Marjorie Wallace

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.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is the mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace. Founder and chief executive of the charity SAINE, her work revolves around ensuring those who need support for their problems find not just a sympathetic and understanding ear, but a practical help they need to cope and carry on with their lives. It's a vital service and one she feels passionately about. But it wasn't her first choice. A talented pianist, she had planned to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

Presenter1:04

Instead, she ended up with a degree in philosophy and psychology, landing a job on a T V show that was the epitome of all that was hip and happening in sixties Britain, the Frost programme.

Presenter1:15

Her print journalism won awards at the Sunday Times. She was part of the team whose landmark investigation uncovered the devastating effects of thalidomide.

Presenter1:24

She says, I have lived life on the edge, and I want to give a voice to other people on the edge. I would like to be able to forgive myself for my frailties, and and so say all of us. I think Marshall was about forgiving ourselves our frailties. We shall talk about your life in detail and the fascinating twists and turns that it has taken. It would be fair to say, I think.

Presenter1:44

That lots of people listening will know the name Marjorie Wallace and they will certainly recognise you when they see you on television. You come up always in reports about government plans for social care and mental health care, about funding. When you've been out there in public for thirty years championing a cause, how comfortable is it for you to s sit with me today and think, oh gosh, I've actually got to fill the time talking

Marjorie Wallace2:06

About me. Well, as you know, I was an investigative journalist and for many, many years a journalist, and one of kind of rules of journalism was that you didn't talk about yourself, you didn't put yourself into it, and even sometimes bylines were considered a a little bit unacceptable. So I'm not used to talking about myself, and I feel, I must say, frankly, rather nervous about disclosing some of the um some of the feelings and the

Marjorie Wallace2:36

Yeah.

Presenter2:36

experiences. Um people will learn a lot about you today, not just, I hope, by what you're going to tell me, but also by your music. It would be fair to say that music is absolutely central to your life. You are

Marjorie Wallace2:48

Passionate about music? I've been passionate about music because, um, with my mother being a pianist.

Marjorie Wallace2:54

I grew up with music. It's it's in my DNA.

Presenter2:58

Let's then hear your first piece of music this morning. Margery Wallace. Tell me what this is, and tell me particularly why you've chosen it.

Marjorie Wallace3:05

I've chosen Chopin's ballad number four in F minor.

Marjorie Wallace3:10

Because my mother was a gifted pianist, but she didn't become a concert pianist, because she followed my father, who was a civil engineer, all over Africa. But wherever they went she had a piano carried with her.

Presenter3:21

Uh

Marjorie Wallace3:21

And at sundown every night, whether or not they were in the bush, wherever they were, she would play the piano. And her favourite composer was Chopin. But I have another reason for Chopin, because much later on, when I was a student, I met this charming Polish emigré psychiatrist, very attractive, and I fell in love with him.

Marjorie Wallace3:43

He came from an aristocratic Polish family. He was a count. And then he took me back to Poland at the height of the Cold War.

Marjorie Wallace3:51

And we went to these estates that he used to own, his family used to own, and one of those was Zeleswova Vola, which is just outside Warsaw, and it is the very estate on which Chopin was born, because Nicholas Chopin, Chopin's father, was tutored to the Scarbeck children. Well, you can imagine

Marjorie Wallace4:10

With with all I felt about Chopin, that probably sealed my fate. But I had to wait many years before I actually married him.

Presenter5:20

That was Chopin's ballad number four in F minor, opus fifty two, played there by Vladimir Ashkenazi. Uh Marjorie Wallace, y you chose that principally, you said, because your mother was this

Presenter5:31

terrifically accomplished uh pianist and she would take her piano wherever her marriage led her including Nairobi, that's I think where you were born.

Presenter5:40

In nineteen forty three. What had taken your parents there?

Marjorie Wallace5:43

Well, my father was a civil engineer, and he went out in his twenties to map railways. So he was on safari, sort of cutting through the bush, mapping railways. And my mother

Marjorie Wallace5:55

followed him, and she followed him all over Africa. Our weekends were spent in the safari park outside Nairobi or driving down to Durban. I remember the vast skies. I remember actually also the darker undercurrents that there were. I remember going into the room one night and seeing my mother, and she had a gun with the mother of pearl handle under her pillow, because it was before Marma, but it was beginning of the unrest.

Marjorie Wallace6:23

I remember tales of people being ambushed in the roads, so there was always this mixture of the utter beauty, and then those undercurrents of fear and darkness.

Presenter6:35

Um your family went first of all to Greece, where of course you went with them, your father's travels as an engineer, you spent a year there, then on to South Africa, and then it was Surrey, which you found just what a terrible disappointment.

Marjorie Wallace6:46

Yes, I I I used to always say to people, um, you know, I I don't really belong here, you know, I'm I I'm from Africa, you know, and um i I never got used to really the routine, I didn't get used to the suburban life, and I really never forgave my parents for leaving this exotic landscape. How did you get on at school in Surrey?

Marjorie Wallace7:09

I did all right at school. I was very, very keen on poetry.

Marjorie Wallace7:13

And in fact, before I'd been at school in Surrey, when I was in Africa, I think I was six years old.

Marjorie Wallace7:20

I remember that I learnt the whole of the rhyme of the ancient mariner. The whole of it? Yes, I think it's a hundred and forty stanzas. And I was taken with this water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink, and the long grey beard and glittering eye. I was so excited by this, and the teachers couldn't believe it, so I then had to recite it to the class, and I did.

Marjorie Wallace7:40

And from then on I just learned poetry by heart, and I would be reading it under the bed clothes at night with a torch, and I was absolutely fuelled by these words and these images and the mystery and the magic romance.

Presenter7:53

Let's have another piece of music then, Marjorie Wallace. We're going to hear y your second piece of music.

Marjorie Wallace7:57

Well, the second track is the sound track from a film which was very famous in the nineteen sixties called Les Paraplis de Cherbourg, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Marjorie Wallace8:06

The story is very simple. It's a beautiful girl played by Catherine Deneuve and she works in an umbrella shop and she falls in love with the local mechanic Guy. He's drafted to the Algerian War.

Marjorie Wallace8:17

She becomes pregnant before he goes.

Marjorie Wallace8:20

He comes back, but it's too late. She's married to a wealthy older man, has a child. He's married another woman. And it brings back to me all that kind of heartbreak of when one's in one's twenties, you know, waiting for someone to return, waiting for the telephone call that doesn't come, waiting for the letter that never arrives, and then gradually that bittersweet reconciliation to loss.

Presenter8:45

And um Oh blah.

Presenter8:48

Com je sousa, nous noura tro et nouseron, Que la ra de rotre femme de mou.

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Shout.

Speaker 19:04

Every sky

Presenter9:05

The father might be

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Is it there?

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Number King D

Presenter9:19

That was Devona Garage from the film Para Prux de Charbourg, sung by Danielle Le Cari and Jose Bartel. Marjorie Wallace, as well as a facility with language, then, you also had a considerable facility with music, because you won yourself a place at the Royal Academy.

Presenter9:36

But you didn't stay. T tell me

Marjorie Wallace9:37

Uh

Presenter9:37

What?

Marjorie Wallace9:38

Patent.

Presenter9:38

Yeah.

Marjorie Wallace9:39

I left school at fifteen to do music, and I was going to do singing as well. But I was put off by that all right, Kirsty, because I thought I was going to be Tosca or or Isolde or or Madame Butterfly. But I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I could only do a sobretto maid's part, and that was the most my voice could ever carry. So that was a bit of a dharma. And then with the piano, I thought, you know, I'd be playing my chopin, I'd be doing concertos, but I went to the academy and I just listened for a day to the competition and I fled. For a day?

Marjorie Wallace10:16

I think it was maybe a few days, but I

Marjorie Wallace10:19

I knew that I never had the love of music, but I did not have that incredible technique and understanding of music which it takes. So I did my A levels and then got a place at University College London to study Can You Beat It? Logic and the Scientific Method.

Marjorie Wallace10:39

After a year of that I found it all too abstract, so I asked to change to psychology, experimental psychology, so in the end I did a degree in both.

Presenter10:48

Let's have some more music. Marjorie Wallace, tell me about your third one today. What is it and why have you picked it?

Marjorie Wallace10:53

Yeah.

Marjorie Wallace10:54

Well, when I left university I certainly didn't want to stay in the academic field.

Marjorie Wallace11:00

and I wanted to join what was going on in the rest of the world, the swinging sixties of London.

Marjorie Wallace11:05

and so I was lucky enough to get a job as one of the first trainee researchers in independent television.

Marjorie Wallace11:12

And one of my very first assignments was to join a small team for the Frost programme.

Marjorie Wallace11:20

This was David Frost's first incursion to serious television. Three nights a week at Wembley, but alongside me were

Marjorie Wallace11:28

people like John Clees, Tim Brooktailer, and uh we used to sort of have great fun. But also we used to have the ferret song, which was like our morning assembly anthem. And

Marjorie Wallace11:40

It was so ridiculous that I would like that on my island because it would always make me laugh and remember those very exciting, as David Frost would say, super days.

Presenter12:02

Uh

Speaker 312:14

Happened nine times yesterday And I shouldn't know for each time I was standing in the way.

Presenter12:27

That was the Ferret song sung by John Plees and the Loving Prune Fool. And I I have to tell you, Margery, that that I think is the first time in seventy three years that Desert Island Discs has uh enjoyed that track. And it was chosen by you because it was the song that reminds you so much of working with uh David Frost.

Presenter12:45

It sounds glamorous of imagining it was damned hard work.

Marjorie Wallace12:48

It was terribly stressful. We would have to come in with at least five ideas. And then, while the jokesmiths were paid for two minutes' worth jokes, as much as we were paid for working sixteen hour days, we had to go out and hunt down the victims. And David Frost would say, Could you just get hold of Ian Smith and Rhodesia? Here's the telephone number, and we just had to do it. And it was very stressful. And at the end of the first series, I had a bleeding ulcer. So it it was stressful, but it was so exciting. And these people that we worked with then became

Marjorie Wallace13:22

the very famous the Monty Pythons, the Two Ronnies, the Goody's David had an immense talent for picking really brilliant writers and comedians.

Presenter13:34

Um so you would be working, what, sixteen, eighteen hour days? Was there much time for for for personal life? I mean, were you you know, did you have boyfriends and so on?

Marjorie Wallace13:43

I think Kirsty We possibly shouldn't go down this road.

Presenter13:46

Oh I don't know.

Marjorie Wallace13:49

Not sure. I got to know a great number of people because actually between the Frost programme series I was in charge of what was called religious programmes.

Speaker 113:58

Let's

Marjorie Wallace13:59

And um the way I tackled that with a colleague of mine was I made a list of all the people in Swinging London I wanted to meet.

Marjorie Wallace14:07

And then I would invent programmes round them, like Sins for Modern Sinners, or Dahlia with Doubt, or My Favorite Poems and then the way it went was that they had lunch with me, and then they recorded the programmes with me, and I got to know a lot of people.

Marjorie Wallace14:23

Bernard Levin was one of the people I got to know. Robert Key. I just simply had a list and went through that and got to know very many of the figures of that era.

Presenter14:36

Time for some more music, Marjorie Wallace. We're going to hear um some verdie now. Just tell me your reason for picking this.

Marjorie Wallace14:42

Well, La Traviata has a very, very

Marjorie Wallace14:46

a personal meaning for me, because when I met my husband, whom we always called the Count,

Marjorie Wallace14:54

He always called me Traviata. He was a darling Traviata.

Marjorie Wallace15:00

And I was so naïve when I met him as a student, I thought that meant the frail one.

Marjorie Wallace15:05

And it was a bit later I realized that it actually meant the fallen woman.

Marjorie Wallace15:09

But by that time it was too late. That was my name.

Marjorie Wallace15:13

And he used to take me to the opera and this particular

Marjorie Wallace15:18

Duet which I've chosen.

Marjorie Wallace15:20

is something that means a great deal to me. Here's Violetta. She is a courtesan.

Marjorie Wallace15:26

She is dying from consumption.

Marjorie Wallace15:29

and for the first time she meets some one that she loves, Alfredo, and they go off to live at Dillickly in the countryside, and then his father, Germont,

Marjorie Wallace15:39

comes to her and says, Your affair is going to spoil my daughter's chances of marriage.

Marjorie Wallace15:45

Can you sacrifice your love and return to Paris?

Marjorie Wallace15:49

And

Marjorie Wallace15:51

She reluctantly and very nobly agrees.

Speaker 316:01

What's my goal?

Presenter16:16

Yeah.

Presenter16:38

Okay.

Presenter16:46

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter16:57

Dite Al Giovini from Verdi's La Traviata sung there by Cheryl Milnes and Iliano Kotrobash.

Presenter17:04

Your reason for choosing that, uh Marjorie Wallace, was because you said it was, you know, principally about sacrifice. This is uh the father talking about sacrifice to the daughter and to her lover. Sacrifice is something you know a little bit about yourself, given given your relationship with this man. You were deeply in love with them and having uh this relationship, and it was a long time before you realized that there was there was plenty else going on in his life.

Marjorie Wallace17:28

Yes, I found that he was married and that he had three then four children.

Marjorie Wallace17:35

Eventually I had my first son Sasha with him, but I didn't marry him then.

Marjorie Wallace17:41

I married him two years later, so I was a single mother for two and a half years.

Presenter17:46

You did then go on to marry and have have two further children. Did did you have a settled family life?

Marjorie Wallace17:52

It wasn't really a very settled family life. In fact, much of the time I was looking after the children on my own.

Marjorie Wallace18:01

And only the other day Stefan was telling me, he was saying, you know, Mum, in the morning, it's a bit like Russian roulette. Were you going to get one child dressed, going to the right school at the right time? And we never knew what was going to happen. And on holidays, I was also a little bit cavalier. We didn't book hotels or do anything sensible like that. And I would want to put on some music that coincided with the scenery. And so I would actually have a video camera through the roof of the car and I would have on the music, the requiem, Mozart Requiem to go with it. And I would have to get the exact moment when the sun was setting, when the requiem finished. And if it didn't work, we'd have to drive back and go and do it again.

Presenter18:45

Yeah.

Marjorie Wallace18:47

And the children were getting tired and hungry in the back of the car, and I would never have a return ticket. There was always, Oh, let's just go on a little bit. There's another hotel round the corner there there's another adventure and I used to have a s little case in case we had to go somewhere and stay longer and they now carry, all of them, a just-in-case case.

Marjorie Wallace19:09

Um tell me then about your fifth disc of the morning.

Marjorie Wallace19:13

Three of my four children

Marjorie Wallace19:16

are musicians. My daughter Sophia works as a music agent.

Marjorie Wallace19:20

And Sasha and Stefan are songwriters. And Stefan wrote the most moving song when I had cancer, called Pink Ribbons, which is a very beautiful message of hope. But somehow I thought on that island I didn't really want to remember that time of having cancer and a bad prognosis. So in fact I chose a song that both of them had done together called Sunrise.

Marjorie Wallace19:44

and it was a wedding gift that Sasha gave to his Norwegian wife, and I will never forget we were in the north of Norway, the gull was screaming, a storm brewing up, and he went to the piano.

Marjorie Wallace19:57

And he played this song.

Speaker 320:01

How can I tell you?

Speaker 320:04

Everything the matter

Speaker 320:08

Everything that might have changed naturally.

Speaker 320:16

And so hold on tight now.

Speaker 320:19

Don't you ever let go.

Speaker 320:23

Don't you ever ever let go of me?

Speaker 320:30

Cause I don't know what I do.

Presenter20:36

That was Sunshine, written by your son Sasha Scarbeck, and sung there by Tom Baxter. It was recorded especially for our programme. Marjorie Wallace, you joined the Sunday Times after your stint working in television.

Presenter20:48

Um the thalidomide uh scandal and the uncovering of that was one of your first assignments.

Presenter20:56

I should remind people, of course, that I think it was more than 400 children who were born in the UK, their mothers having taken the thalidomide drug and having been reassured by their GPs at the time that it was safe to take for pregnancy sickness. It proved very much not to be safe to take.

Presenter21:13

How did you do your research with the families as you uncovered this appalling tale?

Marjorie Wallace21:18

My job was to go and write stories week after week.

Marjorie Wallace21:22

which told what it was like to have a child with the kind of deformities that thalidomide had um created. So I had to track down these families and then I would go out and stay with them sometimes. I would know what it was like to hold a ten, twelve year old, which we were then, without arms or legs, what it was like to go into a cafe, say, with an armless, legless child and watch everybody just simply disappear within minutes. Because people at that time didn't want to know about it and the families were very, very isolated and many of them were too frightened to speak out because they'd been told it would affect their compensation case. And I wrote about Terry Wiles, one of the thalidomiders, as they call themselves now, and I still remain in touch with many of the thalidomiders who are still fighting now for the other children in countries which did where they didn't get so much compensation.

Marjorie Wallace22:25

Let me ask

Presenter22:25

Yeah, but the the effect uh uh upon you. Of course, you you know, you've won a lot of awards for your journalism. You yourself were the mother of young children.

Marjorie Wallace22:34

Yeah.

Presenter22:34

How did it affect you?

Marjorie Wallace22:35

I felt very deeply for what they were experiencing.

Marjorie Wallace22:42

I believe and still believe that you can't write about people unless you know what's on their mantelpiece.

Marjorie Wallace22:50

unless you've been there, unless you've gone out shopping with them, unless you have some understanding of the context of their lives. And some of that

Marjorie Wallace23:01

has, I guess, rubbed off on me. Uh that I've dealt with so many

Marjorie Wallace23:06

Dark stories, dark material, and sometimes I feel as though

Marjorie Wallace23:12

It's like having been I think it was once a scrap tattooed on the inside. That somehow I've carried some of that darkness into me.

Presenter23:20

Let's go to some more music then, Marjorie Wallace. We're going to go on to your your sixth choice of the day.

Marjorie Wallace23:26

A few years ago I met Ray Davis and we became good friends and we put on a concert together for Sane's Black Dog campaign.

Marjorie Wallace23:37

In my choice for the island I think I would go to one of his legendary songs, and I really love this Thank you for the days.

Speaker 123:47

Days I remember all my life

Speaker 123:53

Days when you can't see wrong from right

Speaker 123:57

You took my life.

Speaker 124:00

But then I knew that very soon you'd leave me.

Speaker 124:06

But it's alright.

Speaker 124:09

Now I'm not frightened of this world, believe me.

Speaker 124:14

I wish today

Speaker 124:17

Could be tomorrow.

Speaker 124:20

The night is dark

Speaker 124:22

It just brings sorrow, let it wait.

Speaker 124:29

Thank you.

Presenter24:31

That was Ray Davis and the Crouch End Festival chorus with Days. It will be um thirty years, I think, next year, Margery Wallace, that you set up Sane.

Presenter24:41

How much progress do you think has been made, particularly in the funding of mental health services?

Marjorie Wallace24:50

You've come to the hardest part of it. I wear the hair shirts of having to try and get funds.

Marjorie Wallace24:58

But there have been some changes, because when I set up saying

Marjorie Wallace25:02

I was a journalist, and it arose from a series of articles that I wrote called The Forgotten Illness.

Marjorie Wallace25:09

And in those articles everybody was photographed in the shadows and they had false names. And I decided that we had to make

Marjorie Wallace25:21

people with mental illness as respected as we do people with cancer, heart disease or any physical illness.

Presenter25:28

And so you say that in my question there, the the funding of mental health services, I've really gone to the most difficult part, the implication there being that the funding of mental health services is still inadequate. So let me ask you if you think that the bulk of your work has been done in managing to make people feel as though they don't have to sit in the shadows. Do you think the biggest shift in Seine's work has been in changing societal attitudes to mental health problems?

Marjorie Wallace25:55

I hope that we've contributed towards changing attitudes and that we've raised some degree of understanding and awareness.

Marjorie Wallace26:04

All we have, really, is words.

Marjorie Wallace26:07

and trust. And what we have actually denied people is the continuity of having one person that knows their history, that they can trust. All the changes and the services, the way the landscape has been shifted around, the whole jigsaw of funding and trust, has not really helped that person who is in deep distress, who needs somewhere to go when they feel that they can no longer carry on.

Presenter26:36

You wrote an article once about your own you describe it as melancholia.

Presenter26:41

Wha why did you decide to talk about that publicly?

Marjorie Wallace26:45

Well

Marjorie Wallace26:46

I think that it's very important to show that you understand.

Marjorie Wallace26:53

And I think I also know a little bit about what it is to have that winter off the mine.

Marjorie Wallace27:00

Where

Marjorie Wallace27:01

Nothing is moving where everything is paralyzed, and it's a very frightening feeling.

Marjorie Wallace27:08

And that has made me realize that it's so important that when people are in that state, when they are depressed or very, very anxious, that they don't feel alone. But we also believe very much in research, because until we find

Marjorie Wallace27:26

the causes, a bit more about how the mind and brain works, we're not going to be able to get the treatments that work, and we're not going to be able to give that hope, and we won't be able to do what happened with cancer. Have those kind of cures which can break the stigma.

Marjorie Wallace27:42

And until we do that, people will go on being afraid of mental illness.

Marjorie Wallace27:48

Let's go on then to your seventh disc, Marjorie. Wallace, what are we going to hear?

Marjorie Wallace27:52

Doctor Tom Margeson, whom I met when I was working in television in the sixties.

Marjorie Wallace27:58

was, I believe, the cleverest man I've ever met.

Marjorie Wallace28:02

And I

Marjorie Wallace28:04

was deeply attached to him.

Marjorie Wallace28:06

Eventually

Marjorie Wallace28:08

Thirty two years ago I left the Count and I went to live with Tom, and they were really the happiest days of my life, and we had our daughter Sophia, and for the first time

Marjorie Wallace28:22

I experienced what it was like to

Marjorie Wallace28:25

Live with someone to share a family.

Marjorie Wallace28:28

Without him, I doubt if I would have been able to have written my books, nor have found it sane. And

Marjorie Wallace28:37

After I got cancer and was in remission.

Marjorie Wallace28:39

He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

Marjorie Wallace28:43

For a while we managed really very well indeed, but the last ten years of his life it took a grip first of his body and then off his mind.

Marjorie Wallace28:55

And when this happened he wrote beautiful little cards and letters to me, which he would leave on my pillow, or leave on the hall table when I came home. And when he couldn't write, what we did was I would dance with him, and we would dance a foxtrot, and then when that couldn't happen,

Marjorie Wallace29:14

I started singing from my favourite musicals, and I would come in and say good morning, good morning The sun will soon break through.

Marjorie Wallace29:22

And he would join in, and he never sung in his life before, and then from then on we dueted together until the time of his death.

Marjorie Wallace29:31

And I think those moments are so precious they're like jewels.

Marjorie Wallace29:35

They remain in your mind. So

Marjorie Wallace29:38

I've chosen this.

Marjorie Wallace29:40

Hello, young lovers from the King and I, because would bring Tom back to me and remind me of the way that we used to have these duets together.

Presenter29:49

Oh, young lovers, whoever you are, I hope your troubles are few.

Presenter30:00

All my good wishes go with you tonight. I've been in a love like me

Presenter30:10

Be brave, you lovers, and follow your star. Be brave and faithful and

Presenter30:21

Cling very close to each other tonight.

Presenter30:27

I've been in a long blue

Presenter30:32

That was Valerie Masterton singing Hello, Young Lovers from the film The King and I, and that was chosen, you said, just as we were listening to the last part of that there, for the love of your life, for Tom, who you spent thirty years you lived together. Margery Wallace, you are clearly somebody for whom optimism is still very much alive. What do you put that optimism down to?

Marjorie Wallace30:51

Scottish grit?

Marjorie Wallace30:54

Um stoicism.

Marjorie Wallace30:56

And I also think I hope with a little bit of elegance and a lightness of touch, and I think what's really important is to have a sense of humour and a sense of mischief.

Presenter31:08

So, by God, you're a survivor. I'm imagining on this island, although you'll, you know, you will doubtless be lonely, you you'll survive, don't you think?

Marjorie Wallace31:15

Well, I guess as I've survived so much against the odds.

Marjorie Wallace31:19

I might by fluke survive, but certainly not by my talented DIY.

Marjorie Wallace31:24

And then I thought, well, maybe, you know, I could find a passing orangutang and persuade him to come and help me with my DIY and build my shelter.

Presenter31:32

That is indeed optimism. Tell me then about your eighth disc, Marjorie Wallace. What are we going to hear now?

Marjorie Wallace31:37

Well, when I was reporting a film for the BBC called Circles of Madness.

Marjorie Wallace31:43

I wanted to find some music that would transcend

Marjorie Wallace31:47

all the torment and the mental anguish of the people that I was interviewing, that I was writing about.

Marjorie Wallace31:54

as well as my own yearning for some kind of inner peace and I heard this on the radio, and I knew then that this sublime melody

Marjorie Wallace32:07

was going to give that sense of it's an old-fashioned word.

Marjorie Wallace32:12

Redemption.

Marjorie Wallace32:14

It's full of the idea of forgiveness and release, a true freedom.

Presenter33:29

Preponty or by Gunno is sung by Sheryl Studer there, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jan Marine.

Presenter33:35

It's time then, Margery Wallace, for me to give you the books. You get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book too.

Marjorie Wallace33:43

What will your book be? Lives of the Poets One Thousand Years of English and American Poetry. Right, that will be yours then, and a luxury, too. Could I have a cocktail wardrobe, an elegant evening dress for every day of the week, some party shoes, some sparkly earrings? Then I'd go round, I'd find some champagne that some other castaway had left, and at sundown I would put on my musicals, take my champagne, and have a party.

Presenter34:11

What I'm going to say to you, Margery, is that you have been washed up wearing a beautiful cocktail dress and diamonds, and I will furnish you with a beautiful mirrored cocktail cabinet with drinks to go in it. Champagne, I'm guessing, is the one you'd like. Thus far and no further, I will take you with your luxury. And what about the one disc that you want to save? Which one will it be? It will be Chopin.

Marjorie Wallace34:30

Because whenever I hear Chopin.

Marjorie Wallace34:34

I know I'm in touch with something really beautiful, and that would make me always feel that life was worth living.

Presenter34:43

The Chopin, it is. Marjorie Bolas, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Marjorie Wallace34:48

Yeah.

Presenter34:48

Thirsty.

Marjorie Wallace34:49

Yeah.

Presenter34:49

Uh

Marjorie Wallace34:49

Uh

Presenter34:49

There

Marjorie Wallace34:49

Very pretty Privilege to be an hour.

Presenter35:31

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.