Woman's Hour - Fran & Flora, Margaret Thatcher, Maths

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

Fran & Flora are the violinist Flora Curzon and cellist Francesca Ter-Berg. Their debut album is called ‘Unfurl’ and it combines new arrangements of traditional Transylvanian, Romanian, Klezmer, Greek and Armenian music. They play live in the studio and explain why they're so influenced by the music of far-flung places. Forty years ago today the opposition party of the day won a No Confidence Motion against the ruling Labour Government. That led to the General Election which brought in the UK's first female Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher. The Conservative politician, Edwina Currie, remembers campaigning for her and lobby journalist, Julia Langdon reflects on covering Margaret Thatcher all the way through her career. Maths anxiety is a real problem. One in ten children suffers from despair and rage when they do maths according Cambridge University. They base this figure on a survey they carried out with nearly two thousand pupils who were between 8 and 13 years old. Jenni's joined by Lucy Rycroft-Smith, research officer at Cambridge Mathematics to discuss children's anxious reactions and what support parents can give.

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 Thursday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. Now, do you know the answer to nine times eight? No? Me neither. Did you dread the days when calculus was on the curriculum? Me too. And there's no need for shame if the very questions sent you into a panic. Maths anxiety has been proved to be real. Why does it exist and what can be done to help a child who

is sick with worry? The 63rd session of the UN's Commission on the Status of Women has just ended. What was discussed and what achieved? And live music from a duo known as Fran and Flora. Their album combines arrangements of traditional Transylvanian, Romanian and Klezmer music. On this very day, March 28, 1979, yes, 40 years ago, the leader of the opposition stood up in Parliament and made a speech in which she condemned the government's policies, called for less of a role in politics for the state and greater autonomy for the individual. She was initiating a vote of no confidence in the then Prime Minister, James Callaghan. What condemns the Prime Minister now is the justified feeling that the substance of matters before the House takes second place to the survival of the government.

That feeling is widespread and it robs this government and the Prime Minister of authority, credibility and dignity. The only way to renew the authority of parliamentary government is to seek a fresh mandate from the people and to seek it quickly. And we challenge the government to do so before this day is through. The ayes to the right, 311. The noes to the left, 310. So the ayes have it. Well, in a matter of weeks, Margaret Thatcher was installed in number 10 as Britain's first female prime minister, and she and the Conservative government would rule for just over 11 years. What memories do that speech and that voice invoke in those who were there at the time? Well, Julia Langdon is a former political editor

who was in the lobby on that day. Edwina Currie is a former Conservative minister in the Thatcher government, who at the time of the speech was a councillor in Birmingham. Edwina Currie is a former Conservative minister in the Thatcher government who at the time of the speech was a councillor in Birmingham. Edwina, what strikes you listening to that speech again? Oh, the first thing, obviously, Jenny, is how well behaved they all are compared with the racket that we get at the moment. But I remember it as very, very exciting and thinking, oh good, now we're going to have a general election. Now we're going to see some change.

And now we're going to have a woman prime minister. I was absolutely certain that we would win it. Certain. Juliet, you were in the lobby, one, I think, of only two national female journalists who were there at the time. What did you and the others make of her that day? Well, she'd been leader of the opposition for four or five years by that time. And it seems odd looking back now because her reputation was so established as Prime Minister, but she found it very difficult to establish herself initially. And James Callaghan, as prime minister since 76, had been kicking her around a bit during prime minister's questions. She was not very popular,

even with the Conservative Party. I asked a Conservative woman friend this morning, actually, if she thought Mrs Thatcher was a goer at this point 40 years ago and she was not an enthusiast for her even though she is a feminist my friend I should say so it wasn't it wasn't as clear-cut as perhaps Edwina's suggesting but Edwina is so right it was terribly exciting the tension was palpable it felt like the end of an era in politics I'm not talking about the fact that we were going to get a woman in prime minister, but it felt like the end of an era and it was enormously exciting. Now, Edwina, you became a councillor as she became leader of the party. What impact did she have on your political ambitions?

The fact that, yes, a woman was rising to power. Well, I followed her with some interest, possibly more than most, political ambitions, the fact that, yes, a woman was rising to power. Well, I followed her with some interest, possibly more than most, because we actually had the same birthday. And that meant that when I was going for parliamentary seats just a little bit after this, I did hint that there was maybe some kind of magic connection. Of course, a load of nonsense, but still. What also was very obvious was Margaret was able to both exploit and in a way suffer from and benefit from some of the absolutely blatant sexism of the time. I mean Callaghan would imply that whatever the leader of the opposition said was made much sillier by the fact that she was a woman. On the other hand, then, Margaret appealed to the housewives' vote,

and, of course, still a very high proportion of women were at home managing homes at that time, and saying, well, you know, I know how to budget, and these men, they don't, do they? So that she was able to take advantage of that and turn it, I think, to a success. But Julia is right, because the party, all the polls at the time showed that the party was more popular than she was. There were a lot of doubts about

whether a woman would be capable of actually leading the country. Julia, it was the era of second wave feminism, the politics were being talked about all the time, the feminist politics. How did she position herself within that? With some difficulty, I think, is the honest answer. What is interesting, though, I looked up my cuttings file. This was before the digital age. And I looked up what I was writing at the time for this programme. And I found a story I'd written in the run-up to the election indicating that since Mrs Thatcher was chosen as leader of the Conservative Party,

the number of Conservative women candidates had increased by an enormous number, which is indicative, I think, of a change in perception. It has taken the Tories a long time to get there. They're still way behind the Labour Party in terms of the number of women they have in Parliament. But I think Mrs Thatcher's choice as leader of the party did have an impact there. Edwina, you mentioned earlier her talking about how she knew how to manage her budget and all that sort of thing,

and her image was more consciously feminine at this time in her career talking about how she knew how to manage a budget and all that sort of thing. And her image was more consciously feminine at this time in her career than later in her premiership. What deliberate decisions do you reckon she made about how she presented herself? Well, she took on board criticism. She didn't resist it, rather than I think the current prime minister does. She would listen hard to criticism, see whether she could do anything about it. And much of the criticism, when she was first leader of the opposition, was that she was too fussy. She had lots of little bows and little floral outfits, and the hair was kind of fluffy. And she had a high voice.

She had a tendency to have a little nervous laugh or a little nervous clearing of the throat. And she was taken in hand. She got some of the best PR people, including Ronald Bell, on board and took some notice, took some guidance on voice control and so on. So that by the time you see the film of her during the election campaign, only a few weeks later, she is talking in a much more authoritative way. She's wearing suits with proper reveres and plain dark colours. She's being terribly nice to everybody in slightly infuriating fashion, I thought. But she has accepted that and shown that she can improve. That, I thought, was really rather impressive. It took a lot of courage on their part and a lot of practice. Julia, the voice we've just heard is very different from the later, deeper tones we remember. How readily do you think she took advice on how to manufacture the

Iron Lady? I think I remember Clive James saying she sounded early on like a cat sliding down a blackboard. Get it right. She did. Edwina is quite right. She did take advice. In fact, her advisors, I've listened to the tape where, I mean, years later, of course, where she was being coached in how to lower her voice and not to sound indignant. I think she had a tendency to sound very indignant. And what we've got to remember here, talking about what was going on 40 years ago, was actually that election was lost by the

Labour government. It was not won by the opposition. And there was still widespread doubt that Mrs Thatcher, as leader of the Conservatives, would become Prime Minister. Well, it's worth remembering that, in fact, the Conservatives were only about, I think, eight or nine seats behind at the time, so there wasn't much of a gap. And Callaghan, bless him, nice man, was seen as really very inept and incompetent.

What Margaret Thatcher was able to do, that Jeremy Corbyn is not being able to do at the moment, was capitalise on this and present an image of being much more efficient and competent. Hang on, Edwina. Callaghan had been Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer,

and is now Prime Minister. Let me put one final question to each of you. Edwina first. A Tory minister, Mark Field, said earlier this week, it would not look front bench. But in general, I think we're ahead of that now. We treat people, we judge people. Unfortunately, in politics, you judge people by outcomes and results. If you get the results, it doesn't matter who you are. And if you don't, well, there's always a space at the top, isn't there, Julia? Julia? Indeed. I agree entirely. Gender is irrelevant here. Mrs May is being judged on her competence.

And I noticed Mrs Thatcher said in that clip that you played that we needed a government with authority, credibility and dignity. I made a note at the time. And I think that remains the case today. And we haven't got it at the time. And I think that remains the case today. And we haven't got it at the moment. Well, Julia Langdon and Edwina Currie, thank you very much indeed for joining us and looking back this morning. And we will be talking more about the election of Britain's first prime minister in a few weeks time. We would like to hear your memories, whether you remember welcoming her enthusiastically or you were passionately opposed or maybe a little bit of both. What can you remember about attitudes to women in politics, in society

and in your own homes and families? You can email us through the website or of course you can tweet. And now another reminder of this week's Late Night Woman's Hour with the writer Chidere Egeru, the Daily Record journalist Anna Burnside and Heta Howes, a lecturer in medieval literature at City University London.

They talk, among other things, about guilty pleasures. I think there is probably a gender issue here as well, actually. I'm sure there are things that guys do that are guilty pleasures, but I think women get it much more. You know, oh, you watch television. You eat food. You know, you're eating the moral language that is attached to food now. You know, oh, your treat. No, it's just my cake that I bought and feel happy to eat.

Which I need at 3pm with my tea. You know, I've been reading all day. Come on, give me a break. So what was your guilty pleasure? Or was it not even guilty? Was it just your pleasure you admitted to? So my unabashed pleasure is television. I watch tons of it all the time.

My favourite way to spend a Sunday is to just sit and, you know, have all my stuff that I need around me and occasionally and just sit and watch it. I mean, that's how I can see most TV now. And sometimes that's good television, but sometimes that is stuff that would be considered lowbrow. Who do you reckon that group of people are that would consider your pleasure lowbrow? Annoying academics that are in here. Well, yeah. Tweeted the thing.

Yeah, I suppose. They sound so monofaceted and boring. And it's not, you know, and I think I don't want to sort of misrepresent academia here it's very good i know just like writing it down as my phone tone saying i think the fact that there were so many people writing back and saying this is ridiculous shows that it's not a widespread idea but the idea of guilty pleasure is an interesting concept and what women's guilty pleasure is seen differently do you have a guilty pleasure or something that springs to mind when you hear that phrase now that we're discussing the concept of guilty pleasure i don't think any of my pleasures are guilty no i feel like i have

been conditioned to feel like anything that brings me pleasure outside of what is i've declared i concentrate on is something i should be guilty about i mean i enjoy eating a lot of popcorn like like to the point where the kernels are like trapped in my teeth, I've got swollen gum. So bad, but I don't see it as a guilty pleasure, I just see it as one of my facets. And you can hear that episode of Late Night Woman's Hour and more episodes through BBC Sound. Now, I have often been criticised in the past for publicly stating that I was so useless at maths, my teacher threw me out

of her class and said a science would do for getting into university I did biology. I will no longer be ashamed of confessing my terror of the subject on account of some new research from Cambridge University's Faculty of Education and Neuroscience, which confirms that maths anxiety is real. And I'm clearly not alone in feeling quite sick at the mere thought of the times tables or calculus. I really have this. Watch the bill arrive at a meal out with friends and watch me freeze. And not because I don't want to pay my share. I just want someone else to work that out. Tax returns were a nightmare. At 70, it still affects me. And I am blessed to have a very that out. Tax returns were a nightmare. At 70, it still affects me, and I am blessed to have a very understanding accountant.

When I was eight, I managed to convince my parents I absolutely had to move school. An hour's bus ride away, because my friend was going to move there. It wasn't about my friend at all. It was the looming backlog of sums I couldn't face. My daughter has a total phobia of maths. She is now 15, and we are struggling to find a sixth

form that she can attend because it is extremely unlikely that she will get her maths GCSE. Her problems with maths have shaped her whole education, confidence and sense of self. No exaggeration. It is like a form of punishment and has a constant impact on her life. Maths anxiety started in primary school for my daughter. Now she thinks she is rubbish and can't do anything. Maths anxiety leaks into science lessons and any subjects that might contain numbers. Learning mathematics when I was at school was for me a completely alien subject. From a very young age while at primary school I found the whole subject completely baffling. I would sit in class with tears rolling down my face and when confronted by my teacher as to why I hadn't written

anything she would then very quickly go over the same problems and then leave me to it. I always find it stressful and yet what was very amusing years, I had to do my own VAT returns, which, funnily enough, I quite enjoyed. As a child, I studied my times table over and over again with my grandfather, and he assured me they'd stick. They never did and never have. Nights before maths classes, I couldn't sleep. And when I used to get made to stand up and answer questions in front of the class, I would feel sick. My face would burn red and I just dreaded it. I still feel the same and every time I'm in a work or social situation where numbers come up,

I desperately try to hide my panic. I can only work things out if nobody's looking and I can calm down and preferably use a pen and paper. I feel like it's a big secret, like not being able to read might be. Well, the research in Cambridge surveyed 1,700 British pupils from the ages of 8 to 13 and concluded that 1 in 10 children suffers from despair and rage when faced with the subject. Why is it so frightening? And what can parents and teachers do to make maths less scary? Well, Kayla Fuller is a Digital Communications Coordinator at National Numeracy. Lucy Rycroft-Smith is an academic at Cambridge Mathematics. Lucy, what is maths anxiety

and why do we get it in a way that doesn't seem to happen with reading? Yeah, so the first thing to say is that primarily it would be categorised as an emotional response and you heard lots of emotional words there from people who saying as you say that they felt despair or rage or moved to tears but actually it also might manifest in a physical response in a behavioural response so all of the stories that we heard there about people feeling frozen feeling that they couldn't persist with what they were trying to do because of some sort of obstacle. And so that sense in which it moves beyond just not being able to do something or feeling frightened, that actually it overtakes your brain in some sense. It co-ops your working memory.

So you're actually in that very adrenaline-raised state of fear to the point where you just feel you can't do anything at all. Kayla, I know you had it. How did it make you feel when you were going through it? So when I was originally taking my maths GCSE, which was 20 years ago now, I definitely suffered from maths anxiety. I would sit in class and, as Lucy was saying, my behavioural response was to disengage

because I would feel stress and panic and fear, I think, a fear of humiliation, of being, I want to use the expression, picked on to answer a question, which I think is quite telling. So as a teacher, Lucy, what impact does this have on a child's behaviour in school and their attainment? Well, as you can imagine, as a teacher, when I'm faced with a student who is refusing to engage, my first response might be frustration and annoyance because I might feel that actually that's a behavioural issue that's nothing to do with my subject. And actually, it's very difficult to disentangle sometimes the effects of maths anxiety with just students who are being oppositional or difficult. But one of the things to think about is that perhaps sometimes this is a response, exactly as Kayla said, to a feeling of humiliation, feeling ashamed. And so it's my first duty as a teacher to make sure that pupils are feeling comfortable and comfortable enough to experiment and take risks, because that's what maths is all about.

It's about making mistakes. Oh, thank you. Re you reassuring you're very welcome the report kayla does say that teachers and parents may actually inadvertently play a part in it how much do you reckon that was in your case um i definitely think it had a role to play um my family is the sort of family where we all walked around saying we were words people and not numbers people um and that was the message i received growing up it was okay to not be able to do numbers so I think that definitely impacted how I felt about it and it was almost okay for me to feel the way I did and I could just check out of it and not you know persevere

it does seem to be the case that girls suffer more than boys lucy why yes i think there's potentially three different aspects of that one might be um that girls just generally suffer from a lack of confidence compared to boys and that's the same for women and men as well that persists into adulthood often you will find that um women feel they need to be more competent um objectively speaking than men in order to cross certain thresholds. Another aspect might be stereotype threat, which is the research idea that if you're reminded that you're a member of a particular group, and there's a particularly strong stereotype about that group, i.e. that girls are worse at maths than boys, then your performance actually suffers as a result of that. Just being reminded that you're female before you

do a maths test can affect your mathematics performance you did overcome it yes how um i think for me so i went i went back and retook i reset my maths gcse um as an adult i was almost 30 when i did it and i got an a and i got an a i know which i think i definitely went into the first class still feeling very maths anxious um and it didn't go well that first lesson they the teacher set a test when we on the first day just to get a baseline I think of where everybody was and I sat there and my stomach flipped over my palms were sweaty and my mind went so blank that I couldn't remember how to do things that I knew how to do um but I kept on going because I think at that age I had a really good grasp of the value of what I was doing um and I also had more resilience because

I had life experience to draw on to know that I could overcome things if I needed to and you see I can do my bank account and the household expenses and you know work out what time I have to be at the airport if I'm catching a flight but numeracy is very different from maths isn't it? Yes absolutely so we have sort of what we in actual numeracy call school maths which is you know your algebra your trigonometry and there's that sort of trope about you know i'm still waiting for the day when i'm going to use algebra in my real life um and then you have everyday maths which is numeracy it's the things that you're using every single time you you know when you need to catch your train in the morning and you need to work out how much time you need to leave before you get out of the house that's using numeracy i think it's worth pointing out

there as well that some of the things that you're describing are using tools where in a classroom situation you might be actively not encouraged to use those tools like a calculator or a spreadsheet and the time pressure isn't there in the same way as well so that is why it might feel different it does feel very different but come on what are we going to do to help the children who are suffering now because exams are coming up tests are coming up what do we do so luckily there are some researchers in the field doing really great work on this some some of whom have been working for some time and the idea really is that like any other stress response you want to find a balance point a sweet spot so in maths if you're working on things that

are repetitive and tedious and that you know how to do nobody's learning anything it's quite boring you won't actually register much of any kind of stress or anxiety similarly if you go the other way and something is way too stressful and challenging it might be the math itself that's too challenging or it might be the context it might be the fact that it's time pressured or you feel there's a danger of public humiliation you're not learning then either in the middle however you're you're growing you learning, you're making mistakes, you are slightly overreaching and then coming back and you're able to be creative and experiment and in order to allow students to find that mid-ground sometimes we actually have to present them with these sorts of models and give them the language and the framework to be able to conceptualise the way that they're learning as well as the learning itself. I was very careful

never to say to my boys that i was bad at maths what would you say to your children you can be good at maths it's not hard or just let them go i i probably wouldn't say that it's not hard because i think that's sometimes yeah i think that's part of it and it's um helping them to understand that even when it is hard you can still keep going with it and get there in the end it's not going end. It's not necessarily always going to be easy. But it's difficult to not draw on your own experience. And if you did really dislike maths at school and had a terrible experience, it's so easy to fall into that trap of saying,

don't worry, I hated maths at school, or even saying things like you don't really need maths. I think it's really important to be positive. Kayla Fuller and Lucy Rycroft-Smith, thank you very much indeed and the very best of luck to all of you who will be doing exams this summer. Now, still to come in today's programme, a folk duo called Fran and Flora with an album called Unfurl. Their music is from Eastern Europe and sometimes sung in Romanian or Yiddish.

They'll play live here in the studio. And the serial, the fourth episode of Anika Stranded, read by Nicola Walker. Now, the 63rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women took place at the United Nations headquarters in New York and finished last Friday. Female delegates from all over the globe, leaders, representatives of member organisations,

volunteers and schoolgirls make their way there to be part of a conversation. Enna Miller managed to get a ticket for the event and has put together three reports for us. She collared delegates in lunch queues in between sessions to find out why they were there and what they have to say. Well today she talks to Zarinainsworth, who's been going to CSW since the year 2000, following in the footsteps of her mother, Lois Hainsworth, who attended for decades. My name is Zarin Hainsworth and I am the chair of the National Alliance of Women's Organisations. I've been speaking to so many people who are here to tell their stories, who are here to campaign, who are here to lobby. But can you tell me what they're here for? What is CSW? At the same time as the United Nations was formed, it was felt by obviously

the women who were involved, including Eleanor Roosevelt, that it was very important to have some kind of mechanism included in the UN for women. And so the Commission on the Status of Women was formed. It's shortened to CSW, and that was in 1946, and the first meeting was in 1947. Its purpose is for governments to call each other to account for what they are doing for women and girls in all parts of their life. And agree on ways forward. Why do you do this? Because you do a lot of it. I started coming actually in 2000, so it's 19 years. And I often felt that my time was finished here.

But I'm now bringing young women. I think it's really important that young women's voices are heard and heeded because of their lived experience, but also because they are the leaders of the future. There was something that I thought was really, really interesting that we talked about, which I'd never considered, that although people are here to tell their stories and to campaign, you talked about how important the language of the United Nations were

and you gave an example about the difference between seeing the child and the girl child. Because every UN process has an outcome document, so it's like the minutes of the meeting, it becomes international law, which means that the rest of us can call our governments to account if they've signed up to that document. So the governments are really particular about what they agree to. For example, in the Beijing conference, we managed to get in, among other things, three important words, which were the girl child. Before then, all of the stats and

all the information for under 18s was children. And there was no disaggregated data according to sex in terms of boys and girls. So how many boys go to school? How many girls go to school? How many go to primary, secondary, tertiary? How many child soldiers there are? Are they male or female? None of those stats were available. But since we got the girl child into the document it meant there were stats so you had to record the difference between girls going to school boys going to school etc and that showed us some of the problems another time when we when language made a difference was we got the word harmful before the word traditional because countries hitherto had been able to say, well, this is something that happens to us.

This is our culture. This is our tradition. We can do this because it's a traditional practice. And a lot of the women from Africa were saying, why are you not doing anything about female genital mutilation and female genital cutting? It's something that's happening to our girls. And you lot in the West are keeping quiet about this.

Why is that? So we've tried really hard to get the word harmful. So it can be a traditional practice, but there has to be some understanding that there might be something that is objectively harmful. So if it's harming a woman's mental health or physical health, then it's something that shouldn't take place. You've been coming for nearly 20 years. I've been hearing quite a few people in discussions saying we're going backwards.

Do you agree or do you think we've made progress? We definitely have made progress in many areas. However, there are some countries who want to go backwards. There are still battles to be fought. There are millions of women all over the world who are suffering sexual violence. It's an epidemic of proportions and we aren't stopping it. Is that disheartening for the amount of work and the efforts that you put in every single year? For me, I have this tremendous tension between feelings of frustration that things are still going on. And sometimes you just think, well, why are we not there? And why are people being so stupid? And why are they just allowing politics or the profit motive or personal

aggrandizement to get in the way of that. And on the other hand, you meet these amazing people who are doing huge things, fantastic best practices around the world, whether it's from the Cameroon or Australia or wherever it happens to be. You have all these groups of women who are still fighting, still working together, still making progress, still changing the lives of individuals for the better. And it's those stories of one person's life that has been made better by the actions and motivation and kindness of another human being. And that is what is truly inspiring. And that's what we need to keep working on.

To sum that up up you sort of feel frustrated but inspired? Absolutely yeah it's exactly that dichotomy between frustration and inspiration. The one thing that I've noticed here is that most people I meet are volunteers they're here off their own back and sometimes it just sort of feels that if people are sort of doing the fight as volunteers and they're not coming officially from their countries to take things back then it just doesn't make the fight as strong. Well that is a huge area of discontent which is where's the funding? Why is there so much money for the the beef lobby or the tobacco lobby or whatever and yet there's no money for these people who are working hard to try to have a better world so absolutely that is

a huge problem that that many many people come and they pay their own way and they sleep on people's couches and they go without food my My mother used to come for ages, used to bring her muesli with her from England and her tea bags. And she used to have a breakfast in her bedroom with a little portable kettle because she couldn't afford it. But she came every year paying for herself. And there are people like that who really are so convinced and motivated and inspired that they keep on doing that. If there was proper funding, if there was funding for civil society organisations, we could achieve so much more. In my heart, I do believe

You shall set us free, so dear And next time, we'll be talking to delegates from around the world about the causes they are keen to promote. Now, Fran and Flora are a musical duo, a cellist and a violinist, whose first album, Unfurl, has been greatly lauded by the critics. Max Reinhardt on Radio 3's Late Junction called them a string duo bound for glory. Tom Robinson on Six Music said, playing that has the kind

of quality you couldn't fake. And The Guardian called them classy and brave. Well, their work is rooted in or inspired by the traditional folk tunes of Eastern Europe. Now, pretty good reviews, you two, that I just read out. Francesca, the cellist, how would you describe the music that you play? So, in its essence, it's traditional, mostly klezmer and Romanian tunes

that we've been learning for about ten years, going on adventures and things. But because we have lots of other influences from sort of early music classical to like free jazz and experimental electronics and things we've on the album we've incorporated all of that together and so we've really kept as to the tradition as hardcore as we can like that was a doina which is a modal sort of that was a composition from Transylvania. It's a modal sort of arrhythmic piece, but we kept it quite free and like with an improvisational like essence. Yeah. Flora, clutching the violin.

Why were you influenced by music rooted in Eastern Europe? Yeah, I mean, you're London and Buckinghamshire. Yeah, I don't have a Jewish background or heritage from Eastern Europe, but I was just so drawn to the soulfulness of the music and I guess I first heard it on pop records about ten years ago, just little snippets of violin playing, either from the Romanian or the Jewish traditions, which I didn't know, I wouldn't have been able to identify those back then,

and have since just wanted to get to know how it works and how to play it. The fun and the freedom of it has just really spoke to me. Now, Francesca, the klezmer, the traditional Jewish style, and you do have a Jewish background, has tended to be dominated by male musicians. How welcome into the style are two young women? Well, I think back in the day,

traditionally it would have been male, although women would have played and sung at home. But nowadays, I'd say it's not 50-50, but there are a lot of women playing, and especially in the US, there's a lot of women being celebrated playing. And that's been going on since the 70s. But I think we're totally welcome.

It's just we have to stand up for ourselves. That's the challenge, but we're trying our best. Now, Transylvania is one of the places that you've gone to study and learn how to do this. It has that kind of slightly scary feel about just the name. What was it actually like, Francesca? Oh, OK. So, I mean, it was amazing.

We went to study with a guy called Marcel Ramba in Turgamures. He's actually a very experienced teacher, so he was used to welcoming people from sort of west like more western cultures in and his basically his wife cooked for us all day and then we just sat there and played tunes like for hours and hours and hours yeah it was it was cool. What did you make of actually being there Flora? Yeah I loved it it was a real experience and i particularly enjoy learning by ear so the way that we learned with with marcelle really um yeah it was it was a good process for me it's how i grew up learning music as well um and yeah we just played tunes all day it was great fun

and you went to the other countries whose music you were interested in yeah where else did you go um so i've been to hungary and serbia and we've both been to crete um and we've also studied a lot with charlin burger in brussels who's this amazing um polymath musician he can play any instrument and all sorts of styles and how able were you to work as you were going around there and money to pay your way? Yeah. Well, we kind of, like, you know, when we were on those kind of, they're kind of like studying retreats, basically. So we had to, you know, work doing all kinds of things and then save up and go along and do it like that.

Yeah. And people were happy for you to go and join and perform we weren't we weren't really doing performing um so much because there was so much to learn so we were we were doing more kind of sitting at the feet of the the masters kind of vibe and um performing came later once we felt like we had a bit of a grip because it's not easy music to learn. So we didn't really want to start doing performances until we felt like we'd got some of the nuances of the music that took a few years. Now, as I said, Flora was clutching her violin.

You have your cello between your knees. Flora, you're going to play Romanian Fantasies. Tell me something about the music and what we're going to hear. So this is a very old tune recorded in about 1910 by a violinist called Josef Solinsky and it's part of a set of four tunes called the Romanian Fantasies and we've kind of put together two of them to make a little medley. You're tuned up, you were tuning up as you came in away you go I was talking to Francesca Tabag and Flora Curzon of Fran and Flora and they were playing Romanian fantasies.

Now, earlier we discussed Margaret Thatcher winning a vote of no confidence 40 years ago. Today, Susanna sent an email and said, As a lifelong socialist and Labour voter, when Margaret Thatcher became Conservative Prime Minister, I was delighted. It seemed the largest coup for women. It seemed unimaginable then that a woman could achieve this status. I still admire her chutzpah. In the coming weeks, we'll be covering what the first female Prime Minister meant to you. We'd like to hear from you. Do send us your memories. You can tweet at BBC Women's Hour or you can email us through the Women's Hour website.

We also today discussed maths anxiety, which is something I know lots of you have experienced. Sue Crisick on email said, When I was eight years old, I moved to a new school. I loved maths but had not yet done times tables at my previous schools. Unknown to me, the maths teacher was obsessed with the answer to 8 times 7. On my very first morning, the teacher asked me the answer to this in front of the class and I said I didn't know. The whole room reverberated with laughter.

It marked the beginning of my total fear of anything to do with numbers. Jacqueline sent an email, I've taught lots of maths phobics. Being gentle on a one-to-one basis with adults or children really works. Reading aloud is equally stressful for those who suffer from dyslexia or people who felt behind their peers in childhood. And Bob said, I'm a retired maths teacher. Many parents told me at parents' evening they were not surprised that their child found maths difficult because they themselves found it difficult and intimidating. This attitude is infectious and should be confronted. Maths is magical, mystical and fun. But most importantly, confidence is all. And I'm trying to be convinced by Bob's advice and maybe just try harder.

Tomorrow, Tina Dehealy will be here with the program. Do join her at two minutes past 10, if you can, from me for today. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. 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. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.