Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A writer whose novel 'A Woman of Substance' sold over 20 million copies; the most requested author from British libraries. Former journalist.
On the island
Eight records
And that is the first operatic aria I remember actually hearing on a record at home when I was a child. My mother loved opera, and I'm sure I heard others, but this is the one that stuck in my mind. And it's always been a great favourite, perhaps because it was a favourite of hers, and it was in fact the first opera I ever went to see.
It's Over the Sea to Sky, which is the first song I remember learning to sing at school, at that church school, Christ Church, in Armley.
I'm choosing this because I've always liked it and it was one of my father's favorite operatic arias.
The Pipes and Drums and Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
My mother loved that hymn, and so did my father, but I would like to choose one with the Scots Dragoon Guards, because I love the bagpipes, and my grandfather Taylor, Alfred Taylor, was a sergeant major in the Seaforth Highlanders, and of course when I was a child, he was no longer in the Seaforth Highlanders, but I was a special favourite of his. and I would sit on his knee and he would tell me stories about his adventures when he was a soldier. So I think the bagpipes are appropriate.
In A Woman of Substance, Emma Hart is a little girl walking over the Yorkshire moors on the way to Fairleigh Hall where she is a servant, is terrified she's marching along, singing on with Christian Soldiers, because she's rather afraid of all the fog and it's very early in the morning, and she hears a rumbling noise and is even more terrified, and then from the fog emerges Blackie O'Neill. ... who is a navvy on his way to Fairleigh Hall to repair the chimneys and the flues, and he becomes her lifelong friend. And as they're walking along the moors he bursts forth into Danny Boy, because he's an Irishman who has come from Ireland to live in Yorkshire, as many of the Irish did in those days. And whenever I hear Danny Boy I think of Blackie and Emma
First time I heard that on a disc was in Zurich in 1982, just after I'd finished Voice of the Heart. And I was emotionally moved by the lyrics and Barbara Streisen's voice. And my husband said, My goodness, you've got tears in your eyes. Whatever is it? Why are you upset? And I said, I thought of Nikki Latimer, and this is one of the characters in Voice of the Heart. I thought of Nikki Latimer and whatever's going to happen to him now that Catherine is dying. This sums up what the book was about. It was about memory and memories and the past, and the past coming back and trying to recapture the past.
JerusalemFavourite
It is from the movie, as you know, and the last part of Poseidon is called Jerusalem, and it is that marvellous English hymn which I always loved as a child, and I particularly like this recording of it.
Maria Callas, Philharmonia Orchestra, Tullio Serafin
I've chosen it to because it was my mother's great favourite. She loved opera and would try to go when the opera was in Leeds, and she didn't always have someone to look after me, so I was dragged along. I always choke up when I hear one fine day because I think of my mother.
I chose it because in Emma's Secret I bring Emma back, and to do that I have to go to the war years because those years were pretty much told in a little bit of narrative and then a few little scenes, but no long chapters. The book was getting too long, so I had to skimp on the war and those years of the Blitz. So in the book, I have the war years with Emma, and I have some of those lovely songs that we all remember if we were around in those days.
Yvonne Kenny, Philharmonia Orchestra, David Parry
And again a story about my father, because he always thought that whoever was singing it was singing about the father. And one day I said to him, But, Daddy, you're wrong, you know. She's singing about the man she loves. She's going to go and see him and get her wedding dress. And he said, Oh, Barbara Love, I don't care if she's singing about her father or her lover. I just like this song, and I love the words and I love the music.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor
Vladimir Ashkenazy, Philharmonia Orchestra, André Previn
I've chosen this because it's one of my own favourites. It's Rachmaninoff's piano concerto number two in C minor. It's almost like that grand theme that you would have behind a very dramatic Hollywood movie of the 40s and 50s, or indeed maybe a television miniseries.
It reminds me all the time of Bob. Not particularly that one song, but the singer of the song. Um I often if I'm out and he's come home from the office before I'm back, and I know he's home because I hear this lady singing, and I think, Oh, good Bob's home He just loves the way she sings.
One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)
Well, you know, I think that Frank Sinatra was always probably the greatest entertainer in popular uh music that there has ever been. And since I often write about unrequited love, I've chosen that great barroom song One for My Baby.
Vissi d'arte (from Tosca)Favourite
Kiri Te Kanawa, Welsh National Opera Chorus, Sir Georg Solti
I've chosen Visi Darty. From Tosca, because it was my mother's. favourite opera of all the operas. I mean she loved the the one I had in the beginning, but this she loved tremendously and would always go to see it when it was on in in Leeds and would take me with her. And actually it's one of Bob's favourite operas because he is very much into classical music as well and opera.
Charlotte Church, Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera, Sian Edwards
Well, you know, when I was going to school, I went first to a school called Christ Church. Church of England School. So I chose Jerusalem because it's one of my favorite hymns. It's stirring and inspiring and there's something wonderful about it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:59How do you remember Leeds as a small girl? Was your childhood a happy time?
It was I was an only child. My parents are both dead now, but I was very, very close to them. ... My childhood was happy and I was very close, as I said, to my parents and remained close to them.
Presenter asks
7:37Do you remember any particular stories that you went out on when you were very young as a Cub reporter?
No, not anything very specific that was world shaking. Of course, I did cover all these things that seemed unlikely for a girl to cover because any Cub reporter was given the tedious job of what was called the police rounds, and that was going to the coroner's court, to the infirmary in Leeds, to the the hospital, to the emergency room for accidents and those sort of things, and then phoning in the information and they just made little squibs, you know. And it was just routine stuff.
Presenter asks
15:42How long was it before you began to write seriously?
Well of course I did continue my career as a journalist Roy and wrote a a syndicated column ... But around 1968 I thought if I'm going to write a novel I really must do it now. And I'd always wanted to be a novelist.
The keepsakes
The book
Charles Dickens
I think after a lot of reflection this week, before I did the show, I decided upon a book called David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It's about a person overcoming great adversity.
The luxury
A little bag of eye makeup, especially mascara
A little bag of eye makeup, especially mascara. Being a blonde, I've got blonde eyelashes. And if I'm going to be rescued by a handsome British sailor in a rowboat, at least I want to have my eyes looking right.
Presenter asks
17:59You had to get your facts right [for A Woman of Substance]. You couldn't research it all in New York, could you?
No, and I didn't really need any research for the first two hundred pages, but then I realised as I went back from the present to nineteen oh two and nineteen oh three that I didn't know anything about that period of time ... So I did come home and spend about five weeks and I researched in the libraries in Leeds. ... and as I say spent about five weeks digging into the Edwardian era ... And people did do things differently and speak differently in those days. ... And then went back to the States and continued to write.
Presenter asks
21:57A Woman of Substance put you in the position of someone who would never have to work again, but you went straight to work on another one, Voice of the Heart. Was that one that was also in your mind?
Not in the way that a woman of substance was. I was working on an outline for another book when quite out of the blue something happened in my life. A friend who had quarrelled with me and we had not spoken for ten years came back to New York and asked to see me through a mutual friend. ... And then the mutual friend said, But she is dying. So I said, Well, then, of course, I will see her. And she wanted to make her peace with me and with a number of other people with whom she had quarrelled. And afterwards, this gave me the idea for Voice of the Heart...
Presenter asks
5:38Did [going to the cinema] infect you with this love of narrative?
I think it did. I was absolutely blown away as I sat there in the dark watching people like Carrie Grant and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. I think I fell in love with glamour. … I think what I did when I was sitting there was be fascinated by the story. … I learnt about storytelling because that's what I do. I'm a storyteller.
Presenter asks
7:51Your book, Act of Will, reflects your parents' marriage. There's autobiography there, isn't there?
Yes, and it's the only book that is semi-autobiographical. … And I couldn't write it until they were dead, because I really wrote, in a sense, about this very tumultuous marriage that they had. They were either in each other's arms or at each other's throats, and he was very good looking, and he had an eye for the girls at times, you know. And really what it was that Audrey did, I suppose my mother did, and that is kind of push me without me knowing I was being pushed, and sacrifice, make many sacrifices, so that I could have the life that she had never had.
Presenter asks
10:14How old were you when you had your first story published?
I was ten years old … I wrote a story about a little girl who gets a pony. And it was only about three or four pages. And three months later, we got a letter and a postal order for seven and six or ten and six. … I said to my mother, I don't care about the money, I want to see my name there.
Presenter asks
21:43Why do you think it took that long [until your early forties to write your first novel]?
You know, I really I had to ask myself a lot of questions one day. … and one Monday morning I said, All right, you're in your early forties, you've always wanted to be a novelist. You must do it now, because you don't want to end up being one of those women who regrets not having done certain things. So I said, What do you want to write? Where do you want to set it? What do you want it to be about? And I came up with old fashioned English saga, partially set in Yorkshire, because I know Yorkshire people and what they're made of. I want to write about a woman and then I thought, who makes it in a man's world. And then I thought, but women's doing that. It has to be more unusual. And I thought, Ah when women were not doing that.
Presenter asks
24:06You and Bob haven't had any children. In a sense, are the books and the characters in them your children?
Well, sort of. It wasn't that we set out not to have children and I didn't say, Oh, I'm going to have a big career. I had a miscarriage and I never got pregnant again. And I'm not the kind of person who says, Oh, that's terrible, and becomes gloomy about it. I've had an awful lot of lovely things in my life, and I can't worry about a child that I've never known. You know, we it's the luck of the draw, isn't it? I'd have loved children, but I don't have them. I've got a great marriage. I've got Bob, who is a great supporter of mine in every way, as I hope I am of him. And we've got to be content.
Presenter asks
27:14Why have you decided on this occasion to take action [against the Indian soap opera]?
Well, first of all, it wasn't only one book. We found out that it was three books. It was a trilogy. And it was three of the movies Bob had made. And I actually got a bit panicky because we discovered from their website that they were doing two hundred and sixty two episodes and planning two hundred and sixty two more for next year. … It's the principal and you can't go around stealing intellectual property from other people, and I hope it will help other authors who don't have my resources or my courage to go all that way and go into a High Court in Calcutta.
“My mother said to me when I handed her the printed published book, Well, it's the fulfilment of your childhood dream and indeed it was, because I'd always wanted to be a novelist.”
“I came to the conclusion that I should write about England, specifically Yorkshire, because I'm English and I come from Yorkshire and I understand the English better than I understand the Americans or the French.”
“I feel I'm lucky and that I've had a good day if I get five totally finished pages. And by that I mean pages that I'm satisfied with and that I don't want to rewrite. I work a good ten hours a day, six days a week.”
“My mother gave you the greatest thing a mother can give a child the desire to excel.”
“I think I wanted to write I know I wanted to write books, but I realized that I had to live life a little to understand people.”
“The author's got to truly believe that those things are happening.”