YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Sillitoe

lines on the record: 52
first: 2009-01-25
most recent: 2009-01-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The luxury would be a communications receiver powered by the sun, and I would sling an arrow up the nearest palm tree, and I could listen then to the As my rescuers got closer and closer”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a very difficult question. The one book I might choose would be The Air Publication one, two, three, four, which was the REF Manual of Navigation put out for air crew during the war and which I studied then. It would keep my brain active and sharp. It would keep me going for years, so I would be all right.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well where you walk from handled semile and this one I'd think I'd like where are you walk just as a kind of what tribute to my wife Ruth Fainlight?”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so, actually I have past, the present, and possibly a future to look forward to. I think I could exist on my own fairly okay, but”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I thought anyone who'd had a father I'd had would be a better father simply because he, as I say, he was miserable, really terrible. It was easy in a way bringing up children as long as you had some money.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fairly, yes, I think every grandfather who goes to see his grandchildren should every time he sees them give them a bob or two, so they always look forward to me coming to see them. Fair enough.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the past is always with us, actually, but obviously I do at the same time prefer to not look back, but you know, you can't.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We go back, I think, to Majorca. Okay, so we were there for quite a few winters. But the winters in Majorca weren't very good, as Chopin's experience showed when he went there with Georges Stand in the early nineteen century, and they do say that he wrote the raindrop prelude there, which I think had very likely, because during the winter it rained a great deal, contrary to what people think.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, not I don't know where they tried very hard, but anyway the suggestion was in the air that I should go to Hollywood and they'd give me fifty thousand pounds. Well,”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is true, of course, that after the kind of sort of success of Saturday night and Sunday morning the publisher wanted me to do Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Wednesday night and Thursday morning, but I knew that that was just one statement that I had so much else to do and I was determined not to Depend on that success. I'm very grateful to Saturday night and Sunday morning and the loneliness of the long distance runner because all through my life they have brought me in every year a few thousand pounds and help to bolster the income. Those two Works had given me the possibility basically of carrying on and writing exactly what I want to write at that particular time. If I pick one up now and again I think yeah I couldn't really much improve on this.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I knew it. I went to see him and I said, look, Dad, I've got a novel published. He was absolutely astounded, not having been able to read and write himself, so he took it in his hands and turned it this way and that way Allan said You've written a book, he said, You never had to work again, which I thought was wonderful. That's what it was.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think my father died the following year, but I think my mother could read and she'd read him some of my brothers and sisters. They all loved it, really. They liked it. Because when the movie was made, I think all my family were in it in some small bit part or another, and they all got a pound a day. Literally in it. Literally in it. You can see my sister pushing her eldest child down the street with a”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was swept up in a dislike of it all. My idea was to be essentially a modest writer, like a fish in water, getting on with my work, not having anyone bothered by the fact that my books were selling wonderfully in paperback.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the film Saturday night and Sunday morning was a wonderful film because Carol Rice made it. I wrote the script, but Carol gave me a great deal of help because I thought I'd never written one before. And Jolly Dankworth wrote the music, and I think that Listening and seeing the opening of Saturday night and Sunday morning when all the workers are streaming out of the factory to John in Dankwood's music and Carol's direction, you know, it was such a wonderful uplifting atmosphere because we were all young, and we all had this terrific enthusiasm, and maybe that's why it's still remembered.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I just rewind on that? I think he was sick, really. I don't know if he was gasping. I gave him £8, which I'd saved up, and he bought some more without waiting. So that was all right”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I knew it very well because it was there on VE night, Victory in Europe night. My parents, myself and my girlfriend. We went there and the pub was packed to bursting over this wonderful fifty year old woman got up on a table and did the can with her revuni and jack bloomers on. It was wonderful. We all had a great time and my father lost his false teeth on the way back. Oh, I mean it was such a night.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was that not having much faith in publishers, I also didn't have much faith in reviewers. Especially if they were oversimplistic talking about working class and DH Lawrence. One likes to be praised, of course. One isn't a fool or an idiot, but I didn't have any belief in reviewers.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had been sending novels out, I wrote about six or seven novels before that was published. I'd been sending them out for a decade nearly, and they were being rejected. Then Saturday night and Sunday morning came along, and I knew there was something there. I knew that that ought to be published more than any of the others. And then when it was published I had a certain amount of iron in the soul regarding publishers and what they knew, you know, because one's always heard of novels like Ulysses and Alach de Tampadu being turned down, so you know. I didn't know I had faith in polishes. I'd been turning down my stuff all through the fifties.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funnily enough, I never needed faith in myself. I know that's a bit silly to say, but I didn't. I knew that some day, however long it took, I was going to be able to make my living as a writer. That's all I wanted to do, really, write a novel, make enough for a year, and then write another, plod on, keep writing, and so on.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it is in nineteen fifty three I wrote to Robert sent him two or three poems, and then he invited me over to tea and I cycled over today at ten kilometres away. He judged the poems, told me what he thought not too encouraging, but he never discouraged anyone. I enjoyed his verse, I'd enjoyed his novels, of course, and I had just had faith in him somehow.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've chosen Edith Ping Sari. I believe that those people who go in for excess profiteering at the expense of the poor these people should go to the lantern they deserve to be strung up under the lamp post, and she is perfectly wonderful when she leads the starving Parisian women to the palace of Versailles and she climbs up onto the gates. And she sings this most rousing song to the gallows for the aristocrats because they are causing all the misery to me as a wonderful song.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was all right, you know, it was fabulous, really. But we were working all the time. We were conscious of being poet and writer. It wasn't kind of wasted hedonistic time. Was still working.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, the pension was four pounds seventeen and six, and we were able to get a fully furnished five rooms flat for a pound a week. Wine was sixpence a litre and tobacco tumps an ounce and that's what.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't a surprise for some reason how can I express it why I began to write these little things and also of course to read a lot was that I wanted to cushion the shock again escape I can only bring back the same word When I was demobilized from the IF, I got a pension and to be pensioned off at twenty one was quite something. I met my wife as a poet Ruth Fainlight and we went to live in France and then Spain.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started writing then, yes, reminiscent things about Malaya poetry, short sketches, fictional sketches, things like that.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a shock, total shock. I actually thought that they'd mixed up my x rays, you and I couldn't believe it, because I didn't feel ill at all. I don't know why it was, but anyway, it was true enough they got me.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was seventeen I got a job as an air traffic control assistant. up in the control tower guiding planes in and out. I was able to take that job because of the three years in the air training corps. And every morning I got a bus to the control tower, and especially on a fine spring morning, I just felt as if somehow my life was about to take off I was going somewhere. And I heard this lovely music seventeen come Sunday, I was seventeen, and it filled my brain with the thought that I really was going somewhere and I didn't know where, but it didn't matter.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that was wonderful. I liked it. You were out in the extremities of empire, and I'd always had the feeling that maybe that's what I would do one day I would get a job as a wireless telegraphist in some outpost, and that would be my adventure story, of course.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being in the air training corps, I posted everything I could possibly pass, and then I heard that you could get into the fleet air on seventeen instead of having to wait for the RF at eighteen, so I enlisted, went to Cruve to the Air Cruise Collection Board and passed a cell through my first service pave two shillings a day.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever since I knew what a map was, I've been fascinated by them, and I still am. Imaginary maps, maps of the places perhaps I wanted to go to, Dreamland, Wonderland, so on and so forth. I think it was something to do with wanting to know the place you were on the earth, and that gave you a feeling of some kind of self importance. It was that important to me, very important”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some way they were, I have to believe that it is a drudgery of the day to day if it was pure drudgery meant that you became two people you were the drudge and you were the person with the empty mind who could produce pictures from your mind. When I worked at Lathe eight and a half hours a day, it was so automatic at times that I could do it without thinking, but the other part of me which thought was the one which saved me, which kept me going.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a suspicion, you know, that every single person in England at any rate thinks they are different from anyone else, and I was no exception. But perhaps there was a little bit more intensity in mind than theirs. I don't know. Thank God England is like that. All people know they're different, and that's terrific.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, um, Yes, I mean, who isn't at any age? What man isn't? Of course, during the war, 90% of the work was done by women and the other ten percent by young kids from fourteen to eighteen before call up with the sprinkling of tool setters. It was amazing what they turned out.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when I in my teens toward the end of the war, I went to see King Henry V and I listened to all the speeches, and at first it seemed like a foreign language then when I came to the battle scene with a tremendous flight of arrows, the poor man's weapon killing the flower of modern chivalry seemed to me wonderful, so I went to see it as often as I could, and as I saw it so many times, the language began to make sadness, and that was my first introduction to Shakespeare.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't even know what it needed actually. This idea of going to a grammar school was very important to me, but I couldn't do it. I knew I was reading in order to escape. It was a very good way of cutting off from the world. So it was really an escape primarily and essentially it was an escape.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, I took it, failed it, took it again and failed it, so I think, you know, I am quite unique among all the English writers, but I don't want to claim anything special for that. I was just too dim, perhaps.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in their parlour was a big case of books, and I took out one or two, I think there was an abridged version of Moby Dick and one or two others. My grandmother was very impressed by the fact that I just sat down in front of the fire and gobbled up these books. So she thought well maybe if he's so interested in books he should take the scholarship examination, what they call the 11 plus, I suppose. So I thought it was a good idea because I already knew that having read novels by Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas in English I thought, well, if I could read them in French, what a good thing that would be.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my grandmother spoiled me really. It was important for several reasons first of all. By being one mile and a half out of the city it was in completely pure countryside. It was wonderful. Now the thing is they'd had eight children and during the lives of these eight children they came home with Sunday school prizes and my grandfather, although he couldn't read or write, always insisted that they go to school and indeed to Sunday school.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull ropes, and one heard his by records in other houses booming out onto the street, and Old Man River always very much impressed me because it was about someone who was deprived, felt themselves a slave, and yet at the same time Optimism glowed through the whole thing.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading a great deal took me over. You had access to all these exotic places, and you sort of said to yourself One day that's where I'm going. So it was more an obsession, I think, to get out by any means possible.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, now and again my father would buy a radio, then he'd default on the payment and they'd have to take it back. But what I did hear was terrific, impressed me no end as the saying goes.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I can only call her long suffering. I mean, she was a blacksmith's daughter who should I thought she should never have married him, but then again you couldn't tell her that I mean the attitude in those days was you make your bed and you lie on it, and of course that's what she had to do. But there was nothing much to be done except to endure and make the best of how things were.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he did, I mean, I think much of it was simply because he didn't have enough money to buy cigarettes. I mean, during the war when he got a job, and he could get some cigarettes at any rate, he was much more sweet tempered.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, physically we had to be, and that was all right not terribly close, you know, my father couldn't read all right, so there was a kind of discrepancy between ourselves. He was very idiosyncratic and unpredictable.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On certain days, not often, but they were providers to the best of their ability. My father didn't drink. He smoked and had cigarettes when he could. So it was touch and go sometimes whether we had to miss a meal. You know, as I say again, looking back on it when you think of all the poor children starved to death in Warsaw and all these places we were in clover.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he was all right. I mean, sometimes we got salvation army parcel or one of our more affluent relatives, although they were never really affluent, but still they could give us a shilling or two. So we had an orange, we had a sixpenny packet of toys or a chocolate box of some sort of sort.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean the thing is the children don't actually suffer except the parents who really are in trouble. The kids as long as they get, say, a couple of meals a day they just grow up and it's not too bad. On the other hand we knew that we were very, very poor indeed at times like Christmas and so on when the presents were few and far between. We got one free meal a day two actually from the educational authorities so the parents didn't have to provide more than one meal in the evening so it wasn't too bad.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bobby Darren singing Mac the knife will get a bit of a tribute to Brecht, and I sort of took to it the moment I heard it Polly Peachman, all the eighteenth century shenanigans, Hogarthian Fielding's novels and so on, it all seemed to blend in to me with that music and that attitude of Bobby Darin when he was singing it.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in England, but the thing is when I was writing it, I was in Majorca, and I sat under an orange tree one day and began writing something called the Adventures of Arthur Seaton, and later when it evolved into a novel, it became Saturday night and Sunday morning. So I didn't know about the so called angry young men. That was a year or two before.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that as long as I go on writing, I shall be all right. Obviously, I will go on writing until my head turns into a cabbage, which I hope will never happen.”
2009-01-25 · Desert Island Discs · Alan Sillitoe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source