Episode 5 My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Hello and welcome to My Life In Books, a chance for our guests

to talk about their favourite reads, and why they're important.

With me tonight, Don Warrington, famously Leonard Rossiter's

posh sparring partner in Rising Damp.

He's been working non-stop ever since.

Alongside him, Pam Ayres, who writes poetry about real life,

and it rhymes and it's funny.

She found fame on TV's original talent show,

Opportunity Knocks, when Simon Cowell was still in short trousers.

-Thank you both for being here.

-It's a pleasure.

APPLAUSE

Don, it's quite surprising to learn that your background and early years

are very different from that voice that has become so familiar to us.

Yes, well, I was born in Trinidad in the West Indies

and I came to England, I think, when I was about eight.

So, I went from being West Indian, Trinidadian,

to being Geordie to being this.

-What did your dad do?

-My dad was a politician.

I didn't know him well because he died when I was quite young,

but that's what he did.

And that prompted you coming to England?

Well, I suppose it was something to do with the move.

I think that my mother felt she needed a change,

and at the time, because of the Windrush and things like that,

-England seemed to be the place to come to.

-The promised land.

Yes, indeed. At school, it was all about this glorious...our country.

Meanwhile, Pam, you were growing up whereabouts?

I grew up in Stanford in the Vale, which used to be in Berkshire,

but then much to our indignation they changed the boundaries

and we found ourselves in Oxfordshire, which we did not like.

-Why didn't you like it?

-Because I'm one of six children,

and my four brothers used to play football for the local team,

and we were Berkshire. Then they changed the boundaries,

and we were Oxfordshire,

we were the people who'd always been the enemy, so we didn't like it.

And I think a lot of people felt that.

You know, you build up a loyalty to your own county.

We did not wish to be separated from it but we didn't have any choice.

-So, rural surroundings.

-Yes. It was a very insular village, really.

Now it tends to be a lot of people who work in Oxford and Swindon live there.

But then, it was very self-contained, it had lots of farms,

it had two builders' yards, lots of shops.

You know, you didn't go anywhere else very much.

So the accent, which everybody talks to me about,

is very common there, cos nobody came or went very much,

and I lived there until I was 18.

And I loved it, I still do.

Your first choice of book, Just William by Richmal Crompton...

-Yeah.

-Why this book?

Well, because one day at Stanford in the Vale village school,

the headmistress announced that we had a school library,

and everybody should go and investigate it.

And so, I went along at lunchtime,

and the library was about three feet of books on a shelf, and that was it.

The teacher was very nice. She said, "What do you like, Pamela?

"What do you feel interested in?"

I said, "Well, I like horses, and things that are funny,"

and she gave me Just William.

And I took it home, and I was convulsed with laughter.

Can you read us a small extract?

Yeah, certainly.

An auntie gives William sixpence and he goes to the pictures,

and this is one of the films that he saw.

And I've chosen it because of the language,

how sort of un-childish it is.

"Lastly, came the pathetic story of a drunkard's downward path.

"He began as a wild young man in evening clothes,

"drinking intoxicants and playing cards,

"and he ended up as a wild old man in rags,

"still drinking intoxicants and playing cards.

"He had a small child with a pious and superior expression,

"who had spent her time weeping over him

"and exhorting him to a better life,

"till in a moment of justifiable exasperation,

"he threw a beer bottle at her head."

That's why I love it, the language was very advanced,

but the situations were all recognisable, and they don't date.

Did you find William to be living the same life as you were living?

He was quite posh, wasn't he?

Yes, and his poshness grated on me.

I loved William and all the scrapes he got into, but every now and then

a very discordant note would sound when he talked about "one's cook"

or "one's gardener," and I didn't like that,

cos that made him different from me.

I wanted him to be ordinary like me.

But wasn't your village, wasn't that the distinction?

Well, exactly.

Our village was very much what my dad used to call "the nobs and us."

"Nobs" short for the nobility.

My head teacher, when I interviewed her years afterwards,

she said it was such a feudal village,

and there was this great divide between the landed gentry

and the people who went to church on a Sunday morning

and the people who swanned round in cars,

and us, you know, from the council houses,

and they were not affectionately regarded, I have to say.

Meanwhile, Don, you'd moved from Trinidad to Newcastle.

-Were you one of the nobs in Newcastle?

-No. No, no.

I mean, a different climate, a different culture.

How unusual, that era, was it to be a small black boy in Newcastle?

Well, it was very unusual. It was very unusual indeed.

But I think the thing about being a child at that age

was that one had enormous adaptability.

Very quickly, one could become a part of the community.

It was alien to me to be surrounded by all these white people,

basically, because where I'd come from, there were very few.

There were more of me than there were of them, so things had changed.

So I decided, "Well, I'll become like them as quickly as I can."

And how did you get round learning to speak the same as everybody else?

Well, I simply heard the way they spoke and I spoke like them.

I've always, I think, had the ability to pick up,

you know...so people would say things like,

"Hello, Don. How are ya?" And I'd go, "I'm fine, man." So, you know...

That's wonderful.

Your first choice of book is Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham.

-Why this one?

-I think coming from Trinidad to England

meant one had to make huge adjustments.

Therefore, I was looking for things, subconsciously,

but looking for things that would help me to make that adjustment.

At school, there were a list of books,

and I stumbled upon The Day Of The Triffids,

and I read it, and it had echoes for me because it was about

the world being suddenly made very different.

That was what my world was. It was suddenly very different indeed,

and I needed something that echoed with me, that said,

"Ah. Other things happen. Other people have had this experience."

And in a way, I found a sort of comfort in reading this book,

which is a rather dark book, actually.

It's a sci-fi book, isn't it?

It's a book about... It's also a book about the time, actually.

It's a book about paranoia, because at that time the world was in danger

from the Russians and all the rest of it...

-Yeah, it's a '50s book.

-Yeah, and that's what he's reflecting.

And there was also in it, I suppose, when I look back on it now,

a warning about how we should live, and that we should actually

look after the land, which I didn't know at the time, but you know...

Pam, did you have anyone in the village that encouraged you...?

Well, yes.

The vicar, the Reverend Selwyn Fry was a very nice man,

and people used to go to him for advice

if they were perplexed by things.

And I was so frustrated in the village when I was 17 or 18,

and I was desperate to get out,

and I could see that some girls became air stewardesses.

They became very glamorous air stewardesses

and they jetted off round the world.

And so, I went to consult the Reverend Selwyn Fry

and I didn't know that if I stood up with the accent I've got and said,

"Ladies and gentlemen, fa-asten your seatbelt..."

You know, everybody would fall about laughing

and nobody would do what they're supposed to do.

So I went to see the Reverend Selwyn Fry and he said,

"What you must do, my dear, is to buy yourself a tape recorder

"and listen to Radio Four, and emulate what you hear

"and then keep playing it back to the tape recorder."

But the idea of doing that was excruciating,

because that would have meant that I spoke differently

from my mum and dad, my granny and grampy,

all the people I loved.

I would have sounded a fraud.

It's how you two differ, isn't it?

Because you decided very ruthlessly that...?

Well, it was naivety, really,

because when I came into contact with actors,

they all talked differently to me.

And I thought, "To be like them, I'd better learn to talk like them."

So, I simply listened and adopted their accents,

cos I thought that's what actors did.

So, what was the alternative to...?

Oh, well, what I did in the end,

I joined the Womens' Royal Air Force when I was 18, and I could see

that it took you off to foreign climes at no cost to yourself.

-And in a very smart uniform.

-Absolutely.

There I am with my posh hat on.

And it was actually leaving the RAF,

they gave you an opportunity to re-train at something.

You were offered various re-settlement courses,

where you could go and train for the next thing.

I went on this creative writing course.

At the end, this is going to sound terribly arrogant,

but it was very thrilling for me because the man who was tutoring it

asked to see me and he said, "You are a writer,"

and he said, "You've got a style all your own," and I was only 22.

And he said, "You go away and read and read,

"and one day you'll be a somebody."

Your second choice of book is wonderful.

It rings so true.

It says that we drown ourselves in clutter for stupid, fatuous reasons.

You know, "I'm going to mend it."

"I've kept this hammer with the wobbly head

"because I'm going to mend it."

Or, "I've kept this card with a daffodil on the front,

"this Easter card that my son made for me when he was three.

"He's now 58 and a chartered accountant,

"but I'm going to keep it."

And as I read that book about clutter, it rang so true.

It's funny and it's very true.

Meanwhile, your T-shirts are all ironed and nice, are they?

Not quite, but I just like to be able to see above the horizon...

I feel that if there's too much, I'm enclosed and...

I like to see what I've got.

Your next choice of book is The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.

-Yeah.

-In your teens, when you were reading this?

-In my teens, about 14.

Tell us about the book?

The book is basically about a boy

coming to terms with growing into a man.

He sees that the weight of life

destroys people,

and so he's busy trying to find

an identity for himself,

and that identity involves looking at who he is.

Part of that, certainly at that age, is to do with one's sexuality.

He wrestles with the problem of his sexuality, doesn't he?

Yes, he does. In my case,

I translated that to wrestle with a question of identity, who was I?

And that's what drew me to James Baldwin.

Although I lived in Newcastle, he lived in Harlem,

there was that essential isolation that I felt, really,

and I could find comfort in his struggle

to find a place of belonging.

Was it difficult to achieve a dream of being an actor?

You were a teenager, black, in Newcastle. What were your chances?

Who knows? One didn't think about chances. It was simply an ambition.

So, how did you go about it?

I went down to the local theatre and I asked them for a job.

And they looked at me and smiled, kindly, and thought,

"What a strange little boy this is."

And they said, "OK, we'll give you a job,"

and they gave me a job as a student ASM, which meant

that you did everything people told you to do and so I did.

But basically, I got into the building

so I could be near to people who were doing the thing I wanted to do.

-And you got to drama school as a result.

-Yeah.

Later on, I auditioned for what turns out to be

a very radical drama school called the Drama Centre, where they...

their philosophy at the time was, "We will take you into this school.

"We will destroy your personality and remake you as an actor."

It was a belief system they had.

It's very complicated,

but they believed that personality was the thing that inhibited actors

from being able to create other people.

So, whose personality have you got?

-Well, now, I can be... Who would you like me to be?

-I don't know.

Well, this is me. This is me. This is me, as far as I can tell.

Pam, you were taking a different route to fame, weren't you?

You were encouraged, weren't you, to try Opportunity Knocks?

I did want to go on Opportunity Knocks, yes, I did.

I was working round the folk clubs, and I had written lots of poems.

Well, I'd written about 12 poems, I suppose,

and people kept asking for copies.

So I had a little pamphlet produced,

and at the end of the performance I used to say,

"If you like me poems and you want to read some more,

"I've got a book for 40 pence, buy it at the door."

And then I shot down off the stage

and sat at my little shop and sold these pamphlets of poems.

And I sold 7,000, which astonished me.

Then I was working as a secretary, which I didn't like,

and I was working in the evening as some sort of entertainer,

which I loved. I thought that the talent shows were a way to go,

and I went on Opportunity Knocks in 1975, which I won.

This is you a year after Opportunity Knocks,

-performing on the Parky show.

-Oh, right.

Oh.

I am a bunny rabbit, sitting in me hutch.

I like to sit up this end,

I don't care for that end, much.

I'm glad tomorrow's Sunday, cos with a bit of luck,

As far as I remember, that's the day they pass the buck.

APPLAUSE

Your timing is what...? Isn't her timing great?

-It's very, very good.

-But it's so slow. It seems so slow to me now.

I want to say, "Get on with it! For God's sake!"

Your next choice of book...

Tell us about this.

Well, I just happened to pick it up one day. I liked the cover. And I...

That's why you're so refreshing.

Thanks. This is the cover. This is the one I saw.

You've got a sort of lesser version, but this is the one

that I fell in love with, and it's a story of a deaf boy and his dog.

It's a very charming book on that level.

It's also a very creepy ghost story. It's got very eerie elements to it.

It's a murder story. There's a hateful uncle that you detest,

and the language is exquisite.

It's the most spellbindingly written book.

It took him ten years to write.

-Well, I think you've sold that very well.

-Have I?

-Very well indeed.

-You going to read us an extract?

-I'll read you a little piece, yes.

This is where, there's a lady in the book called Ida Payne,

and she has premonitions and she's a really creepy lady.

And Edgar, the boy in the book,

he's threatened by a man with poison.

The man with poison is in the background.

Ida can see this, and the little boy can't.

"Images he didn't understand occupied his mind's eye.

"A dark, cobbled alleyway, a dog limping through the rain,

"an elderly Oriental man holding a slender length of cane

"with great delicacy."

That's the poison.

"And Edgar looked at the Coke bottle in his rigor-locked hand.

"And then he saw that the bottle had changed.

"It had taken the shape of an antique cruet or inkwell,

"and maybe a prescription bottle from olden days.

"Some oily liquid glazed the inside. Prismatic, clear, viscous.

"The thing was banded with a ribbon,

"and the ribbon was covered with markings in some foreign alphabet.

" 'If you go,' she whispered, 'Don't you come back. Not for nothing.' "

-It is scary.

-It's a cracking book.

I think it's more fun if you're reading it.

That's how I'd like to hear it.

Don, almost the same time that Pam was hitting television

with Opportunity Knocks, along came Rising Damp for you.

Yes, yes indeed. And it came absolutely out of the blue.

Rigsby, who's the main character played by Leonard Rossiter,

is a despicable, racist, bigoted old man, isn't he?

Well, well, no. I mean, yes, on the one hand,

but, no, on the other.

The great thing about that character

was he was so self-deluding that in the end,

one had a degree of sympathy

for just how far outside of himself he was.

That was the greatness in it, I think.

Let's have a look.

This is, he's the landlord and you're one of the tenants.

If you're the son of a chief, why are you called Smith?

-That's not my real name.

-Of course it isn't.

-What's your real name, then?

-I can't tell you that.

-My real name is known only to the elders.

-Oh!

My people believe that if a man has your name, he can take your name

-and work evil with it.

-We've got people like that in this country.

We call them the police.

Rigsby, Philip's name's taboo.

Well, if his name's Taboo, why can't he say so? He's being so secretive about it.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Despite the great success, you were obviously still grappling

with identity when you look at the next book you've chosen,

which is The Song Of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

Yeah, I mean, identity's always been

the thing that I've searched for,

and I think it's because

I'm essentially an immigrant, you know.

And all immigrants need to find a place to belong,

and it's how you go about finding that.

In my case, it would come through literature.

It's a huge fable.

It's a fable about people who are held

in a kind of, erm, unhappy state,

and how, within that, they find a way of expressing themselves.

What I found fascinating was the bits of detail which were so real,

like the fact that the local hospital, a black baby

had never been born there cos black women couldn't take their babies in.

And also, it's about the wit of survival, because the hospital

was called Mercy Hospital, but black people renamed it No-Mercy Hospital

because black people weren't allowed to be born there.

It's how you work the system from underneath, which is...

-It's brilliant. Would you read us a little?

-Yes, I will.

"Macon focused his eyes on his son."

"Papa couldn't read, couldn't even sign his name. Had a mark he used.

"They tricked him. He signed something, I don't know what,

"and they told him they owned his property. He never read nothing.

"I tried to teach him, but he said he couldn't remember

"those little marks from one day to the next.

"Wrote one word in his life.

"Pilate's name, copied it out of the Bible.

"That's what she got folded up in that earring.

"He should have let me teach him.

"Everything bad that ever happened to him

"happened because he couldn't read.

"He got his name messed up cos he couldn't read."

-Lovely, and a wonderful reading too. And I love the specs.

-Thank you.

Pam, your next choice of book, fabulous again.

The Complete Book Of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour,

and this is an ageing copy, as is the one...

-My copy's ageing, as well.

-Yes.

I chose this book because as far as I'm concerned,

it's a book to live by.

And in the '70s, John Seymour came on the scene

and he was talking about things

which people have espoused today.

He was telling you how to keep a few chickens in the back garden.

How to perhaps have a hive of bees.

How to have a compost heap, how to have an allotment.

And all the things that nowadays people do

and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's talking about and other gurus.

But John Seymour was there first, and even if you only plant

a bit of mustard and cress in the windowsill, to do something

for yourself and not be entirely dependent on the oil companies

and the supermarkets.

Do you keep animals nowadays?

-Yeah, I do. I've got 13 cows.

-Really?

Yes, I've got 13 cows, nine sheep, 17 guinea fowl,

a host of chickens and usually, four dogs.

-In how many acres?

-20.

-So you've become a nob now?

-I am a bit of a nob now, Anne, yes.

No, I'm not a nob, actually, cos nob is the "nobility."

You have to walk around with your nose in the air to be a nob.

But 20 acres in Gloucestershire, that's quite nobby, isn't it?

It is quite nobby. I confess.

Don, your last choice of book, Everyman by Philip Roth.

Yeah, it's narrated by a dead man, really.

The book opens with him being put in the grave,

and it's how we make arrangements with what's going to happen

to all of us, really, which is we're going to die.

-Have you prepared yourself for death?

-I don't know that one can,

I don't think there's any ritual you go through,

but I guess you prepare yourself for death by the way you live.

You know, and at a certain age you begin to think, "Well, I don't have

"that long, again, that I've already had, so it's what's going to happen,

"and if I can live properly now, then when it comes,

"providing it's not gruesome and horrible

"and I've not got a terrible disease, then there it is."

And what's wonderful and uplifting about this book -

although it does sound pretty "Hmmm," it isn't -

is that at the end, he is joyous when death comes.

He is taken away because he remembers his life.

He remembers the good bits

and he remembers the fact that there were people in his life

that loved him, that gave him a place to be in the world,

his family.

And what's joyous about this is that life ends,

and if we can end it in as comfortable a way as possible,

then that's fantastic.

Pam, you're very practical,

so have you made arrangements for your funeral?

I can't bear to think about it.

I can't bear to think about it, I just love life so much.

I've got such a nice life and a nice family, and a lovely home,

and this time of year, the snowdrops are all coming up and the aconites,

and I can't bear to think that they'll be coming up

and I won't be there to see them.

I find it heartbreaking.

And so I tend not to think about the end of life,

but I'm glad I've had a life that's been jam-packed

with all sorts of different things.

So, you haven't got a poem for a burial...?

Yes, I have.

The interesting thing is, I suppose if I'm known for anything,

I'm known for funny poems.

And once, a few years ago, I wrote a piece called Woodland Burial,

which is about my own feeling that I would like to be buried

in a woodland environment, with trees and plants

and they could use the residue to make something nice.

I like that idea, and I didn't know whether to publish it or not

cos I thought, "This is not what people expect from me."

Anyway, I did,

and it's been taken up by innumerable natural burial grounds in woodlands,

and I'm so pleased that I had the courage to show it to people, to say,

"This is something I've written which is different,

-"but I hope you like this."

-Can we have a couple of lines?

I'm not sure I can remember all of it. I'll have a little go.

I didn't know you were going to ask me, but it goes like this...

"Don't lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall,

"Where the dust of ancient bones has cast a dryness overall.

"Lay me in some leafy loam, where sheltered from the cold,

"Tiny seeds investigate and little leaves unfold.

"There, kindly and affectionately, plant a native tree,

"To grow resplendent before God and hold some part of me."

Fantastic.

APPLAUSE

I feel tearful now.

How wonderful. Thank you both very much. Don Warrington and Pam Ayres.

-Thank you.

-Thank you. It's been a real pleasure.

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