Desert Island Discs interview part 3: Writing
The final third of the interview (from 19:00 on), in which Sutcliff tackles the burning questions of Scotland, the sexual orientation of her protagonists, the three draft formula, and the wisdom and practicability of escaping from desert islands.
RP: Right. Record number five.
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: The lament “The Flowers of the Forest”, played by the pipes and drums of the First Battalion of the Scots Guards.
RP: Do you have any Scottish roots, Rosemary?
RS: 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.
RP: Well your latest novel of course is a Scots subject, Bonnie Dundee.
RS: Yes.
RP: And you’ve been up to Edinburgh to launch it yourself.
RS: Yes.
RP: Your hero tells his story in the first person in Scots dialect - [laughter] you were taking a chance in presenting that to the Scots!
RS: Well, I served quite a good apprenticeship to that - for years I wrote scripts for Radio Scotland -
RP: Yes.
RS: - For their school broadcasts - little plays, twenty minute plays. [Published as the story collections The Capricorn Bracelet, 1973, and We Lived in Drumfyvie with Margaret Lyford-Pike, 1975.] 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.
RP: 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.
RS: 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.
RP: You have all these virile heroes, but they never chase girls.
RS: No; they’re not queer, either. But - [laughter] They’re usually too busy being soldiers, career soldiers, or warriors or something.
RP: There is a virtually complete absence of sexual encounter; is this because you’re writing for children?
RS: I don’t think so; I don’t honestly know why, it’s just happened that way.
RP: I does mean that, surely, that there’s nobody for girl readers to identify with.
RS: That doesn’t seem to worry them. They usually identify with the boys, quite happily.
RP: Now a few of your books, a very few, just three or four, are labelled adult. [Lady in Waiting, 1957; The Rider of the White Horse, 1959; Sword at Sunset, 1963; The Flowers of Adonis, 1969]. Does that mean that sex does rear its ugly head there?
RS: Yes it does.
RP: What age do you write for?
RS: Nine to ninety.
RP: Do you find that having got a customer at school, he stays with you?
RS: Sometimes he grows out of me in his middle teens, but then he will grow back into me again in his early twenties.
RP: Well, that’s comforting.
RS: It’s nice, isn’t it?
RP: What are we going to have next? We’ve got to record number six.
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: 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.
RP: 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?
RS: 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.
RP: Do you write to a standard length, do you know how long a book’s going to be?
RS: 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.
RP: Yes. How many drafts do you write, ordinarily?
RS: Three.
RP: That’s your set rule, is it?
RS: 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.
RP: And then the last one is a polish.
RS: The last one is a polish, which is delightful to do.
RP: What’s your next book going to be, what’s the period?
RS: 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. [Flame-Coloured Taffeta, 1986].
RP: That sounds fun.
RS: I hope so.
RP: Record number seven, we’ve got to; what’s that?
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: An excerpt from The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams, the Boyd Neel Orchestra with Frederick Grinke as solo violinist. You particularly wanted that performance.
RS: 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.
RP: 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?
RS: 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 realised when I was seven that the safety pin was shut up. And that was my only experience of fishing.
RP: [laughing] It does make a difference -
RS: It does make a difference!
RP: Do you cook?
RS: Not really.
RP: If we gave you a boat ready-rigged, could you sail it?
RS: 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.
RP: That’s a very reasonable point of view. We’ve got now to your last record.
RS: Can I have Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, please.
RP: Of course.
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: 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?
RS: I think The Lark Ascending.
RP: Right. And one luxury, any one object that would give you comfort and pleasure to have about but it’s of no practical use.
RS: Can I have my dogs?
RP: No, alas, alas, it must be inanimate.
RS: Can I have fresh flowers delivered daily by bottle, fresh flowers?
RP: I don’t see why not; what sort of flowers?
RS: Oh, long stem florist’s rose and, you know, flowers - whatever is -
RP: Whatever is suitable for the time of year.
RS: Yes, whatever is suitable for the time of year.
RP: Yes, we’ll arrange that -
RS: Thank you.
RP: - 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.
RS: Can I have Kim, please; it would have to be Kim or Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and Kim is longer.
RP: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
RS: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
RP: You shall have it handsomely bound, and thank you, Rosemary Sutcliff, for letting us hear your desert island discs.
RS: Thank you.
RP: Goodbye, everyone.
[theme music]
RP: Right. Record number five.
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: The lament “The Flowers of the Forest”, played by the pipes and drums of the First Battalion of the Scots Guards.
RP: Do you have any Scottish roots, Rosemary?
RS: 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.
RP: Well your latest novel of course is a Scots subject, Bonnie Dundee.
RS: Yes.
RP: And you’ve been up to Edinburgh to launch it yourself.
RS: Yes.
RP: Your hero tells his story in the first person in Scots dialect - [laughter] you were taking a chance in presenting that to the Scots!
RS: Well, I served quite a good apprenticeship to that - for years I wrote scripts for Radio Scotland -
RP: Yes.
RS: - For their school broadcasts - little plays, twenty minute plays. [Published as the story collections The Capricorn Bracelet, 1973, and We Lived in Drumfyvie with Margaret Lyford-Pike, 1975.] 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.
RP: 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.
RS: 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.
RP: You have all these virile heroes, but they never chase girls.
RS: No; they’re not queer, either. But - [laughter] They’re usually too busy being soldiers, career soldiers, or warriors or something.
RP: There is a virtually complete absence of sexual encounter; is this because you’re writing for children?
RS: I don’t think so; I don’t honestly know why, it’s just happened that way.
RP: I does mean that, surely, that there’s nobody for girl readers to identify with.
RS: That doesn’t seem to worry them. They usually identify with the boys, quite happily.
RP: Now a few of your books, a very few, just three or four, are labelled adult. [Lady in Waiting, 1957; The Rider of the White Horse, 1959; Sword at Sunset, 1963; The Flowers of Adonis, 1969]. Does that mean that sex does rear its ugly head there?
RS: Yes it does.
RP: What age do you write for?
RS: Nine to ninety.
RP: Do you find that having got a customer at school, he stays with you?
RS: Sometimes he grows out of me in his middle teens, but then he will grow back into me again in his early twenties.
RP: Well, that’s comforting.
RS: It’s nice, isn’t it?
RP: What are we going to have next? We’ve got to record number six.
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: 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.
RP: 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?
RS: 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.
RP: Do you write to a standard length, do you know how long a book’s going to be?
RS: 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.
RP: Yes. How many drafts do you write, ordinarily?
RS: Three.
RP: That’s your set rule, is it?
RS: 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.
RP: And then the last one is a polish.
RS: The last one is a polish, which is delightful to do.
RP: What’s your next book going to be, what’s the period?
RS: 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. [Flame-Coloured Taffeta, 1986].
RP: That sounds fun.
RS: I hope so.
RP: Record number seven, we’ve got to; what’s that?
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: An excerpt from The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams, the Boyd Neel Orchestra with Frederick Grinke as solo violinist. You particularly wanted that performance.
RS: 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.
RP: 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?
RS: 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 realised when I was seven that the safety pin was shut up. And that was my only experience of fishing.
RP: [laughing] It does make a difference -
RS: It does make a difference!
RP: Do you cook?
RS: Not really.
RP: If we gave you a boat ready-rigged, could you sail it?
RS: 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.
RP: That’s a very reasonable point of view. We’ve got now to your last record.
RS: Can I have Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, please.
RP: Of course.
RS: 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.
[music]
RP: 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?
RS: I think The Lark Ascending.
RP: Right. And one luxury, any one object that would give you comfort and pleasure to have about but it’s of no practical use.
RS: Can I have my dogs?
RP: No, alas, alas, it must be inanimate.
RS: Can I have fresh flowers delivered daily by bottle, fresh flowers?
RP: I don’t see why not; what sort of flowers?
RS: Oh, long stem florist’s rose and, you know, flowers - whatever is -
RP: Whatever is suitable for the time of year.
RS: Yes, whatever is suitable for the time of year.
RP: Yes, we’ll arrange that -
RS: Thank you.
RP: - 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.
RS: Can I have Kim, please; it would have to be Kim or Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and Kim is longer.
RP: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
RS: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
RP: You shall have it handsomely bound, and thank you, Rosemary Sutcliff, for letting us hear your desert island discs.
RS: Thank you.
RP: Goodbye, everyone.
[theme music]