Fay Weldon

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is Faye Weldon. She's written for radio, T V and films, and published dozens of books The Life and Loves of a She Devil and What Makes Women Happy Among Them. Her answer to that particular conundrum, incidentally nothing, not for more than ten minutes at a time.

Presenter0:51

Off the page, the story of her own life seems replete with drama, passion, and varying degrees of intermittent recklessness.

Presenter0:59

Fiction never seems a patch on real life, she says. So far-fetched. People will complain about novels, especially mine. But write the truth and no one believes you. It's too alarming. You say no one believes you, Fay Weldon, and you also say that to interviewers you tend to give about sixty per cent true answers, forty per cent fake. How are you going to do today? Do do you promise to be honest? Yes, I actually promise to be honest. Actually, it's usually print media I'm so dishonest with. Radio, for some reason, does seem to bring out the the the the truth rather more, if only in the tone of voice. I'm glad to hear it. You also said that um you write because you think you know something that others don't. What do you think you know?

Presenter1:42

I think I know what goes on in other people's heads more than most people do. It can be quite uncomfortable, actually, but you know what they're thinking. I think writers actually, on the whole, tend to have a degree of empathy which not everybody has. And yet, although you think you're able to d divine truths and understand what people are are thinking, you yourself have changed what you think about especially about the relationships between men and women. Well, the relationship has changed between men and women. It would be very odd, it seems to me, if I didn't. It has not always been what it is now. I mean, we're socialised in the most extraordinary degree now, or have become so, probably mostly for the good.

Presenter2:22

And you change your view.

Presenter2:23

And you seem often to think that the struggles that women choose to fight are the wrong ones. You know, you'll say, Well, it's fine at work to say I'm not going to make the coffee, but when you go home, really it's easier, and probably better, to be the one making the coffee. I'm afraid you probably have got it about right there, Kirsty. Well, you said it, not me.

Presenter2:42

You've got to go. Well, I know. But I think you can exhaust yourself fighting for justice in the home. There isn't much justice in the home. But, you know, it's not too bad accepting it. On the other hand, when you go to the office, you, you know, you are a human being, not necessarily female. Do you think we were sold a pup with feminism? No, you weren't sold a pup. We weren't sold a pup. We were sold a a sort of rather major rather matrix, snapping, snarling kind of nice animal. Works well, that analogy, doesn't it, under these circumstances? Your music, then. What are we going to hear first today, Faye Weldon?

Fay Weldon3:15

LT

Presenter3:21

We're going to hear first Rocking My Life Away, Jerry Lee Lewis, because it's so sort of cheerful and makes your your foot stomp and cheers you up and it seems a fairly good way to have lived a life.

Speaker 23:34

1425 and 1498 I voted rock'n'roll party on my last birthday, but it's good I rocking my life away

Speaker 23:45

I've been moving and I'm grooving and I'm getting more nice things.

Speaker 23:51

Got a gal called Nellie, she's a chili pepper hockey knowed how to roll a killer, knowed how to rock and I'm rocking, rockin', rocking my life away.

Presenter4:02

That was Jerry Lee Lewis and Rockin' My Life Away. Faye Weldon, it it strikes me that you're something of a a provocateur. You know, rocking the boat is something that's fine by you. It doesn't bother you too much.

Presenter4:14

I don't think it does bother me v very much. You know, you live, you die, what does it matter? You say what you think, you do your work, you try and do it properly, and really that's that's all you can do. And you do say what you think, but you tend to think things five years ahead, I find. That's the problem. I mean, I remember Pity the Poor Men became something shocking that I said, because nobody pitied men, but now everybody pities men. You just get there first, you see, that's the trouble. I see. You have written that that that as a child you were too aware of the precariousness of life. Why was that? I mean it was to do with family circumstances. There was a lot of shuttling around for you. Explain a little of that.

Presenter4:54

Well, before I was born there was an earthquake. I sometimes think that might be what it was.

Presenter5:01

And my mother had to leave New Zealand, where I was conceived, and go to England, because everything suddenly fell down. And I think, in a way, this kind of concept has stayed with me, that things can so easily just fall down, and you have to live to be prepared for that.

Presenter5:16

And I think we all see our lives as too settled and safe and and not wary enough about what's going to happen next. So what makes you feel secure? Is it is it earning and money in the bank and knowing that you can turn a good phrase and get a book published? I don't think anything really makes me feel secure at all. But I don't see why it should.

Presenter5:35

That must be a very nerve-wracking way to live, though, if there's not a sort of, if you like, a kind of place of safety. Well, this seems to me to be just a human condition.

Presenter5:45

To be unsafe, to be unaware, to have tigers crawling outside the cage. How can one live in peace or security? I don't think it's possible. Are you always managing your fear then, or or tempering your fear about what life may bring? No, not at all. I mean I mean the worst that can happen is death, really, isn't it? It's not so bad.

Fay Weldon6:00

But

Presenter6:05

Right. Why do you say it's not so bad? It might sound pretty bad to most people. Well, it may I mean it might be hell, it's true. It might be purgatory, it might be heaven, and it might be absolutely nothing. I think I've presented myself here as somebody sort of very nervous and frightened. I'm not. I'm not frightened. I'm I mean there's very little frightens me, except I don't drive because I'm so nervous of what's over the hill, because I have a sort of scenario. You tell yourself sort of stories as you drive about what might be round the corner. So it makes it very difficult to drive. But this I've put down to my overblown narrative sense. It would be easy to sort of interpret it as a almost a

Presenter6:42

You know, a second sense about things. Yes, there is a degree of second sight there, I think. Yes, on occasion. When did that begin?

Fay Weldon6:46

Is that

Presenter6:50

Oh, I think when I was really quite small. A tendency to see things that weren't actually there.

Presenter6:57

sort of ghosts or figures round the bed or voices in your head or, you know, all sorts of things, which I think are really quite common in children.

Speaker 37:06

Yeah.

Presenter7:06

Actually, because I mean, what is reality? It's really difficult to put your finger on it or say, Yes, that's real, that's not. And with me, if you spend your life making things up and making characters up and situations up, I have no idea any more almost whether I'm real.

Presenter7:23

Let's have some music. Tell me about your second choice today. I've chosen a Schubert. And why?

Fay Weldon7:27

And why?

Presenter7:28

Because it was sung by my grandmother, who was a musician and who came over from America and lived with us in New Zealand, and she used to play the piano for six hours every day, classical mu classical piano. Uh she was taught by a pupil of Clara Schumann, which takes us way back in time. But she would sing uh this particular song, and I loved to hear it.

Speaker 37:52

Saint Roer's lein fields lein of it.

Speaker 38:01

Arzo Jung more than fear, Lieber Schnell is not so sin, so sweet fear and froid.

Speaker 38:15

Here's liner, rise, line or ears liner.

Presenter8:16

Uh

Speaker 38:20

Uh

Speaker 38:22

Where's my

Presenter8:31

That was Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, accompanied by Gerald Moore and Schubert's song Heidenbrueslein, Little Wild Rose, conjuring up, Faye Weldon, as you were saying during that piece of music, an entirely different era. There was your grandmother playing in this was in the house in New Zealand that you lived in with your mother, and your grandmother had travelled all the way from America. You were born then in it was 1922, September.

Fay Weldon8:46

Yeah.

Fay Weldon8:47

With your ma

Presenter8:54

And you on the birth certificate Franklin Birkinshaw was who you were.

Fay Weldon8:57

Yeah.

Speaker 28:57

Come on.

Fay Weldon8:57

What was that?

Presenter8:59

Yes, well, my father was Dr Berkinshaw, my mother was misses Berkinshaw, and she called me Franklin because he was called Frank and and she believed in numerology, and if you added all the numbers up and did the workings out, it came out as William Shakspere, so she thought Franklin Berkinshaw.

Presenter9:16

So she had aspirations for you as a writer even then? Yes, well she was a writer and my father wrote as well as being a doctor, so it was not perhaps astonishing that she did that. What did your mother write? When she was twenty two she published a really, very good novel. After that she wrote women's romances to sort of keep us all because my father left and we were very poor and they they divorced when I was six. You know, so she managed to keep us alive by writing. Why did they divorce?

Presenter9:43

I think they were both rather temperamental people. Was it explained to you of course now children are sat down at the kitchen table, aren't they? And and told that, you know, mummy and daddy love you, but mummy and daddy can't live together. What what did your parents say to you as a little

Fay Weldon9:49

Aren't they in the

Presenter9:55

Six-year-old? Uh in those days, no, they didn't tell you anything, so I didn't know my parents were divorced. I thought he had to work somewhere in the north, so that was why he wasn't with us. And then then I was told, Oh, he's getting married again, and I thought that was very strange because I thought he was already married. However, the world is very strange, and for all you know, you're allowed more than one wife at a time. You know, things have to be explained to children. In those days, they very seldom did. And there was a point at which your mother left altogether, didn't she? She decided to go to the middle of the morning. But but not taking you. But not taking us again, so she was just not there when.

Fay Weldon10:26

Oh, that was that was

Fay Weldon10:34

But not to

Presenter10:37

Morning.

Presenter10:38

And I asked my sister where my mother was, and she said, Oh, she's gone home,'cause home was what England was called in those days. My sister was older. And but I couldn't understand that. I just assumed again she must there must be another home somewhere else where one day I would go.

Presenter10:53

And you did you went home. You were what? You were it was on your fifteenth birthday. I arrived on my fifteenth birthday. At Tilbury Docks. At Tilbury, yes.

Fay Weldon10:57

Yeah.

Fay Weldon10:58

At Tilbury Docks.

Presenter11:01

It was terribly exciting. And you went into London and the whole thing was full of bombsites, like gaps in teeth, really. And yet really exciting, because it was

Fay Weldon11:07

Night.

Presenter11:13

Just this feeling of new beginnings and something terrible having happened with this sense of.

Presenter11:21

Something else about to happen. Let's have some music just now then. Tell me about your third piece of music. What have you chosen?

Presenter11:27

The third piece of music is Buffy St. Marie's Little Wheel Spin and Spin, and this to me has always seemed the most haunting and extraordinary piece of music. It's a kind of sense of destiny, I think, that she brings, and a kind of overall vision of what our existence is.

Speaker 311:45

Little wheels spin and spin, big wheel turn around and around. Little wheels spin and spin, big wheel turn round and around. Blame the angels, blame the fates, Blame the Jews or your sister Kate. Teach your children who to hate, And the big wheel turn round round. Little wheels spin and spin, Big wheel turn around, round Little wheels spin and spin, Big wheel turn around and around

Presenter12:01

Um

Presenter12:10

Buffy Saint-Marie and Little Wheels Spin and Spin. I'm not sure why, Faye Weldon, but as I listened to that I was reminded of your book The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. It might have been talk of Blame the Angels, Blame the Fates. There is a sense often when you write that you are tempted to stray into those areas that are thought of, you know, by intellectuals as slightly nutty. You know, those areas where we invoke the spirits and invoke the devils and somehow help them to conjure up forces to help ourselves through things.

Presenter12:39

Well, I think i it's very much part of life. I think it's very much there. You can deny it because it's very frightening and you can't control it and you don't understand it. But this sense of a sort of destiny, of the sense of cogs of wheels within wheels, of coincidences and things that you don't quite understand, which seem to have a purpose, is very much always, I think, with me. And yet you seem determinedly not to be a fatalist. I mean, you're somebody ev even as a a schoolchild. When you came back to England, your mother had sent you to quite a a bohemian alternative school where they didn't believe in exams. And you said to your mother, No, no, no, I want to go to Hampstead School for Girls, where they very much do believe in exams.

Fay Weldon13:12

So you said

Presenter13:18

That is exactly what I said, and since the government paid for me to go go because I was a scholarship child.

Presenter13:24

I was able to go, but there were a whole lot of little intellectuals there. They were very, very bright girls. Hampstead School for Girls was quite a proper school, and you had quite a proper address. But in fact, you weren't living in the house, you were living in the basement. Oh, yes, that is true. No, that is true. My mother was a housekeeper, and and we lived in the basement. With the rats, it were rats. It was terrible. There was no money. The world as she knew it, the literary world. My grandparents had run a kind of literary salon in Hampstead with Wells and Pound and all sorts of people. And she was used to that life, and her friends were Evelyn and Annick Ward, and do you know, but all that had just simply vanished. Like all the best writers then, you you used this experience to write it was the pilot for Upstairs, Downstairs that you wrote, which won you uh an award at the time, because you were observing, as a schoolgirl, you were observing the delineation, the things that were

Fay Weldon14:09

Yeah.

Speaker 314:09

Really?

Presenter14:17

never to be said and the way that staff behaved in relation to the people with the money upstairs and all of that. Oh, yes, of course. No, it was it was no, there's a lot of experience has gone into this, plus a lot of reading, actually, because you you know, I just read and read and read and read as a child, and I was brought up really on Victorian favourites.

Fay Weldon14:22

Who is it?

Presenter14:35

As a scholarship girl, your y your name was on the board every day for free school lunches. Everybody knew that uh Faye was was not really one of them in that respect. Did that affect you at the time? I didn't mind at all. I just thought it meant I deserved to be there. I was really proud proud of it, you know. And these things did not particularly impinge upon them, or if it did, I didn't notice. I think there are many, many things I don't notice, actually, about what goes on.

Fay Weldon14:47

Right now.

Presenter15:03

Really? Somebody with a writer's eye likes.

Fay Weldon15:06

Okay.

Presenter15:07

Well but when when I got a bit older I sort of lived in sin with people, and had a baby without a father, it didn't occur to me that there was any shame or disgrace in this, and indeed I met very few people who ever behaved.

Presenter15:19

As if there was. Nobody seemed to think Oh, you're a bad girl, particularly.

Presenter15:24

I in real life people are actually much, much kinder than they ever appear to be in fiction.

Presenter15:30

So much to fit in, let's have some music now. Du tell me about disc number four.

Presenter15:35

Disk number four is a tombstone every mile, which is a sort of country and western song. And i i i it's this kind of wonderful

Presenter15:46

American sort of romanticism about the sort of opening up of America. I suppose New Zealand was a pioneering country too, and my great uncles were

Presenter15:56

Danish actually, and they were in America as cowboys at the turn of the century. And uh it it always had this extraordinary romanticism to me.

Fay Weldon16:06

It's a stretch of road up north in Maine That's never ever ever seen a smile If they buried all the truckers Lost in them woods there'd be a tombstone every mile Count them all

Fay Weldon16:25

There'd be a tombstone every mile

Presenter16:35

Dick Curlis and a Tombstone every mile. We were talking there, Fay Weldon, about you being an unmarried mother, aged twenty two. It was nineteen fifty four. You you said that that people were really quite nice and matter of fact about it, but isn't it the case that you changed your name by Deedpole, so as people would think you'd been

Presenter16:53

deserted you know, as a as a wife, you'd been deserted by your husband, because that was preferable to being perceived as an an unmarried lover. Well, that was my mother's idea, and I always did what my mother told me. And she said, you know, it didn't rub people's noses in it if you said you were Mrs. Somebody and your husband was away. They were all perfectly prepared to accept this.

Fay Weldon17:00

What

Presenter17:11

And women change their names anyway a lot in those days. Yes, you've written about about you changing your name. How many names have you had? I don't know.

Presenter17:20

I do remember in about sort of nineteen eighty, I think, I saw my medical card and and it had all the names I'd gone by. There were lots of names, I couldn't even remember them. I must have been living with people or had taken somebody else's name for some reason or other. I don't know. But I was never really of any sort of fixed personality, I suppose. At the time, it would have been your first marriage, I think. You had your your son Nicholas. You married this man quite quickly after meeting him, did you? Oh, yes, yes. Well, you had to, because there was no social security. You either supported your child, or they took it away and put it in an orphan engine. So the customary thing for girls in this situation to do was to marry somebody for for for a roof over your head and to be kept and you would provide services of a domestic and sexual nature, which many people see marriage as anyway, and in return for your keep. So it was not so surprising or terrible a thing to do. But you had been working. Did you just find working and having a child on your own just too much? You couldn't it was too much to do? Well, yes, because in those days, if you're a woman, you couldn't earn enough to keep yourself. We're going right back to the nineteen fifties, and and women could only earn pin money. So no matter how hard you work

Fay Weldon18:24

Well, yes.

Presenter18:36

It was a really difficult thing to do, which was, I suppose, one of the reasons one became a feminist, actually.

Presenter18:42

After that marriage, after I married for love after that as well as but then I could afford to, you see, because as soon as you can keep yourself, you can afford to love. You said a moment ago that that, you know, to get married it w was a direct exchange for sort of housework and sexual services. It's a very uncomfortable thing to say, though, isn't it? Because people don't want to be quite as stark about it as well. No, they don't. I mean, b George Bernard Shaw always saw.

Fay Weldon19:02

No.

Presenter19:05

Marriage and slavery is much the same, because it was a trade, in fact. You would hope, like Jane Austen heroines, to marry for love, not money, but it was a very difficult thing to do. You had to marry for love and money.

Presenter19:18

Let's have some music. What are we going to hear next? Well, the next one is Vaughan Williams, because we have to bring the standard up a bit here, I think. You've got a point to prove after the country in Western. Yes, I think.

Fay Weldon19:26

You've got a point to prove after the country in Western.

Presenter19:31

And I can go, if I have to, into grandeur.

Speaker 219:56

On the same

Presenter20:25

Antie Fern from Five Mystical Songs by Vaughan Williams with the Guildford Choral Society and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Hilary Devan Wetten. So, Faywell, didn't you you had been working at the The Daily Mirror, you were also working as an advertising copywriter, although you didn't coin the phrase go to work on an egg, which is often. Well, I sort of did and sort of didn't. I was in charge when it appeared on the poster. But it was, like most things, taken out of the files twenty years back. We're at the point in your life, then, as we follow it through, when it's been so full of events that it is almost impossible to pack them all in, but I will do my best. You have have your son Nicholas, and you're in your unhappy first marriage, and you decide to do what sort of reads a little like a kind of moonlight flit. You just you leave the marriage one night.

Fay Weldon20:45

Well I saw

Fay Weldon21:03

The empty.

Presenter21:15

Yes, and yes, I did. I ran away in the middle of the night. I stole four pounds from his wallet and ran away. Why I didn't just tell him I was going, I can't imagine. You see, but then one was qu one was quite young, and I suppose.

Presenter21:29

I suppose you felt

Presenter21:31

very wicked in doing such a thing because you didn't do it and women were, I think, much more frightened of the anger of men. And actually it seems that he wasn't that angry, because your first hus husband gave you fifty quid to go with the four quid and sort of said to bid you goodbye. No, no, no, he was fine and helped me find a flat and all sorts of things, because I think he could see it was a totally unsuitable and impossible marriage. But also because what I had found out was that he kept marrying.

Fay Weldon21:46

That you could buy.

Presenter22:00

I was the third marriage, and then he went on to have another one in which he married a girl with a s with a son. He was a headmaster and was applying for other headmasterships, and he had to say wife and son on all of them, and he'd somehow the women had left, so he always kept having to find another wife and son, but read the same. And I think probably he felt rather bad about that.

Fay Weldon22:16

Different white sound, but it read the same.

Presenter22:23

You threw yourself into the arms of fate on the night that you met Ron Weldon. Oh, I did, yes. Yes, tell me what happened.

Fay Weldon22:27

Oh, I did, yes.

Presenter22:29

Well, he went to the party with one person. I went to the party with myself. On the way there on the bus, on the thirty one bus, I remember it very clearly. I knew that I was going to meet somebody I was going to marry, so I met this person and

Presenter22:42

Went home with them and never left since. I had to, actually, for about a week, but only for about a week. But the cynic might say, and I'm not such a cynic myself, I have to say, but if you'd if you thought on the bus I'm going to meet the man tonight that I'm going to marry, it could just be that well, it could have been Ron, but it could have been somebody else in the room. You were just determined to meet the person you were going to marry. I think you're absolutely right, Kirsty, yes.

Fay Weldon22:56

Goodness.

Presenter23:05

Now do you, or are you just toying with me?

Presenter23:11

I don't know, because there's a s there's a celebrity website which gives me my my esoteric portrait free, and I look it up every morning and it tells me what the day is going to be like, and then I live that day. Now, if I didn't look it up, I'd probably have an entirely different day. I don't know. How would I know?

Fay Weldon23:18

Free

Fay Weldon23:22

Like

Presenter23:29

What did it say your day was going to be like today? Did you have time to to take a look? Yes, I did. It said I was going to be very

Presenter23:37

But I must look after money matters.

Presenter23:42

Let's have some music then. I'm afraid we're down to disc number six already. Tell me about what it is. Well, disc number six is People We Once Knew, which is a song written by my son Nick, who is a musician, and his wife and and sung by his wife Andra. And it is about that other part of life, which is the

Presenter24:03

not the nostalgic but the song about the things we have lost and the people who have died, who are who remain very much part of us still. And it's a lovely song. There are shadows still

Presenter24:17

On the age of three

Presenter24:22

Where we hear the dark old songs we used to play

Presenter24:31

Echoes of the past

Presenter24:39

And the people we once knew

Presenter24:43

Andrew Sparks and People We Once Knew, a song written by your son, Fay Weldon, your son Nick. We also could hear him playing the piano there as well. And that's his wife, Andrew Sparks, singing.

Fay Weldon24:51

It is well.

Fay Weldon24:53

Soon

Presenter24:55

You went on then, as we say, to marry Ron, and it was a very long a happy marriage, but quite a tempestuous marriage? Yes, it was happy but tempestuous. Right. Do you want to tell me about that, or do you not want to tell me about that? I'm not sure. I can't tell by the look on your face.

Fay Weldon25:08

I'm not sure. I can't tell by the look on your face.

Presenter25:11

Uh it was happy but tempestuous, and and it went on for thirty years and then it collapsed rather horrifically. What you said about that thirty years you we divorced and he died and I thought I would go out of my mind. It's terrifically poignant. Did you divorce?

Presenter25:30

In a fit of pique, were you annoyed at him? Was it No, he was annoyed with me. No, he he just you know, he just didn't love me any more.

Presenter25:37

Well, you know, people are loud.

Presenter25:40

There's no obligation to love somebody, but it's rather shocking when they stop.

Presenter25:46

But anyway, but he died and um

Presenter25:50

Yeah, I think I nearly did go out of my mind. I think I probably did go out of my mind. But then, you know, where's your mind anyway?

Presenter25:56

I wrote some quite good books out of it. It is a terrible thing that writers do is to use everything, you see.

Presenter26:05

But also because I think what you know, or what I know, is that you share these things with so many people.

Presenter26:12

You can't control your life and actually shouldn't want to.

Presenter26:15

And of course you would have had, if not quite grown up children. You you had uh there was Nicholas and then you went on to have three more sons. So you tell me about I mean a a household with four boys in it is a pretty lively household. How were you?

Fay Weldon26:21

Yeah, so you can

Presenter26:28

As a mother, because you must have been writing the entire time to produce the amount of books you have.

Presenter26:34

Yes, I think well, I was I think I was a very solicitous and loving mother, and I was able to stay at home a lot of the time, and there was the whole world of au pairs who would come and help you, you know. Did you write in the house? And I wrote in the house, yes. And I did certainly think that my habit of writing short sentences and lots of paragraphs was because of the children who kept interrupting. You were, at that time, of course, somebody who was held up as a a great feminist writer and something of a feminist icon, and therefore whatever you have said and done subsequently has been scrutinised. So if you talk about lipstick, or if you say, well, yes, I might have had cosmetic surgery, I feel better for it.

Fay Weldon26:41

And and

Presenter27:16

People are

Presenter27:18

Often appalled by that, they think that you should be behaving in a way that um that is totemic, representative.

Presenter27:26

I've always found it very difficult to live by principle, you know.

Presenter27:32

Do you try?

Presenter27:34

No.

Presenter27:36

No, I'm afraid I don't. Um, I I got into great trouble lately for for for for saying women should pick up.

Presenter27:43

Men's socks in the home. Because you said it's easier to do it than to have the fight about getting him to do it. But the thing is that my husband picks up my socks. This is how little connected my life and my theory is.

Fay Weldon27:48

But there's

Presenter27:56

And does that make you think that you might have the wrong theory?

Presenter28:02

No, I think the theory is right, but I will go to hell.

Presenter28:06

Yes, can we talk a little bit about religion? Um you were baptized in what was it the year two thousand you were baptized? Yes, must be by now. Yes. And and why did you decide that religion was important to you?

Presenter28:18

I think I decided it was important to everybody. I think it's difficult to b live without a sense of life being in some way permanent or not over particularly just because you happen to die. You had a while, these things are characterized as near death experiences. Can you explain what happened?

Presenter28:38

Yes, well I had a kind of allergic thing and I happened to be in hospital at the time and my heart stopped and I died actually and was brought back to life with various electric shocks and but had in that time saw the pearly gates, the gates of heaven. And the thing is, they weren't sort of nice tasteful kind of pale colours, but very rather violent sort of Indian temple colours.

Presenter29:00

of orange and crimson and rose, they rather vulgar and, what's more, they were double glazed.

Presenter29:06

Because of the nature of of this experience, the the double glazed gates as you describe it, you think for a minute it was just your writerly imagination running away with itself. Of course it probably was.

Fay Weldon29:17

That's enough.

Presenter29:21

But, you know, it certainly e made me even less afraid of dying than I had been before, because because of this this sort of sense of that there was no such thing as finality, actually, I suppose. Let's have some music then, Fairweldon. What are we going to hear at disc number seven?

Presenter29:38

And now we're going to hear Worst Fears, which is sung by Linda Hayes and written by my husband Nick, which is about actually what we were talking about earlier, the terrible emotions women go through. Because the book Worst Fears was written at a time when I read it was probably just about losing my mind and I mean I would like everything I wrote to be put to music actually.

Presenter30:01

Uh and Nick put this worst feels to music.

Fay Weldon30:06

We're spears.

Fay Weldon30:09

I was hypnotized.

Fay Weldon30:13

They cut me down

Fay Weldon30:16

Like spears of ice.

Fay Weldon30:19

Burst fears.

Speaker 230:20

Uh

Fay Weldon30:23

Where did I go wrong?

Fay Weldon30:26

The rock is gone

Fay Weldon30:29

That I was standing upon.

Fay Weldon30:32

It's my worst fears.

Presenter30:35

That was Linda Hayes singing Worst Fears, a song written by your husband, Nick Fox. And Nick Fox is your third husband. You've been married for, what, around, about 15 years now? Yes. You've said before that women are.

Fay Weldon30:44

Who is not?

Presenter30:47

Plagued with anxieties, doubts, and guilt, have you managed to rid yourself of those things?

Presenter30:53

Not too silly.

Presenter30:56

Not totally, but it's certainly much easier much easier than it was. Yes. With you I'm thinking because you your manager with Nick, you you've said, well, he's the one that makes the coffee and he's the one that picks up the socks and he's also he's your manager as well. Doesn't he? Yes, and and an editor and and, you know, a partner in all senses.

Fay Weldon31:08

Yeah.

Presenter31:14

And you are also grandmother to is it seven grandchildren you've got what sort of grandmother are you?

Fay Weldon31:18

Good.

Presenter31:20

Yeah.

Fay Weldon31:22

Do you tell me more?

Presenter31:22

Do tell me more.

Presenter31:25

I mean, I'm not a good I'm not a well, I'm somewhere else and I'm busy and I'm not a babysitting grandmother. And besides, you see, they're the children of sons and I think in a way the maternal grandmother's role is to be this person and the the the mother-in-law I think really probably needs to keep out of it rather more. Perhaps this is just excuses because I'm not a good grandmother.

Presenter31:47

But I pray for them.

Presenter31:49

Let's um let's look to this island. Alone, alone, all, all alone, as you will be on this island, Faywelt, and how are you going to cope with that?

Presenter31:58

So I won't mind.

Presenter32:00

It'll be all right.

Presenter32:02

I'd be rather annoyed if I'd try and write out if I had a pen and pencil it'd be all right, and a bit of paper. I had to write in the sand and the the sea came and washed it all away, I wouldn't be too happy, I suppose. Yes, we shall come to that in just a moment. Before we do the your final piece of music to day is is what, and and why have you chosen it?

Presenter32:20

It's the grateful dead and touch of grey because it's so cheerful and it's so positive and it's so sort of

Presenter32:27

looking at life and deciding it's going to be okay. And also because I was used to we used to go on stage with them once upon a time, a long time ago, sitting in the back.

Presenter32:37

Go on stage to do what? Well, it's a great favour. You're allowed to sit on stage while they do a concert, and it's terribly exciting and it's considered a great honour, and indeed so it is.

Fay Weldon32:37

Go on stage.

Fay Weldon32:39

Yeah, it does.

Speaker 232:49

Draw the curtains, I don't care, cause it's alright.

Speaker 232:56

How we'll get by

Speaker 233:02

I feel and die.

Speaker 233:08

How do you get out

Speaker 233:11

I will survive.

Presenter33:17

That was the grateful dad, and a touch of grey. So, Fay, I will give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can choose a book to take to the island. What are you going to choose?

Presenter33:28

Actually I'm going to choose Kennedy's Latin Primer because it's been sitting on my bookshelf for about fifty years when I haven't.

Presenter33:38

Haven't brushed up on my Latin. I loved learning Latin. My mother always said every day you had to be a little further forward in something. It didn't matter what, even if it was only your Latin verbs. So that's what I'll do. What good advice And a luxury, too.

Presenter33:54

Well, again you think and you think and then you think, actually, what would probably make you happy would be a shot gun.

Presenter34:00

For the purpose of not ending at all. No, no, no, no. Crocodiles, invaders. I don't know what. It would just make you feel feel somehow secure and sort of male fridayation. I'm worried about you with a shotgun and I'm not sure why. Can you use a shotgun?

Fay Weldon34:02

We can solve it.

Fay Weldon34:14

I'm not sure.

Presenter34:18

No, but if I was allowed to have bullets I would practise and I would get a little bit better every day and then, you know

Presenter34:24

I shall give it to you then. And if the waves were to wash to the shore and threaten to take away your disks, which one disc would you run to save of these eight?

Fay Weldon34:25

And

Presenter34:33

I think I'll go back to the Jerry Lee Lewis one and rock my life away.

Presenter34:39

I'd be just fine. Sounds like it. Faye Weldon, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Presenter34:45

Thank you.

Presenter35:32

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc. co dot uk slash radio four.