HRH Princess Michael of Kent

Speaker 30:00

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

Presenter0:30

I am happy to say that our castaway this week is Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent.

Presenter0:35

We're very glad to welcome you to our island, ma'am. Could you endure loneliness?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent0:40

Yes. I I think without any trouble at all.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent0:43

I don't think I get lonely. I I've spent a lot of time on my own in Africa and I like to be alone. I like my own company.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent0:49

I have a cattle tour aunt.

Presenter0:50

But

Presenter0:52

Well, cats we'll refer to later. Let's leave them out for the moment. How much does music mean to you?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent0:58

Well, a very great deal at certain times of the day. I like silence. I like to be quiet at some times.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent1:06

In Africa particularly, I learnt that I could only have music in the evenings, because that was the only time I could get the battery out of the lorry, so that I could play my my music then. So during the day I was totally in peace and quiet with sort of animal noises, bird song.

Presenter1:22

Right. Now that is playing recorded music. Do you make music? Have you studied it? Do you play an instrument?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent1:28

Yes, I do actually. I play the guitar. Well, I've studied the classical guitar many years ago. I have a younger brother who's a hornist. He plays the the horn.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent1:36

and an older brother who wished that he'd been a pianist, but he's a scientist instead. And I don't play enough really any more, because it takes time and practice to play as well as you would like to play.

Presenter1:48

But when you were young there was family music, the best kind of music.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent1:50

Always, always, always, always terrible arguments between my mother and my brother about the speed of some movement or some concerto. Terrible mathematical arguments about music. I'm I'm emotional about music. I'm passionate about music. Um not mathematical about it.

Presenter2:06

You have this meagre ration of eight disks. You do find it very hard to choose. These are the eight that may have to last a long, long time.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent2:14

Pessimist.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent2:16

Yes, of course. Everyone finds it very hard to choose eight discs, but you originally asked me about four years ago to do this show, and at the time it was thought perhaps as no one had done it in the family that it mightn't be quite the moment. And so ever since then I've been making lists.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent2:32

And on the whole they have remained the same.

Presenter2:35

What's the first one on the list?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent2:37

It's Dvorak's cello concerto and the entry of the cello, because I'm born in Bohemia and Dvorak of course is a Czech.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent2:46

And every person from my part of the world is is full of Welt Schmerz and and when I'm really, really depressed I play this because it takes me as deeply and as makes me as depressed as I possibly can and then I can only go up, I feel, after this. And it reminds me of my grandmother.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent3:02

who was my model in all things, and a very beautiful and grand princess and whenever life is tough and the going is difficult, I think of her, and so Dworjak will remind me of her.

Presenter4:07

Part of the Vorschak cello concerto in B minor.

Presenter4:10

Rostopovich with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carien.

Presenter4:16

Now you began life as Mary Christine von Reidnitz and you were born, as you said, in Czechoslovakia.

Presenter4:23

Your father, Baron von Reibinist, where was he from?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent4:26

He's from Salira.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent4:28

And he was so old that as far as he was concerned he was from a previous incarnation when Silesia was still part of the Austro Hungarian Empire. In fact, it's now Poland and these borders change rather rapidly, so one has to try to keep up with that. But my father wasn't around a terribly long time.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent4:46

and I was totally brought up by my mother's family.

Presenter4:49

Now she a Hungarian countess.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent4:51

Yes.

Presenter4:52

How many children were there?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent4:53

My older brother, one and a half years older than myself, and much, much later, when my mother remarried,

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:00

I have a younger brother whose father's Polish, who's sort of twelve years younger than I am, who's a Hornist.

Presenter5:05

Now sadly, when your parents split up, you stayed with your mother. She went to Australia. Why Australia?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:12

Well, my mother was not only a historian by training, but she was also a great skier and she skied in the Thirty Six Olympics and at that time the only other people who seemed to be skiing were the British. So she had a lot of English friends who said after the war, you know, Austria's such a mess, why don't you come out to Australia and bring your two small children for a few years till Europe settles down a little bit? And she thought this was a good idea and they assured her there was very good skiing in Australia and so that's where we went.

Presenter5:40

At that time, as a small child, could you understand English?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:43

Yes, because I had an English governess, but I was a little bit the wall is white, the grass is green. I was trying, I was trying.

Presenter5:50

Whereabouts in Australia did you settle?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:53

He went to Sydney.

Presenter5:54

And you went to school there?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:54

And you rented it.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:55

I went to school there with a sacrific girl.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent5:57

and beautiful, beautiful city, Sydney. And I hadn't been there for some twenty years when my husband and I went there two years ago, and it had changed so that I didn't recognize it at all.

Presenter6:07

What were you best at at school?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent6:09

Think English literature and history, really. I always wanted to do everything that I did as well as I possibly can. That's very Capricorn, I suppose so that I didn't have any particular ambition, I just wanted to do everything well. I think I wanted to be a historian, like my mother. From the beginning.

Presenter6:26

Uh, when you left school, you left for Europe. That was to stay with your father?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent6:33

No. My father had a farm in Africa, and I went to Africa. I was a little bit too young for university, and I thought, well, it's time to go and meet the father who I hadn't met before.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent6:45

So that was a a terrible shock in itself.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent6:47

to meet a very much older person who could have been my grandfather. But it was also an introduction to Africa, and Africa became a great love of my life.

Speaker 46:56

Hmm.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent6:57

And

HRH Princess Michael of Kent6:58

Loved going on safari, hated killing the animals, never shot at them at all, but did everything I could, like playing very loud music, to stop them being shot at.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent7:10

But I loved being in the jungle in Africa.

Presenter7:12

And from Africa you went to Austria.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent7:13

Back to Austria, yes, back to visit all the the relatives and to meet all the cousins about whom I knew every little detail, because that was the role of every Central European, to know everything about one another's relatives, unlike here where you don't n even know your first cousin sometimes.

Speaker 47:28

This is sadly true.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent7:29

And we we we know our fourth cousins very, very well indeed. And many of them had like I had been brought up elsewhere and we came back from our various countries of temporary exile to meet one another and hopefully marry and settle down in Austria.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent7:46

And so we exchanged many stories and exchanged languages and I discovered after a little while that this was not what I wanted, to settle in Austria, but to learn instead interior design.

Speaker 47:56

Yeah.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent7:56

And so I came to England for that reason, because there wasn't such a study in Austria. At the time, it was thought that if your house had been good enough for your grandmother to live in, then it was good enough for you to live in, why should you wish to do anything quite so nouvea rich as to do it up?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent8:11

in a new modern way. And my mamma had great English friends from her skiing days.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent8:18

And one of them was a very excellent interior designer who decided to, out of her great generosity, take me on.

Presenter8:25

As Napoleon

HRH Princess Michael of Kent8:26

Prentice

Presenter8:26

So we've got you to England. This seems the point where we should have your second record.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent8:30

Well perhaps my second record

HRH Princess Michael of Kent8:32

in honor of my mamma, not that she needs to be remembered, but a chardash from Fledermaus, because it'll be representative of the passion in my life, tempered, of course, by the sense of the Capricorn.

Speaker 49:17

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Presenter9:46

The Chardas from Fledermaus, sung by Annalise Rottenberger.

Presenter9:51

So you came to London to study interior design. You studied for a while at the Victoria and Ablett Museum.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent9:57

That was a little bit later. First of all, I was apprenticed, interior decorated, and I learnt everything that an interior designer should know in order to correct her workmen.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent10:08

and her builders. So I did a bit of carpentry. Um I certainly know how to mix paints and how to paint and so on and so forth, before I started at Victorian Island.

Presenter10:17

At one point you had a spell in an advertising agency. Was that in the studio?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent10:20

This was really a a very brief spell because I felt that at this point that I wanted to know how to run my own business. And by this time I felt I'd done enough apprenticeship and that in in order to run my own business I had to know something about how an office worked.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent10:40

And so I went to work in an office to learn how an office worked. I'm afraid I was not at all gifted, but I learnt enough to know how to tell others to work for me. I think that's what it's all about.

Presenter10:49

Yeah.

Presenter10:50

So then you set up your own firm.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent10:52

I did.

Presenter10:52

And did the commissions come in?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent10:54

Stick and fast.

Presenter10:56

Vapor.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent10:56

I did very well. I made lots of money. I was very successful.

Presenter11:00

Let's have your third record.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent11:01

My third record is The Beginning of Undermilk Wood.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent11:05

An undermilk wood was given to me when I was quite young in Sydney.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent11:10

And I didn't understand I didn't even know where Wales was, let alone anything about Dylan Thomas. But it taught me the beginnings of my love of English literature.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent11:19

And I think if we we have the beginning, it'll set me off because I think I know the rest by heart.

Speaker 411:24

It is spring moonless night in the small town.

Speaker 411:28

Starless and Bible-blessed.

Speaker 411:31

The cobble streets silent and the hunched quarters and rabbits wood limping invisible down to the slow-black, slow-black, crow-black fishing-boat bobbing sea.

Presenter11:47

The opening lines of Under Milkwood spoken by the author Dylan Thomas.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent11:53

There's a lovely character in Unimote Cord called misses Ogmore Pritchard, and she's incredibly tidy and clean.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent11:59

And she really is unbearably untidy and clean and and and I terrorise my husband when he comes in sometimes from shooting and there's awful dead birds all over the hall and he calls me Mrs Ogmore Pritchard and and then he sort of says in an awful sarcastic voice quotes from it and Before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his feet

Presenter12:20

Now while you were working in London you married an English businessman, but it didn't work out and the marriage was annulled. But this led to problems later when you and Prince Michael of Kent fell in love and wanted to marry.

Presenter12:33

You were a Roman Catholic and a divorcee, and uh a church wedding at that time wasn't possible.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent12:40

Well, we thought it would be possible. It certainly would have been possible in the Catholic Church, because after all my first marriage had been annulled by Pope Paul the Sixth. The problem arose in that Prince Michael could not have Catholic children.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent12:56

This was in fact, after the Second Vatican Council, no longer a great obstacle, but there were problems of communication.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:06

between the English Catholic Church. And it was going to take a little bit longer than the one month of engagement that we allowed ourselves to explain this to the English Catholics, who were up in arms thinking

Presenter13:14

To explore

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:19

that because our children could be Anglican, why was it that they felt they had been under some pressure to have Catholic children? In fact, this situation has never changed. Our marriage was convalidated recently, as you know.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:34

And our children are very much remaining Anglican, and I very much wish to remain and shall remain a Catholic.

Presenter13:41

You and Prince Michael attend both Anglican and Roman Catholic services.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:45

On alternate Sundays

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:47

And he comes with me, and I go with him.

Presenter13:49

Within the

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:49

We're very ecumenical.

Presenter13:51

Well, that sounds a splendid arrangement. Let's get back to music. Watch number four.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent13:55

Record number four is Beethoven's fifth. This is uh largely due to my brother, who was my greatest musical influence, and probably the dearest, sweetest person other than my husband that I know, and he gave me this before I left for Mozambique.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent14:10

And I played da da da da throughout the jungle, and my father would scream that it would frighten away the buffalo and the elephants, but I didn't care, and it did.

Presenter15:06

The opening of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony

Presenter15:08

Carlos Kleiber conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter15:12

Prince Michael is an ex-soldier and, like your mother, he won distinction in winter sports. He was British Bobslay Champion.

Presenter15:20

He's also a rally driver and a horseman. How many of these sports interest you?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent15:25

You could offer me any money and I would not go down a bob sleigh. I think he feels a little bit the same way about hunting, but he does it out of love for me.

Presenter15:34

But you like horses, you like ride.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent15:36

I like horses, but I'm not very expert. I sort of

HRH Princess Michael of Kent15:38

believe in having a good horse and heading for the biggest fence because that's the biggest thrill. But I also have the biggest spir

Presenter15:43

No.

Presenter15:47

But um he d he doesn't like the high fences as much as you do.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent15:50

Um I don't think he likes horses anymore. Yeah.

Presenter15:55

And of course you have many royal duties. I believe that between you you attend something like three hundred functions a year.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:03

News to me. I've never counted them up. But I believe you. If you say so, I believe you.

Presenter16:07

All at your own expense, I believe.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:10

Well, my husband was brought up to believe that you cannot um have the privilege without the obligation, and therefore he

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:19

fulfils what he sees as his obligation, and I, as his wife, follow him.

Presenter16:24

It must sometimes be hard work. I remember an awards function where you had to stand for about an hour and a half, nobody provided a chair, and you were giving smiles and cheerful words to all the winners.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:37

I remember that because I was wearing rather uncomfortable shoes. Um well, there we are. I mean, there are worse things. Yes. It would have been silly to get up and get down every time ev you know.

Presenter16:47

Yeah, it's quite a bit.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:48

Probably easier to stand.

Presenter16:49

Is there any particular function you remember that really came unstuck?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:54

Um too many to mention.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent16:58

Usually when when I haven't been told I have to make a speech and um in the middle of lunch I sort of choke on whatever it is I'm eating because I'm making a speech at the end of it and I have to think about that.

Presenter17:09

But you usually know what's going to happen.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent17:11

Oh, yes, yes, yes, it's it's my own muddle if I don't, I assure you.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent17:15

My office is very very Yeah.

Presenter17:16

Yes, you get mixed up in silly stunts. There was one where some man dressed up as a wolf and attacked you just to get newspaper published. I mean, that that kind of irresponsible behavior can't happen very often.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent17:29

Yes, but the letters one gets are so delicious that it almost makes it all right. I I never forget one particular letter I had after the the so-called wolf episode, which which was a lovely lady who wrote saying, quite honestly I wouldn't be upset if I were you, because for a married woman of your age to still be attractive to wolves is quite something in itself.

Presenter17:51

Oh, Tommy.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent17:51

Oh, Tommy.

Presenter17:53

You must have a vast male.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent17:55

Yes, we do.

Presenter17:55

All of which has to be answered, I suppose.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent17:58

Yes, yes it does. Our office is is is um very, very hard working and under a lot of pressure a lot of the time. Um, you know, incidents happen that mean more male, the birth of children, obviously.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:09

A sudden

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:11

A religious marriage, the tragic loss of a cat. I had over two thousand letters when my my cat disappeared.

Presenter18:17

Really? You are a great cat lady. You you love cats.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:20

I do. I love cats. I love dogs. I love all animals. Anything on four legs with fur on more or less qualifies. Um

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:26

I do love cat.

Presenter18:27

How many do you have at any given moment?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:30

Um, I have nine at the moment.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:34

But only the Oriental three travel backwards and forwards to London with me. The Morgis tend to stay put in the country.

Presenter18:41

I see.

Presenter18:42

Let's have another record.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:44

Record number five

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:46

is a waltz. Now this is the Gold and Silver Waltz by Lehar with which we opened our wedding ball in Vienna.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent18:55

It's always been said we only had a civil wedding in Vienna. The fact of the matter is that we were always going to have a civil wedding followed by a church wedding, because that is the law in Austria, as in most European countries.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent19:09

And after our civil marriage, that evening we were to have a wedding ball, and the next day our religious marriage. Well, we missed out on the religious marriage, but we still had the ball. And we opened the ball with this waltz, and my husband said waltz and I said waltz and he thought one, two, three, one, two, three and I said, No, darling spin at quarter time.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent19:30

And that was the last time that I have said follow me, I shall lead, because he's never let me do it again. And he's never quite got over the dizzying speed of it, but it started our adventure into our own life, so I'd like to remember.

Presenter19:30

And that

HRH Princess Michael of Kent19:47

Yeah.

Presenter20:45

Dehaas gold and silver waltz, Villy Boskowski conducting the Johann Strauss Orchestra. Do you still find time to do some designing?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent20:54

Yes or no. I do a certain amount of consulting still, which means being bossy and giving my opinions and what I like and don't like. Not as much as I'd like. I'm I'm a trustee of the Victorian Albert Museum.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:04

And that gives me at least a little bit of time.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:06

to look at beautiful things. And the best part of being a trustee is that you're allowed to touch things. All museums say please do not touch and I can touch things and nobody can say a thing to me.

Presenter21:17

Oh, you have a country house. Of course you worked on the interior of that.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:21

Yeah.

Presenter21:21

It's an old house.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:21

Uh

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:23

It's a very old house indeed. It's very old in that it's full of woodworm and crumbling and full of rot. Do you paint?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:30

I do paint. I painted a lot more before I married. I seemed to have a lot more time for the children, you know. But during the month of January, when the ground is too frozen to hunt,

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:39

And there's very little else happening. I paint. January is my painting month. And the light is rather beautiful.

Presenter21:46

You mentioned your children. You have two. You have Lord Frederick Windsor.

Presenter21:51

How old is he?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:52

Is four?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent21:53

And then I have uh my little Gabriella, who we call Ella, and she's two. They're both April babies.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:00

although he is Ares and she's uh Taurus.

Presenter22:03

And your Capricorn.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:04

Hello everyone, I'm going to have trouble with my Torres daughter, I'm told, but she's such a good little girl at this stage, I think not. She's the image, incidentally, of my mother-in-law at this age, as my sister-in-law tells me, anyway. So I I have hopes of a great beauty in the family.

Presenter22:19

We got to record number six.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:21

We got to record number six, which is still in Vienna, because Vienna taught me to love opera. I had a very small apartment around the corner from the opera house.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:30

In the equivalent of what is Covent Garden in Vienna, it was over the flower market, so every morning I woke to the sounds of the flower cellars and the smell of the flowers.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:41

And I didn't have television and I didn't have any other form of entertainment.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:44

And so when I was spare in the evening, which was quite often, I popped around the corner of the opera house, where the tickets were very, very cheap.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent22:51

and I could walk there in the snow sometimes. So this is an aria from Tosca. Not because Tosca is necessarily my favorite opera, but it's one of my favorites. I think we've got Di Stefano singing the aria.

Presenter23:04

Yeah.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent23:05

And Itosuka is such a powerful love story.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent23:09

And as a very typical Central European, I like a good tragedy.

Presenter23:23

Uh

Speaker 423:28

And my early sky

Speaker 423:36

We are

Speaker 423:49

By the way.

Presenter24:01

An audio from the last act of Puccini's Tosca, sung by Giuseppe DiStefano.

Presenter24:07

I don't know how you find time for all this, ma'am, but you're also writing a book. You're busy on an historical biography.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent24:14

Yes, busy is at the moment not really the word. I started two and a half years ago.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent24:19

working on a biography of Elizabeth Stuart, better known as The Winter Queen.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent24:24

Largely because I've always been fascinated by her, an English princess who became Queen of Bohemia, and there was a Bohemian who became an English princess. And also because once I started reading about her, I really became fascinated by her and was somewhat affronted that so many people didn't know that she was English, that they confuse her with Elizabeth Empress of Austria, and that she actually started, in effect, the Thirty Years' War. I'm afraid at the speed that my book is progressing, it's going to be my own little private Thirty Years' War and that it's going to take me 30 years to complete.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent24:59

I'm I'm being a little slow.

Presenter25:00

You've been researching in Heidelberg?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent25:02

I've done all the research in Prague, Heidelberg and The Hague and I've started the writing, but I find just organizing my papers takes me hours. You know, and then the kittens come in and spill everything, and then the children come in and mess everything up again.

Presenter25:15

We look forward to that.

Presenter25:16

Let's have record number seven.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent25:17

You'll be waiting a very long time for that book. Record number seven is by Mahler, another bohemian, and I love a great deal of his music, but this is number five in C Sharp Minor, the fourth movement, The Adaggietto, which was chosen for a very beautiful film about Venice.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent25:35

This particular theme recurs again and again, and Venice has been a favourite bolt hole of my husband and mine. We were not actually there on our honeymoon we were in India and in Iran. But we very soon afterwards went to Venice, and we go there as often as we can, and so this will remind me of our very happy times in Venice.

Presenter26:49

The adacciato from Mahler's Fifth Symphony in C Sharp minor, George Shelty conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter26:57

How resourceful would you be on a desert island? Could you build a hut?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:01

Oh, yes.

Presenter27:01

Have you done any fishing?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:03

Yes.

Presenter27:04

I had a

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:04

I've had a little fishing on the wire, a little salmon fishing. I don't know that I should have that sort of facility on this desert island.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:11

But I think I would fish quite well.

Presenter27:12

Do you know the principles of it? And you can cultivate, obviously.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:16

I'm a farmer's daughter.

Presenter27:18

Sailing. Could you construct some kind of a craft, a raft, or whatever?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:22

Now we're getting into very dangerous water here. Having launched Britain's challenge for the Americas' Cup, I really ought to say yes, yes, yes, I can say that. My husband assures me that I turn green in the bath because I'm seasick. I'm seasick looking at the water. I'm seasick thinking about the water. No, I'm going to stick on this island. I'm not going to venture forth.

Presenter27:42

We'll do our very best to get you rescued very quickly.

Presenter27:46

Your age.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:46

I'm very happy on this island. I don't mind a bit if you leave me there for a while.

Presenter27:51

Your last record, the last of the eight.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:53

Now, my last of the eight I've come to Mozart.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent27:56

Largely because I think all eight could have been Mozart.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent28:00

I have chosen the violin concerto, better known as K two one six and G. With Karyan conducting, Karyan is a friend and someone I admire very much.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent28:09

And this is one of his young proteges playing Ansofi Muta.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent28:13

This happened to get stuck in our tape deck at our house in the country, and for about a month we heard nothing else but this tape. So I shall be reminded of our beautiful house and never of course forget our children, but I shall be reminded of the horses, the goats, the dogs, the cats, and all the sundry animals, the Cotswolds, hunting and the very private part of our lives.

Presenter29:26

The opening of Mozart's Violin Concerto No. three in G major.

Presenter29:30

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrian and the soloist Ann Sophie Motte.

Presenter29:37

If you could take only one disk of the eight you've chosen, which would it be?

HRH Princess Michael of Kent29:42

Well, I think that last one, the Mozart, with all the fond memories of my home and my happy family.

Presenter29:47

You're allowed one luxury, any one object of no practical use whatever, that will give you pleasure on the island.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent29:53

Now, I'm going to insist on this. I want to take a cat.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent29:57

And it's got to be Oriental, and it's preferably pregnant.

Presenter29:57

And it's got to be a

Presenter30:00

I'm sorry, wait, wait.

Presenter30:02

Oh here is conflict. No, it must be inanimate. If we look at the...

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:04

It must be.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:05

It's luxury, it's luxury. It's a total luxury, you've no idea what they cost me. They shred my carpets, they shred my curtains, my furniture is absolutely in pieces. This is a luxury of a of a limit that you cannot imagine.

Presenter30:12

Go ahead.

Presenter30:18

I would give you anything you want except a cat. It must be something inanimate. A statue of a cat. A sculptured cat.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:23

A statue of a cat, a sculptured cat.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:26

You don't understand you don't understand. There's there's method in my madness. This cat is not only going to be pregnant, but an Oriental cat is one hell of a hunter.

Presenter30:26

A trade cap.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:36

And they bring me little presents on the end of my bed and they're going to bring me little rabbits out of this desert island.

Presenter30:36

Click and

Presenter30:41

I am afraid we shall have to discuss this at some length afterwards. You have no luxury at the moment. But you do have one book apart from the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, which are already there.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:45

The moon.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:51

Yeah.

Presenter30:53

I know you haven't made me unhappy.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:54

Huh?

Presenter30:55

This is just

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:55

I'm having a cap.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent30:57

Now, you didn't notice that I had a little cat in my pocket when I was rescued and landed on this desert island. You didn't see it, you didn't notice it. No, it was very quiet, it was very small.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent31:08

My book.

Presenter31:09

Yes.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent31:10

Um when my children go to boarding school, which happens at an unhealthy early age, I think in England, it's very difficult for your peer and girl to let her children go to boarding school quite so young. However, when they do, and I'm suddenly left without any noise and clamour in my life, I'm going to go to university and take a degree in history.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent31:31

And therefore it has to be a history book.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent31:34

I might as well get ready on this design for this time. So when I thought about all the history books that I could take, it had to be one that I could read again and again and again.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent31:44

So at the risk of sounding very erudite, I'm going to ask for the Histories of Herodotus, because I can read him again and again.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent31:54

He he likes details. He likes lots of frivolous details. While he's describing a battle, he will tell you about the colour of the shields and the way they do their hair and and and what how they tied up their boots and all these sort of delicious little details which I absolutely love and which waste so much of my time when I'm trying to write my own history.

Presenter32:12

All right. You shall have the histories of Herodotus, and give you all the facility for writing another book when you come back.

Presenter32:19

And thank you, Your Royal Highness, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc.

HRH Princess Michael of Kent32:23

Thank you very much.

Presenter32:24

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 332:32

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