Stan Barstow

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:29

Our Castaway Today was part of that outburst of Northern talent in the sixties which produced writers like John Brain, Alan Sillito, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse, and Willis Hall. They along with the actors and the musicians were part of what can now be seen as something of a cultural revolution.

Presenter0:45

Today the participants in that revolution have, generally speaking, departed the battlefield and headed south. Not so our castaway. Since he made his name in 1960 with a novel called A Kind of Loving, he's remained in his native Yorkshire, moving no further than a few miles from his birthplace and writing to date eight novels and three volumes of short stories. He is Stan Barstow. Stan, why have you never left the area that you were born in?

Stan Barstow1:10

Well, let me remind you of Roy Hattersley at the beginning of one of his essays that when I was a young man I had one unique attribute. I was convinced that there was something tender and romantic about Barnsley.

Stan Barstow1:23

And I think that if a writer in the north or in the regions finds his own sort of Barnsley, you'll admit that was rich coming from a Sheffield man, won't you? Absolutely. And if the penny suddenly dropped, that there is something tender and romantic about Barnsley or about Dewsbury or about Wakefield.

Speaker 11:31

Absolutely.

Stan Barstow1:40

Well, that's the kind of thing that happened to me when I suddenly realized that here was a whole mine of

Stan Barstow1:46

material to work from, to write about, enough certainly to last me the uh the rest of my life.

Stan Barstow1:53

I like to move about, I like to go abroad, I don't like to be tied down, but always there is that string.

Stan Barstow1:59

holding me back to my roots, I suppose I started

Stan Barstow2:04

becoming myself, finding myself

Stan Barstow2:07

much too late in life to sever those roots very, very easily. And in fact, I saw no reason to do it. I wanted to be part of a provincial regional Renaissance. And so I thought, if I stay here,

Stan Barstow2:21

That is what I can be. And although a lot of the

Stan Barstow2:25

The writers and actually the actors have to move away. A lot of the writers have moved away, but a lot of others are coming along and some have even moved back. And so there's a nice scene going up there.

Presenter2:35

Let's now have our first choice of records, Dan. What's it to be?

Stan Barstow2:38

Well, I think in all this turmoil we're always looking for a little serenity of mind and spirit without opting out altogether. And there's one composer who in his very, very short life, he only lives to be thirty-one, seemed to find that uh deep inside himself, and that was Schubert. You can find it in the some of the impromptues and in the quintet and in such songs as Du Biste Rue.

Presenter4:00

Stan, let's go right back to the very beginning now. Whereabouts were you born?

Stan Barstow4:04

I was born in a little town called Horbury in the west riding of Yorkshire, which is between

Stan Barstow4:09

Wakefield and Dewsbits in the Calder Valley.

Stan Barstow4:12

It was both a pit town and a mill town and an engineering town.

Stan Barstow4:17

quite an attractive little town with a very, very strong non-conformist influence.

Stan Barstow4:23

There were four Methodist churches within about a hundred yards up the High Street.

Presenter4:27

We made to a tenth.

Stan Barstow4:27

We made to attend. Yes, I used to go f I used to go three times every Sunday until I was old enough to say, I don't think I let they go any more. Yeah, three times more. And I used to pump the organ as well at one time.

Presenter4:38

Was that the extent of your musical knowledge in those days?

Stan Barstow4:41

Well, it shouldn't have been, because my father was a very good brass band cornet player. My mother played the piano, and I think one of my father died in his late fifties. I think one of his greatest regrets was that I didn't

Stan Barstow4:55

you know, take up an instrument. He had one or two girls that had a go at the piano, I had to go at a trombone. I played the cliinet a tiny bit at one time, but there was some kind of indolence which was holding me and right into my teens, I suppose, right up into my twenties, which

Stan Barstow5:11

put pay to that, and also to a great deal of my education.

Presenter5:15

What about your father? What did he do?

Stan Barstow5:17

He's a coal miner.

Stan Barstow5:18

Uh in fact

Stan Barstow5:20

My grandfather was a coal miner. I had several uncles who were coal miners, and of course I belonged to the

Stan Barstow5:26

For the first generation of scholarship boys, I had a county minor scholarship when I was eleven.

Stan Barstow5:32

In um

Stan Barstow5:33

nineteen thirty nine, and I went to grammar school the month, the very month that the Second World War broke out, and it was a a matter of great satisfaction to my father that I was going to go into a job, he hoped.

Stan Barstow5:45

that wouldn't involve the same kind of hazards and the h c same kind of labor that he, um

Presenter5:49

But that in itself is unusual, isn't it? Because I mean generally speaking in Pitt Villages, no matter whether you're a scholarship boy or not, you had to go out and and follow your father's family.

Stan Barstow5:57

Well, it wasn't a c it it differed in that sense that it wasn't what I've always called it a kind of enclosed pit village.

Stan Barstow6:03

In a real South Yorkshire pit village, of course, everybody worked down the pit and you'd to take a long bus ride before you found anything else. If there was anything else, there might be one or two farms around, but there wasn't much uh choice otherwise. Very little work for the women. Now in my village, the women could go out to work as well, and consequently that meant that um

Stan Barstow6:23

Sometimes when things bit hard, when there were strikes and lock outs and so on in the pits, there was sometimes a way that a woman could go out to work and keep the house going.

Speaker 46:32

Hmm.

Stan Barstow6:33

Now my mother and father in

Stan Barstow6:36

Around about nineteen thirty, when I was very, very small, my father was out to work.

Stan Barstow6:41

And they went to live with my uh grandmother. They sold up all their goods and chattels. When I say they sold up their home, I mean they sold up their bits and pieces, what they put together in a rented house, and went to live with my maternal grandparents, of whom I was very, very, very fond. And so I spent quite a number of my formative years in their cottage. And I think the only thing really that saved me from poverty was the fact that I was an only child. If there'd been any more of us, we might have been very, very poor.

Presenter7:12

Let's have a second choice of records then.

Stan Barstow7:14

One of the greatest inventions of man is the is the modern symphony orchestra. One of the earliest geniuses to exploit that was Berlioz. His opera The Trojan is about a hundred and thirty years old this year, and I'd like to hear from that marvellously orchestrated the Royal Hunt and Storm.

Presenter8:33

Stan you'd mentioned you were a bright boy. I mean you won a scholarship, you went to grammar school.

Presenter8:37

Wh when you were at school? I mean, did you write there? Were you good at writing essays?

Stan Barstow8:40

Well, English was about the only thing that really and I was any good at all history and I yes, I think I could put words together.

Stan Barstow8:47

in some fashion. But of course there's all the difference uh between that and becoming a creative writer, writer of novels.

Stan Barstow8:56

And certainly after I

Stan Barstow9:00

won the scholarship which labelled me as a bright boy and gave me that chance to go on to sixteen instead of leaving school at fourteen and going either down the pit or into a factory or a mill or somewhere like that.

Stan Barstow9:13

After that

Stan Barstow9:14

It just seemed like downhill all the way. I can't explain it now.

Stan Barstow9:18

In my own mind I've I've tended to blame myself since, and then I've I've tended a little bit to blame

Stan Barstow9:25

The teaching staff in difficult times during the war, men and women coming and going and so on and so on.

Stan Barstow9:31

I've tended to blame the kind of school which based itself on sort of public school sort of ethics. It tried to put into people who came from houses with no books in them a sort of semi-classical sort of education, and I think they were barking at the wrong tree.

Stan Barstow9:47

I feel that I needed somebody, bright, to get hold of me.

Stan Barstow9:52

And say, look, I know there's something in you, and we've got to find it. Well, that didn't happen.

Stan Barstow9:57

And so when I left school, I left as an abject academic failure. You know, I mean, I'd wasted all that bright promise. They picked me out at eleven, and at sixteen I was just uh I was just nobody.

Presenter10:11

Let's have another choice of records.

Stan Barstow10:13

Well, about that age, when I was about sixteen, in my teens, I was absolutely mad keen on jazz. I was very, very knowledgeable about jazz in those days. And I think the big band

Stan Barstow10:25

reached its zenith about that time with the first post-war Woody Herman orchestra the third herd which had marvellous soloists and very free arrangements which allowed improvisation and and a marvellous powerful drive. It absolutely made my hair stand on end to hear things such as this one that I'd like to hear, North West Passage.

Presenter11:49

So, Stan, you left school at sixteen, this abject failure. What did you do for a job? What did you do to earn a living?

Stan Barstow11:54

Well, just over the wall behind uh my parents' house in this sort of mix that the small town like that um allows was the house of the chief draftsman of a a very big local railway wagon manufacturers.

Stan Barstow12:10

And um he said, you know, he asked if I wanted a job, he did I know what I was gonna do and I didn't know what I was gonna do at all. And they offered me a job in the drawing office there. So I went there at the age of sixteen.

Stan Barstow12:23

I began to go to night school to study for Audrey National Certificate and eventually Higher National Certificate in Mechanical Engineering.

Stan Barstow12:33

But what I found out was there were still all kinds of temptations, including the cinema. And I remember distinctly going to see, for instance, Lawrence Olivia Henry the Fifth at a picture house in Wakefield when I should have been at the tech and that kind of thing. And I I realized

Stan Barstow12:49

along the way that although I was a pretty good draftsman and gave satisfaction.

Stan Barstow12:55

I wasn't really an engineer.

Stan Barstow12:57

I didn't have the

Stan Barstow12:58

The ambition, the drive.

Presenter13:00

But how did the writing start then? When would it first start writing?

Stan Barstow13:06

I'd become more and more interested in music. It was a real outlet for me. I became passionately interested in music. And I joined a grammophone society, attempted to find people I could talk to.

Stan Barstow13:16

And I gave a programme of records one night and I swatted up in all the books and so on and wrote a script and this other thing. That impressed Connie, my wife, and she said to me, I think you ought to be able to write something, you ought to be able to write stories. And I suppose that was fertile ground. I seized on it and said, well, you know, there's a hell of a lot of rubbish about I should be able to make some money out of that.

Presenter13:37

Uh

Stan Barstow13:37

Where do you start for first?

Presenter13:38

Just right.

Stan Barstow13:39

So I began to write for magazines. I began to write for any magazine which had formula stories and so on, and I tried to write.

Presenter13:39

I guess it's

Presenter13:41

Ah

Stan Barstow13:46

things completely remote from my own life. You know, I never dreamt

Stan Barstow13:51

That anything that I knew, or anybody that I knew, could be any kind of fit subject for fiction.

Stan Barstow13:58

And that came later. The seed had been sown.

Stan Barstow14:03

I was

Stan Barstow14:04

Interested in putting words on paper is a sort of a sort of hobby.

Stan Barstow14:08

And one day I picked up a book of stories by H. E. Bates, and

Stan Barstow14:13

I realized in my astonishment that they were about

Stan Barstow14:17

Fairly inarticulate people. They were about people to whom words soon ran out.

Stan Barstow14:23

Even though his characters lived in sort of rural country surroundings, I realized that here was the key, here was what I'd been looking for. And I looked around. It was just as if he'd take me to another window in the house, opened and said, Look, you've been looking at the wrong place all the time. That's where you should be looking. And and suddenly I was seeing all the life around me. I was suddenly seeing the magic in Barnsley, the equivalent of it, you know, in people.

Stan Barstow14:49

And that was the moment when I became a writer and I sat down then and thought I must try to get these people, the people I know so well, onto paper.

Stan Barstow14:59

I must try to write stories about them.

Stan Barstow15:01

Let's have a look

Presenter15:01

Another choice of record.

Stan Barstow15:04

I like exuberance in the arts, but I also like a sense of mastery of a great power sort of held in reserve. And one of my very, very favorite composers is Sibelius.

Stan Barstow15:17

I love that feeling of great majesty and restraint that he worked towards and finally achieved in his Seventh Symphony.

Presenter16:25

Stan, the very first novel you had published was A Kind of Loving. Was that in fact the first novel you'd written?

Stan Barstow16:28

Yeah.

Stan Barstow16:30

Well, I'd written one before then, but it was still born, it wasn't very good at all, and didn't get published.

Stan Barstow16:36

I'd been writing short stories, serious short stories, since reading Bates. That would be from about 1953 on.

Stan Barstow16:46

The B B C, bless them, took two and read them on the air in the North, which was confirmation that I wasn't wasting my time, but I couldn't get into print. Nobody wanted stories about working class life in the North of England at that time.

Stan Barstow17:00

And I had several problems to sort of overcome. You know, could I write? Well, I think the the BBC acceptance has proved that I could.

Stan Barstow17:07

But how the devil could I get into print?

Stan Barstow17:11

Well, something very important happened in nineteen fifty seven and that was the publication of Room at the Top.

Presenter17:17

Miss.

Stan Barstow17:18

And that sort of opened up the whole scene in a commercial way and opened up the seam of material. Also made me aware for the first time that there were other writers.

Stan Barstow17:28

doing the kind of thing that I'd been doing because before that

Stan Barstow17:33

The most important thing in my life was the total isolation, the total loneliness. Now when Brain brought out Room at the Top and then Keith Waterhouse, there is a happy land, Sillito, Saturday night, Sunday morning, they began to come and I realized that all kinds of people of a similar generation were working independently and doing the kind of thing that I'd been doing, you know, mining the same scene.

Stan Barstow17:57

So I cast about for the material for a novel.

Stan Barstow18:03

and conceived this I didn't know what to write a novel about. I could write short stories, but I didn't know what the hell to write about to fill a hundred thousand words, you know, two hundred and fifty pages or whatever. So I I I set off with the idea of writing just a lace curtain working class family and sort of improvising, just making up the stories as I went along.

Stan Barstow18:20

But the story which I'd allotted to the elder brother Vic,

Stan Barstow18:25

which was one of the oldest cliches in fiction, you know, one of the brothers gets a girl in the family way, has to marry her, and so on and so on. I sat down and I thought, Has anybody e actually ever written about this?

Stan Barstow18:37

Absolutely close in. You know, just put it under the magnifying glass.

Stan Barstow18:42

I thought, No, they haven't. No, they haven't. Is it important enough? I think it's important enough to be written about, as it were, from the horse's mouth. And through a series of decisions and trial and error, I finally came to letting him tell his own story and tell it real with his own sort of hints of black humour.

Presenter19:00

But it certainly worked. I mean, it became a a huge bestseller. It made you, of course, overnight into a a celebrity, didn't it? Did that disturb the pattern of your life at all?

Stan Barstow19:00

But it's

Stan Barstow19:08

Well, not for a while. I stubbornly sort of went on working for a while at the in the uh in the drawing office. I was married, I had two small children by that time. I used to find that I was spending more time

Stan Barstow19:22

pretending to be a writer than actually writing, you know. I mean, I I did become a sort of minor celebrity and people wanted to talk to me. I was on call for this, that and the other and and and so on. I was a bit bemused by it all really, I suppose, because

Speaker 119:25

And I did

Stan Barstow19:35

I'd been working all this time and suddenly quite a lot of people were interested.

Stan Barstow19:41

What I did see was the possibility, for the first time, that I might actually become a full-time writer, and I come to this by very, very gradual stages.

Presenter19:50

Let's have another choice of record.

Stan Barstow19:52

Women's voices in duet or trio or quartet can be very, very appealing. Richard Strauss used that combination in several of his operas and so did Benjamin Britton in Peter Crimes and I'd like to hear from Act Two of Peter Grimes they are children when they weep, we are mothers when we strive. They're talking about men really and how they look after them without the men really knowing or appreciating.

Speaker 420:21

Are they skeletonic?

Speaker 420:23

Be all in the soul that brighten ourselves.

Presenter21:17

Stan, you mentioned there that Kind of Loving was inspired, if you like, by people like Brain and Silly Tow and Waterhouse all working away in the same area but independently of each other. And then of course along came the pop music and then along came the actors, people like Finney and Tom Bell and the playwrights. Uh this huge cultural explosion happened. What caused it? Do you have any theories about it?

Stan Barstow21:38

Yeah.

Presenter21:40

Yeah.

Stan Barstow21:40

I think post war

Stan Barstow21:42

Flexibility, full employment, partly after the war, the emergence of

Stan Barstow21:48

some first generation grammar school boys who were

Stan Barstow21:51

questioning their own role and their own place in that society, were thinking that they might move out, wondering what of value they were going to leave behind.

Stan Barstow22:03

at the same time as shedding the restrictions. And they began to talk about it, and the writers began to express it, began to try to put their

Stan Barstow22:12

predicament down because if you look at most of the novels of the time, there is a sort of common predicament in them, and it is this new mobility that came through education and through the power that the boom of the post war years uh allowed.

Stan Barstow22:27

And society began to change, it began to become less stratified.

Stan Barstow22:33

And all this was reflected in the arts, in the writing.

Stan Barstow22:37

Along the way, television.

Stan Barstow22:39

and the establishing of television companies in the region. Um Granala, for instance, in the north.

Presenter22:43

Well

Stan Barstow22:46

To its eternal credit, began to look for material which was indigenous to the North, but which also could speak universally to people outside. And that was a great step forward, because I think we had all suffered from the notion held by publishers who were metropolitan-based, London-based, that their main audience were the home county's middle-class audience and it could only be given a certain limited amount of material. And one of the things it didn't want and wouldn't have would be any exposition, anything which used

Stan Barstow23:20

regional working class mores and culture and so on.

Stan Barstow23:24

At the same time

Stan Barstow23:26

The people in the regions were earning more money and they became the television audience.

Stan Barstow23:31

and in comedy shows and in popular

Stan Barstow23:33

expressions of it like Coronation Street, all the revolution began to find it its popular manifestation. And so there was a great movement which couldn't be reversed, had got underway.

Speaker 423:45

The f

Stan Barstow23:46

Well, I mentioned Richard Strauss. Again, he's a composer I've always liked. I'd thought about taking one of the big symphonic poems, but I've opted for what I think is a haunting

Stan Barstow23:59

Interlude from his opera Intermezzo.

Presenter25:02

Stan, can we talk a little bit now about the actual process of writing? People have very peculiar ideas about authors. They seem to think that they sit there waiting for the bird of inspiration to nestle on their shoulder and then bash out a novel in a week or something like that.

Presenter25:16

What kind of process do you have?

Stan Barstow25:18

Well, the bird of inspiration is gonna alight on my shoulder when I'm actually sitting there working, not when I'm walking about waiting for it. And I've got to keep office hours.

Stan Barstow25:29

I've got to sit down and make myself write. And the magic, if it's going to happen, will happen then. Because I know one or two basic truths about writing, just one or two. And one is that when we're actually sitting there with a pen in the hand,

Stan Barstow25:45

We're actually in touch with a part of the mind that we don't normally use as we walk about trying not to bump into each other. But you've got to let the memory, the unconscious, all these things make the meaningful connections that make up a piece of work.

Stan Barstow26:02

Even though what you write about is not autobiographical in that sense, you are incapable of writing about anything which is not somewhere inside your head to begin with. It's got to be there. But the observation and the memory and all the impressions that are stored there have got to be sort of teased out. And they can be teased out if you sit with the pen in the hand or your hands on the typewriter or whatever and sort of give yourself up to it. And all kinds of things will come out then. And then the other part of your mind, the part that's tight to the craft,

Stan Barstow26:33

Can shape it and give it form.

Stan Barstow26:36

um make it into a presentable stage for somebody else to read.

Presenter26:40

But how long does this process take you? I mean, with your new novel? I mean, how how long did that take you to write?

Stan Barstow26:42

I mean

Stan Barstow26:44

Well, I reckon, you know, I I wouldn't like to think that I had less than eight or nine months to write a novel and I can sometimes give myself a year.

Speaker 426:50

Mm.

Stan Barstow26:51

As they say to tease it out and find out what it is.

Stan Barstow26:54

all about. And I think, you know, one's got to be prepared to do that.

Presenter26:59

Another choice of record.

Stan Barstow27:01

Well, back to the great days of the big bands, I think.

Stan Barstow27:05

I think one of the greatest arrangements I know of one of the greatest popular tunes ever written is the nineteen forty Artie Shaw version of Stardust.

Presenter28:17

Stan, you've spent a a lifetime up in in Yorkshire there writing about the area that you live in. But there's still a job to be done there, isn't there?

Stan Barstow28:25

Oh, I think there's a great job to be done. I think perhaps that, interestingly, that the next real generation of writing out of the north may well be immigrant writing, maybe Asian black writing, about what it's like to live in the north of England, having your roots outside the country. And I think that may well be the new thing. For the rest of us, there's a touch of nostalgia. My newest novel is about somebody coming to adulthood in 1939, and I hope to continue it a bit further. But nevertheless, that's a look back instead of

Stan Barstow28:59

Looking at that, you see I looked at 1980, 1970, 1980 in a novel called The Brothers Tale a year or two ago and I didn't really like what came out. It was a bit grim. I realized that I didn't really care much for the late seventies and early eighties and um there was not much for your comfort in that novel and so I went back a bit and uh I think other people are coming on, I hope are coming along who will tackle all the big new problems and things about the the new society that we've got up there.

Speaker 129:22

Oh.

Presenter29:30

A final choice of recostin.

Stan Barstow29:32

Well, there's one composer who me, the working class lap from the north of England, can't live without and may seem rather incongruous, and that's Edward Elgar, who has always meant a great deal to me in his cadences, in his tunes, in the the melancholy, the nobility of his uh utterance. And one of my very, very favourite of his works is his his Second Symphony.

Presenter30:57

So, Stanbar, so you're now on the desert island. Do you think uh you might enjoy the experience?

Stan Barstow31:02

I don't think so. I I'm not a solitary. I I like to be solitary inside myself with other people around me. I'm fairly gregarious really.

Presenter31:08

Are you a practical man, practical enough to build a boat to escape?

Stan Barstow31:11

Well, I think I could after a while I'd get round to doing things that I don perhaps wouldn't think myself capable of now.

Presenter31:16

And what about the record? You can take one record, rescue one record from the eight that you've chosen. I think we'll have to take this.

Stan Barstow31:22

I think I'll have to take the Algae, the second symphony.

Presenter31:24

Why?

Stan Barstow31:25

There are just things there that speak something very, very deep in me to all the the things that I I like about England.

Presenter31:33

What about the book, then, not Shakespeare, not the Bible?

Stan Barstow31:36

Well, I've got Shakespeare in the Bible, I like that. Yes, yes.

Presenter31:37

You want that?

Stan Barstow31:39

Ask me again next year, it might be different, but I've always been going to read Prouce's Remembrance of Times Past, and since I don't seem to be able to get round to read it in the with the kind of life that I uh lead now, I'll take it with me.

Presenter31:52

And what about the luxury object, inanimate?

Stan Barstow31:54

I've got to take a a lot of paper and some pens because surely I'll be able to get down to write those superb, refined short stories that are the ambition of my life.

Presenter32:04

Stanvasto, thank you very much indeed.

Speaker 132:12

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 132:16

For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio forward