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Episode image is a detail from the cover of Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell, published by Dutton; cover illustration by John Alcorn.
For this 24th edition of Page One, Charles Adrian takes us on a trip through his younger days and chickens out of doing an Irish accent – but how could he compete with the treacle-voiced Edna O’Brien? The music is all by Louis Armstrong and is likewise inimitable. What a treat!
The books from The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell are discussed in Page One 55.
Another book by Daphne Du Maurier, Not After Midnight, is discussed in Page One 45 and Page One 167.
This episode was recorded at the Wilton Way Café for London Fields Radio.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 26th February, 2013.
Book listing:
The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell
Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening... you're listening to London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Hello. This is Charles Adrian in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney for the 24th Page One. This is London Fields Radio. All my music today is... is by Louis Armstrong just because it is and so I'm going to start with something from 1955. This is Back Of [sic] Town Blues.
Music
[Back O' Town Blues by Louis Armstrong]
Charles Adrian
So that was Louis Armstrong with Back O' Town Blues.
My first book today is by Edna O'Brien, who at time of recording has just published a memoir called Country Girl. This is... This is her first novel. This is called The Country Girls. It's from 1960, although my copy is a Penguin edition from 1971 with most of the torso of a young woman on the front. She's naked, she's, kind of, covering her breast with her hand. This... This apparently took her three weeks to write. The memoir took her three years to write and the... and I saw an interview where she was asked which one she preferred and she simply said: “Well, three weeks is a lot easier than three years so obviously the novel... novel is the one I prefer”, which I thought was quite a good answer.
I heard Edna O'Brien reading from this book on Radio 4 when I was a teenager and she has the most wonderful reading voice. It's... It's deep and rich and beautiful. And she has... she has a gorgeous accent. I'm not going to try and emulate her in any way at all. I'm just going to read it. I'm not even going to try and do an Irish accent. I think that would be insulting. Here's... Here's the first page of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls:
I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home.
Getting out, I rested for a moment on the edge of the bed, smoothing the green satin bedspread with my hand. We had forgotten to fold it the previous night, Mama and me. Slowly I slid onto the floor and the linoleum was cold on the soles of my feet. My toes curled up instinctively. I owned slippers but Mama made me save them for when I was visiting my aunts and cousins; and we had rugs, but they were rolled up and kept in drawers until visitors came in the summertime from Dublin.
I put on my ankle socks.
There was a smell of frying bacon from the kitchen, but it didn't cheer me.
Then I went over to let up the blind. It shot up suddenly and the cord got twisted around it. It was lucky that Mama had gone downstairs, as she was always lecturing me on how to let up blinds properly, gently.
The sun was not yet up, and the lawn was speckled with daisies that were fast asleep. There was dew everywhere. The grass below my window, the hedge around it, the rusty paling wire beyond that, and the big outer field were each touched with a delicate, wandering mist. And [sic] the leaves and the trees were bathed in the mist, and the trees looked unreal, like trees in a dream. Around the forget-me-nots that sprouted out of the side of the hedge were haloes of water. Water that glistened like silver. It was quiet, it was perfectly still. There was smoke rising from the blue mountain in the distance. It would be a hot day. Seeing me at the window, Bull's-Eye came out from under...
There we go. That's the first page of The Country Girls, a book that shocked polite society when it came out in 1960. I think because there's unmarried sex in it. It's... It's... It's a lovely book. I very much recommend it.
I'm going to come on to my second track now. So this is also obviously by Louis Armstrong - a much later track. This is Louis Armstrong playing with Duke Ellington. It's from the album The... The... oh what's it called? The Great Summit, I think. Goodness. Why didn't I write that down? This... You should listen out for the... for Barney Bigard on clarinet. This is just magnificent. This is... This is Mood Indigo.
Music
[Mood Indigo by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington]
Charles Adrian
Louis Armstrong with Mood Indigo, playing with... [laughing] who did I say it was?
This... Now we're going to come to a memory from further back in my childhood.
Duke Ellington. That's who he was playing with.
The next book is My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. This is... I have a beautiful copy of this. It's a, sort of... it's in slightly Monopoly colours. I think of one of those, sort of, mid-price squares halfway round the board. It's a, sort of, magenta striped cover with... with some illustration on. It's a Penguin edition from... also from the sixties. This is from 1961. It's c... It cost three and six when it was originally published and it has a picture of Gerald Durrell wearing an extraordinary sweater inside the front cover.
Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals - the... the television adaptation - was on when I was a child and we used to watch this week after week. I've a feeling it was on at the weekend. And it was... it was such a pleasure. I'm going to read two parts of this. I'm going to read the first page of the introduction, which is called The Speech for the Defence, and then I'm going to read you the first page of the book itself. Here is The Speech for the Defence:
‘Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
The White Queen - Alice Through the Looking-Glass
This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters. It was only with the greatest difficulty, and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I could devote exclusively to animals.
I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture of my family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. To explain some of their more curious ways, however, I feel that I should state that at the time we were in Corfu the family were all quite young: Larry, the eldest, was twenty-three; Leslie was nineteen; Margot eighteen; while I was the youngest, being of the tender and impressionable age of ten. We have never been very certain of my mother's age, for the simple reason that she could never remember her date of birth; all I can say is that she was old enough to have four children. My mother also insists that I explain that she is a widow for, as she so penetratingly observed, you never know what people might think.
In order to compress five years of incident, observation, and pleasant living into something a little less lengthy than the Encyclopedia Britannica, I have been forced to telescope, prune, and graft, so there is little left of the original continuity of events. Also I have been forced to leave out...
But there, we shall never know what he was forced to leave out until we reach our own copies of this book and continue reading. I'm going to turn to the first page here of the... of the book itself:
The Migration
July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky. A sharp, stinging drizzle fell, billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth sea-front the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, froth-chained sea that leapt eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the housetops on taut wings, whining peevishly. It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone's endurance.
Considered as a group my family was not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon, for the weather had brought with it the usual selection of ills to which we were prone. For me, lying on the floor, labelling my collection of shells, it had brought catarrh, pouring it into my skull like cement, so that I was forced to breathe stertorously through open mouth. For my brother Leslie, hunched dark and glowering by the fire, it had inflamed the convolutions of his ears so that they bled delicately but persistently. To my sister Margot it had delivered a fresh dappling of acne spots to a face that was already blotched like a red veil. For my mother there was a rich, bubbling cold, and a twinge of rheumatism to season it. Only my eldest brother, Larry, was untouched, but it was sufficient that he was irritated by our failings.
It was Larry, of course, who started it. The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences. He had become increasingly irritable as the afternoon wore on. At length, glancing moodily round the room, he decided to...
I have sometimes wondered what Gerald Durrell's family thought of their portrayal in this book and... and then obviously on television in front of perhaps millions of people. They are all portrayed as... as difficult or extraordinary, odd, slightly unsocial people in a way - unfit for society. Larry was definitely my favourite when I watched the television series, partly because he was a writer. He was moody, he was handsome, he did explode around the place. He was an awful lot of fun.
I'm going to move straight on to my... to my third book, which is by Larry - or Lawrence Durrell, as he calls himself. It has a rather extraordinarily yellow colour - uncomfortably yellow, I would say - and it's published by Dutton Paperback and it's inscribed to Austen Harrison, Esq, of Lapithos in Cyprus. It's a, sort of, elegy for Cyprus. This is the first page:
Towards an Eastern Landfall
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will - whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection...
These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down through the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections, cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole colour-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colours, merging, overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of ricepaper. Fragments of history touched with the colours of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal and ripening grain. The whole at the same time being rinsed softly back at the edges into a dawn sky as softly as circumspectly blue as a pigeon's egg.
Mentally I held it all, softly as an abstract painting, cradling it in my thoughts - the whole encampment of cathedrals and palaces, against the sharply-focused face of Stendhal as he sits forever upon a stiff-backed chair at Florian's sipping wine: or on that of a Corvo, flitting like some huge fruit-bat down these light-bewitched alleys...
The pigeons swarm the belfries. I can hear their wings across the water like the beating of fans in a great summer ballroom. The vaporetto on the Grand Canal beats too, softly as a human pulse, faltering and renewing itself after every hesitation which...
I like to think that maybe Larry had an influence on... on Gerald's writing style and perhaps Gerald's influence is seen in the animals that appear in Lawrence's writing.
I'm going to come on now to my... to my third track. This is something of an oddity. This is a duet between Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. I'm not entirely sure that the two of them got on. I found a photograph once - it was a postcard - of the two of them posing for the camera and they look very tense. This is... This is Sweet Hunk Of [sic] Trash.
Music
[My Sweet Hunk O' Trash by Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday]
Charles Adrian
chapter one
It was a cold grey day in late November. The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brought a granite sky and a mizzling rain with it, and although it was now only a little after two o'clock in the afternoon the pallor of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist. It would be dark by four. The air was clammy cold, and for all the tightly closed windows it penetrated the interior of the coach. The leather seats felt damp to the hands, and there must have been a small crack in the roof, because now and again little drips of rain fell softly through, smudging the leather and leaving a dark-blue stain like a splodge of ink. The wind came in gusts, at times shaking the coach as it travelled round the bend of a [sic] road, and in the exposed places on the high ground it blew with such force that the whole body of the coach trembled and swayed, rocking between the high wheels like a drunken man.
The driver, muffled in a greatcoat to his ears, bent almost double in his seat in a faint endeavour to gain shelter from his own shoulders, while the dispirited horses plodded sullenly to his command, too broken by the wind and the rain to feel the whip that now and again cracked above their heads, while it swung between the numb fingers of the driver.
The wheels of the coach creaked and groaned as they sank into the ruts in [sic] the road, and sometimes they flung up the soft spattered mud against the windows, where it mingled with the constant driving rain, and whatever view there might have been of the countryside was hopelessly obscured.
The few passengers huddled together for warmth, exclaiming in unison when the coach sank into a heavier rut than usual, and one old fellow, who had kept up a constant complaint ever since he joined the coach at Truro, rose from his seat in a fury; and, fumbling with the window-sash, let the window down with a...
That's from Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn and that sees us shuttling back to my teenage years. She more or less flavoured my life between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. I remember reading Rebecca, The Birds, Frenchman's Creek, The House On The Strand, this - Jamaica Inn. It still makes me shiver a little bit to pick up one of her books. I absolutely adored the effect that she had on me.
I'm... I'm running out of time so I'm going to bring this programme to a close. This, as I said, was the 24th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian. I've been in the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio. Maybe we can have a little... little jingle before I... before I finish.
Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.
And now I am going to play the last track that I have for today. This... I heard this... this version of this... this piece first of all at a Swing night in the 100 Club in Oxford Street. They still have Swing nights there once a month. It's called Stompin' at the 100 Club. If you're interested in Swing, do look up the London Swing Dance Society. There is all sorts of stuff going on and Stompin' is a wonderful night. And the first time I went there they played Ain't Misbehavin' by Louis Armstrong and... and here it is:
Music
[Ain't Misbehavin' by Louis Armstrong]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]