Beryl Bainbridge

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 six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway today is one of Britain's leading novelists. She's the winner of both the Guardian and the Whitbread Fiction Prizes, and has several times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work's been variously described as outrageous, exhilarating, and beautifully malicious. She's also a successful painter, and moreover, in the view of some observers, she's a genuine English eccentric, and she is Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl, can we deal first of all with this thing that several reporters have made about the remark they made that you are in fact eccentric? Do you think you are eccentric?

Beryl Bainbridge1:02

Not in the slightest

Presenter1:03

They remark the fact that you have a dummy called Neville Chamberlain who sits at your breakfast table. Is this true?

Beryl Bainbridge1:09

Yeah, yes, but I got him for a purpose, you see. I got him because I was writing a book. It's a book about Adolf Hitler.

Beryl Bainbridge1:17

I'd always wanted to make figures. I like making things, you see, and I at one point I was going to make the whole of um Suzanne's card players out of wax, but never got round to that. So I thought, well, I'll get one figure.

Beryl Bainbridge1:28

And he turned out to be Adolf Hitler, he had a moustache. The people who made him went too far and

Beryl Bainbridge1:34

Got enthusiastic.

Beryl Bainbridge1:36

And after a bit I couldn't sort of live with Adolph, so I he looks quite like Neville Chamberlain, so I turned him into Neville.

Presenter1:42

And he sits at the table.

Beryl Bainbridge1:43

I move him round the house, yes. Sometimes in the summer we put him on the front step for a bit of an airing.

Presenter1:45

Uh

Presenter1:48

Also you you have a stuffed dog and a stuffed bison in your hallway.

Beryl Bainbridge1:52

He's a buffalo.

Presenter1:53

A buffalo, I'm sorry.

Beryl Bainbridge1:53

I'm sorry. That was a bit of a mistake. The Buffalo is a bit of a mistake. You see, where it came from is not from being eccentric. I had an ex husband who worked at Liverpool School of Art, who was a teacher. And when that revolution came about where you didn't um draw from life,

Beryl Bainbridge2:08

They broke huge statues, Michelangelo, you know, sort of casts of statues. They burnt those beautiful butterfly cases. They threw out, you know, squirrels in cases. And I heard about this and I said, Well, don't let him do that. I like those sort of things. So I'd started from that. It was really saving England's heritage in a funny sort of way. But the buffalo was a mistake,'cause I saw him in Liverpool in a the foyer of a junk shop which had been the Odeon Cinema. It was burnt down in the riots later. And of course if you see a a full size buffalo inside a huge foyer, it doesn't look very big, you see.

Beryl Bainbridge2:43

But once you get him into your hall,

Beryl Bainbridge2:45

In fact, the reason he's in the hall is he he won't go through the doorway.

Presenter2:49

Of course he won't.

Beryl Bainbridge2:51

So he's awkward, but I don't notice him anymore.

Presenter2:53

Well, I think you've established absolutely the observers are wrong. You're not in the slightest bit eccentric. But I wondered in fact if your choice of music was in in any way unusual. So let's let's start finding out now. What would your first record be?

Beryl Bainbridge3:05

Well, this is a record called For Old Time's Sake and it's a Leighton and Johnson record and I suppose it's because of my

Beryl Bainbridge3:13

Dad, and he used to

Beryl Bainbridge3:15

we had a wind up grammar phone with about four records. Not that this was one of them. He was a grave fellow for turning off the light in the evening by the firelight.

Beryl Bainbridge3:25

and he used to, you know, listen to songs, but you could always hear him throughout with his handkerchief blowing his nose. He was moved, as they say.

Speaker 43:33

Let us forget we were parted and be just the same as we started.

Speaker 43:42

So all the babies.

Speaker 43:46

Find the kid.

Presenter4:03

Farrell, that record takes you right back to your youth, so let's talk about that. You were brought up in Liverpool. What sort of a background was it?

Beryl Bainbridge4:10

Well, my father was a commercial traveller, not exactly door to door.

Beryl Bainbridge4:15

It was all mysterious, but he he dealt in tin and corks sometimes shoes, if there were shoes for sale or something. But he did all his work in a place called the Carnarvon Castle, which is a pub in Liverpool. His office was sort of there, but he at home he just worked on the backs of brown envelopes, it seemed to me.

Beryl Bainbridge4:32

He must have done very well.

Beryl Bainbridge4:35

He was also an undischarged bankrupt, which I didn't know for years later, which soured his life.

Beryl Bainbridge4:41

A clever man, obviously, and and an educated man, even though he left school at nine.

Beryl Bainbridge4:46

A man very rigid in his ways. I mean, he was terribly bigoted. Catholics were dreadful. Naughty women no, wicked women he called them. Wicked women. They were wicked women. But he was very, very fond of Jews. I suppose because a lot of his business acquaintances were Jews.

Presenter5:01

Wh where did your mother fit into all this? Because he can't have been a very easy man to live with, given this extraordinary cocktail that you've described.

Beryl Bainbridge5:07

He wasn't. But the other it's this lovely thing which I think is is almost essential in England if you want to be able to write novels, is this the class structure, you see. So my mum was also from Liverpool.

Beryl Bainbridge5:18

But my grandfather had been um a manager or something or other of a Goodless Walls, a paint firm, and she'd gone to finishing school in Belgium, which always

Beryl Bainbridge5:28

in rows was used as a tremendous, you know, sort of laughing point. Your mother went to a bloody finishing school. And she could speak French bits, and uh she played the piano, and she was very ladylike, and in a sense

Beryl Bainbridge5:42

My dad was very proud of that. He loved

Beryl Bainbridge5:46

But I don't think she could stand him very quickly afterwards.

Beryl Bainbridge5:50

I mean, I slept in my mother's bed, and my brother slept in my father's bed, simply.

Beryl Bainbridge5:55

To keep them out of each other's bed, and that went on for years. There was always this excuse that the mattresses were damp in the other room.

Presenter6:03

What about the writing then? When did that start? Did you start writing as a as a very young child? Do you keep a diary, for instance?

Beryl Bainbridge6:08

Yes, not a proper one, but I I started very early to write what I call novels usually sort of copies of Dickens or Treasure Island I did one on.

Beryl Bainbridge6:18

encouraged very much by my mother.

Beryl Bainbridge6:21

Because there were so many frequent terrible rows in the house, you see, because the house was so cramped, because of, you know, this business where you stayed in the one room economically, because that was where the fire was.

Beryl Bainbridge6:32

She used to encourage me to put things down, I think. So I although I wrote in those days actual real fiction like Treasure Island.

Beryl Bainbridge6:40

They were really about my mother and father. I was always watching them and noting it down.

Beryl Bainbridge6:45

But I d I used writing as a not but not just me, you see, everybody wrote in those days. We all girls anyway, we were always writing stories and little plays.

Presenter6:55

Let's now go on to uh the second choice of music. What might that be?

Beryl Bainbridge6:59

Well, that's uh Richard Tauber.

Beryl Bainbridge7:01

singing something called a simple little melody. And again that's a, I suppose, a childhood thing. It's also a thing I can remember my mother was very fond of Richard Tauber, because he spoke so nicely. I don't think I even knew that Richard Tauber was foreign. I I thought that was the way a nice person spoke.

Speaker 47:19

We are simple Eastern melodies.

Speaker 47:26

Only for you for you

Presenter7:49

Richard Taver.

Presenter7:51

You left school at at fourteen, Beryl. Why, first of all?

Beryl Bainbridge7:55

I went to very good school. I went to merchant tailors, but I was expelled.

Beryl Bainbridge7:58

Because I wrote um um a poem.

Beryl Bainbridge8:01

I didn't make it up. I mean, it's a very old poem, uh, you know, that one about it's only human nature after all. Take a little girl but I illustrated it'cause I was quite artistic and my mother found it.

Beryl Bainbridge8:12

and she imagined I was utterly depraved.

Beryl Bainbridge8:17

Because, I mean, sex was never talked about in the house, and so she took it to the school, to merchant tailors.

Beryl Bainbridge8:22

And they put me on probation for a few weeks, and I had to carry a book around. I always remember it, with a drawing of a

Beryl Bainbridge8:28

Very soppy woman breastfeeding a baby, I remember that.

Beryl Bainbridge8:32

And it had nothing inside except the fish and the bees. The last chapter got near, but not very far.

Beryl Bainbridge8:38

But scholastically I was hopeless anyway.

Beryl Bainbridge8:41

So, in the end, they just said there was nothing more for me. I would obviously not get a school certificate, so I was taken away.

Presenter8:46

And your first ambitions in in those days were toward the stage, when they

Beryl Bainbridge8:49

Well, my mother's ambitions were that I should go towards the stage.

Presenter8:52

Didn't you share them at all?

Beryl Bainbridge8:54

Well, I was a show-off.

Beryl Bainbridge8:56

You see, my mum's very astute. I think she thought that obviously I needed some channelling.

Beryl Bainbridge9:02

They used to call me Barmy in those days, you know, potty. Not eccentric, barmy, and that if I had an outlet I'd be all right

Beryl Bainbridge9:10

And also don't forget one of the great things about going for the stage is you'd have to talk nicely, and that was very important to my mother. I'd had all these elocution lessons to iron out the vowels and what not. Then she wrote away to Manchester to Children's Hour.

Beryl Bainbridge9:24

and I was sent to a sort of a wireless school for six weeks with Billy Whitelaw and Judith Chalmers.

Beryl Bainbridge9:31

Then you learned how to do the cocoanut, and I went for for years doing children's hair.

Presenter9:33

My life

Presenter9:36

And what about the stage acting? You were li with the Liverpool Playhouse for a while, wasn't it?

Beryl Bainbridge9:39

Well, then I was into boarding school, but that only lasted a year.

Beryl Bainbridge9:42

And then my father, who knew Maud Carpenter, who ran the Liverpool Playhouse, because it was all done in those days by who he knew.

Beryl Bainbridge9:49

Got me in as a student at um an ASM to the Liverpool Playhouse, and I went there when I was fifteen and a half.

Beryl Bainbridge9:56

I'd only been there a few months on the Prompt Corner when

Beryl Bainbridge9:59

A play was written called The Son and I, S O N, by a man called Watmore, about a boy genius, a boy mathematical genius.

Beryl Bainbridge10:08

and the boy went sick.

Beryl Bainbridge10:10

So they rushed me to the barber, shaved my hair, and I paid this boy, and from then on um I was sort of in the company.

Presenter10:18

Will you stay struck at that point, you think?

Beryl Bainbridge10:20

Not terribly no,'cause I I loved the bit when you were doing it. I loved that, but I hated rehearsals. I thought it was a very strange life. I mean, it was very interesting.

Presenter10:30

Is there a record from that period in in your life that's a very important thing?

Beryl Bainbridge10:31

It's a marvellous one. The one of the very first plays we did in the company was a a marvellous play by Priestley called Dangerous Corner.

Beryl Bainbridge10:39

And in it was a one called Maureen Pryor, who's since dead, who is a lovely actor.

Presenter10:43

Lovely action.

Beryl Bainbridge10:44

She was marvellously very good at crying. She played the naughty wife in it.

Presenter10:45

It's actually good at

Beryl Bainbridge10:48

And it begins or ends, and the beginning and the ending is the same, in actual fact. She was in a black velvet dress with a spotlight on her.

Beryl Bainbridge10:55

and they danced, and I thought it was the most

Beryl Bainbridge10:58

romantic thing I'd ever seen, and they danced to my foolish heart.

Speaker 411:03

Then let the fire start For this time it isn't fascination

Speaker 411:14

Or a dream that will fade and fall apart It's love this time it's love my foolish heart

Presenter11:31

Margaret Whiting from my foolish heart.

Presenter11:34

Beryl, you mentioned uh that you were something of a reluctant performer on stage. Might this have something to do with the fact that when marriage came along or the proposal at the age of twenty that you willingly went into it at such an early age?

Presenter11:46

That I mean you weren't bothered about the career on the stage as such.

Beryl Bainbridge11:49

Well, I'd fallen in love at sixteen with the fellow who painted the scenery, you see, so in a way I was trapped because

Beryl Bainbridge11:57

I was so much in love with him that every time I went off on jobs all over the country

Beryl Bainbridge12:01

I just wanted to marry him, so I became a Catholic so that it would finish.'Cause I knew if I was a Catholic obviously he wouldn't marry me, but he asked me to marry him.

Beryl Bainbridge12:11

And

Beryl Bainbridge12:12

By this time I'd become a Catholic, so it was almost an invalid marriage from a Catholic point of view. Anyway, got married, and I didn't mind giving up, because

Beryl Bainbridge12:20

I think all I wanted it sounds ridiculous now, but I did want stability. I wanted lots of children.

Beryl Bainbridge12:27

And even the you know, I I sort of had ridiculous ideas about doing a bit of cooking.

Beryl Bainbridge12:32

But I'd married somebody who was a lovely man, but who wanted me to be free. He he said, like most men do, you know, I don't want you to be a cooker and I don't want you to do this. But of course I was so bad at it that very soon he

Beryl Bainbridge12:46

realized he'd made a mistake, but it wasn't his fault the marriage broke up it was that fellow Colin Wilson that rode the Outsider.

Presenter12:52

What?

Beryl Bainbridge12:53

Well, Ozzy read the book and realized or thought he he was an outsider, and you know, it's a great message, you've got to be free and do your own thing. So

Beryl Bainbridge13:02

he very quickly became free.

Beryl Bainbridge13:04

only physically, and he went off physically, he was awfully good financially, he sort of, um

Beryl Bainbridge13:09

you know, looked after us very well, he kept on sending the money. You know, I never went out to work or anything, I just stayed in Liverpool.

Beryl Bainbridge13:15

And then I went back

Beryl Bainbridge13:17

Getting odd jobs, I walked on a Granada in

Beryl Bainbridge13:21

Odd bits of things was something called a family solicitor, or in Biggles. I remember walking on in doing something in Biggles.

Presenter13:26

Yeah.

Speaker 413:26

Uh

Presenter13:27

Yeah.

Beryl Bainbridge13:27

which I quite enjoyed, but I didn't really miss

Presenter13:30

The theatre, I don't think. But what about the writing? Did it start about this time and did it start therefore out of necessity? They had children, of course, and you had to raise some money, one assumes.

Beryl Bainbridge13:34

And did it

Beryl Bainbridge13:37

Yeah.

Beryl Bainbridge13:39

No, I didn't imagine anybody would give me any money for writing. It was purely that I was by this time Ozzie, my husband, had gone.

Beryl Bainbridge13:47

even if it was only round the corner, and so I did it to fill in the time. I just

Beryl Bainbridge13:52

Wrote a novel, the first one I ever wrote.

Presenter13:54

Do you submit it?

Beryl Bainbridge13:55

So make it?

Beryl Bainbridge13:56

Not right away, and then I'd sent it to somewhere like Chatto, or somewhere Chapman Hall, something like that, and they said it that even in these enlightened times no printer would print it, it was too filthy.

Beryl Bainbridge14:08

And that was my first book, which is quite normal. I mean, I don't know what they meant.

Presenter14:13

So what was the first book that you had published then?

Beryl Bainbridge14:15

Another part of the wood.

Beryl Bainbridge14:17

which I rewrote later. But the first book I ever wrote was my third published book, and that was called Harriet Said.

Beryl Bainbridge14:25

And that sort of got me going.

Presenter14:26

What about the first two books then, before Harriet said I mean, they were published? Did they make any money?

Beryl Bainbridge14:32

No, the first one I think I got twenty-five pounds, and the second one I owed them at the end of it. But um.

Beryl Bainbridge14:40

But they were different from the ones I write now. I mean, I couldn't get somebody sitting in a chair without them tossing their head and lighting a cigarette and stumping it out. I I filled in the sentences rather a lot. I had to learn to cut all that out.

Presenter14:53

Hmm.

Beryl Bainbridge14:53

One was okay, I think.

Presenter14:56

But given that your first book owned twenty five quid and your second book, I mean, you owed them money, wasn't that very daunting? Didn't it actually fill you so much with despair that you didn't want to write again?

Beryl Bainbridge14:58

Building it.

Beryl Bainbridge15:07

No, because again, bear in mind embarrassment. I would have willingly said you can have them for nothing. I d I don't I don't think things artistic. I've changed my mind since, but at that time I didn't think

Beryl Bainbridge15:19

that you should get paid for scribbling away.

Beryl Bainbridge15:22

'Cause all I ever wanted to do was to make sense of what had happened to me in my childhood, and'cause however much I joke about it, there were some very dark strains to it.

Beryl Bainbridge15:33

And so that's all I was exercising in a funny sort of way. So every time I wrote a novel,

Beryl Bainbridge15:39

Though it may seem about something else, it was always my mum and dad.

Beryl Bainbridge15:43

and me in a sort of way, so I gradually shoved it out that way. And once I started writing, whether they took the book or not,

Beryl Bainbridge15:51

little bits of that sort of angst, for want of a better word, sort of flew out the window. I mean, I think writing and a bit of money, you see.

Beryl Bainbridge15:58

Quickest cure for a neurosis that one knows of.

Presenter16:02

Let's go now to your fourth record.

Beryl Bainbridge16:04

My fourth record is One Call is Something in Your Eyes, Madame, and it's by Geraldo's Gaucho Tango Orchestra, which is a name to conjure with.

Beryl Bainbridge16:14

And I can imagine with a partner, with a piece of driftwood, rushing up and down this desert island in the moonlight doing this.

Speaker 416:20

something in your eyes madam I seem to sympathize madam it's easy to reveal when I'm with you

Speaker 416:38

For there's music in your voice, madam It makes my heart rejoice, madam For little strand that sing my brand that all my

Presenter16:53

Peryl, this thing about exorcising the the the the childhood, the ghosts of the childhood, on your latest book, Mum and Mrs. Armitage, which is a a collection of short stories, the the frontispiece actually or the cover of the book is actually a picture of your mum, isn't it?

Beryl Bainbridge17:06

Yes, we were smiling away in the Adelphi with a business friend of my father's.

Beryl Bainbridge17:11

You see, I had the photograph which I was very fond of, and I was doing some short stories anyway, so I thought that would make a nice jacket. So then I wrote a story where the title would fit, in other words. I do like that period, that sort of nineteen forty fifties. I love that that part. What what I find difficult sometimes is I think the title story, Mum and Mr Armitage, is a memory of a holiday in Cherbury, which is Shropshire.

Beryl Bainbridge17:35

And there was a hotel, the Herbert Arms Hotel, and people went there and they played practical jokes, and it was all

Beryl Bainbridge17:42

Again, from my point of view, it seemed to me to be perfectly normal.

Beryl Bainbridge17:47

But when it was reviewed.

Beryl Bainbridge17:49

Though they liked the story, they said how vicious and cruel these people were. Well,

Beryl Bainbridge17:56

There's either something in me that doesn't see that, or there's something in other people that haven't had the same experience, so they mess it up, they don't understand that

Beryl Bainbridge18:04

But that seemed to me perfectly ordinary behaviour.

Presenter18:07

If we keep going back to, as you do, constantly, to your childhood, and as you said, that I think when you did Young Adolph, I mean, even though it was about Adolf Hitler, the character in fact was your father, you wrote about your father.

Presenter18:19

Why haven't you yet written your autobiography? Wouldn't that be the way of purging everything, to put it really down on paper as it was?

Beryl Bainbridge18:28

Well, one, I've used so much stuff anyway. I've I've kept on using bits about childhood and so in a sense I'm constantly writing my autobiography, though I put it into different characters.

Beryl Bainbridge18:42

Two, again, I do hate this business of um

Beryl Bainbridge18:46

you know, in a sort of way.

Beryl Bainbridge18:48

It's this mixture again of being a show off, but also referring to oneself. It embarrasses me to say

Beryl Bainbridge18:53

I was born in Formby in such and such a time. You see, the next echo in my head from I was born in Formby is so what? Um

Beryl Bainbridge19:02

From other people's point of view. You know, if if one was just doing this for oneself, yes, I could do it quite happily.

Presenter19:04

You know,

Beryl Bainbridge19:08

I'd much prefer to say he or she was born in some mythical place in some mythical time, and then do the same thing, rather than actually put me down all the time.

Presenter19:19

What about um the fifth record?

Beryl Bainbridge19:21

The fifth record is By the Ink Spots, a great favourite of my dad's.

Beryl Bainbridge19:26

and it's ring telephone ring

Beryl Bainbridge19:29

I seem to have spent a lot of my time in my life waiting.

Beryl Bainbridge19:32

for a particular telephone course that never came.

Beryl Bainbridge19:36

I think weeping is is of sentimental weeping is is a very nice thing, you see. So I can see myself weeping buckets while I play this record.

Speaker 419:44

I'm lonesome tonight ring.

Speaker 419:51

Telephone ring

Speaker 419:57

I'm through with pretending.

Speaker 420:02

There's no way to forget.

Speaker 420:09

I miss her tonight.

Presenter20:15

Beryl, apart from being a successful novelist, you're also a very successful painter as well. I mean, you you sell very well commercially.

Presenter20:22

You started painting how long ago? In your youth?

Beryl Bainbridge20:24

Oh yes, yes, when I was about oh, again when I was about ten. I mean I don't paint anymore now, I haven't painted for about

Beryl Bainbridge20:30

Six or seven or eight years, I've got the time, and I don't think you should do two things. I was never.

Presenter20:35

Yeah.

Beryl Bainbridge20:36

A proper painter must emphasise that.

Beryl Bainbridge20:39

Again, it's just business making things. I just like making pictures and things. They're all very, you know, with a subject, always with a subject. There's always a story, isn't it?

Presenter20:44

There was always a story, wasn't it? And where do where do you get the sort of source of the story from?

Beryl Bainbridge20:49

Well, there's one which um it's a picture of a a woman with nothing on and a man with a raincoat on. No, no, I don't think he's got anything on either. And they're on some stairs, and then there's a woman with her clothes on, with a little gun.

Beryl Bainbridge21:02

And I call that um Did you think I would leave you dying when there's room on my horse for two?

Beryl Bainbridge21:08

I don't quite know why, I think I just like the sound at the time.

Presenter21:10

Lovely title.

Beryl Bainbridge21:11

It's a good title, isn't it?

Beryl Bainbridge21:13

Well, the painting was about I had um my mother in law who was about seventy at the time, and she was a bit obviously a bit round the bend, but she came to the door and she said, Had I got photographs of her when she was young?

Beryl Bainbridge21:26

And she came in, and I knew she was in an odd state. So I went up to get the photographs from the upstairs room, and she followed me up the stairs, and I came out of the door, and she opened her little old handbag, dear little white haird old lady, and tempted to shoot me. And

Beryl Bainbridge21:42

Because one had watched a lot of Telly, I was quite you know, automatically you knock her arm up, and she brought the ceiling of the stair thing down. I was living at the time with a painter called Don McKinley, lovely Don.

Beryl Bainbridge21:56

and he only had a pair of jeans and a and a sweatshirt, and he was painting for me, so he was decorating, and in order to save this one outfit, all he had on was a Macintosh.

Beryl Bainbridge22:08

An old Mackintosh, you see, and he was painting.

Beryl Bainbridge22:10

And she ran out she was furious she'd miss she ran out and stopped a police car in Albany Street and said she'd shot a woman.

Beryl Bainbridge22:18

in Campden Town, and they arrived, and there was Don in his Mac and nothing else, and it was all very embarrassing. Anyway, we enacted the crime she was kept in the car. We enacted the crime on the stairs.

Beryl Bainbridge22:31

It was a man called Inspector Harris. It was all frightfully interesting. And then I thought that obviously if somebody shoots you, it was a Webber, Ve Weber, or something. But she also had a diagram in her bag of the most vulnerable points. She was aiming for my throat, she said.

Beryl Bainbridge22:46

And I thought she'd be put away but if you don't press charges, she only went for twenty four hours. And ever after you know how most families have grannies that come round? Well

Beryl Bainbridge22:56

We had a spy hole put in the door, and the next time she came, when she went in her handbag for sweeties for the children, we all dropped to the floor. And she had a carving knife. This is true.

Presenter23:04

And she had a

Presenter23:06

I don't believe it must be true.

Beryl Bainbridge23:08

But

Presenter23:11

Even if it's not about the planet, right?

Beryl Bainbridge23:16

Hence the bending.

Presenter23:17

But and it's got also got nothing to do with the title of this next song, which is

Beryl Bainbridge23:20

No, nothing to do at all. When you and I were sweet sixty. Yes, exactly. No. This song is in memory of not that she's dead, I mean, but it's a very

Presenter23:21

When you and I were Sweet Sixty.

Beryl Bainbridge23:29

dear friend of mine who, um, when we go out to public houses, which I mean, we don't spend our time in public houses, but she always has this playing she always makes me go and and put the pennies in on that instrument thing, and I can never find the right place, so we have to listen to about ten other records. But we always end up with um Sweet Sixteen, and it's the one with the Furies.

Beryl Bainbridge23:48

Because they do it so nicely, they don't ruin it.

Speaker 423:53

In my dreams of love and gold

Speaker 424:00

I love you, I loved you.

Speaker 424:05

When you weren't sweet When you weren't sweet

Speaker 424:14

Six

Presenter24:16

The feurism when you were sweet sixteen.

Presenter24:19

Beryl, you try to write a novel a year, apart from all else that you do. I mean, that in itself is is something of an achievement. Does it get more difficult?

Beryl Bainbridge24:28

Much more difficult. It's tiring for I used to work at night, you see. I mean all night. I do sometimes now, if it's going well, I can work in the night.

Beryl Bainbridge24:35

The difficulty of that is if you smoke, which I do, you you obviously consume twice as many cigarettes, which isn't a good thing.

Beryl Bainbridge24:42

It's hard because

Beryl Bainbridge24:45

One is this business of always trying to have a fresh creative feeling. I mean, I don't really approve of words like creative feelings and all that rubbish, but I mean

Beryl Bainbridge24:55

Reason you're doing it.

Beryl Bainbridge24:58

What I worry about is more and more as I get older and more a bit more tired is that

Beryl Bainbridge25:02

though there are many occasions when I am doing something which I I like very much.

Beryl Bainbridge25:08

There's other occasions when I realize I'm doing things because I've got to earn money, so I'm not trained to do anything else.

Presenter25:14

But it does isolate your writing more than most occupations, doesn't it? Terrible. And you find this more difficult to cope with, don't you? I do.

Beryl Bainbridge25:17

Yeah.

Beryl Bainbridge25:18

Terrible.

Beryl Bainbridge25:20

I do, yes, because the children have, um, more or less moved out and and so that it is more lonely because

Beryl Bainbridge25:29

I never answer the telephone. I've got to think about the telephone anyway, so people who when they do come round sort of hear the telephone ringing and instinctively get up to answer it and I say leave it'cause I never

Beryl Bainbridge25:40

I've never have been curious about the telephone.

Beryl Bainbridge25:43

I very rarely go out. I mean, I've got to parties and things. Um, if somebody comes to the door I hide under the table.

Beryl Bainbridge25:50

It's all to do with the idea that

Beryl Bainbridge25:52

If they did come in when I'm working on something, then it stops your concentration, you see.

Beryl Bainbridge25:58

But then those odd moments when you're not working

Beryl Bainbridge26:01

And by this time people aren't going to knock on the door because they've got no answer so often. Um

Beryl Bainbridge26:07

It's difficult. I wish I could plan it so that I could write, say, for six months and and then emerge and have six months' living. It's a very second hand way of living, writing books, you know.

Presenter26:18

All right, let's now move on to the seventh record.

Beryl Bainbridge26:21

The seventh record is another very, very sentimental song. It's Richard Harris singing Didn't We Girl mostly'cause I like his voice, and it's also another good weepy.

Speaker 426:33

We almost sang our song in change.

Speaker 426:42

Didn't we?

Speaker 426:44

Girl

Speaker 426:48

This time we almost made it.

Speaker 426:54

To the moon

Speaker 426:57

Oh.

Presenter27:02

Richard Harris not so much singing, I think, as doing a sort of dramatic rendition there, didn't we?

Presenter27:08

Colonel Bainbridge, would you in fact welcome this desert island? I mean, as a writer, you've been talking about the isolation, the loneliness. You seem quite used to that. Well, yeah, I've.

Beryl Bainbridge27:16

Well yeah, actually that'd be on for a long time. Yes, I think um well, I'd welcome obviously the sunshine and the fresh air. And you see, presumably I wouldn't have sickies so I get a bit more healthy. You wouldn't try.

Presenter27:25

You wouldn't try to escape?

Beryl Bainbridge27:26

Oh, yes, after a bit. Oh, yes. Yes, I think so. I'd like to disappear, you see, and then rather dramatically return. I think that'd be rather fun.

Presenter27:34

Are you a practical person in the sense that you could actually look after yourself on this desert island?

Beryl Bainbridge27:38

Oh, I think so. All I

Beryl Bainbridge27:40

I was thinking about how I'd fish. I don't think I could do the fishing. I could certainly make shelters and uh

Beryl Bainbridge27:46

think up extraordinary ways of killing the odd bits of wildlife.

Presenter27:51

Let's go on to your final choice of record.

Beryl Bainbridge27:53

Well the final one is uh George Melly singing Sugar in My Bowl. If you listen very carefully to it, it's perfectly obvious why I've chosen this one, and I have very many happy memories of this.

Speaker 428:05

Like the whole world.

Speaker 428:10

Since my

Speaker 428:12

Hell being gone.

Speaker 428:17

Need a little sugar

Speaker 428:20

In my bowl.

Speaker 428:23

Need a little hot dog.

Speaker 428:26

In my role.

Speaker 428:29

I need some love and

Presenter28:34

Let's finally ask you then about the book you might take on this desert island. You have the works of Shakespeare and you have the Bible. What were the books?

Beryl Bainbridge28:41

Well, I take it's a book called The Worst Journey in the World, and it's by Apsley Cherry Gerrard, who was one of Scott's men on the expedition, and it's a big book as well, so you take a long time to get through it. I mean, I've read it hundreds of times, but

Beryl Bainbridge28:54

It's about extremes of terrible cold terrible trouble while he's trying to get these Emperor Penguin eggs off this ice floe, as well as trotting off with Scott to the Pole.

Beryl Bainbridge29:06

At night when they went to sleep, it was so cold.

Beryl Bainbridge29:10

that it took an hour and a half to thaw the sleeping bags out. And then, of course, they got into wet sleeping bags, and they spent all night just turning round and round and groaning. Temperatures of minus sixty seven, think of that.

Presenter29:23

So make your life in this desert islands sound wonderful by comparison. What would be then the one record that you'd keep? Uh let's suppose that seven were swept away.

Beryl Bainbridge29:33

I think only a simple little melody, Richard Tauber, I think so.

Presenter29:36

Because I think it's a very good question.

Beryl Bainbridge29:41

Could I have a one of those really huge fat diaries, you know, like the old fashioned ones, like a Bible with a clasp on?

Beryl Bainbridge29:48

with a hidden supply of instant pens forever, but a huge big

Beryl Bainbridge29:53

diary I could write in.

Presenter29:55

Well, Bainbridge, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Speaker 330:04

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