Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Writer, best known for her seventeen novels, winning the Whitbread Prize and being shortlisted for the Booker five times.
On the island
Eight records
He was a grave fellow for turning off the light in the evening by the firelight. 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.
A Simple Little MelodyFavourite
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.
She was in a black velvet dress with a spotlight on her. and they danced, and I thought it was the most romantic thing I'd ever seen, and they danced to my foolish heart.
Something in Your Eyes, Madame
Geraldo and his Gaucho Tango Orchestra
I can imagine with a partner, with a piece of driftwood, rushing up and down this desert island in the moonlight doing this.
I seem to have spent a lot of my time in my life waiting. for a particular telephone course that never came. 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.
This song is in memory of not that she's dead, I mean, but it's a very dear friend of mine who, um, when we go out to public houses ... she always has this playing she always makes me go and and put the pennies in on that instrument thing ... But we always end up with um Sweet Sixteen, and it's the one with the Furies.
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.
Need a Little 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.
my grandfather we're talking about um ooh, nineteen forty two, nineteen forty three, something like that, used to sit at the piano and uh he'd sometimes sing it, and my grandma would sometimes join in. But I can remember hearing it at the back of my mind every time I went upstairs.
My then husband taught at the Liverpool Art School. He was a painter, Austin Davies, and he taught John Lennon. and there was a boy called um Sutcliffe. And he died very early. He died when he was about 21. He was a member of the group, he was dying. He was a member of the group, yes, quite a very big one.
Can I Forget YouFavourite
I want this for my agent to hear, Andrew, who's been so good to me and so kind, and so was his late wife. And it sounds like a love song well, it is a love song. But not in the way it may sound, but it's it's for Andrew.
Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major
I sang it to the troops in Southport during the war, and I had a little um tule skirt on, bally shoes no, no, no, tap dante shoes, of course a little red military jacket, and a little sort of box cap. And I sang Kiss Me Good Night, Sergeant Major, to the troops.
I didn't understand a word when it was first played, but then somebody told me I don't know how true it is that it's all about drugs. It's either Harris is singing about drugs or the person who wrote it was on drugs when they did it. I don't know, but I I think it's wonderful.
I heard it years and years ago, and and and I thought it was absolutely beautiful, and gradually it became something we knew, and then my grandchildren and I we did a sort of a mock play of Scott going to the pole, and this was one of the things in the background, one of the the tunes, when they're struggling through the snow. And and obviously somebody's several of them are going to die, so that's why that's why I chose it.
I suppose I've chosen it because um I I have very few modern records among this lot and and Uh I do remember him belting away something, and particularly this one, so I like it.
Again, I think one of doing plays with the children, I think. It was that not so maybe even writing about the Titanic, those words, ground control to Major Tom. They were looking for help. So instead of writing dot dot dot, we've hit an iceberg, they'd say ground control to Major Tom.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:29Do you think you are eccentric?
Not in the slightest
Presenter asks
4:03What sort of a background was it [growing up in Liverpool]?
Well, my father was a commercial traveller ... He was also an undischarged bankrupt, which I didn't know for years later, which soured his life. ... A man very rigid in his ways. I mean, he was terribly bigoted. ... My mum was also from Liverpool. ... she'd gone to finishing school in Belgium ... and she was very ladylike, and in a sense My dad was very proud of that. ... But I don't think she could stand him very quickly afterwards. I mean, I slept in my mother's bed, and my brother slept in my father's bed, simply. To keep them out of each other's bed, and that went on for years.
Presenter asks
6:03Did you start writing as a very young child?
Yes, not a proper one, but I I started very early to write what I call novels ... encouraged very much by my mother. Because there were so many frequent terrible rows in the house ... She used to encourage me to put things down, I think. ... They were really about my mother and father. I was always watching them and noting it down.
The keepsakes
The book
Wendy Moore
Well, um, there's a an amazing book. It's about seven hundred pages, because you need something that'll last a long time. It's called The Case Book of John Hunter, and it's about surgery and dissection and autopsies and treatment. And he collected all the things that are now in the Hunterian Museum, which is a wonderful place to go.
The luxury
Presenter asks
7:51You left school at fourteen, Beryl. Why, first of all?
I went to very good school. I went to merchant tailors, but I was expelled. Because I wrote um um a poem. ... I illustrated it'cause I was quite artistic and my mother found it. and she imagined I was utterly depraved. ... But scholastically I was hopeless anyway. 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.
Presenter asks
18:07Why haven't you yet written your autobiography?
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. Two, again, I do hate this business of um ... referring to oneself. It embarrasses me to say I was born in Formby in such and such a time. ... 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.
Presenter asks
24:19Does [writing a novel a year] get more difficult?
Much more difficult. It's tiring ... What I worry about is more and more as I get older and more a bit more tired is that though there are many occasions when I am doing something which I I like very much. 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.
Presenter asks
1:02Do you sit opposite me now as a calm centred and entirely happy human being?
Yes, and I I don't think I was um all that unhappy. I I've I think I've had a very good life. … I think creativity possibly only does come out of sort of uh friction and trouble and something else, because it makes your brain think a lot.
Presenter asks
2:04Five times you've been nominated [for the Booker Prize]. Do you care? Do you bother?
There was only one time that I cared. I think that was about the fourth time when I began to kid myself that it was. you know, that I would win. … But all the other times I was fortunate enough to have a publisher who, right from the beginning … didn't care about it, and and I don't think I did. It was just jolly nice going to the um the Booker Dinners.
Presenter asks
4:19Describe the domestic set up at home [when you were young].
Well, I didn't realise what was behind it all until much later. It was that my father was a a businessman and had been doing very well in Liverpool. My mother married him on the rebound, and about four years after they got married, there was that slump in nineteen twenty nine or something, and he became a bankrupt, so that when when I was about six, seven or eight, I was signing cheques for my father without knowing it. It ruined his life, it ruined my mother's life. And they constantly quarrelled about it.
Presenter asks
9:51Why did they throw you out [of school]?
Well, it was only because of um there was a a dirty rhyme going round the school, you know, and it was written on a piece of paper, and everybody had a turn of seeing it, and I did drawings to it, I illustrated it, I thought that would be a help.
Presenter asks
13:00What do you mean when you say I believe in class?
Well, there are such things as classes, the the lower classes, who used to be called the working classes, and there's the middle classes. Um you know, have a bit of money, and then of course there's the other lot who have a lot of it. I mean, I grew up among the the middle lower classes, and you did talk about class a lot. I mean, all this idea that you can wipe that out and say how ridiculous it is daft. You can't. I mean, it still exists. In fact, it probably exists more than ever.
Presenter asks
13:41How did you find out [that your husband was having an affair]?
I came back from hospital from my first child, from Aaron, and there was a note on the table with two cups and two plates saying Can't see you tonight. Beryl's coming out of hospital, so … I adored Austin. I thought oh oh God, I I loved him so much.
“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.”
“I didn't think that you should get paid for scribbling away. '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.”
“I think writing and a bit of money, you see. Quickest cure for a neurosis that one knows of.”
“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.”
“I think creativity possibly only does come out of sort of uh friction and trouble and something else, because it makes your brain think a lot.”
“I mean, you can't be eccentric or a bit bit crackers if you've managed to write a whole pile of books and to support your children. And to end up more or less okay. I mean, uh you can't be.”
“I still think men are more capable than women. I always have thought so. I have never ever thought to myself that I was better than a man. Ever.”