Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Writer best known for scooping the Everest conquest, acclaimed travel books such as her portrait of Venice, and chronicling her sex change in Conundrum.
On the island
Eight records
Suite No. 2 in B minor, BWV 1067
Gareth Morris, New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer
One is that I was brought up to believe that Bach was easily the greatest composer the world has ever known. And do you know that when I was very small I thought this was a sort of scientific fact.
Band of HM Royal Marines, Lieutenant Colonel F. Vivian Dunn
I spent a lot of my life thinking about the British Empire. And in retrospect, what chiefly strikes me about that phenomenon is a sort of sadness and a wastefulness to it.
String Quartet No. 19 in C major, K. 465, 'Dissonant'
I had reached the conclusion that music, if you played a lot of it, sunk into the walls of things and thereby gave them a sort of spiritual meaning. So I played my six records over and over and over again in the hope of impregnating the walls, the wooden walls of this old ship with the beauty of the classics.
Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, 'Italian'
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti
The fourth one is directly connected with Venice, really, because the best book I've written about Venice, which is simply called Venice. I like very much. I'm fond of it as a as a child of mine. And I like to think that it aspires in a way to the condition of Mendelssohnian music.
When I think of music in New York, I think of piano players, because as you know, the place crawls with piano players. When I think of piano players, I have come to think first of Thelonius Monk, and I like mister Monk playing T for Two.
Dacw 'Nghariad i Lawr yn y Berllan
My feelings about Wales are are profound and deep and and sentimental. And um one half of them are particularly moved by the melancholy and wistful side of Welsh life, the feeling of might have been, the constant yearning for something which I think comes out of the particular nature of Welsh history.
This is another Welsh one, and this expresses the other side of my view about Wales. I'm a a patriot and a nationalist, and I believe that only by active means can Wales retain its Welshness and its language and its separateness and the possibility, the potential which I believe in.
Jesu, Joy of Man's DesiringFavourite
Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra, Karl Richter
So I would like to end the programme, as I propose to end my day on the island, with something really serene and calm and grand and great, and something that I'd never ever get tired of.
Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning
I've been a soldier quite a while, and I would like to stay … The life is simply wonderful. The army food is great. I sleep with 97 others in a wooden hut. I love them all, they all love me.
Al Johnson's has no particular reference to me, it's just that I've always been entertained by Al Johnson and I like the song, Let Me Sing and I'm Happy and I agree with that too.
A Couple of SwellsFavourite
Every year since nineteen fifty three I've been to New York. … So Manhattan, so I've always felt I have one foot in Manhattan and one foot in Flannistinbury, the Welsh village where I live. And this song, which is purely New York, I've loved for that reason.
I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm
I always really like Sinatra like everybody else really, and I like the song. For obvious reasons, I've got my love to keep me warm.
I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket
I always liked El Satchma. But I must say about this record I wish she sang it a bit faster.
I first heard it after the war when Anna Get Your Gun, from which the song comes, went on in London. … I remember the song very well, and I've always liked it, and I like its emotion, too. It's full of joie de vive, and a bit of swagger too.
Bryn Tevo lives up the road from me. I admire him very much. And so I thought I was going to have uh what is, I think, perhaps serving Berlin's one of two most sentimental songs, which is White Christmas. And I thought I'd like to have it sung by this great Welshman.
This is the song Always which Irving Berlin wrote as a wedding present for his wife. And it means a lot to me, of course it does, because, you know, I've lived with the same friend for fifty years. Which is jolly nearly always, isn't it? And I hope it will go on for always.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:27Were you as happy [at the choir school at Christchurch] as you would have been at any other boys' preparatory school, do you think?
I think more so in many ways, partly because I love architecture and I liked it even then when I was very small. So that Oxford provided the most marvellous environment for a child who was interested in in the visual side of a city life. And then the daily cycle of the services in the cathedral I in those days thought were very beautiful. I was very moved by them. And the music was lovely, and the the words of the then unsullied Bible and prayer book were very beautiful, and the whole the tempo of the life of a of a child in such circumstances, I think, had a lasting effect upon me.
Presenter asks
5:38Were you making any plans about what was going to happen to you when the war was over? I mean, had you got ambitions nagging at you?
I don't think I ever had any doubt at all that the only thing I could do was to write, really. I had no other talents that have been noticeable then or since. It's about the only thing I could do, and it never I don't think ever occurred to me to think about doing anything else.
Presenter asks
11:50How did you manage to keep [your Everest dispatches] under wraps for the Times?
The keepsakes
The book
Anonymous
It's one of the great works of medieval literary history. It's very funny and a very interesting and exciting book.
Yes, it was vulnerable even before it got to Katmandu, and in fact several of the runners had their pouches that they carried my dispatches in... tampered with by rival correspondents along the way. But the reason that they didn't find out what they meant was that we'd devised a crude but effective system of codes to prevent them realizing what was happening... I had to devise a simple code just for this one last message, which appeared to make sense, but it would be the wrong sense, you see.
Presenter asks
23:48Since the age of about four you had had the idea that you were encased in the wrong kind of body?
It was more than an idea, really it was a kind of mystic conviction. I never had any doubt about it at all there had been some sort of a mistake.
Presenter asks
31:28What conclusions did you draw about the British Empire achievement or experiment? Where did it go wrong?
I don't think it could be said to have gone wrong. I think, on the whole, it improved, as a matter of fact. But time and the world overtook it, did they not? At the at the time of the climax of the empire, I think It could be said to be mostly an honourable enterprise. Most people thought that they were doing good... But morality changes, does it not? By the twenties and the thirties the men themselves who ran the empire were beginning no longer to believe in its morality and to think that it was wrong for one small power to impose its will upon another one.
Presenter asks
35:42Do you find travelling more difficult as a woman?
No, on the contrary, I think I find it easier. People are very much kinder, you know. To women rarely still, on the whole, than they are to men, and also they expect no harm of you. There's more of an innocence to you.
Presenter asks
2:43Why do you identify with Trieste of all places?
Triess has has always had a particular place in my life. It was the first city. that I ever lived in as an adult. … And from the very beginning it had a strange effect upon me. Of course it was just at the end of the war. Nobody quite knew what was going to happen to it. It was bang on the fissure between East and West. It was the bottom end of the Iron Curtain. … And the whole place was in a state of limbo. And that is the state it's in for me still.
Presenter asks
11:30Why don't you particularly like talking about your childhood?
Well, it's chiefly because it was an entirely happy childhood. I had a marvelous time. And all through my later life people have been trying to find Freudian reasons for my particular predicament. I don't believe in them anymore, and I so I've given up talking about my childhood. Except my boyhood. I don't mind talking about that.
Presenter asks
12:43How would you know at such a small age [that you should have been a girl]?
I don't know. I have no explanation for it. I've uh uh even in the book Conundrum I I admitted I had no explanation for it. I've always myself thought it was some spiritual thing.
Presenter asks
20:33Why did you decide, age thirty five, to turn your back on [a glittering career]?
I got a bit tired of the world. I'd seen a lot of it, and especially you know, most of my journalistic career was in the Middle East, which then as now was in a state of flux and anxiety. I didn't much like that world, and I I decided to get out of it and be on my own.
Presenter asks
26:18Why would you go to a clinic you don't know to be operated on by a surgeon you don't know [in Casablanca]?
You know, all this is a blur in my mind. But there was something faintly romantic, was there not, going to Casablanca in Morocco for this thing. And the surgeon was a very dashing, elegant young Frenchman. Full of child. and uh suavity. There was music on in the street outside, Arabic music, which I love, which came through the window as I lay there waiting for this thing. So in my memory I wasn't in the Disprint and I don't think I was then either. I I was quite determined this was the necessary thing to do, and so I just went and did it, you know.
“I don't think I ever had any doubt at all that the only thing I could do was to write, really. I had no other talents that have been noticeable then or since.”
“I never had any doubt about it at all there had been some sort of a mistake.”
“I very gradually crossed this line whose existence I don't entirely believe in, incidentally. The line from male to female, from one gender to the other”
“I'm a patriot and a nationalist, and I believe that only by active means can Wales retain its Welshness and its language and its separateness and the possibility, the potential which I believe in. of its becoming an ideal country.”
“I found an identity, but my identity is compromise.”
“I do like to think that I've played Life Like an Artist, not always successfully, believe me but I like to think that I've played it as if I were composing a book a book that has its flat moments certainly but on the whole, for me just for me I haven't read right for anybody else but for me It does have a a certain style to it that I've enjoyed and like still.”
“I've never myself tried to analyse this thing. I've just accepted it as it came. And I did the right thing, I'm sure. And so to try, all these years later, too, to try and pin down exactly what it was, exactly what I felt, why I did this, when I did so and so, jars with me. It's like trying to define a piece of music by Debussy.”