want to talk about the day-to-day of your family a little later, but for now I want to look further back than that. I know Sir Thomas Barlow. He was.

Presenter5:20

The royal physician to Queen Victoria. I read that he was the physician who attended her on her death. What do you know about it?

Ruth Padel5:28

I don't I don't really really know anything about him. I mean, I know that I I was born in his house. You were born in Wimpole Street. Yes.

Presenter5:33

Uh

Ruth Padel5:35

At the top of it. My mother says it was not an attic, she said rather hotly.

Presenter5:39

Because you say it was a it was the attack.

Ruth Padel5:40

I think it was, but she as a biologist she thinks that I have a propensity to over romanticize and over poeticize and, as she puts it, exaggerate. But they were living at the top.

Ruth Padel5:51

In the attic he bit.

Ruth Padel5:53

And I used to sort of drop things down on the heads of all these people coming into the consulting rooms at the bottom of it.

Presenter5:59

Your grandmother, Nora Barlow, she was responsible for going through the vast archive of Charles Darwin's papers, this archive that ended up at Cambridge University. What do you remember of her?

Ruth Padel6:09

Oh, she was wonderful. The house that she and my grandfather lived in, Boswell's, was a very was my sort of paradise. It was my image of.

Ruth Padel6:18

I don't know, of jungle, of wildness, of of excitement. And um it was in Buckinghamshire. The house itself was magical. There was a sort of schoolroom and wonderful books in it and

Ruth Padel6:30

Chinese pottery. There was beautiful Tang horse, great big Tang horse scratching his bottom, you know, sort of rough, rough ceramic in the um dining room.

Ruth Padel6:39

But the garden was the great thing, and there was a gipsy caravan where I used to play for hours. I used to take that dog for a walk in the in the woods surrounding Boswell's, and there were sort of mazy sort of yew hedges all shaggy and overgrown, and a great house tree. I loved it.

Presenter6:52

What an extraordinary and rich environment for for a child who maybe anyway possessed a good imagination. You said your mother always has accused you of exaggerating to to be brought up in. I mean the interior of the house almost sounds like one of these old Victorian museums where curiosities and collectibles were just part of part of every room.

Ruth Padel7:11

That's what it felt like. I mean, when you you know the beginning of The Lamb, the Witch and the Wardrobe when the children are sort of um g have to go out of London to to this house, and this sort of magical house, that's what it felt like to me.

Presenter7:18

Yeah.

Speaker 17:19

Uh

Ruth Padel7:22

And is it true that you wanted to be a panther? A black one. A black panther. A black panther. Yeah, but that was because my favourite, favourite character was Bagheera in the Jungle book. You know, he's wonderful. Kipling is such a beguiling, seductive writing. Bagheera has a a skin like watered silk and voice like wild honey dripping off the trees. And you know, I wanted to be Bagheera and then a little later I wanted to marry Bagheera. That was a Bagheera was my hero.

Presenter7:47

Tell me about the second piece of music you've chosen then.

Ruth Padel7:50

Yes. Well, one of the sort of kernels of all our upbringing was the string quartet. My father was a cellist, and actually my parents met at music camp. My mother was a clarinetist.

Ruth Padel8:00

This is my most favourite string quartet of all. This is Beethoven op one thirty two. My father, when he was a psychoanalyst, used to say that he thought that you could deduce everything really from the relations of a string quartet, the two fiddles, the viola and the cello and I was a viola player, so I knew all these things from the inside.

Presenter9:16

The Boradine quartet playing the opening of Beethoven's string quartet in A minor. Very interesting that you said, Ruth, that you hear this and you you know it from the inside. Can you explain that to me?

Ruth Padel9:29

Yes, it's it's a very interesting thing and I'm very, very grateful that it was the viola that my father chose for me to play. He he got us playing all playing stringed instruments.

Ruth Padel9:38

And it's this smoky, unheard voice. I mean, the fiola is inside and it's like standing in the middle of a forest. I don't know why forests are so important to me, they are um and listening to all the other things around you.

Presenter9:51

And that smoky, unheard voice and you've said yourself that for a poet that that is almost the essence of of what you feel yourself to be doing, is it that in some way you're identifying the unidentifiable, those things that flit through our consciousness, that are so important to us but that we can't quite grasp.

Ruth Padel10:10

Yes, I mean in a way uh you know it's the task of a poet to get the reader to understand something clearly for themselves.

Ruth Padel10:18

Poem

Ruth Padel10:20

can be something that accompanies you. You learn it with any luck, you learn it early, and then you grow with it. People talk technically about poetry as a line of poetry. It's got feet in it. It's made of one foot after the other. And versus means a turning. It's the turn at the end of the plow when the farmer comes back when he's ploughing.

Ruth Padel10:40

So that it's a a turning and a going forward at the same time, which is probably what life is anyway. Yeah.

Presenter10:45

So you were one of five, you were the eldest, and your mother I mean, also had a profession. She was a

Ruth Padel10:51

Biologist? No, she stopped. Um when I came along, she stopped. She was doing cancer research, but she stopped.

Presenter10:56

Right. How bi I'm I mean, I'm imagining a very five children, even if they are strung out over a period of time. That's a that's a busy household, and your father away.

Ruth Padel11:03

Yes, he was he was away in my early childhood because he he used to be a classics teacher. He used to teach Greek and Latin. And then when I was about three he decided to be a psychoanalyst, but he wa had to do the proper training. So first of all he had to do well, whatever the equivalent was of A levels then, and then he had to go and do an internship.

Ruth Padel11:21

Yes, it was very busy for my mother. She couldn't she couldn't work.

Presenter11:24

Even though you were one of five, the sense I get, as you were describing going to your grandmother's, is that you weren't necessarily a child who was involved in being part of a big group much of the time. You did you like your own company?

Ruth Padel11:36

Yes, I was I was quite solitary child, yeah, and shy, and I played a lot, I read a lot.

Ruth Padel11:42

And walk the dog. I love walking the dog, yes. Walking the dog is still very important. It's I actually learn poems when I'm walking the dog. Something about the rhythm of you you walk along and you can learn you can get the the rhythm of the words into you as you walk along.

Ruth Padel11:57

There was a poem I learnt by Emily Dickinson when I was on that damn kayak in Laos, and I was so scared.

Ruth Padel12:03

I just realized what Emily Dickinson's dashes are all about. You can say a little phrase, and then you go down a bit more and you wait for the next rapid that's going to kill you, and you just gather yourself, and then you know the next phrase is coming, and the next phrase. And actually that's what poetry is. It's sort of going forward

Ruth Padel12:19

In this sort of dangerous environment, life, and finding connection in it, finding a rhythm in it, finding meaning in it.

Presenter12:26

Um, y you have chosen as your next piece of music um Kathleen Ferrier singing What?

Ruth Padel12:31

Singing Down by the Sally Gunns, a poem by Yeats. Kathleen Ferrier actually was the first the first record I ever had and I treasured it. I didn't find it strange then that here's this immensely fruity voice singing these actually quite light songs. I just loved them the music.

Speaker 412:50

Believe God's my love and I

Speaker 413:00

We are

Speaker 413:02

She passed the salts where the little dark snow

Speaker 413:20

Ed Mary tape on Missy As the leaves grow.

Presenter13:40

Kathleen Ferrier and Down by the Sally Gardens. You mentioned then that there were these important dog walks, Ruth Padle, that that sort of you know that you now use in your life t to to learn poetry. Um as a youngster and as you were walking, is that when your early relationship with with words was cemented? Did did you fi I mean, what did you find? Did you find solace, beauty, fun in words? Maybe all those things?

Ruth Padel14:05

So I found a world, many worlds, and also rhythm. We had a lot of books. My mother was wonderful at reading to us when we were very little. And my father took over and read us a lot of books together. I remember him reading me all of David Copperfield, for instance. There were also I had a book called A Thousand and One Poems, and I used to know those as well. That was always by my bed. I used to like the animal poems and that. I didn't think of myself as a human being, I don't think, for a long time.

Presenter14:30

There's a wonderful phrase in a book that you've subsequently written. You say, It is in language that we reflect our experience, worry about the world and ourselves. So that started early on. It must have done, yeah.

Presenter14:42

Um you spoke only briefly, and we need to find out more about it this extraordinary tiger trip, I'm going to c call it, where you went around the world to to to experience tigers in their natural habitat. I mean, d were you ever it it sounds quite a dangerous thing to do. Were you were you ever in danger?

Ruth Padel14:59

From tigers I don't think so. Once, maybe, in in Russia.

Ruth Padel15:02

There was a radio coloured tiger.

Presenter15:05

So this is a tiger that was being tracked by

Ruth Padel15:05

So then

Ruth Padel15:06

Yes. They knew this tigress had young cubs and they wanted to find out where she was. So I was with a young Russian called Andrei, who didn't speak any English, but his girlfriend did, and she was the daughter of a famous tiger biologist. The scary thing in that forest, it was September, in dense, dense forest. It had ticks that carry Japanese encephalitis. They look like little black spiders. They're quite scary. So they were there.

Ruth Padel15:30

But there was also the Tiger, and we went up and it was very, very rocky underfoot, and every now and then we passed a little a little stream and dense trees either side us. And it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It was early September, so it was just on the turn. Fantastic forest.

Ruth Padel15:45

We were getting closer, and Andreai had this G P S, and he knew that this tigress was getting closer. And we didn't want to spook her or or upset her. We saw then the these tall, sort of frothy, purpley flowers, and they'd been broken, and then we saw a bit of her fur on the tree that she'd brushed past, and we realized we were at her back door, this was her path.

Ruth Padel16:06

And a tigress, you know, the Siberians are the biggest. They're as big as a sofa.

Ruth Padel16:10

And here was our fur, you know. We stopped and and Andrea was going on in this male way, saying, I think she's over there and yes, I think we're a quarter of a kilometre now. And I said, Don't you think that's that's that's far enough? And the girl said, Yes, and we were sort of now it was up to our shoulders in this this this vegetation and she said and this is a tick, she said, showing on her finger a little. She said, Um, I think I think I want to go back now. And and when the girl who was the daughter of a famous tiger'sologist said she'd like to go back, I thought I'd like to go back too.

Presenter16:39

I wonder if he would read us one of the poems that was born out of Your Tiger experience.

Ruth Padel16:44

Yeah, this poem is called um Tiger Drinking at Forest Pool.

Ruth Padel16:49

Water, moonlight, danger.

Ruth Padel16:52

Dream

Ruth Padel16:54

Bronze urn Angled on a tree root, One slash of light.

Ruth Padel16:58

then gone.

Ruth Padel17:00

A red moon seen through clouds or almost seen.

Ruth Padel17:05

Treasure found

Ruth Padel17:07

But lost.

Ruth Padel17:08

Flirting between the worlds of lost and found.

Ruth Padel17:11

An unjust law repealed.

Ruth Padel17:14

A wish come true.

Ruth Padel17:16

A lifelong sadness.

Ruth Padel17:19

Heal.

Ruth Padel17:20

Haven in the mind for any one hurt by littleness.

Ruth Padel17:25

Prayer for the moment save.

Ruth Padel17:28

Treachery

Ruth Padel17:30

Forgiven.

Ruth Padel17:31

Flame of the crackle glaze tangle, amber reflected in gray milk jade.

Ruth Padel17:37

An old song remembered long debt paid.

Ruth Padel17:42

A painting on silk which may

Presenter17:45

Yeah.

Presenter17:48

Thank you. Can you tell me then about your next musical choice?

Ruth Padel17:52

This is partly comes out of, you know, being in late sixties, Oxford, dancing all the time to satisfaction to the stones.

Ruth Padel18:00

When I was at Oxford I was doing a lot of um singing and um playing chamber music, but of course um in life I was dancing.

Ruth Padel18:08

But then later on I did I wrote a book called I'm a Man, Sex Gods and Rock and Roll.

Ruth Padel18:14

And where did that come from? That was masculine, and it came from very, very masculine, blues-like muddy waters.

Speaker 418:21

I prove to you, baby, that I ain't no square.

Speaker 418:27

Really let me bother you.

Speaker 418:32

I am ready for you.

Speaker 418:34

I hope you will

Speaker 418:38

Where are the

Presenter18:48

Muddy Waters and I'm Ready, and memories there of dancing your way through the sixties. You were at Oxford studying classics, Ruth Pardle. Um and it was in your twenties that you went to Greece for the first time. You've said that that was the making of you. Why?

Ruth Padel19:02

It was my other country.

Ruth Padel19:04

I mean, my father taught me Greek, and then I did Greek at Oxford and so on, and I was by then doing a sort of a PhD.

Ruth Padel19:11

And um

Ruth Padel19:13

I went to Athens. Then the archaeologists at the British School of Athens said we need students in Crete because we're excavating a trench and we need helpers. So they sent me off to Knossos, and there I met somebody who was working for them, who was a very important friend of mine for the rest of my life.

Ruth Padel19:31

He was Cretan, he was digging for them, he didn't know English. I loved his language. I mean, I would stumble my way in Greek and say, Are you afraid of something? forvarasse He said, No, I I respect something, sevom and that would be a word that actually came in Aeschylus and all the you know, came from from texts I'd studied. And there's this very, very magical thing when something that's been so important to you if you're if you're somebody like me who is obsessed with language and who lives through language and for whom words are

Ruth Padel19:58

Physical things. When you actually find somebody using the words that have been important to you, or when what was on the page becomes real, it is magic.

Presenter20:08

You said that your father, who had started as a classicist and then went on to medicine, had had engendered in you this connection with the Greek language and and Latin too you studied. Is there a sense in which

Presenter20:20

They are the basis for everything else.

Ruth Padel20:22

Yes, yeah.

Ruth Padel20:26

Sometimes it's a barrier because other people it's been lost now and other people don't have it. And it annoys my daughter when I say.

Ruth Padel20:33

But that word comes from so and so, you know.

Ruth Padel20:36

But to English it can seem.

Ruth Padel20:39

upper class, which I'm not.

Presenter20:42

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Ruth Padel20:43

When I was in Greece digging for the British archaeologists, you had to keep very, very carefully a trench book of what you found. You know, so what lair you found, this bit of the shardin and the shard was very important. But the Cretan diggers were a lot of them quite old men and they knew these wonderful mantinathas, which are little rhyming songs which can be spontaneously done. They used to be able to go on for hours just about what's happening to you. There you are, Kirsty, with your blonde hair and what's happening to you, where your eyes look like that. You know, a mantanada singer would sit down and sing it just like that. The archaeologists found all these sort of mantinathas scribbled all over the dig books. And I loved all that. And I loved the song. And this singer, he was born in 1923, Calagridis. He's an old master of the Lyr and of the Mantinada.

Speaker 421:30

Vimyaga, Yelpa Pa.

Speaker 421:50

Aruna simaze.

Presenter21:56

Jorvos Kalogridis and the traditional Cretan song Yesimi Horos Nero Jasmine without water cannot live, and nor can a heart without love. So, Ruth Pardle, um, for a time then you pursued this academic life essentially. You shuttled between Oxford and Greece. You were teaching, you were lecturing.

Presenter22:13

When did you decide I am a poet and not an academic?

Ruth Padel22:16

Uh

Ruth Padel22:18

In about 1984. You see, I never applied for a full-time job. I was always I was always too cagey about commitments to administration, as it were. And also a man called John Welsh who who runs a a small poetry press called the Many Press. He'd agreed to publish a pamphlet of my poems called Alibi. And alibi means elsewhere. And it was my alibi. It was my other place. You know, poetry was.

Ruth Padel22:46

So I gave up my job and I then went free home.

Presenter22:50

So this was a very significant time for you, because you'd also in this period got married and then subsequently you gave birth to your daughter, Gwen. In you know, in a very short space of time you had acquired lots of titles and positions. You know, you were a poet, you were a wife, you were a mother. How did how did you adjust to all of that?

Ruth Padel23:08

Yes, I'm not very good at thinking of myself from outside with titles and roles. I mean, from the inside, it was, you know, there was my husband.

Ruth Padel23:15

and there was Gwen, and there was work. We also had a dog.

Ruth Padel23:20

Uh

Presenter23:20

But you sound as if, up until then, you had, as you say, you weren't keen to tie yourself down. You had lived.

Presenter23:26

in reality a freelance life, but also in terms of your spirit, you know, back and forward to Greece, out on your travels, um boyfriends here and there, all of those things that enabled you all the time to be sort of elastic in terms of your sense of yourself. And then here you were.

Presenter23:40

But did you feel like the same person or did you feel s like somebody who was going through significant changes?

Ruth Padel23:45

You're quite right, Kirsty. I hadn't it hadn't occurred to me yes, it did feel being tied down.

Ruth Padel23:50

And I hadn't um felt tied down before. I'd been very inchoate. I think if I lived it again, I wouldn't have li been inchoate and nomadic for so long. But um

Ruth Padel24:00

I suppose you you can't you can't wish bits of your life unlived. Tell me about your next piece of music then.

Ruth Padel24:07

Ah, this is from Cosi Fantutti, which is one of the wickedest and most sexist plots of any opera. I had to have opera, and I've chosen Cosi not because it's necessarily the most sublime of Mozart's operas, but um because this little bit of it is all about relationship, and I think for me that's what music is about, is about relationship. And this is the point at which

Ruth Padel24:30

The man who is orchestrating this terrible scam on these for these women.

Ruth Padel24:35

um is laughing at the men, at the young men.

Ruth Padel24:38

Because they are going to find out that their their girls are going to be unfaithful.

Ruth Padel24:43

whereas the young men are laughing because one girl has just proved particularly faithful.

Ruth Padel24:49

I mean in one level it's horrible, and one level it's terribly human, and I love the way that the counterpoint suggests the division of of how the two people are looking. They're all laughing, and they're laughing about different things.

Speaker 425:02

Your panda mustache.

Speaker 125:14

I will sun down into the girls who planned in Mars!

Speaker 125:17

Uh

Speaker 125:18

Yeah.

Speaker 425:39

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Presenter25:50

Uh

Presenter25:54

The trio avoiridette and You're Laughing from the first act of Mozart's Cosifantute.

Presenter25:59

Sir Ruth Pardell, um you have won a clutch of notable awards. I'm not going to sit here and go through them all. But I wonder how much it matters to you to be not just a poet, to be a successful, a well regarded poet. Is that important?

Ruth Padel26:14

I suppose it is now because you want people to think well of your work.

Ruth Padel26:18

Um

Ruth Padel26:19

I mean, for a long time, you know, for twenty years maybe, mostly I didn't publish. I was um skipping around the world between Greece and England, as you say. But I like it when people say what you wrote mattered to me. When somebody said that poem you wrote really spoke to me, that's the best thing, because then you know what you're doing works. I like giving people things.

Presenter26:41

But of course we all have to live, don't we? And I'm thinking about your success I mean, I'm thinking about the book particularly, The Soho Leopard. It won a significant prize. It was very well received critically. You were actually paid, I believe, by your publishers, a thousand pounds for that book, and then you received a royalties check the next year after.

Presenter26:59

All of the praise that it had garnered for precisely was at fifty four pounds your royalty check.

Ruth Padel26:59

Well

Ruth Padel27:04

I think so.

Presenter27:05

Yes. Well, I mean, one thousand fifty four pounds for a book that has been lauded and held up as a perfect example of beautiful contemporary poetry doesn't seem to me to be that much to live on.

Ruth Padel27:16

Every poet would recognize that.

Ruth Padel27:18

What's so interesting, and maybe, you know, and what's mad, but interesting, is that.

Ruth Padel27:23

The power of poetry isn't commensurate with what happens to it economically.

Ruth Padel27:29

And that's just the way it is, and you've got to get on with that. It's always been like that. The early archaic poet Pender is always sort of going on about money.

Ruth Padel27:38

Poets always go on about money'cause they don't get very much of it.

Presenter27:41

So there we are. We've already explored Charles Darwin, your great-great-grandfather. There was also the royal physician who we've spoken about briefly.

Presenter27:48

I'm sure obviously it has had tremendous advantage, but do you ever feel weighed down by the history and possibly the expectation upon you, for all these great ancestors might have left you with a certain amount of baggage, possibly?

Ruth Padel28:03

There's a lot of baggage, yeah. Um

Ruth Padel28:06

I'm not sure it's whether it's about expectations. I think it's probably about ways of seeing and ways of experiencing.

Ruth Padel28:12

I think that's what I found in Greece, in Crete particularly. There were different ways of feeling the world, which are not

Ruth Padel28:20

Knowing the name of the plant, knowing the name of the song.

Ruth Padel28:23

but more immediately.

Ruth Padel28:25

It's interesting you always learn from the next generation when I'm with my daughter and we go to a play or something. She does not want to buy a programme. She says, I want to I want to feel the play. I don't want to see who's in it and what it's about. I want to feel it myself.

Ruth Padel28:37

And did I honour that?

Presenter28:39

Uh your daughter Gwen, then, i music is important to her as well.

Ruth Padel28:43

Yes, she mm maybe I've loaded her with too much music. She was a fabulous she is a fabulous musician, and she's a she played the violin.

Ruth Padel28:51

The next record is going to be the Bach double violin concerto, which he plays beautifully. And I remember one evening when I was rather sad and

Ruth Padel29:01

We were at home, we were on the stairs. She said, Oh, come on, mum, you know, let's let's just play the the bach double. And I'm a viola player, I'm hopeless on fiddle, but somebody has given us a

Ruth Padel29:10

an extra fiddle. So we started off, and I can't really do all these high positions, but it was a very healing moment. She was so good at doing that. And it's a wonderful it's a wonderful um concerto about the relationship of two voices.

Presenter30:24

Part of the second movement of Bach's double concerto for two violins in D minor. So Ruth Pardle.

Presenter30:30

As a child you you enjoyed your own company. As an adult, do you do you spend lots of time alone and thinking?

Ruth Padel30:36

Yes, I think any any any writer has to be alone a whole lot of the day in order to do the writing.

Ruth Padel30:42

But yeah, being alone.

Ruth Padel30:45

It is is vital in order to write.

Presenter30:47

And what about relationships? Your marriage broke down in the early 90s and you have had a series of significant relationships. But y are you single now? I'm single at the moment.

Ruth Padel30:56

Yeah.

Presenter30:56

And does that suit you?

Ruth Padel30:57

Yeah, I'm I mean I'd I'd much rather be on my own than in in something that didn't suit me.

Presenter31:03

I'm thinking of the panther-like qualities. I'm thinking of somebody who

Presenter31:07

almost is better suited to being alone. Is that fair?

Ruth Padel31:11

I don't know. I'm I'm I'm not very good at seeing myself from the outside.

Ruth Padel31:15

I like being in a relationship, but I also like being on my own.

Presenter31:20

And the therapeutic nature, the helpful nature of poetry. You described that wonderful moment when you were in it wasn't a kayak, but a sort of canoe thing, and and you were reciting Emily Dickinson. I mean, do you do you use other people's poetry even in a day to day way, or is it is it much more occasional than that?

Ruth Padel31:37

Yes, I think most poets would be very unhappy at this idea of a therapeutic idea or using poetry. Why is that?

Ruth Padel31:45

Because it's not a plaster, it's not a consolation. You know, poetry is quite a fierce thing.

Ruth Padel31:51

It it's got to be the the best words in the best order.

Ruth Padel31:54

Yeah.

Presenter31:54

And so on a desert island, surrounded by all its beauty and savagery and all of the the nature you will experience, and with all of the words that are in your head because you've learned so many other people's poetry as well as your own, will you feel comfortable?

Ruth Padel32:11

Yeah, I I I think I think that would be fine. I mean it would be very very nice if I had a bit of paper and pencil.

Presenter32:18

We might come on to all of that.

Ruth Padel32:19

Am I okay.

Presenter32:20

Tell me about your final piece of music, then.

Ruth Padel32:22

Okay, well this is Melina. Melina McCurry had the most wonderful, hoarse, whiskery, cigarette voice. And this is from the film Never on Sunday, and this is The Boys of Piraeus. And um she's so vital in that, and it's it brings Athens to me. Piraeus is the harbour of Athens.

Ruth Padel32:39

And it's the ancient harbour. It it somehow collapses for me a lot of sort of what

Ruth Padel32:45

people I've known who loved ancient Greece and also modern Greece. It's the sea, it's the boats, it's you know the sexy evening time when the when the sort of violet shadows fall and the ouzo comes out and the clouds are rolling in over the grey blue sea. I just love this sort of slightly raspy, sexy smile in the voice. It's a wonderful song.

Speaker 133:08

Tuparazila mustal maenaziyo ketoriyai ketes rafilia.

Speaker 133:16

Uftanus tol mani en ai ketlioi keteri i kete seraburia.

Speaker 133:32

Usa famiga losunola nayinuna leva.

Presenter33:36

Molina Mercury and the Boys of Piraeus from the film Never on Sunday. So, Ruth Pardle, I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you may take one other book. What's it going to be?

Ruth Padel33:49

I think it'll be Homer. I think it'll be the Ilia.

Presenter33:51

You may have that and what luxury

Ruth Padel33:55

Can I have a herd of deer?

Presenter33:57

I don't think you can.

Presenter33:59

I don't think you can have a

Ruth Padel34:00

I wouldn't tame them. I wouldn't eat them. I'd just to be in the forest. I would there would be a forest with there.

Presenter34:05

I would say, if you're feeling lucky, you might assume that they might already be there on this island. It might be an island that already has deer on it. I don't think I can give you deer.

Ruth Padel34:14

Okay.

Presenter34:15

Uh Yeah.

Ruth Padel34:15

What?

Presenter34:15

But maybe your island has dealt. Let's imagine that it does. In which case, can I ask you for something else?

Ruth Padel34:17

In which case

Ruth Padel34:22

Well, you see, I couldn't live without a pencil and paper.

Presenter34:26

Would that be it? Yeah, I mean, you can have a lot of paper and lots of pencils, too.

Ruth Padel34:30

The

Presenter34:30

And if you had to choose just one piece of music from the eight, what would it be?

Ruth Padel34:36

Well, it'd be an agonizing choice, but in the end I think I would take Cosie Fantutti because it is all about humanity and that's what I think music is about.

Presenter34:44

It's yours. Rose Pardle, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you, Kirsty.

Presenter34:56

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