YouSaid · the spoken record

Jan Pienkowski

lines on the record: 39
first: 2009-10-18
most recent: 2009-10-18
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'm afraid it's going to be frightfully prosaic. I have these And I always draw on the tube, on the bus everywhere, and so I would like to have a sort of large supply, a crate of those limits.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is, I like it very much. The only thing is it's rather a long way to go, so I sometimes go to the Isle of Wight, which is much nearer, and in fact the piece that I hope we're going to hear is the monks of the Isle of Wight, and it's the Noctimitis, the last song of the last service of the day, and it's a song of resignation, if you like, and being prepared for the final going to sleep.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think about what you do? The one I like best is up in Scotland, it's in Marrishire. It's called Plaskaden Abbey, and it was built as a Benedictine Abbey and then never destroyed. They grow all their own food, they've got more than a hundred varieties of apple, they grow lavender to have an income and so on. They've got a lovely river running by.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I often wonder about it, but of course when I go on retreat I know I'm going to come home Whereas the desert island you think well that's it”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Children love that good, don't they? They love a bit of chaos and nonsense and people who are excited. That'd be all of that. No, I've got around dozen of Godchildren and so that's enough for me.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When my father was very proud of my achievements in the art part and distressed at my orientation. However, he was very fond of David, and he got over it, but there was an underlying sadness, I think having lost one child, and then again, if you see what I mean, having lost the grandchildren. It was a bit of a hard deal”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the river, you see what you can find by the river in Paris'cause I worked in Paris on Disneyland Paris and I did an enormous giant pop up book which opened and then actors of small stature came on the pages and acted and so on. And it was a very happy time. And this is a very old song that I remember from my youth and it's what you can find under the bridge.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has become infested with schools there are five schools on our street now the five schools on our street are four very privileged children And so I suppose they've got plenty of everything, so if they sort of leave their jumper hooked over a tree because it was a hot day and then forget to collect it, you know, Mummy just buys them another one, I mean, I don't know, so it's extraordinarily from a wartime person that this happens. But I've made an effort for you, but normally you do look for me. I wear entirely clothes that I found that fit me and the others I give to the hospice. Did you?”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That people have thrown away. Isn't that true? You get that from. Tell me about that. Well, because I live in a street which is parallel with the river forty I don't know forty odd years and”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the melancholy is the best because I have lived with it for so long, and I know that it can be controlled. It was very frightening when I started, it was really, really terrifying. But now I think I can still make use of it, and I think it does help enormously. It's actually, if you like, it's a gift, and I think the whole idea of everybody having to be the same is perhaps not a good idea. It's perhaps a good thing that some people should suffer that, and then they're the ones who can express things perhaps slightly more graphically than the people who are on an even keel. I don't know. I notice all these things, as you say anyway.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes I used to suffer from Bipolate disease I used to have this sort of profound melancholia, and now it's all right so under control but I still get little bits of it so when I get the melancholia I'm all right because I think look it might not be like this is just me making it up everything's very much the same as it was yesterday it will be tomorrow where I really am frightened is when I get the upbeats and suddenly everything's wonderful you know and all that then I think hello old friend I know who you are I'm not going to believe you know so in a way I'm happy with the melancholy I prefer the melancholy”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now what David does as his hobby is he plays cello, and he plays that on the ground floor of our house and I'm on the top floor in the studio in what used to be the attics and some of the music, especially the lower the bass notes come up the chimney because I stand next to the fireplace and I can hear it. And this is one of the pieces that he plays which I like very much. So this is as I say my favorite piece.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we went the very first day that it was allowed we went to Richmond Registry Office in the morning and so it was the first day that it could be done. The interesting thing I think I can say this before we did it I sort of thought well I'd better talk to my parish priest about it so we went to Mass and then afterwards we sort of waited for people to leave as I thought it better to do this outside the church and I said father you know we're going to have the civil partnership tomorrow and I just wanted you to know and so on and it's a very terribly nice man and he said well you know I can't give you a blessing and I said yes I realized that and then he said but I'll say yes”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we met in a pub in the King's Rudge. We just hit it off, and I went off on the back of his scooter, and that was the beginning of that.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I went to King's there was a little house by the Granter pub, and but five of us put together and I gradually realized that the reason we were all there was that we were all foreign. There was an Irish American, a Jewish South African, a Punjabi, myself, and my great friend Dilipadaka, who was from Bombay. And he used to sing this pop song over and over and over again until one day we heard Mrs. Tuet, who's our wonderful landlady. And I remember hearing her coming up the stairs with the breakfast singing. Corey, Cory.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was wonderful, wonderful. Joan said Otian, you know she's so pleased at what I'd done with the necklace, and she said, What shall I do now? And I said, Well, can't you do some stories from where I come from? And she ended up with the stories from Croatia and that northern part of the Adriatic. And that's got the Baba Yaga. I mean, it is really the same tradition, the Slavonic tradition. And so she did those to please me, you know. So I put a lot of Polish things into it, you know.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what happened was the first book I was offered, that was in the sixties, and it was some Joan Akin stories and I thought she was very, very good, I still do. I had to do one sample picture to see if I got the job, and I did a picture of a northern city, you know, in the snow, and I thought the city was good, the sky was good, the snow was good, everything was good except the figures, and I thought, oh, they won't do, I'll never get this job. So at the last moment, I'm afraid I am a bit of a last minute merchant, the last moment I thought right, I'll black them in, so I black the fingers and I've got the job.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was him. He encouraged it all the time. He had an uncle who was a successful painter. And he more than encouraged me. He arranged for me to go when we came to London. I was about twelve or something. He arranged for me to go to a live class in a painter's studio when I was about thirteen.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was maybe ten, something like that. We had a wireless. It was kind of welded onto the home service, and I listened to children's hours at five o'clock, and probably once a week had this song Oranges and Lemons, and of course at that time I did not realise what it was about, and then when I came to London gradually it dawned on me, so oranges and lemons say the bells and clemence, well St. Clements is in the strand it is more or less opposite my publisher penguin's office. It is the Air Force Church, and my partner was trained as a fighter pilot in the RAF and both his father and his uncle in both wars in the Royal Flying Corps. So he sometimes go to the dos. So I likes Clements very much. So all these things have terrific resonance to me now, and I didn't know that. I knew the song, and I didn't know what they were. Now I do.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose whereas bluesing you know my first country it was long ago and far away and saw the concept of losing this one is so utterly appalling and terrifying that I suppose that's what upsets me. I don't know why.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew you were going to ask that All right, all right, I wasn't going to say this because it might end in tears, but I shall. I didn't know what the answer to that question was, but then I heard this poem, and it is by Kipling, and it's about a Roman centurion who's served in Britannia for many years. Obviously Rom is pulling out of Britain and his cohort is being told to go back to Rome. And he says command me not to go. And so I don't know why that I should find that play so very moving and has a wonderful description of the English skies and the English countryside compared with the Italian, and then he says but I don't want to go on to stay.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then when I went back to Rome on my own, when I knew I was going to get into Cambridge I left school and earned enough money to go to Rome for a couple of months, and I stayed with a very nice widow lady with two sons and one of the sons was more or less my own age, Franco, and we used to go around together and he took me to the bars of Caracalla, where they had the opera in the open air, and there was a wall outside, and you didn't have to pay you could sit on the wall. And the one I remember is Aida. Aida is a hostage, and then her father is taken prisoner, and they want to escape. And I suppose it was something to do with being away from the land of your birth, of your childhood, you know, and going back. Perhaps that's why it has such a powerful resonance to me, but I think it's also very beautiful duet.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we lived in Italy with the Polish Army in nineteen forty five, my parents took me to Rome and I was completely gobsmacked completely flattened by I loved it ever since it's just wonderful. And I remember I went to the opera for the first time”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, by the time I was eight I was speaking Italian so be Italian, German and Polish, and my parents spoke French to each other when they didn't want me to understand so I picked bits of that up, I suppose. But that was it.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think I was very happy on my own. I think when I sort of see my friends and the problems they have with their siblings, I think I was well out of that. And do you think?”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother did that. Because you see, the schools were closed down by the Germans. There were no schools for Polish people. So she taught me, and in fact she taught the village children as well, but she taught me systematically. And of course, because she was a scientist, she could do it. So I think I probably had as good an education as at school because it was one to one.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a polonaise which is the Polish dance, and it's the polonaise in praise of Warson, which is my native city where I was born. This version of it was done in the communist times, and free speech was not the rule of the day. The words go so now Warsaw smiles again with good heart and with good cheer. We understand each other without words like two good friends, meaning that you couldn't say what you wanted to say, but everybody knew what you meant nudge wink.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the sort of pits between the tracks so the mechanics can get underneath the trains. And so we slept in those pits. It was all this kind of atmosphere of panic fear and very unpleasant. And then we were put on open top cattle trucks and taken down to the Reich. So fortunately my father had relations in Krakow who helped us and then my father got a job on a farm in Vienna because you see there were so few men left in Germany by then. They're either dead or they were the Russian front.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so again Warsaw, that was in 1944, about a year later. And then we were there until it fell. And then the surviving population marched to a depot where trains amended.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five, six, maybe six. And he just went and didn't come back and he sent me a little toy train. And I remember being very upset. And I unwrapped this little brown paper parcel and I said, I don't want to train, I want my dad. So that was very sad.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he went to a German university in Poznan. My mother studied chemistry at the Warsaw University where her father was a professor of maths.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my mother certainly has sterling qualities or character. I don't know if my father was quite so sterling. No, he was a good man, very kind”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my father was a country squire. We had a little country house by a river now the extreme east of Poland. When the Germans and the Russians attacked Poland, my father's policy was always to stay on the German side of the front because then we wouldn't end up in Siberia or whatever. So my mother and I put everything on a cart with a couple of horses and drove to Warsaw, which was quite an adventure. So she was a doctor's daughter and she was very, very practical, hardworking woman.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it was a bit like it must have been in England before the Industrial Revolution or even earlier than that almost medieval in the sense that we grow the flax, we put the flax in the pond, come the autumn fish it out, dried it out, and there was a special medieval device for getting the husks off, then that was combed, then that was given to the spinsters to spin, then it was given to the weaver to weave, by this time it was spring, then it was pinned out on the meadow in the sunshine to bleach by the sun, and then it was made into sheets, shirts, whatever it was, you know, so that was just an example. So everything was done in the old way. It was like Chaucer, I suppose my life, you know.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like the Beatles and the particular song I've chosen is because presumably the other castaways are all untiny little islands dotted round the ocean and they're all alone and so in a way although we are alone, we are not alone because there's so many of us and so I thought this was appropriate Eleanor Rigby.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't like shrill noises. I think because I've blotted out the screams, you know, I can remember sort of terrible things happening and people being killed and so on, but I don't remember the noise. The noise has been obliterated somehow, but it's there inside me, and so I feel terribly unhappy with screaming and all that sort of thing. People, panicking, trampling, and screaming, that is what scares me.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know I don't know that my pictures the petrifying There is an awful witch in a house on a chicken foot and of course the man who's cutting off his hand to throw to the wolves so they let him through that is sort of fairly horrific for instance I suppose children like to what was nice about being frightened was that I was in a safe place if you in bed and your father or your mother reading your story you can be as petrified as you like because you know you're safe but then of course when we went to Warsaw in forty four and then the war caught up with us and then we saw action and then that was pretty scary and I think that those stories then would be terrifying I don't know if that makes sense it does”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever the word is, when you get rid of some childish terror by replaying it, and I think that probably what it is. That's how Meg came about.”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she was where we lived during the war was in the Reich, I mean it was technically Germany, and my father ran a farm there and my mother was always working and she was terribly anxious that I shouldn't get TB so I had milk from the cow, but it had to be boiled and I really didn't like it when I hated it and so there was this poor lady our neighbour's wife who had this task of making me drink this awful milk and she hit on this solution where she's thought on one of these gruesome stories and then stop and say drink your milk and then I had a little bit and then she'd tell me the next bit and the heroine of the terrible stories was always Babayaga the terrifying witch flies about and eats children and so on and I think that Meg is a kind of”
2009-10-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jan Pienkowski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source