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(Background noise might make this episode a challenging listen.)
Episode image is a detail from the cover of Beyond Recall by Robert Goddard.
Back on his lonesome, Charles Adrian hosts a ‘back to basics’ edition of Page One this week with nobbut the books and a little bit of music. In this edition, we steer past love and death to arrive at the Autumn of Shakespeare’s life, finishing up with some sweet Radiohead.
You can listen to Dame Judi Dench’s 1998 appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs here.
Another novel by Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, is discussed in Page One 25 and in Page One 131.
William Shakespeare is also discussed in Page One 92.
This episode was recorded at the Wilton Way Cafe 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: 30th October, 2012.
Book listing:
Thaw by Bette Paul
Stuck On You by Sue Welford
Beyond Recall by Robert Goddard
The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis
Introduction to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Lloyd Storr-Best
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening... you're listening to London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Hello. You are listening to London Fields Radio. This is... This is Charles Adrian in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney. This is... This is Page One. This is the 9th edition of Page One and this is... this is a, kind of... what would you call this... We're... A back to... back to basics... I don't know how to describe this. I'm just here on my own this week. I don't have any guests. That's nothing to do with Tom Webb and his... his lack of books last week. It's just... you know, I thought: “Why not?” And... and to prove it, I have... I have a guest next week who is a proper book-reading guest. But for this week, it's just me - me and my books - and I should start with some music.
I'm going to start... So this is my only concession to the fact that this week is Halloween. It's B*Witched with Blame It On The Weatherman.
Music
[Blame It On The Weatherman by B*Witched]
Charles Adrian
So here we are. This is... This is quite different. I'd forgotten what this was like. I have no one to talk to while the... while the music's playing. It's just... It's just me and my books. Well! I'm going to start. I'm just going to start reading.
This is... So the first book I've got is a Point Romance. I've no idea... This... This isn't a book that I've... I've had for years. I found this somewhere or other and I thought: “Oh yeah. I vaguely remember Point Romance from when I was a teenager.” This is... So, it's a whole collection of absurd stories called Winter Warmers: Ten Stories To Melt Your Heart.
I really like... There's one in the middle that I really like called Thaw so I'm just going to read you the first page of that one. It's by Bette [/Bet/] or Bette [/Beti/] Paul. And here's how it goes:
February in the Pennines is like three in the morning - life's lowest ebb. It's the cold heart of winter up here - fog, frost, snow, sometimes all together, interspersed with bouts of stormy winds and driving rain. And never really light. Dad calls it the ‘long, dark night of the soul’. Which just about summed me up at that time: I'm very long - well, tall anyway - and very dark, and so depressed just then that a dose of self-flagellation would have come as light relief.
The half-term holiday didn't help - I'd a mountain of work to shift before exams and nobody had time to help. Dad was watching over the spiritual needs of three parishes and Mum was fighting off a flu epidemic down at the misnamed health clinic. So I was left to get on with my work alone. Nothing new in that; I'd spent most of my childhood alone - vicarage children often do.
Boo hoo hoo. So I can't... I have read all of these but I can't remember what happens. Presumably someone comes along and... and makes it all better.
The first... The first book... The first... first book! The first story in this book is called Stuck On You and this also I really like. It has... It has a, kind of, retro feel to it that... that I think... I think you guys will appreciate. This is by Sue Welford.
“Kim! Are you up there?” Kim's mother called from the bottom of the stairs. “Julie's on the phone.”
Kim sighed and got reluctantly off the bed. That's all she needed - Mum yelling up the stairs like a maniac. Why couldn't her mother just have said she'd gone out? The last person she wanted to talk to right then was her elder sister Julie. If Julie started lecturing her about Adam, she reckoned she'd go crackers. All she wanted was to be left alone.
Kim dragged herself to the door. She turned off the cassette player. Even listening to her favourite tape hadn't cheered her up. In fact, it had made her feel worse. When you really listen to the words of the songs, they were all about broken hearts and betrayed lovers. Funny how you never noticed that until you were the one with the broken heart.
So that's full of memories of my childhood. Going downstairs to answer the phone! Extraordinary. And also... So... And the... the mention of... the mention of a cassette player made me think of a cassette that I got free when I bought - well, I didn't buy it - when my parents bought my first mountain bike, which was a white bike with pink and fluorescent yellow stickers on it, as far as I remember, and it came with a... it came with a tape full of the current hits including The Bangles' Eternal Flame, and The Final Countdown by whoever that was by, and something by Sinita, and... and also this by Terence Trent Darby. This is Wishing Well.
Music
[Wishing Well by Terence Trent Darby]
Charles Adrian
My next book is by someone called Robert Goddard. This one, I think I bought very close to where I live. It's... It's described as his 'new bestseller'. This is back in 1997. It's called Beyond Recall. I think he had several bestsellers. There are pictures in the front of five of his books. It has a slightly bluish picture on the front of a graveyard with a man walking in it and he seems to have a bag in his left hand. There's... and it has... Also, I should say, it has a very nicely wrinkled spine, which I appreciate. It's published by Corgi. For those who are interested, it's set in 10/12 Plantin by Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire. I don't know what 10/12 Plantin is. I'm not an expert in typesetting.
The first part is called Today:
THE AIR IS different here, purer somehow. The light is clearer, the edges of the leaves and the lines of the buildings as sharp as the memories. Recollection invades my senses through the unchanged brightness of this place called home. I raise the window on the evening, cool and sweetly washed by late afternoon rain. I touch the wood and test the paintwork with my thumb. I watch a rabbit, disturbed but not startled by the squeak of the sash, hop away into the trees. The direction of his leisurely retreat draws my eyes towards St Clement's Hill, where I can make out the roofs of Truro school, and just the north, the white dots that could be sheep in a field but for the regularity of their spacing, sheep safely grazing rather than the headstones of the dead resting for ever on a familiar hillside.
I didn't ask for an east-facing room. I didn't let slip my connection with Tredower House when I booked in. I didn't even disguise my name. The receptionist was too young to remember anyway, probably too young even to care. Pure chance, then, puts me here, in this particular room, where my great-uncle kept his vast old daybed and his jumble of assaying equipment and his...
Now I'm going to... I thought I would play something death-related and originally I thought: “Well maybe I'll play Ralph Stanley's Oh Death” - you know, the one from... whatever that film's called. But instead I'm going to play a choice that came up on Dame Judi Dench's Desert Island Discs, which was recently replayed on Radio 4 Extra. It's rebranded as Desert Island Discs Revisited. This is the March from Purcell's Music For The Funeral Of Queen Mary.
Music
[March from The Funeral Music For Queen Mary by Purcell]
Charles Adrian
We move on now to something of an antidote to all of that, perhaps. This is, as it proudly proclaims in orange capitals at the top, [putting on silly voice] A Penguin Book. It's by Kingsley Amis and it's called The Anti-Death League.
On the front there's a... there's a rather strange green head in a... in one of those soldier's hard hats and John Lennon shades, and there's a bunch of flowers, and below that there's a, sort of, green earth. It's all rather mysterious. This was... this was published... This edition was published in 1968. I think it originally - let me just check - it originally came out in 1966. It's addressed “To Colin”, whoever Colin is.
The first part is called, rather wonderfully, The Edge Of A Node and the first page goes like this:
A girl and an older woman were walking along a metalled pathway. To their left, beyond a strip of grass, was the front of a large high building in grey stone. Reaching its corner, at which there was a pointed turret, brought them in view of a square of grass on which stood a tower-like structure supported by stone pillars. The afternoon sun was shining brightly and the space under the main part of the tower was in deep shadow.
The girl halted. ‘What's happening?’ she asked.
‘That's just the old cat,’ said the other. ‘He's spotted something under the tower there, I expect.’
A small black cat, crouching quite still, faced the shadow. After a moment, a bird with tapering wings flew out, dipped towards the cat, gave two brief twitters and wheeled back to where it had come from. The girl went on watching.
‘Oh, you know what that is,’ said the older woman. ‘She'll have got a nest under there, the bird, and she's trying to keep the cat away from it. Trying to give him a scare, you see.’
As she spoke, three uniformed men came into sight round the corner of the block beyond the tower and walked along the path towards the women. At the same time, a large aircraft, flying low, moved into earshot.
The bird made its circuit exactly as before. ‘Why doesn't he move?’ asked the girl. ‘Can't he see the bird?’
‘Oh, you bet he can. He's not missing anything, that old cat. He's got his eye on her all right. But he's not going to move and give the game away. Now we'll just watch them the once more and then we'll be getting on, shall we?’
The three in uniform came up. One of them, a tall fair-complexioned young man, slowed in his walk and stopped. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Did you ever see anything like it?’
A quick jingle.
Jingle
London Fields Radio... It's London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
My last book for today - the... this ninth edition, this Halloween ninth edition - is by Shakespeare. I don't know how many of you will have heard of Shakespeare. He's a playwright. This is... This is an undated The Companion Shakespeare edition of The Tempest.
I looked up... I looked up The Companion Shakespeare online to see if I can find any clues. It doesn't exist online. It's obviously completely disowned by whoever created it or else just hasn't been taken up by the the tech-savvy peeps of the modern world. But it's rather beautiful. It's in a blue, vaguely cloth cover with a gold crest on the front with, you know, a C and an S intertwined.
This... This is a book... This has special memories for me because it's a book that I used as a prop in the first devised play that I was ever involved with. This was at school. The play was called Echoes and it was based very, very loosely on The Tempest and also on The [sic] Inspector Calls, which I think we'd seen as part of a class outing. I played the romantic lead, Freddy, who was loosely based on Ferdinand, who is described here as “Son to the King of Naples”. It's the only time I've ever played the romantic lead. That's... that's all I have to say about that.
I'm going to... I'm going to read the... I'm not going to read any of the play because then I'd have to do too many voices and I think it would be... It's... It's a... It's one of those scenes with Master Shipwrights and Boatswains and... I don't know... it's all too dreary. So I'm going to read the introduction in... instead.
Just in case anyone does come across one of these editions, in the back, don't miss “Some notes on acting Shakespeare's plays”. And this one has “with special reference to The Tempest”.
So this is the introduction to The Tempest:
The Tempest was the latest, or at any rate one of the latest of the plays composed wholly by Shakespeare. It was written in the calm afternoon of life, when the poet was turning to rest after long toil.
The poor boy who left the free Grammar School at Stratford when only thirteen years old, to be apprenticed to a butcher; who married at eighteen, was imprisoned for poaching, went to London, and there “took care of the gentlemen's horses who came to the play,” and was afterwards in turn call-boy at the theatre, actor, and finally actor-manager and playwright in one, had wrought a miracle. By sheer genius, power of will and hard work this half-educated and reckless ne'er-do-well had won an empire which is now as wide as the world. When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest he had gained his crown, and, rich and honoured, was going back to live and die in his old home at Stratford.
And so some people have thought this play to be a beautiful farewell to the Stage and that Shakespeare saw himself in Prospero, and in Ariel his own swift and glittering imagination. It may be true, for The Tempest came close after the great tragedies, with their volcanic passion, their heart-shaking pity and terror, and The Tempest is a happy play, ending with love and mercy and peace.
But this is no more than a guess - whether right or wrong only Shakespeare himself, and perhaps not even he, could say. Nor does it greatly matter that in The Tempest, as in most of Shakespeare's plays, there are faint echoes from other poets, and from Montaigne, from old romances, travellers' tales and stories of political adventure - for the ore he drew from others...
I have to say, I never really liked The Tempest. It wasn't a play that particularly appealed to me. We had to read it at school. But I have... I have a new fondness for it now since my elder godchild was named Ariel - after quite a lot of prevarication, I have to say. Still, I can't... I can't quite fall in love with it.
All the same, I'm going to come to my last track now. And this, I suppose, is the reason why I wanted to read from Shakespeare at all. This... So this, my last track... this is the music that underscores what I think is the best scene in Baz Lurman's Romeo and Juliet. I have no idea which album it comes from. I found it on iTunes and it seems to be included in something called The Best of Radiohead. This is... So this is by Radiohead and this is a track called Talk Show Host.
What do I need to say before I go? I'm Charles Adrian. You can... you can find all of my previous London Field Radio... London Fields Radio Broadcasts at charlesadrian.com, including the Jubilee edition from this summer and all the Second-Hand Book Factories and all of my earliest shows. And all sorts of other shows as well, of course, at londonfieldsradio.com. This is... We're in the Wilton Way Cafe. Come down to Wilton Way and have a coffee here with the lovely people here.
That's it. I've finished. This is Radiohead with Talk Show Host.
Music
[Talk Show Host by Radiohead]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]