Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer who helped pioneer birth control, owned a deep sea fishing trawler, and became adviser to an African tribal chief, with over ninety books to her name.
On the island
Eight records
I'd love to hear a piece from Sibelius, because it it takes one straight out into another world. A dark, cold, beautiful world. And it's so exciting to get into another world and then perhaps write about it.
You Canna Shove Your Granny Off a BusFavourite
Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor
Just believe it. That's pure Glasgow… Just tears you up, as you say.
Dragon School Song
So you'd like the Dragon School song to remind you of those happy times? [Not explicitly stated further by guest, but implied affirmation.]
W. H. Auden (poem), read by Patrick Wymark
This is the nightmail crossing the border…
I do like this heavily romantic stuff, and you can just bathe in it.
The Rite of Spring: Part 1 – The Adoration of the Earth
Orchestre Symphonique de Paris
…it was this wonderful dancing that we'd never seen anything like before.
Naomi Mitchison's tribe, the Kgatla
A tribal song from Botswana sung by Naomi Mitchison's tribe, Kgatla.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:40How have you found time to produce a large family and entertain a social circle while writing so much?
Because I can write anywhere ... and on any bits of paper, with any pencils or pens which are about. I used to find that going round in the circle in the underground was a very good way of not being interrupted.
Presenter asks
4:36Why did you put your recreation in Who's Who as 'a little danger'? What dangers have you courted in your life?
I suppose when I look back at my life, I have been in various near dangers … not necessarily physical ones, but perhaps about the people I was with. And sometimes one finds one's among people who are quite different from oneself and yet one must get inside them and understand them. And one can't usually do that without getting at least a few scratches.
Presenter asks
5:48What didn't the publishers like about your sexually explicit novel 'We Have Been Warned'?
The publishers got frightened. It was a bit of straight sex. It was that they couldn't bear.
The keepsakes
The book
a book of mostly modern poetry
not yet published (to be compiled)
I would like a book of mostly modern poetry. It hasn't yet appeared, but it will just have all the modern poetry which I I most like.
The luxury
endless supply of writing material
That would be wonderful. And then anything was over I'd make into nice paper animals.
Presenter asks
12:12You met your husband Dick when you were sixteen and married at eighteen – that was awfully early. Was it a happy business?
It was romantic in a kind of way that I thought … And I was so alarmed when I realized what [marriage] was … I'd never been kissed like that before. I remember my first sort of proper kiss, and I was sort of staggering at the end and saying, 'Oh, do let me go, I can't bear this' and I thought it was rather frightening.
Presenter asks
21:30Was your open marriage – where you and your husband allowed each other to have affairs – painful to hear about his lovers?
No. … I was so glad that he was happy.
Presenter asks
25:01What were the attractions of upper-class socialism for you in the 1930s?
I think we all felt a bit guilty. First of all, we'd survived the war. And then we were having such a much more comfortable life … and tried to feel what it was like … You know, one felt that it was possible to make things a lot better.
“I think I'd be able to write if I was hanging off a cliff by my feet.”
“It was all mixed in my mind with the war and feeling one must do something. To help with the war and being rather miserable about the sex. Part of the price you had to pay.”
“He thought women were there to give him food. They were an inferior class. He was always terribly nice to me, but he had some pretty awful friends…”
“I helped him through his time in England and suggested that he read quite a number of things. And I put him up into a room at the top of the house and said, 'Now you can come down when you've read three chapters.'”
“I don't feel that I could knock somebody out if we had a fight.”
“But you once wrote that you thought that death might be the most exciting thing that ever happened to you. — It might, but I think it won't be. I think one will probably just one day not wake up, which isn't very exciting.”