Backlisted - Biography and Memoir

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

A Backlisted Special dedicated to biographies and memoirs, with books by Nancy Mitford, Roger Lewis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, P.D. James and Jean Rhys.   John Mitchinson talks to the writer and friend of the show Laura Thompson about five of her favourite books – two of them biographies (Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford and The Real Life of Laurence Olivier by Roger Lewis) and three memoirs (Slipstream by Elizabeth Jane Howard; Time to Be in Earnest by P.D. James and Smile Please by Jean Rhys).   The discussion explores the difference between writing about someone else’s life and writing about your own; the various motivations that lead writers to produce memoirs, and the relationship between both forms and fiction. Laura Thompson is herself the writer of both biography and memoir. She has written a life of Agatha Christie, and books about the Mitford sisters and the Lord Lucan case, as well as a memoir of her grandmother, The Last Landlady. This is her fifth appearance on Backlisted, after joining us for episodes on Nancy Mitford, Antonia White, P.D. James and Agatha Christie. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Why? Why? It's hard to talk about books if you haven't read them and I know that you're you're reading heavily this week as well aren't you? Well I'm only reading one book but don't worry everyone it's 850 pages long so I won't be I won't be doing much else this week. Surely you must have a secret helper? No, but what I do use is a Serious Reader's Lamp, as do you, John, I believe. That's true. We spend hours squinting at the pages of the books we have to read for our show,

so we know the importance of good light. And the Serious Reader's HD light has transformed how we read. It replicates daylight, making every word crystal clear and reducing eye strain so we can read for longer. For £150 off and free UK delivery of a Serious Readers HD Lite, go to seriousreaders.com forward slash backlisted and use the discount code BAK. That's seriousreaders.com forward slash backlisted with the show. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today's show is a biography and memoir special. We've got some serious ground to cover with five books from

Nancy Mitford and Roger Lewis to Elizabeth Jane Howard, P.D. James and Jean Rees. I'm John Mitchinson, writer and publisher. I'm delighted to welcome to backlisted today our guest and friend of the show, Laura Thompson. Fabulous to be here. Lovely to have you. Regular listeners will know, of course, that Laura is both a writer of biography and memoir. She's written a life of Agatha Christie, books about the Mitford sisters and the Lord Lucan case, as well as a memoir of her grandmother, The Last Landlady, which I had the good fortune

to publish. This is your fifth appearance on Backlisted, Laura. You joined us, can you remember, all the way back to the beginning, Nancy Mitford, The Blessing, the third show we ever recorded back in 2016, and then shows on Antonio White, PD James, and most recently, our live falls extravaganza on Agatha Christie. Well, it's very nice to have you back on the show, Laura, looking forward to getting into the detail about the five books that you've chosen but before we do that here is a message from our sponsors and we're back and before we start on the main course as it were it's probably a good time to mention that we'll be picking up the discussion that we're having today about the books that Laura's chosen in next week's Lock Listed. Andy, Nicky and I'll choose some of our own favourite memoirs.

So if you want to listen to that show, all you need to do is to go and subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. And you'll find not only next week's discussion, but you'll also find five years of superior book chat. Plus, you'll get ad free early versions of the main show. Now to business. Where are we going to start? We're going to start with this. Nancy Metford's 1956, Hamish Hamilton published. 54. 54, sorry. Nancy Metford on Madame de Pompadour. I mean, I'm going to ask you, of course, for each one of these, why you chose it. But I mean, it's going to ask you, of course, for each one of these, why you chose it. But I mean, it's fairly obvious why you chose it because it's bloody great.

Oh, did you think? Did you love it? I did love it. And you know, I'm kind of not, it's an area of history that I'm relatively ignorant about. So I can't judge how good the research is, but my god it it it rollics along Well, that's it. She more than anyone if I have any skill at writing biography. I learned it from her I learned I mean the first biography I wrote was about her and I was kind of learning how to do it Through reading her biographies Because she is the perfect biographer it seems to me because she just writes them like damn books. I don't know what you see this is the thing John.

What's a damn book? I like it. Well what is a biographer? You're just a writer aren't you? You're telling a story. And I think we're gonna, this theme will come up again particularly in the next book we're gonna talk about but can I read a little bit here about the author? Because I'm reading from the Reprint Society. If you remember what they used to do in the 50s when they had a book that had done particularly well, they would reprint them in hardback and at a much cheaper price. It says, the sedition published by the Reprint Society by arrangement with Hamish Hamilton

1955. So I think by that stage, it had had already, it did get amazing reviews. But this is, this is the about the author which I just think is perfect. Nancy Mitford might never have written Madame de Pompadour had not a friend unable to read French asked if she could recommend a biography of her in English. I was fascinated by the subject says Miss Mitford. So I decided to write her life myself as you do. Right, okay. I don't think that's quite really how it happened.

Soon after the war ended Miss Mitford migrated with her husband and their family to Paris where they have remained. She does not think that living there and writing in English has had much effect on her style but she says I very much hope she says that I shall not fall into a sort of pigeon English like poor Fanny Burney in similar circumstances. That's a pretty mad blurb, right? It's a completely mad blurb because what she actually did was leave her husband to go and live in Paris because she had a flat very near her lover. So it's all, you know, well. Well that was the next thing I was going to

ask you is how much of this subject do you think was chosen because there was a kind of, there were at least resonances, there were chimes at least with her own life at the time. I think she does. I mean, she's such an interesting writer, I think, and I think she's a very influential writer. I mean, I have no woman friends who don't adore her. Now why is that? There must be something very substantial in there. And she's writing about a woman here

as well. We should say who Madame de Pompadour for people like me who wasn't quite clear who she was. I'm sure you were but Evelyn Waugh did say to her don't write it as a novel which was the original idea. Hamish Hamilton wanted it as a novel. He said, on no account a novel, write for the sort of reader who knows Louis XV furniture when she sees it, but thinks Louis XV was the son of Louis XIV and had his head cut off. Okay. But in fact, of course, Louis XV is the grandson of Louis XIV and didn't have his head cut off. And Madame de Pompadour was his chief mistress.

And he had a few. Yes, he was very libidinous. But she... Isn't there, I mean, one of the things I had to keep rereading the book, there was sort of observation of the conjugal carry-on in the French court. There's this whole idea that the French court was, I mean, they were obsessed with their, passionately obsessed with the personality of their kings and queens. Yes, I think she's so good on things like that. I mean, AJP Taylor and other historians were-

No slouch himself in the historical narrative. Well, no, but he was very snooty about her and saying- Really? that. I mean, AJP Taylor and other historians- No slouch himself in the historical narrative. Well, no, but he was very snooty about her and said, all she's done is take the Mitford family and put them at the court of Versailles. You see, I think that's very unkind and very wrong because she does, of course, she invests these people with her own imagination and she says, oh, they were all just like one. Well, they weren't really, but she kind of reconfigures Pompadour and Louis-Louis Caz as herself and her boyfriend Gaston Pilevsky and sort of, she does do that. But that's part of what gives it so much life, this incredible

vivacity that makes you actually want to read the damn thing, which is not always the case with non-fiction in my view. And she's got this incredible gift for cleaving to the heart of motive. Like when she says, oh, Louis XV loved the Duke de Choiseul because he didn't go droning on about things. And of course, if you're the wrong sort of reader, you think, oh, what a frivolous woman. But actually, he probably did like him for that reason. And somebody said to me, she's so clear and so incisive in her understanding of why people do things, almost like a very, very clever and perceptive child. He said, it's the only time I've ever understood the Seven Years War is when she wrote about it.

That's, I mean, she is incredibly clear and good at telling the stories and all the little side stories of the, you know, the different mistresses and the, and the, the, as you say, the psychological motivations and the, the, the, I mean, the thing that I hadn't really taken on board was just how odd the court of Versailles was. Yeah. And eccentric and unlike, I mean, not really, that, I mean, there wasn't anything comparable really happening in, in, in Britain. It made, it made our Royals sort of 18th century with just a lot of, as she says, a lot of dull Germans for the most part and we didn't seem to mind. Well, I suppose we had Charles II, but he sort of trod a warier path, didn't he, as

they probably should have done. But yes, she's absolutely brilliant on the life of Versailles. She's absolutely brilliant on why people do things. And she doesn't, I mean, Harold Nicholson said, it's not history. Well, it's untroubled by footnotes, isn't it? It's untroubled by sources. Glory be. And her friend, Raymond Mortimer said, it reads like an enchantingly clever woman telling the story to me down the telephone. But I think let's hear a little bit of this, because it is, I have to say, all the books that you've chosen today are pleasurable in their own way, but there is something that

is a bit like stuffing your face with extremely sugary sweets in this book. The prose is a delight. And the stories are just, you know, are completely winning. So let's hear a little bit. Okay, well, I mean, one could pick, with any of these books, it's impossible to pick a bit. I've almost gone like that. So anyway, but this gets to the heart of why she's so clever about why people do things. While nearly every inhabitant of Versailles was passionately anxious to get, somehow,

by hook or by crook, an invitation to Madame de Pompadour's theatre, the marquise herself was longing for the presence of the one person who would not spring forward when she lifted her little finger, the queen. The dowdy, sleepy queen, impervious to fashion and charm. So this is Louis XV's actual wife. Pete Who was a Polish, Polish royal. Louise That's right. Pete With whom he consummated the marriage seven times on the first night and was commended

by everybody in the court for having performed so manfully. But that's typical of him, I would have said. But anyway, she was very polite to Madame de Pompadour, who continued to pay her court punctiliously, although it must have bored and tired her to do so. That's the sort of thing I love. The outward appearances were thus perfectly maintained, but the Marquise wanted more than that. She really seems to have wanted, in her affectionate bourgeois way, to be looked upon as one of

the family. In the end, it must be said that she succeeded, but these were early days. And she started off by making a curious mistake. She saw that the Queen's happiness, interest and occupation was in her religion and she thought a good way to approach her was by showing an interest in the life of the chapel. Now, Madame de Pompadour was totally irreligious. That is to say, she was not one of those who believing in God and understanding the protocol with which he is surrounded was kept away by some weakness of the flesh. She simply did not grasp the meaning of religion. All

her life she behaved with an extraordinary denseness when anything to do with the church was concerned. Now that is just one randomly chosen bit, but it's this marvellous simplification that's also full of resonance that I think is typical of mature Nancy Mitford. This reads as easily and as astutely as love in a cold climate. It's this enormous sophistication that she has, this unshockable, we know, very Mitford and everything. I mean, she says things that nobody would get away with today. But always done with this smiling, almost benevolent, sort of cutting to the heart of things. You know, when I wrote my biography of her, the best thing that anybody said to me was Peter Brook, the theatre director,

who directed a play that she translated. And he wrote to me, he said, she was light, but light is an absolute value, not light as the opposite of weighty. And that was incredibly useful, yeah. I wondered, I was going to ask you whether, you know, for people who obviously, as you say, she's become important to a lot of women writers, whether this book in some strange way was a very early kind of exercise in feminist reclamation.

Here is a woman that has had a reputation and has probably been ill judged by history. Whether Nancy herself, because of the identification, is kind of looking and saying, I could tell this story and make her seem a lot more independent, a lot more intelligent, a lot more give her, as the young people might say, a lot more agency

than the kind of the received wisdom, historical wisdom has given her in recent times. That's so clever. And she would never have seen it that way because she always, she was very anti-feminist in the way that Agatha Christie was. These women who earn their own money by their own brains and always said, oh, good Lord.

She always said, female deputies in the, whatever the French, she was used to say, oh, I wish they'd be quiet. She was, and she called Madame de Pompadour going off to this, some negotiations of the Seven Years Wars, she had going off in a bustle of self-importance, but what woman could have resisted? You know, she's quite, she's very pro-women really, but she's also quite, again, this cutting to the heart of motivation is probably a bit more truthful than we'd get away with today.

If you're a fan of Nancy Mitford's fiction, why would you pick up Madame de Pompadour? Because it's as enjoyable as her fiction. It's comparable with Love in a Cold Climate, I think. Her later biographies are more that haven't quite got so much scintillation. This is a perfect meeting of writer and subject, I think, which is what you're always looking about. Exactly. And actually a very good way for us to segue into the second book, which is also a biography.

We should say we've got two biographies and three memoirs, and we'll talk a little bit about why more memoirs and biographies, I'm sure. But the second biography we have is The Real Life of Laurence Olivier by Roger Lewis, published by Century in 1996. And those of you who are regular backlisted listeners will know that Andy and I have a particular soft spot for the work of Roger Lewis. I think we both, at least I think on a lot listed recently, praised to the skies his extraordinary, magisterial book on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, which glories in the title Erotic Vagrancy, everything you want to know about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And this though is from much earlier in his career and it's the great kind of dominant probably I would say actor of the 20th century, British actor of the 20th century, Laurence

Olivier. What's so great about it, Laura? That book is the only time I've ever written a letter to an author. I just could not stop myself. I've never met Roger, we email, because he was kind enough to be very lovely about our book, The Last Landlady. And that meant a lot to me, because I think he stands alone. I think he's in a league of his own. I'm really interested. I'm partial. I'm I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm partial. You're not going to get, I'm afraid you're not going to get balance here. There are some people who would, I know that erotic vagrancy was, was criticized in some quarters, probably quite justifiably

for its somewhat unkind sort of presentation of Elizabeth Taylor in particular. Well, he's not frightened, is he? Most people are, most of us are. He is fearless and he is also not afraid I think of putting himself into the narrative, which is, I mean one of the things I, we're talking about sort of what makes Barguely, he doesn't like biography. He said in a great passage from Merotic Vagrancy, the process is bogus. The whole boiling is overly settled, too much carried away by and credence given

to balance and fairness. There's no understanding that reserve and secrecy are part of life, possibly more than verifiable events are than action is. Now that's fascinating when you, obviously for Burton and Taylor, but it's fascinating when you think about Laurence Olivier because he lived an incredibly public life. And his son has said this is the only biography of Olivier that he's, that he talked in, Olivier is the only one that he would recommend.

No, I didn't know that. That's interesting. I mean, I always adored Olivier. I worshipped Olivier because I wanted to act, which was very foolhardy, but I did think he was also in a league of his own. And I think Roger has the magnitude to take him on, which it's that what you've just read of Roger's, what he calls the biographical fallacy. Matthew 20.10 Fallacy, yeah. That little, well, it's not little, it's majestic, but that passage in the Burton Taylor book. And I was just like so often with Roger, I was just going,

yes, yes. Because it's complete, he's said it far better than I could, but I agree with every word of that. That's what I meant when I said at the beginning, what is biography? It's a story, it's a story. And by definition, a story is an interpretation. So and he says that life is not a story. Life is he's got this great phrase. He says life is contingent, ziggy, zaggy, and made up of discordant moments. Yeah. So a biographer is always doing pulling stuff together to make a kind of a okay narrative. Yeah, and it's completely, it is false. And unless you're, and also what he said, that thing about that sort of starting point template, which I found when I wrote about Nancy Mitford,

that people always said, she had no happy love life, she had no children, therefore her life must have been a little bit sad. So you're judging a template, you're not judging her, and that is what Roger is so brilliant at, I think. Judging, you know, he writes about people like Peter Sellers, and he writes a book that is appropriate to Peter Sellers. He writes about Olivier. He doesn't say, oh, he was this, he writes the book that's appropriate to Olivier. And he loves Olivier, doesn't he? I mean, that's one of the things that comes out. I mean, famously halfway through the Peter Sellers biography, he turns to the reader and says, this man is just awful. Yeah, absolutely.

Whereas he is interested in, while he's very good on Olivier's self-mythologizing, he's also, his method is really more like criticism, isn't it? He watches everything, he reads all the biographies, he tries to kind of, not so, to create a surface narrative of a person's life. He thinks that dates and chronology of which this book is a perfect, this is not, this doesn't tell the story of he was born, he grew up, he went to school, you know, the usual, he duts in and out of Olivier's life and goes to a certain performance and goes to a certain, a certain period of his life,

the Vivienne Leigh stuff in particular is so vivid. Do you want to read a little bit? Well, I'll read a little bit that's about, because what I think he's so brilliant about with Olivier is who's been criticized for being, you know, a too technical actor, too bravura, an actor too much concerned with the superficialities. He understands the interplay between. And he's so good about all the injuries that Olivier sustains. Because Olivier was famously, I mean, when I was growing up, my mom was, the world used to slightly divide into, if you were an intro, my mom was a drama teacher.

So she was very much of the Gielgud School, which was the language. The language is a beautifully, mellifluous Gielgud's delivery of Shakespeare is second to none. Whereas Olivier was like leaping all over the stage, he's brilliant, he loved makeup, he absolutely loved transforming himself.

I mean, you know, perhaps most famously or now infamously, although it's brilliant if you haven't seen it, playing Othello. Othello, yeah. Which I still think is one of the great, one of the great Othello, which I still think is one of the great Othello's despite the obvious difficulties. Yeah, I agree. No, I agree. So I picked a bit that sort of relates to that. Olivier was always mocked for his experiments and inventions, perhaps because his impersonations, like Meryl Streep's, are slightly off, over

precise, like elocution lessons. They're put on over the top of their normal tones and rhythms, allulating in the jazz singer, eh-hef-no-san, or growling in Cat on a Hot Tim Roof. Cantor Rabinovich and Big Daddy are still Olivier. That's what I love about him, you see. Just as though he developed what he described as the violet velvet that I felt was necessary in the timbre of the voice in Othello, for which he was much lampooned, he is still Olivier. He was always different and the same. He could toy with caricature, not only with how he sounded. He could literally make caricature, not only with how he sounded. He could literally make

a spectacle of himself. Yet there's no escaping his grandeur, his refinement. It's the quality Zeffirelli wanted him to bring to the small role of Nicodemus in Jesus of Nazareth. And in an even briefer role, Dr. Spanda, who pleads with SS General Ludwig for a temporary truce to remove allied wounded in a bridge too far. There's that unique quality again. Olivier and only Olivier, as the director Richard Attenborough knew, could convey by his countenance alone the sorrow and pity of war. Which is as well because his Dutch accent is out of the Muppet show. But that is, you see, that is someone who to me gets Olivia, who doesn't, who's not saying, well, they're not criticizing for what he isn't. And that is what I do find

that quite a lot with biographies. Yes. The sixth form of biography. That attempt to sort of also put into a contemporary context the the obfied definition of the not contemporary which can sometimes work brilliantly. What I think when every time I read I was so I hadn't read this book before you recommended it was that really what you want is to read Roger Lewis on everybody. And I wondered if there was anyone that he hadn't. I was thinking, why is there not?

I don't think, although I liked Simon Callow's Orson Welles, and I liked-ish the Barbara Leeming. I mean, he's the man if you want a big reputation. So I'd have loved to, Roger Lewis on Alston Wells I would love to read. Yeah, that would be extraordinary. I wondered if there were any other people that you felt you could, because it is Roger Lewis on, isn't it? His, that kind of ability to go from high to low, to have strong opinions, to make you

laugh in the middle of a paragraph when you feel that actually, shouldn't we all be worshipping at the shrine of this great actor? He's very good at puncturing pomposity. Yeah. Yeah. Could Olivia play Richard the second? That's something that people have said and the answer I think is probably, I don't think he'd be very good necessarily. And I wouldn't waste, I wouldn't want Roger to waste his time on some nimmini-pimmini. The biography of David Beckham but he'd probably do it absolutely brilliantly. No I know what you mean I think also that that passage was perfect because it says the thing that we kind of all the mystery of

a great actor like Olivier is he is always Olivier. I was thinking the same thing watching Mark Rylance playing Thomas Cromwell, which I think again, hits that just astonishing kind of transcendent thing where you think this has gone beyond acting now, this is like channeling something. And yet at the same time, you're absolutely aware that it is Mark Rylance. He gets criticized as did Olivier, as did I'm sure all great actors for being what people

call mannered, which means that they are reminding you simultaneously that they are both the character and themselves, which is, I think, one of the great, I mean... What makes it exciting. Yes. Yeah. And that's... And that's the thing. This book is... I understand, sir. ...really full of excitement. And obviously, it's a big life. Yeah. And he... Goes to Hollywood. He does Rebecca. He... Olivier's life is exciting. He's got that tempestuous relationship with Vivien Leigh. He has a great last act, doesn't he,

where he plays old men brilliantly, both King Lear on one hand and the dentist and marathon man in the other. And Roger's, that's the thing, Roger can do all of that. He can do the Shakespeare and he can do, and he can do, oh, my favourite is the terrible Harrod Robbins film he's in. Oh, The Betsy. The Betsy, which, again, Roger has great fun. Well, he's a… You see for the first time ever, Olivier's Bottom in a… Septuagenarian Olivier.

But can you imagine adoring Olivier and having read all these boring, dutiful biographies which say, oh, you should never have gone off with Joan Plowright, and then reading that. And I mean, the excitement of reading. And did you then go on, had you not written the Mitford book or Agatha by that stage? No, I hadn't, but I never thought that I would be doing such a thing at that point. I can't remember what I was doing at that point. But he, I mean, I, you know, I think

what he does with biography is what one should aspire to do, I think. It's interesting. We've done two biographies and we're about to start on three memoirs. Elizabeth Jane Howard, P.D. James, and finally Jean Rees. Both, all three very different. But I'm intrigued, I have to ask you, I mean, we could have just done biographies, but let's be absolutely honest, you said, you know, I don't like enough biographies to pick five.

But that sounds terrible, doesn't it? Doesn't sound awful. I don't think it does because I want to ask you what it is about memoir that you really do love because it's, it's, it seems to me we're going to, we're going to kick off with Elizabeth Jane Howard's slipstream, which is Macmillan published in 2002. She was, I suppose, at that stage in the last decade of her life. So she's in her 80s looking back on her life. She died in 2014, age 90. So she's looking back on, my God, what a life. But just sticking with the memoir thing at the moment, what is it that you, about the form that you, because let's be honest, Laura, we are from all sides now,

bombarded by memoir. It's a growing form. The thing is, and I have thought about this, and this is a really feeble answer, the truth is, John, I'm almost less interested in what people write about than how they do it. And she is such a wonderful, tremendous writer. And I love Martin Amis for thinking she's a great writer. I love him for that and for being so generous. And we should explain. Oh yes, sorry, yes. And we should explain. Let's do a little bit about her life and why this book is, I mean, it's remarkable because it's a long life that stretches across what we might call the

Bohemian sort of literary scene of the 20th century. It's Slipstreams, which is Elizabeth Joan Howard's memoir published when she was in her seventies. And it really covers the big eighties in her eighties, which really covers the whole of Bohemian literary London from, you know, from before the second world war right through to right through to publishing. As I remember, I remember her going to and having dinner with her in Bath. Did you? And sitting next to her and being incredibly impressed and how interested she was in everybody

and how generous she was, but also how strangely still concerned about her status as a writer, which is a kind of a theme through the book, isn't it? Yes. So do you want to give us a little potted history of Elizabeth Jane Howard, why she matters, who she married and who she slept with? Because that's, let's be honest, candor is probably the key word with this biography. Well, that's, yes, well, that's what I love about her. And of course, if you know her novels very well, you will recognize almost everything in this book. You can see, you know, the inspiration,

the dovetailing of inspiration. She was born in 1923. She's posh. She's posh. She's got that strange network of the posh within this book, isn't there? There's always friends and cousins and nephews, my niece called Minky. Yeah, my uncle who was the governor of the Bank of England. And when she goes to an acting school during the war, I was there with Paul Schofield. And it's very, but that's all, I find all that very, very fascinating, the world that she portrays growing up, difficult family life, not an affectionate mother, a father who became too affectionate toward her. Yeah. All this is in the casolets.

Yeah. And she was, this is what is interesting, and this isn't being superficial, she was extraordinarily beautiful. And she doesn't seem to know that how extraordinarily beautiful she is for quite a lot of the book. Well she, I think you must if everybody. The number of men who throw themselves, literally throw themselves at her, clasp her knees. Her therapist did this. Yes. Said, I want to marry you, I can't live without you, I'm in love with you.

I was in love with you from the beginning. And this happens to her a lot. She must have had, like they said about Diana Moseley, she wasn't just beautiful, she had an aura of beauty. And she does have this extraordinary- Henry Mantel said that. She said that when she was much older, she was expecting somebody who would be small and intimate.

And she said she had this incredible presence she said incredible large tall amazing quite theatrical voice she said if she'd started purring you felt that the whole building would start to shake which I thought. That's brilliant. Yeah. I mean so she had presence, but she had very kind of insecure and not least because of the people she got involved with. Well, I think that dilemma of being a woman who is also a very, very fine writer in my

view, I think that, I think possibly it's an English thing. I think people don't know how to judge a woman like that. And I don't know how much better that has become, actually. I think the publishing industry, a lot of them wanted to sleep with her, but they also knew that she had value as a writer. And I think she started to validate herself almost by sleeping with lots and lots of people. I mean, that's very much like Cressida and after Julius, who is, as I now realize, what a self-portrait that was. And she does sleep with, you know, all the usual suspects, Cyril Connolly, did anyone not sleep with him?

But Cyril, let's be honest, I mean, it is extraordinary. Cyril Connolly, she sleeps with Laurie Lee, famously kind of Laurie Lee. That's a beautiful little kind of interlude where I think for the first time she discovers that sex can be about two people, not just her pleasing the man. Yeah. Arthur Kessler. Yes, he was foul, wasn't he? He was foul. Ken Tynan. Yeah, again, who didn't? But I think, yeah, but she's like an incredibly high-level girl for hire,

in a way, because she's got this vulnerability. What you feel all the time is this disconnect between that and her extraordinary talent and the resentment of that talent and the desire almost to put her down because she had that talent. And I find all that really very interesting and I know we do a lot of people read that book and said, Oh God, wasn't it awful for women in the fifties? I don't know how much has changed in that respect. I don't mean to be a downer, but she couldn't be placed. Well, I think that Hilary Mantel said that very clearly, said that she was, why isn't? I mean, we should say that a couple of these, she won the John Llewellyn Reese for The Beautiful Visit, her first novel. And then she tried to do a book, which was, I

still think is an absolute masterpiece, where she tries to tell the story of a girl's life backwards in the long view. The long view, yeah. It is a masterpiece. We did a whole backlisted on Something in Disguise, which is another brilliant book. And then, you know, obviously the late book that she wrote about the con man. Oh yeah, Falling. Falling, which is a novel, but based absolutely, as you discovered, from Slipstream. I love the idea that Slipstream, she says that she's always living in the slipstream

of her actions. It's like things happen to her and the writing is kind of her way of processing it. And I wondered about this, but whether you thought that there was some sense in which not just as a woman, I mean, we haven't mentioned the big relationship in her life. She for 18 years was married to and lived with Kingsley Amis. Uh, and that was a very happy, productive relationship for quite a long time until it wasn't. But you never felt, even though she's very generous to him in the book, when he, when she eventually decides that because he stopped loving her, she has to leave him, he never forgives her.

No, I think he felt pretty guilty about leaving that first wife. Right, Hilly. Well, this is just my reading of it. Yeah, again, not wanting to interject myself into the narrative too much, but when I went to interview him for his memoir, I went and visited, and it was very peculiar because you went in, it was sort of in just off Primrose Hill, and you opened the door and then you were at the door, it was hilly, and she lived downstairs,

and she sent you upstairs to go and see Kingsley, and Kingsley was just sort of there, chuckling away to himself, you know, bottle typewriter doing his, there's a great scene in the book where they're moving house and everything moves, all the furniture's moved except for him sitting there at the desk, they literally have to move his desk before he'll, So not a man who helped about the house, Kingsley

Omis, but he reestablished a strange menage with Hilly, his first wife, and completely cut Elizabeth Jane Howard off in a way that is obviously was deeply painful to her. Yes. And that's when I said about Martin, who was very generous about the whole thing and brought up the front for Kingsley's memorial service and all that kind of thing, which I don't think Kingsley himself would have particularly wanted. No, he didn't want her at the funeral, famously. But again, this chimes perhaps a little bit with Nancy Mitford, because I think Hilary Mantel's view is that because she wrote women's books about domesticity and but she wrote them rather like you know Elizabeth Taylor another writer I know that we talked about on Backlist and I know that you're a great fan of, that because, you know, it's not about men and war and violence,

that there is a sort of a downgrading of the sense of the seriousness of the writing, which is crazy, because the books, I think the quality of the writing in slipstream I suppose that was what I wondered what you thought her motivation in writing this book other than the fact she's a writer and is interested in other people and interested in psychology and was very is very positive about therapy in this book. Yeah I do lose it a bit with all that I have to. She's quite... Well, it's all right. We've got Phyllis James coming up next. Yeah.

We have no time for that. That's, yes. I mean, it meanders off a bit toward the end, I think. Well, she becomes happy. Yeah. She reestablishes a relationship with her daughter and she has grandchildren and she moves out to Suffolk and, you know, she's got a bit more money. Heather Hyslop That's another really interesting thing though, the female writer who gives up a child in order to, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Jane. I think she is, I've always adored her. I read after Julius when I was about 13,

I've always thought she was a supreme stylist. This aura that she had personally, I think, shrouds her writing. She writes not quite like anyone, this tremendous, sensuous quality that she's got. Why did she want to write? I don't know why people want to be so honest about themselves. Because I should think it must be very, very painful. You do feel it comes at a slight cost. And the introspection in this book is always, I mean, the anxiety about status, as I say, comes up again and again. Do you want to read a little bit? Well, yeah, this isn't so much an example of her, oh no, I've got the book here, of her brilliant writing. It's more an example of this extraordinary

life that she had. On a Sunday morning in midwinter, I think she's probably in her thirties at this time, living in London and divorced from Peter Scott, who was her first husband. Yeah, Peter Scott, the son of Robert Falcon Scott, the guy who set up Slimbridge, who comes out as a sort of pleasant but slightly dull man who was in kind of, you know, his mother was the center of his life. Mummy, wow. Kay, as she's known. Wow.

Okay. On a Sunday morning in midwinter, the telephone rang. It was Romain Garry, a French novelist with whom I'd once dined with Arthur, Arthur Kersler. He looked like a character from a Russian novel. He and Arthur had discussed French literature and politics, and I'd eaten my dinner quietly as Arthur liked me to do, seen and not heard. In the middle of the meal, Arthur had suddenly cried out irritably, Why do you look at her like that? Why? And remained clearly embarrassed, denied that he'd been staring, not at all.

Now he was saying he had something he particularly wanted to tell me. Could he come to my house? Half an hour later, he arrived. I took him into my sitting room and sat down, assuming that he would too. But he stood, leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down at me. Then, in a matter of fact manner, he said he'd been madly in love with me since the first moment he saw me. He'd not approached me earlier because he'd known that the affair with Arthur had caused me much unhappiness, but he'd been told I was over it now. You may not know, but I'm to be posted by the Quai d'Orsay to Los Angeles and I desire you to come with me. Don't worry, the Quai d'Orsay would much prefer me to have a mistress and they're prepared to ship

your furniture and anything else you would like. I think you'd be very happy with me and we would have a good life together. Now let us not speak of this anymore for the present. Let us have lunch. I mean this is this is what her life was like. Yeah it's it's it's there are that's a particularly extraordinary passage, isn't it? And there are lots, but there are lots, there's so much in this book, isn't there? You go, what? The quality of her observation is so acute and high level that, you know, the whole thing is, it's, it's, it's, it's utterly gripping, utterly beautiful.

There's a lovely thing, another thing that Hilary Mantel said, she said she never forgot in her fiction what it was like to be a young girl. And she carried an ingenue spirit inside a wise and experienced body. And I think there is there is something of that in this book, isn't there? That she's still she seems more baffled by herself than she is by any of her characters. Yes, I think that's right. I love how Hilary Mantel writes about her. Oh, she, yeah, she was, again, but also she said, I love her because of her craft. She's a supreme craftswoman.

She's incredibly perceptive of women. As you say, Martin said he thought she was a great novelist and deserved to be ranked alongside Iris Murdoch. Wow, I agree. Which I think is probably about right. So now we're going to go and break now for another message from our sponsors. Right, our second memoir in this biography

and memoir special is Time to be an Earnest by P.D. James, which is, let's say a very different book from the last one we've been discussing. Both in form and in style and in conception. Do you want to explain what it is? Because it's sort of a diary, well it is a diary, isn't it? It is a diary.

It's very, very Phyllis, isn't it? It's, well dear, I'm going to tell you this much and no more and I'm going to be in control. And yet, I do think she reveals an enormous amount in this book actually. But she didn't want a biography down and there hasn't been one down, has there? I can't believe there won't be. But what she says is her way of keeping that at bay almost is rather than write a full blown memoir, she will write the diary of a year of her life. You know, it is a diary, today I went so and so, today I did this, but going back and forth through her life. So it is in fact a memoir. It is a memoir. I think it's a wonderful book.

And it's, she's 77. She's absolutely at the height of her kind of fame and power. She is, you know, P.D. James, obviously, one of the most fated crime writers, of the English crime writers of the late 20th century. Her work's adapted for television. She is president of the Society of Authors. You know, she's a life both of extreme literary achievement, but also public service.

In this book, she's just been made a life peer, sitting in the House of Lords. She is famous for, you might say, her kind of conservative social outlook, but actually this book is, this book is from, I think, in lots of ways, very, very funny. She's got an amazing sense of humor.

I was gonna just read this little passage because it always amuses me about how her first book got signed up by Faber. And then you must read a book. But this gives you, I think, the absolute, and I, again, I was very lucky to meet her on several occasions and she was always incredibly professional, warm, very warm.

And she always, you know, she was very good at doing, if people asked her to do things, you know, the modern detective novel with a fiction, all that kind of stuff, she'd do it and she'd always do it brilliantly. But this is what she says about, you know, she had been, I think her agent was Elaine Greene who was married to Hugh Greene,

who was director of the BBC at the time, and she becomes a governor of the BBC as well. So I mean, lots and lots of boxes ticked. This is very much her style. I'd gone to have lunch or dinner, I forget which, at All Souls College, Oxford. There she'd sat next to Charles Monteith, director of Faber and Favour. Elaine, this is Elaine Green, her agent, an enthusiast for detective fiction, had said how sad she was at the death of the crime writer Cyril Hare. Who reads Cyril Hare now, I wonder? Not even me.

Whose novels, mostly set in the world of law, are some of the most elegantly written in the genre. One, tragedy at law, is in my view among the most enjoyable classical detective stories. She never holds back with her views, Phyllis, does she? Oh no, no, no. There's lots of views in this book. Yes. Charles Monteith said that Faber would now start looking for a replacement for Cyril Hare and Elaine told him that she thought she'd found one.

She sent the manuscript to him next day. That's her first book. And Charles has accepted it. I think this success produced some unease among my daughters who had read that any writer of real talent could paper his or her walls with rejection slips. They tactfully pointed this out, anxious to arm me against future disappointment. I retorted with some tartness that children with no faith in mummy's talent would not get new bicycles out of the proceeds. A couple of extremely good bicycles, as well as other small treats, constituted for me financial success.

Oh, she's heaven. Absolutely heaven. It's just, it is deeply pleasurable, this book, because she's interesting on all the subjects that she writes about. She's a little bit obsessed, perhaps, with, there's a bit where she talks about the Mary Bell book that Gita Sareni has done and she's on a panel and she said she doesn't really like the idea of the book at all because she feels, you know, she doesn't feel that all children are basically good. She thinks that, you know, there is such a thing as evil in the world and sometimes that is manifested in children. So there is that kind of, but it's never overbearing and it's never not done in a kind of, in a, in a reasonable way. But she's got, I think she's got such a, such a waspish sense of humour. And although it's only a year, as you say, she, she manages to use that year to spin out,

to tell the whole story of her life. And I, again, I wondered, I was going to, just going to ask you, who do you think, you think I mean who who would enjoy this book? Well, I think she might have gone a bit out of fashion has she am I wrong about that but maybe I still I mean she's not writing obviously new books Which is not her fault being dead, But that quality you talk about with her, that there is something not modern about her. She's very crisp and precise in her judgments. She is, and I'm thinking about a book of hers

which I really admire, Innocent Blood, which is about a girl who's born to two murderers and is adopted and finds out that she was born to two murderers and is adopted and finds out that she was born to two murderers. And I've read contemporary reviews of that, that really excoriate P.D. James for not being sufficiently, you know, she's taking some attitudes that don't chime with contemporary orthodoxies. So I don't know if there is a kind of conservatism about this book that I think might put some people off.

But you see, I love her concealments and her. She's always compassionate. You can't, you know, there's political conservatism and there's an innate conservatism, which I do think she possessed. Her life was very, very hard. She was born just after the end of the First World War. Yes, she wasn't a particularly happy marriage that she was born into. Conor, her husband, had suffered from mental illness and died quite young.

Yeah, and she really probably would have said pulled herself up by her bootstraps and took evening classes to join the civil service and wasn't even able to write her first book until she was sort of 40. And with two young daughters and she really, really is what I would consider to be a highly admirable woman, but she doesn't make an awful lot of concessions to more modern orthodoxies, I would say. I felt one of the things that I enjoyed is that, in that way that memoir perhaps preserves a consciousness

that I don't feel that the world is producing consciousnesses like Phyllis James' anymore. So it's to me, even though we might disagree that, you know, I don't feel that the world is producing consciousnesses like Phyllis James' anymore. So it's to me, even though we might disagree on, you know, how to properly raise children or, you know, other things, I'm deeply interested in seeing how her worldview kind of is manifested. And you know, there's much, you know, there's lots of asides about, you know, I really don't like Americans going on about things about Britain and being critical.

She's sort of, she's very old school and patriotic, and as you say, small-c conservative, but the work is what's fascinating about her because she writes about murder. She writes about, she's, one of the paradoxes, she says, I completely think that, that capital punishment would work as a deterrent, but I hate it. And she hates it for rather strange visceral reasons

that she just thinks hanging is, is a really brutal way to kill anyone. Yeah. I also find very interesting about her that she never had any feeling that although she wanted desperately to be a novelist, she always wanted to be a crime fiction novelist. She never had any thought that genre writing or that the necessary sort of limitations of that genre, she regards those as a positive. And that seems to me quite interesting about her personality, that facades and concealments and parameters are, they're sort of key to how she functions and they're key to this book. There's so much that is concealed. I met her to talk

to her about Agatha Christie when I wrote my biography and she, I don't think she really admires Agatha Christie, but she was so civil and lovely that she she sort of listened, heard me out as it were and she said yes you are always aware that there's more there than is apparent with Agatha and that is also of her, even though she's a far more full-blooded writer and a far more descriptive writer and she deals in landscapes and she deals in... And she's very, very interesting in this book about how she, like the original conception of devices and desires, things like that. I think it's actually a very honest and, yes, you feel she's only revealing what she wants to reveal, but inevitably that's

a bit more than you think, I think. Pete But you want to read a little. Anastasia Yes, because this is sort of, to pervise this, you see, I find this passage very moving. So she's talking about her husband, Connor Bantry-White, who did have mental illness, very serious. So this is the 1st of April, 1998. Today is the anniversary of my husband's birthday, and inevitably it's a day for memory to take

hold. This is so foolish. It was an un propitious day to be born. Provoking in childhood the inevitable jokes and teasing, Connor would have been 78 today and I'm trying to picture him, like me, stiffer in his walk, his strong fair hair now a thatch of grey. I know that he was glad to die and I never mourned him in the sense of wishing that it had not happened. I still miss him daily, which means that no day goes by where he doesn't enter into my mind. For much of his last years he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, chiefly good mays in Essex. It was, indeed still is, one of those impressive and forbidding Victorian edifices

which during my childhood were called asylums. The word is beautiful, as is its meaning. But it was spoken then always with that mixture of fear and shame associated with the word workhouse. These large communities for the care of the mentally ill have of course been largely superseded by community care which could be described more accurately as the absence of care in a community still largely resentful or frightened of mental illness. Connor was never unhappy in Goodmay's but then as he said education at a minor public school and subsequent army service prepared one for anything. For him, and for very many, particularly those who could not

possibly have survived outside, it was indeed an asylum." You see, there's so much compassion in that. And yet, that's what I mean by modern orthodoxy. She's... I agree. I think that is actually wise. She has a wisdom, which is why I find it... I have to say, I had not read the whole thing before we did this. I'd read bits of it for the episode we did on children of men of it also really amazing book. With that we're going to

leave we're going to leave Phyllis James behind but a book I think for anybody who's interested I mean if you're interested in a fiction for sure but also I think if you're just interested in as I say a way of looking at the world which as you have said is maybe not not modish, but has huge amounts of integrity and interest. And so the final book we're going to discuss today is Smile, Please by Jean Rees, which is an unfinished autobiography.

Do you want to explain a little bit about the background of when this book came out? And a little bit about the background of when this book came out and a little bit perhaps. I know Jean Rees is a keen favourite of the backlisted audience, massively important to Andy and indeed to me. It was the subject of our second ever backlisted with a wonderful episode with Linda Graham, which we re-released I think last year. But yes, this book is a miracle, I think. Yeah, had you read it before? Yeah. No, I hadn't.

I don't know why. I'd read all the fiction, I just hadn't read it. So it was published posthumously in 1979 by Andre Deutsch and comes with an introduction by Diana Attil, who was famously Jean Rees's editor and who, well maybe you should tell the story of the rediscovery of Jean Rees in the 60s. It's an unbearable story in a way I find, although when you've got work this good, nothing's unbearable in a way, but she'd written these four novels between the wars,

which are my favorites of hers, Four Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Quartet, and Good Morning Midnight, which I think is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and which died in 1939. It just died. And the reviews, nobody should ever take any notice of reviews ever.

If you read the reviews for that book, you know that they're- I think we did. I think we read some out when we did the episode, yeah. All right. Just unbelievable. And then her life fell apart somewhat and she wrote, I was accused of impersonating a writer named Jean Rees, people thought she was dead, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, she was writing what would become Wide Sugg S.O.C., which was the prequel to Jane Eyre, of course, but also very much deriving from her upbringing as a White West Indian. And Diana Attil rediscovered her in the sense that she brought that novel to fruition and it was published in 1966. So a gap of 27 years between that and- Right. And won the W. H. Smith Award.

Yeah. And she said, it's come too late. Good for her. Good for her. And this book really was, you know, she wrote it later than Wide Saga SOC, didn't it? Yes. I mean, Diana Attil is incredibly good on how she wrote and how she, her sort of obsession with self-editing and her obsession with, and that she more or less had

to wrench the manuscript of Wide Segue SoC away from her. I mean, this is unfinished, this is unfinished, but I love the unfinished bits. Yes. And the first bit really is her life in Dominica growing up, which are incredibly vivid and yet strangely both revealing and unrevealing. I was going to ask you about how this ranks next to her fiction. where this, how this ranks next to her fiction.

It's a bit like some of her short stories really, but it's um, and she, she, it's also a bit like passages in Voyage in the Dark where the, the, which is her, I mean, I'm not demeaning those books to say that they're completely autobiographical. Um, that is the story of a young girl who comes to England and becomes a chorus girl and falls into the sort of demimon and has these memories of being back in the West Indies. And those passages are set alongside each other. And it's a bit like that, but it's more, this is more precise and it is

almost painfully pared down, isn't it? Or do you not find that? No, I think, I mean, I suppose I was going to ask you, you know, we're talking memoir, do you think this is a great memoir? And what do you think? And why did, in a way, why did you choose it if you didn't? Because I just think she's one of the great writers. I mean, what is a great memoir? I mean, it's a great example. It's like I said to you earlier, I'm almost more interested in how people write things than what they write about. It's extraordinarily self-revealing, self-hitting. I mean, her writing is almost branded with honesty, isn't it? Too much so for some people.

Yeah, I was going to say, some people can't read her because they just find it too depressing. But it's so beautiful. But it's the language, isn't it,'t it? Will you read a little bit? Yeah, well this is right, okay, confession time. After leaving university I wrote a solo show about Jean Rees. Yes you did. And I because I wanted to act and I was all right on my own because as soon as other people were on the stage with me I just was the most terrible giggler. I just couldn't look at anybody on the stage. I thought, well, I'll solve this.

I'll do a one-woman show as if that's the long-term solution. Lost myself in this woman's writing. I don't think it's bad actually. I'm sure the performance was terrible, but I don't think it's bad actually. I'm sure the performance was terrible, but I don't think the writing's bad. That probably was a pointer to where I was headed. But it's so funny reading this book because little bits pop out at me and I think,

oh yeah, I remember saying that. So I just wanted to read, this isn't being me, me, me, but it's just because I think it's a brilliant little episode. So this is when she'd come to England from the West Indies, and she was a chorus girl. She became a chorus girl. It was a steady job.

There was however a dreadful gap after the winter tour finished and before the summer tour started. It was impossible to save enough to tide you over the gap. So more of the girls lived at home for those two or three months. The few who, like myself, had no home tried to get a job in what were known as musical sketches which went on all the year round. I mean, no wonder she talks about walking a tightrope.

In one of the gaps, I managed to be taken on in the chorus of a musical sketch called Chanticleer. It was an appalling show. However, we opened at a town in the north and there we were, waiting in the wings, ready to go on. It was cold and I was shivering. We heard a loud tramping noise and somebody said, what on earth's that?

The answer was, that's the gallery walking out. The gallery didn't hiss or boo, if they just liked to show, they simply walked out making as much noise as possible. When it was our turn to go on with our very amateurish dance, I was

shivering with fear as well as with cold. As soon as we began, I felt the mockery and scorn coming out from the audience like smoke. I was at the end of the line, near the wings. And after a bit of this, I simply left the line and went off stage. Before I left, I looked at the girl next to me. Her face was grim. She felt it as much as I did, but bravely she went on dancing. I took my makeup off and went back to my lodgings feeling very unhappy at being so cowardly. I kept thinking, she stuck it. Why couldn't I? I've used that in my little

show. That walking out on things, because she does do that throughout her life, this fear of life, this inability to sort of confront or to handle or to cope in any way, which she turns into the most extraordinary art. Is that depressing? No, I think you're touching something really important there because I think the, you know, we might say that Phyllis James's consciousness is not one that's being, but so many, Jean Reese's reputation grows and grows and grows and I think when you read her work, what always strikes me is it could have been written yesterday. The conscious, she has some ability, she's figured out something about what it's like to be a sort of slightly

alienated modern person that captures it in the language so perfectly that it's, yeah, if you want to understand what it feels like to be young, female, vulnerable, but also in a strange kind of way, a perfectionist. So I just wanted to read one tiny little line because it just strikes me as being the kind of key to her and to this book in a way. Yeah, that's brilliant. Which is a little bit from the diary at the end of the book. The trouble is, she said, I have plenty to say. Not only that, but I'm bound to say it. Bound?

I must. Why, why, why? I must write. If I stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people, but it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death. Earned death. Sometimes, not often, a phrase will sound

in my ear clearly as if spoken aloud by someone else. That was one phrase. You must earn death. A reward? Yes. Any other phrase? Yes. You will be helped. You're aware, of course, that what you're writing is childish, as has been said before. Also, it's dangerous under the circumstances. Yes, most of it is childish, but I've not written for so long. All I can force myself to do is to write, to write. I must trust that out of that will come the pattern, the clue that can be followed. Why is all this dangerous? Because I've been accused of madness. But if everything is in me, good, evil and so on, so must strength be in me if I know how to get at it.

This is the way? I think so. All right, but be damn careful not to leave this book about. That saving little, why is that so good? And yet most people splurging like that would be intolerable. Yes. It's this saving sort of overview that is just what Muriel Spark called the sixth sense, the literary sense.

Well, we're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately. Like life itself, even backlisted must come to an end. Huge thanks to Laura for plundering her bookshelves so generously. To Nicky Burch for making us sound, I think, clearer and smarter, I hope. If you want shows, notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And for those of you who have subscribed to our Patreon, there's still time to do it. Please hop on the chat and suggest your favourite memoirs for discussion in the

next lock listed. Anyway, before we go Laura, is there anything else you'd like to add about any of these books or authors that you want to leave people with? Read them. Just read them. They're all very, very different. They're all very, very different. They are ways of, what was it, ziggy-zaggy. Life is ziggy-zaggy and contingent, but books try to give shape to things, I think, and all of these books, all five of them in different ways, from the ridiculously OTT Frenchness of the court of Louis Kahn's to the bed sit in which Jean Rees is sitting there on her own, their amazing books. Anyway that is all for this. As I say, if you want to join in the conversation subscribe

to Locklisted, otherwise we'll see you all in a fortnight. Goodbye. you