Charles Causley

Charles Causley0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy nine, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

On our Desert Island this week is the poet and writer of children's books, Charles Causley.

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Charles, you're a Cornishman. What part of Cornwall? Uh my home is in Larnson, which is on the eastern bit of Cornwall, the bit that abuts on Devon. We are separated from Devonshire and England by the River Tamar.

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Yes. Right on the frontier. Right on the frontier.

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As well as words, is music important to you? Uh yes, I've always loved it and uh really couldn't live without it. Have you any musical skill yourself? I've hardly called it uh skill, but I was taught the piano when I was a little boy.

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And this was very useful to me in the 1930s when I played in the local dance band, even more so when I was in the Navy.

Charles Causley1:15

Commander

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I played the fiddle. I was in the school band, and when I was in the Navy I played the tin whistle. I can still give a respectable performance of the Teddy Bears Picnic. On the what? On the tin whistle. On the tin whistle.

Speaker 31:27

Yeah.

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Now records. What's the first one? Uh my first record is Daniel's play, the play of Daniel. This is a musical drama, sung in Latin by an unknown author of the twelfth century. A thrilling story of the adventures of the prophet Daniel in the land of Babylon and in encounters with uh pits full of uh lions and uh goodness knows what. There's a splendid overture.

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to this little

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opera, which is crisp and witty and bright and amusing, and always makes me want to jump out the house and dance. I love it. The overture to Daniel's play.

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The overture to the twelfth century play Daniel's Play It's a Russian recording by the ensemble Hortus Musicus.

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You're an only child, aren't you? Yes, I am. My my father uh became a casualty during the First World War, and my memories of him were very faint indeed. And so I was brought up in this little Cornish town where I lived with my mother until the outbreak of the Second World War. Were you bright at school? No, I wasn't, and I wasn't very ha you know, I didn't really enjoy school very much after I left the primary school. I used to go to a huge Church of England primary school about five hundred yards from my home, a great granite and slate building on the edge of the town allotments. But one marvellous thing that happened there was that we had every Friday afternoon a music lesson conducted by the head master, Mr A. K. Lee, who had been there for about thirty years. And Mr Lee stood at a harmonium with one foot diagonally across two pedals, pumping away furiously, and he taught us a marvellous vocabulary of British song and folk song. And one of the songs from those days is a song I really couldn't do without. It's Tom Bowling, a wonderfully affecting poem by Charles Dibden about the dead sailor, and which when I was doing some research for a sea anthology a couple of years ago, I found is probably

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based on the loss of Dibdin's own brother, Captain Thomas Dibden, who died in Cape Town in seventeen hundred and eighty on the way home from India. It's a lovely song, and I'd love to hear Robert Teer sing it.

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Here she hike lies poor on board.

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The dawn

Charles Causley5:02

No, no, hear yield the tempest howling.

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Yeah.

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Death has rolled.

Charles Causley5:18

His form was of the earth.

Speaker 35:21

Yeah.

Speaker 35:25

Uh

Charles Causley5:25

We won't he is hard. Yeah.

Speaker 35:28

God was kind and sore.

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Robert Teer singing Tom Bowling with Andre Previn at the piano.

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What else interested you at school apart from music?

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Well, I enjoyed reading English. Of course, I was absolutely hopeless at science and mathematics and all that kind of thing. And I still don't know, I'm glad, rather proud to say, one end of a football pitch from the other, nor do I care. But English always absolutely fascinated me. And the most wonderful person in the world to me, I'm afraid, was not an engine driver, but somebody who'd written a book. And the day that I met a man who'd written a book, must have been about 16 years old, was a very

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Important one for me through the thirties I

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Tried to write plays and poems and stories, but not with a great deal of success. Most of my success was as a pianist with the local dance band.

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Did you ever envisage being a professional musician or running your own dance band? Oh, no. I knew that I was never sort of good enough for that, but I was good enough to play with this uh splendid group called the Rhythm Boys. We play for five-hour dances at seven and six a time. I reckon I've I've frightened more woodworms out of more ancient pianos than anybody else in the west of uh in the west of England. But I've always admired the great jazz pianists.

Charles Causley6:47

Everybody else in the west of

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What were you doing the rest of the time? What was your job in the daytime? Well, I left school at fifteen and um w with an unemployment figure of something like a couple of million in the early thirties, I got a job uh first with a builder in an office uh and then with a local electric

Charles Causley7:08

Uh

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company. Most delightful people I worked with, but the most staggeringly

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Boring job. I mean, I have to be grateful to Hitler for just one thing, for getting me out of life in an office. And that's when he went into the Navy. Yes, it was.

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Why did you opt for the Royal Navy? Well, I think it was pure ignorance. Uh I'd read all the First World War poets, and uh the accounts of what happened in France and Belgium in the First World War didn't appeal to me at all.

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And the notion of going to sea, I suppose, was a romantic one, rather a mistaken one in my case. I mean, when it actually came to going to sea in a destroyer, I found that the sea was even more difficult and dangerous than the business of confronting the enemy, or it was by my books anyway. A very dangerous, unpredictable element indeed. What was your job?

Charles Causley8:03

Yeah.

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I was a coda.

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I was a coder. One had to turn signals in plain English into codes, and vice versa, somehow or other.

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What sort of craft did you serve in? I started off uh in a destroyer off uh Scupper Flo, very terrifying, and I worked my way up during the next five and a half to six years through uh shore establishments and so forth, until I finished in an aircraft carrier in the Pacific in nineteen hundred and forty-five.

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Yes, he rose about as high as a coater can go, I believe. I was a petty officer. I think that's the ma that's easily the the highest point I shall ever rise in my whole life. I was I was really.

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Rather proud of that, but it was only on account of old age, that was all. I was always the oldest one who'd been around. Was there any opportunity for writing at all? No, none whatever. It was the um uh there was the opportunity for the preparation of writing. You see, in the thirties I didn't really know what was my line. I knew that I should be a poet or a playwright or a novelist somehow. That was what I wanted to be. But being in a small ship or being in a shore establishment somewhere or other meant that one had a job to do and that one couldn't really write a novel or a play, for example. One hadn't got the time or the physical space. But poetry can be written in the head with nobody else having the faintest idea of what's going on.

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I've gone on writing my poems in my head like that ever since.

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Record number three, what's that? Well record number three is an echo from my days in the dance band. It was an old seventy-eight record I had of Garland Wilson playing a tune by Cole Porter called Just One of Those Things, a wonderful pianist who quite often sounds like eight men playing one piano.

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Yeah.

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Garland Wilson playing just one of those things.

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So after six years you were out of uniform.

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Did you consider going back to the old job? No, not for a second. I made up my mind during the war that if I survived it, that at least I'd do something with my life which I wanted to do. And so I threw up my old job and was lucky enough to get a place in what was then called a teacher's training college and went off and took a a course in teaching and emerged, as I thought, a teacher.

Speaker 210:55

And back to Cornwall.

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Yes, quite by chance a a job came up in my own home town in the very school that I had attended as a boy. I was uh assured that this was a terribly wrong thing to do psychologically and in every kind of way. It was quite accidental that I landed up there, but

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I can see now that it was a very lucky accident as far as I was concerned. Just five hundred yards from home. That's right.

Charles Causley11:14

Talk to her.

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What age children did you teach? Well, I began by being faced with fourteen-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds, uh and then the school was split up. It was in the days when uh secondary modern education was introduced, and so our school became a primary school, and half the staff went off to teach at the new secondary modern school with the older children, and one was given the choice. I decided to stay with the younger children, because I didn't want to specialise in English, never wanted to specialise at all. I was much happier trying to take everything from religious instruction to disorganised games and needlework and God knows what. It was really like a long-running variety show. We never had enough time to get bored, and I must confess I loved it. And that left you reasonably fresh to write in the evenings, because you hadn't been doing anything similar by day. Well, nothing literary. I I don't know about fresh. I mean, I used to think that one wrote poems by leaping out of bed in the early morning feeling dazz fresh and all that. But I mean, in fact, the creative thing doesn't happen like that at all. But at least I was doing something which was

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Totally different from the way in which I spent the eight daylight hours of the day. In those early years, who were your influences?

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Well, you know, this is very difficult to tell. I think outsiders can tell it more quickly than insiders, but I mean I

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All the thirties poets influenced me very much indeed, particularly Auden, whose work I enjoyed and enjoy almost beyond measure. Shakespeare, of course, never miss a performance of a Shakespeare play, never, ever. And indeed any any kind of poem that I or poet that I liked. When I was a schoolboy I was taught that Shelley was not a good poet, rather rather wet, in fact. But I discovered the more that I found out about Shelley that he was really a very delightful fellow. I'd like to have Shelley on the Desert Island, but I can't have him, can I? Well, yes, of course. Splendid chap, splendid fellow. A lot of Shelley's been recorded. A lot of Shelley. And once again, during the war, I came on an old 78.

Speaker 213:20

Splendid chap. Splendid fella.

Charles Causley13:24

Yeah.

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Of a reading by Gielgood, by Sir John Gielgud, of one of Shelley's finest poems, the poem about

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Was it Mandius of

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Egypt, where the uh uh traveller has has seen a a great shattered stone figure in the desert. Absolutely unforgettable piece of work.

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I met a traveller from an antique land Who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, Whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things.

Speaker 214:16

Sir John Gilgood, reading Shelley's Osimandius. When and where was your first poem published?

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It was published in the nineteen forties, in about forty seven or forty eight. I began trying to write poems in nineteen forty three, and I resolved that I wouldn't have a wall papered with rejection slips, that I'd be my own.

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Editor, and so I wrote and rewrote and didn't send anything at all to an editor until I was reasonably confident that I might get some kind of success. And my very first poem was published by J. C. Truin, who's now a well-known London dramatic critic, in a magazine called The West Country Magazine. Great moment in my life, that was. Yes, he's a Cornishman, isn't he? He is indeed.

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Now you published eight or nine slim volumes of verse from nineteen fifty one onwards, and recently you've collected what you think are the are the best from all those volumes and and put them into one book of collected poems.

Charles Causley15:20

Uh

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One thing that that book would seem to show is that your style hasn't changed all that much in twenty five or thirty years. There's there's a constant. You're a romantic and you're by no means obscure.

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And you're

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A ballad poet, primarily.

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Would you agree with all that? Well, I'm not so sure about the ballad thing. I mean, one gets a label. You know, I've written a certain number of ballads. Curiously enough, if one counts them up, they're by no means the majority of poems that I'm to begin with.

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I wrote, I suppose, a fair number of uh ballads, but it's a kind of label that one has to live with, you know, somehow or other. But uh I I like to think.

Charles Causley15:55

Somehow

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that my range is a little uh is a little wider than that. But the ballad has always fascinated me very much because it's such a a a seemingly simple kind of poem, and yet one has to communicate somehow to people, and the ballad also has to have another face, another meaning.

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And many poems about the sea.

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And about children.

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And you obviously have a strong religious faith.

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Well, I'm not at all sure about the religious faith. I mean, I'm working away, but I'm not sure what's happening. My feelings, really, I think, are rather those which in Boswell's Life of Johnson, Johnson observed about old Dr. John Campbell. He said, I'm afraid he hasn't been inside a church for many years, but he never passes one without taking his hat off. This shows that he is a man of good principles, Johnson said, and that's really about as far as I can go.

Charles Causley16:44

This shows

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And your other writings, some short stories.

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Yes, I began by writing short stories. My very first book of poems appeared in the same year as a collection of short stories which, as you know, I've recently republished, um mostly about my life in the Navy, a kind of detritus, things I couldn't see.

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as poems, but I simply had to get down on

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Paper. Hands to Dance in Skylark. That's a very nice title. And your children's books. D that grew out of your teaching?

Presenter17:24

Well, I suppose it did. Yes, I suppose it did. You see, when I when I tri I don't really think I taught anybody anything, Roy, actually. I mean, I learned far more from the children than they ever did from me. But I always read poems and talked to children about stories and things that I liked, that I enjoyed. And I think children will kind of catch fire from this kind of enthusiasm somehow or other. I think it would be very wrong to put on an act.

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and call it capital E education, you know. So really those children's books and those children's anthologies are for myself principally.

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Another record, please.

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Well, if I was a composer, instead of a man trying to put words together, I'd like to be able to write the kind of music that Mozart wrote. Brilliant, sparkling, clear. To me, very much like the prose of two twentieth century writers I admire, Shaw, Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Clear and bright. And one of my most favourites of all is Concerto by Mozart, the one he wrote for two pianos. And I'd like to hear it played by Alfred Brendel and by Walter Klein. I wish I could write like this.

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The closing passage of Mozart's concerto for two pianos and orchestra in E flat major, the soloists Alfred Brendel and Walter Kleene.

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In nineteen sixty seven you were given the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Is that an annual award?

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No. It seems to be awarded when the committee, or whoever it is who advise the Queen on this matter, think that the award should be given. It's not an annual thing, then.

Charles Causley20:06

thing.

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When did you give up school teaching? Uh three years ago, almost exactly three years ago. After a good long stint? Yes, over a quarter of a century.

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And since then you have been teaching at the University of Exeter? Well, it would be more accurate to say that I take part in a couple of poetry seminars every week, which I enjoy very much indeed. They've given you an honorary doctorate, which is rather nice? Yes, it was very generous of them.

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Now you give readings of your poetry about the place. Do you enjoy performing? No, I don't, to tell you the truth. I mean, I I'm told I look as if I uh as if I enjoy it, but I feel guilty. I feel that I should be at home.

Presenter20:45

Writing, instead of bouncing about reading poems, is really terribly easy if you've written the poems. It becomes boring.

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To a writer, I suppose, the most interesting thing he's ever written is the piece of work he's engaged on at one particular moment. And uh poetry readings in a way to me are a kind of Lazarus act in which one tries to

Speaker 321:02

PA

Presenter21:07

Resurrect the dead. It has led to a certain amount of traveling. Oh, yes. Yes, oh yes. I've en uh one always enjoys

Charles Causley21:10

Oh, I know you enjoyed it.

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visiting places like Dublin or Sarajevo or Paris or Jerusalem or whatever. Next year I hope to go off to Australia.

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That's fine. That's all right. But I think what I'm really saying is that one mustn't do

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Too much of it.

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Very dangerous thing in a writer. You should stay home and get on with the job. Yes, now how do you get on with the job? You can't write poetry when you don't feel like it. You can't sit down at home.

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a desk at ten o'clock in the morning and say, and go to write poetry? Or can you? Well, it's very difficult. I mean, the thing about poetry, I think the thing about all creativity is that it's a compulsion. One never really feels one wants to do it. One tries to invent all kinds of jobs which will

Presenter21:57

uh prevent one from making a start, if you know what I mean. But but it is a compulsion. One gets uh a notion in one's head, something which sort of ticks away and knocks away, and it really gives one no rest until it's been laid, like a kind of ghost, and then something else slowly begins to appear. But of course one can't write poetry.

Charles Causley22:01

But

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all the time. I think it's very important for a poet to

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Engage in activities connected with poetry, a very great deal of reading, great traditions of poetry.

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and study, thought um

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anthologizing, things like that, not getting too far away from it. I don't really want to venture into prose writing if I can help it, because it really is an entirely different technique.

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We've now reached record I think number.

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Six.

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What's that?

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Well, this is a ballad called The Cut a Wren. It's sung by the Ian Campbell folk group. I've always loved it because it has a very deep historical root. It's concerned on the surface with the ritual hunting and killing and dismemberment of the wren on St Stephen's Day, on Boxing Day. But underneath it's very much a song of protest in which there is a secret meeting. Oh, where are you going? said Milder to Mulder. Oh, we may not tell you, said Fessel to foe. And they seek the wren and cut it up and

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Give it to the poor. Wonderful, exciting, urgent piece. The Cutty Wren. How far does this song date back? Oh, the folklorists say perhaps to the Peasants' Revolt.

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Where are you going? said Mother to Mother.

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Tell you, said Fezel to foam, We're off to the woods, said John the Red Knows. We're off to the woods, said John the Red Nose. What will you do there, said Malda to Mulda?

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Tell you, said Fair Soul to Foe, We'll hunt the trotty wren, said John the Red Nose. We'll hunt the trotty wren, said John the Red Nose. How will you shoot for Saddam Muller? We may not tell you, said Fair Soul to Foe, With bows and with arrows, said John.

Presenter24:37

The Cutty Wren by the Ian Campbell Folk Group. Let's go straight on to your next record. What's number seven? Well, the next record is a song sung by Noel Coward. For me, I suppose he epitomizes the theatre of the 1930s. I never saw him perform. I'd love to have done so. I've always admired his very smart and slick technique and his professionalism and the way he could write words to be sung. And this song, accompanied by one of my favourite pianists, Carol Gibbons, is called Imagine the Duchess's Feelings.

Speaker 325:12

Is that the Duchess?

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Well

Speaker 325:13

So

Speaker 325:15

Something doesn't tell.

Speaker 325:17

Fed the Dutches well

Speaker 325:20

No.

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Imagine the Duchess's feet.

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On having hatched out our brood

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To find her first son was weak though well-mannered, her second rather stupid and her third plain rude, her eldest son when in trouble went white, her second son looked blue and hung his head.

Speaker 325:37

But imagine the duchess's feelings when her youngest son went red.

Charles Causley25:37

Uh Uh

Presenter25:37

Uh

Charles Causley25:37

Yeah.

Presenter25:42

Noel Card with Carol Gibbons at the piano. Now as a resourceful sailor you should be able to look after yourself on a desert island. You had plenty of survival drill and that sort of thing. I wasn't a resourceful sailor at all, uh Roy. I've never met anybody who loathed the navy more than I did or who was more uneasy on what Shakespeare called the wild and wasteful ocean. But I've seen the island that I want to be on. It's if you can manage it. It's in the

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Luisadi Archipelago, which is uh

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sort of my navigation isn't very good, but you go up the east coast of Australia and vaguely turn right. Lovely little place there, and it looks as though you could live there without any kind of roof over your head at all.

Charles Causley26:19

Yeah

Presenter26:25

Yes.

Charles Causley26:25

Could be very well information.

Presenter26:28

I haven't the faintest idea. I was probably being too sick at the time to notice. But far enough to be classed as a as a desert island. I'm sure of it. All right, you sh you you shall have that one. Splendid. You're a little worried about your navigation, but if you could construct some kind of raft or craft, would you try to get away? Under no circumstances whatever, I should sit firmly on the island and wait to be.

Charles Causley26:36

All right, you s you shall have

Presenter26:50

Rescued. I am by temperament, I suppose, um a solitary man. I really wouldn't mind it all that lot, and I should be able to get on with some work. And you know too much about the sea to take chances. Oh, yes.

Presenter27:04

Your last record. My last record is by Janacek. I spent much of the past summer in Central Europe, in Yugoslavia, translating some poems by a Yugoslav poet. And then I went on to Czechoslovakia, which I'd never visited before. Wonderfully romantic landscape of Bohemia, which I think Janacek catches perfectly in his Sinfonietto. There's a part towards the end of the second movement, the Andante, which expresses the atmosphere of that wonderful country in a wonderful way. Janicek, I believe, talks about the breathing of a green hill, and one can feel it in this music as it surges along.

Presenter28:45

Part of the second movement of Janacek's Sinfonietta, played by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. If you could take just one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would you select? Ah, I should take the play of Daniel. It's sung in Latin.

Presenter29:00

The record sleeve I can't read a word of. It's a Russian recording.

Presenter29:05

And uh I should love to spend my time trying to f I've got the Bible with me, have I? You have the Bible, yes and Shakespeare. I'd simply love to to try and fit my own version of the story of Daniel in the Lion's Den.

Charles Causley29:11

Well then

Presenter29:18

To the music of the record. Very useful Palestine. Right. And one luxury?

Presenter29:25

Well, you know, this was a bit of a problem. I I I don't know whether I could live without a little uh transistor radio, but I think I'd like a really nice grand piano so that I could improve what might be laughingly called my technique. Do you think if I had a stool you could put in the complete works of Chopin? That would be so good. That can be organised, yes. Thank you. You have to promise not to live under it, and we'll give you a cover to keep the sound out.

Charles Causley29:44

It's good.

Charles Causley29:46

Thank you.

Speaker 329:51

BA

Charles Causley29:51

Uh

Presenter29:53

And you're allowed one book in addition to that Bible and Shakespeare we've already talked about. We don't encourage big encyclopedias because that's a bit of a cheat.

Presenter30:02

I think I'd take the book that got me through the Second World War, Boswell's Life of Johnson, splendid piece of work about that wonderful, commonsensical

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Man, I can never get tired of stories about uh about Johnson and his life, and I admire him very much indeed. I like a really well annotated edition

Presenter30:23

Of the Boswar, please.

Presenter30:25

Boswell's Life of Johnson, and thank you, Charles Gausley, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Thank you, it's been delightful. Goodbye, everyone.

Charles Causley30:41

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