Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A novelist best known for The Cazlett Chronicles, four novels about a family in the thirties and forties.
On the island
Eight records
Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449
Mozart is, I suppose, my very favourite, most serious composer, and I love the piano concertos, and this E flat major one is my favourite. It's Kirkle four four nine, and I think Marie Parra is a wonderful pianist, and so that's a good combination.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050 (opening)
I couldn't think which Brandenburg concerto to have, and then I decided to have the opening of number five, simply because in a way I'm not sure that it's the first one I ever heard in my life, but it is the one which reminds me of all the others, and I feel on an island I'll need that.
Mazurka in B major, Op. 41, No. 3
The next record is I'm having this because not not only because I love Chopin, but particularly because I love the playing of my oldest friend, Nina Milkiner, whom I have known since I was fourteen, and I met her when she was playing to my grandfather, who was a composer, when he was dying. And we became friends, and we've been friends ever since, and she is a very remarkable pianist, I think.
Zerbinetta's aria from Ariadne auf Naxos
Well, I regard Strauss, Richard Strauss, as almost the last great composer and I've only heard the whole of that opera, Ariadne, at Lynborn once in my life, but I've never forgotten it. And I particularly love um Zelbinetta, her immense aria, and it's a bit of this.
Well, Scarletti is one of my very, very, very favorite composers, and this sonata is my favourite sonata and one of the nicest things that ever happened to me was when Rafe Kirkpatrick played sixteen Scarlatti sonatas in the double cube room at Wilton and as an encore he played this B minor which because he knew it was my favorite.
Concerto in D minor, Wq. 22 (third movement)
Slovak Chamber Orchestra, Bohdan Warchal
Well, uh, in our family, that was Kingsley, we always called JS Bach Bach's father, because C. P. Bach was Bach, and that was a kind of joke. But I love him, and one of the things about him, the quality he has, is of it's very heroic music. And I think if I was alone on a desert island, one would need bracing up with a spot of heroism, you know?
Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major, Hob. VIIe:1 (final movement)
Håkan Hardenberger, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner
I love trumpets. I think that all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side makes me cry as a line out of the Pilgrim's Progress. I love trumpets. I love Haydn because he loved Mozart and he was a lovely man and I love his keyboard work too. But this concerto is tremendous, is full of gaiety and excitement and I particularly fond of The Last Movement.
Dies Irae from Requiem in D minor, K. 626
BBC Singers, London Mozart Players, Jane Glover
I always feel very sad about this because I feel sad about Mozart's death and the manner of it, and this requiem is so much connected with his death in a way. And also, it's conducted by my very dear friend, Jane Glover. We have many times when we talk about Mozart together, for she loves him and knows him of course much better than me. And this is the DS Erie, which is a marvellous bit for a great work.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:21Did you have ambitions [to be a dancer]?
No, my mother had them for me, but uh she said miserably after several goes at this that my back was too long and my legs were too long and I didn't look right, which was perfectly true, and thank God she didn't go on with it.
Presenter asks
1:14Were you encouraged by your parents in your theatrical ambition?
I was neither encouraged nor discouraged. They were perfectly they said, You've got to finish your education such as it is, and then if you really want to do that, you can have a crack at it.
Presenter asks
4:48How long did it take you to write [your first novel]?
Well, I began it when I was 20 and I think it was published when I was 25, so a good four years.
Presenter asks
5:49After such a very successful start with The Beautiful Visit, wasn't it a little daunting to try and top it with your second novel?
The keepsakes
The book
My book would be All the Scarletta Sonata. Because my luxury would be a piano. And it's no good having a piano if you're me and you can't be a bend composer without some music.
Well, not really, because I I didn't feel uh once the Blue Four Visit was published, I didn't think it was a very good book myself. Uh I thought it had some good things in it, but it was much too l sort of splashed all over the place and repetitive and a lot of things bad and I very much wanted to try and do a novel which had a good bone structure which I had to stick to.
Presenter asks
7:58How autobiographical are your novels? How much of your own experience goes into each?
Well, practically none, except the places I've been to. I mean, I don't write ever about people I know. I sometimes write about an animal I know. But mostly um I use places very carefully um and and I have to know them very well before I can use them.
Presenter asks
8:21You're married now to a successful writer, Kingsley Amis. Does that present special problems? And do you discuss each other's work in progress?
Um yes, we do. We read to each other when we're both working on something every night, and we often read bits of journalism to each other that we've written. Uh this is very good, really. Uh it's on the whole better to be married to somebody who's interested in what you do, I mean from both our points of view than not.
Presenter asks
1:09So the fact that you've produced four volumes of the Cazalet chronicles over the past five years means that you haven't been distracted by the demands of love, does it?
I am afraid not. No, the nearest I have come to it is my Cavalier Spaniel. And it is rather less demanding.
Presenter asks
5:59Your greatest problem you've confessed before now was trying to get your parents to care about you more than they did. What did they care about instead?
Well, I think my father cared about me, but he was, of course, you know, working and out all the time, really. Um I was trying to get my mother to love me, and I don't really think, poor dear, that she did much. And she loved my brothers. And I loved her and that was very sort of debilitating.
Presenter asks
10:33Tell me about being educated at home in London in the thirties.
Well, it was not even in then, those days, it wasn't a very usual education. I had. the governess who had taught my mother. And she seemed amazingly old to me, and my mother said that she'd always seemed old to her as well. But she was the most astonishing woman. She was nearly blind and remarkably ugly. and very gentle and very intelligent. And she would have taught me Greek much more than and Latin, but I wasn't very good at them. But she let me read Shakespeare for an hour and a half every day aloud, which is what I wanted to do. I mean, she was quite right to do that, but a lot of people wouldn't have, you know. So so there were advantages in that sense to being taught at home.
Presenter asks
15:16You were sixteen when the war broke out. Did that mean the end of childhood for you in many ways?
Yes, very much, I think. And it was something that I had been dreading for ages, uh all my childhood really. I I started dreading war because I saw this faded photograph on my father's dressing table of men in very baggy uniform, and I said, Who are they? and he said, They were my friends, and I said, Where are they now? and he said, They're all dead except me. And this was so shocking to me. As I he then explained that they had died in the war, as I started reading books about the First World War, and the more I read about it the more terrifying war seemed to me to be.
Presenter asks
21:55You called yourself a bolter. Do you think it takes courage to bolt?
Yes, I think it does. It always takes some courage to divest yourself of the status quo, I think, because one usually has a very great deal invested in that, whatever it's like. And the unknown is always a bit alarming.
Presenter asks
31:05How much do you regret all those years you subjugated your writing to the marriage, all the years you spent cooking and tending husbands and families?
I think that had to be done. I mean, I think it it's very difficult. I got awfully tired, and I think it's very difficult to write when you're tired. I got very seized up at one point I couldn't write at all. For about two years, I really wasn't able to produce anything. And I think it was partly because I was nursing my mother and also other people who died there. You know, there was a sort of collection of sadness and I had no energy, really, for doing it. So I do I do regret it, but I don't think it's other people's fault. I think it was what I chose to do, and I think it was the wrong choice, but I chose it.
“No, my mother had them for me, but uh she said miserably after several goes at this that my back was too long and my legs were too long and I didn't look right, which was perfectly true, and thank God she didn't go on with it.”
“I got ill really, out from sheer self protection, and then I had my mother's governess, who was a most remarkable old lady.”
“I did that really because I became aware of war through my father and the photograph on his dressing table of very faded, baggily dressed soldiers and I could see that one of them was him and I said, where are the others? He said they're all dead except me and I felt so sorry for him.”
“It takes me at least a year. I have to write down on the back of an envelope, you know, what what I what the theme, what I'm writing about, and then I have to sort of test it for about six months, because if it isn't going to interest me at the end of six months, it's not going to interest anybody to read, I feel.”
“I thought that it might be cheering to other people whose marriages have crashed to know that it isn't necessarily the end of your life. I mean, it may be more or less awful to you, but I think very often at the time you feel that it absolutely is the end, and you may waste quite a lot of your life feeling that.”
“I am afraid not. No, the nearest I have come to it is my Cavalier Spaniel.”
“Well, I think my father cared about me, but he was, of course, you know, working and out all the time, really. Um I was trying to get my mother to love me, and I don't really think, poor dear, that she did much. And she loved my brothers. And I loved her and that was very sort of debilitating.”
“Yes, very much, I think. And it was something that I had been dreading for ages, uh all my childhood really. I I started dreading war because I saw this faded photograph on my father's dressing table of men in very baggy uniform, and I said, Who are they? and he said, They were my friends, and I said, Where are they now? and he said, They're all dead except me. And this was so shocking to me.”
“Well, how I could have left her? I feel very bad about that. Um I saw her all the time. She was in London and I I you know, I saw her Well, at all Nanny's time off and holidays and anxieties to take her away. But I just felt she was having she had a better life with him, you know. She had more more things and more everything really. And that that's what one had to do.”
“No, I think really good love, I'm not saying great love, is actually relatively rare. And I think people talk about it a lot, so there's the idea is that People think that everybody because e everybody could fall in love or have love, they think that everybody does. I think this is not true. I think it's a remarkable gift.”