Wendy Cope

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:42

My castaway this week is Wendy Cope, one of Britain's most popular contemporary poets. She has a reputation for her wit, her masterful use of poetry's many forms, everything from villainelles to haiku, and for her subversive streak. She made her name with observations on love such as Bloody Men Are Like Bloody Busses and brilliant parodies of poets including Seamus Heaney, Wordsworth and TS Eliot. Her ascetic sense of humour is matched by her ability to articulate uncomfortable truths with remarkable clarity, and her subject matter is wide ranging, covering everything from love and psychoanalysis to alcohol and radio four.

Presenter1:21

It was teaching music at a primary school in London that kindled her creative flame. When her first collection of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986, it became a bestseller. Though her reputation as an overnight success with a knack for parodying the overwhelmingly male greats of the form didn't initially endear her to the overwhelmingly male establishment. However, since she described them as wicked as a ginless tonic and wild as pension plans, it seems the feeling was mutual, at least at first. Now in her 70s, she's one of Britain's premier poets. She sold her entire personal archive to the British Library and recently published her fifth collection. She has no plans to retire. The only excuse for being a poet, she says, is that you couldn't help it. Wendy Cope, welcome to Desert Islanders.

Wendy Cope2:10

It has.

Presenter2:11

Now any reader would be struck by the emotional range and the many tonal shifts in your work. Humour and sadness are often bound up together in poems like Loss, a very short poem that appears to be about the end of a relationship but might actually be more concerned with the loss of a corkscrew. But I know you dislike being referred to as a comic poet, so how would you characterize your work?

Wendy Cope2:33

I don't mind being referred to as a poet who's sometimes funny. I don't like the expression light verse, because it seems to imply that if something is humorous then it's sort of lightweight and unimportant. So I just like to be referred to as a good poet.

Presenter2:48

As a child growing up in the fifties, you described the poetry you encountered as like cabbage, green, good for you, but not very interesting. What do you look for in a poem today?

Wendy Cope2:55

That's right.

Wendy Cope2:59

Gosh. I I look for a poem that has some effect on me, that moves me in some way. It might be it makes me laugh, it might be it makes me feel tearful, it might be that it makes me think.

Presenter3:10

And are those the things that you look for in your own poems as well when you're working yourself?

Wendy Cope3:15

When I'm working myself, I just preoccupied with saying what I want to say, what I think to be true, as accurately as possible. And when you've got a poem on the go and you feel it's going well, it is a very good feeling. And how do you greet the prospect of being cast away on our desert island?

Wendy Cope3:33

I think I'd be terrified, actually. I mean, I would be terrified of having no access to doctors or medicine. It's a fair fear. As to being alone, I did live alone for quite a long time before I met my partner. I didn't like it much. Being a freelance writer, obviously you do have to spend time alone and sort of dream time, I mean time just for thinking when you don't appear to be doing anything. You know, I've also got a room of my own in our house where I can write. And now I'm happy to be on my own quite a lot in the daytime, but it's really nice to know there's going to be someone there at mealtimes.

Presenter4:08

Yeah. It's the

Wendy Cope4:08

That's the difference.

Presenter4:09

With the desert island. Of course, you're going to be sharing music from your life with us. How important is music to you?

Presenter4:15

It is imp

Wendy Cope4:15

important to me. I played the piano and the guitar and the recorder and I was in the school choir. And when I was a primary school teacher, I did lots of music with the children, and that was great.

Wendy Cope4:27

So tell me about your

Presenter4:28

First disc today. Why have you chosen this one?

Wendy Cope4:30

I love hymns, and I think hymns have influenced me quite a lot. And this is a hymn I've known since I was at junior school. And I love the tune, Talis's Cannon, and I like the words too, by Bishop Thomas Ken. They were written for the Scholars of Winchester College. I lived there for quite a long time, because Lachlan taught there. So there's all sorts of connections with this.

Presenter5:05

They watch them made him authentic.

Presenter5:11

In these thyroid wings.

Presenter5:33

As with all my sight I dream.

Presenter5:41

I say what please lay.

Presenter5:48

Glory to Thee, my God, This Night music composed by Thomas Talis, sung by the Cambridge Singers, directed by John Rotter.

Presenter5:56

Wendy Cobe, there is sometimes quite a long break between your collections. How much of what you write makes it into the books that listeners might have at home on their shelves? Quite a lot.

Wendy Cope6:06

It doesn't actually. Sometimes because it's a poem that might upset somebody. Sometimes because I'm not sure if it's good enough. But actually the next thing I'm hoping to do is to do a collected poems. And I've actually got quite a lot of uncollected poems that I now think I wasn't sure about them, but I now think they're not too bad. I wonder where the poems that might upset people go. I'm quite keen to know their location. Well I don't throw anything away. I mean out of vanity, this is why I had such a big archive. There's poems that I've put aside for 10 years or more in a file called Failures and Unfinished. And then I've looked through them and found things that actually I thought were fine. So I say don't throw anything away. You might change your mind about it.

Wendy Cope6:47

And

Presenter6:48

Are you good at knowing when a piece of poetry is finished?

Wendy Cope6:51

Yeah, what happens is I'll write a poem and I'll think it's finished, but then I'll be going over it in my head over the next day or two and I'll realize there's a line or a word that isn't quite right and oh hell, I've got to do some more work on this. And it's when that stops happening, when I can keep going over it in my mind without saying, oh hell, I've got to do some more work on this, then it's finished.

Presenter7:11

When your subconscious mind becomes tranquil. Yeah.

Presenter7:14

Fit.

Presenter7:15

As I mentioned in my introduction, you are known for expertly parodying other poets, and I could never look at Barbara Blacksheep in quite the same way once I'd read your version in the style of Wordsworth. Why did.

Wendy Cope7:26

Do that? Well, this was a phase. I don't do it much now, but it was a phase I went through really when I was learning to write. I went to some very good evening classes run by Blake Morrison, where every other week we took our own work, but on the other weeks we looked at the work of a contemporary poet. So I looked carefully at the work of a lot of contemporary poets, and I think, well, you know, I can see this is good, but it's actually not how I want to write. So I just sort of made fun of it, and it was a very good exercise because to write a good parody of somebody's work, you really have to look at it very carefully, and so you learned a lot.

Presenter7:58

I think the critical perspective on that is very interesting because it's often described by critics in gendered terms, you know, that it is a woman artist reacting to the grades of this very male canon. Yes. Is that how you see it as well?

Wendy Cope8:10

Yes, I mean I did uh when I started writing

Wendy Cope8:14

Women poets being published at the time were very, very much in the minority, and I felt that there wasn't much encouragement for women to tell it how it is about what happens between men and women. But I started doing that anyway. And how much better are things now, do you think?

Presenter8:29

Yeah.

Wendy Cope8:30

It's completely changed. There are far, far bigger proportion of women being published now than there were back in the 1970s, 1980s.

Wendy Cope8:38

Tell me about your second disc today. What are we going to hear next? This is from The Mikado. My father loved Gilbert and Sullivan, and so I used to get taken to it rather reluctantly actually when I was a little girl, to local amateur productions and sometimes to see the Deuly Carte Company at the Savoy Theatre. And I grew to love it. I'm very annoyed by people who sneer at it, because I think Gilbert was undoubtedly a genius. And Sullivan wrote some really lovely tunes.

Presenter9:05

On a tree by a river a little tom-tit Sang will-ow, tit, will-ow, tit, will-ow. And I said to him, Dicky Bird, why do you sit Singing will-ow, tit, will-ow, tit, will-ow? Is it weakness of intellect, Birdie, I cried, Or rather tough worm in your little inside? With a shake of his poor little head, he replied.

Speaker 29:39

Oh, Willow

Speaker 29:40

It will oh.

Speaker 29:42

Tit will oh

Presenter9:50

He slapped at his chest as he sat on that bough, singing Willo, tit, will oat it, will o' And a cold perspiration bespangled his brow Oh will oat it, will o' tit will oh He sobbed at his side Tit Bellow from The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan sung by John Reed. Wendy Cope, do you remember your first introduction to poetry?

Wendy Cope10:17

My father

Presenter10:18

Yeah.

Wendy Cope10:18

He belonged to that generation that had learned poems off by heart at school. So he would recite things like The Charge of the Light Brigade or bits from the rhubarat of Omar Kai Am. We didn't encourage it, you know. You don't encourage your father to embark on the Charge of the Light Brigade at lunchtime. But, you know, I grew to like it. And I liked that stuff better than the weedy poems about nature that we did at school.

Wendy Cope10:43

You know, in the fifties what was considered suitable for little girls was lots of fairies and flowers and things, and I lived in a London suburb. I didn't really get that. Did you write as a child? I did. When I was sort of six, seven I used to write stories in an exercise book and I used to say I wanted to be a writer.

Speaker 110:49

Slender

Wendy Cope11:02

And then I forgot all about it. You know, I sort of gave up on the idea. I thought, oh, everybody wants to be a writer, I probably can't be. And it didn't really come back to me till I was in my late twenties that this was what I really wanted to do.

Wendy Cope11:14

And I'm not really surprised that I've grown up to be a writer, but I am surprised that I've grown up to be a poet. I thought I would write stories for children,'cause that was what I knew about when I was seven. Yeah.

Presenter11:25

And you mentioned the influence of hymns, and you had quite a religious upbringing. What were the influences there?

Wendy Cope11:31

Well, for one thing, I went to boarding school when I was seven, and we were taken to an Anglican service every morning, and we had to sit right through the whole thing. And it was very boring. My mother was the evangelical, and that caused a few difficulties because I was taken to hear Billy Graham when I was nine years old, the evangelical preacher. And you know, he did this thing of getting people to come forward if they accepted Jesus Christ. And because I was only nine, I thought I better do this because otherwise I'll go to hell. So I went up to the front, and I was the only one because it was a relay to our local Baptist church. And it wasn't a good experience. These days, I'm an agnostic, but I love the liberal middle-of-the-road Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, and hymns. But I don't have a lot of time for evangelicals.

Speaker 111:48

Jeffrey Preacher and

Wendy Cope12:16

What about life at home? How would you describe your family?

Wendy Cope12:21

My father was old.

Wendy Cope12:23

He was a nice man. I loved my father very much.

Wendy Cope12:26

But he was tired, you know, and we often had to be kept out of the way. He'd come home and he was managing director of a department store. My mother worked with him. She'd been his secretary before they were married. So they'd come home and talk business and we'd have to be kept out of the way quite often. I had a difficult relationship with my mother, which was a lot to do with this If Only You Had Faith in Jesus business. She was quite controlling and it was quite difficult. And anyway, I was sent away when I was seven to boarding school.

Speaker 112:41

Hmm.

Presenter12:54

Yes, you've written about that experience.

Wendy Cope12:56

Yeah.

Presenter12:57

Seven years old and she didn't cry because, you know, you'd read Oh, you know the you know that one? Yes. Tell me about that. Tell me what what are your memories of of leaving for boarding school? Because you write that, you never really came back. Yes, exactly.

Wendy Cope13:01

Yeah.

Wendy Cope13:09

Um, yes. They decided it was best for me to go on the train to make some friends. So I was taken to, I think it was Charing Cross station, and I said goodbye to my parents and I got on the train. And the first thing I discovered was that I'd already broken the rules because I had a watch. You're not allowed a watch, you're not allowed a watch. And then when I got there, I found out I'd broken the rules again because I had a torch. These sound like extremely sensible things to take with you. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, obviously going away was difficult, but once I settled down, I did have some fun. I mean, it wasn't all terrible.

Presenter13:34

Yeah.

Presenter13:42

Time for some more music. Tell me about your n

Wendy Cope13:44

Next choice today, why have you chosen this one? Mozart. Well, there was an important moment when I was at secondary school. I wasn't sure if I liked classical music or not. I quite often found it boring. But one day, a music teacher came to a class music lesson with an LP of Mozart's Eine Kleinenachmusik and played it to us. And I just thought, it is absolutely wonderful. I just love this. And you know, I've loved Mozart ever since. So the bit I've chosen is a lovely duet from The Magic Flute.

Speaker 114:25

Lord I'm the Lord of Spain. Yeah.

Speaker 114:33

Uh

Speaker 214:33

It's you sometimes

Speaker 214:39

It's all free and free.

Presenter14:44

Yeah.

Speaker 214:44

Yeah.

Presenter14:44

I will flee.

Presenter14:50

Yeah.

Speaker 114:50

Few more than Lord Spirit.

Presenter15:16

Part of the duet from Mozart's The Magic Flute, Act One, sung by Kiri Dekanawa and Olaf Baer, with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields Orchestra, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter15:27

Wendy Cope, while you were away at boarding school, your parents would come to visit you, but you've described feeling tense when they did. Why was that?

Wendy Cope15:35

Well, you settle down at school and then your parents come and see you and there's the whole thing of parting all over again. So the whole day there's this cloud over the day that you've got to say goodbye at the end of it. You know, three times a year for the holidays, three times a year for half terms was all this packing and unpacking and saying goodbye and settling down all over again. And I sometimes used to feel it would just it'd be easier

Wendy Cope15:57

to just do one either be at home at the t all the time or at school all the time. So permeated by a kind of constant anxiety uh that that's well it was sadness. I mean, you know, I g I it was it was sadness about having to say goodbye to everyone at home.

Presenter16:05

Well it was sadness. I mean

Presenter16:12

Your poem, You're Not Allowed, describes the powerless frustration that many children feel towards quite dominant parents. You know, that that line, things will get better if you're very good. How much of your own experience is in that work? How hard you can do it.

Wendy Cope16:28

My childhood, yes.

Presenter16:30

How hard did you have to try to please your mother?

Wendy Cope16:32

Uh pretty hard. Um

Wendy Cope16:35

I mean, I got very good at it. I got very good at knowing how not to upset her, but it wasn't very good for me having to do that all the time.

Wendy Cope16:45

And what happened? What was the impact on you?

Wendy Cope16:49

I got depressed. I mean, I um you know, I think I was depressed.

Wendy Cope16:55

Probably through most of my childhood I was depressed. I was a bit overweight. And I think I you know, that I didn't really get over that until in my late twenties when I went into psychoanalysis, and that helped a lot.

Presenter17:09

Were you able to talk about this with your mother? I mean, I know that that poem is in the collection Family Values, and that wasn't published until after her death.

Wendy Cope17:17

No. That's that's one sort of reason I put poems aside. I did once, when I was at university and I was home for the vacation and I was very depressed, I did once try to talk to my mother about it, and what she said was, If only you had faith in Jesus.

Wendy Cope17:32

That was all she had to say about it.

Wendy Cope17:35

I I preserved myself by becoming quite secretive. You know, I I had a performance for my mother and my real self was was hidden away.

Presenter17:46

Let's go to the music. Tell me about your fourth disc today. What have you chosen and why have you gone for this one?

Wendy Cope17:51

Well, after I finished university, I became a primary school teacher for quite a long time and

Wendy Cope17:57

My knowledge of music was then very useful because in primary schools they always want someone who can play the piano and so on. And so I did a lot of music with the children, including singing with them. And that is really one of the things I miss about teaching. I loved singing with the children. So I've chosen a song that we used to sing.

Speaker 218:17

Bali ali bali me said

Presenter18:20

On your mummy's knee, prin for a wee bow we buy some cool skin.

Speaker 218:25

What are we

Speaker 118:28

Uh

Speaker 118:34

Uh

Presenter18:34

Levin's very hard anew

Speaker 118:38

Feather sign and on the

Presenter18:40

But your mommy's got a penny for you to buy

Speaker 118:45

I

Wendy Cope18:46

There is some cool turn

Presenter18:47

But it's kind.

Presenter18:49

Courta's Candy, performed by Robin Hall, Jimmy McGregor and The Galliards. Wendy Cope, your choice then to take you back to your time as a music teacher, but there were other contenders, I understand.

Wendy Cope19:00

Yeah what

Presenter19:00

Uh

Wendy Cope19:00

Uh

Wendy Cope19:01

They did like this one, and so did I. I think there were some others I think their favourite songs were probably Football Crazy and There's a Hole in My Bucket, and I wasn't going to have any of either of those on my desert island.

Presenter19:11

Could have been a first for Desert Islanders but I understand. So you graduated from Oxford in nineteen sixty six. Why did you start teaching? It was in West Ham, Lewisham, mainly off the Old Kent Road that you

Wendy Cope19:22

Can vote that you will

Presenter19:23

Yeah.

Wendy Cope19:23

Yeah, well By the time I left Oxford I didn't have much confidence, I didn't know what to do with myself.

Wendy Cope19:30

And because I'd read history at Oxford and I knew I didn't want to be a history teacher, I went and did this course in primary school teaching. So I mean also there was part there was a little bit of wanting to do something useful.

Presenter19:42

Yeah.

Wendy Cope19:42

And now

Presenter19:42

Do you

Wendy Cope19:42

Uh

Presenter19:42

Feed about

Wendy Cope19:42

And

Presenter19:43

Bye.

Wendy Cope19:43

Experience in a bait.

Presenter19:43

About that choice looking back.

Wendy Cope19:44

Well in some ways it was good for me because I really think that my work as a teacher helped bring out the creative side of me. Before that I'd thought of myself as a brainy person who wasn't creative but this was the era when there was a lot of emphasis on creative work in schools and so I was doing a lot with poetry and music with the children and I think that woke up something in me.

Wendy Cope20:04

I went on these music courses where we made up our own music in groups in a sort of avant-garde idiom that meant you didn't need to know about traditional harmony and notation. And it was such fun, I just absolutely loved it. And I started thinking I'd like to be a composer. But then I thought to myself, well, actually, I was only average at music at school. But what I was really good at was English. So perhaps I'd try this creative thing with English. And also, you know, I was encouraging the children to write poems. And they'd show me their poems. And you have to be careful. But I could see what was needed to make it better. But that made me think, I'm going to have a go at this in my spare time. So that was how it started. And what were you writing about?

Wendy Cope20:44

My feelings, because writing poetry started about six months after I was in analysis, and I was getting in touch with feelings that I needed to express.

Wendy Cope20:55

Uh

Presenter20:55

Let's go.

Wendy Cope20:55

Yeah. Music. It's your fifth.

Presenter20:57

Yeah.

Wendy Cope20:57

Uh Uh

Presenter20:57

Esquaivitu.

Wendy Cope20:57

Uh

Presenter20:57

Yeah.

Wendy Cope20:57

Isn't it? Yeah, this is The Beatles Blackbird. Now, this may sound a bit self-dramatizing, but when I started writing, as I was emerging from quite a severe depression, I really did identify with the bird in this song. I mean, I now understand that McCartney says it's about civil rights, so I didn't know that. To me, it was about singing in the dark. And also realising, and I began to write poetry, I realised this is what I really want to do. And so you were only waiting for this moment to arrive is a line that resonated very much with me.

Wendy Cope21:35

Blackbirds singing in the dead of night

Wendy Cope21:39

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

Wendy Cope21:44

All your life

Wendy Cope21:48

You are only waiting for this moment to arrive.

Wendy Cope21:58

Blackbirds singing in the dead of night

Presenter22:01

The Beatles with Blackbird, so Wendy Cope, you're a fan, despite satirising Lennon and McCartney in print in the past.

Presenter22:08

It was around nineteen seventy three, as you said, that you decided to enter psychoanalysis. Tell me more about that. I think you've been quoted in the past as saying I was afraid I'd become a bag lady. How serious were you when you said that?

Wendy Cope22:20

Thank you.

Wendy Cope22:21

Well, I think I'd been depressed for a long time, but my father died in nineteen seventy one and then it got worse and I was, you know, finding earning my living

Wendy Cope22:30

Quite a strain. So, yes, there was a fear I'd become a bag lady because, you know, I was always quite anxious about earning a living. But anyway, I found a way to have psychoanalysis. I thought you had to be rich, but it turned out there was a clinic where I was taken on as a clinic patient, and I still had to pay, but not nearly as much as the private rate. And I was in analysis for about ten years, and it's a slow process, but gradually I became less depressed.

Presenter23:02

You'll

Wendy Cope23:02

We're working with a therapist called Arthur S. Couch. My first book is dedicated to Arthur S. Couch, and of course the publishers thought it was a joke. It's De Mezian, isn't it? It would be what it was called.

Presenter23:11

Before you get it.

Wendy Cope23:13

B. Wals is now

Presenter23:13

Bye.

Wendy Cope23:13

Aim.

Presenter23:13

So why did you dedicate the the book to him?

Wendy Cope23:16

Because he'd helped me so much. I mean, you know, I was this depressed primary school teacher and now it's being published by Faber and Faber. That's quite a leap.

Presenter23:24

Obviously, there's the creative side, but I mean, what did therapy give you as a person?

Wendy Cope23:30

It's a question of being in touch with one's feelings. You know, when someone asked me, How do you feel about something? I would come up with a reasonable answer, you know, and someone would say, Are you angry with me? and I'd say, No, of course not, because I have no reason to be angry with you.

Wendy Cope23:45

But what I began to realize was that, you know, often you don't

Wendy Cope23:49

know what you're feeling. So sometimes um things you do or things you say or things you dream about, of course, that's very important, help you to find out what you are really feeling.

Wendy Cope24:01

What was that process like?

Presenter24:03

Because there must have been a lot of stuff in there that had to come out. Yeah.

Wendy Cope24:06

Uh

Wendy Cope24:06

And there was quite a lot of anger. I mean the analyst had quite a tough time with me because I used to shout at him and argue with him a lot and called him rude names. But that was important because, you know, my father had been old and I was afraid, you know, if I did anything bad, it might kill my father. So being able to be rude and aggressive to the analyst and realising nothing terrible was going to happen was a very useful process. I mean I used to think, oh, I'm going to you know go to the clinic and say he's no good and can I have a different analyst?

Wendy Cope24:35

He presumably took it all in his stride. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know how it felt to him, but we ended up being really quite good friends, which is not strictly orthodox, but, you know, we and we got on well.

Presenter24:46

Yeah.

Wendy Cope24:46

Yeah.

Presenter24:47

You've described therapy as learning to be yourself. Who did you discover yourself to be by the end of that process? And how different was that person from the person you expected to meet?

Presenter25:00

Go.

Wendy Cope25:00

Push me.

Wendy Cope25:02

Well, more creative and happier, I suppose.

Wendy Cope25:06

Yeah, I mean the thing is it doesn't do everything. I'm still quite neurotic enough to get by as a writer, even after ten years in psychoanalysis.

Wendy Cope25:14

And also, if you're a poet, it's about telling the truth, including the truth about your own feelings, and I just don't see how knowing yourself better could possibly make someone a worse writer.

Presenter25:26

Let's take another track. This is your sixth today. Why have you chosen it?

Wendy Cope25:29

Ah well this is Bach, my favourite composer, but this particular piece of Bach is what we had at our wedding.

Wendy Cope25:35

I'd lived with Lachlan since 1994. We didn't get round to getting married until 2013. We weren't rushing into anything.

Speaker 125:42

It's not fair wild.

Wendy Cope25:46

And um we had a very small quiet wedding with just relatives there. But we did have music and during the signing of the register we had this movement from the Bach double violin concerto.

Presenter27:01

Part of the second movement of Bach's double violin concerto in D minor, performed by Takako Nizhizaki and Alexander Yablokov with the Capella Istropolitana Orchestra conducted by Oliver Dochnani. Wendy Cope.

Presenter27:16

Tell me about being published for the first time. How did it happen?

Wendy Cope27:21

Well, for years I was sending poems to little magazines and they were turning them down. So for about I spent about six years being rejected.

Wendy Cope27:28

Then through being at Blake Morrison's class he became poetry editor of the TLS, and one time I took a poem along that he liked, and he put it in the Times Literary supplement.

Wendy Cope27:38

And then I got some poems published in a magazine called Quarto, and that changed everything.

Wendy Cope27:44

Faber wrote to me and said, We'd like you to send us some poems for us to consider. And this was the most exciting moment of my whole literary career when I got that letter from Faber and Faber. You know, all the time when I began writing in the 1970s, I sort of hoped I would get some things published, but I didn't dream that I would get published by Fabric and Faber, and then that it would actually get on the bestseller list. You know, not the poetry bestseller list, actual bestseller list. So that was all very exciting, and I was very lucky. But in some ways, it was quite difficult because suddenly, you know, the phone rang all the time with people wanting me to do things and often asking me to do things for inadequate amounts of money before I realised. And some people from Faber took me out to lunch a few weeks after the book was published and said, don't do anything for less than £100. This was in 1986. And I said, but I've already agreed to do loads of things for less than £100. But another thing it made me realise, because I wasn't in a relationship at the time, is that.

Wendy Cope28:43

Success is a bit empty if you haven't got anyone to share.

Presenter28:46

Bear it with.

Wendy Cope28:47

Yeah.

Presenter28:47

How did the people closest to you react? What about your mother? What did she make of your poetry?

Wendy Cope28:53

I don't think she really understood, and she didn't like the book'cause there was sex in it.

Wendy Cope28:58

I mean a friend of mine that came with me to see my mother and stepfather because she had remarried.

Wendy Cope29:03

So they've no idea what's happening to you. They don't understand it at all.

Presenter29:07

So I mentioned in my introduction a certain amount of antipathy between you and some of the poetry establishment in those early days. Tell me a bit more about what happened.

Wendy Cope29:12

Mm-hmm.

Wendy Cope29:15

Yeah.

Presenter29:15

Well

Wendy Cope29:15

Boop.

Wendy Cope29:17

Because I seemed to suddenly appear from nowhere and get all this publicity, I can understand it was very hard for other poets. And so, inevitably, there was a certain amount of hostility. And that has affected my relationship with the poetry world ever since. It hasn't completely died away, even now. I met a young man who was at university and wanted to write his long essay about my work, and he told his tutor, and his tutor hadn't read me. So, the guy said, Well, I'll give you a copy of the book. He said, I wouldn't read that book even if you gave it to me.

Wendy Cope29:49

And I had a before I'd met Lachlan, I had a brief relationship with somebody who knew about poetry and who'd never read me. And then, you know, when I was involved with him, he he read my books and he said kept saying, You're a good poet, you're a good poet like it was really surprising. So what's your take on that then?

Wendy Cope30:07

Um well, I mean, I can get very upset about it sometimes.

Wendy Cope30:11

But on the other hand, I have a lot of readers and I'm in some ways I've been very lucky. I mean, my books sell well by poetry standards. When I do poetry readings, I get big audiences and people are very nice to me, so that's the other side of it.

Wendy Cope30:24

Time for your next piece of music. This is your seventh disc. Why have you chosen it? The television series Unforgotten with the wonderful Nicola Walker as one of the detectives. Over the opening titles there's this song and this song gradually grew on me and by the time we were watching the third series every time we watched it I'd say I really like this song. And so unknown to me Loughlin bought the CD and then he came home one day and said I've got something for you. Listen to track 11 and it was this song and it was such a nice thing to do.

Wendy Cope30:55

Our widow is lying wait.

Wendy Cope30:59

All we do is, all we do is lie in wait All we do is feel the fate

Wendy Cope31:06

All we do is, all we do is feel the fame.

Wendy Cope31:10

A thing

Wendy Cope31:12

Upside down.

Wendy Cope31:14

I don't wanna be the right way round.

Wendy Cope31:18

Can I find paradise on the ground?

Presenter31:25

All We Do by Oh Wonder. Wendy Cope, the lyrics to that song still fascinating and beguiling you out.

Wendy Cope31:33

But

Wendy Cope31:34

Yeah, I just

Wendy Cope31:36

Did wonder if it might be about a sloth because of

Wendy Cope31:41

Because of being upside-down.

Presenter31:42

Or maybe a bat. They they are upside down and underground sometimes. Yes.

Wendy Cope31:44

I'm underground sometimes.

Presenter31:47

You mentioned the idea of being one person in your relationship with your mother and then another the rest of the time and then going through therapy. These days, I wonder how comfortable you are in your own skin and how comfortable you are being yourself and telling it like you see it.

Presenter32:04

Gosh.

Wendy Cope32:04

Well, much more than I used to be.

Wendy Cope32:07

I still sometimes can only get the courage to write by saying to myself, Well, they'll all hate this, but I'm going to write it anyway.

Wendy Cope32:14

And that kind of frame of mind. And then I promised myself, I'm not going to publish it. It's so important to write what you want to write and not be deterred by the thought of all the poets who don't like you, all the people who might not want to publish it, all the people who might be cross with you because it's not politically correct, all those things. And so it's so important just to sort of push all that away and write what you want to write. And then afterwards, you can decide whether to publish it.

Presenter32:41

Having been a poet for so many years, has it changed you, do you think?

Wendy Cope32:46

Well, it's changed my life. I mean, you know, I've earned a living without having to have a job.

Wendy Cope32:51

Has it changed me?

Wendy Cope32:53

Well, I suppose it's it's bound to have done, yes, because what's interesting, you know, when that first book came out and suddenly I felt successful, you then you go back and the whole story of your life changes as your life changes because you say, Oh, it was leading up to this, but I didn't know that.

Presenter33:09

We were reframing.

Presenter33:11

It's time for some more music. This is your eighth disc. Tell me about this one.

Wendy Cope33:15

This is Bach again, but it's an arrangement that I only discovered recently. The Wacket Auf chorale, which I've known for a long time. This is played by a trio of um

Wendy Cope33:26

Bass mandolin and yo yo Mar on the cello playing the chorale.

Presenter34:41

Fox, Awake, The Voice Is Calling Us, played by Yo Yo Mar, Chris Thieley, and Edgar Mayer. So, Wendy Cope, we're casting you away with the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You can also take a book of your choice. What will it be? Well, I.

Wendy Cope34:57

I thought about this and I decided that the Bible and Shakespeare would give me plenty of serious reading, so I'd like something that will make me laugh. So I think I'll take The Complete Molesworth, which is a book that's been making me laugh since I was 11 years old, and he feels like an old friend, so it'd be nice to have him there. It's yours. What about your luxury item? I have to have writing materials, really. It's boring because this is what all writers say, but at least, you know, if I could write, that would help. And, you know, no one to talk to, but if you can communicate with a piece of paper, someone might read it sooner or later.

Presenter35:29

And what about if you had to save one track from your eight discs?

Wendy Cope35:33

It would be the block dog.

Presenter35:34

Bubble violin concerto, just because I like it a lot.

Presenter35:38

Wendy Cope, thank you very much for sharing your desert island discs with us. Thank you.

Presenter35:52

I do hope you enjoyed my conversation with Wendy. I like the idea of her chortling over the antics of Mullsworth while she's on her island. Over the decades, many poets have been cast away, including Lem Sissé, Jackie Kaye, Benjamin Zephaniah, Liz Lockhead, John Agard, and Philip Larkin. And back in 1990, Sue Lowley interviewed Seamus Heaney.

Presenter36:13

Were you a a born poet, Seamus, is there such a thing?

Speaker 236:16

Well, uh most children probably have the solitude and

Speaker 236:22

Distance and fear of the world, which we associate with the truly imaginative being.

Speaker 236:29

The the onset of capacity and the onset of capability and the onset of uh

Speaker 236:36

Adequacy

Speaker 236:38

banishes the the poet. So I think that there are many born poets and that s spacious uh little fearful part of yourself, that's where the poetical being resides.

Speaker 236:50

Probably I in that sense I was born, but I would say many people are born.

Presenter36:54

But reading um about your roots, your your background now, it it sounds very poetic. I don't know whether the reality was sound.

Speaker 237:00

Well the the reality was indeed. I mean uh when I describe it in words it immediately becomes, if you like, a mythic status. It is true that there was uh a house with uh trees around it and a thatch and there there were horses in the fields and uh people came to the well for water and so on. So when you're describing that you're describing

Speaker 237:20

a medieval uh community.

Presenter37:22

Your father w was a farmer.

Speaker 237:24

He was a farmer, but he had a certain freedom. Uh I mean, he he had the farming thing, but actually he wasn't enslaved to it. That is the killing thing about small farming, is to be uh enslaved day and night, day after day. And he had a certain uh

Speaker 237:40

Panash with his stick and going out, and he was able to have people at home working on the farm.

Presenter37:46

And and inside the house there were two very important women in your life.

Speaker 237:50

Well, indeed, I become to realize that I had really two mummies.

Speaker 237:53

I had uh I had my own uh mother, of course, who who bore me.

Speaker 237:59

But uh

Speaker 238:00

My father's sister, Mary, was in situ in the house when my mother came to live there, when she buried my father.

Speaker 238:08

And I suppose it says a lot about uh my aunt, the father's sister, that she and my mother worked out. They lived together in

Speaker 238:16

in in harmony. My aunt every day for example baked bread. She also milked because she uh was there to assist. And and my mother was much more involved necessarily with the whole business of youngsters. I mean our our family came very quickly, one after the other. How many? There were nine of us.

Wendy Cope38:35

How many?

Speaker 238:37

And I think probably six of us born inside eight years or

Presenter38:41

Were were you the elder?

Speaker 238:42

I was the eldest, yeah?

Presenter38:43

Yes. And it was a very happy, obviously very secure house.

Speaker 238:46

It was secure, yeah. There was no menace other than the menaces that are in the imagination, you know, the dark and the trees and uh the scuttling of wild things on the ceiling at night.

Presenter38:58

She Miss Heaney, Talking to Sue. You'll find all those programmes and over 2,000 other editions in the Desert Island Discs back catalogue. Next time, my guest will be the inimitable Bob Mortimer. I do hope you'll join us.

Presenter39:23

It's 1994, and two pop stars are flying to a remote Scottish island.

Speaker 139:27

Josie Bello and Jamie.

Presenter39:28

With two suitcases.

Speaker 139:29

Yeah.

Presenter39:30

Each container

Speaker 139:32

Doing that thing where you crawl it around yourself and it looks like it's fastened.

Wendy Cope39:35

They're about to do something really stupid.

Presenter39:37

Actually, take your suitcases.

Speaker 139:37

Uh

Presenter39:39

Or really clever. You decide.

Presenter39:43

This is the story of two men who burned a million pounds of their own money.

Presenter39:50

Why? Why the

Speaker 139:51

Would you do that?

Presenter39:53

How to Burn a Million Quid by Sean Grundy and Cara Dillings. Download the free BBC Sounds app and subscribe or visit bbc.co.uk slash sounds.