YouSaid · the spoken record

Fay Weldon

lines on the record: 50
first: 2010-05-09
most recent: 2010-05-09
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

“No, but if I was allowed to have bullets I would practice and I would get a little bit better every day, and then you know.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, no, crocodiles, invaders, I don't know what it would just make you feel somehow secure and sort of Mel Friday.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I am going to choose Kennedy's Latin primer because it's been sitting on my bookshelf for about fifty years when I haven't I haven't brushed up on my latin I loved learning Latin my mother always said every day you had to be a little further forward in something it didn't matter what even if it was only your Latin verbs so that's what”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a great favour you're allowed to sit on stage while they do a concert and it's terribly exciting and is considered a great honour and indeed so it is.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the grateful, dead and touch of grey because it's so cheerful and it's so positive and it's so sort of looking at life and deciding it's going to be okay, and also because I was used to go on stage with them once upon a time a long time ago, sitting in the back.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't mind It'll be all right I'd be rather annoyed if I cried right, and if I had a pen and pencil would be all right and a bit of paper I had to write in the sand and the sea came and washed it all away I wouldn't be too happy I suppose.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm not a well I'm somewhere else and I'm busy and I'm not a babysitting grandmother and besides you see they're the children of sons and I think in a way the maternal grandmother's role is to be this person and the mother in law I think really probably needs to keep out of it rather more. Perhaps this is just excuses because I'm not a good grandmother. But I pray for them.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we're going to hear worse fears which sung by Linda Hayes and written by my husband Nick, which is about actually what we were talking about earlier, the terrible emotions women go through because the book Worse Fears was written at a time when I reading was probably just about losing my mind and I mean I would like everything I wrote to be put to music And Nick, for this worse fears to music.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, of course, it probably was. But you know it certainly made me even less afraid of dying than I had been before because of this sort of sense of that there was no such thing as finality, actually, I suppose.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well I had a kind of allergic thing and I happened to be in hospital at the time and my heart stopped and I died actually and was brought back to life with various electric shocks but had in that time saw the pearly gates, the gates of heaven. And the thing is they weren't sort of nice tasteful kind of pale colours, but they rather violent sort of Indian temple colours. of orange and crimson and rosy rather vulgar, and what's more they were double glazed.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I decided it was important to everybody. I think it's difficult to believe without a sense of life being in some way permanent or not over, particularly just because you haven't a die.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like getting him to do it. But the thing is that my husband picks up my socks this is how little connected my life and my theory is.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wrote in the house, yes, and I did certainly think that my habit of writing short sentences and lots of paragraphs was because the of the children who kept interrupting.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think well I was I think I was a very solicitous and loving mother and I was able to stay at home a lot of the time and there was the whole world of au pairs who would come and help you, you know.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he was annoyed with me, no, he just you know, he just didn't love me anymore. Well, you know, people are loud. There's no obligation to love somebody, but it's rather shocking when he stopped. But anyway but he died and um Yeah, I think I nearly did go out of my mind. I probably did go out of my mind. But then you know, where's your mind anyway? I wrote some quite good books out of it. It is a terrible thing that writers do is to use everything, you see. But also because I think what you know or what I know is that you share these things with so many people you can't control your life and actually shouldn't want to.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure. I can't tell by the look on your face. It was happy but tempestuous, and it went on for thirty years and then it collapsed rather horrifically.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well disc number six is people we once knew which is a song written by my son Neck who is a musician and his wife and sung by his wife Andrew, and it is about that other part of life which is the Not the nostalgic, but the song about the things we have lost and the people who have died who remain very much part of us still, and it's a lovely song.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just toying with me. I don't know because there's a celebrity website which gives me my esoteric portrait free and I look it up every morning and it tells me what the day is going to be like and then I live that day. Now if I didn't look it up I'd probably have an entirely different day. I don't know how would I know?”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well he went to the party with one person, I went to party with myself on the way there on the bus on the thirty one bus, I remember it very clearly. I knew that I was going to meet somebody, I was going to marry, so I met this person and went home with them and never left since I had to actually for about a week, but only for about a week.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, bid you goodbye. No, no, no, he was fine and helped me find flat and all sorts of things because I think he could see it was a totally unsuitable and impossible marriage. But also because what I had found out was that he kept marrying I was the third marriage, and then he went on to have another one in which he married a girl with a son. He was a headmaster and was applying for other headmasterships, and he had to say wife and son, on all of them, and he'd somehow the women had left, so he always kept having to find another.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and yes, I did, I ran away in the middle of the night, I stole four pounds from his wallet and ran away. Why did I just tell him I was going I can't imagine you see what one was quite young, I suppose. I suppose you felt very wicked in doing such a thing because you didn't do it, and women were, I think, much more frightened of the anger of men.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I thought of dead and sort of didn't I was in charge when it appeared on a poster, but it was, and like most things, taken out of the files twenty years.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well the next one is Vaughn Williams because we have to bring the standard up a bit here, I think. You've got a point to prove after the country in West End. Yes, and I can go if I have to into grandeur and”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they don't. I mean George Bernard Shaw always saw marriage and slavery is much the same because it was a trade, in fact. You would hope like Jane Austen Herons to marry for love or money, but it was a very difficult thing to do. You had to marry for love and money”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, because in those days if you were a woman you couldn't earn enough to keep yourself we are going right back to the nineteen fifties and women could only earn pin money so no matter how hard you worked, it was a really difficult thing to do, which was, I suppose, one of the reasons I became a feminist, actually. After that marriage, after I married for love after that, but then I could afford to, you see, because as soon as you can keep yourself you can afford to love. You can”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, yes, will you had to because there was no social security you either supported your child or they took it away and put it in an orphanage, and so the customary thing for girls in this situation to do was to marry somebody for a roof over your head and to be kept and you would provide services of a domestic and sexual nature which many people see marriage as anyway, and in return for your keep, so it was not so surprising or terrible a thing to do.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know but I do remember in about sort of nineteen eighty I think I saw my medical card and it had all the names I'd gone by there were lots of names I couldn't even remember them I must have been living with people or had taken somebody else's name for some reason or other I don't know but I was never really of any sort of fixed personality I suppose”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was my mother's idea and I waited what my mother told me, and she said, You know, it didn't rub people's noses in it if you said you were misses somebody and your husband was away. They were all perfectly prepared to accept this, and women change their names anyway a lot in those days.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disc number four is a tombstone every mile, which is a sort of country in Western song. And it's this kind of wonderful American romanticism about the sort of opening up of America, I suppose New Zealand was a pioneering country too. My great uncles were Danish actually, and they were in America as cowboys at the turn of the century, and it always had this extraordinary romanticism to me.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a writer's eye like that. But I just remember, I mean, but when I got a bit older, I sort of lived in sin with people and had a baby without a father. It didn't occur to me that there was any shame or disgrace in this, and indeed I met very few people who ever behaved, as if there was nobody seemed to think oh you're a bad girl particularly. In real life people are actually much much kinder than they ever appear to be in fiction.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't mind at all, I just thought it meant I deserved to be there. I was really proud of it. And these things did not particularly impinge upon them, or if it did, I didn't notice. I think there are many”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, of course, no, it was no, there's a lot of experience that's gone into this, plus a lot of reading, actually, because you know, I just read and read and read and read as a child, and I was brought up really on Victorian favourites.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How yet satis, my mother was the housekeeper, and we lived in the basement with the rats, the rats, it was terrible. There was no money. The world as she knew it, the literary world. My grandparents had run a kind of literary salon in Hamstead with wells and pounds and all sorts of people, and she was used to that life, and her friends were even in an attack war, and you know, but all that had just simply vanished.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is exactly what I said and since the government paid for me to go because I was a scholarship child. I was able to go, but there are a whole lot of little intellectuals there. They were very good.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's very much part of life. I think it's very much there you can deny it because it's very frightening and you can't control it and you don't understand it. But this sense of a sort of destiny, the sense of cogs of wheels within wheels, of coincidences and things that you don't quite understand which seem to have a purpose is very much always, I think, with me.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third piece of music is Buffy Sam Marie's Little Wheel Spin and Spin, and this to me has always seemed the most haunting and extraordinary piece of music. It's the kind of sense of destiny, I think, that she brings, and a kind of overall vision of what our existence is.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Tilbury, yes. It was terribly exciting, and you went into London and the whole thing was full of bonsights, like gaps in teeth, really, and yet rarely exciting because it was just this feeling of new beginnings and something terrible having happened with this sense of something else about to happen.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But not taking us, and again, so she was just not there one morning. my sister where my mother was, and she said she's gone home'cause home was what England was called in those days my sister was older but I couldn't understand that I just assumed again she must be another home somewhere else where one day I would go.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I thought he was already married. However, the world is very strange and fall, you know, you were allowed more than one wife at a time. You know, things have to be explained to children. In those days they very seldom did.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those days no they didn't tell you anything, so I didn't know my parents were divorced. I thought he had to work somewhere in the north, so that was why he wasn't with us, and then I was told, Oh, he's getting married again, and I thought that was very strange because”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When she was twenty two she published a really good novel, after that she wrote women's romances to sort of keep us all because my father left and we were very poor and they divorced when I was six. You know, so she managed to keep us alive by writing.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well she was a writer and my father wrote as well as being a doctor, so it was not perhaps astonishing that she did that.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that you lived in Was who you were? Yes, well, my father was Dr. Birkinshaw, my mother was Mrs. Birkinshaw, and she called me Franklin because he was called Franklin, and she believed in numerology, and if you added all the numbers up and did the workings out, it came out as William Shakespeare, so she thought Franklin Perkinshaw.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“narrative since it would be easy to sort of interpret it as almost a second sense about things. Yes, there is a degree of second side there, I think. Yes, on occasion. When did that begin? Oh, I think when I was really quite small a tendency to see things that weren't actually there, sort of ghosts or figures round the bed or voices in your head, or you know, all sorts of things which I think are really quite common in children, actually what is reality it's really difficult to put your finger on it or say yes that's real, that's not. And with me, if you spend your life making things up and making characters up and situations up, I have no idea anymore almost whether I'm real. have some music. Tell me about your second choice today. I chosen a Schubert And why? Because it was sung by my grandmother.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well,'tis seems to me to be just a human condition to be unsafe, to be unaware, to have tigers prowling outside the cage how can one live in peace or security? I don't think it's possible. Are you always managing your fear then or tempering your fear about what life may bring? No, not at all. The worst that can happen is death really, isn't it? It's not so bad. Right. Why do you say it's not so bad? It might sound pretty bad to most people. Well, I mean, it might be hell, it's true, it might be purgatory, it might be heaven, it might be absolutely nothing. I think I've presented myself here as somebody sort of very nervous and frightened. I'm not. I'm not frightened. There's very little frightens me, except I don't drive, because I'm so nervous of what's over the hill because I have a sort of scenario. You tell yourself sort of stories as you drive about what might be round the corner, so it makes it very difficult to drive, but this I'm put down to my overblow.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, before I was born there was an earthquake I sometimes think that might be what it was and my mother had to leave New Zealand where I was conceived and go to England because everything suddenly fell down and I think in a way this kind of concept has stayed with me that things can so easily just fall down and you have to live to be prepared for that and I think we all see our lives as two settled and safe and not wary enough about what's going to happen next. So what makes you feel secure? Is it earning and money in the bank and knowing that you can turn a good phrase and get a book published? I don't think anything really makes me feel secure at all but I don't see why it should. That must be a very nerve record.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was Jerry Lee Lewis and rockin' my life away You know, rocking the boat is something that's fine by you. It doesn't bother you too much. I don't think it does bother me very much you know you live, you die what does it matter you say what you think you do your work you try and do it properly and really that's all you can do and you do say what you think but you tend to think things five years ahead I find that's the problem I mean I remember pity the poor men became something shocking that I said because nobody pitied men but now everybody pities men you just get there first you see that's the trouble I see you have written that the Why was that”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and probably better to be the one making the coffee. I'm afraid you probably have got it about right, there, Kirsty. Well, you said it, not me. You've got it about right. Well, I know. But I think you can exhaust yourself fighting for justice in the home there isn't much justice in the home, but you know, it's not too bad accepting it. At the other hand, when you go to the office, you know, you are a human being not necessarily female. Do you think do you think No, you weren't sold up, we weren't sold a pup. We were sold a sort of rather majesty snapping, snarling kind of nice animal. Works well, that analogy, doesn't it, under these circumstances? We are going to hear first rocking my life away, Jerry Leis, because it's so sort of cheerful and makes your foot stomp and cheers you up. And it seems a fairly good way to have lived a life.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“especially about the relationships between men and women. Well, the relationship has changed between men and women would be very odd, it seems to me if I didn't, it has not always been what it is now. I mean, we're socialized in the most extraordinary degree now or have become so, probably mostly for the good. And you change your view. And you seem often to think of women choose to fight are the wrong ones, you know, you'll say well, it's fine at work. Not going to make the coffee, but when you go home.”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and published happy among them her answer to that particular conundrum incidentally nothing, not for more than ten minutes at a time. Off the page the story of her own life passion and various Fiction never seems a patch on real life, she says, so far fetched people. But write the truth and know. Yes, I actually promised to be honest, actually it's usually print media, I'm so dishonest with radio for some reason does seem to bring out the truth rather more if only in the tone of voice. I'm glad to hear it. You've also said that you Don't what do you think you know? I think I know what goes on in other people's heads more than most people do. It can be quite uncomfortable, actually, but you know what they're thinking. I think writers actually on the whole tend to have a degree of empathy which not everybody has. And you”
2010-05-09 · Desert Island Discs · Fay Weldon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source