Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A romantic novelist, best known for her romance novels.
On the island
Eight records
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Which is to me one of the most beautiful things that Bach ever wrote.
Siegmund's Love Song (Winterstürme)Favourite
Lauritz Melchior, NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini
I would rather love to hear Melchior singing Siden song to Valkyrie.
I feel I must choose my most romantic and beautiful, and the one which I think I hold very dear.
It does depict the love and the longing of two ill-starred lovers.
Phyllis Sellick and Cyril Smith
I would be comforted if I could hear Bach Sheep May Safely Graze played by two pianos.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:37How would you react to a long isolation from the world?
I wouldn't like it at all because I don't like being alone. I really do so enjoy being with those I love, either family or friends. I could hardly bear the idea of being sequestered forever. But on the other hand, I would would try to make the best of it.
Presenter asks
0:57Can you think of any consolation, any one thing you'd be so happy to have got away from?
Well, perhaps from the everlasting question of money, the whole monetary system, always being asked to consider how much does it cost, how much should you save, how much will you want, will the prices freeze, will they unfreeze, the whole thing I find terribly boring and it'd be marvellous if I could go out and pick my coconut and not have to ask how much it is.
Presenter asks
2:59Are you a musical person?
I don't play an instrument. I think I count myself a very musical person because I'm the child of a musician and I was brought up with music. … My father was [Hermann Klein], who was quite in his day a famous teacher of singing, and he also was a music critic on the Sunday Times and the Manchester Guardian for ten years. And I always think of him as sitting in his box in Covent Garden in all his glory with my mother, listening to the great Wagner operas, which he loved so much.
The keepsakes
The book
I'm going to be very unoriginal and say I would take the Encyclopedia Britannica because there's so much for me to learn that I don't know.
The luxury
a large frame containing photographs of all my family
an enormous frame in which there were photographs of all my family, all those I loved, so that I could look at them every day, at least once a day.
Presenter asks
6:06Did you spend some years in the United States as a child?
Yes, because after the divorce of my parents my father took me and my two brothers to America. And for three or four years I lived there with my uncle and went to school there and went to school in also in California. But later on I came back to England and finished my education. … I, as a child from about 12 upwards, used to type her manuscripts for her because we were all so poor in those days, she couldn't afford to have her stuff typed. And so I used to type it for her, and this gave me a tremendous feeling that I could do it, too.
Presenter asks
7:19What was the first thing of yours that you saw in print?
Oh, well, it was really rather um interesting because it was a very holy, spelt H-O-L-Y type of story in a little magazine called Christian Novels, which I'd picked up off a station platform newsagent. And I thought, well, I can do one of these. So I wrote it and sent it up, and it was actually taken and paid for. It was about 25,000 words. And they gave me 10 pounds, and I thought I was enormously rich.
Presenter asks
11:11How emotionally involved do you feel with your characters? Do you suffer and rejoice with them when you write?
I'm too much involved. I've always been told so by my secretary. I find it very hard not to burst into tears at times. I feel the the the sufferings of my heroines and and the griefs of uh of those who are grieved in my books. I can't help feeling it, and maybe it's that which makes me write that kind of thing. … I think I've got a great feeling for women and a feeling that they're not always treated as they should be treated by men, although I know the position can be reversed. But from the romantic point of view, it is the women who have, I think, the greatest sense of romance as a whole.
“I wouldn't like it at all because I don't like being alone. I really do so enjoy being with those I love, either family or friends.”
“Well, perhaps from the everlasting question of money, the whole monetary system, always being asked to consider how much does it cost, how much should you save, how much will you want, will the prices freeze, will they unfreeze, the whole thing I find terribly boring and it'd be marvellous if I could go out and pick my coconut and not have to ask how much it is.”
“I find it very hard not to burst into tears at times. I feel the the the sufferings of my heroines and and the griefs of uh of those who are grieved in my books.”
“I would take the Encyclopedia Britannica because there's so much for me to learn that I don't know.”