Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A university don and education writer who published her first novel at 80, about love and Fenland village life.
On the island
Eight records
Victoria de Los Angeles and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
My very first memory is of waking up in my cradle and seeing the rest of my family... and so my first record is Rossini's Cat Duet
My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair
I'd never heard music like this before. I loved it so much.
One of the things my sister used to play for me over and over again.
We spent a whole term with everything we did based on Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.
I danced my way through all my teens... the thing that brings it back to me absolutely is Love is the sweetest thing.
Record number six really is a memory of that enchanted evening that really did happen to us.
This is just a gesture of gratitude for a really, really happy life... and also my daughter used to sing it.
I'd like to think of it happening as sort of just going away from it... like the lark ascending, still singing.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:01Why did it take you so long to write a novel?
Really because I was doing other things all the time, things that were important to me as the days passed. But I had conceived the ambition when I was ten. I'd had novels read to me and I wanted to be a novelist. It took me seventy years.
Presenter asks
1:55Was [writing about romance in middle age] difficult to write about?
Not at all. It was lovely to remember.
Presenter asks
5:16Tell me about why you care so deeply about village life. What do you feel are its strengths?
There was this very gentle sort of slope of social standing that had the squire at the top before the First World War. It was that breed of village land owners whose sons went and were all killed, so they were wiped out, really, at the end of the First World War. But then there were the farmers, the rich farmers, and then the smaller farmers, and then the small holders, and then the labourers, and so on down to the people who served them. So what were the strengths then of that set up? That everybody was interdependent. And there was a sense of history, and everybody knew their place. Yes. And yet you were all part of a tribe, if you like. Yes, a Fenland tribe. There is a quite distinct dividing line between the Fens.
The keepsakes
The book
Mark Twain
a book I could never get tired of, and a book in which I'd find something new every time I read it, and also I could hear Dad's voice reading it to me when I was only eight or so.
The luxury
inexhaustible supply of beautifully laundered Swiss lawn handkerchiefs
without which I can't go to sleep. I have to have a clean handkerchief in my hand because I can't go to sleep without one.
Presenter asks
12:55Does that [the propriety that kept you from knowing about your baby] make you very angry?
Not in my family. I know it was only done because they loved me too much. They thought it would be better for me. I think if we'd had any claims to nobility at all. Our motto would have been Emerson's words Laugh often and Love Much.
Presenter asks
24:28Can you describe to me that moment of meeting [the man you've spent your life with]?
Well, it was the most extraordinary thing. THE most romantic novelist ever couldn't have really thought up the circumstances, I'm sure. The writer, Henry Trees, was coming to do a lecture for me, and he had to let me down. And he said, Can I send the substitute? And he did. And by this extraordinary chance of sort of fish hooks, one thing catching on to another, we found ourselves that is, myself and the visiting lecturer, at a blind date at a university ball, and we had both been deserted by the people who'd taken us, and I uh hung about in the ladies' room, waiting for my lady escorted with whom I had gone. And he was hanging about in the hall waiting for his escort. And in the end I thought, I'm I've had enough of this. I'm going down. So I went down the stairs, all in my evening gown. I happened to have one. That's a strange thing. And when I got about four steps from the bottom, he moved forward and put out his hand. And we just recognised each other. I put my hand in it. And there was a completely empty ballroom because the b the students were all having their supper. And there was the band. I said, I haven't been on the dance floor for twenty five years. He said, neither have I. Let's go and see if we can still do it. And we had the ballroom to ourselves, and they were playing all the silly songs. But it's a gorgeous thing to waltz to. I'm shy, Mary Ellen, I'm shy. And that was that. It was instant friendship. Instant friendship. As if we were emotional twins, as if we could read each other's thoughts at once.
Presenter asks
31:29What ambitions have you got left to fulfil?
Oh, at eighty, oh, so many. But I had three, and they were to be able to dance a Viennese waltz again, because I'd been eight years bent double on elbow crutches, and I wanted to be able to dance again, and I'm going to on my birthday this year. I'm going to achieve that one. Another one was to see my name on the novel, as I've told you, and I've done that. And the last one I fear is the one I probably shan't achieve, but I want to die in Cambridge Scarlet as a doctor of Cambridge University.
“I leaned over and kissed her. And of course she was very cold, and she sank. The horror of the moment I've got thrills going up my spine at the moment, and goose pimples, I can never really forget. I thought it was my fault.”
“I could not ask those children to do anything that they wouldn't attempt.”
“We don't just double each other. We square each other at the base of a geometrical progression.”
“I must have been born like Beatrice, born under a lucky star instead of a dancing one.”
“I want to die in Cambridge Scarlet as a doctor of Cambridge University.”