Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer best known for a series of historically researched novels about a British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, featuring hero Richard Sharpe.
On the island
Eight records
Pie Jesu (from Requiem, Op. 48)
The Cambridge Singers and City of London Sinfonia, conducted by John Rutter
it's liturgical, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of church music, and I collect church music, liturgical music, and this is one of my favourites.
This is my nod towards fundamentalist Christianity. I couldn't bear to be on my desert island listening to sort of Jesus Wants Be for a Sunbeam, but I love this song
After a time I'm going to find myself in Belfast, and I remember the first summer living in Belfast. It seemed to me that every street you walked down you heard astral weeks, and so it's a happy memory of that lovely city.
well record number four is is is really a record about exile and and it's about Judy, my American wife, and it's the song that that sort of haunted us in our courtship
this is one of my all-time favourites, of course, Over the Hills and Far Away, which was the in fact the song with the rifles in the Napoleonic Wars ... and which of course closed every single programme of sharp.
Mary Plazas, Diana Montague and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by David Parry
simply because this is the British Airways' signature tune. And and Judy and I both love to travel and come to England an enormous amount. And if I'm on my desert island every time I hear this I will think of those theatre visits to London and all the good times that we've been travelling.
Benedictus (from Requiem in D minor, K. 626)Favourite
I can remember years ago, in I was very young, hearing Mozart's Requiem and being swept away, and I still am swept away.
Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
one of the most wonderful romantic things I think about America is driving down the long interstates ... And there's only one thing you can have on the radio as you drive the interstates and that's Country and Western.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:07What made it happen eventually [writing your first novel]? Because it didn't happen until your late thirties.
It happened in my late thirties and I was working in Belfast ... and out walked a blonde. And I said to my reporter, I'm going to marry that one. And that was Judy. And she was American, and for family reasons she couldn't live in Britain. And I could go to the States. I had no ties. But I couldn't get a work permit. So I airily said to her, Don't worry, darling. I'll write a book. And well, we're still married and I'm still writing the books.
Presenter asks
6:46How did this [fundamentalist upbringing] affect daily life? What was it like living with them?
I don't remember it fondly, which is sad, because in fact they were actually very good people ... As fundamentalist Christians often are, they're honest, they're painfully honest, they work to be honest. And as as my real mother said when she saw them, when they came to pick me up for adoption, she said I could see they weren't cuddly. And and she was right, they weren't cuddly ... What my father wanted above all was to save my soul.
Presenter asks
8:50Did you always feel a misfit in in the midst of all of this? Or were you, as you've described, in a sense, trying to fit?
The keepsakes
The book
John Cowper Powys
it's full of an exquisite sensibility and and I've never really given it the time it deserves, so I want to take that.
I was trying to fit and didn't. It was just one of those tragic adoptions where you simply don't fit. And I I certainly fretted under the the prohibitions and there were an awful lot of prohibitions. I mean for for a long, long time, for most of my childhood there was no television. And I was beaten once for reading the wrong kind of book. Um you know there were no cosmetics, no alcohol, no tobacco, no cinema. It just went on.
Presenter asks
13:12Was there a single moment when you felt that liberation [from fundamentalist religion]?
Yes, I actually at last I got converted. It was a m a marvellous moment. Everything they said about it was true. The liberating influence of conversion was true. But there was one big difference. I woke up one morning and I suddenly had the absolute conviction that it was all rubbish. There was no God, there was no salvation, there was I mean, the whole of this Christian fundamentalist message was untrue, and I've been happy ever since.
Presenter asks
25:18Can you explain the motivation [to track down your real father]? Was it simple curiosity?
I don't think it was deep, but I think it is simple curiosity ... when I was ten or eleven my father had left his safe open one one evening and I was walking past his study and I saw it was open and I dived in ... What I did find was a piece of paper with my real parents' names written on it. And I copied it out and I kept that piece of paper for years.
Presenter asks
28:42Why when she saw your name on that book, as you say, sixteen or seventeen years ago, why why didn't [your mother] get in touch?
I don't know. I and I wish she had. I really wish she had. She told me that she she didn't want me to think that she was after me money. So she didn't she didn't get in touch with me and as I say it was only last year we met.
“I'd always wanted to write. I mean, I'd always had the idea that it was better than working, which has actually turned out to be entirely true.”
“I woke up one morning and I suddenly had the absolute conviction that it was all rubbish. There was no God, there was no salvation, there was I mean, the whole of this Christian fundamentalist message was untrue, and I've been happy ever since.”
“I look very like him. I look more like him than his other kids ... I can remember standing outside his his apartment, looking in on this very happy family, which I had suddenly been welcomed into and welcomed with open arms. And and thinking of my adopted mother and thinking, Gotcha.”