Desert Island Discs interview (1983)
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sutcliff_spaceThis interview by Roy Plomley is an episode of BBC Radio's long-running programme Desert Island Discs, broadcast on 1 October 1983. Each episode covers the guest's life and the eight records they'd prefer to be marooned with. Sutcliff's interview followed the 1983 publication of her memoir Blue Remembered Hills and draws largely on it, as well as Plomley's standard questions for writers and other castaways. You can listen to the interview on the BBC site or your usual purveyor of podcasts, under Desert Island Discs Archive 1981-1985. It's about 30 minutes long. I do recommend it; she has a rather soothing voice! A transcript is below.
Note: I posted a raw transcript of this interview on LiveJournal in 2014 (part 1, part 2, part 3). This version has been corrected and lightly edited.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS INTERVIEW
Q: This week our castaway is the writer of children’s books Rosemary Sutcliff, and I’m talking to her in her house in a Sussex village. Is Sussex your native country?
A: No, to my shame I have to admit that I was born in Surrey. But I count myself as a West Country woman, as a Devonshire woman.
Q: Is music important in your life?
A: Yes, I think so. But I’m not musical, I don’t know a thing about how it works. I’m one of those dreadful people who “know what they like.”
Q: Did you have any plan in choosing these eight pieces of music, that may have to last a long, long time?
A: Not really. I chiefly just chose the eight that – well, eight of I suppose about twenty – of the ones I love best of all.
Q: What’s the first one?
A: The New World Symphony.
Q: Dvořák. Yes, why did you choose that?
A: Chiefly just because I love it. It’s very exciting I find. I have a great fondness for, not American films as such, any kind of American films, but I love the good old-fashioned cowboy films. And I think I always get the same kind of feeling from this as I do from a really good cowboy film.
Q: Part of the third movement of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, From the New World. The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by István Kertész. So, you were born in Surrey; your father was a sailor.
A: Yes, he happened to be at the Admiralty at the time.
Q: You’re an only child?
A: Yes.
Q: You have a gift for recalling events in your very, very early childhood, haven’t you?
A: Yes I think I have.
Q: How far back can you go?
A: My very first memory I was only eighteen months old. And we know that it was so because I was never in Poole Park, which was the place that it happened, again until I was seven. The thing was that I was taken for a walk – I was taken along a path, and I came out from the narrowness of this path into an open space, where there were things in cages. Notably a squirrel, restlessly sort of wandering round and round his cage, obviously with a headache. And all the injustices and sorrows of the world broke over my head for the first time at that sight, and I broke forth into bellows of fear and had to be removed from the park.
Q: And you could recall that.
A: I could recall that. Quite clearly. And as we all forgot it, until after I was grown up something triggered the memory, and I said to my mother “Did this actually happen,” and she sort of said, “We think,” and then realized it had. So it can’t have have been one of those things which were just told about.
Q: Being in the Royal Navy, your father had to move about, so you and your mother moved with him, some of the time, to various military establishments in the south of England.
A: Yes, and to Malta, when I was very small.
Q: When you were still very young, you had the misfortune to acquire a form of juvenile arthritis, which has plagued you all your life. The idea of Malta was that the hot climate would help you. Did it?
A: No, I don’t think so, but I’m glad I went all the same.
Q: What do you remember about it?
A: Oh, little sort of cameos. I remember branches of an orange tree hanging over a wall. And I remember the people coming and going in the streets. Four kinds of people in particular: priests, who I remember as wearing lace petticoats. You know one’s memory is a little kind of peculiar at that age – I was only about three. Goats, usually with a paper bag hanging out of their mouths, because they sort of ate anything and everything, and used to be milked on the doorstep, which was a great way of spreading Malta fever, I believe. Sailors of course, everywhere. And in those days still a great many women wearing the faldetta, which I don’t suppose you would ever see in Malta nowadays, which was a very becoming headdress.
Q: One of the results of your sad illness was having to move around some of the time in a strange vehicle which is now, fortunately, virtually unknown: a spinal carriage. Can you describe that horrible thing?
A: Well it was rather like a wicker coffin. It was very uncomfortable, and you lay flat out in this thing, and of course all you could see were the branches of the trees or the roofs of the houses going by overhead. And it was extremely boring. With any luck you were perhaps allowed to sit up on the way home from a walk.
Q: Let’s have your second record.
A: Well my second record dates really I suppose from those days, and because of having a father who was a sailor. “For those in peril on the sea” – it’s part of life if you’re to do with the Navy, and we had it at his funeral, actually, too.
Q: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”. A Cornish recording by the Holman Climax Male Voice Choir and the Mabe Ladies Choir. Disabled as you were, Rosemary, were you able to go to school?
A: I didn’t go for a very long time because of traipsing around so much. My mother used to educate me herself, chiefly by just reading to me the books that she liked. But I did go to school, and I’ve always been very thankful that I went to an ordinary school, I never got incarcerated with other disabled children.
Q: And I suppose you read a lot.
A: Yes, well chiefly I had read to me, which is a thing I love, to this day. And I didn’t learn to read for myself until I was very old. Me and Kipling, we were both nine before we could read. But this I think was because my mother read aloud to me so much, and this I loved very very much.
Q: Did you listen to the radio?
A: Yes. Children’s Hour.
Q: Now, in your book about your childhood, Blue Remembered Hills, you write about your loneliness. Curiously, your parents didn’t seem to trouble to find other children for you to talk to, to have around in the home.
A: No they didn’t, and this is odd, because they were very understanding; nobody could have had nicer parents. But they were very sufficient unto themselves. Neither of them seemed to want a social life themselves, and I think it honestly never occurred to them that a child growing up and going through its teens required other young people.
Q: During that time were you having treatment, were you having to go into hospital from time to time?
A: Yes, that used to be the one place where I did meet young children, children of my own age. And of course at school. But I was never allowed to bring friends home.
Q: Is it a disease for which nowadays treatment has improved enormously?
A: Oh yes it has improved enormously, but there still isn’t, you know, an unlimited amount that can be done about it. Some children are very much more lucky than others.
Q: You were able to move around all right, I mean you could travel. Sometimes you were in your chair, but you could be taken in trains and that sort of thing.
A: Oh yes, I’ve always been sort of carted around the world, and gone to things and done things.
Q: Your next record.
A: I would like Après-midi d’un faune. I don’t quite know why; it just does things, it trickles up and down my spine, and I suppose it’s very sensual, but I do love it.
Q: Debussy’s Prelude, L’Après-midi d’un faune. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. When you were I think about fourteen, you went to art school.
A: Yes, I left school, which one could do at fourteen in those days, and put in three years at art school.
Q: Which form of art attracted you most?
A: Well I did the general art course – painting in oils and watercolours and, you know, making charcoal drawings of the Apollo Belvedere from the north, south, east, and west.
Q: Of course, yes. And you set up as a miniaturist. Did you find commissions coming in?
A: Yes I did. In the war I had quite a lot of work to do. Quite often rather sadly from photographs of young soldiers who weren’t coming back, and things of that sort.
Q: Where were you living at this point?
A: In north Devon. My father had gone back into the Navy.
Q: Did you work at home?
A: Yes. And also at the local art school; I was allowed to use a room.
Q: Did you enjoy it?
A: I enjoyed it, but I found miniature painting cramping.
Q: You did very well at it; you exhibited at the Royal Academy.
A: I was a good craftsman – but I always had this feeling of having my elbows tucked too close to my sides when I was doing it.
Q: Why did you give it up? I mean, to do what?
A: Well I gave it up to write. I think for this very reason, that I began to feel that I’d got to do something to break out. And I could write as big as ever I wanted to. I could use an enormous canvas if I wanted to.
Q: Had you written as a child, had you written stories?
A: No. No, I wasn’t at all sort of writing-minded at school.
Q: How did it start, what did you want to write?
A: I don’t even know, I just wanted to write. And I sort of scribbled happily most of the time through the war.
Q: What did you scribble about?
A: Oh, it was quite dreadful. It was rather a mixture of Jeffrey Farnol and, oh, Georgette Heyer? They’re both good writers, but I took the worst elements from both of them.
Q: It was history that fascinated you the most.
A: It was history that fascinated me.
Q: So, what happened, did you send your stories away to anybody?
A: No, I never even thought about getting them published; I wrote purely for my own pleasure. And then, about the end of the war, I did a retelling of some British legends. Sent them to an old friend, sort of to see whether he thought they were any good. Because you can never show things that matter very deeply to your own family.
Q: Yes, that’s strangely true.
A: So I sent them off to this old friend, Colonel Crookenden, and he, unknown to me, had a friend who had married into the Oxford University Press. So he sort of passed these scripts along to her, and sort of said, “Show these to your husband.” And the very first thing I knew about was I had a letter from the Oxford University Press saying they didn’t want them, which was a surprise to me as I didn’t know they’d got them. And saying would I try doing a Robin Hood for them instead. So I did a Robin Hood, and that was how I became launched as a writer.
Q: So there you were, a published author. It was about that time that romance came into your life.
A: Yes. My one and only boyfriend, who I had two separate love affairs with, but the same chap both times. He was a sergeant pilot – bomber pilot – just out of the war, with, oh, they used to call it shell-shock. I think now they call it combat fatigue. Anyhow he was the sort of person who had permanently dilated pupils and shot out of his chair if anybody slammed a door. And we had a lovely two years, sort of very gentle love affair.
Q: It was your decision not to marry him?
A: I don’t honestly know whose decision it was; the situation became impossible, my own family was so against it, and everything. And I think people’s feelings were very different in those days to what they are now, about anybody with a disability being allowed to have any emotions. And neither of us were very grown up – even Rupert wasn’t very grown up – and we just couldn’t cope. So that was that.
Q: Another record.
A: Yes, well it was the one that everybody was singing and whistling just at the time that Rupert was around: Ivor Novello’s “We’ll Gather Lilacs.”
Q: Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, “We’ll Gather Lilacs” from Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream. So there you were, Rosemary, a published author – well you’d published one book. What happened next?
A: Well, I just went on writing. And I produced about three books which I very much enjoyed writing, but which were very much for little girls. And they all had sort of, rather “more in sorrow than in anger” reviews.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: Well, I think the reviewers thought they were quite pretty and sweet, but much too sweet. And obviously thought I was just going on like this, sort of “Oh my God, forever more and more of these books are going to come out.” And then after about three I began to find my own voice, very slowly.
Q: How many books have you published so far?
A: Well I think my most recent one was my forty-third.
Q: That’s a lot of books! And they’re all historical.
A: They’re all historical. I don’t think I could write a modern one; I don’t know how.
Q: Now, they’re really falling into two categories: they’re set either before the Norman conquest, or in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Never about the Middle Ages.
A: I can’t write about the Middle Ages. It’s not that I’m not interested; I love reading about the Middle Ages. I think I can’t accept the way that religion permeated everything. The tremendous stranglehold that religion had on people’s minds and consciences. I can’t take this.
Q: In which period do you feel most at home?
A: I think in Roman Britain. I always feel it’s perhaps a little shameful to be quite so at home with the Romans, because they really were a very bourgeois lot, but I do feel very at home with them; I feel, “Here I am back at home again” when I get back into a Roman story.
Q: Do you really feel at home to the extent of believing in reincarnation or having any feeling that “I’ve been here before”?
A: I do get feelings I’ve been here before. I think I do believe in reincarnation; I hope I do, because I think it’s the one thing that makes sense, that makes for justice and a really sensible pattern to life.
Q: How do you work, do you write in longhand, do you dictate?
A: I write in longhand. I can only create from the top of my head, down my right arm, and out of the point of my pen.
Q: Do you work regular hours?
A: No. Too many things happen all the time. I begin work usually the middle of the morning, and I work on and off, as opportunity offers, until say seven o’clock, sort of supper time. But so many things happen through the day that quite often I only get an hour’s work in, and sometimes I’ve done a whole seven solid hours.
Q: How do you set about your research, do you go down to the local library, do you get books sent to you?
A: I get things from the local library. I also belong to the London Library. I am quite shameless about writing to people – you know, people who know about breeding horses or whatever it is I want to know about, and asking a particular question. And people are usually very kind about sharing their own expertise with you.
Q: Your detail is meticulous. I mean, the buckles of a centurion’s belt are described, and I’m sure they’re right.
A: I think so, I hope so. I hope they’re right; I take great pains that they should be right!
Q: You go to museums?
A: Yes. And of course again I’ve got quite a lot of books on things like the buckles of centurions’ belts. I do rely very much also on this feeling, “does this smell right,” does it have the right feel to it.
Q: Do you get letters, have you ever made any error of which you were ashamed, of which a lot of students wrote and said, “look, you haven’t done this right”?
A: I’ve never had anything that a lot of people have written to me about. But I have once or twice made an error, which has almost invariably been picked up by a sixth form schoolboy. Sixth form schoolboys are dreadful; they know so much!
Q: Right. Record number five.
A: This I think is perhaps to do with the kind of book I write. It’s “The Flowers of the Forest”, played on the pipes.
Q: The lament “The Flowers of the Forest”, played by the pipes and drums of the First Battalion of the Scots Guards. Do you have any Scottish roots, Rosemary?
A: Not as far as we know. I think I’m pure Saxon – dull Saxon – but I’ve always had this feel for Celtic, particularly Scottish, things and ways of thought.
Q: Well your latest novel of course is a Scots subject, Bonnie Dundee. And you’ve been up to Edinburgh to launch it yourself.
A: Yes.
Q: Your hero tells his story in the first person in Scots dialect. You were taking a chance in presenting that to the Scots!
A: Well, I served quite a good apprenticeship to that. For years I wrote scripts for Radio Scotland, for their school broadcasts – little plays, twenty minute plays. And the producer, who later became a great friend, who I worked with, was actually herself a Sassenach, but she’d married into Scotland, she’d lived in Scotland her whole life, and she taught me exactly how to write the lowland Scots. And also the difference between the lowland Scots and the highland way of speech. So I think this came in very useful – though of course it’s not as broad, the use that I’ve made of it in Bonnie Dundee.
Q: I’ve dipped into about a dozen of your books, and they seem to have one thing in common: they’re told from a male point of view.
A: Yes, that’s funny, because I don’t think I’m a particularly masculine kind of woman. But I can’t write about girls from the inside.
Q: You have all these virile heroes, but they never chase girls.
A: No; they’re not queer, either. But they’re usually too busy being soldiers, career soldiers, or warriors or something.
Q: There is a virtually complete absence of sexual encounter; is this because you’re writing for children?
A: I don’t think so; I don’t honestly know why, it’s just happened that way.
Q: It does mean that, surely, that there’s nobody for girl readers to identify with.
A: That doesn’t seem to worry them. They usually identify with the boys, quite happily.
Q: Now a few of your books, a very few, just three or four, are labelled adult. Does that mean that sex does rear its ugly head there?
A: Yes it does.
Q: What age do you write for?
A: Nine to ninety.
Q: Do you find that having got a customer at school, he stays with you?
A: Sometimes he grows out of me in his middle teens, but then he will grow back into me again in his early twenties.
Q: Well, that’s comforting.
A: It’s nice, isn’t it?
Q: What are we going to have next? We’ve got to record number six.
A: We’re going to have, please, Under Milk Wood, the only record I’ve chosen which isn’t music – well, even that’s mostly a song. But I love this; I discovered Dylan Thomas, I suppose not more than ten years ago, but he was one of the lovely discoveries of my life.
Q: An excerpt from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas; “Polly Garter’s Song” sung by Diana Maddox, and we heard, very briefly, Richard Burton as the narrator. Now going back to your books, do you construct a framework before you start, or do you hit on an incident to get you going and then see what happens?
A: No, I get an idea to start with. Never a plot, I’m not very strong on plots, but a theme, which grows from the idea. And I do have a certain amount of framework; I’ve got to know how I’m going to get from the beginning to the end, and a few ports of call on the way.
Q: Do you write to a standard length, do you know how long a book’s going to be?
A: No, I find that a book takes its own time and gets to its own proper ending place. But it would tend to take about the same time, perhaps eighty, ninety thousand words, something like that.
Q: Yes. How many drafts do you write, ordinarily?
A: Three.
Q: That’s your set rule, is it?
A: Yes. Occasionally just a piece of the story will need an extra draft or even two. I have written as many as eight. But normally three drafts will do it.
Q: And then the last one is a polish.
A: The last one is a polish, which is delightful to do.
Q: What’s your next book going to be, what’s the period?
A: Well it’s only a very little book, but I hope it’s going to be all right. But it’s about this part of the world, Sussex, with a smuggling background.
Q: That sounds fun.
A: I hope so.
Q: Record number seven, we’ve got to; what’s that?
A: The Lark Ascending, which I’ve always had a great fondness for even before I came to Sussex, but it does express Sussex very much for me – the Downs. But it expresses England altogether. If I was homesick on my desert island, I would put The Lark Ascending on and I would have England.
Q: An excerpt from The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams. The Boyd Neel Orchestra with Frederick Grinke as solo violinist. You particularly wanted that performance.
A: Yes. It’s always seemed to me that none of the later performances, however gorgeous they are, have quite caught the lark as Frederick Grinke did. You really feel it soaring into the sky when he plays.
Q: Now, we’ve put you on this desert island. We want to make things as easy as we can for you; you’ll find a ready-built hut – can you fish?
A: I’ve never – yes I have tried; when I was five I went fishing with my father, and I couldn’t think at the time [why] I didn’t catch anything, till I realized when I was seven that the safety pin was shut up. And that was my only experience of fishing.
Q: It does make a difference! Do you cook?
A: Not really.
Q: If we gave you a boat ready-rigged, could you sail it?
A: I don’t think I’d try. I think I’d stay very firmly put on my desert island, feeling that one palm tree is very like another, and better the palm tree you know.
Q: That’s a very reasonable point of view. We’ve got now to your last record.
A: Can I have Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, please. It’s got this wonderful hopeful feeling. Again, it’s a soaring-upward piece of music. It’s sort of the resurrection, everything going upward into the sky.
Q: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring from Bach’s number one four seven, the choir of King’s College conducted by David Wilcox. If you could take only one disc of the eight, which should it be?
A: I think The Lark Ascending.
Q: And one luxury, any one object that would give you comfort and pleasure to have about, but it’s of no practical use.
A: Can I have my dogs?
Q: No, alas, alas, it must be inanimate.
A: Can I have fresh flowers delivered daily by bottle, fresh flowers?
Q: I don’t see why not; what sort of flowers?
A: Oh, long-stem florist’s roses and, you know, whatever is suitable for the time of year.
Q: Yes, we’ll arrange that. Difficult, but it can be arranged. And one book. You already have the authorised edition of the Bible and and the complete works of Shakespeare.
A: Can I have Kim, please. It would have to be Kim or Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and Kim is longer.
Q: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. You shall have it handsomely bound, and thank you, Rosemary Sutcliff, for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Note: I posted a raw transcript of this interview on LiveJournal in 2014 (part 1, part 2, part 3). This version has been corrected and lightly edited.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS INTERVIEW
Q: This week our castaway is the writer of children’s books Rosemary Sutcliff, and I’m talking to her in her house in a Sussex village. Is Sussex your native country?
A: No, to my shame I have to admit that I was born in Surrey. But I count myself as a West Country woman, as a Devonshire woman.
Q: Is music important in your life?
A: Yes, I think so. But I’m not musical, I don’t know a thing about how it works. I’m one of those dreadful people who “know what they like.”
Q: Did you have any plan in choosing these eight pieces of music, that may have to last a long, long time?
A: Not really. I chiefly just chose the eight that – well, eight of I suppose about twenty – of the ones I love best of all.
Q: What’s the first one?
A: The New World Symphony.
Q: Dvořák. Yes, why did you choose that?
A: Chiefly just because I love it. It’s very exciting I find. I have a great fondness for, not American films as such, any kind of American films, but I love the good old-fashioned cowboy films. And I think I always get the same kind of feeling from this as I do from a really good cowboy film.
Q: Part of the third movement of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, From the New World. The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by István Kertész. So, you were born in Surrey; your father was a sailor.
A: Yes, he happened to be at the Admiralty at the time.
Q: You’re an only child?
A: Yes.
Q: You have a gift for recalling events in your very, very early childhood, haven’t you?
A: Yes I think I have.
Q: How far back can you go?
A: My very first memory I was only eighteen months old. And we know that it was so because I was never in Poole Park, which was the place that it happened, again until I was seven. The thing was that I was taken for a walk – I was taken along a path, and I came out from the narrowness of this path into an open space, where there were things in cages. Notably a squirrel, restlessly sort of wandering round and round his cage, obviously with a headache. And all the injustices and sorrows of the world broke over my head for the first time at that sight, and I broke forth into bellows of fear and had to be removed from the park.
Q: And you could recall that.
A: I could recall that. Quite clearly. And as we all forgot it, until after I was grown up something triggered the memory, and I said to my mother “Did this actually happen,” and she sort of said, “We think,” and then realized it had. So it can’t have have been one of those things which were just told about.
Q: Being in the Royal Navy, your father had to move about, so you and your mother moved with him, some of the time, to various military establishments in the south of England.
A: Yes, and to Malta, when I was very small.
Q: When you were still very young, you had the misfortune to acquire a form of juvenile arthritis, which has plagued you all your life. The idea of Malta was that the hot climate would help you. Did it?
A: No, I don’t think so, but I’m glad I went all the same.
Q: What do you remember about it?
A: Oh, little sort of cameos. I remember branches of an orange tree hanging over a wall. And I remember the people coming and going in the streets. Four kinds of people in particular: priests, who I remember as wearing lace petticoats. You know one’s memory is a little kind of peculiar at that age – I was only about three. Goats, usually with a paper bag hanging out of their mouths, because they sort of ate anything and everything, and used to be milked on the doorstep, which was a great way of spreading Malta fever, I believe. Sailors of course, everywhere. And in those days still a great many women wearing the faldetta, which I don’t suppose you would ever see in Malta nowadays, which was a very becoming headdress.
Q: One of the results of your sad illness was having to move around some of the time in a strange vehicle which is now, fortunately, virtually unknown: a spinal carriage. Can you describe that horrible thing?
A: Well it was rather like a wicker coffin. It was very uncomfortable, and you lay flat out in this thing, and of course all you could see were the branches of the trees or the roofs of the houses going by overhead. And it was extremely boring. With any luck you were perhaps allowed to sit up on the way home from a walk.
Q: Let’s have your second record.
A: Well my second record dates really I suppose from those days, and because of having a father who was a sailor. “For those in peril on the sea” – it’s part of life if you’re to do with the Navy, and we had it at his funeral, actually, too.
Q: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”. A Cornish recording by the Holman Climax Male Voice Choir and the Mabe Ladies Choir. Disabled as you were, Rosemary, were you able to go to school?
A: I didn’t go for a very long time because of traipsing around so much. My mother used to educate me herself, chiefly by just reading to me the books that she liked. But I did go to school, and I’ve always been very thankful that I went to an ordinary school, I never got incarcerated with other disabled children.
Q: And I suppose you read a lot.
A: Yes, well chiefly I had read to me, which is a thing I love, to this day. And I didn’t learn to read for myself until I was very old. Me and Kipling, we were both nine before we could read. But this I think was because my mother read aloud to me so much, and this I loved very very much.
Q: Did you listen to the radio?
A: Yes. Children’s Hour.
Q: Now, in your book about your childhood, Blue Remembered Hills, you write about your loneliness. Curiously, your parents didn’t seem to trouble to find other children for you to talk to, to have around in the home.
A: No they didn’t, and this is odd, because they were very understanding; nobody could have had nicer parents. But they were very sufficient unto themselves. Neither of them seemed to want a social life themselves, and I think it honestly never occurred to them that a child growing up and going through its teens required other young people.
Q: During that time were you having treatment, were you having to go into hospital from time to time?
A: Yes, that used to be the one place where I did meet young children, children of my own age. And of course at school. But I was never allowed to bring friends home.
Q: Is it a disease for which nowadays treatment has improved enormously?
A: Oh yes it has improved enormously, but there still isn’t, you know, an unlimited amount that can be done about it. Some children are very much more lucky than others.
Q: You were able to move around all right, I mean you could travel. Sometimes you were in your chair, but you could be taken in trains and that sort of thing.
A: Oh yes, I’ve always been sort of carted around the world, and gone to things and done things.
Q: Your next record.
A: I would like Après-midi d’un faune. I don’t quite know why; it just does things, it trickles up and down my spine, and I suppose it’s very sensual, but I do love it.
Q: Debussy’s Prelude, L’Après-midi d’un faune. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. When you were I think about fourteen, you went to art school.
A: Yes, I left school, which one could do at fourteen in those days, and put in three years at art school.
Q: Which form of art attracted you most?
A: Well I did the general art course – painting in oils and watercolours and, you know, making charcoal drawings of the Apollo Belvedere from the north, south, east, and west.
Q: Of course, yes. And you set up as a miniaturist. Did you find commissions coming in?
A: Yes I did. In the war I had quite a lot of work to do. Quite often rather sadly from photographs of young soldiers who weren’t coming back, and things of that sort.
Q: Where were you living at this point?
A: In north Devon. My father had gone back into the Navy.
Q: Did you work at home?
A: Yes. And also at the local art school; I was allowed to use a room.
Q: Did you enjoy it?
A: I enjoyed it, but I found miniature painting cramping.
Q: You did very well at it; you exhibited at the Royal Academy.
A: I was a good craftsman – but I always had this feeling of having my elbows tucked too close to my sides when I was doing it.
Q: Why did you give it up? I mean, to do what?
A: Well I gave it up to write. I think for this very reason, that I began to feel that I’d got to do something to break out. And I could write as big as ever I wanted to. I could use an enormous canvas if I wanted to.
Q: Had you written as a child, had you written stories?
A: No. No, I wasn’t at all sort of writing-minded at school.
Q: How did it start, what did you want to write?
A: I don’t even know, I just wanted to write. And I sort of scribbled happily most of the time through the war.
Q: What did you scribble about?
A: Oh, it was quite dreadful. It was rather a mixture of Jeffrey Farnol and, oh, Georgette Heyer? They’re both good writers, but I took the worst elements from both of them.
Q: It was history that fascinated you the most.
A: It was history that fascinated me.
Q: So, what happened, did you send your stories away to anybody?
A: No, I never even thought about getting them published; I wrote purely for my own pleasure. And then, about the end of the war, I did a retelling of some British legends. Sent them to an old friend, sort of to see whether he thought they were any good. Because you can never show things that matter very deeply to your own family.
Q: Yes, that’s strangely true.
A: So I sent them off to this old friend, Colonel Crookenden, and he, unknown to me, had a friend who had married into the Oxford University Press. So he sort of passed these scripts along to her, and sort of said, “Show these to your husband.” And the very first thing I knew about was I had a letter from the Oxford University Press saying they didn’t want them, which was a surprise to me as I didn’t know they’d got them. And saying would I try doing a Robin Hood for them instead. So I did a Robin Hood, and that was how I became launched as a writer.
Q: So there you were, a published author. It was about that time that romance came into your life.
A: Yes. My one and only boyfriend, who I had two separate love affairs with, but the same chap both times. He was a sergeant pilot – bomber pilot – just out of the war, with, oh, they used to call it shell-shock. I think now they call it combat fatigue. Anyhow he was the sort of person who had permanently dilated pupils and shot out of his chair if anybody slammed a door. And we had a lovely two years, sort of very gentle love affair.
Q: It was your decision not to marry him?
A: I don’t honestly know whose decision it was; the situation became impossible, my own family was so against it, and everything. And I think people’s feelings were very different in those days to what they are now, about anybody with a disability being allowed to have any emotions. And neither of us were very grown up – even Rupert wasn’t very grown up – and we just couldn’t cope. So that was that.
Q: Another record.
A: Yes, well it was the one that everybody was singing and whistling just at the time that Rupert was around: Ivor Novello’s “We’ll Gather Lilacs.”
Q: Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, “We’ll Gather Lilacs” from Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream. So there you were, Rosemary, a published author – well you’d published one book. What happened next?
A: Well, I just went on writing. And I produced about three books which I very much enjoyed writing, but which were very much for little girls. And they all had sort of, rather “more in sorrow than in anger” reviews.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: Well, I think the reviewers thought they were quite pretty and sweet, but much too sweet. And obviously thought I was just going on like this, sort of “Oh my God, forever more and more of these books are going to come out.” And then after about three I began to find my own voice, very slowly.
Q: How many books have you published so far?
A: Well I think my most recent one was my forty-third.
Q: That’s a lot of books! And they’re all historical.
A: They’re all historical. I don’t think I could write a modern one; I don’t know how.
Q: Now, they’re really falling into two categories: they’re set either before the Norman conquest, or in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Never about the Middle Ages.
A: I can’t write about the Middle Ages. It’s not that I’m not interested; I love reading about the Middle Ages. I think I can’t accept the way that religion permeated everything. The tremendous stranglehold that religion had on people’s minds and consciences. I can’t take this.
Q: In which period do you feel most at home?
A: I think in Roman Britain. I always feel it’s perhaps a little shameful to be quite so at home with the Romans, because they really were a very bourgeois lot, but I do feel very at home with them; I feel, “Here I am back at home again” when I get back into a Roman story.
Q: Do you really feel at home to the extent of believing in reincarnation or having any feeling that “I’ve been here before”?
A: I do get feelings I’ve been here before. I think I do believe in reincarnation; I hope I do, because I think it’s the one thing that makes sense, that makes for justice and a really sensible pattern to life.
Q: How do you work, do you write in longhand, do you dictate?
A: I write in longhand. I can only create from the top of my head, down my right arm, and out of the point of my pen.
Q: Do you work regular hours?
A: No. Too many things happen all the time. I begin work usually the middle of the morning, and I work on and off, as opportunity offers, until say seven o’clock, sort of supper time. But so many things happen through the day that quite often I only get an hour’s work in, and sometimes I’ve done a whole seven solid hours.
Q: How do you set about your research, do you go down to the local library, do you get books sent to you?
A: I get things from the local library. I also belong to the London Library. I am quite shameless about writing to people – you know, people who know about breeding horses or whatever it is I want to know about, and asking a particular question. And people are usually very kind about sharing their own expertise with you.
Q: Your detail is meticulous. I mean, the buckles of a centurion’s belt are described, and I’m sure they’re right.
A: I think so, I hope so. I hope they’re right; I take great pains that they should be right!
Q: You go to museums?
A: Yes. And of course again I’ve got quite a lot of books on things like the buckles of centurions’ belts. I do rely very much also on this feeling, “does this smell right,” does it have the right feel to it.
Q: Do you get letters, have you ever made any error of which you were ashamed, of which a lot of students wrote and said, “look, you haven’t done this right”?
A: I’ve never had anything that a lot of people have written to me about. But I have once or twice made an error, which has almost invariably been picked up by a sixth form schoolboy. Sixth form schoolboys are dreadful; they know so much!
Q: Right. Record number five.
A: This I think is perhaps to do with the kind of book I write. It’s “The Flowers of the Forest”, played on the pipes.
Q: The lament “The Flowers of the Forest”, played by the pipes and drums of the First Battalion of the Scots Guards. Do you have any Scottish roots, Rosemary?
A: Not as far as we know. I think I’m pure Saxon – dull Saxon – but I’ve always had this feel for Celtic, particularly Scottish, things and ways of thought.
Q: Well your latest novel of course is a Scots subject, Bonnie Dundee. And you’ve been up to Edinburgh to launch it yourself.
A: Yes.
Q: Your hero tells his story in the first person in Scots dialect. You were taking a chance in presenting that to the Scots!
A: Well, I served quite a good apprenticeship to that. For years I wrote scripts for Radio Scotland, for their school broadcasts – little plays, twenty minute plays. And the producer, who later became a great friend, who I worked with, was actually herself a Sassenach, but she’d married into Scotland, she’d lived in Scotland her whole life, and she taught me exactly how to write the lowland Scots. And also the difference between the lowland Scots and the highland way of speech. So I think this came in very useful – though of course it’s not as broad, the use that I’ve made of it in Bonnie Dundee.
Q: I’ve dipped into about a dozen of your books, and they seem to have one thing in common: they’re told from a male point of view.
A: Yes, that’s funny, because I don’t think I’m a particularly masculine kind of woman. But I can’t write about girls from the inside.
Q: You have all these virile heroes, but they never chase girls.
A: No; they’re not queer, either. But they’re usually too busy being soldiers, career soldiers, or warriors or something.
Q: There is a virtually complete absence of sexual encounter; is this because you’re writing for children?
A: I don’t think so; I don’t honestly know why, it’s just happened that way.
Q: It does mean that, surely, that there’s nobody for girl readers to identify with.
A: That doesn’t seem to worry them. They usually identify with the boys, quite happily.
Q: Now a few of your books, a very few, just three or four, are labelled adult. Does that mean that sex does rear its ugly head there?
A: Yes it does.
Q: What age do you write for?
A: Nine to ninety.
Q: Do you find that having got a customer at school, he stays with you?
A: Sometimes he grows out of me in his middle teens, but then he will grow back into me again in his early twenties.
Q: Well, that’s comforting.
A: It’s nice, isn’t it?
Q: What are we going to have next? We’ve got to record number six.
A: We’re going to have, please, Under Milk Wood, the only record I’ve chosen which isn’t music – well, even that’s mostly a song. But I love this; I discovered Dylan Thomas, I suppose not more than ten years ago, but he was one of the lovely discoveries of my life.
Q: An excerpt from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas; “Polly Garter’s Song” sung by Diana Maddox, and we heard, very briefly, Richard Burton as the narrator. Now going back to your books, do you construct a framework before you start, or do you hit on an incident to get you going and then see what happens?
A: No, I get an idea to start with. Never a plot, I’m not very strong on plots, but a theme, which grows from the idea. And I do have a certain amount of framework; I’ve got to know how I’m going to get from the beginning to the end, and a few ports of call on the way.
Q: Do you write to a standard length, do you know how long a book’s going to be?
A: No, I find that a book takes its own time and gets to its own proper ending place. But it would tend to take about the same time, perhaps eighty, ninety thousand words, something like that.
Q: Yes. How many drafts do you write, ordinarily?
A: Three.
Q: That’s your set rule, is it?
A: Yes. Occasionally just a piece of the story will need an extra draft or even two. I have written as many as eight. But normally three drafts will do it.
Q: And then the last one is a polish.
A: The last one is a polish, which is delightful to do.
Q: What’s your next book going to be, what’s the period?
A: Well it’s only a very little book, but I hope it’s going to be all right. But it’s about this part of the world, Sussex, with a smuggling background.
Q: That sounds fun.
A: I hope so.
Q: Record number seven, we’ve got to; what’s that?
A: The Lark Ascending, which I’ve always had a great fondness for even before I came to Sussex, but it does express Sussex very much for me – the Downs. But it expresses England altogether. If I was homesick on my desert island, I would put The Lark Ascending on and I would have England.
Q: An excerpt from The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams. The Boyd Neel Orchestra with Frederick Grinke as solo violinist. You particularly wanted that performance.
A: Yes. It’s always seemed to me that none of the later performances, however gorgeous they are, have quite caught the lark as Frederick Grinke did. You really feel it soaring into the sky when he plays.
Q: Now, we’ve put you on this desert island. We want to make things as easy as we can for you; you’ll find a ready-built hut – can you fish?
A: I’ve never – yes I have tried; when I was five I went fishing with my father, and I couldn’t think at the time [why] I didn’t catch anything, till I realized when I was seven that the safety pin was shut up. And that was my only experience of fishing.
Q: It does make a difference! Do you cook?
A: Not really.
Q: If we gave you a boat ready-rigged, could you sail it?
A: I don’t think I’d try. I think I’d stay very firmly put on my desert island, feeling that one palm tree is very like another, and better the palm tree you know.
Q: That’s a very reasonable point of view. We’ve got now to your last record.
A: Can I have Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, please. It’s got this wonderful hopeful feeling. Again, it’s a soaring-upward piece of music. It’s sort of the resurrection, everything going upward into the sky.
Q: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring from Bach’s number one four seven, the choir of King’s College conducted by David Wilcox. If you could take only one disc of the eight, which should it be?
A: I think The Lark Ascending.
Q: And one luxury, any one object that would give you comfort and pleasure to have about, but it’s of no practical use.
A: Can I have my dogs?
Q: No, alas, alas, it must be inanimate.
A: Can I have fresh flowers delivered daily by bottle, fresh flowers?
Q: I don’t see why not; what sort of flowers?
A: Oh, long-stem florist’s roses and, you know, whatever is suitable for the time of year.
Q: Yes, we’ll arrange that. Difficult, but it can be arranged. And one book. You already have the authorised edition of the Bible and and the complete works of Shakespeare.
A: Can I have Kim, please. It would have to be Kim or Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and Kim is longer.
Q: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. You shall have it handsomely bound, and thank you, Rosemary Sutcliff, for letting us hear your desert island discs.
