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Season 1 Episodes

Things can only get better, right? This 28th edition of Page One is, loosely, about the difficulty of making that happen. Drifting East from Thomas More’s New World Utopia, we visit Germany, Russia and China to catch a glimpse of some of the twentieth century’s great social experiments. In the middle of this edition, Charles Adrian relates a brief but affecting anecdote of a journey on the Chinatown bus from New York to Boston back in the early days of the ipod.

Another book by John Le Carré, Call For The Dead, is discussed in Page One 60.

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 March, 2013.

Book listing:

Utopia by Thomas More (trans. Paul Turner)

The Lousier War by W. A. Tucker

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carré

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn (trans. Gillon Aitken)

Grass Soup by Zhang Xianliang (trans. Martha Avery)

Links:

Page One 60

Charles Adrian

Episode transcript:

Jingle
You're listening... you're listening... to London Fields Radio.

Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 28th Page One going on - out, sorry - on or around the 26th of March. I'm Charles Adrian. I'm in the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio. This is... It's just me again this week and I'm going to start with my... my first book, which is Thomas More's Utopia. This is... this is a book that I found, I think, at my parents' house.

Now, Thomas Moore's character, I think, was... was rightly and properly assassinated in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall - which is an essential read, for anyone who hasn't read it. Nevertheless, there's no reason to dismiss his work. This was originally written in Latin. This Penguin Classics edition is from 1972, priced 30p in the UK, and contains Paul Turner's translation. I've written that down very small so I have to check... Yes, Paul... Paul Turner's translation. Well done Paul. It's a long time since I read this so I don't really remember very much about it. The back of the book has this to say about it:

Sir Thomas More's entertaining description of Utopia, an island supporting a perfectly organized and happy people, was a best-seller when it first appeared in Latin in 1516. This work of a Catholic martyr has later been seen as the source of Anabaptism, Mormonism, and even Communism.
Utopia revolutionized Plato's classic [sic] blueprint of the perfect republic, mainly by its realism. Locating his island in the (then) New World, More endowed it with a language and poetry, and detailed the length of the working day and even the divorce laws. Such precision gives a disturbing and exciting impact to Utopia, which still remains a book of the future.

I'm going to read you the first page, which I think shows that he must have been quite fun, for all his martyrdomness.

Book One

There was recently a rather serious difference of opinion between that great expert in the art of government his invincible Majesty King Henry the Eighth of England and his Serene Highness Prince Charles of Castille. His Majesty sent me to Flanders to discuss and settle the matter along with my friend Cuthbert Tunstall - an excellent person who has since been appointed Master of the Rolls, much to everyone's satisfaction. Of his learning and moral character I shall say nothing, not because I am afraid of seeming prejudiced in his favour but because they are too remarkable for me to describe adequately and too well known to need describing at all. I have no wish to labour the obvious.
We were met at Bruges, as previously arranged, by the envoys from Castille, who were all men of great distinction. Their nominal leader was the Mayor of Bruges - and a splendid fellow he was - but most of the thinking and talking was done by the Provost of Kassel, George de Thiemsecke [sp?]. This man was a born speaker as well as a highly trained one. He was also a legal expert and, both by temperament and by long experience, a first rate negotiator. After one or two meetings, there were still some points on which we had failed to agree so they said goodbye to us for a few days and set off for Brussels to consult their royal oracle.
In the meantime, I went to Antwerp on business of my own. While I was there, I had several frequent visitors but the one I liked best was a young native of Antwerp called Peter Gilles [/ʒiːl/] (or Gilles [/gɪliːz/] or Gilles [/dʒaɪlz/]). He is much respected by his own people and holds an important post in that town but he fully deserves promotion to the highest post of all for I do not know which impressed me more: his intellectual or his moral qualities. Certainly, he is a very fine person as well as a very fine scholar. He is scrupulously fair to everyone but towards his friends he shows so much genuine kindness, loyalty and affection that he must be almost unique in his all round capacity for friendship. He is unusually...

And there the first page ends. I should have said before I started that I have no idea how to pronounce any of the Flemish names. George de Thiemsecke is really a... Thiem [/θiːm/]... could be Thiemsecke [/θiːmsek/]. Or maybe he's George [/geɪ'ɔːge/]. I've no idea.

I'm going to... I'm going to play my first... my first track now. This is by N.E.R.D. - or nerd... however they liked to be known - and this is Things Are Getting Better.

Music
[Things Are Getting Better by N.E.R.D.]

Charles Adrian
Things Are Getting Better by N.E.R.D.

My second book is a New English Library book. It's not a new book, it's a New English Library book. It's called The Lousier War by W. A. Tucker. I'd love to know who owned this before me. I bought it at one of those shops that sells old furniture that's been reupholstered with Union Jack patterns and mirrors and records and all sorts of random bits and pieces including books. And I... I can't imagine where they get their books from unless somebody just leaves them books in their wills or perhaps dumps boxes of books outside their back door and they think: “All right, yes, we'll put this in a box out the front”.

This... The cover of this book shows a rather longsuffering soldier in a foxhole during the First World War. This is a first-hand account - or, as the back says, “A fascinating first-hand account of a British P O W in the First World War”. It says:

This is Tucker's personal recollection of the First World War - the lousier one with more than the Germans as an enemy... the rats, the lice, and the scabies.
Taken prisoner he and his comrades suffered near starvation but he also gained a curious and sometimes baffling insight into his captors as well as the women of occupied France.

Now, I haven't actually read this yet so I don't know what kind of insight he got into the French women but the first page is rather fun. I should perhaps say that this was priced 35p in the UK in 1975. It's a very foxed cover so it's quite difficult to read anything but I think it does say 35p. Here is... here is the first page:

Welcome To The Forces 1914 Style

“And what the hell do you want here?”
Bob, the sergeant in charge of the improvised recruiting depot. He was a formidable example of the traditional bully sergeant, beetle-browed and moustached.
Chilled but dogged I replied:
“I've come to join your battalion.”
I pulled what I imagined might be the kind of face that would make my seventeen years of age look like nineteen at least.
“Oh, you ’ave, ’ave you?” observed the sergeant. “Well, you can sling your bloody ’ook an’ run home to muvver,” he roared. “You ’aven't got the cradle marks off your arse yet and we want no short-arsed rookies in this lot either,” he added.
This was the kind of reception that greeted countless British youths after they had queued for hours outside recruiting centers in the hope of being accepted for the fighting line in the days following the outbreak of war in 1914.
The immediate reaction by Britons all over the world was surely a phenomenon which could only happen once. We shall never know because the eventual disintegration of the British Empire dissolves any prospect of its recurrence even if modern youth held the same jingoistic reverence for the Union Jack. Making every allowance for the patriotic flag-wagging fervour which agitates most nationals of any country when war looks likely, there must have been something extraordinary about the British reaction. That millions of men - thousands from all corners of the globe - should be volunteering to fight was something that most other countries just did not understand.
For example, when I was eventually a prisoner in German hands, the German soldiers were fond of asking: “Tommy - du Freiwilliger?” (Did you volunteer?) When the answer was yes, the German soldier would almost always tap his head to imply I was a lunatic. In fact, volunteers for the British Army supplied all the manpower they could cope with for nearly eighteen months. Compulsory service did not effectively take shape until well into 1916.

There we go, that was The Lousier War by W. A. Tucker.

Now I'm moving straight on - and moving a little further east now with my third book - to Berlin during the Cold War. This is the epoch-making, genre-busting The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré. It's a Pan Books edition from 1965, which celebrates the... the release of a Paramount Film starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Oskar Werner. Some of you may have... may have watched that. There's... There's no illustration on the front, there's just... there's just words against a black background and the remainder of a yellow price sticker. No clue as to how much it was sold for second hand in the past and no clue as to how much I may have bought it for. Ian Fleming said of this book: “A very, very fine spy story”, Graham Greene said: “The best spy story I have ever read” and J.B. Priestley said: “Superbly constructed with an atmosphere of chilly hell”. I think it's a wonderful book. I love John le Carré's... especially his early books and I think this is just phenomenal.

Chapter One: Checkpoint

The American handed Leamas another cup of coffee and said, ‘Why don't you go back and sleep? We can ring you if he shows up.’
Leamas said nothing, just stared through the window of the checkpoint, along the empty street.
‘You can't wait for ever, sir. Maybe he'll come some other time. We can have the polizei contact the Agency: you can be back here in twenty minutes.’
‘No,’ said Leamas, ‘it's nearly dark now.’ ‘But you can't wait for ever; he's nine hours over schedule.’
‘If you want to go, go. You've been very good,’ Leamas added. ‘I'll tell Kramer you've been damn’ good.’
‘But how long will you wait?’
‘Until he comes.’ Leamas walked to the observation window and stood between the two motionless policemen. Their binoculars were trained on the Eastern checkpoint.
‘He's waiting for the dark,’ Leamas muttered. ‘I know he is.’
‘This morning you said he'd come across with the workmen.’
Leamas turned on him.
‘Agents aren't aeroplanes. They don't have schedules. He's blown, he's on the run, he's frightened. Mundt's after him, now, at this moment. He's only got one chance. Let him choose his time.’
The younger man hesitated, wanting to go and not finding the moment.

My next track is by Antony and the Johnsons, who I was introduced to at the same time as I first listened to an iPod. I was on the coach between New York and Boston, as I remember, and the guy I was travelling with was obviously fed up of my conversation so he said, “Why don't you play with my iPod?” And on there was the first little release by Antony and the Johnsons. Just three... three tracks. And possibly the first album as well. I don't remember. I think I listened to it on repeat the whole... the whole of the rest of the way to Boston. This is from a more recent album. This is Another World. I just love them.

Music
[Another World by Antony and the Jonsons]

Anthony the Johnsons with Another World.

I'm moving still further east for my third book. This is One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, translated by Gillon Aitken. This is from 1971. It appears at some point to have belonged to my younger sister so I apologise to her for stealing that. I read it as a teenager and remember very little about it. I think it's definitely another one for the reread pile. What... All I do remember is that it had quite an effect on me. It starts with absolutely no preamble on pretty much the first page of... of the book itself.

At 5.00 a.m., as usual, reveille was sounded - a hammer banged against a rail just by the staff barracks. The intermittent ringing came faintly through the windowpanes, two fingers thick with frost, and died away rapidly: it was cold, and the warder did not want to go on banging for long.
The noise stopped, and outside the window it was pitch dark when Shukhov got up to go to the latrines; it was as dark as night. Then the yellow light from three lamps - two on the perimeter; one inside the camp - fell on the window.
For some reason nobody had come to open up the barracks; and there was no sound of the orderlies lifting up a latrine barrel onto poles in order to carry it away.
Shukhov never overslept reveille, but always got up at once - which gave him, until parade, about ninety minutes to himself, unordained, and anyone who knew camp life could always earn himself something - by sewing someone a cover for his mittens out of a piece of old lining; by fetching some affluent gang leader his dry felt boots - right up to his bunk so that the fellow would not have to stumble about barefoot around the pile looking for his own; or by going around to the store-rooms where someone might be able to use him, sweeping or carrying something; by going to the mess-hall to pick up the bowls from the tables and take them in piles to the dish-washer - there was always a chance of getting something to eat, although there were too many others with the same idea - and, what's worse, if you found something left in a bowl, you couldn't resist starting to lick it out. And Shukhov had never forgotten the word of his first gang-leader, Kuzyomin - an old lag who had already been inside for twelve...

Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.

Charles Adrian
It is, it's London Fields Radio, I'm Charles Adrian and we're in the Wilton Way Cafe for the... what was it... the 28th Page One? This is my last book. We're going even further east. It's just a continual travel against the jet stream. Or with the jet... Which way does the jet stream go? I don't remember. This is Grass Soup by Zhang Xiangliang. I don't know how to pronounce that. I have no... no knowledge of Chinese at all. This is translated by Martha Avery.

This... Similar to the previous book, this is the story of a struggle under a system that was supposed to make the world a better place. It was written in 1960 and first published in China in 1992. This Minerva paperback is from 1994. It was... it was given to me by someone who stayed with me once and I don't know whether he wanted to get rid of it or whether he wanted me to have it but I am pleased I read it. I think it's... Well, it's a very straightforward story but it's a good one and I think it has something to tell all of us starting from the very first page.

1960, 11th of July: Capital construction - hauled dirt clods.

I don't know why this was the day I began writing a diary. Nothing unusual had happened in the farm where I was being reformed. I'd been sent in on the 18th of May, 1958, and had already been here over seven hundred days. I had adjusted to it as if I'd been raised here and spent my life here. A sharp knife had sliced through the middle of my existence. The half of which I was now conscious had been tossed into this barren wasteland. Where the other half was I had no idea. I wasn't even sure if I had ever been whole before.
Hacking away at the earth, the only painful sensations I had were physical. After hurting for more than seven hundred days, I was numb. I no longer felt the pain. I only felt hunger.
If this thin diary did not exist, I might begin to wonder if that part of my life was real. People have poor memories. They deal with the present, whether it is joyful or painful, but the present and mankind within it are the consequence of the past just as the future is the result of the past. The lives of men do not pass without a trace, disappear as though they had never been lived.
Many living in China today dare not admit this. They dare not face the past and some are unwilling to face elements of the present. For this reason, I have felt that I should make this most real of diaries public, also that I should annotate it so that people can understand it.

On this evening of the 11th of July, I have opened a small diary that I bought at the camp shop. Poised to write something in it, I'm astonished by the pen in my hand. It may be that I want to write this diary simply because I own a pen.

So there we go. That's the end of this Page One. Next week, the Second Hand Book Factory returns but, in the meantime, how could I not end with this? This is Michael Jackson's Heal The World. Have a nice week, everybody.

Music
[Heal The World by Michael Jackson]

[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]