Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer and countryman best known for his classic book 'Akinfield', a portrait of English rural life.
On the island
Eight records
Stephen Varcoe, Ian Burnside & Delmé String Quartet
They're kind of shadows really in both the poem and the music of the First World War. Gurney was shell-shocked, as they used to call it, and spent most of his life in an asylum. And Hausmann wrote his A Shropshire Lad in the 1890s, and it was almost like a premonition of what would happen, although he could not have known it at that time. But the two things coming together are very tragic in feeling and also immensely English in feeling.
I watched Ella Fitzgerald at Ronnie Scott's Club on television, and she was then old and I think ill. Then they she began to sing. And the perfection of her art the voice dropping exactly correctly on every note and the rhythm and the unaffected grandeur of it I was overpowered by I thought she was absolutely the most wonderful person.
The Choir of the Temple Church & Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
This is The Shepherd's Farewell. From Berlias is The Childhood of Christ. And often the Shepherds in paintings are often thought about as very humble people and ignorant and and touching and peasanty sort of thing. But Christ was the descendant of the great shepherd poet David, and also the shepherds named the stars because they were out all night. And so I don't see the shepherds as these yokels. I see them as something quite different. And I think Berlius has capt somehow captured this glory about them.
Peter Pears & Benjamin Britten
I thought I must have something connected with the Alborough Festival, because eventually Benjamin Britton became a friend and he gave me a little job and got me to edit the programme books and do bits of translation and all literary things really. I used to see Ben walking when I was walking on the Alborough marshes. He was all music. He seemed to work almost incessantly, but in the afternoons he used to walk with his little dog on the marshes and just wave as he passed. And I thought what summed it up. Most of all what would be Schubert's Winterisse, which is the journey really of aging.
I love hymns. And in the next village, called Little Henny, there was a seventeenth century clergyman, a young man, who loved the the poetry of George Herbert. one line of which is my song is love unknown and this clergyman, young clergyman, wrote a poem based on that one line. And then In the nineteen twenties, I think it was Geoffrey Shaw, took John Ireland out to lunch and said, This is a lovely hymn. Could you set it to some music? And Ireland set it there and then on the back of the menu. So that this is one of my favourites, really. We should certainly be seeing it in our church at Wormingford on Easter Sunday.
William Chapman Nyaho & Susannah Garcia
I've been to America sometimes. I'm very fond of Aaron Copeland's Music. And I also love the kind of uh simplicity of certain Christian sects, and the Shakers are a kind of Quaker, I suppose. Form of simplicity, and Copeland's Appalachian Spring contains variations on a shaker melody which is now extremely well known.
I suppose the most indigenous of all English rural writers is the poet John Clare, and we decided he ought to be in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, and so we were allowed to do this. And I asked Ted Hughes, who was then the Poet Laureate, to come and read, and I gave the the address. And Ted chose The Nightingale's Nest and read it absolutely marvellously.
Pavane pour une infante défunte
I simply love this Ravel Pavant for Dead Infanta. Because if it's gravity. It's profound sadness. I sometimes have to take village funerals. Often the people I've known for ever. and I impose a little bit of the old order of mourning into them, without being miserable. I think the end of life is a very important and rather austere and extraordinary occasion. And so I think this exquisite composition rather sums it up for me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30Are we still so influenced [by the English year] even in this urbanized technological twenty-first century?
We would like to be. It's a longing to be influenced. And I think we are influenced to a great degree by the pattern of the year. Perhaps because of the seasons in England, which are very defined. The winter and springs and autumns are very distinctive. … But I think there is a hanging on, really, this to the shape of life as it used to be. People want the old village life, and they do find it in certain institutions, shall we say, the church or a little church school or something like that, or in certain societies, particularly bell ringing societies and horticultural societies. When these things occur, the old thing comes back with a rush.
Presenter asks
2:28Why do you say that you think [the English year] has more effect on us than politics?
I think because it's continuous and lasting and politics is episodic. Politics creates laws and comforts and rightnesses and all kinds of things like this, health and education. But there's something underlying this. I suppose you could call it some kind of spirituality to people who are no longer religious.
Presenter asks
9:55Where did your family sit then, Ronald, in this rural pecking order, as it were, between the wars? What did your father do for a living?
The keepsakes
The book
James Boswell
It's a huge book full of society. It's it's absolutely wonderful. I once took it in my twenties all round Scotland walking where they walked on that amazing sort of tour.
Well, they were, I suppose, endless generations of Suffolk farmers and farm workers really, and shepherds and all kinds of people. But my mother came from London, and they they met because she was a VAD nurse. My father married and came to S live in Suffolk.
Presenter asks
13:39When did you decide, was there a moment when you thought, I am going to be a writer proper?
It really happened on a walk with Christine Nash, John's wife. All of us, I think, bore our friends by saying, I must do this and I must do that, but not doing it. And I was on this walk and she s suddenly stopped and said, Why not do it? And she found me, or helped to find me, this little house on the Suffolk coast. And about five months later, I wrote a novel there. And then I was introduced to Britton, who lived about a couple of miles down the road.
Presenter asks
25:50How lasting an effect do you think the current [foot and mouth] crisis will have?
No, it never is. I don't think. It re it it's an extraordinary resilient sort of place. And things will be different. But but it picks up rather quickly in some ways. … They'll look back on it as they do on Mixomatosis on the sixty-seven. It's it's rather like the set aside fields which some people complain about or pulling out the hedges and not putting them back again. This is a a kind of thing which happens all the time.
Presenter asks
31:47How would you be if you were really alone, without any one?
Well, I suppose I can't imagine it, but I mean, I have always been alone in that sense, but with a circle. I have a little circle of dear friends and I I rely on them tremendously. … Ab absolutely awful. I couldn't imagine being without Tamrelli.
“I can remember as ch my childhood men doing the sugar beet in old army uniforms in the field, old great coats and putties to keep the r because there were no Wellingtons.”
“I've known them for ever, you see, and and so I do know what they've done and what they are. I'm I'm fascinated by their personalities and by something which is unreachable, which might be called their spirituality or their prayerfulness, and I see them Sunday after Sunday just below me. I suppose it is the writer in me which becomes enthralled by them.”
“I think living in darkness is absolutely wonderful. But now, of course, in the villages, in ours too, you have these outside vast glaring lights on little courtyards, uh and sometimes old fashioned lamp posts set up in the garden.”
“I feel very grateful for life on the whole. I feel that it's um Exceeded all my expectations.”