YouSaid · the spoken record

Allan Ahlberg

lines on the record: 56
first: 2008-11-14
most recent: 2008-11-14
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

“I've given this a lot of thought, and it's slightly complicated. I would like a large barrel of bricks, a bucket of mortar, a trowel, a lump of chalk, and a football size four. Then I would build a wall with the bricks and the mortar. It would be Mrs. Pernel's wall from the fish shop, and I would chalk a goal on it, and I would kick a ball against it. One thing I like best is kicking a ball still at my it seems a rather boastful and ridiculous luxury, but I would rather enjoy kicking the ball against the wall.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The book I would take would be Alice Monroe's Selected Stories. I've got some of her stories at home, but I realise I've not really read many, but the ones I read are wonderful, and in this selection you get twenty eight stories and five hundred pages. I'm a slow reader, so it will last me plenty of time.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is music to strut to. It's also, I think, daydreaming music. You can imagine yourself into the story of this music. It's Joseph Locke singing goodbye from the White Horse Inn.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes I buy loads of CDs, I spend much less than I earn, I think that the great advantage of the money has been that it meant that we could just simply spend as long as we liked to do the next book.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not absolutely sure the timing, but I do remember that my editor, David Lloyd, came to the house up in Leicester where I then lived with the book that we were working on, and we spent some hours working on it, then I drove them to the station and gave Vanessa the usual kiss on the cheek which one gives one's editor, and only when I got home did I put it. Begin to feel that there was something a little more in that kiss than usual, and then gradually over the next few months or so I courted her, really, and we got together.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did really, yes, and there was a bonus. When I went there, a friend of mine said See if they'll put you with an editor. She's really very good, and her name is Vanessa Clark. And they did, and it turned out to be quite a good thing.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I simply went to them and said, look, I think I want to try and work again, but I can't, to begin with, come and work with you, it would be too painful. And I went to a publisher where some friends worked, and I did one or two books with them as it were to get me afloat again.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It isn't very proper, is it now? I'm quite proud of this one, really. It's funny and it's sad, and it's sexy, and it's wonderfully musical, and I love it, and I thought we might come in the middle of it because there are bits in the middle that I would quite like”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which is Lena Cohen, isn't it? Yes, I do love this song called Closing Time. It's about singing and dancing in a dive and it's about”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in some ways it was just ordinary, you know, Jessie went to school, Jessie helped when we organized Janet's funeral, we put photographs and flowers all up and family and friends spoke, and Jessie managed to speak as well. But then after for many months it was just ordinary, rather painful life. She went to school, she came home and we had meals. We just kind of limped along, shipwrecked for months and months. I got into making this book. And Jessie survived That's about it, really, I think.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She worked, she worked almost to the very end, which she finished a couple of books, and then at the very end she wrote beautiful postcards which he illustrated and gave to her family and friends. Farewell, in one of them to a friend she said she didn't want to go, she was enjoying it so much, but she'd just go on ahead and put the kettle on.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was beautifully bound and the paper was immaculate, and I could have great rows with the printer about everything and get really lunatically sort of precious and obsessive about it, and it took a year to do it, and so I made the book, and I think I printed five hundred or a thousand and gave them away to family and friends. And that just the making of that book got me out of the tunnel part way out.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their partners Well it was, and curiously eventually it was writing that got me out of it really for months and months I just drifted around and the usual despairing empty hollow tragic thing that thousands of people endure of course. The way I got out of it was instinctive more than anything I suddenly after quite a few months I thought that I would try and make a little book about Janet. In part it was a book about how she dealt with the awful business of knowing you're going to die and dying but then it was also celebration of all the things that she did, not just the books, but she was wonderful at making gifts and cards and toys and models and things for all her friends and her family. But the business of making this book was just quite a short book almost like a picture book in lots of ways, not many words but a great many pictures her pictures her roofs and the things that she made. I made this book myself it was privately printed.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was really quite a versatile illustrator, so that the text tends to come first, you see, and although I knew the kind of pictures she made, I would write a story and bring it to her, and then she would respond to that. I think it was that was the sequence”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got these three lovely voices, Norma Water St. Janet Baker, now Ella Fitzgerald. There's a whole lot of songs written in the thirties and forties by people I call Porter or the Gershwins, but particularly Rogers and Hart that I love, and this one is one of theirs, and it's I didn't know what time it was”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. We needed to have an envelope and then a blank page and then an envelope and then a blank page and they would send it back and say we can do it, we can do it. But you've got to have two blank pages here. And we said, no, no, no, we can only have one. So then they did it again and they said, well, you've got to have two blank pages at the beginning. It all to do with the way paper is cut and folded. Jessica was seven when the book was published. So it took five years.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jessica was two when she gave us the idea, and you're right, it was a fight to get it made. You could obviously make it, but it would have cost thirty pounds a copy, and we eventually managed to find, I think it was made in Hong Kong initially.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, no, but some quite good books came. I mean, the jolly postman came because Jessica used to play with the post when she was two, just putting things in and out of envelopes like a toy, and I thought how nice it would be to have a book with envelopes that you could take things out of.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When did she come along? We'd been married about ten years. It was generally supposed, of course, in the business that he was not so much a baby more a piece of market research. Did you all?”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not really, no, I just thought because we'd had our first book accepted, I thought it was just as easy as that. We then spent about eighteen months writing and illustrating more. The system was, yeah, I'd write a story. Janet would do some pictures and we'd post it to a publisher. And the publisher would keep it six weeks or two months or three months and then send it back and say they didn't want it. We had about 20 rejection slips. Then we ran out of money, so I had to go back to teaching for a while. And then suddenly we got two or three things taken.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was five books actually called The Brick Street Boys, and it was about a gang of boys obsessed with playing football, and we did these five, and I thought this is a piece of cake, so I gave up teaching, and then we carried on with other books. So you were”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She had done a number of books by then, and they were mostly non fiction books about how to make things out of yogurt pots, and she was sick of that and asked me to write a story.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Janet Baker, isn't it? I've got three women's voices, one after the other, and a very different voice from Norma Waterson's, but just so beautiful. I've picked a song called Come Sing and Dance, despite the fact that it's a religious song because I'm not religious, but it's so ecstatic that I forgive it its religious flavour.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sunderland students used to go up to Newcastle, which was the really lively place. I went up with a friend of mine to the student union, and Janet went up with a friend of hers, and we all rushed to get the twelve o'clock bus back to Sunderland, and my friend fancied her friend, and it went from there, really, so we just sat on the bus and got to know each other.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a scruffy white suit. I'm not, I'm more a pint of beer man than in a pair of I do like the way of life. I mean, the way of life is you just go off on your own and try and make something out of words, and that does still please me.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Holiday as early as thirteen or fourteen, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and my image of the writer was a man in a white suit who strolled down to the harbour side in Nice or Cannes or somewhere and had a paratif, and sat there at about eleven o'clock, and he looked as though he'd done nothing at all, really, but in fact he'd been up at six and he'd written two or three pages. It was words, and it was also a way of life that I was romanced by, and”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now in those days it was legal to go and work in a school with no qualification at all. I think if the parents in that area knew that an ex grave digger had walked in and begun to teach their kids they might have protested because on the first morning I arrived full of doubts really and shyness the head Mr Fellows met me and he said Come with me he said and he took me into a classroom and he said sit here and I sat at the teacher's desk and he opened the register and he said I'll be back in a minute and he disappeared then till playtime because the teacher of that class had not shown up and Mr Fellows whatever else was going to happen was not going to teach them himself and luckily these little kids they were only seven they'd come up from the infants so they didn't know I wasn't a teacher and so somehow I survived that day and by the end of that day I realized that this was something I might be able to do and increasingly I just loved it and for about seven or eight years I forgot all about it.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parks, who thought you shouldn't be grave digging. He ran all the parks and cemeteries in the Aldbury district. He discovered I'd got a couple of A levels, and so he kind of hoisted me out of my hole in the ground, and he said he thought I should be a teacher. I was very shy in those days. I mean, I had trouble buying a bus ticket without blushing as a conductor spoke to me. Anyway, he took me round, in his car, took me to some schools, and I worked for a year in a rather nice little school called Bleak House Junior School, and discovered that I could do it. Lucky.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After I'd been in London for a few months, I then got to do my national service. I did three years instead of two, mainly because a national serviceman, I think got twenty one shillings, which is over a pound. If you signed on for next year, you got three pounds a week, and I know I sent my mother a pound a week, and that's why I signed on for another year. And then after the army, I was briefly a plumber's mate in Mariburn, and I had to give that up after, I think four days, because I pushed the plumber's cart around Marleburn, and then we went to repair a lady's lavatory in some swanky bit of London, and I had to carry all his things down the steps to the toilet. All the time there was glamorous young women were going up and down the stairs, and so I was as bright as a beetle as I was just unbearably embarrassed to be doing this, and I resigned my job as a plumber's mate, and I think I went home then, and that's when I became a grave digger.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I can't think she did. She did, she never abraided me, and within a few weeks I was sending a laundry, I mean shameful again, but I got her to send me my football boots, which I desperately needed, and things like that.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was brutal. It was a harsh thing. Yes, I know it was. I did feel a sense of panic of being trapped and in fact subsequently the other jobs that I took when I was in my early twenties were all overall jobs. I had the sense that if somebody got me in an office and nailed me down, I'd stay there as long as I was digging a grave in the middle of nowhere or pushing a plumber's cart around Marillabon. There was a degree of freedom.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in an office wearing a collar and tie which I hated, and I think I was an estimator, but I was really just they used to send me round to the shop to get the bacon sandwiches at half past nine. At that time I hated Albury, and so I ran away. I got on my bike and supposedly went to work, but I pedaled up to Birmingham and pawned my badminton racket and tried to sell my bike and I left it in the street because I couldn't sell it, and with the little money I had I got on a train and went to London. I'm glad to say on that day I did send in fact I think before I left Birmingham I sent my mother a telegram.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Persuade you I had a job. I think I was working at that time at Ackles and Pollocks, which is a famous factory that makes steel tubes in Albury, and”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the democracy of music in cars which most families experience, I've been exposed to a lot of Dylan over the years because Vanessa, my present wife, loves Dylan and he's taken me a few years to get into Dylan, but I do really think he's wonderful, and I've picked a mysterious and comic, strange song called Ain't Talkin'.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No at the grammar school I had a very good English teacher her name suitably was Miss Scriven, and Miss Scriven would give us essays to write. They weren't intended to be works of fiction, but I invariably twisted the title to write a story, and she gave Marks out a twenty. She gave Marks for spelling, and mine was rubbish and handwriting and I looked like a spider had jumped out of the ink well, and I wrote in such a state of excitement that I left words out. So I'd get about four out of twenty, and she'd give it back to me and she'd say that she had enjoyed those bits that she could actually decipher. But the thing that she then did was she invited us to read our stories to the other kids, and that was the first time because then I could read my own writing just about and I could put the word back in that I had left out, and the kids laughed at my story, and that was the beginning of thinking I like this”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you don't know that as a child, but the consequence of going to the grammar school was that one way or another I ended up with a couple of A levels which later on down the road meant I could become a teacher.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my dad used to help me you could make a ball by cutting up inner tubes, you get some silver paper, crush it to a ball, and then you'd wrap these elastic bands rounded tightly, so the ball was irregular in shape, and it was tremendous for ball control because you couldn't rely where it was going to bounce.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, yes, but the thing was, it was, I mostly love to play football with other kids and play a game, but for about eight or nine years of my life, when I wasn't doing that, I would just walk down our little road and kick a ball against Colonel's fish shop wall. The Colonel's fish shop was at the end, and the end wall was perfect for kicking a ball against. That was my main like activity. I did it more than reading, I did it more than listening to music. Yes.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean he was I don't know perhaps four years younger than me we just didn't connect really and I was the older brother and I could have been a better brother to him Andrew wasn't into football very much and my child was mainly concerned with getting up in the morning playing football going to school and playing football at playtime at dinner time coming home from school and playing football and Andrew wasn't a footballer so that was a factor I guess”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that town and in most towns like it you didn't buy and sell houses, you exchanged houses and you put a card in the news agent's window saying where you lived and where you'd like to live. I went to three infant schools in Albury in the space of about two years'cause my mother kept moving us and I don't think I ever knew why she was moving us until I was about eleven. She was hunting for a house that had an indoor toilet and a bathroom.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I wanted to have the end of the sum because suddenly out of nowhere appear all these shipmates all singing beautifully, so that's why I wanted to hear this surprising addition to the music.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in the Midlands as far away from the sea as you could get, but I've always loved the sea, and so I've chosen one of Stanford's songs of the sea, Drake's Drum, sung by Thomas Allen. I just love this song, and I love his voice. It's a story song, really, Drake's drum, and so the pine begins like this, and then we'll hear the second half. Drake is in his hammock, and a thousand miles away. Captain, art thou sleeping there below? Slong between the round shot, Inombre Dius Bay, and dreamin' all the time a Plymouth Honder looms the island, yonder lie the ships. and the shorelights flashing, and the night tide dashing. He sees it all so plainly as he saw it long ago”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, as long as my mother was alive and she lived into her eighties, it never occurred to me to look for my blood mother, or for that matter father. It felt disloyal I had a mother, why should I go and find another one?”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was playing in the street with a gang of kids, and this girl said to me Your mother's not your mother, because she'd heard it from her mother, you see, so I went home and spoke to my mother and she said, What? No, no. And she confessed. But even then she couldn't tell me the truth, so what she told me was that my parents had been killed in an aeroplane crash. But of course I was a poor little illegitimate unwanted kid which they had adopted.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She used to clean people's houses in the daytime, and then from six till nine she would go down the local factory offices and clean the offices, and much of the money that she earned, which wasn't much, she spent on me. And of course they adopted me. If they hadn't adopted me, I'd have been in an institution, and the best institution in the world is worse than almost the worst family. There were two of us. They adopted a brother, really. They adopted Andrew. And we didn't get on. Brothers often don't get on anyway. We didn't get on particularly.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are more than that, and they would say, when your dad comes home, he'll give you the belt, which he did, and at school the teachers would hit you with sticks. It was a more violent time, but at least everybody got it. I wasn't being singled out. So my mother My mother's classic move was to smack me around the head, you see, if I was a trouble, which I was a trouble. But she was deaf in one ear, because her mother had smacked her round the ear when she was little, when she was eight, my mother was taken to a doctor's surgery and she scrubbed the floor before she went to school. So she had a massively tough life, and she was with her.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She struggled with life. It's so hard in a few sentences to pin someone down, you know, I know I won't do her justice really. When I was a kid she wailed me, but then most of the mothers round there wailed the kids. The teachers that smacked me.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I regret it in a way because he died when I was seventeen, the kind of memory of him faded too quickly, really, whereas my mother, who, I had a pretty rough time with my mother when I was a child, and I grew to love and admire her when I was in middle age because she was still around, and I would like that to have happened with my father, but he didn't. So he was really invisible, he was shadowy. And I know.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a laborer. He worked in one factory or another. In one of my stories I referred to him as my invisible dad, because the only way a laborer can make money is to do overtime, and he would leave the house at five thirty I would never see him in the morning he would come home at eight and some when I was little I was in bed he would work Saturdays and Sundays.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Oldbury in the West Midlands. Old Bury, yes, which is a bit of the black country. I realise now that at the time when I was living there, it was almost in its pomp. It was full of smoke and steam and furnaces glowing, and it smelled to high heaven there were glue factories, and I grew up there.”
2008-11-14 · Desert Island Discs · Allan Ahlberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source