Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and journalist, best known for his novel 'The Virgin Soldiers'.
On the island
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:00You're from a seafaring family, I believe?
Oh yes, my grandfather was one of the old Cape Horners. In fact, he refused to go to the reunions of the Cape Horners because they swore too much. He was a very religious man, and in fact I saw a photograph of him recently and I was surprised at the family resemblance. The whole family went to sea for generations and did all sorts of adventurous things. My father and my elder brother they fought on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War. I might say they were gun running. It was nothing political about it. It was just money, which has always been another Thomas thing.
Presenter asks
1:05You lost your father at sea?
Yes, yes, he was drowned in nineteen forty three. So that meant that you spent some years at doctor Bernardo's home? Yes, my younger brother and I went off to uh Bernardo's and uh we spent uh several years there.
Presenter asks
2:10Did Bernardo's make it possible for you to start as a writer?
Well in those days it was difficult. I mean uh these days it's much different in Bonados. But they gave me my first typewriter and uh they helped me get a job on a local newspaper. So really they did launch me, yes. Good for them.
Presenter asks
3:33What was the first job that turned up?
Oh, I had uh a job on a local newspaper again … in Wilsdon in northwest London, which is a very good news area, really. I mean very crowded industrial … and eventually I got to Fleet Street.
Presenter asks
6:37How long did you stay with journalism after you'd written your first two successful books?
Oh, was that it? Yes, it was. I decided that, the um, you know, I I wanted to write books and I quit.
Presenter asks
8:09Who do you write for, Leslie? While you're writing, do you imagine an old lady, a young man? I mean, who is reading your book?
Do you know it's terrible, but I write for myself in the end. I think you've got to, you know, I write because I want to write that way. If it never sold a copy, then it's there. But I'm amazed at the cross-section of people who write to me. Only yesterday I was talking to a very, very famous psychiatrist and he's written a, you know, one of these marvellously learned books about some facet of psychiatry. And to my amazement, on the first page, there were three quotations. There was one from Shakespeare, there was one from Oscar Wilde, and there were thirteen lines from one of my books.
“I stood up and marched through the boys, and I went up to the gaffer, I was about 14, I suppose, and I said. Sir, I want to be a writer. And he was a bit deaf and he said, A waiter in a very good restaurant, son. So I then not only had the problem of being a writer, but not being a waiter, which was considerably more difficult.”
“I landed up at Hounslow with two suitcases and stood on the edge of the curb and had nowhere to go, literally nowhere to go. I mean all the other fellas disappeared to Manchester and Liverpool and London and off they went to start their lives again. And I stood there and I thought well where the hell am I going to go now?”
“And he came in, and there was I, fast asleep, with the office cat on my chest. I said, Oh, there's a big story doing upstairs, sir. They're going mad. They've sent me down for arrest. Well, upstairs was only the roof, but it made it.”
“Someone said to me, Well, I've just read one of your books, in fact the latest one, Arthur McCann and All His Women he said, There's someone in there screaming to get out. And I think that was quite true. That was what I I'd aimed for. Of course when you write a book uh a lot goes into it that you don't intend.”
“I write for myself in the end. I think you've got to, you know, I write because I want to write that way. If it never sold a copy, then it's there.”