Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet who began writing at 50, became a popular, wryly compassionate voice and a poet laureate candidate.
On the island
Eight records
Come away, fellow sailors (from Dido and Aeneas)Favourite
I love this, and what I like about Purcell is the the sort of jauntiness, the gaiety, and the tremendous sadness the sailors are rejoiced to be leaving Carthage on their way to Rome but, on the other hand, it's just leading up to the most tragic piece of writing in English music, I suppose, Dido's Lament.
This goes back to the sixes and is uh every time I hear it I see the young Scylla Black, and uh probably the young me too.
Surely he hath borne our griefs (from Messiah)
Chicago Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Sir Georg Solti
This was the first piece of startling music that I came across. Just to do it with the humble little English word surely, which is saying nothing, surely, and a German handle to do it. I think it's marvellous. It startled me out of my wits then, and it still does.
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten
This is a marvellous combination of talents, I think. It the poem is by A. E. Hausmann. and it's the voice of a m dead man talking to his mate who is still alive. The music is by George Butterworth, who was killed in the First World War. And the singer is Peter Pears, who does both the dead man and the live man, and Britton, of course, at the piano.
Kathleen Ferrier, accompanied by Phyllis Spurr
sung by the incomparable Kathleen Ferrier, whom I'd have had for all eight records if I'd thought that I wouldn't be made too sad by it by the thought of such brilliant talent and such a short life.
Peter Dawson, accompanied by Gerald Moore
Oh, this is a marvellous song, I think. Schubert, the wonderful songwriter, the Earl King or the Goblin King, sung by Peter Dawson, and I love the accompaniment.
Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen (from The Magic Flute)
Irmgard Seefried and Erich Kunz, with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
I love this because the b opposite ends of the spectrum. Pamina. is the daughter of the Queen of the Night. She is a very special lady indeed. And Papagheno is the Birdman, with his extraordinary baroque costume. And uh here they are together, like Bottom and Titania. It's the same sort of combination of unlikeness that I like so much.
Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny
Roly Veitch and his Blaydon Aces
I have a great hang-up about the beautiful f songs that come from Tyneside. Rosie introduced me to these, she's a Tynesider herself. This is a f very famous Townside song, Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny, in which Geordie and Bob are sharing a bed, not um with any lubricious intent, but simply because there isn't another bed, I think, and um one is keeps knocking the other one with his sort of enthusiastic sleep. And every time he's thinking of something really beautiful about his love. It goes wrong again. It gets another thwack in the chest.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:34Why and how [did you leave teaching to work in a hospital]?
Well, in the first place, I was a person of such excruciating unimportance that um nobody really knew me, and I had to sit in what I thought of as my glass dug-out. … And this was a much more enlivening experience than anything I'd had before, because I wasn't part of the picture. I was merely a watcher.
Presenter asks
2:36Why would that [hospital experience] inspire poetry?
Because I felt so surprised myself at what the people were like, the patients, that I thought I didn't know there were peop were people like this. There must be a lot of others in the world who don't know, haven't had the kind of experience that I'm fortunate enough to have now. It was fairly harrowing, but I also felt I was lucky to have it, and it seemed important to tell people about it.
Presenter asks
8:06Did you find [teaching at Cheltenham Ladies' College] in the end less than fulfilling?
Well, I think all the time I was living on my nerves really … And all would have gone well, I think, if they hadn't made me head of department, and that went to my head. And I started sort of wanting to innovate … But then I began to get delusions of grandeur and think that I I mattered. I didn't really. … I felt also that it was a matter of listening and speaking, and that I was doing an awful lot of speaking, as I am now, and not much listening, and that listening was what I should be doing.
The keepsakes
The book
I would really like a bird recognition book about the bird life on the island.
The luxury
A real bath with soap and towels
I would think the Romans were good on bars, and I'd like to be a a Roman in that respect.
Presenter asks
13:59How did you react to [your mother's wartime anxiety]?
Um everybody else was saying careless talk costs lives and serious things like that, and it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was not let my parents know how unhappy I was. So I didn't.
Presenter asks
29:06Do the poems come easily and quickly?
Well, they can take a long time. Um the one you quoted from about my mother, Fanfair, that took four years. … Sometimes I'm in the middle of something and I know that's a lovely place to be. To be in the middle. You've got the beginning. Uh you probably know where the ending is going to be and you're there you are toiling away in the middle and it's lovely.
“I suddenly d decided to re-baptise myself and Ursula had always been a burden to me rather, because people said, What? or how do you spell it? or occasionally, Oh, I know what that means, little bear, none of which I had much cared for. So it was a kind of liberation, was it? Yes, yes, a new life, a new me.”
“I thought of my father a lot. My father had been dead quite a long time. But, as you said, he was a judge, and he was always talking about the responsibility of the witness, and I felt here I really am a witness. Nobody else is here to look at quite the things that I'm looking at.”
“I was jealous of them. And it was the sixties, a very exciting time to be young. And I wasn't old enough to feel that I was past it. I felt I could still do something. I don't want to be stuck here for the rest of my life. And the future that I saw simply consisted of going on doing the same things, probably rather less well.”
“One of the best times for thinking about what to write is actually early in the morning, and I've found other people know this too um that if you wake up at about five just stay in bed. The thoughts from the night. mixed with the thoughts of the coming day and some sometimes something will come there.”