Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist known for Carrie's War and The Peppermint Pig, and Booker-shortlisted adult novel Circles of Deceit.
On the island
Eight records
Guest walked across hills in Montgomeryshire shouting Housman poems.
First Festival of 1000 Welsh Male Voices
Guest heard Aneurin Bevan speak and walked back over mountains singing.
Thomas Hampson and Barbara Bonney
Guest thought it was a love song until she saw Don Giovanni on honeymoon.
Appropriate for the sixties when her children were growing up.
Symphony No. 9, final movementFavourite
Guest is a convinced European and it is the European anthem.
Two Studies for Orchestra on Scenes from Bayreux's Romance of Tristan
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Guest tried to enjoy modern music and found this lyrical.
Bourrée from Cello Suite No. 3 in C major
Guest heard it in Dubrovnik before the war, a magical sound.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:05Do you cease to know what's true after years of embroidering stories?
I think usually I I know when something is developed from a story. The truth has got a bit twisted, if you like, but I don't always.
Presenter asks
6:23Your own experiences of evacuation were much harsher than in Carrie's War – can you describe that?
Yes, it was sinister I suppose, but you see, I was fourteen and I had my best friend Jean with me and she was fourteen too. And you can put up with an awful lot when there are two of you and you're that sort of age. … But on the other hand, again, you know, you thought this is what you have to put up with.
Presenter asks
12:23What did you have in mind for yourself as a girl in the thirties? Where did you intend life to lead you?
Well, my mother made quite sure I did. I hadn't got any high flown ideas for myself. I used to write plays for my toy theatre, and I think I thought I'd like to write something, but what I'd thought I'd really like to do would be a famous journalist, possibly a foreign correspondent. You know, crawling through enemy lines with my camera. Perhaps I wanted to be a photographer as well.
The keepsakes
The book
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon
I've been trying to read it for many years and I would manage it at last.
Presenter asks
25:15What were the first signs of your son Nicky's problems?
He became woolly minded. He didn't get up in the morning. He was very difficult. … And so we went to a psychiatrist who said that he had a ordinary adolescence depression, no more.
Presenter asks
28:19Do you feel guilt that you didn't spot your son's schizophrenia earlier, and can you come to terms with that?
Well, it's not spotting it. It's kind of little things that you feel might have made a difference, like being able to send him to America when he wanted to go with his girlfriend and only asked us the day before if we could give him the money. … And also but the dreadful thing was is is to see someone suffer that you love.
Presenter asks
36:17Do you feel you've done yourself justice? Are you rightly proud of your body of work?
I don't know. I don't think it ever occurred to me to ask myself that question. But you feel pleased when a book does well, and of course I'm proud of them. I'm proud of them rather than me.
“I think usually I I know when something is developed from a story. The truth has got a bit twisted, if you like, but I don't always.”
“Yes, it was sinister I suppose, but you see, I was fourteen and I had my best friend Jean with me and she was fourteen too. And you can put up with an awful lot when there are two of you and you're that sort of age. … But on the other hand, again, you know, you thought this is what you have to put up with.”
“I didn't know what it was, I thought it was a love song. And then when I got married for the first time and went on honeymoon to Zurich, we went and watched Don Giovanni, and I discovered it was really a dreadful seducer who was trying to drag this poor girl off to his castle.”
“I'm not playing at politics like you, Nina. I intend to get into Parliament, and this is the best way to do it.”
“He became woolly minded. He didn't get up in the morning. He was very difficult. … And so we went to a psychiatrist who said that he had a ordinary adolescence depression, no more.”
“Well, it's not spotting it. It's kind of little things that you feel might have made a difference, like being able to send him to America when he wanted to go with his girlfriend and only asked us the day before if we could give him the money. … And also but the dreadful thing was is is to see someone suffer that you love.”