Woman's Hour - 75th Anniversary of VE Day, DIY during lockdown, golden age of Irish writing, rape trials in military courts.

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Today marks 75 years since VE day and we remember the end of war in Europe. We speak to Shirley Mann about how her mother’s own war experience inspired her to track down more women’s stories from this time. She shares the stories she discovered of the women who were pilots, wireless operators, and even “plotters” in the Battle of Britain bunker – and what they did next. Three women from the Armed Forces are taking legal action against the MOD claiming they are victims of sexual assault and rape. Their cases have already gone through military courts but there were no convictions and they believe justice would be better served if their cases were dealt with through the usual routes: the police and the CPS. We hear from lawyer Emma Norton, director of a new organisation called the Centre for Military Justice, who is representing the three women. Is Ireland going through a ‘golden age of literature’ when it comes to women’s writing? Sally Rooney and Anna Burns are hugely popular but what is behind this boom in new writing? Writers Lucy Caldwell and Jan Carson discuss.Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been hearing from women around the world who have dragged out their sewing machines to make face masks at home. In the Czech Republic masks are mandatory so Marcela has been doing her bit as she tells Maria Margaronis. For some people lockdown has proved the perfect time for some DIY and home improvements - from wallpapering to tiling to even a spot of joinery. How comfortable are you about doing the work yourself? We discuss the dos and don’ts with DIY expert Jo Behari and Sarah Beeny, presenter of HGTV’s ‘Renovate Don’t Relocate.’

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to The Woman's Hour podcast for Friday the 8th of May. Good morning. Sally Rooney's Normal People has been the TV hit of the lockdown. Anna Burns' The Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize and Michelle Garland's Big Girl Small Town is described as Milkman meets Derry Girls.

What's behind the rise and rise in popularity of new female Irish writers? The 75th anniversary of VE Day, Shirley Mann, inspired by her mother's war work, has researched the lives of her wartime contemporaries and asked what happened to them after the war. Marcela, who's making masks in the Czech Republic, where it's mandatory to wear them,

and DIY during the stay-at-home phase. I've noticed my bathroom ceiling needs painting. What are you anxious to improve and dare you do it yourself? Three women, one from the army, one from the navy and one who's an army reservist, are taking legal action against the Ministry of Defence. Each says she's the victim of sexual assault and rape. Their cases have been investigated and two have been heard in military courts, but there have been no convictions. The women believe justice may be served better if their cases were dealt with through the usual channels, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Well, Emma Norton is a lawyer and director of a new organisation called the Centre for Military Justice, and she's representing the three women. Emma, the women remain anonymous. What is their position at the moment as serving members of the forces? Well, two of them are actually in the process of being signed off sick, so they will be leaving the forces in the next several months. All three of them were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, that's PTSD, following their reports of rape, but also critically following the way in which they were treated after they had reported their acts of rape, the fact that they were victims of rape. What do you mean the way they were treated? By the chain of command in particular, but also the process of going through the court martial process and the preparation for that trial,

which was extremely difficult, and in one case, particularly difficult. But in addition to that, you have this additional layer that these women are working in a very closed environment, they can't just leave, you can't just resign from the armed forces and walk out. And therefore, if you are unfortunate enough to be in a unit which is not very well equipped to deal with and support you as a victim, as a survivor of rape, then you're going to be subjected to this whole other world of pain, which just does not apply in any other environment other than the armed forces. And all three of these women describe those kinds of experiences. What do they say happened to them?

Well, each case is obviously different. We can't reveal too much information, but they're all women in their 20s or 30s. One of them had been earmarked for commission. They all had incredibly promising careers. One of them had a very longstanding career. And they all report being the victims of very serious sexual assaults, including rape, by people they were working with, so fellow service personnel, which means that those cases are going to be dealt with in the service justice system. That's a military justice dealt with in the service justice system, that's a military justice system, rather than the civilian justice system. Well, their claims have been investigated and two have been through court-martial.

And the MOD tell us sexual offences are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. They say we have confidence that the service justice system provides an effective and fair system of justice. It is not second rate compared with the civilian criminal justice system. Why do you doubt that response? Because of the experiences that these women have described. But not only that, the statistics that the Ministry of Defence published themselves, that they published themselves in relation to rape, reveal very, very poor outcomes. They've published data only for the last five years. And by their own account, it looks as though convictions were secured in relation to cases that actually got to court

martial. And remember, the vast majority probably won't even get that far. There were convictions in just 10%. Now, we know that there are really serious problems in the civil justice system that's by no means perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We're very, very supportive of other organisations that are doing work on that. But it pales in comparison to the civilian justice system. 10% is absolutely risible. But you see, again, the MOD says the system of court-martial is the same as for civilians, and there have been convictions for sexual offences. How different have you concluded the two systems are,

given that the conviction rate is low in both cases? They're very different, and it's not about the court-martial procedure itself. This isn't a case about court-martials themselves. This is about what happens long before the cases get to court-martial procedure itself. This isn't a case about court-martials themselves. This is about what happens long before the cases get to court-martial. So it's about under-reporting initially that there's a lot of evidence that women who are reporting sexual offences in the forces are not reporting anyway. We say that if they knew that they could go to what they would perceive to be an independent police force, they might be encouraged to come forward. Then you've got issues around training and expertise within the service police, that's the military police. And it's not just us and these women

saying this. An independent service justice review that was published in February this year found very serious problems with the way in which the service police are investigating sexual crime. And there are problems with the army's, sorry, the force's equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service. That's called the Service Prosecuting Authority. This independent review, so it's not just us, it's an independent review found that the Service Prosecuting Authority lawyers are insufficiently experienced to conduct this case. In fact, in the two years prior to the review, they said that half of the lawyers had never prosecuted a case before. Now, these are lawyers which are handling

some of the most sensitive and difficult cases, and there is no good reason for these cases not to be handled by the civilian justice system, and the MOD has come up with no reasons for refusing to act upon the recommendation of this review, which was send those cases out. The review that you mentioned said the court martial should not be used for murder, manslaughter and rape,

specifically when such offences are committed in the UK, except with the consent of the Attorney General. How do you plan to use that in your case? Well, it's an important part of the evidence because what we are arguing is that if you have a situation where a whole category of crime like this rape, which disproportionately impacts on women self-evidently, all of the perpetrators that were recorded in the MOD's own statistics were male, 77% of the victims were female. This is a crime that obviously disproportionately affects women. If you can show that the outcomes in the service justice system are manifestly, obviously different from

those which you could expect in the civilian justice system, that is discrimination. And it is up to the Ministry of Defence to justify it. And so far, not only have they failed to justify it, they've failed to give any reason for refusing to hand these cases over, other than by saying they believe their system is capable of dealing with it. But I'm afraid the evidence and the experiences of these clients strongly refutes that. Where do you go from here? Well, we've started the process. So we've sent our pre-action protocol letter, which is where you set out your case. And the Ministry of Defence's response is due next week.

And following that, we will be issuing the proceedings in the High Court by the end of the month. Emma Norton, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning. Now, Sally Rooney's Normal People was a big hit as a novel. It won the 2018 Costa Novel Award. It's now BBC Three's most successful drama series. In the same year, Anna Burns' The Milkman won the Booker Prize and Michelle Galland's Big Girl, Small Town has been brilliantly reviewed and described as where milkman meets dairy girls.

There has been some rapid social change in the whole of Ireland, both north and south. To what extent has it influenced the subject matter of this new generation of female Irish writers? I'm joined by Jan Carson, who's a novelist and the author of Firestarters. Lucy Caldwell, who's also an author and playwright, and most recently the editor of an anthology, Being Various. Lucy, why do you believe Ireland is going through what some people have described as a golden age of writing? Yes, the term golden age,

sometimes you think it seems a bit of a truism, something that people easily reach for. But when I was putting together the intricate puzzle of writers that I wanted to be represented in the anthology of New Irish Writing, it was just beyond a doubt the range of work that's being produced, crime writers, writers of young adult fiction, writers who are blending genre in different ways, you know, creating whole new genres. There's just such a wide variety of writing happening at the moment. Jan, to what would you put this boom down?

I guess for me, there's a number of different reasons. I think particularly for women writers in Ireland, there's been a lot more visibility for us. There were a few huge groundbreaking anthologies. Sinead Gleeson edited The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore, and then we had Female Lines in the North. And there's a kind of critical momentum when you can see other women raising their voices and saying things so eloquently and powerfully it

makes you want to to write yourself and I didn't grow up with a lot of female Irish icons to read and to emulate so it makes me excited for the next generation of young women writers who hopefully have a few more role models to look to now. Now, I understand you waited a while before you began. You didn't begin writing until you were 25. What might have held you back from saying, yes, I can do this. I can write a great novel and publish it. I guess it took me a long time to come into my voice I was scribbling away in secret and I think I needed to scare myself a little bit I actually moved to the States and started telling people I was a writer before I was writing anything to shock myself

but for me one of the big things was I grew up in quite a conservative religious background and rural Presbyterian in the north and there wasn't a huge amount of support for the arts within that community. It's quite a Calvinist background. There's a bit of a fear of the arts and the links to idolatry and kind of losing yourself in the world. So it took me a wee while to realise that actually, you know, theologically there is a huge mandate for engagement with the arts. And, you know, it was OK for me to begin writing and sharing my stories

and experimenting with creativity. So, Lucy, how much influence would you say the social, political and economic changes that have happened have had on women who want to write and may have been afraid to do it in the past, but are no longer afraid? An incredible amount. When I got my first book deal, my sisters made me a postcard, a congratulations card, and they used that famous postcard of Ireland's writers. You know, it's a sort of sepia-toned one,

and you've got Joyce and Oscar Wilde and Sean O'Casey, Yates Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Behan. Not a single woman, of course. And they found a suitably studious looking picture of me, Tippex, my name on just below Oscar Wilde's shoulder. And I've always had that on my desk. And you start to think, where are the, you know, where are the women if they're not celebrated?

If you don't have them, as Jan says, as role models, if you can't find yourself, place yourself in those genealogies, it can be very hard. One of the things that was most interesting in all of the referendums that have been happening in Ireland, in Southern Ireland, the extent to which they relied on personal testimony and personal stories. I remember being so struck by one woman, she was about 80, she was being taken to vote in the marriage equality referendum. And she said she was voting for marriage equality because she had never been able to live the life that she wanted. She'd never been able to love the person or people that she'd wanted. And she wanted that

to change. And you think that's such a sense of loss we don't have those stories you know those stories are completely missing um at the same time at the moment I'm mentoring a woman writer who is Muslim um she came to Belfast as a child as she grew up in Belfast she is married to a Belfast man and has three children and she says she's always had a complete block around writing anything set in Belfast because and has three children. And she says she's always had a complete block around writing anything set in Belfast, because she feels like an imposter. She feels like her stories shouldn't really belong. But what happens is as soon as her stories are published, as soon as they're there, other women will feel that they can tell their stories. And so the tapestry just

gets richer. But what about some of the tremendously influential women of the past? I mean, even Boland, who died at the end of April, her poetry was about the female experience in Ireland. Edna O'Brien, Maeve Binchy, both very different novelists. But there, up in the front, why did they not say to you, yeah, go on, do it? I mean, they should be they the Irish Times did produce an alternative version of the famous poster that I'm talking about but there are still so many women who aren't celebrated as they should be um Nilo Freilon's brilliant essay collection

with a brilliant title Are You Somebody um Frances Malloy who's a writer from Derry who published just one novel um mid-70s written in a child's vernacular, and a young woman's, you know, with that Derry idiom, really scabrously funny, really good. There are so many women whose work has been underappreciated, and they're there. They need to be championed a bit more. Jan, your Firestarters is set in East Belfast in 2016. Very contemporary. But the style is magic realism. Why did you choose to write it in that way? Oh, gosh, I could give you an essay on this.

One of the things was... We don't have time for an essay, but we're very interested in what you have to say. I guess I've always read magic realism, and there's very little in Northern Ireland's canon that isn't very realist. I think we mistakenly think serious times require serious, straightforward writing. So I wanted to bring some magic realism into the mix. I also wanted to allow particularly the Protestant community that I write about, I wanted to allow them to see the magic in their culture. I think when you introduce magic realism or the fantastical,

it allows people to see themselves in a different light, that there is potential for wonder and strangeness and all of that fantastic thing, even in the culture that you're very familiar with. And I think then my final reason, and I steal this from Flannery O'Connor, who's my hero, she was asked why she used the grotesque. And she always said,

to the heart of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. And for me, sometimes you need to throw something a bit unsettling into the mix when you write because we can become so used to hearing the same story over and over again, particularly in a Northern Irish context.

Those absurd tropes of magic realism just make people wake up and pay attention. Lucy, I mentioned that the success of that trio, Rooney, Burns and Gallant, that we've become very aware of recently. How does their success influence others in both the North and the South? I think, I'm sure Jan would agree with this. When I started writing, when I started publishing, it would be very unusual to have more than one woman on a panel discussion about Irish writing. You certainly wouldn't get two Northern women.

And the success of all three of the authors he mentioned, all three are brilliant, writing very different styles, telling very different sorts of stories. Sally Rooney is obviously very young. Other writers, there's often the sense that new is used as a synonym for young, and that's not the case. In my anthology, I have writers who are writing for the first time, publishing for the first time in their 50s. One writer who is 70 and it's her second ever published story. And so I think, again, the greater variety of writing that we have. Michelle Gallen's book is brilliantly funny. Anna Burns as well.

It creates a space for so much more. And I think as a writer as well, when you see other people writing really well, it ups your game. You know, you learn from the risks that they've taken. You learn from the techniques that they've used. It becomes very exciting to feel yourself in conversation with those such books. And Lucy, in your anthology, you've included voices of those who are not necessarily born in Ireland, but have Irish parentage or residence. They've come to live in Ireland, as you said, you're a Muslim woman.

Why have you decided to do that? Well, I think that's so important, Jenny. You know, for so long, Ireland has, our sense of Irish identity has been based on the diaspora. But, and we have so many brilliant voices sometimes we can be blinded to those you know that we're not seeing and I wanted to include people who have come to Ireland from elsewhere because when you're starting to think about place I have a writer Malata Uchea-Corey, who wrote a beautiful story.

She came to Ireland as an asylum seeker from Nigeria. I have another writer called Yenge, who wrote a brilliant story. She's a bit of a superstar in China. I met and fell in love with an Irishman and moved to Ireland and started writing in English. Another Finnish-born writer who said that although she's lived for twice as long, she's lived for 40 years in Ireland, no one ever considers her an Irish writer, even though it's a place that she's chosen to come, the place that she's chosen to live. And so I wanted to look at that sense of

how identity, you know, what makes a writer Irish? Is it the place you happen to be born in? If you are born in Ireland and yet choose to leave, do you have more right to be an Irish writer than someone who's born elsewhere and yet chooses to leave do you have more right to be an Irish writer than someone who's born elsewhere and yet chooses to come so I wanted to consider a lot of those questions in the anthology And Jan, finally, from an astonishingly Protestant background with an orange man grandfather what was it like when you were awarded the EU Prize for Literature last year?

How did that go down? I won the EU Prize for Ireland, actually, which was particularly poignant. Honestly, Jenny, it was an incredibly humbling experience. My book is concerned primarily with loyalism and British identity in the North and for the judging panel for Ireland to be inclusive and open-minded enough to think that this was a book which represented Ireland as a whole. To me, it's really hopeful for the future that this is a place that's always struggled with identity and who we are and a lot of binary-isms. And that Ireland that I have experienced as a writer, the community there is incredibly inclusive and diverse and eclectic. And I've always just felt so at home there. So to me, it made me cry to receive that prize in a really humbling way to feel like this is a community that wants me.

Well, Jan Carson, Lucy Caldwell, thank you both very much indeed for joining us this morning and the best of luck with your writing careers. Now still to come in today's programme, the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Shirley Mann was inspired by her mother's war work to track down others who were pilots, wireless operators and plotters. And the lockdown craze for DIY. What have you been tempted to do and how careful should you be not to take on a job you really can't finish? And now another of those laughing babies sent to us by you after we discussed why babies laugh. Today it's Harley. He was recorded in 2016 when he was six months old. His grandmother, Joy,

sent it to us and she says he's now four and hoping to start school at some point later this year. Like that. Like that, like that. Nothing like a laughing baby to just cheer you up. More and more and more of them, please.

Now, some of us are wearing masks when we're out from home. Others don't bother. And whilst it's required in some countries, in the UK, it's pretty much up to us. Nevertheless, there are lots of women the world over using their time at home to get their sewing machines working, to make masks for other people. In the Czech Republic, masks are mandatory. But when none were provided, Marcella decided to do her bit. The song you'll hear is one she sings while she works, and she spoke to Maria Magaronis. I'm Marcela Tomčelová, I'm from the Czech Republic, and as my job, I am a lawyer.

But currently I'm on my maternity leave, so at home with my children. I have two boys. The younger one is six months old and the older is three years old. The government promised to give a mask to every citizen, but they didn't do it. They just opened the shops to buy some fabrics and this stuff that people need to to sew the masks on their own. I had my sewing machine newly oiled. I just started recently the sewing course so I was ready to do this. At the beginning, I started to sue for my family, for my husband who goes

shopping for us. And then for my father, because my mother who sues also, she has broken her arm. The checkpost delivers the masks when they are in transparent envelope for free. And then a major of our village, she asked the volunteers to sew the masks for the town hall employees and hospital employees. I sewed 150 in three days. My husband also helped me a lot. He cooked, he took care of the baby. I wore only the pyjamas and suit. It was really tough. I thought that it is really necessary. I wanted to help. I felt the urgent need. It was how I was able to fight even if I was at home with the children. My son, he can play himself. He doesn't need me all the time. So I said him everything, that the virus virus came that this is a really dangerous disease we need to protect for example his grandpa grandma we need to sue some masks for them and for

other elder people and yeah he sees also this these you know news in television and so on. Everyone there has the mask. So he understands that now the situation is quite exceptional and we need to protect ourselves and we need to help each other. So he let me to sue. He wears the mask also without problem. We had some fabric with fish. So yeah, he wears it quite proudly. I sing while I'm sewing. I sing the song I composed, actually, because it's about sewing masks. The noise of the sewing machine is my music now. It's a mask blues. And then bye. Lily's War. It was inspired by her mother's life as a wireless operator in the Women's

Auxiliary Air Force, the WAF, and those of other women who risked their own lives to protect the United Kingdom. She joins us from Derbyshire. Shirley, why did you decide that you were going to travel around the UK talking to women who'd been in the WAF, the Air Transport Auxiliary, factories and farms. What inspired it? It was my mum, really. Anybody who's got an elderly parent will know that the last few years of their lives are often, you lose sight of the person that used to dance around the living room. And it was quite tough going. But when she died, I thought there was so much she told us about the war. And it was obviously a shining time in her life. And I thought, I thought there was so much she told us about the war.

And it was obviously a shining time in her life. And I thought, I wonder if I can recreate this pair. My dad, unfortunately, died when he was only 66. But he also had talked about his work during the war when he was a tank transporter driver with the 8th Army. And I thought, I wonder if I can recreate this pair and rediscover and almost it was to help with the grieving process um so I thought right well I'll write a novel I'll give it a go I'm a journalist maybe I can do this um and then I thought oh you stupid woman you didn't ask enough questions so I thought well I'd better go and find out some more information from people. So what did you know of what your mother, Eileen, remembered of her war years in the West?

How much had she told you? She told a fair amount, which was maybe unusual. I think I was quite lucky with my parents in the fact they didn't have horrendously traumatic wars. My mum had a ball dancing with the Americans and jitterbugging and getting nylons and things. And she told us she was a wireless operator with Bomber Command. And the story she told us was things like she would have breakfast with crews and she would try and pinch their bacon because they weren't allowed bacon. The wafts could only have the eggs, the congealed eggs. But then she also just casually mentioned that she would then,

eight hours later, be sitting with her finger over the morse key waiting for that crew to come back. And she said sometimes the silence was deafening. But then I know you've talked about her quietly going back to the kitchen when it was all over. What did you make of that, the fact that she seemed to accept that that was what was expected of her? Well, I'm a post-war generation child, so it was almost normal that your mum was at home. So I didn't really question it as a child. But as an adult, of course, you see things very differently. You know, I've had a career, my daughters have got

careers. But she was just expected, having done all this, to just marry and go back into the kitchen. And I think for a lot of women, that was really hard, because they'd stepped out of their comfort zone and they'd found that actually, strangely, they were very capable and nobody was more surprised than they were. But there were an awful lot of people around the country who thought women should not be doing men's jobs and believe me, at the end of the war, they were told very firmly to pipe down. I know you met one of the last living ATA pilots, Mary Ellis, and the rest of her life actually was shaped by the war. Let's just listen to her speaking in the BBC documentary Spitfire Women, explaining how they would fly several planes in one day.

And we'd say to each other, oh, look what I've got, look what I've got. And that was terribly exciting. It was sometimes frightening as well because the aeroplanes were all different. You'd get out of a Tiger Moth into a Wellington bomber and then into a Spitfire. And so one had to know what one was doing. This was August. On the first I flew a Spitfire and a Hellcat. On the second I flew a Firebrand and a Warwick. On the fourth, I flew a Fairchild, a Walrus and a Reliant. You weren't very busy then? No, that was not a very busy time.

When one looks back at it, you think it couldn't have been possible. But it was and we did it and I enjoyed it. How much, Shirley, did the women pilots have to prove themselves? You said, you know, that really women were not expected to do these kind of things, certainly after the war. No, the women pilots were a huge step forward for women, because even men and other women around the country did not know that they existed. So everywhere they went, and they had these very smart uniforms with the key wings on their jackets, and people would look at them and go, oh do you do and there's one wonderful story that Mary told me and told everybody else was that she was flying one of these big planes

I think it was a Wellington and she got down from these took you know between five and seven crew normally and she was on her own and the ground crew came and said where's the pilot and she said I am the pilot and they went into the cockpit to check and they said, I don't believe it. You can't be the pilot. You know, they had an awful lot of prejudice and disbelief to deal with. I know you've said that you loved hearing the minutiae of these women's lives. What kind of things really did you love? Oh, I think one of the main things about writing was that I didn't want to solely rely on the history books, which is why I raced around talking to all these women. And it's those little gems that just, I hope, make it more authentic. But,

you know, things like they all carried one of the old pennies because there were no rubber plugs because the rubber had gone to the war effort. And you had very little water. Some stations had hardly any. And they practically had a thimble full to wash in. And they would stick the penny in the plug to stop the water dissipating. And they would pour out their hot water bottle remains into the wash basin to wash in the morning and to wash their hair. And then there was Helen Mills, who is a wonderful 95-year-old plotter that I met and who is still

alive and very much in contact with me. She's lovely. She was telling me that to make those lovely rolls of their hair, they tried ribbons and they didn't work. So they all use shoelaces and tied the hair around the shoelace. Now, I've never read any of those things in a history book and I just find them absolute golden gems. I love them. But why, Shirley, do you suppose we of that post-war generation didn't ask our parents more? I think because it was the war and it was boring and anything to do with our parents was boring and we were too busy inventing the teenager to be honest we were moving forward we were the bright new generation we were going to go places and do things and there can't have really been

anything that our mums did you know the ones who put our tea on the table every night every night we we just didn't think that they actually could have achieved all that. And I think it's only through all this research that I've begun to look at my mum in a totally new light. Because, you know, they had six years of this and they had deprivations, but they made the most of every moment they could. Shirley Mann, thank you so much for being with us this morning. The book is called Lily's War and we'd like to hear from you. If you took part in some of the things we've been talking about, we'd like to hear from you. If your parents did, if your mothers did, then do send us a tweet or an email. We'd love to hear from you. Now we've all been spending more time than usual at home and there is no doubt

my bathroom ceiling needs a good lick of paint but as my husband and my two sons are all locked down in different places do I have the nerve to go and buy the paint and do it myself. How comfortable would you be with cracking on with home improvements and how careful do you have to be not to overdo it? Well, Sarah Beeney is presenter of HGTV's Renovate Don't Relocate and Jo Bahari is a specialist in DIY. What, Jo, is the number one rule about DIY? The number one rule, I think, is to do your homework. Make sure you've done some research. Don't just kind of bundle into a job. Have a look in a DIY book. Have a look online at instructional videos and make sure you know what the job entails before you tackle it. What, Sarah, is a good starting point if you're not experienced? You don't want to start drilling into walls, do you? I would say look at the job that you're trying to do and try and quantify where the beginning and the end is.

There is a temptation, especially if you're spending a lot of time at home, to think, well, there's loads and loads of things I need to do. And we'll take it all to pieces. We'll start peeling a bit of wallpaper off there and we'll pick a bit of paint off there and then we'll take a bit of wall down. And before you know it, you've covered the whole house in dust and you've started loads of projects and you haven't finished any of them. So I would say try and take it in really nice bite-sized chunks that you can say, say for instance, your bathroom ceiling, think, well, I'm only going to do the bathroom ceiling, move everything out, set yourself a bit of a deadline, think I'm going to do it by tomorrow afternoon, then sand it down properly, seal it, fill it and repaint it because it's actually not going to take as long as you think. I think we all feel that we can't do things, but actually you can. And be very careful standing on the ladders, yes?

Oh yes, always be careful standing on the ladder. Especially at the moment, we don't want any accidents or people going to A&E. No, we do not want to further overburden the NHS, do we? Simple things, Jo. I mean, a lot of people have pictures and they pile them up against a wall thinking, oh, I'll hang that. Now's a time when actually you could hang those pictures that are standing there. What's the best way to hang a picture? So it really depends on your walls. We have two types of walls mainly in our homes, plasterboard walls, which are kind of hollow and lightweight and brick walls. Brick walls are solid and they're hard to get into.

And the best way to hang a picture onto a brick wall is by drilling a hole into it, putting in a solid wall and putting in a screw but to do that you have to feel pretty confident that you can use a drill you can use a nail but if you have a very heavy picture you want to make sure that you're hanging onto a secure fixing and the best way to do that is by drilling a hole and putting a screw into the wall and hang on joe in order to do that you have to have been to the shop bought yourself a drill uh learned how to use it and and got that what are those things that you put inside the hole so that the wall fixing thank you yeah so yeah what i was about to say is that does involve you being a little bit confident with a power tool which is probably why all these people have hundreds of pictures lined up against their walls rather than putting them up, because it can be a

bit of a daunting task. But if you do your research and you have a look at how the job's done online, or you ask a friend, you know, we've all got very confident with Zoom calls and video calls at the moment. So you could get somebody to video call that is competent at DIY to talk you through that job. Sarah, I know you're keen on people transforming their home and using their space better. And you learn where they're going wrong by putting video cameras in people's homes. Where do people tend to go wrong? It's really interesting because the idea for the show, which is on Monday night at the moment at 8 o'clock, it's basically the concept that we live in houses and we put up with how we live and we think they don't work for us,

but actually very often it's because we don't use the space very well. And often people will extend their kitchen, but in a standard Victorian terrace, you'll find the front room is never, ever, ever used. It just sits there with two sofas and it's kind of their posh room. But of course, we never have time to sit down and be posh because we're busy working and doing everything else. But it's about reorganizing the space so it fits your family better. So that was the whole concept of the show.

And we've put cameras into people's houses to to really to prove to them it's kind of obvious when you go in you just think that there's four of you living here or two of you living here and you don't use this space and you do use this space so let's make the building function better for you and it's about reorganizing your space in a logical way because very often the sofa sits where it it was put down when you moved in because your arms hurt and 20 years later people if you say why is the sofa there people will go i don't know it just always it's always been there right but now is not necessarily the time to start knocking down walls to improve space is it no no you don't necessarily

i mean no possibly if you if you have the capability but i definitely would advise against taking down a structural wall right now if you don't know what you're doing in any way but um but i actually just reorganizing your space sometimes turning the bedroom into a sitting room or the sitting room into a bedroom can make a massive difference reorganizing the furniture and and doing some think, empowering yourself to take control of your space rather than putting up with it is what the show is really about. Jo, I just need to ask each of you, what's the worst mistake you've ever made? Jo, worst mistake ever? Oh, there's plenty. I remember once, though, because I think you have to learn by your mistakes. So that's why I have to make them, because otherwise I don't learn. But I did once plasterboard my spirit level into a wall and then looked for it for about an hour and a half before I realised it was behind the plasterboard.

That was pretty stupid. OK, yeah, that was really bad. Sarah, what's your worst ever mistake? Probably, well, there's so many. It probably well there's so many it's just i mean they're just plenty but but i think the most irritating one is is being really really cross with my brother and now my husband who was my boyfriend when we when we were really early on in developing and i was really cross with them and we had carpets being fitted and i was screwing the floorboards down and and they weren't helping and they were just watching me and being annoying. And they said, well, whatever you do, don't put it.

I was hammering them down with the nails. But anyway, they said, don't put a nail through the water pipe, will you? And I shouted at them and then put the next nail through a water pipe. And that's really annoying. And it taught me a lesson that you must be really careful when you nail floorboards down not to put them through a water pipe and that's really annoying and it taught me a lesson that you must be really careful when you nail floorboards down not to put them through a water pipe and also be very careful if you're hanging a picture on the wall not to drill into the electricity joe yes absolutely price you can get which which finds the uh cable but but normally they run vertically up from a vertically or horizontally they're meant to run.

But, you know, there's no kind of golden rule. But do be careful. The other thing I'd say about drilling is that people often feel they mustn't pick up the drill. They mustn't do anything with it. I would say find a bit of the wall that you're never going to see and practice making drilling holes and sticking some rule plugs in and then see how the rule plug works and expands when you wind the screw in because once you understand how it works and once you've done a few holes you kind of think I think you feel a bit more empowered to have a go it's like using a circular saw once you've cut a few bits of wood up you think oh that's not so bad um so I think I think have a go on some somewhere you can't, no one can see. I was talking to Sarah Beeney and Joe Bahari.

On Shirley Mann's story of her mother and the other women who did work during the war, we heard from Bob who said, my mum was 10 and living in Downham near Catford before being evacuated. She used to be sent to collect the family's rations. On one occasion, she was so hungry, she ate the entire family's weekly ration of cheese about the size of two OXO cubes on her way home. She doesn't tell us what happened when she arrived home,

minus the cheese. We don't know how lucky we are to be living in relative peace today. Julia said, My mother was 15 on VE day. Her diary entry reads Wentbuck Palace, palm oil lit with brazier lamps, Whitehall flood lit, danced and sang. Tubes hell so walked home. Ouch my feet. People slept in parks. Lovely evening. Anne Landall said my mum talked about the war a lot. We were brought up on stories that started when I was in Lowestoft. She volunteered for the Wrens at 17 and a half.

She saw Glenn Miller at the US Air Base and was sent off the dance floor by a USMP for dancing with an officer. She wasn't. She's nearly 95. Sal said, I knew Joan Hughes, who was an ATA pilot. She told me about how much prejudice she suffered after the war as one of the first female instructors. Anne said, I was a child in the war going to school each day at the age of five on a bus from a small village, Oldingbourne, to Chichester, across the fighter base aerodrome Tangmere. Sometimes, as the bus was crossing the aerodrome, there would be an air raid and a kind grown-up would haul me off the bus to lie underneath it until the all clear sounded. Eventually, the practice of buses crossing the aerodrome was stopped. I thought nothing of it. At the age of five anything that happens appears normal. I think my mother was very brave sending me off each day. She had a baby to care for on my own.

And Susie said our wonderful mum was in the ATS and was a spotter. My sisters, twins and I were always aware of what mum did during the war if we were watching films like the Battle of Britain. She would keep up a running commentary on which planes were on the screen. It was quite annoying at the time to have mum saying, that's a hurricane or that's a Messerschmitt 109. She could spot and name all German, Japanese and American planes. We didn't realise what a brilliant thing this was until we were all much older.

And now DIY, and I knew I would make you cross with what I said about painting my bathroom ceiling. Susan says, does Jenny Murray not find any irony in the fact that after the inspiring story regarding the female ferry pilots in the Second World War, she was suggesting that women were not capable of doing such a simple job as painting a bathroom ceiling and had to advise listeners to take care on a ladder? Well, frankly, Susan,

I was warning male listeners to take care on a ladder. Well, frankly, Susan, I was warning male listeners to take care on a ladder as well. We've heard that lots of them have fallen and done themselves serious injuries. Fran said, I've recently laid some lino in the bathroom, installed an outside tap, changed the front door lock and made and put up some willow trellis in the front garden, all whilst homeschooling my three children. I'm affectionately known by my neighbours as that DIY woman. The Glimmities is coming on brilliantly, by the way,

and, Fran, I'm glad to hear it. Now, Valerie said, Helping my daughter to open up a boarded-up doorway, I managed to cut straight through the main burglar alarm cable, which the previous owner had put in diagonally through the door space. Cost us £2,000 plus for a new alarm system. Sheila said, I'm getting increasingly annoyed at the assumption that only men can do DIY.

Not only has my husband never touched a paintbrush in our 40-year marriage, I have done all the painting and papering in our houses, and I'm sure there are plenty of other women who do all the DIY. Judith said, I can't believe what I'm hearing read DIY, this attitude that, ooh, how do I paint a ceiling without the men around? Being a silly, helpless woman, straight after talking about the war women, how could you? I'm really cross. It sounds like the 1950s.

Stop it. OK, I've stopped it, and I will go and buy the paint, and I will paint the ceiling. OK? Do join me tomorrow when I'll be here for weekend. And Woman's Hour, that's at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon and of course in the morning I will have painted the ceiling bye-bye

my name's Louis Theroux and I'm doing a new podcast for Radio 4 it's called Grounded with Louis Theroux I've assembled a series of interviews from my own home. The idea is that we can dig a little deeper, peel back the layers and find out who they really are. A free-flowing exchange of ideas, reflecting on what's going on now, but also looking back at the past. And featuring, at no extra cost, extraneous family noises in the background

and dodgy microphones. Two people communing through the miracle of the interweb at long distance and yet so very close. To hear new episodes as soon as they go live, just subscribe to Grounded with Louis Theroux on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, on BBC Sounds. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby.

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