Lucy Irvine

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

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.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway this week has had practical experience of being on a deserted tropical island. She's the author of the book Castaway, It's Lucy Irvine.

Presenter0:38

Tell me about yourself, Lucy. Mid twenties, yes?

Lucy Irvine0:41

Yes, I was twenty five when I went to the island.

Presenter0:43

Blond, very pretty.

Presenter0:46

How much does music mean in your life?

Lucy Irvine0:49

Music means a great deal to me. It's something that's always been able to move me up or down on on the scale of emotional well being. And originally we did plan to take some music with us to the island.

Lucy Irvine1:01

But this fell through as my funds ran out and I was unable to buy anything but the most basic provisions and certainly couldn't afford batteries for a tape recorder. However, later I realized how glad I was not to take any music to the island, because that way I was able to listen to Tooin's own music.

Presenter1:17

Ntuen being the name of the island.

Lucy Irvine1:18

Tuin was the island I lived on for a year, yesterday.

Presenter1:20

You did take a flute.

Lucy Irvine1:22

I took a flute, yes, with this rather grandiose idea of teaching myself to

Lucy Irvine1:27

play while I was there. I thought it would be a good desert island occupation. But I succumbed to shortness of breath and malnutrition and all the difficult things that happened to us during the hard survival phases, and the flute succumbed to tropical fungus, so that idea had to be abandoned.

Presenter1:40

So

Presenter1:43

Well, we're sending you now to our island, and we have a very strict rule that eight discs must be taken.

Lucy Irvine1:48

And I hope you've got some water there, too.

Presenter1:50

Well, we'll do our best. How did you set about choosing them?

Lucy Irvine1:53

It was very difficult but in the end my choice was based on what would move me emotionally, what is guaranteed to move me, and especially what would make me happy. I didn't want to be dragged back to nostalgia or thrown forward into what might be in the future. Living on a desert island is very much a business of living in the present. It is its own world.

Presenter2:13

What's the first one you've chosen?

Lucy Irvine2:15

The first one I've chosen is one of the most brilliant pieces I know, guaranteed to put me in a good mood, and it's a Bach violin concerto. It's number two in E, played by David Oystroch, just the third movement.

Presenter3:18

The third movement of Bach's violin concerto number two in E, David Oustra conducting and a soloist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter3:26

What part of the country do you come from, Lucy?

Lucy Irvine3:28

I was born in Witten, near Twickenham, but I tend to think of myself as a Scot, despite my very English accent, as I have spent most of my childhood and early life there.

Lucy Irvine3:38

There are three of us in the family: brother, sister, and myself. I'm the middle child.

Presenter3:43

And your father was also a film director.

Lucy Irvine3:44

That's right. Until he threw it all up to take on a hotel in the North West Highlands of Scotland.

Presenter3:51

You ran away from school.

Lucy Irvine3:53

Yes, I did. I wasn't um a tear away. I was a rather quiet truant. I just decided there were other things in life I wanted to get on with. I wasn't keen on the idea of spending so much time, right up until I was eighteen, having other people tell me what to do.

Presenter4:07

What did you want to be? What plans did you have for yourself?

Lucy Irvine4:11

When I was very young I wanted to be a monkey keeper.

Lucy Irvine4:16

I was interested in the study of human behaviour, and I thought that beginning with the larger primates would be the best thing, and in fact I did have a job for a while, but uh the guiding light that I expected to be in the laboratory wasn't there, and really my job was just to feed the little wretches and clean them out.

Presenter4:33

You did some travelling when you were very young, some independent travelling.

Lucy Irvine4:37

Yes. I went to the Middle East. I went to Israel at a time when it was really rather difficult and got stuck in Turkey for some time.

Presenter4:45

Well, after that you did just whatever jobs that turned up waitress, model, that sort of thing.

Lucy Irvine4:50

Oh, I I didn't just take what um turned up. I advertised myself as young, strong, willing, and able, and uh never looked back. I got a remarkable number of replies, and some of them very good and useful.

Presenter4:56

Yeah.

Presenter5:01

You eventually found a settled job, but it was a bit boring.

Lucy Irvine5:04

I deliberately set myself the challenge of working for two years as a clerk at the Inland Revenue.

Lucy Irvine5:12

I decided one day that it was about time I imposed some discipline on myself, having rejected all outside forms of discipline. And it worked very well. The only way I could do it, though, was to dangle the carrot of adventure in front of myself, and this carrot was the promise of a year out, something quite different to follow. So when I saw Gerald's advert, Writer Seeks Wife for a year on Tropical Island, it fitted in perfectly with my plans.

Presenter5:35

Well, we'll talk about this extraordinary proposition later. Let's have another record.

Lucy Irvine5:40

Record number two is a very sentimental one for me. It's one of Sarty's Trois Gem Pidis, and something I used to dance to by myself, feeling very mystical and magical.

Presenter6:45

Sat is Trojymnopedy.

Presenter6:47

The Camerata Contemporary Chamber Group.

Presenter6:51

Now let us set the scene. It was one lunch time, and you were in the public library of Richmond, Surrey.

Lucy Irvine6:58

That's right.

Lucy Irvine7:00

Yes, I just cycled there from work, as I did most days, in fact.

Lucy Irvine7:04

and I was browsing through the travel sections of various magazines there.

Lucy Irvine7:08

When I saw an intriguing little advert

Lucy Irvine7:11

Writer seeks wife inverted commas for year on tropical island.

Lucy Irvine7:16

And although I hadn't anticipated anybody else being involved in what I'd come to see as my year out, that advert intrigued me.

Lucy Irvine7:24

It contained the two things that appealed to me most at that time one year. That meant that it wasn't going to be a long term commitment, and Tropical Island, I have to confess, that had a great appeal to it.

Presenter7:36

So you met. What was his intention? Was it to write a book, or just to have the experience, or what?

Lucy Irvine7:42

Yes, he'd had a commission from Collins Publishers six years previously to write a book about a Robinson Crusoe experience. I think probably they had in mind a a rather attractive coffee table

Lucy Irvine7:55

paradisial sort of book that people could read comfortably in their arm chairs.

Presenter7:59

With lots of colour photographs.

Lucy Irvine8:01

With lots of color photographs, yes, and pretty images.

Presenter8:04

And the word wife in inverted commas. How did you find this man? Was he attractive? Was he much older than you, or younger, or what was he like?

Lucy Irvine8:11

He was twenty six years older than me. He had the typical Robinson Crusoe red hair and beard, which he'd warned me about before we met.

Presenter8:17

Yeah.

Lucy Irvine8:20

He gave me a terrific spiel which I presume he had given to a lot of the applicants who went before me, and I tended not so much to listen to what that spiel contained, but the way the man behind the words was projecting himself.

Lucy Irvine8:36

And I got the impression that for whatever reason he was determined to see that year through.

Lucy Irvine8:41

And that, for me, was the important thing. He recommended himself without knowing it.

Presenter8:43

You recommend

Presenter8:46

Did he have an island in mind?

Lucy Irvine8:47

No, he had no island in mind at the time. It was a question of shopping round the world for an uninhabited but habitable tropical island.

Presenter8:53

Yeah.

Lucy Irvine8:54

Not an easy task.

Presenter8:55

Which way did you start?

Lucy Irvine8:56

Well, we wrote off to various embassies and tried to find out

Lucy Irvine9:01

Where there was a possible island, we started off with the Seychelles group and met a curious

Lucy Irvine9:07

Little chap, the consulate of the Seychelles, existing in some small cubby hole in London with dandruff all over his collar, you know the sort of thing and discover that an awful lot of those islands, in fact, have been bought up either by individuals or by syndicates, and uh are used either as naval bases, satellite tracking stations, or for private purposes of enterprise. So, although there may be a few habitable tropical islands round the world, not many of them are available. That's how we ended up with Australia.

Presenter9:39

And they found something.

Lucy Irvine9:40

They said they had found something for us.

Lucy Irvine9:43

And we took the very major step of getting married in order to get to that island because they made it clear that unless we showed them a marriage certificate our visas for immigration would not be stamped.

Presenter9:54

They are very respectable in Australia.

Lucy Irvine9:56

They are very respectable in some ways, although I think it was a highly immoral move.

Presenter9:57

Some way.

Presenter10:01

There was this advance from the publisher.

Lucy Irvine10:03

Oh, that had been blown years before.

Presenter10:05

So you had little money to set up a proper expedition.

Lucy Irvine10:06

That's right. I sold a piano, which bought one air ticket, and for the other air ticket we went to the Sunday Telegraph, and they gave us an advance of four hundred pounds which bought the other air ticket, and a possible extra eight hundred pounds on an article to be written on the island.

Presenter10:22

Now where was this island?

Lucy Irvine10:24

The island was half way between Papua New Guinea and the northernmost coast of Australia, in the Torres Strait, right between the Coral Sea and the Arafura Seas, and later on, of course, we were to learn how those currents intermingle and cause a great deal of problems in that part of the world.

Presenter10:40

Right now, at that point, let's have your third record.

Lucy Irvine10:43

Well, this is a a rather odd little choice on my part. It's a piece called All By Myself, and although of course I wasn't, in fact, all by myself on the island, I many times felt that I was, and this would always put me in a good mood. It's a bouncy, insoucient little piece, sung by Big Bill

Speaker 311:07

On my way just around the world. When I get back, I'm going to have dance and purse. By myself. All by myself.

Speaker 311:18

I don't need nobody to help me. I can do it all by myself.

Speaker 311:24

Locked up in jail, it wasn't no hanging crime. Now I'm on the farm, boys, and I'm doing time. All by myself. All by myself.

Speaker 311:35

I didn't have nobody to help me. I had to do it all by myself.

Presenter11:58

All by myself.

Presenter12:00

Big Bill Brunsey.

Presenter12:02

So off to your island, Tuin. How did you get there?

Lucy Irvine12:05

We got there by a boat called the Torres Strait Islander, a cargo boat manned entirely by Islander crew.

Lucy Irvine12:12

And it was on our way over there, in fact, that we had the first of our mishaps. The Australian Government had very sensibly told us that we must have a C B radio for emergencies, and we'd pack the radio and the aerial in the centre of the boat.

Lucy Irvine12:29

On the way over between Thursday Island and Badu Island, which is the nearest inhabited island, we hit a shoal of jumping queenfish, which is a very exciting sight. Their great silver bodies spring out of the water up to a height of six feet, and the natives got as excited as we did, and they ran to their pile of spears, picked them all up, and flung them in. Of course the Ariel went over with them. So that was the end of our contact with civilization.

Presenter12:53

So you couldn't send for help if you were in real trouble.

Lucy Irvine12:55

No but later I was to find that I was glad of this, because if we had been able to send for help, then we never would have had the opportunity of discovering those second resources of the survival urge that were within us, or have had the privilege of meeting the Torres Strait Islanders on their own ground in the way that we did.

Presenter13:13

Was there anything on the island at all, any kind of hut or ruin, or anything of that sort?

Lucy Irvine13:18

There was a small hut which we weren't expecting to find, which was the legacy of Torres Strait Islanders who had originally tried to make a garden on the island. We were to discover, of course, why they'd abandoned their efforts.

Presenter13:30

How big was the island?

Lucy Irvine13:32

The island was approximately a mile long, and about two hundred and fifty yards across at its narrowest point. It was shaped like a bone, flaring out at both ends into high knuckles, forested on top, thickly forested.

Presenter13:45

Was there a good water supply?

Lucy Irvine13:47

Oh no.

Lucy Irvine13:48

We thought there was going to be more than one water supply on the island, but in fact

Lucy Irvine13:52

All there was in the way of water was three washing up bowl sized pools of fresh water, which wasn't very fresh at all it was highly brackish even even at the beginning.

Lucy Irvine14:04

and they refill themselves daily from inland seepage.

Presenter14:08

Every day they they didn't try.

Lucy Irvine14:10

They began to dry up slowly after a month or so.

Lucy Irvine14:14

a situation that obviously we found very frightening.

Presenter14:17

Now there was fruit, uh there were coconuts.

Lucy Irvine14:20

There were plenty of cocoanuts, but they're damned difficult to get. People have this wonderful image of palm trees swaying, and they do sway, and they're very high. We used to try climbing them, and I would leave considerably more skin on them than I came off with.

Lucy Irvine14:33

Clinging like a frog.

Presenter14:35

You had fishing gear, of course.

Lucy Irvine14:37

We had some fishing gear not nearly enough, of course. We had a reel of a hundred pound braking strain fishing line, and some hooks. Of course we lost the line very quickly. It coiled itself round the coral sea bed.

Presenter14:40

What had

Lucy Irvine14:51

And we lost a lot of hooks that way as well, and had to start to improvise. The best shark line that we ever made was designed out of a clothes line, last minute gift of a friend in Brisbane, and a coat hanger, shaved down at the end to make a hook, and on to this we'd put a bloody parrot fish head, fling that out anywhere off the shore, because there were sharks all round the shores of Tuin, and very soon we'd get one in.

Presenter15:14

What was the climate like in general?

Lucy Irvine15:16

Hot. Hot. But hot. Really hot. Yes. Of course, at one time of the year the quality of the heat changed. It changed from being a dry heat that made the interior sounds stiff and crackling. If you couldn't imagine the pandana sleeves peeling themselves off some falling in in

Presenter15:16

But hot, really hot.

Lucy Irvine15:35

powdery lumps into the interior, and every footstep that you took was loud, magnified in the stillness, in fact. But later on the humidity increased, and it it was a damp, sapping heat. That we found wore us down considerably more than the dry heat of the night before.

Presenter15:54

How much did you have in the way of supplies?

Lucy Irvine15:57

Not very much. This was due to two reasons. Mostly because I'd run out of money, didn't have enough to buy a large stock of provisions. But in the end, I was to find myself glad of that, because if we'd taken a great deal of supplies it would have been like one long camping holiday, and this was not the intention. We took enough in the way of carbohydrate, dried rice, and few dried beans and things like that, to last out until our twelve packets of seeds from Woolworths came up.

Lucy Irvine16:25

Unfortunately, due to the shortage of water on the island, the seeds failed to grow. We didn't get much of a crop.

Presenter16:31

That was a worry, but that was to come later. As you explored the island for the first time, was there a feeling of optimism about the whole year's enterprise?

Lucy Irvine16:39

I was immensely excited about the whole thing. I remember when we went to sleep the first night in the tent, Gerald folded himself away quickly into sleep. But I couldn't sleep. I was so excited. The thought of three hundred and sixty five dawns ahead, the whole island to explore, all that space, and that dubious word freedom as well.

Presenter17:00

Right. So what's your fourth record?

Lucy Irvine17:02

The fourth record I've chosen is

Lucy Irvine17:05

Summer from the four seasons. Now, in fact, Tuin only had two seasons, a dry season and a wet season, and it was when the monsoons came and the water from the sky hit the water on the sea, like a myriad arrows bouncing off that surface. It was so beautiful and magical, and that piece of music actually went through my mind while I was watching it. So if you're sending me to an island where I must have music, I'd certainly take that with me.

Presenter18:27

Summer from Pivaldi's The Four Seasons, Zuckermann playing and conducting the English Chamber Orchestra.

Presenter18:34

Right now, things weren't too bad. You were getting fish and so forth. What about cooking? On a camp fire, or had you a stove?

Lucy Irvine18:41

Oh, no, no, we didn't have a stove at that time. I graduated from just a pile of sticks on the beach to a full, highly complex range which I designed by myself, with Gerald's help to begin with.

Lucy Irvine18:55

Along the shores of Tuin I would pick up petrel drums which had obviously rolled in either from the coral or the Arafura seas, coming from Papua New Guinea, or possibly from the coast of Australia.

Lucy Irvine19:05

And I'd knock out the bottoms of these, and bash out with the axe part of the side, so that they were well ventilated little stoves in themselves. And I'd use one, with the top just cut off with an axe, for slow cooking, and a large range built up with stones from the beach, for fast cooking. And of course I had to discover which kinds of wood burned best.

Presenter19:30

How about insects and other things that bite? Did they worry you?

Lucy Irvine19:34

Yes, they did. We made a bad mistake. Right at the beginning we pitched the tent on the beach not far from the sea. We did this because on the day that we arrived it well, we arrived in the afternoon.

Lucy Irvine19:46

and we wanted to get the tent up before dark.

Lucy Irvine19:49

We had to decide which was the lesser of the two evils to take the choice of pitching the tent in the interior where there might be snakes and spiders lurking, or risk putting it on the beach where there might be crocodiles coming up. We decided in the end to put it on the beach, and this was where we did make our big mistake, because we were attacked on the first night by sand flies, and they were later to cause a problem that was to blight

Presenter20:09

And

Lucy Irvine20:12

Gerald's life on the island considerably.

Presenter20:15

Let's have record number five.

Lucy Irvine20:17

Well, record number five.

Lucy Irvine20:19

goes with uh an activity that I did nearly every day. There was a beautiful sand spit stretching out in front of him, and usually I'd walk along it at a glide, after all I had all the time in the world. But just occasionally I'd get a real bounce in my step, and then I'd think of Django Reinhardt Stephan Grappelli playing the Lambeth Walt.

Presenter21:21

The Lambeth Walk by Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grippelli. You said Gerald was ill. Did you have any medicine, any first aid kit?

Lucy Irvine21:30

Before leaving England I consulted my own GP and said, I am going to spend a year on a tropical island. What do you advise me to take? And he said, Oh, I'll give up two of my patients to talk to you about this and we sat there on a Saturday morning discussing what would be best to take with us, and uh ended up taking all sorts of completely irrelevant things, like chloromycetin, eye ointment, antifungal powder, antibiotic powder. None of these things were effective against the ulcers that were to affect Gerald very badly.

Presenter22:02

This has started from the sandply bite.

Lucy Irvine22:04

That's right. He became so infuriated by the itching that he tore the tops off all the bites, and every single one of those wounds became infected within a very short space of time. I was uh attacked by the sunflies as well, but I stopped myself actually pulling off the tops of the bites. And perhaps also because I was younger, I healed more quickly.

Presenter22:26

Now you had troubles of the water supply. There was a time when you were more or less starving, the two of you. You were thin and weak.

Lucy Irvine22:33

Yes. This was because our vegetables hadn't come up.

Lucy Irvine22:37

We were down to a diet of pure protein, pure fish, mostly shot, because it was so easy to catch, and also we could dry of what flesh we didn't eat straight away, and cocoanuts. But we found that protein alone is not enough. I didn't realize how weak I was becoming, or how ill Gerald was becoming. We had no

Lucy Irvine22:58

Gauges by which to measure our physical or emotional states, because it wasn't only our bodies that were being affected by the malnutrition, it was our minds as well.

Presenter23:05

You went to the island as a couple, but your sexual life together soon broke down.

Lucy Irvine23:09

Yes, that's true. I think it was partially due to the fact that we were forced to get married. This was an unnatural thing, an imposition from a world that was irrelevant on our lawless little island.

Presenter23:23

At one point you had two white visitors who brought you mail.

Lucy Irvine23:27

Yes, this was extraordinary. I couldn't believe it. One day I was standing

Lucy Irvine23:32

Poking the fire, in fact. I I was um roasting some peepa flesh. Peepa was the term that uh we gave to the green cocoanuts before they developed into meat cocoanuts, and I decided I wanted to find some way of making them palatable. And anyway, there I was poking them in the fire, when I saw what I thought were two white birds huge white birds coming from the direction of Weir Island, which was the island with the swamp on top and all the crocodiles.

Lucy Irvine23:58

But as they came nearer I realized they were far too large to be birds they were sails. It was very, very strange to me at the time that I realized they were men they were people other people. What's more, they were whites they weren't islanders, because their hair wasn't fuzzy and they didn't have big bellies.

Lucy Irvine24:14

And they they must have come from civilization. I thought that they must just going to mm pass our island, but in fact they landed.

Lucy Irvine24:22

and as they walked up the shore one of them held out a buff envelope.

Lucy Irvine24:29

Memories of the inland revenue. But no, it was our census forms what a way for them to recharge.

Presenter24:29

And memory

Presenter24:34

Walk away for them to reach us?

Lucy Irvine24:37

We had great fun describing our accommodation, as you can imagine.

Presenter24:41

Although it was pleasant, obviously, to have contact with the outer world, they didn't help the situation.

Lucy Irvine24:45

No, because up until that point we had had no comparisons. We didn't realise how bizarre our own lack of communication would seem to the outside world. Those boys were appalled by the way we didn't seem to communicate with each other. By the way, I seemed to be doing all the heavy work on the island, although I must point out that that was by choice. I liked being busy. It pleased me to do the chopping of the wood, to do the cooking and the fishing and so forth. I liked that, and Gerald preferred to lead a quiet life.

Presenter25:16

Your visitors only only stayed a day or so.

Lucy Irvine25:18

They stayed for thirty six hours, but the effect of their visit was catastrophic.

Lucy Irvine25:23

There were terrible jealousies, there were sexual feelings aroused.

Lucy Irvine25:27

I hadn't planned on being celibate for a year either, believe it or not. So it wasn't only Gerald who was frustrated on the island. And he, of course, imagined that I had gone off and had a jolly good and rude time with the boys, which in fact I hadn't, and wouldn't have done, because that would have been stepping outside the uh bounds of what I considered to be our agreement. In that I was married to the island for a year, I was also married to Gerald.

Presenter25:46

Yeah.

Lucy Irvine25:50

If only in name.

Presenter25:52

Let's have your sixth record.

Lucy Irvine25:55

Well, on to him.

Lucy Irvine25:57

We couldn't afford to give way to sentimentality, we couldn't afford to give way to tears. But as you're sending me off to another island and you insist that I must take some music with me, I'm certainly going to take something guaranteed to make me cry, because I think one needs that physical release. And this is Paco Bell's Canon.

Presenter27:02

Pachelbell's Canon, played by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner.

Presenter27:09

The second half of your stay on Tou In was better, wasn't it, Lucy? Because you got to know the islanders on a neighbouring island, and they were a help.

Lucy Irvine27:17

Yes, they were a great help.

Lucy Irvine27:19

I owe those people my life, possibly.

Lucy Irvine27:23

My gratitude is boundless, but on the other hand they took away what perhaps the year was all about, and that was isolation. When progress gets its foot in the door it's very unlikely that it's it's going to step back, and that's what happened. The Islanders discovered on Touin a resource more valuable to them than gold, and this was Gerald's ability to fix engines. Their main industry was cray fishing, and they'd just begun to use outboard motors. There were some among them who still believed that when the motors ran out of petrol they were dead, they would no longer function. And of course on Touin they found a man who was prepared to fix them in some way, for the tacitly agreed price of a bag of rice or a tin of flour.

Presenter28:05

and they brought two white nurses over to deal with

Presenter28:08

Poor Gerald's legs

Lucy Irvine28:10

That's right. They thought we should both go to hospital straight away. But then they were measuring things by civilized standards. I knew, and Gerald knew, that we could go on surviving for some time to come.

Presenter28:20

The islanders, of course, brought better living conditions altogether. All this, of course, was now a compromise, because you were mixing with the life of the island. So surviving wasn't such a desperate struggle as it had been.

Lucy Irvine28:32

No, then it became a desperate struggle to survive emotionally, because I found that the only way I could keep Gerald on to him

Lucy Irvine28:41

was to use the fact that I was a woman and he was a man.

Presenter28:45

And this was a conflict.

Lucy Irvine28:48

This was the final compromise. I had grown to love Tuin so much that I wanted to stay there by hook up by crook. I'd have done anything to stick out that year on the island, and I did.

Presenter28:58

Record number seven.

Lucy Irvine29:00

This one I've chosen specially for Gerald.

Lucy Irvine29:03

It's Kenny Rogers the Gambler, and he used to sing it to me at night six or seven times, one after the other, and it's something I'll never forget.

Speaker 329:14

When the whole

Speaker 329:16

Know when the folder

Speaker 329:19

No wind to walk away

Speaker 329:22

Know when to run, you never count your money.

Speaker 329:27

When you're sitting at the table, there'll be time enough for counting

Speaker 329:33

When the dealin's done

Presenter29:36

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler. Now after your three hundred and sixty-five days on touring, you wanted to come back to Britain. Did Gerald come back with you?

Lucy Irvine29:45

No. As a matter of fact, it turned out to be four hundred days and four hundred nights. Gerald and I parted on Bardu, where I left him mending an engine. I thought he was in fact going to stay there, as he was something of a king among the islanders.

Lucy Irvine29:59

But he didn't. He soon drifted to Australia.

Presenter30:02

Yeah.

Lucy Irvine30:02

I came back to Britain.

Presenter30:04

And you haven't seen him?

Lucy Irvine30:05

I've seen him once since then. We've had one

Lucy Irvine30:08

meal together in civilization. I think it's probably the last time that we'll meet.

Lucy Irvine30:12

'Cause in a way our relationship the relevance of our relationship ended with the relationship with the island. That was our mutual cause, almost like our child. When that went there was no more Gerald and Lucy.

Presenter30:24

And you decided to write the book.

Lucy Irvine30:25

Well, I didn't decide it so much. It came as a great surprise to me. I was actually invited by Gerald's publishers to try to write a book, and when I started writing the true story of what happened on Twin, I simply couldn't stop. I never really believed that it would be published until the day I held it in my hand, because it's such a very personal account.

Presenter30:44

You don't feel that that's Gerald's story, I mean.

Lucy Irvine30:46

Oh, I wish he'd written the book that he intended to write. And in fact, some good news that I've had recently is that he is in the process of writing a book due to come out later this year.

Presenter30:56

Well, your book, Castaway, obviously a very honest book.

Presenter30:59

And you are having deserved success for it. In fact, there's going to be a film.

Lucy Irvine31:03

There's uh tentative talk at the moment about a film. I'm very excited about it, and glad that it's going to go to a British company who I hope will make um a truthful rather than a sensational job of it. After all, it's something I have to live with. It's true life, real life.

Presenter31:19

And what are your plans now?

Lucy Irvine31:21

I've been bitten quite badly by the writing bug, and, having written about one year in my life and one man, I'd like to write about other years and other people.

Presenter31:29

Right.

Presenter31:30

What's your last record, number eight?

Lucy Irvine31:32

Um well, with no slight int intended to Gerald here.

Lucy Irvine31:36

It's called The Man I Love and it's Billy Holiday singing it.

Speaker 331:40

Uh

Speaker 331:43

Man alone.

Speaker 331:46

And he'll be big and strong.

Speaker 331:50

The man I love

Speaker 331:53

Then when he comes my way

Presenter31:53

Uh

Speaker 331:56

I'll do my best to make him stay.

Presenter32:02

Billy Holiday, The Man I Love. If you could take only one of the eight records, which would it be?

Lucy Irvine32:08

I think it would have to be Big Bill Brunsey singing All By Myself, because that's just so guaranteed to cheer me up.

Presenter32:14

Right. And one luxury to take to the island, one thing of no practical use that would really give you great pleasure.

Lucy Irvine32:21

Well, I know you say of no practical use, but one can't really get pleasure on an island like that unless you are free from the irritation, so I would plump for a crate of mosquito coils, and if you won't allow me that, then I'll take an apple pip and grow a tree.

Presenter32:34

We'll let you have both, after all an apple purpose is very easy to conceal.

Lucy Irvine32:38

Quite so.

Presenter32:39

And one book you already have that statutory allowance of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Lucy Irvine32:45

Well, books, and the same way as records don't really have a place on a desert island.

Presenter32:50

Did you really find that? I mean, you had a few books. You didn't read at all?

Lucy Irvine32:54

Oh, I read them all very quickly in the first couple of weeks when I was still thinking in civilized terms. After all, a book is something from your world, this other world. Twin was a world on its own, a world apart, and anything in the form of a book or a record was a hark back something from this world.

Presenter32:59

Yeah.

Speaker 132:59

Uh

Lucy Irvine33:10

But, if if I must take a book with me, I'd take one that I have already read half way through that was Anthony Burgess's Language Made Plain a book that was damaged by geckos before I could get to the end of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Presenter33:24

What a shape. Right, and thank you, Lucy Irving, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Lucy Irvine33:29

Thank you.

Presenter33:30

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 133:37

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