Professor Lucy Easthope

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:52

My castaway this week is Professor Lucy Easthope, an advisor on disaster recovery. She's an expert on planning for and reacting to major incidents natural disasters, terrorist attacks, pandemics, and fires. Cataclysms like these comprise her working life.

Presenter1:10

She's been involved in the response to many of the most significant disasters costing British lives from 9-11 onwards, including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 7-7 bombings, the Manchester Arena attack and the COVID-19 pandemic. She was born and raised in Merseyside and cites watching the 1989 Hillsborough disaster unfold on television when she was 10 as the spur for her career. Why is no one helping? she asked her father, the first of many difficult questions she would pose as she pursued her calling.

Presenter1:41

She's the visiting professor of mass fatalities and pandemics at the University of Bath.

Presenter1:47

She says, the hardest part of working in disaster is going home. Professor Lucy Easthope, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you for having me. So Lucy, let's start with that quote from you then. The hardest part is going home. Why exactly?

Professor Lucy Easthope2:00

I think people assume that the the most difficult things will be the things you see at the scene or the time spent in the aftermath.

Professor Lucy Easthope2:08

But for me the hardest thing has always been separating, coming away from that and having in in many ways to sort of reintegrate back into society and walk through the front door. And that line has always just summed up how I feel about that. You inhabit two worlds and home can seem a very, very strange place. It's not the disasters that often seem strange to me. How do you do that then?

Professor Lucy Easthope2:35

You have to really learn to do it and if you don't do it, one of the things that I learnt very early on was that you cost yourself relationships, you become very frustrated with the mundanity of life because you think you've seen something so much more important and so much worse. And actually, that makes you really difficult to live with. So one of the things that I was very, very, very grateful for early on was training actually from colleagues who'd walked the path before me, who had learnt the hard way. They'd really been very difficult to live with. So what an average day for you if there is

Presenter3:11

Fun.

Professor Lucy Easthope3:11

Usually at any one time, both kind of in the brain and on the laptop, there are multiple tabs open. There'll be a current incident going on, something that's that's recently happened where they're asking for advice right now. There might be a trip being arranged to go to a scene or to a mortuary or to where we are keeping safe the personal effects. There'll be another tab open which is an incident perhaps six, seven months old, and people are getting very weary and exhausted and they're looking for new ways of thinking about it. There'll be training, so I'll be perhaps heading off to train places to be ready. Again, very hidden work, so I've just come back from training for people who are ready to go in the event of a major incident into assistance centres where people would be taken if something happened. And then there's those reviews two, three years on of whether we're doing the right thing, whether the plans are good enough, and that feeds into new plans. Other days of the week are all consuming. Perhaps you're visiting the mortuary or the scene, but the particular place where my passion is particularly is to spend time with the personal effects from a disaster.

Presenter4:22

And why is that your passion? You've described that as almost a spiritual experience for you.

Professor Lucy Easthope4:26

When I started working in this field, the personal effects had only just started being protected. There was some new legislation in America to protect the items recovered from things like air disasters and bomb explosions. They were just starting to develop what I've called in my writing an ethic of care around them. But still, if you didn't get there early enough, they would go into bins and skips. And for a lot of the kinds of instance that I was working on, there would not be a body to return or a whole body to return, but there would be what I've called the furniture of self from the wonderful Kai Erikson, a disaster sociologist. And these are the things that make us us. They're on us, they're in our bags, they're in our homes. And then as I moved into the 2000s, only certain types of personal effects got protection. So an air crash, the airline would pay for it, but in a flood, all of your life's hoard just went in the skip.

Professor Lucy Easthope5:23

And these became something that I knew needed to be treasured because what I would see is communities couldn't come back without them. They needed their furniture of self, they needed their photographs, their war medals, their certificates. It's a loss in the soul. And I think a lot of my work has been about losses of soul, losses in the soul that are irreparable. But there are some things we can do to say, you know, I still have that. And one of the great things now about my work is getting to a scene and somebody has read something that I have written and they have stopped the personal effects going into a skip and therefore landfill.

Professor Lucy Easthope6:04

And that is a a tangible, a tangible difference from, say, when I started out twenty-five years ago.

Presenter6:11

Well, it's so connected to, you know, the very heart of this programme, the idea behind it. You know, starting again, leaving behind everything. Who are you if you're cast away? There's a lot to talk about today, Lucy, but also your music, of course. And I know that music helps you manage your emotions while you're working. You actually have a playlist of planthems. We're going into your first disc. Is this one of them? This most certainly is the most important one of them, yes.

Professor Lucy Easthope6:36

Tell me about what what constitutes a planthum. How does it work?

Professor Lucy Easthope6:40

It's music that readies you. It's music that separates you from the world you're about to leave and the world you're about to go into. So the beat goes into my body and stabilizes what is quite a wobbly core. It strengthens me, it plants both feet on the ground, and then I'm ready to go in. Some of my coping strategies for work I've been taught, and some of them are staples in trauma management, disaster management, and other ones I taught myself. And one of them was the value of music with a deep beat that goes right within me. So this is Lose Yourself by Eminem.

Speaker 37:16

Just let it slip. Yo. His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are

Speaker 37:31

The whole crowd goes so loud he opens his mouth but the words won't come out He's choking how everybody's choking now The clocks run out Time's up Over plow Snap back to reality Oh there goes gravity Oh there goes rabbit choke

Presenter7:46

M M and lose yourself.

Speaker 37:47

Event

Presenter7:49

So, Lucy East Hope, let's go back to the beginning. You were born in Liverpool in 1978 to Anne and Bob, both teachers. Let's start with your mum, Anne. Tell me about her.

Professor Lucy Easthope7:59

Oh, she's wonderful. She is this pocket rocket of of talent and incredible linguist in French and German. She was very keen for us, myself and my little sister, to take advantage of opportunity and of the world.

Presenter8:21

Tell me a little bit about your dad then. So, Bob, Mum was a language teacher. He was a woodwork teacher.

Professor Lucy Easthope8:27

It was woodwork, metalwork and car maintenance and he was very good with his hands and then both of them had got teaching positions at the wonderful West Derby School for Boys in Liverpool and my mum had a puppy and she was throwing sticks for it and she accidentally threw her car keys into the lake and my dad fashioned a contraption to retrieve the keys and uh a courtship

Presenter8:53

Blossomed from there. Oh, I love that. Were his skills as a craftsman evident at home? I'm imagining you must have been growing up around his projects.

Professor Lucy Easthope8:54

Oh, love.

Professor Lucy Easthope9:00

He's everywhere. Doors and ledges and benches and he made some doors for a couple of churches in Liverpool and gates for nursery schools. His favourite wood was oak.

Professor Lucy Easthope9:12

But of course the other thing that he did was he was where the scallywags would be sent at the end of the day. He would be sent if if somebody had been messing about in maths, they would go and hang out with Dad in the woodwork and metalwork workshop and they'd make something.

Presenter9:21

Yeah.

Presenter9:26

And was he good with those kids?

Professor Lucy Easthope9:28

He was brilliant. Time, patience. It meant that when we went out in Birkenhead and in Liverpool.

Professor Lucy Easthope9:35

The scariest looking youths would be all, you know, coming out, all right, sir. And he did something quite quite unusual for the time. So, this is the 80s. My mum became a teacher full-time, and my dad was at home with us with the Sherpa van with our Jack Russell in it. And he would go to building jobs in the day, but he would be there at three o'clock to pick us up. You know, never made a profit really with the business because he was so generous and he was a sucker for particularly kind, elderly old ladies who would say, Oh, I haven't got much, but could you do my bathroom? And he'd make a terrible loss doing their bathroom. And then in our early teens, he was diagnosed with a very severe form of arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, and it started to take his physicality. He couldn't move, he couldn't get down to do the you know, somebody's joinery work on the floor or mend a radiator or any of those sorts of things. And it started to take his hands. So he went back to teaching and a second renaissance, really. There are now lads 10-15 years after his first time teaching who were hugely influenced by him. You know, every plumber knew my dad, every tradesman knew my dad, every builder's merchant knew my dad. But he was becoming more and more immobile and also in pain.

Professor Lucy Easthope10:57

He went part-time and then eventually he retired early.

Presenter11:02

Let's have some more music, Lucy Easthope. Your second choice today. What are we going to hear?

Professor Lucy Easthope11:07

Well, this is for him. This is for for Daddy Bob, Lord of all hopefulness. And it's because of being teachers, you have that constant exposure to the assembly banger you're constantly in, and he would sing them off key at least one octave too low, and there was only ever going to be one song for him, and it is this one. The line strong hands on the plane and the lathe, that's the one that will always just typify him really.

Speaker 311:44

False trust never childlike, no past not destroy.

Speaker 311:52

Be the Lord.

Speaker 411:54

That's all brave.

Speaker 311:56

And they must be

Presenter11:57

Uh

Speaker 312:01

Please give your mother.

Speaker 312:14

What a Lord Frank!

Speaker 312:18

Whose common skill at the planet of lay.

Speaker 312:27

And that's the one we're going to do.

Presenter12:34

Lord of All Hopefulness sung by the choir of Queen's College, Cambridge, conducted by James Weeks and Matthew Steiner on the organ.

Presenter12:42

So Lucy Easthope, you said that you define yourself as the daughter of two teachers. So what kind of pupil were you back then at school?

Professor Lucy Easthope12:51

I really struggled with being a child. I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to ask the difficult questions. You do your necessary three or four lessons on Anne Frank, but I'd want to know so much more behind the scenes or I'd want to worry about whatever was in the news and talk about that to my teacher. And so I think I was quite a intense pupil.

Presenter13:13

It was alive at home, but not at the time.

Professor Lucy Easthope13:15

Not at school so much.

Presenter13:16

The 1989 Hillsbridge disaster was a defining moment for the region during your childhood. There were kids that went to your school at the match. What are your memories of the tragedy?

Professor Lucy Easthope13:27

They were in my class. There were boys who were at the match, and both my mum and dad had pupils.

Presenter13:33

at the match.

Professor Lucy Easthope13:34

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope13:34

Uh

Presenter13:34

The kids in in your class, they got home safely, they were traumatized by what they'd seen and experienced, obviously, but they made it out.

Professor Lucy Easthope13:43

I think our class changed that day with very little support at the time. You know, twenty twenty five all kinds of interventions would have come into that school, but at the time there was very little support.

Presenter13:54

And for you, Lucy, that day, the day it happened, you were at home with your dad watching the news. What did you see and and what was your response to it?

Professor Lucy Easthope14:03

Dad could be very, very dramatic and very, very scouse when he was alarmed and he had a a tea tray and he sort of threw it down and he he called for my mum.

Professor Lucy Easthope14:15

And they were both sort of trying to they were watching the television and they were trying to make sense of it. As the the coverage became much more negative to the fans over the next few days, my dad became more and more agitated and one of the phrases that I remember him saying was, you know, somebody needs to sort this and he was angry that the fans were being vilified and I took that as a direction, I think, and that that's the line that you know I always remember him saying.

Professor Lucy Easthope14:43

And he would take me to see on the way to visit my gran, who was in Wavertree, the protests against the Sun newspaper, and he'd beep his horn in support.

Presenter14:54

And Lucy, what what lessons have you taken from that experience, watching Hillsborough and the unfolding response to it, into your professional life now?

Professor Lucy Easthope15:05

It's with me every single day, and one of the things that's hardest to

Professor Lucy Easthope15:10

compute sometimes is that sometimes the initial event

Professor Lucy Easthope15:14

terrible as it may be, isn't the worst thing. Sometimes the responders and the response is worse than the first event.

Professor Lucy Easthope15:26

And that is a profound thing, and that is something that it can make you have a lot of enemies because people think that you're going to be united against the one common thing, and actually you're pointing out to responders that they're doing something really unhelpful, or they're really making things worse, or they are leaning into, as we saw with the aftermath of Hillsborough, they're leaning into a lie. And in 1995, Hillsborough, the incredible drama documentary, had been produced by Jimmy McGovern, the playwright. And what that shone a further light on, which was how the families were treated with regard to things like the care of their deceased.

Professor Lucy Easthope16:09

Having to view multiple Polaroids, having to attend a gymnasium, the tea urn.

Professor Lucy Easthope16:15

had a sign on it that said for police only.

Professor Lucy Easthope16:18

And that

Professor Lucy Easthope16:20

That was when I also knew I wanted to change that. That I understood that sometimes something might happen, but that the afterwards

Professor Lucy Easthope16:31

We could do so much better. And so one of the things I get into trouble for quite a lot is I'll leap from very strategic planning and very strategic thinking to

Professor Lucy Easthope16:40

Where's the tea urn for everybody?

Presenter16:42

But the little things, in moments of crisis, they are sometimes all that you've got. What aren't they?

Professor Lucy Easthope16:47

They're everything. And from the minute something happens, the families and those affected, they're on this high alert, looking for signs that they can trust you, and most importantly, often looking for signs that they can trust you with the body of their loved one. And if they get there and it's chaos, and if they get there and your people are rude to them, and there's no warm drinks and no comfort, you can watch the trust and the hope fade out of them. And that is something that I try and instil in all of those responding, that the faith that they put in us that moment, we have to try and honour.

Presenter17:27

Lucy, we've got to make room for the music too, and I really want to hear this third disc. What's it going to be? It's the uh music from the film Rob.

Professor Lucy Easthope17:34

Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. This was so important to me and my sister. There were six or seven big clunky VHS's that we'd put into the machine and uh on a weekend we rotated the classics of the eighties, Back to the Future, Willow, the Goonies, and my personal favourite was Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner.

Professor Lucy Easthope17:57

Alan Rickman, and that was something we would do together.

Professor Lucy Easthope18:01

And then later some of my happiest teen young person memories are being in the wonderful Wirrall Schools concert band. And I'm I really struggled with the the sort of rapid playing of a clarinet, but I was allowed a bass clarinet and I would hit that low G or that low D and hold it.

Professor Lucy Easthope18:21

And the joy. This music was the music of a younger childhood and then later the music of a concert. And we once performed this for the Queen. So this is a very special track to me and my sister.

Presenter19:09

The overture from the soundtrack to Robin Hood Prince of Thieves composed and conducted by Michael Kamen and performed by the Greater Los Angeles Orchestra.

Presenter19:21

Lucy Easthope, you went on to Bristol University after school to study law. What was your goal back then? Was it to be a lawyer?

Presenter19:31

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope19:31

No. So I'd been to my career as teachers with all of these things that I wanted to do around changing the world and particularly, very specifically, improving things for families after disaster. And the suggestion was that I should study geography because there was the early burgeoning of various geography specialism degrees where you could do disaster management. And I said, no, it's it's not that sort of disaster management. And also for me, geography seemed to involve a lot of standing in rivers in North Wales and floating oranges down and I was struggling with maths and sciences and things. And I but I like to speak and I like to advocate. And one of the things that I still hopefully do today is I don't need to like somebody or agree with somebody to completely defend them. One of the best decisions ever in my life was to go to Birkenhead Sixth Form College. If somebody had a problem, I was often speaking for them. I became vice president of the National Union of Students at the college.

Presenter19:59

Some floating orange

Professor Lucy Easthope20:28

And so there was this sort of suggestion of advocacy as a way forward and looking at activism.

Presenter20:32

Forward activism.

Professor Lucy Easthope20:35

And uh and off I went to do look. Everybody was going for the big magic circle firms and everybody was going for for training schemes. And I went to intern for the wonderful Professor Phil Scraton, who was then advocating at the Centre for Crime and Social Justice for the Hillsborough

Presenter20:53

families. After university, you got a gig as a T V researcher, and I think you were unique in that you were the only person working there who didn't want to be in T V. So how did you transition out of doing that to jumping into what you do now?

Professor Lucy Easthope21:08

Things like Big Brother were new then, so everybody was trying to get the roles on that. And I was saving up to go to disaster conferences. And particularly, I was very, very blessed to be invited to conferences with the wonderful organisation Disaster Action, which was a group of bereaved and survivors of these iconic disasters. Hillsborough, the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Martianess disaster, Piper Alpha. I was working as a researcher in the day and then studying for a master's degree in disaster management at night. So it was always there. I was going to do this.

Presenter21:43

So Lucy, you got your first job in disaster recovery working on the aftermath of 9-11. Tell me about that. What were you actually doing?

Professor Lucy Easthope21:53

So I was working for a private firm that mobilizes when the worst happens. And what it allows governments and airlines and ministries of defence to do is not keep a constant standing contract ready for disaster. It doesn't have to have all the kit. It can hire somebody in. And for September the 11th, they had been hired to provide additional support for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York.

Professor Lucy Easthope22:19

and what they needed was personnel. So I came on board in two thousand two to manage a British team that would be constantly rotated working with the human remains and the personal effects at Ground Zero.

Presenter22:35

Lucy, you've written that I am the collector of a very specific type of story and the keeper of a very particular type of secret sorrow. Tell me about that. Why secret sorrow?

Professor Lucy Easthope22:47

I would go from disaster to disaster. I did 13 mass fatality responses in two years for that particular private contractor. The thing I find I think most interesting and most difficult often about the personal effects, I find it much more intimate than working with the body of the deceased. The personal effects, I feel I I always start with an apology. It's such a violation. And obviously there's codes of practice and ways that we work, but it's a really intimate thing. Do you literally make

Presenter23:05

The personal effects I feel

Presenter23:16

make an apology, you kind of say to the person.

Professor Lucy Easthope23:19

In my head I say I'm really sorry to have to go into here, I'm into this bag and I'm sorry that this happened to you. You get to know the person in a in a way that they never intended for you to get to know them.

Presenter23:33

Lisi, it's time for your next piece of music, disc number four. What have you chosen? This is Tender.

Professor Lucy Easthope23:38

By Blur.

Professor Lucy Easthope23:40

And for many years I would get quite frustrated. I had fallen very, very, very hard in love with Tom.

Professor Lucy Easthope23:49

But I'd grown up in Birkenhead in the eighties, where love was demonstrated with big hallmarked headies and big fluffy cods on Valentine's Day. I'd found this man who

Professor Lucy Easthope24:01

was not incredibly demonstrative and certainly not incredibly vocal about how he felt. And then eventually one day

Professor Lucy Easthope24:09

He said that our love song is tender and he he plays it constantly.

Professor Lucy Easthope24:15

And he loves it and I hadn't realized that he was playing it to me and for me, so this has to be on there.

Speaker 324:30

Slender is the night

Speaker 324:33

Lying by your side Tender is the touch That someone loved you love too much Tender is the day The demons go away Lord, I need to find Someone who can heal my mind Come on, come on, come on

Speaker 324:59

Get through it.

Presenter25:03

Blur and tender. For your now husband Tom, you two eloped in 2007, I think, Lucy, to get married. Where did you go?

Professor Lucy Easthope25:11

Uh

Presenter25:12

We went to New York.

Professor Lucy Easthope25:13

And it was just brilliant. So we got married in the town hall and then we went across to the public library. It's in Ghostbusters with the big lions and emailed everybody to tell them. But the best thing about the wedding obviously the very best thing was marrying each other, but the ver the second best thing was that there is a convention when you get married at New York City Hall that the people in front of you in the queue for their licence act as your witnesses if you have eloped. Tom's favourite film is Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Professor Lucy Easthope25:47

And the two people in front of us in the queue were the actors Alan Rupp.

Professor Lucy Easthope25:52

And Mirei Enos. So they were our witnesses. Who were in the film? Yeah. I mean Alan Ruck was Cameron. So more recently has become very famous for succession. One of the flaws of that day is we only actually have pictures of Alan Ruck and Mirei Enos. We have one of us. He is on our marriage certificate. He and his his now wife signed our marriage certificate.

Presenter26:16

How much are you able to tell Tom about what you do and share with him? And has that changed over the years?

Professor Lucy Easthope26:24

Uh

Presenter26:24

In the

Professor Lucy Easthope26:26

Early parts of my career

Professor Lucy Easthope26:28

I brought nothing home. So Tom was a a young airline pilot.

Professor Lucy Easthope26:34

And I was responding to air crashes.

Professor Lucy Easthope26:37

And what I had learnt was it takes a huge amount of courage and strength of will and mind to fly a plane, as well as all the technical abilities. You have to be very certain that you can do this. And I felt this huge responsibility to not bring my work home. He never asked me not to. And it wasn't part of our life, which sounds strange. I would go off and do my work. I'd deploy. You might not see me. I would come back.

Professor Lucy Easthope27:08

and I would have a shower, and that sounds strange, but the one time I didn't, he said, Why do you smell of kerosene? and it was because I'd just come from a helicopter crash. And then we would just have this life that was away from it.

Presenter27:22

Lucy, I want to take you back to 2002. Late that year, you were part of a team planning a temporary mortuary at Brysnorton for the military action in Iraq, which was about to start. So you were doing that, but you were working alongside military personnel who were about to be deployed. Were you able to balance their anxieties, what they were going through, with getting the job done?

Professor Lucy Easthope27:46

No, no, I I wasn't, and one day

Professor Lucy Easthope27:49

I made a a mistake, which was that we were preparing for the very first it was going to be a televised repatriation, royals would be in attendance and my team, which was sixteen funeral directors in full tails who would bring the coffins in after the the military removal from the Hercules hadn't eaten.

Professor Lucy Easthope28:14

and I took them in for breakfast into the main canteen at Brysnorton.

Professor Lucy Easthope28:19

and the room was full of young men and women about to deploy.

Professor Lucy Easthope28:25

and it just washed over me what I had just done.

Professor Lucy Easthope28:30

And

Professor Lucy Easthope28:31

There are a number of lessons taken from that. One is to always think about how I will feed my team. And I often look very obsessed when a plan comes in and I say, you know, there's no plan here for how to feed that team or how to shower that team. And then a second thing that reinforced for me that day, which I use pretty much every day of my working life now, is to think about how things will be perceived and seen by those around them and that little things matter and it's going back to that view of being able to trust, but also the very, very courageous men and women about to deploy really did not need to see that right then.

Presenter29:08

Yeah.

Presenter29:08

And what was their reaction, Lucy? Was it just a case of everything going quiet?

Professor Lucy Easthope29:13

Yes. Busy naffy, you know, all that crockery and cutlery and eggs and bacon and it just went completely deathly silent and

Professor Lucy Easthope29:24

Utter horror on people's faces. I mean, it was so dramatic, it was like a film. You know, I marched in sixteen funeral directors in full garb. It was it was it was a sort of horrific flash mob. It was just awful. And th those sort of moments now, often I'll say something and a detective will say to me, you know, you you're overthinking this or you're worrying too much. But that was a very, a very hard lesson to learn very early on.

Presenter29:52

So Lucy, once the military action actually began, you were then in charge of repatriating soldiers who died and their belongings. What kinds of things were you doing to protect and preserve these items? You've told us how important it is to do that and how much they matter to you. What kind of duties of care are we talking?

Professor Lucy Easthope30:11

So the American and UK forces would get their soldiers out of of the initial theatre of battle and into Rise Norton and then our job was to very much in the background prepare for things like the family assistance, the family viewing of the deceased and actually in the first few uh repatriations they weren't supposed to have any personal items on their body apart from their dog tags, but they had put uh letters from home in a couple of cases in their underwear and that was being thrown out and there were other letters from home in some of the small bags that came back with them and the letters the original plan was that was that they would go in the bin and myself and a couple of colleagues asked if we could prepare the letters to be returned to the families and how did you do that? We sanitised them as best as possible, sometimes it had blood on them and then we would sit and very on a very low setting dry them out with um a low setting on a hairdryer and then the military said that we could return them but only if they were laminated which filled me with horror from a practical level as well because I knew that would mean I'd have to try and use the laminator and I would mess it up and I'd put the pouch in wrong but

Professor Lucy Easthope31:32

a colleague stepped in and we we laminated them. And I had very mixed feelings about that. I thought, you know, these widows don't want a laminated letter. They want the letter that his hands has been on. But

Professor Lucy Easthope31:43

Actually I learnt something there which was now I still see some of those women talk about the letters in documentaries. It's, you know, twenty years on and they hold them and I don't know that they would have survived without that protection. So you learn a lot through extremis, I think, sometimes.

Presenter32:01

Lucy, it's time to go to your next piece of music, your fifth choice today. What are you taking to the island next and why?

Professor Lucy Easthope32:08

The wonderful Pink has got me through so many difficult times. She's very, very well represented on the planthems. And Trustful felt like the right song to take with me, to remind me that it's all worth fighting for. And whatever I see, I'm never cynical. I'm an optimist and I'm very hopeful. And this felt like that. That needed to be on my island with me for what I'm going to face there.

Speaker 332:41

Running out of time

Speaker 332:44

Are we hiding from the light?

Speaker 332:48

Are we just too scared to fight for what we want tonight? Close your eyes and leave it all behind. But where love is on our side, so trustful, baby.

Presenter33:11

Pink and trustful. So Professor Lucy Easthope, you were studying for a PhD alongside working in disaster planning and recovery, and your thesis was looking at the impact on those living in the village of Tolbar in South Yorkshire. It was flooded in two thousand seven. What were your key findings?

Presenter33:30

I Uh

Professor Lucy Easthope33:31

found the most incredible community there.

Professor Lucy Easthope33:35

And it also did teach me that the plan has value. One of the problems we have in emergency planning is that plans are.

Professor Lucy Easthope33:44

Despite being the core tenet of what we do, people are quite disparaging. There's always, you know, the plan won't survive contact with the enemy, it means it won't survive the incident. But actually, I realized the plan does something, even if all it does is make sure that the community can find a way to access an income stream or find a way to access some support. And so it wasn't a negative thesis about we're not getting anything right in the way we respond to disaster. It reinforced for me

Professor Lucy Easthope34:13

very operational points like the meaning of a life scape, how a community is built on places and spaces. It also reinforced for me the work there's a whole chapter in the thesis on by the time I was studying in Tolbar,

Professor Lucy Easthope34:29

Flooding personal effects and flooding loss of home were really the neglected aspect of disaster management. Explosions, crowd crush, plane crash, you would get support for things like the loss of your personal effects. But with a flood, the one thing that would happen is the skips would be delivered to the bottom of the road.

Presenter34:49

How much emphasis do you place on mental health support in emergency planning, both for survivors but also responders?

Presenter34:56

And

Professor Lucy Easthope34:57

My work.

Presenter34:59

Uh

Professor Lucy Easthope34:59

In some of the incidents where psychological care has been so poor and consideration of rest and self-care has been so poor, I have seen very, very high levels of attrition rate. So the workers have never worked again or they've never worked in the field again.

Professor Lucy Easthope35:15

I've seen people, as I say, we call it going pop, so completely losing control or becoming very, very distressed or very, very angry. That's a very well-known phenomenon in our field because the stress is cumulative, so people will get very, very distressed. My biggest fear now was none of this really was carried into the pandemic for healthcare workers and for mortuary workers. They weren't supported from the start. They weren't allowed to really think of this as a global disaster. They were now disaster responders. And one of the hardest things is to try and fix it too late. So I do a lot of healthcare events now. And sometimes the room, it's almost spiritual when you say to them, this is what we would expect to see. And they are relieved. They've been personalising this trauma. Or you speak to their partners and their children. They say, you know, mum was great. She was a frontline responder in the pandemic, but we feel like we've lost her ever since. We didn't provide healthcare workers with that kind of support and knowledge. It's not that I was given it. I had to. I was told to seek it by American colleagues and American psychologists and I procured it for myself. And that's really relevant. I don't know if I'm sane. Maybe the island will find out for me. But I know that I am a lot weller than I could have been if I hadn't had people to debrief to. Because the other thing is, however close my family was, I couldn't take some of this home to them.

Presenter36:42

Lucy, it's time to go to your next piece of music, your sixth choice. What are we going to hear next, and why are you taking it with you?

Professor Lucy Easthope36:50

It's Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. I love everything about it. I love listening to it. It also captures something for me about hope and hopium and the difference between the two and

Professor Lucy Easthope37:03

I always hope that Tracy Chapman's uh character in the song gets away and gets out.

Presenter37:09

out and hopium is that

Professor Lucy Easthope37:11

Bam

Presenter37:11

Waiting and hoping that things will get better on their own then. It's absolutely there.

Professor Lucy Easthope37:15

Yeah. And it's one of the most devastating things I think we see in disaster, is people waiting too long, waiting to evacuate, waiting to get help, waiting for the authorities to come.

Speaker 337:31

You get a fast car I wanna take it to anywhere Maybe we make it

Speaker 337:38

Maybe together we can get somewhere Any place is better

Speaker 337:43

Starting from zero, got nothing to lose Maybe we'll make something Me myself, I got nothing to prove

Presenter38:00

Tracy Chapman and Fast Car. So Lucy Easthope, you are a parent to two girls. Has parenthood changed your attitude to the work that you do?

Professor Lucy Easthope38:11

A lot of people who had worked in the mortuary.

Professor Lucy Easthope38:14

had told me that it's very hard to do it once you have children and you're seeing reminders.

Professor Lucy Easthope38:21

The age that completely floors me isn't babies or children.

Professor Lucy Easthope38:26

It's working on an incident where the people are late teens.

Professor Lucy Easthope38:32

early twenties because it's like as a parent you're putting so much work into getting them to that point. That's just the take off point, yeah and then t for somebody to be robbed of that feels so cruel. So those I've I that that took me by surprise. I didn't expect that to be something that would be so so hard.

Presenter38:38

Yeah.

Presenter38:39

Yeah, and then

Professor Lucy Easthope38:50

I think what I did have to work very, very hard to do was not in any way to curtail their lives. And also I couldn't stop them living their lives to the full, you know, stop them travelling or the older one particularly rides horses. I couldn't worry about that. It took a long time to get them. I struggled to hold on to a pregnancy and so they are number four and number six of seven pregnancies. And so I had a lot of time, I think, to think about what sort of mum I wanted to be.

Presenter39:24

And Lucy, you know, going through that very difficult journey to have the girls, as you say, five miscarriages, doing the work that you do, the nature of the work that you do, the kind of locations where you are, you know, and disaster zones and sites. And I mean, that must have been extremely difficult for you, and emotionally and physically, too. I mean, miscarriage is a huge physical experience. How did you cope with that? It was one of the times.

Professor Lucy Easthope39:49

That I felt most grateful for my work. And the irony was when I was in the hospital, the forms that we were using for my losses were the forms that I use in the mortuary for human remains after disaster. There's a variation, but they're the same human tissue legislation. And so there'd be the part of my brain saying, Oh, I wonder how this doctor's going to handle this. I wonder if he'd handle it as well as I saw a colleague handle last week. And then I would be pregnant, then I wouldn't be pregnant. And it was actually the women of Tolbar who really kind of outed me.

Professor Lucy Easthope40:25

And they noticed that I was sometimes ill and sometimes wasn't and and and we ended up having very, very intimate chats that were supposed to be about flooding and my PhD and ended up about being

Professor Lucy Easthope40:36

you know, just keep going, you'll get there. And maybe there was a part of me, maybe it was hopium, but I could always see those two girls.

Professor Lucy Easthope40:44

And that kept me going.

Presenter40:46

Uh

Presenter40:47

Lucy, you're um a visiting professor in mass fatalities and pandemics, and you've talked about the impact of the COVID pandemic and school lockdowns on young people who were students at the time. You must be teaching students who were kids back then during that time. I wonder what you observe about that age group, what you're learning about them.

Presenter41:08

The

Professor Lucy Easthope41:08

Hardest thing to do, I think probably in my life was plan for a pandemic.

Professor Lucy Easthope41:15

C A pandemic.

Professor Lucy Easthope41:18

But not be able to do some of the protective things that we plan to do.

Professor Lucy Easthope41:23

For many reasons.

Professor Lucy Easthope41:25

For children and young people.

Professor Lucy Easthope41:27

And one of the earliest places I was giving advice in the spring of 2020 was into the Department for Education.

Professor Lucy Easthope41:36

Many of the civil servants there knew the toll that both the virus and the measures that would would be taken would do to all age groups, everything from babies born in lockdown to postgraduate students. But it all felt too much to give time to. And it was an antithesis of what I had trained, which was there is time, there is time. I always call it put the kettle on, there is time to put the kettle on. We could see other countries trying to do different things for those age groups.

Professor Lucy Easthope42:05

I worry about all age groups, but for my particular university experiences now,

Professor Lucy Easthope42:11

But it was a complete failure in terms of all of the social side of university and college and technical training. All of that was lost. I find a very, very dejected and betrayed group of postgrad students

Presenter42:26

Lucy, let's take a break for some music. It's your penultimate track today. What have you

Professor Lucy Easthope42:30

Uh

Presenter42:30

Uh

Professor Lucy Easthope42:30

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope42:33

There is nothing that sums up

Professor Lucy Easthope42:37

The disaster hiraith, the Welsh word for the loss of the life before,

Professor Lucy Easthope42:42

Then this incredible song from the musical come from away, something's missing.

Professor Lucy Easthope42:49

Why does it sum it up so well?

Presenter42:50

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope42:50

It's about the sudden realisation of how much has changed and is different from the life before. And one of the things about going into places after disaster within a few days of the thing happening is you are just with people who are fighting with every sinew for it not to have happened.

Professor Lucy Easthope43:13

And for the life before to be back.

Professor Lucy Easthope43:17

And this song is about the realization of what has changed. When I see it with emergency planners, we go as a group.

Professor Lucy Easthope43:26

There's a catharsis in this song which sums up why we do what we do.

Speaker 443:32

At the end of the day, after everyone left...

Speaker 343:37

We all tried to go back to normal, except the town was more quiet and somehow far emptier. We all looked

Speaker 443:47

The same.

Speaker 343:47

Uh

Speaker 443:47

Uh

Presenter43:47

Uh

Speaker 443:48

But we're different than we were. The gym was a sight as I stacked the last cart.

Speaker 343:55

Thank you's written everywhere, And things they forgot.

Speaker 343:59

The Board of Health says

Presenter44:00

Uh

Presenter44:01

Something's Missing from the original Broadway musical soundtrack to Come From Away by Irene Sankoff and David Hine.

Presenter44:10

Professor Lucy East Hope, you've spent a lot of time thinking about places and what they mean to people, even when they've been all but destroyed by a disaster. I wonder which place means the most to you?

Professor Lucy Easthope44:21

So the most special place in the world for me, wherever I go, will always be Liverpool and then obviously there's always wherever you wherever my husband and my babies are is the place that I want

Presenter44:32

Well, unfortunately I'm about to cast you away to the island, away from everything. I wonder what the mental checklist that you'll be working through as you wash up on the shore will be.

Professor Lucy Easthope44:41

I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to try and get off the island or whether I'm supposed to make the best of it.

Presenter44:45

Well, that was always one of Roy Plumley's

Professor Lucy Easthope44:47

Did I record?

Presenter44:47

Questions would you would would you try and

Professor Lucy Easthope44:48

And also am I supposed to be trying to get help and what's happened. I want to do some kind of after action review as to how I've ended up on the island as well. What I've learnt to do is hunker down for that first night. Say I've arrived about four o'clock or been washed up about four o'clock, hunker down and then tomorrow

Presenter44:49

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope45:07

Uh put the kettle on metaphorically, I don't think I've got a kettle, but put the kettle on and work out what I'm going to do. And one of the things I do a lot in my work now is is buy people time really to make their decisions a bit slower, to make better decisions. Measure twice, cut once. Yeah, as dad would say, that's exactly what he'd say.

Presenter45:22

Yeah.

Presenter45:23

That's exactly what he'd say.

Presenter45:26

And how would you handle the isolation? Obviously, once your physical needs were met, then the the mental side of it all kicks in.

Presenter45:32

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope45:32

I would be talking to myself a lot and probably out loud because there's no nobody to feel embarrassed in front of. And as I say, I don't know if I'm ever getting off the island, so I'd want to I would perhaps start to hoard things that would tell my tale of the time there. So maybe there's a shell or some driftwood, and then I would start to think about what next.

Presenter45:53

And would you try to escape?

Professor Lucy Easthope45:55

I like here too much to want to be on the island. I live every day genuinely as if it is my last. I think a lot of people think that's a shtick or a affirmation, but I do and I've seen enough lives interrupted. And I live every day with the people that I love and I would I would find being apart from them very, very hard.

Presenter46:18

Well, one more track before we send you there, Lucy East Hope. Your final choice today. What are we in for?

Professor Lucy Easthope46:24

This is for my girls. This is Thunderstruck by ACDC, which we have a new ritual because I don't want it always to be the hardest part of working in disastrous coming home. They play it on mama's arrival home. They got into the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and they love it and it sums them up despite having a mum who only ever gets to see the worst of the world live life so fully and this is for them.

Speaker 347:04

Fine and the ground!

Speaker 347:07

I knew there was no turning back.

Speaker 347:11

Thunder, my man grace, and I thought, what could I do?

Speaker 347:18

Thunder and new

Speaker 347:21

There was no help! No help from you!

Presenter47:25

A C D C and Thunderstruck. So, Professor Lucy Easthope, it is time to cast you away. Thank you, I think. I'm giving you the books to take with you, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take another of your choice. What are you going for?

Professor Lucy Easthope47:40

I really struggled with this one because books are my comfort, food, I have them everywhere in the house and I love a new book.

Professor Lucy Easthope47:48

But I thought, no, I'm going to go back to the book that's brought me the most comfort as a child, and that was The Diddekoi by Ruma Godden.

Professor Lucy Easthope47:56

And actually when I look at that one, it's about a child who is a a Romani child who knows exactly what she wants. She's not a future adult, she's a child right now with her own views. I was so in admiration of her as a child. So I thought I'll take this one. It's a lovely read. It's got a story arc of hopefulness. And the other thing is it's got quite large print because I don't know if I'm allowed my glasses.

Presenter48:22

I think we can imagine that you had your wash your glasses on when you were washed up. Yes. Your gags, as we would say in the North.

Professor Lucy Easthope48:26

Yes.

Presenter48:29

You can also have luxury item, what's that going to be?

Professor Lucy Easthope48:32

I don't like the dark, so I would like a solar powered lantern or torch, please, if I may, for my I've made a little shelter and I would like to put that on about five o'clock when the sun starts to set, uh, if I may.

Presenter48:47

It's on the practical side, so I mean I shouldn't really, but there is precedent you'll be pleased to hear, so I'm going to allow it.

Professor Lucy Easthope48:52

You'll be pleased to hear.

Presenter48:55

And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves first, if you needed to?

Professor Lucy Easthope49:02

And I'm presuming there's some mode by which I play this in my shelter with the other one. And so the thing would be light would go on.

Presenter49:06

Oh yes, you've got to be able to do that.

Professor Lucy Easthope49:11

and I would settle in it would be tender.

Professor Lucy Easthope49:15

Bye-blaur, because

Professor Lucy Easthope49:17

He wouldn't be with me on the island.

Professor Lucy Easthope49:19

It would be that as if he was there, so that would be tender.

Presenter49:22

Yeah.

Professor Lucy Easthope49:22

Uh

Professor Lucy Easthope49:22

Uh

Presenter49:22

For Tom.

Presenter49:24

Professor Lucy East Hope, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter49:43

Hello, it was lovely to chat to Lucy, and I hope she enjoys her time on the island with the comfort of her solar-powered lamp.

Presenter49:49

There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive which you can listen to if you search through BBC Sounds or on our own Desert Island Disc's website. The studio manager for today's programme was Emma Hart, the executive production coordinator was Susie Roylence and the producer was Sarah Taylor. The content editor was Mugabe Turia. Join me next time when my guest will be the politician and campaigner Lord Alfred Dubbs.

Speaker 350:49

This is Dr. Chris and Dr. Zand here and we are dropping in to let you know about our new BBC Radio 4 podcast.

Speaker 350:57

In What's Up Docs, we are going to be diving into the messy, complicated world of health and well-being because it can be confusing, can't it, Zahn? That's right, Chris. The mass of information out there can be contradictory, it can be overwhelming, and Chris and I get confused too. That's right, we get seduced by the marketing, the hype, the trends, so we want to be your guides through it. And I think it's fair to say, Zahn, we are going to be getting personal. We're absolutely going to be getting personal, Chris. What I want to do is bring in my own health dilemmas in the hope that we can help you with yours. Listen and subscribe to What's Up Docs on BBC Sounds.