Woman's Hour - Small Island, Esther Wojcicki, Natalie Haynes

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island was published in 2004, dramatised for television in 2009 and now Helen Edmundson’s theatrical adaptation has begun a run at the National Theatre. It tells the stories of Hortense, who grows up in Jamaica and moves to England as part of the “Windrush” generation, and Queenie, who escapes life on a Lincolnshire farm to find herself in inner-city London as social and ethnic dynamics shift after the War. Jenni talks the actors playing Hortense and Queenie, Leah Harvey and Aisling Loftus.How do you raise successful people? Esther Wojcicki claims to have done just that. She is the mother of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, 23andMe Co-Founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki, and Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Pediatrics Janet Wojcicki. Esther has written a book including 'simple lessons for radical results' and she shares her strategies with Jenni, explaining her TRICK theory and why she thinks it works equally well whether you are raising children or managing a company.Why has Leeds become the first city in the UK to report a drop in childhood obesity, what’s the significance of this for the rest of the UK and what else is being done throughout Europe and the world to tackle the problem? Jenni is joined by Esther Wojcicki, author of How to Raise Successful People, Susan Jebb, Professor of Diet and Population Health at Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford and Franco Sassi, Professor of International Health Policy and Economics at Imperial College, London. In her latest novel, A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes tells the story of the Trojan War from an all-female perspective. She joins Jenni to explain why she decided to give a voice to these overlooked women, girls and goddesses and what can be gained by listening to their stories.Presenter: Jenni Murray

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. It's a programme for parents called Henry, and has resulted in Leeds becoming the first UK city to report a significant drop in childhood obesity. How was it done? Small Island is the novel by the late Andrea Levy, which described the experience of the Windrush generation as they arrived in Britain. It's now a play at the National Theatre, and I'll be talking to the

two young women playing Hortense and Queenie. And A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes tells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of the women involved. Now, Esther Wojcicki is a teacher and a parent. She has three daughters. One is the chief executive of YouTube. Another is one of the founders of the genetic testing company 23andMe. She's also its chief executive. Her third daughter is a Fulbright scholar and professor of paediatrics. So it's not surprising that their mother has

written a book called How to Raise Successful People. But what does she mean by success? Success is feeling a sense of peace and happiness with what you're doing in the world. So you have good relationships, you have a place to live, food to eat, clothing that is necessary, not necessarily designer clothing, but good clothing. But it's a sense of peace that you feel on a regular basis, at least 51% of the time. But how do you measure it? I mean, your daughters are phenomenally successful in the traditional sense. They are at the top of their tree. Well, I'm extremely proud of my daughters. And I never, as a young mother, ever thought that they would do what they're doing today. I was just a mother that was trying to empower her daughters

to do whatever they wanted to do in life. And so, luckily luckily I gave them the tools of self-confidence, self-confidence and ability to think, and ability to do research and understand what the results of their research were. And that is what resulted in them being able to be leaders in the industry. I never ever said that boys were superior or girls had in any way any less capabilities or less of opportunities. As a mother, I always said that they had the same opportunity and same skills and there was no difference. And I bought them toys that were basically toys for boys or for girls.

They played a lot with Legos and they did lots of arts and crafts and they did music instruments and they did a lot of sports. So I just tried to encourage them to be independent and to think about whatever it was. If they had a question, it was encouraged for them to ask questions and to challenge authority. I think that was a key factor. You developed a system for raising children, which you've called TRICK. T-R-I-C-K. What is it? So TRICK stands for Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. And I say that it belongs in all families, in school, and in all business.

Because in family, when you trust your child, then they believe in themselves. They trust themselves. And it starts early in life. In other words, you should definitely give your child opportunities to show that you trust them. Give them an opportunity, for example, to help you shop, or help you plan the dinner, help you plan a vacation. Because what you're doing is you're helping them see themselves as being able to do these things. So one of my statements and philosophy in the book that I talk about is the more you do for your child, the less empowered they are. So give them that opportunity. There was an incident in your childhood that

seems to have influenced that philosophy. When your baby brother died, what happened and how did that influence you? So he died, he was about 16 months old. And my mother was an immigrant from Russia to the United States. And she actually did not question authority. As an immigrant, she came in, she thought, well, everybody else knows better than I do. It's such a wonderful, smart country. When my brother accidentally opened a bottle of aspirin on the floor of the kitchen and then ate it, she called the doctor because she thought, of course, the doctor would know how to deal with that. Unfortunately, the doctor was probably very busy or didn't listen. That's the only explanation I can think, because he told her to put him to bed and see how he was in two hours.

And so that's not the thing you do with a child that's ingested a poison. But being unsure of herself, she followed the directions. And in two hours, he was violently ill. We went to a county hospital where they pumped his stomach, but he really needed to be kept at a hospital and be treated. So we went from one hospital to another, but they wouldn't accept him because we didn't have proof of payment, which is really a tragedy in America. So anyway, by the fourth hospital, they accepted him, but at that point he died. So it left a terrible impact on my family and my mother. And on me, I was just devastated.

But I didn't realize the impact it had on me until later. And what the impact it did have was that I no longer trusted anybody in positions of authority, especially medicine or anybody with a long title. No matter what they said, if it didn't make sense to me, I was going to challenge it. You say that you didn't want to repeat the mistakes your parents made in raising you. Where would you say they did go wrong? They never encouraged me to challenge authority. They were always saying that I should always follow the instructions. And that incident with my brother David, it taught me just the opposite.

But how then, if they failed, did you grow up to be such a success? Well, I was 10 at the time. And I think I had this opportunity to think for myself. What I did, which was unusual, I went to school in the Los Angeles City Schools that were overcrowded at that time. And so they had two sessions. They had a session that started at 7 and ended at 11.30. Another session that started at 12.30 went until 4. And that was to accommodate all the students. And I think I was the only student in that high school that asked permission to go to both sessions. And they said yes. So I was lucky because I took everything in school. And my theory was the more that I knew,

the more that I could educate myself, the less likely it was that I would ever fall into that same trap that my mother had fallen into. You know, there are lots of snappy titles for, I suppose there's a fashion now for advice on how to be You know, there are lots of snappy titles for, I suppose there's a fashion now for advice on how to be a parent, how you raise your children as helicopter parents, tiger mums, snowplow parents, and you're known as panda mum. Why panda mum? Well, I had a debate with Amy Chua in Mexico. The tiger mom.

The tiger mom. And she said how much she hated being a mother and how difficult it was. And she was challenged all the time. And then I basically came on stage and I said just the opposite, that I loved being a parent. For me, it was an exciting time. My children represented hope and the future. And then somebody on that panel, in that audience, labeled me the panda mom.

And so that title stuck. You're also known as the godmother of the Silicon family. Silicon Valley. Oh. It's the whole valley. Oh, the whole valley, not just a little bit of it that your daughter's involved in. Okay, why? Well, I think that's because I've been a teacher at Palo Alto High School for 36 years,

and a lot of my students have gone on to found companies and to do amazing things. And I've used this same methodology, this trick philosophy in my classes. So I trust my students. I get much more than most teachers ever do. I trust, respect them, give them a lot of independence. I encourage collaboration and I always treat them with kindness. So I think that's probably the reason that it's happened. And then I've been an advisor to many companies, the startups, the young companies, coming out of Stanford and in Silicon Valley. There's another incident in the book which seems to demonstrate a calm approach that you have to the anxiety that a lot of parents suffer from.

What happened when your daughter appeared to have gone missing in Siberia? Oh, that's quite the story. So Anne, my youngest daughter, the founder of 23andMe, she decided she wanted to take a trip. And she started in Turkey and then went through Eastern Europe. And I said to her, Anne, you know, it's really important for you to be on a tour. This is a big trip. And she's like, sure, Mom, I'll take a tour.

And then she went missing. I couldn't figure out where she was. You know, that was the age before cell phones. And I had just tracked her somehow in Siberia, and I ended up, you know, I spoke Russian at one point. So somehow, miraculously, all my Russian came back. And I called one hotel after another after another in this town of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. And I found her.

And she was shocked. And then when I talked to her, she's mom how did you find me she wasn't happy actually she thought that there was you know she's like oh mom seems like you can find me anywhere that you were an anxious mother really well just one four months you know she was gone just one final point you also claim never to have checked or helped with your children's homework. How did you get away with that? Because I never checked ever. What I did is I let them come to me if they couldn't do it. And if they came to me and asked for help, I was like, sure, I'll help you. And if I couldn't help you, I'll hire a tutor for you. But I never said, show me your homework,

because if you don't, then I'll be upset. Well, Esther Wyszycki, thank you very much for the moment. Do stay with us for the next item. There are some headphones there, and if you pop those on, you'll be able to hear someone who is in another studio, but we need to hear her. Now, as you may have seen in the papers or heard in the news, something extraordinary has been happening in Leeds.

A programme called Henry, Health, Exercise and Nutrition for the Really Young, was introduced in 2009, and the latest data shows that Leeds has become the first city in the UK to report a drop in childhood obesity. Well, how is it done, and what else is being done across the world to tackle a problem described by the chair of the Royal College of GPs as one of the most serious issues of our time? Well, Esther remains with us and we're joined by Franco Sassi,

Professor of International Health Policy and Economics at Imperial College London, and Susan Jebb, who's Professor of Diet and Population Health at Oxford University joins us on the line. Susan you describe what's happened in Leeds as startling. Why did you choose that word? Well I need to clarify your headline a little bit because there are a number of cities in the UK where the prevalence of obesity in very young children, we're talking about children when they start primary school, is beginning to go down. But the startling thing in Leeds is that the decrease is quite pronounced. It's more than we see in so-called comparable cities, and it's more than England as a whole. But the particular thing is the decrease is happening in children living in the most deprived areas.

And that's startling because in other parts of England, we're seeing the gap between children living in the poorest areas and the richest areas getting wider, whereas in Leeds it's getting narrower because something is happening in the deprived areas and the children living there and their rates of obesity in preschool, well, essentially preschool children, we measure them when they start school, are going down. So it's a slightly more specific finding than perhaps your headline implied, but nonetheless very important. But how was it done?

Well, that's the big question. And we published this report the other day. And essentially, at the moment, it's just an observation. But what we do know, and we need to do some more work to really better understand what's going on in Leeds and what's going on in some of the other cities around the world where we're beginning to see these reports of success. The feature of Leeds, I think, is that several years ago they basically said, this is a priority, we're really going to put some effort into it. We are really going to focus on preschool into it we are really going to focus

on preschool children because we think that if we work with parents and with carers we really can shape the lives of those very young children without really engaging the children in it we'll just change the environment around them change the way that their parents and carers look after them and see if we can make a difference. And thirdly, let's really put our biggest efforts into the most deprived communities. And I think that strategy is paying off. Franco, how significant would you say the Leeds experience is

when you look at the problem of childhood abuse throughout the UK? Well, I think we need to look at... Sorry, I was putting that question to Franco, Susan. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Thank you. The experience of Le leads is significant, but it shouldn't be a reason for complacency. We are still very, very far from tackling the problem. I mean, obesity is still a major issue in the United Kingdom as well as elsewhere in Europe and around the world.

And we don't have a solution yet that will really solve it. I know your daughter Janet, the pediatrician, has worked to reduce childhood obesity in the US. What strategies has she introduced? The main strategy is she wants young mothers to realize the danger of feeding your child any kind of soda, any kind of soda, and any kind of fast food. By soda you mean sweet, fizzy drinks. Fizzy drinks. No fizzy drinks. No juice. No fizzy drinks. Only water. Water and milk. And that's about it. And it's worked quite a bit. And then also exercise.

Those are the main things. Exercise, water, no soda. Franco, working as you do on an international level, what's the role of the food companies in all this? Well, the role of food companies has been contributing to the problem, of course, over the years. But they must also be a partner in finding a solution

to the issue. The only places where we have had some success in addressing obesity are places where we have managed to build coalitions, led by government, either central or local government, including actors at the grassroots level, civil society, as well as business.

And where has that been, where there's been that kind of cooperation? Well, it has been mainly at the local level. There are places in countries like France, the United States, Italy, Central Europe, even the United Kingdom where this has worked. But these are just local examples at the moment. We really need to trigger sustained, meaningful and widespread change. We need to transfer these solutions on a larger scale. And there are things that we can do that we're learning from our European project in this direction.

What can you do? Well, there are three things mainly. One is change the lifestyles of women when they're pregnant and even before they conceive children. Because we have found in our project that the lifestyles are linked with the genes that are activated in children

and some of these genes are linked with obesity. The second thing is changing the environment in which children and their parents make their food choices in particular. And the third thing is really removing the barriers that prevent children from doing physical activity. These barriers are almost impossible to remove in adults but in children there is really no reason why children shouldn't be as physically active as we have been in our generation. Susan, I read something this morning, you said

you're testing children pre-school, that we should be checking babies for the potential to become obese. What's your view on that? Should we be checking babies? Well, it was a separate report which was trying to say, can we identify which children are most at risk when they're very young? And the theory would be then we could intervene more intensively in those children to prevent them becoming obese later. So that's an interesting idea.

The challenge is that because so many children do go on to become overweight, if not obese, and that gets worse as they get older, I tend to think we probably need more of a whole population approach. So we ought to be talking to everybody to try to prevent obesity. And that's, I think, what they really did in Leeds. So a big feature of their programme was to train all of the health visitors, all of the people working in daycare centres, children's centres, all of those professionals that come in contact with young children and their families. And as we know, actually, when your children are very young, you do have quite a lot of those contacts over the course of their early years.

And they train those practitioners to really take a very supportive approach to help parents build their parenting skills but also but to do that around thinking about diet and physical activity behaviors so we just heard keep your you know ensure your children drink milk and water that's a great message but how as a parent are you going to do that? What do you say when your child says but I want that red shirt? Let me ask Esther what she did as a family. What did you do as a family? We never drank soda ever. Not once. I never allowed them to buy it in this at a restaurant. Never on an airplane and I have a actually a rule in my classes, no soda, no juice.

And I can tell you that my students don't drink any of that. After six months with me, no one drinks any. Franka, what's going to make people take childhood obesity seriously? Well, I think the staggering numbers. I mean, today about one in 10 children is obese at the age of two, which is... Is that just in the UK or is that internationally? No, it's in the countries where the child obesity rates are highest, like the United States or the United Kingdom or some of the southern European countries. But it's absolutely staggering. And it's extremely important that we start acting from that age.

Overweight children at age two are likely to become obese adolescents. If we break that pathway and we make sure that children are on a downward trajectory for their weight, they are likely to have the same outcomes as children who have never been overweight or obese when they become adults. But we need to make sure this happens. Professor Franco Sassi, Professor Susan Jebb and Esther Wojcicki, thank you all very much indeed for being with us. On Monday, we're going to be holding a phone-in about eating, how can we develop a healthy relationship with food, and how to encourage the children to do the same.

So you can email us or you can tweet us now, or of course you can call us on Monday. Now still to come in today's programme, a chance... Oh no, we're not going to hear a chance encounter with an 88-year-old. Sorry, we've lost that one another day. Natalie Haynes will tell us the story of a thousand ships, the story of the Trojan War from the point of view of the women who were involved in it. Now you may have read the book or seen the television series, but there's now a chance to see Andrea Levy's story, Small Island, about the arrival of the Windrush generation in the UK in the theatre.

The novel has been adapted for the Olivier at the National Theatre by Helen Edmondson. And the only tragedy surrounding the production, which opened to a standing ovation last night, is that Andrea was not there to see it. She died earlier this year and she would have loved the portrayal of the entwined stories of Queenie, the Lincolnshire farmer's daughter who acts as landlady to Gilbert and his wife Hortense, newly arrived from Jamaica. Aisling Loftus plays Queenie

and Leah Harvey is Hortense. Welcome, both of you. How familiar, Leah, were you with Andrea Levy's work before you began working on the play? A few months before doing the workshop for the play, I was auditioning for The Long Song, which recently came out, and through that I was introduced to Andrea Levy

and read The long song, watched Small Island, the BBC adaptation. And so I kind of had seen it. And then, yeah, a few months later, I was auditioning to play Hortense. And Ashley, what about you? How familiar were you with that work? I wasn't, to be honest. I remember it being on the telly, but I didn't watch it. My fella did.

And so then when I got the audition through and the script was so good i you know sped read the the book and it's brilliant isn't it it's such a brilliant read um so yeah now your parents leah came to the uk from the caribbean how did that affect the way you approached Hortense? Yeah, my grandparents did. In a way, it more affected me in my life. Through doing the play, I learnt things and then could apply it to my grandparents and seeing how they were and understand them a bit more. So I think it informed both parts of my life.

And what did what did you know about pig farming in Lincolnshire nothing still don't I don't I don't want to go there but you have to go there because that's where she comes from yeah yeah you you there is a pig at one point that looks... With its guts pulled forth. Yes, alarming. OK, we won't go there. I mean, the most shocking part of the story is the overt racism that the black characters have to suffer. How aware were you, Leah, of how bad it was?

As in how bad it was back then? I mean, I think that as a young woman who appears, as a black woman, I am very aware of how it was and I'm very aware that it couldn't have been easy. So I knew the kind of things that were happening, but to really hear it and to have it be introduced into my vocabulary again and to be hearing those words every day I think affects us naturally but yeah I mean I was pretty aware of how hard it was The words just come and slap you in the face don't they?

Yeah they really do You just don't want to hear them anymore. How difficult was it for you, Ashlyn, to go back to a period where landlords, and your character is a landlady, would turn people away and fellow workers would use those terrible words without thinking about it?

I think that it's really appropriate that the reality is painted as ugly as that because that's kind of racism is born of ignorance. And then you also see other types of racism that are born of, you know, hatred and just nastiness and fear and whatever else. So I think that, you know, Andrea and Helen together did a really brilliant job of portraying those different facets. What do you reckon makes Queenie so much more tolerant than any of the other white people we meet in the play? I don't know, because she's not a saviour.

You know, she's a complicated woman. She's a survivor, isn't she? Yeah, yeah. I think that she so survivor isn't she yeah yeah she I think that she is has she so wants to be loved she's so lonely and um she uh she just wants she's just got a big heart she's so that isn't filled up by uh maybe it's never filled up maybe it's only filled up, maybe it's only filled up very briefly. She does have a ghastly husband, doesn't she? I wondered how you were responding, the pair of you.

I mean, I was in the audience last night. It was packed with very enthusiastic people, some of whom I suspect were friends and relatives of the class. But there were moments when, like, when you make a rude remark to your husband somebody in the audience shouts yeah tell him there was a lot of audience involvement yeah how do you cope with that because you can't be used to it it doesn't happen very often in the theatre it's kind of great it's brilliant it's It's so fun to hear them because it's like having another actor on the stage. And especially for us, because we have a direct address at the

beginning of the play when we're telling our stories. And so we talk directly to the audience. And, you know, throughout rehearsals, we didn't have an audience to play off. So it felt like there was an actor missing from the company. And as soon we had them in it was like oh and it gives them permission to be vocal and to they feel like they're involved in the story I hope which means that then for the rest of the story even when we bring it down a bit they're still able to vocalize and and react Hortense at the beginning we see her as a very energetic little girl obviously not played by you, not played by me, played by somebody who is a genuinely very little girl who then grows into a rather serious and proud woman. How easy was it for you to show that

change in her? I think Helen and Andrea made it very easy by it's all there in the words I felt like it was all there in the words so all I had to do was remember the heartbreak and have the moment of putting on armour which happens at the end of her story without spoiling it too much puts on all that armour and no one else is going to break her heart,

no-one else is going to make her cry. And I think that's what it is. It's a very serious play. It's tragic at times, and I have to tell you, I don't often end up in tears at the end of a play, but I did last night. It's also hilarious. I mean, there were times when I was

roaring with laughter and there were people sitting all around me who were killing themselves laughing how easy is it for you to combine the two, to shift from the really really funny to the really really tragic I think that in Act 1

we're all able to craft our own stories so you know in that way that when you tell a memory, you can be as charming as anything about that memory. So we're all able, it's funny, isn't it? The first act is funny. And then the second act is kind of life runs away from us and things, you know, life happens to all of us and we're not able to hold back the

tide anymore and um i think that just the thing of the the some of it's so devastating for all three of us and we've all everyone's got that in them haven't they it's just that most people in their day-to-day lives they the valve is securely fastened whereas actors get to take the valve off and uh get the guts out how would you say you deal with that um great difference in the two parts i think there's there's a beautiful combination of tragedy and and humor and and depending on which order it is you know in the moment um so there are moments where you know something really really funny happens and then you see the tragedy in that and so you get both sides of the coin in the almost a split second and i think that is what

is so great about this play is that you you you can see the humanity and the way that humans cope with tragedy, but you still see the struggle underneath it. Now, I told you earlier, I knew Andrea really quite well. I interviewed her lots of times. She appeared on Woman's Hour lots of times. And it was so sad that she was not there last night to see the great work that you did with it. How involved was she when you first started?

So this play was commissioned in 2015 and for the three years leading up to basically the beginning of this year, she was very involved in creating the script. She picked Rufus and Helen to adapt and direct the play and you know Andrea she wants what she wants so she was very very involved

in the creation of it and near the end of that process she wasn't able to be involved as much but she's very much in that script, obviously. She would have been very pleased if she'd been in the audience last night. That's lovely to hear.

Thank you both very much, Leah Harvey and Aisling Loftus, and enjoy the rest of the run. Thank you. And, of course, we must mention that it's going to go into cinemas, isn't it? Yes. So all over the country, people who can't get to the National Theatre to see it can see it in the cinema. Thank you both very much.

Thank you. Indeed. Now we all know it was Helen who had the face that launched A Thousand Ship. She was the beautiful Greek wife of Menelaus who went to Troy with Paris and caused the Trojan War. We also know that Cassandra warned of the imminent conflict and was ignored, and that Penelope was left behind in Ithaca, patiently waiting for her Greek husband Odysseus to come back from the war,

which lasted for ten years, ending with the Trojan horse. But these characters are brought to life by Natalie Haynes in her novel A Thousand Ships, the story of the war from the women's perspective. Calliope, the muse, comments throughout the book and here she's referring to a male poet, unnamed, trying to compose an epic. If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him. The presumption of these men is extraordinary. Does he believe I have nothing to do with my time other than sit around being his muse? His? When did poets forget that they serve the muses and not the other way around? And if he can remember new lines of verse during his recitations, why can't he remember to say please?

Does everyone have to die? He asks. Perhaps he thought he was writing about one of those other wars devastation is what happens in war it is its nature if you didn't want to think of men cut down in battle then why would you compose epic verse ah but now i see the problem it's not their deaths he's upset about it's that he knows what's coming and he's worrying it will be more tragedy than epic men's deaths are epic women's deaths are tragic is that it he what's coming and he's worrying it will be more tragedy than epic. Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic. Is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage and carnage has both causes and consequences

and those don't begin and end on a battlefield. I will teach him this before he leaves my temple, or he will have no poem at all. Natalie, you've taken these very familiar characters, we are familiar with them, and told the story very much from their perspective. How did you choose, though, which female characters to feature? Well, essentially I started with sort of all of them, because this is my epic, I guess. I've written Greek tragedy before, and this was the time I wanted to try and write epic so huge scale I didn't want to focus on just one character or two or three characters I wanted to do the lot I wanted to do the women who caused the war they're mainly goddesses and I wanted to tell their story in sort of in backwards so you could

find out it's like well is this where it starts no wait is that where it starts no wait hang on this is where it starts and I wanted to tell the story of the Trojan women who are who lose their city, lose their husbands and brothers and fathers. And I wanted to tell the story of the Greek women waiting for their husbands and sons to come home. So I took a very broad sweep this time. And then there are some who I didn't expect to kind of survive the editing process because they felt quite tangential. And then someone loved them and I loved them and I didn't want to let them go. Who stayed in that you didn't think?

I thought Penthesilea would have to go. I thought the warrior woman, the Amazon queen, would have to go because she's just a standalone story. And there are a few of those in the book. Laodamere, the wife of Protesileus, the first Greek to die at Troy, managed to stay in and Penthesilea did. And Laodamere's story is in Ovid, it's in his

Heroides and Penthesilea's story is only in fragments of Quintus Maneus, it's really obscure and I thought well, you know, my publisher's bound to say you've got to go hard in for We only want Helen and Cassandra and all of this Yeah, exactly, and no, they were like, no we love this one Oh great, I've got away with it again

Warrior women, who doesn't want them? There are some comic elements. Penelope in particular. Sad, patient Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come home. Yeah, not in my version. Not in your book. She's so snarky. She's a very snarky letter writer. I know, I love her. Well, stole the idea of of a woman waiting writing letters to her absent husband from Ovid um who writes a whole book of them uh and they are wonderful

um and I thought she starts out as this kind of perfect archetype of patient wifeliness at home weaving and he's gone for 20 years and so she starts off you know her letters are my dearest Odysseus and then by the time you get to the letters are my dearest Odysseus and then by the time you get to the second she's like dear Odysseus and then by about the fifth she's like because you know every story that she gets of him he spent a year hanging out with a beautiful nymph or he spent seven years trapped on an island with another beautiful nymph and it's like well you know you can see kind of where she might get across. There's in book 11, I think that's right, of The Odyssey. He goes down to the underworld and he sees his mother who is dead.

It's not obvious. She wouldn't have been in the underworld. Well, I mean, he's not dead. Anyway, we all see the problem here. And he asks her a series of questions. This is how he finds out that she dies in his absence. He asks her a series of questions about his, you know, he says, has my son, has my palace, has my kingdom. And like the ninth thing he remembers to ask about is Penelope. And that's in Hover. Like, there's no way I'm not putting

that in my book. It's just too good. And why would she be happy about that? It's like wifely patience. No, I don't think so. Now, Helen of Troy, who famously launched the Thousand Ships, so they say, she's generally blamed for the war. And she is not apologetic in your version. She's not. Why not? Because surely it's Paris who's to blame. I think it's Paris who's to blame. Yes, or maybe Tyndareus, who's the one who makes all those suitors swear the oath that if they want to be considered to marry Helen, then they have to agree that they'll defend whoever does get to marry Helen if anyone ever takes her away.

And so it's his stupid idea to have everybody pledged to start a war. It's like the one thing they didn't think about was that it would be a non-Greek who took her away. And that, of course, makes the whole system fall apart. But yeah, I mean, Paris turns up and says, you know, Aphrodite awarded you to me in a beauty contest. Who's the witness for that, Paris? Just out of interest. It's just you. Literally just you. Swan's in.

Hi. But people have been issuing defences of Helen since, well, the most famous maybe is in Euripides in his Trojan Women. She issues her own defence. She's been sentenced to death by the Greeks in her absence. And she walks on stage and says, you know, you didn't give me a fair trial, so here it is. Boom.

And her defence is astonishing. She blames everybody except herself. It's so brilliant. And in his play, Helen, she didn't go to Troy at all. She goes to Egypt and an image of her, Adalon is the word in Greek, goes in her stead.

So her reputation is traduced for 10 years all across the Greek and Trojan armies. But actually she was never involved. Which of the women fascinated you most? Cassandra. Why? Because it seems to me she was just the most, it is the most extraordinary curse, Cassandra's, that she is condemned to see the future and never to be believed.

So the words sound like madness when she says them, or we just don't hear her when she says them. But she's never mad. She's just the most isolated person in the world, because she can, everyone she ever meets, she can see what will happen to them. She'll see, you know, all the terrible things that are ahead of them. And so the pain of that must be extraordinary. And then she's on her own, she has to suffer on her own. And there seemed to be something so resonant about being able to sort of predict the future, even the really urgent future,

and just not ever be able to prevent it. It's like an anxiety dream that you're constantly saying to people, please don't do that because if you do that, then it will happen. And they never heard you say it. Oh, awful. Who was this book written for?

Is it for... You. I do everything for you, Jenny. You know that. I read it and there were all these familiar characters. And I thought, well, you know, I do know a bit about this. But what about the audience that is not at all familiar with the classic? Well, I hope I've found a way to share these stories with them. I mean, obviously, with the radio show with Natalie Hinn stands up for the classics,

I'm telling a Radio 4 audience, so 1.6 million people about somebody they've often never heard of. I'm not suggesting that my audience hasn't heard of Plato, who we did, or Socrates, we did in one series, but Lucian is quite obscure. So I'm not afraid of finding things to tell you about the ancient world and handing it over to people who don't know very much about it. But yeah, I think everybody probably does know a bit about Helen, but I think very few people know about Penthesilea. I don't think very many people know about Laodamere. Most people might know about Paris and Helen eloping.

They might even know that Helen has a husband, Menelaus. Most people don't know that Paris had a wife. What drew you to devote yourself to the classics? I started at 11. I started at 11 because I had a wonderful Latin teacher. I was just incredibly lucky. I was taught Latin by a man named Mr Cooper, to whom I owe my entire life and career.

It's absolutely undeniable. I took up Greek at 14. I took triple classics A levels. My degree is in classics. I ran away and joined the circus for a bit, and then I ran back and joined the library. So, yeah, I've been here ever since. And as fewer and fewer children get to learn Greek or Latin now, why should they learn it?

I would love all children to have the opportunity to learn classics of some form. I don't mind if it's classiv, classics and translation, rather than Latin or the Greek languages, although obviously I'd love them to have the opportunity to do all of those. But we should learn them because the writing's beautiful. I mean, people will give you all kinds of good utilitarian answers. It makes you better at English. It makes you, you know, you'll be much better at going to read English at university if you know about Homer or Ovid, and that's all true. And you'll be better at your own language if you can do the grammar of another language,

and that's all true. But why would you deprive a generation of children, any generation of children, of the joy of reading Ovid or Homer or Virgil? it's made my life as good as it could possibly have been I would never rob another person of that and briefly is this still something you would read just as you're reading for pleasure or is it always for pleasure you're hilarious I can't remember when I last got to do that I've been at work every day for three years yeah one. One day when that happens, yes, that's exactly what I'm going to do. One of these days you'll read of it again. It's a pleasure.

Natalie Haynes, we had lots of response from you on the question of how best to be a parent. Deirdre said, great stuff. As a mum of two teens, I feel I got quite a lot right and it was about not repeating my childhood,

but I have regrets too and that's hard to reconcile. Instincts guide us, but fear and indecision and culture all interfere in both good ways and bad ways. Claire Scott said, how can your guest claim to have collaboration with her children but ban soda? Surely that's ruling the roost, not trusting your children to make the right choice. And Pim said, Well, thank you for all your contributions to this morning's programme. And those that think flying for a shopping weekend is a human right. Well, thank you for all your contributions to this morning's programme.

Jane will be here tomorrow morning when she'll be meeting a monster truck driver. She's also a hair salon owner, Brianna Mahon, and she joins Jane to talk about what's involved in such a male-dominated sport and why she wants to inspire young girls to be strong. That's Jane tomorrow morning at two minutes past ten from me for today. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, 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 somebody out there who's 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.