Backlisted - To Serve Them All My Days by R.F. Delderfield

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

Writer and author Jenny Colgan joins John and Andy to discuss R.F. Delderfield's epic of life in an English boarding school between the wars. Craig Brown's 'Ma'am Darling' and 'Priestdaddy' by Patricia Lockwood are the books we've been reading this week.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'42 - Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons8'30 - Priest Daddy by Patricia Lockwood13'45 - Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown21'31 - To Serve Them All My Days by R F Delderfield* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. My mother and I have just been up having lunch with a 98-year-old friend of the family who was the head of department at my mum's first teaching job. Really? And you know what?

She was talking about getting married during the war and she talked about how, you know, when the news came through about Rotterdam, we all started to do things we didn't think we would do and I married this man and he was the wrong man for me. I said, I'm now in an R.L. Delderfield novel. He actually mentions the fall of Rotterdam in the first World War sections of the book.

So life imitating art, art imitating life yet again. So we should say that this episode is being witnessed by your mum. My mum is here. Hello, Mum. Hello. You might hear that there's more background noise than there normally is because we're having to record it early tonight because

you Andy and our esteemed guest Jenny are partying. Are we? What? We don't get asked out very much. No, yeah. We leave work early. Are we? What? We don't get asked out very much. Yeah, well, no, this is... We leave work early.

You know, the thing is, we are lucky enough to have been invited to the launch party for the new set of adult ladybird books by our former guests, Jason Haisley and Joel Morris. And when they originally launched those books, they launched them with a select group, small group of people buying their own drinks in a pub, and now they appear to have hired the whole of the South Bank.

The whole festival. We're very excited. We're very excited. It slightly reminds me of that time there was a Faber summer party and Marcel Theroux came up to me and he said, thanks for the drinks, mate. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, it's fairly obvious who's paying for the drink this evening.

It's got to be the QI book had been number one on Amazon at this point. So fresh-faced in those days, I didn't know what it was. I've never understood that. I hate it when your friends become successful thing. I personally found it absolutely fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. They put the hours in. God knows.

Share the joy. Which is the party you've been to which has had the biggest spend on it, which has later come to be shown not to have been worth the spend? I absolutely know the answer to that, and I'm not going to say it. I know, I'm not telling mine either. Mine was the, because the South Bank, you reminded me, was the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film, which they hired out the whole of County Hall for.

And they had so many DJs and they had that whole terrace and they had kind of lights in the sky and kind of, you know, and it must have cost a proper bomb. I went to the John Travolta Scientology film premiere and party. Oh, yeah! And I tell you why that was so weird. It was big, but it wasn't like that. It was... There was no one there there was me because i i wasn't used to this kind of thing

and everybody else had just run like screaming from the theater but it was actually i ended up chatting to rages because there was literally no one else there for him to talk to he's very nice was he very nice well Did you watch John Travolta? Was he very nice? Well, you know, slightly perturbed. Right. We can do this live this week, can't we? Let's do it live. Come on, let's do it live. Go, go, go. Sit, please.

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. We're here with the assistance of our sponsors, Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. My name's John Mitchinson and I publish books at Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller and it says here, I write books that make the whole world sing, including the year of reading dangerously. You join us gathered in the remove of a second division boarding school

somewhere in the depths of Exmoor, where today we'll be discussing To Serve Them All My Days by R.F. Delderfield. And with us today to talk all things educational is Jenny Colgan. Hello, Jenny. Hello. Who has written a string of successful novels, including the Beach Street Bakery series, multiple Doctor Who novels, and whose book Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop of Dreams

won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists Association. Matt wants to know who are the Romantic Novelists Association and how can he join? Actually, you can join. They are a sinister cabal. No, they're lovely. They're a group of lovely ladies who meet and run awards and seminars

and all sorts of... I'm saying this, I'm not sure. They were very nice when I met them. Possibly quite frightening. You surely have to be a romantic novelist, though, to join. You can't just be... I know, I know. You're thinking of the Royal College of Science?

So the other thing I want to note about Jenny before we move on to talking about what we've been reading this week, is that John and I have met, we're authors, we've met a lot of authors. I think Jenny Colgan is amongst the most ferociously well-read authors I've ever met. And incredibly well-read across genres. You're always reading, you always read all sorts of fascinating different types of book, right? And I would like to just let a bit of daylight in upon magic you're always reading, you always read all sorts of fascinating different types of book, right? And I would like to just let a bit of daylight in upon magic with how we get backlisted together,

that when we ask a guest to take part, we normally ask them for a choice of two or three books. Does this happen? I just turn up. And then we talk about which ones we might like to do and what we don't. And I'm just going to read out, when I first asked Jenny and she said yes to coming on,'m just going to read out when I first asked Jenny and she said yes to coming on I'm going to read out the list of potential titles I only asked her for two or three and this is the list that she came up with right any one of which would have been fantastic here we go the Game Players of Titan by Philip K Dick something by E. Nesbitt

something by Olivia Manning the French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, Fairestead the Wind for France by H.E. Bates, something by Bernard Malamud, something by Robertson Davis, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute. Now, any one of those books would be brilliant. Were you looking for forgotten

popular classics? Absolutely. Nobody reads Malamud these days. Totally got it. Any one of those books would be brilliant. Also, A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute. There's two points of interest there. You have just written, haven't you, an introduction to a new edition of A Town Like Alice? I have.

And you also, your dog is called Neville Shute. Well, he's on the beach. Dog is called Neville Shute because he's always on the beach. Doggy's called Neville Shoot because he's always on the beach. Do you know, can I tell you why we didn't I'm disappointed and I think you should do Fierce Did The Wind For France because I read that, do you know that bit was published in 1944, which means it was

written in 1943. He had no idea how the whole thing was going to turn out, which I find so fascinating looking at it now. I'm looking at John as if to say, have you read any H.E. Bates? Darling Buds. Oh no, first of all, it's much better. I mean, you know,

back in years ago. But I mean, you have to read a bit of Bates. It's that line in Withnor where Marwood says we met one of the local country types and weren't at all like what I was expecting from the H.E. Bates. Oh, that's another thing. You were reading one of my favourite books this week,

which I was going to join in, but I couldn't, which was Cold Comfort Farm. I did read Cold Comfort Farm, and what I noted about Cold Comfort Farm, which is extremely funny, but also here in the year 2017, it magically contains parodies of both nature writing and folk horror. It does, absolutely.

Which is very on point. And it's brilliant. According to the Romantic Novelist Association. I mean, I think it had Lawrence firmly in its sights and did a great job. But it's a work of genius. It's such a peculiar book. I don't think it's ever been out in print. No, but it's such a peculiar book.

It's become a bestseller. Andy, what do I have to ask you? No, I have to ask you. Oh, do I? Yeah. Oh, great. John, what have you been reading? I have been reading a brilliant, very, very funny memoir,

I think the funniest book I've read all year, by a young American writer and poet, Patricia Lockwood. It's called Priest Daddy. The premise of this book is quite mad. It's a full memoir about her family, mostly about her dad, but quite a bit about her mum as well. She goes back married in her early 30s to live with her family. married in her early 30s to live with her family.

And her dad is a absolutely... Her dad is a Catholic priest. Well, you say, how can her dad be a Catholic priest? He converted to Catholicism, and they had a family, and then he applied to Rome to allow him, even though he had a family. So he applied to Rome to allow him, even though he had a family. So he applies to Rome. Well, that's interesting enough. So he's going up as a Catholic priest with a family.

I have a question. Did he have to be celibate after he became a priest with his own? No. That's the answer, no, because he's got... That doesn't seem fair. That's a new poll. Well, it's complicated. They have special expectations.

All I want to say, I'm just going to be really quick with it. He is insane. He listens to right-wing radio. He spends most of his time in his underpants in the book. If he's really mad or upset about something, he wears see-through underpants. If he's not, he's got white pants. All her friends who have to come to the house,

she's, Dad, are you dressed? Are you not dressed? He's kind of... He plays guitar. I'm going to read a little bit about that he takes guns apart he kind of mouths mad right-wing platitudes but he's also extraordinary and kind of comes out of the book as a sort of lovable monster it's just a great book about a completely mad family but it is one of the funniest books i've ever ever read And it's a bit of a popular choice in the office here, but I'll give you the bit where he's in the Navy and he ends up converting. They watch The Exorcist 27 times. In the end of it he decides he needs to convert to Catholicism. He's on a submarine with a lot of other sailors. But this is him.

When the biological urge comes upon him, he lifts his caversus red guitar out of its case with a hushed reverence and cradles it in his arms. Then he plugs it into the most powerful amp that's legal in the state of Missouri and begins rocking himself into a frenzy. It sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972. He plays the guitar like he's trying to take off women's jeans or like he's standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm

and calling down lightning to strike his pecs. It's not bad, exactly. It just makes you doubt your version of reality. He plays lots of notes, very fast and all in a row, but they don't seem to have any relation to one another. I've never heard him play an actual song, not even by accident, and I've made something of a study of his style over the years. Some people are, through whatever mystifying means,

able to make the guitar talk. My father can't do that, but he can do the following. One, make the guitar squeal. Two, make the guitar say no. Three, make the guitar falsely confess to murder. Four, make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads The Hunt for Red October out loud. I can't figure it out, and I think for a living.

He practices mainly in his bedroom, so it's possible he's having sex with his guitar. It's possible that somewhere out there I have a half-brother who is just a sweet lick from the waist down. And does it hang together as a book? Like, all funny books, does it hang together as a book? It does hang together as a book because she's such a good writer. I mean, the language is just lively, original, different.

It's the mad meditations on Catholicism and on religion and on faith and on lack of faith and on... I mean, there's dark stuff in the book as well. There's dark stuff about sex in the book, for sure, and families. But I don't know, it's that thing. If you can write that well and you can keep all those balls up in the book as well there's dark stuff about sex in the book for sure and families but i don't know it's that thing you know if you can write that well and you can keep all those balls up in the air and you you know there are laugh out loud scenes on almost every page i could read one very brief tiny little bit from um oh yeah this is about when she's trying to persuade a

seminarian you know she's got a seminarian. Her and her husband living in her dad's house have got a seminarian drunk. And she says, Shh, quiet now. I need to do something incredibly important. I tell him in units of varying coherency. I need to show you my beautiful stomach. My drunkenness goes in six stages. There is talkativeness, dancing, grammar derangement, showing you my beautiful stomach,

reading your tarot with such intensity that both of us begin to weep, and finally, blessed unconsciousness. I'd never hit the fourth stage so early. He crosses his forearms in front of his face. At last, I warranted the celibacy block. No, no, why would you do something like that? Because Jason's roofied us up, I say, balefully flipping my shirt up for one demure second. That doesn't give you an excuse to show your stomach. It gives me the excuse to do what I want. It's like St Augustine always said, Oh God, don't make me good, not ever.

Augustine didn't say that. Oh God, make me a very bad boy who needs a spanking. No! Oh God, make me the member of a motorcycle gang who has to kill an old lady for our initiation. He clips his hands over his ears. I suspect we're not handling our liquor well, but when we turn back to look at Jason, he appears to be completely unaffected.

It's great. Brilliant. It's funny. What have you been reading, Andy? I'm going to keep this very brief and to the point because I've read three books that I've really loved this year, new books. They are Lincoln and the Bardot by George Saunders,

The Lucky Ones by Julian Pacheco, and the third book, which I read this week, Mom, Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to read one short chapter, one footnote, and make one observation on the Amazon customer reviews for this book. And then the listeners can make up their own minds. So this is a book about Princess Margaret. As the subtitle suggests, there are 99 chapters. It is based on 99 different encounters or witness reports of Princess Margaret. It is, roughly speaking, chronological.

It is incredibly funny, very moving, very compassionate. It manages to be a book about the royal family, class, Britain, writing a biography about all those things. It is just the most wonderful, wonderful book. So I'm going to read chapter nine. And I'm going to say before I read it that of anything we have ever talked about on Backlisted or I have read out on Backlisted,

more than anything ever, I wish I had written this chapter. Nine. Princess Margaret was born in 1930 the same year as Air Hostess and a newscaster entered the language and died in 2002 when Googling, selfie, blogger

and weapons of mass destruction first appeared Is it just me or do a remarkably high proportion of the words that share her birthday also reflect something of her character? Blase first made the channel crossing in 1930, subtly altering its meaning on the way. In its home country of France, it meant sated by enjoyment, while here in Britain it meant something closer to bored or unimpressed through over-familiarity.

bored or unimpressed through over-familiarity. Also from France, or 18th century France, came negligee, with that extra E to show that it now meant a lacy, sexy dressing gown rather than an informal gown worn by men and women alike. Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer, electric blanket and jingle, all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them.

The Gibson, a martini-like cocktail consisting of gin and vermouth with a cocktail onion, was introduced to fashionable society. In All About Eve, 1950ty davis serves her guest gibson's saying fasten your seat belts it's going to be a bumpy night then again learn a driver washing up machine and snack bar also came into being in 1930 yet it's hard to relate any of them to princess margaret who never learned to drive nor to operate a washing-up machine, and, as far as I know, never entered a snack bar. Also making their first entries that year were to bail out, meaning to make an emergency parachute jump,

to feel up, meaning to grope or fondle, and sick-making, meaning to make one either feel queasy or vomit, depending on the force of one's reaction. Each of these three has something Margaret-ish about it, as do crooner and eye shadow and the adjective luxury. Two concepts dear to any biographer, but perhaps particularly dear to biographers of Princess Margaret, entered the language in the year of her birth,

guesstimate and whodunit. There also came a word that had been around for several centuries, but which, as a direct result of the birth of the little princess in 1930, was to take on a life of its own. Horoscope. And he goes on to tell the story. It was invented. It was invented for her birth, wasn't it?

Indeed. Well, it wasn't invented for her birth. It sort of spun out from finding out what the star sign around her birth. Such was the reaction of the public to learning this information that they realised that if they tailored it to the public themselves... You're suggesting it's not a real thing? Yes. Suggesting just that.

So here's a footnote. This book is like a convivial version of roger lewis's book about peter sellers which long-term listeners will recall is one of my favorite books and there's a footnote here which is as intemperate as some of the footnotes in that magnificent volume of all the adjectives used to describe the queen mother radiant is surely the most frequent. During her lifetime, it almost became part of her title, like Screaming Jay Hawkins or Shaking Stevens.

Radiant this, radiant that. She might have popped out of the womb radiant and continued radiating morning, noon and night. As time went on, it became hard to imagine her ever unradiant, but then again, she never had to put out the bins or book a ticket online or trudge around a supermarket with a 12 pack of toilet paper. She seems to have achieved her perpetual radiance by ring fencing

herself from anything unpleasant or a favourite word this, unhelpful. She was singular in her pursuit of happiness, banishing anything upsetting from her walled garden of delight. She rarely attended funerals or memorial services, even of old friends, and was a stranger to deathbeds. Hugo Vickers cites a particularly

chilling example of her ruthless contentment. When Sir Martin Gilead, her loyal private secretary for 37 years, was dying, she never once visited him. Quote, before he died, perhaps because of the pain of his terminal illness, or perhaps because due to Queen Elizabeth's ingrained dislike of dying friends, she had not gone to see him. Gilead railed against his employer, declaring that he had wasted the best years of her life in her service. So, not afraid to be dyspeptic when he wants to, also incredibly funny about Margaret, incredibly compassionate about her as i said earlier i think this is one of those books that manages to do something subtly

fascinating by rewriting what you can do with the biography in its own light amusing way unlike many of the customer reviews on amazon who disagree with that point of view and it's got quite a lot of bad reviews. And it seems to me one of the reasons for that is that Craig has hit the sour spot where people who want a biography of Princess Margaret want it delivered straight, no chaser. So they don't want 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret. And people of the sort who might enjoy the type of book that Craig Brown has written about Princess Margaret are unlikely to read a book about Princess Margaret.

So my job here today is to say, overcome your prejudices, readers of either stripe, and get this book. It deserves to win many prizes, and it deserves to sell a lot of copies. Great. I mean, he's just never... The last one he did, which the title I can't remember, which was the linked one

where he went from... Oh, I love that. Where the people that had met people that had met people. It's wonderful. And you pick it up anywhere. Yeah. But I thought that was...

I thought the Princess Margaret one was doing quite well, but maybe the Amazon reviews... The critical reviews, brilliant. The Amazon reviews, less so. So, make that what you will. Let us move on.

I think once the crown starts up again, as a non-English person with I couldn't be less interested in the Royal Family until I started watching the crown

and I'm completely obsessed with all of them. Time now for an advert. Right, should we talk about the book we're here to talk about?

Let's move it on. We're here to talk about? Let's move it on We're here to talk about To Serve Them All My Days The longest book by some way I think it's quite a bit longer than The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov by R.F. Delderfield I guess we always ask the same question don't we? Would you like to ask?

I'd like to ask it this week Do you remember when you first encountered this book? Was it through the TV series or was it? Actually it wasn't it was kind of by mistake, I was a really very very very very bookish chap and I was a library reader

and I got to the point where I got my adult card, they gave me an adult card at ten and it was because our library was quite small, it was genuinely the first time that it ever occurred to me that I wasn't going to get to read every book on earth because I'd read everything in the children's section, like the calligraphy books, everything.

That was a bit of a shocker. So they did let me move quite early and I made huge... I took out Louis Lemieux books, massive errors and all sorts of things that I really oughtn't to have been reading. And so I kind of fell upon To Serve Them All My Days because I'd been a big boarding school book fan,

so I'd read Mallory Towers and St Clair's and Autumn Terms and Antonia Forrester and all that thing, and I was obsessed with it, despite the fact that no one I had ever met had ever been to boarding school. And years later, there are none in Scotland, apart from the English people that hate their kids send theirs to eventually later years when I did meet people that went to boarding school I was so interested that one the goal wasn't like that but two they all read loads of boarding school fiction as well and then Harry Potter of course came along and and kind of you know upended it and and leveled up

so that was why it was one of these books that worked very well for a younger reader. And then, of course, the TV series came along and was an absolute phenomenon. In fact, very much, it was an Andrew Davis adaptation, very much in the way that Andrew Davis did, you know, own Sunday nights. And I don't remember much about that. My mother was a big fan,

but I think she was probably a big fan of John Dutton that played... I think I was a bit young to see the kind of charms at that point, but she was a big fan, but I think she was probably a big fan of John Dutty that played... I think I was a bit young to see the kind of charms at that point, but she was a big fan of him. But it was a huge deal. I have to say it's a bloody marvellous book. Isn't it lovely? Absolutely. Just pure

joy reading it, I have to say. I suppose we should set it up, shouldn't we? I'd like to just set it up by saying I started reading it. You say it was long, John. It is quite long. It's like 500, 600 pages. It's an easy read, right, in the best possible way. And as it

was going along, I was thinking... 662 pages. There you go. This is quite... This is a pleasant read. It's nicely written. It's very enjoyable. And then in the last 200 pages, I realised I was... First of all, I was totally... He set you up all along. ..on the narrative. He's got me in the narrative.

But I also began to feel very passionate about the book and excited about us having the opportunity to talk about not just this book, but books like this. And so we'll come on to how this fits. It's sort of of a piece with the list of books you suggested, Jenny, which was so interesting, in terms of slightly... I mean, you had Iris Murdoch in there, right at the heart of the literary canon,

but you also had things, different positions around the literary canon, like Neville Shute, like Philip K. Dick, and like Delderfield. You know who... Delderfield, who was tremendously popular when we were younger in terms of quantities of books sold. And even when we were booksellers, you would still expect in the 90s to... Yeah, a horseman riding by just stealing...

And they are forgotten now. And I'm sure they don't sell in any appreciable quantity. I mean, it'd be interesting to know, wouldn't it? I wonder about Winifred Holtby as well, who, I mean, I think is in that sort of genre. But it's defining what genre this is. I mean, it's sort of historical fiction because he wrote it in 1972.

It covers 22 years, doesn't it? I'm going to get the blurb in now. Let's do the blurb, let's do the blurb. I've got the TV Time edition, which I took off my mum's bookshelf, which has got... So this is from 1980. She's licked after it. She has, look at that.

It's considerably less thick than this one, isn't it? It's got the actor John Dutton and the actor Frank Middlemass on the front cover. To serve them all my days, the magnificent best-selling saga of English school life. David Pallet-Jones returned from the carnage of the Western Front, a shell-shocked young man bitterly hardened by the violence of war. He began life again as a master at a remote school, in charge of boys barely his junior, and with an influence to control their destiny.

As the years passed, he became a schoolmaster of rare talent, able to adjust to the changing current of society and finally to face up to the prospect of another terrible war. Now, Jenny, you were saying this was on the telly in 1980. It was adapted by Andrew Davis. It was a 12- or 13-part series. I mean, it was a big deal. We've got a clip here from the first episode of the TV series, which will give you a sense of where we are.

Ah, now, you sit there, Mr Powlett-Jones. Oh, I'm sorry you had to walk. We had an old bone shaker here until Christmas. I, erm... I enjoyed the walk, sir. The countryside, it's much wilder than the country near the hospital and and of course it's... how long were you out there mr. Powlett-Jones? three years. I've been luckier than most. and there's no possibility of your

returning? oh no I I'd be no use to anyone out there now. look here. go on look at this. now that is my 1913 first 15. an ugly looking lot of beggars eh? he's dead. he's dead dead he lost his legs well there's 12 of them gone now 12 of them mr. Powlett-Jones on the 8th of July 1916 I recorded eight names in one week's casualty lists my boys so you see there's no need to feel isolated from us here.

We've lost 87 boys from this school so far. Does that help at all? That's pretty good, isn't it? That's very good. That's formidable, I know. I've got little hairs on my arm. It's also practically verbatim from the book. It is. I think we just have the picture and they've lost all of them.

Yeah, yeah. So when we meet David Powlett-Jones, he is shell-shocked. It's just after the First World War, and we follow him over a period of 20 years... 22 years, yeah. ..into the Second World War? Yep, really into the end of 1940. I think it ends on New Year's Eve 1940 where a young

soldier who was in the British Expeditionary Force has been strafed and burnt and he's arriving in the school much the same state that Powlett-Jones was. That's right. He's writing a new book. So there's that satisfying sense of it. It's ambitious.

It covers the two massive psychic events in the history of Britain, but does it through one man almost entirely in the same place, this one isolated Devon grammar school i mean on that level alone i think it's it's it's incredibly ambitious book it has that school saga yeah thing so to that extent it's like goodbye mr chips very much right but what i found increasingly exciting about the book as i read it was I became more aware of all the other interesting things he's doing with that so he's telling that saga for over 20 years you see the generations of children come through various scrapes occur various tragedies occur various

happy moments occur so he has the built-in narrative going for 20 years but then what he does with that is all sorts of very subtle and interesting things in terms of social history in the period, class history in the period, how wars... What lessons are learnt or not learnt from military conflict, which is all pretty sophisticated stuff. Oh, I mean, you're also dealing with the fact that the family he comes from,

the father and his brother, two brothers brothers get killed down a coal mine and this is the way his mum still has hot tea for him oh stuff but it's it's that the day i mean it's but also i've got the real sense from that whereas the structure of the book is very much designed to upset you it starts in a very upsetting way and it ends in a way that is even more upsetting because now the children that are dying are the children that you knew or that you got to know. But what I really get is the sense of, but the family tragedy, his own, his father and his siblings,

is given no time. There's no psychological effect. That's just something that used to happen all the time. Just get on with it. just get on with it just get on with it and so he's making a point of bringing up the horror of war stuff which is his point but i love the fact that the social justice whilst he comes around to it and is it's not in any sense of self-pitying for most people my dad and my two brothers got trapped down a coal mine that'd probably do it you know john you were saying what genre is this one of the reasons i was so thrilled that we're talking about this book on

backlisted is that it's very much in the tradition of writers like jb priestly or chesterton or arnold bennett or aj cronin aj cronin's novel now this is a thing from dj taylor's book that came out a couple of years ago called the prose factory about about British literary life in the 20th century. And he has a thing in here about Cronin and Delderfield, and I'll just read a little bit of it, because I think it both positions this book and explains what authors like this were doing in this period. He says,

If one wanted a representative figure from this age, and to a certain extent the ages that both preceded and followed it, it might be A.J. Cronin, whose career runs back deep into the 1930s and extends almost to his death in 1981. And yet even the briefest inspection of Cronin's thronged and multitudinous oeuvre reveals how little he conforms to the stereotype of middle-brow blandness. Certainly he showed an uncanny ability to devise work that was acceptable to Hollywood and television, and perhaps more important,

to continue to be acceptable 30 or 40 years after its publication. And then he goes on to say, the same point could be made of that other staple of the post-war library lists, R. F. Delderfield, whose evocations of an unfallen England, one of his novels is actually titled God is an Englishman, and never quite what they seem, and who in The Avenue Goes to War produced a genuine people's war chronicle full of characters picked for their ability

to transcend the divisions of class and status. Not the least of the Middlebrow novel's achievements, it turns out, is, however stealthily and intermittently and with due regard for the sensibilities of its readers, to exhibit one or two of the symptoms of what, again, is a Dickensian quality, the radical conscience. Now, I thought the phrase the radical conscience there was spot-on for this book, that it seems to be telling you

a story it is not unashamed to tell you a story but it also wants to educate you inform you and make political points as it does so oh i have a nice extract that would fit in very nicely here good it's this crusty old there's always the crusty old governors aren't they they're all much of a muchness. Perfectly. Okay, this is quite Brexity as well. It's quite weird to read. Yes, yes.

Okay, so this is when he gets his headship and he thought he would never get it past crusty old Sir Rufus because he's known as a balshy, he's a balshy. And Sir Rufus comes up to him. That's an important background, that Welsh mining background, comes to school, gets the reputation of being... I'm not sure I can do this without getting a bit teary. Do it. She said as a non-English or Welsh person.

Hang on. Right, so he comes up and he's been worried about this guy all along and he comes up and he says, you're a free-born Englishman, I beg your pardon, Welshman. Many good Welshmen have sacrificed their lives for the liberty of conscience you demand. Who am I to deny it? I'm more than twice your age, Powlett-Jones, and I've seen a great deal in my team. Tyranny is overthrown, new ones

set up, the ebb and flow of reforms and recessions in many parts of the world. I have very few real convictions left, but I can think of one. This country, although it still has a great deal to learn, maintains a free society. Its party politics are a charade. They have a part to play in the democratic process, but they remain a charade. This is going to be a stormy decade and will almost certainly end in a drawing together of all shades of political opinion,

here in Britain at least. At a time like this, we need flexibility, particularly if our work takes us among growing boys with their way to make in the world. I think you're flexible enough. Isn't that great? It it is great and the evolution so the whole thing is is is so beautifully done i think where he arrives and he's damaged and algae harry's who's the headmaster does this has this amazing way of pushing people in it's a

public school and palette jones arrives sort of feeling he says somewhere he thought it was halfway between something and Borstal you know he had low opinion of public schools being a working class boy who'd been to a grammar school but he meets Algie Harris and Algie Harris kind of mentors him and encourages him and gives him the confidence he needs to discover that he can be a good teacher and the teaching is the therapy there are various bits in the book all the way through because it's so it's so long and episodic where people learn that you know teachers learn more from teaching oh yeah they see that a lot than the boys so it's this it's watching this man's passage through terrible setbacks painful rejection there's an awful bit in the middle

where there's this that terrible all cock the new headmaster comes in and he's a and he cleans up the school and makes everything work he puts in the toilets and he does quite a lot of good stuff but there's no the educational the spirit of the school sort of it's incredibly i mean amongst other things it was written in the early 70s seems very progressive in its in its sort of vision of what education i think it's very racy for the time as well. Yes, some quite... What do you think? Yes, I agree. Forward-thinking sex scenes in it, and some great women,

great women characters. I'm fascinated by the women characters in this. One of the things that I really love about this book is that he is not afraid to use stock characters, OK? No. Or clunky plot points. When he uses stock characters or clunky plot points, he, A, always hits his marks, and, B, there tends to be a reason for doing it.

Now, the female characters in this book, Jenny, what do you think? Do you think they are well-drawn? They all seem to speak in the same way, and yet... They do. And yet... They do i i think i mean i think there is point about three quarters of the way through where he admits to himself that that his first wife was a fantasy who died before she was 24 and therefore wasn't a real person and of course we've already got that on the other hand he's very good you know forget about 1930s even in 1970 being perfectly happy with this woman who wants to be an MP, of all things.

And she's the best, Christine's the best sketch character. Yes, I think he's generous to most of his characters, really, apart from Alcock, the person that puts toilets in and becomes a real cropper for being slightly distant from time to time. But on the whole, you know, he's very fond of them and he writes A Romantic Man very well, in fact. This year I've read both The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff and London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins,

both novels that have in the last few years been rediscovered and taken on a new critical respectability. And To Serve Them All My Days strongly reminded me of those two books, discovered and taken on a new critical respectability and to serve them all my days strongly reminded me of those two books that they are both sagas and they both deal with quote unquote ordinary people we've lost the middle market really i mean that's what's happened in publishing everything's run to one end of being extremely literary obviously or being extremely commercial and i understand that and but what we spot people think of as middle brown now tends to be once the boot group came along you know and it had to be something to be discussed and it was often about I don't know periods or you know it became quite female focused

and then people started to write towards that market and that the only thing left in the middle market was Richard and Judy and it had to have a message and it had to have a moral and you couldn't do what Delderfield does which is just to tell, he tells you great big rambling stories about which, by the way, the point almost always is don't send a wee boy to boarding school, they'll be real. Literally everything that happens could have been cured by the child going home.

We're just using the word middle brow here. Middle brow is a word with clearly... Sorry, did I say a bad thing a bad thing no no it's not that but i think we need to just make the point to listeners that although middle brow clearly has a pejorative sense it's also used in academia now there is a brilliant website called the middle brow network www.middlebrow-network.com which deals with just the things you were talking about jen real and perceived bias against real and perceived middle brow work yes from the historical perspective and the contemporary perspective and they have a brilliant um quote on the masthead of their

website from punch from december 1925 quote the bb BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the middle brow. It consists of people who are hoping that someday they will get used to the stuff they ought to like. I'm sorry. That's really good, right? Middle brow, OK.

One of the things I really, really like and admire about Del DeField's writing is he's not going to win prose stylist of the year. He tells a story but he tells it economically. There are no passages you think, oh my god, that's awful, that's terrible, that's sentimental.

He's very lean. His psychological, there's this lovely little bit about the teacher Howarth, who we discover in the course of the book has had a picture of a woman in his drawer for years, and he has been full of regret. And this is what, this is how Powlett-Jones thinks about him. It explained David's thoughts on many things, not merely Howarth's bleak and hurried exit from the dining hall that morning,

but the threads that made up his entire personality. It was as though somewhere around 1903, 11 years before the world went raving mad, a young lovesick school teacher in a provincial grammar school had sentenced himself to self-petrification, a penance that had in the end transformed him from an eager, dedicated youngster into a wry, ironic husk of a man, racing towards middle age and the ultimate pedantry that awaits all but a very few of the professions. It was a personal tragedy in its way, as much a tragedy as the loss of Howarth's generation in Flanders.

And yet, as David acknowledged at once, the petrification had never been wholly achieved. Somewhere, under the ice of the simulated personality, the original Howarth was still there Trying hard to get out And once in a while almost succeeding I mean, that's good That is good

But also completely inexplicable Given how many spare women there were at the end of the Great War If there was any single straight men left at all It would have been a complete surprise Which comes up quite often We were talking about the class element of this earlier I'm going to talk a bit about the Delderfields biography in a minute, but I'd like to play this other clip from the first episode

to serve them all my days. I don't know anything about schools like this. I never knew anyone with an accent like you got and they got. Except in France. Well, I come from the people that talk like that to the people that own the land and the coal mines. Just because a person talks in a different way doesn't make him superior to you. I know that!

I don't think I got any business here. My father and two of my brothers were killed down the pit. Sacrifices, see? I mean with the greatest respect. Licking bosses boots that's what my brother Emrys would call it. I see. You know I always like it when people say with the greatest respect. It always means they're going to be rude.

Well go on. I'm sorry I don't intend to be rude sir. But it's just that surely in a public school the boys here just assume they got a right to the best of everything, and they haven't. They've got an unconscious assumption of privilege. Do they indeed? Well, I doubt if they'd be able to remain unaware of it if I let you loose on them, Mr Powlett-Jones. So, R.F. Delderfield was born in 1912 and died in 1972.

He was a, as we've said... So he died the year this book was published? Yeah, this was his last book. He was writing, he had a string of bestsellers from the 50s to the 70s. Horseman Riding By, Diana, Come Home Charlie and Face Them, all of which have been turned into TV series. He was born in Bermondsey and his father worked in Smithfield Market and was a Liberal councillor. He supported temperance and suffrage. And this is the point

where, when I discovered this fact, I was... Oh, is this Andy getting excited? I'm getting emotional. You're laughing, but I'm getting emotional about it because it actually means a lot to me, this. So he grew up in Croydon. I grew up in Croydon. As you know, I spent my life writing about the suburbs and why one shouldn't be prejudiced against the suburbs, people from the suburbs or art from the suburbs.

And one of his books is called The Dreaming Suburb, set in the same time period as The Servant of All My Days, in Addiscombe in Croydon, where my Aunty Linda lives. I'm just going to read this because when I read this last week, I thought, wow, I've waited my whole life to see a writer other than me say this. This is the tale of an avenue in a suburb and of some of the people who lived in that avenue between the long, dry summers of 1919 when one war had just ended

and 1940 when another had just begun, a tale of what they did and what they dreamed. About the time the story starts, the word suburban was beginning to acquire the meaning it has today. It is never said without a sneer or a hint of patronage. This is curious, for three-quarters of our population continue to reside in suburbs of one sort or another. They are not unlike other folk and quite capable of extending their dreams beyond the realms of the 825 out and the 548 in. They dream in fact as consistently and as extravagantly as anyone else. I did not know the avenue until the spring of 1918 so my story begins shortly after that season when men like Jim Carver were drifting home from hell to look for work. Some of the people I have written about I understood. All of them I knew

and knew well. Most of them I loved much more than I knew. And when I left the avenue, I missed and remembered them. Now, you know what? That is written with a full heart and an ability to turn a nice phrase. Both those things. There you go. That's what you need. That's what you need, right? So I will be reading The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War

much sooner rather than later, listeners. So you're going to have to hear me banging on that coin yet again. But he does that with utter... That's what I love about this book. There's utter conviction in his... Yes, it's sincere, which is very unfashionable. Which is unfashionable, but it's a great read. I mean, you are...

You know, you do really vest in these characters. You want to know what happens to... You know, Pallet Jones is a really... Davies is a very, very... I mean, I think he's... And as I say, that passage from how he matures across the book and how he changes. I mean, I'm interested how he matures across the book and how he changes. I mean, I'm interested in what you said about the Brexit thing, Jenny.

That feeling, there's a lot that you forget. You forget about Ransom MacDonald's national government and that sense of, you know, people working, people sort of turning against the Labour Party. There were all sorts of moments in this, but I think, oh, my God, nothing much changes. I find it quite comforting. Yeah, absolutely. Suddenly, you know, know we're talking about the crown the way i find the crown comforting because they cover like two years every episode and someone's always walking around going it's christ it's dead dead christ and then things kind of you know it gets all right again

and i felt the same about this because you can't not see the parallels about how of course the awfulness of that is where it leads. Things are politically dreadful. Oh, OK, and now 15 million people are going to die. Yeah, well, that's good on that. I love this bit where he's saying... He's trying to explain Algie Harris's legacy, and he says, it's a very special kind of school, Mrs Derbyshire. This is when he's talking to one of the three women

he's involved with in the course of this book, Mrs. Derbyshire, who is quite a racy saying. Oh, the foxy one, yeah. The foxy one who ends up having to get the school student. Young Andy Miller was very taken with this particular character. It's difficult to say why or how, but it is, you know. It's got so many of the good things about the old-style public school, a kind of steadiness, continuity,

and a touch of genuine idealism, but it also has, how the devil can I put it, post-war optimism and a broadening of outlook that's been achieved in all kinds of ways since people got the war into perspective. It's a first war, obviously. Put it in this way, it's a kind of launching platform for kids moving out into a world that's still doing precisely what you and I have been doing

this last year or so. And what's that? She asked, smiling. Licking our wounds and preparing for another go. That's Algy's doing of course. He's a bit of a genius really, especially when you consider he was born at a time when there were still hanging people in public and schools like Bamfild were still a between a jail and a 4L bar, we'll more miss him, but we'll survive, given half a chance. Mind you, the setting has something to do with it. It's so permanent, so English, if you like, but the best of England. Anyway, it goes on, but it's...

I love this. I really love this book. Jen, what you were saying was so right in terms of... The audience for this book, or books like this, haven't gone away, but I suspect they are currently not being entertained by books, do you think? I will tell you, I was on a very prestigious radio programme last week, and we had to select three books,

and we were all going to read them and review them, whatever. And we were told by one of the only national books programmes not to choose anything too long. There was literally... John and I are sitting on our hands. Oh, and I was just like, what, you know, how has that happened? You know, I can't make a book long enough for me, but it's not even that.

It was just that kind of... If the attention span of people who are professionally involved in book reading is now considered to be not up for it... But I see Robertson Davis, who's not English but whom I did mention, again, he wrote these massive tomes of incredibly popular, really well-told stories. I know, and they were very popular, but I don't know whether Robinson Davies read any more.

He comes up all the time as a possible backlisted candidate. But, I mean, look, he's setting out. He's setting out to do something, I think, as I said at the beginning, really ambitious, to say these two things happened that have dominated our history. I mean, he's a historian, Del DeField, as much as anything, but he chooses fiction. He did write history as well, and Davy historian, Del DeField, as much as anything. But he chooses fiction. He did write history as well.

And Davy, the character in the book, there's a nice little plot of him writing. He writes for therapy. He writes this history of the Civil War, which is an interesting biography. And the book gets great reviews and sells quite well. And it makes 400 a year. 400 a year. Which is about what you get. And it makes 400 a year off it. 400 a year.

Which is about what you get. Yeah, which is about what you get, I think, if you publish an e-book onto Amazon. But we have, bringing back to Backlisted after two years, we have not one but two tenuous links now. Go, go. Well, John, you do yours first. My tenuous link is the book is dedicated to Robin Denniston,

who was the publisher at Hodder and Stoughton at the time. He would have been the perfect person to talk to about this, what we're calling middlebrow. I mean, John le Carré, who in a way is the patron saint of this. Massive bestseller, huge, but full of ideas and full of great storytelling gifts. So Sir Thornmore Dad Days was dedicated to Robin Denniston. Robin went on to become two things.

One, he was the publisher of Oxford University Press, but also a vicar in a small rural parish in Oxfordshire, what happens to be my parish, Great Chew. And I knew Robin incredibly well. We worked out, in fact, I commissioned and edited a book that he wrote on Trevor Huddleston, the great South African bishop. But Robin is so, I can't help but thinking that Robin is so exactly like Algy Herries. He's one of those people you'd say, what do you think this is a good idea?

He'd never give you a direct answer, but he'd drop some strange book in, or he got me doing... He said, what do you like to preach? So I ended up preaching. I ended up becoming the pool monitor and cleaning the leaves out of the pool, which is another ridiculous link. His dad was Alistair Denniston, who set up Bletchley Park.

So he was that whole strange world of teaching. I mean, not just saying, here's a list of stuff to learn, but the whole book is about a sort of philosophy of teaching where you engage, you get pupils thinking. Robin was like that, but it is just when I saw that, it gave me quite a start dedicated to Robin Dennister and your tenuous link. John, Matt and Jenny, one of you has written Doctor Who. Two of you have not.

But nevertheless, all three of you will be qualified to answer this question. What is the tenuous link between the work of R.F. Delderfield and the early days of Doctor Who? And it is not an obscure one. It's not Verity, is it? It's not Verity Lambert, the original producer of Doctor Who, no. It's not Delia Derbyshire, is it? It's not Delia Derbyshire, is it?

It's not Delia Derbyshire, who arranged the theme music to Doctor Who. Helping the listeners out here. I need Who literate. John, have a pop. I can't think what... Doctor Who, early days, Terry Nation. No, I'm afraid not. It's that.

nation. No, I'm afraid not. It's that R.F. Delftfield wrote a play in the mid-1950s called The Bull Boys, which was adapted for the cinema as Carry On Sergeant, the first of the Carry On films,

starring William Hartnell. I was going to say Hartnell. Hartnell could have easily played L.G. Herries he could I have a link but it's actually not a link, I write a series of

Boring School, I don't Boring School that sounds weird that's a brilliant business idea I write a series of Boring School I started them ten years ago and I wrote two and they didn't do terribly well so we left it for a little bit but they got this kind of cult following and and i kept getting letters from people going please can i find out what happens before i die and stuff like that so we've started them again and the

main characters uh the main english teacher's name is david oh i just nicked it it's not a 10 years link at all i just took took it. That's great. And do you think that that success, that love, is it obviously, you know, it's the narrative thing. You want to find out what happens.

What is it because, like with Harry Potter, that it's everybody in one, it's a sort of an institutional... I think when I've been writing mine, the structure is very useful. You have a Michael Miss Termin, but you know, you have Christmas things,

you have summer things, you have a sport. So you have, you know, you've always got your structure and your structure works. And he's got the double structure because he's got the years and the terms, but he's got the two wars. To me, and why the last hundred or so pages is so powerful,

is you realise, of course, duh, obviously, all these characters he's been setting up, the kid with the card school that got sent down and then got brought back again, the kid whose father dies, they're all about to die. And, of course, it seems obvious in retrospect, and then boom, boom, boom, the last 50 pages, Briarley goes down and that one goes down, and it's utterly devastating to read it.

So, actually, he does such a clever thing by looking like the terms move and nothing really changes and the women come and go, and then bang, two generations left i mean i agree with you completely about that so first of all that delivers on the narrative level but also it seems to me and this is in a sense the great political gesture of the book what the book is about is about the importance of building community in a world where the forces of politics and war are likely to roll you over you anyway so he positions powell jones as a figure who wants to make a difference who can't make a

difference on the political stage but by building a community even a community whose members will be sacrificed as he was nearly sacrificed 20 years earlier is still fundamentally worth doing. It seems so powerful to me and so important and yet so enjoyable. Which is why you need a long book to do it. Yeah, to do it.

If you tried to boil down the ideas into a sort of... It just wouldn't work you need to have that sense of the of that rhythmic sense um you've got to live the years that you're reading have you got another bit that you would care to share with us i do and actually again it works out quite well because he's talking about historical events says now and then the school was jolted out of her complacency the malaise of the world across the Channel would cross boundaries.

The Owl Society would debate the Popular Front in France, or Mussolini's rape of Ethiopia, Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland, and the purges in Moscow. But as soon as the bell rang, the inner rhythm of the place would reassert itself, and it would require something as immediate as the abdication of Edward VIII

to turn Bamfeld eyes outward. But even then, not for long. When a school had spent four months rehearsing the Mikado, even someone like Mrs Simpson had to wait her turn. That's really good. And he does that, doesn't he, the history all the way through it. If nothing else, you learn the major events of that 22 years of history. Oh, you can see why it was a great fit for Andrew Davis.

Yeah. You know what, Jenny, I'd like to say thank you again for choosing this book. And I think the reason, and talking about it today has helped me clarify what it was that really stirred me. I felt like it was putting me in touch with my people. my people you know in terms of the the kind of because i can remember my mum and dad reading the book and i can remember us all being of an age for people to be talking about it and i can remember also coming to it as a more sophisticated reader and seeing all this in all this fascinating and important and politically and socially aware

stuff going on within it. In a sense, this is one of the most important books for me that we've ever done on Backlisted. There's other books that I think are better books. This is not without problems here and there. And yet, I'm so... I feel passionate about this book that people would pick it up and read it and immerse themselves in it and take the time to do it. Make the effort. No, I think I agree completely with that. I mean, I'm absolutely delighted to have...

And, you know, it's an investment in time, but it is also... Yeah, but it reads fast. It's not a difficult book to read, and you really... I mean, you clip through it because you really do want to know what happens. It's... Yeah, I mean, I'm up with that. One of the most important books we've ever done.

Yay. We have a running joke on Backlisted where we talk about esoteric authors as master storytellers. Yes. Backlist Bingo. And yet, you know what? For the first time in two years, I am happily and unironically applying the term master storyteller to

RF Delderfield. You are, sir, a master storyteller. And the storyteller of masters. That is absolutely right, and that is where we are, I'm afraid, going to have to end it. Thanks to our guest Jenny Colgan, our producer Matt Hall, our extensive archive of all shows available on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com forward slash backlisted pod.

We're available and active on Twitter and Facebook, so come and join in the conversation, and we'll be back with you in a fortnight. Sir, sir! LAUGHTER you can choose to listen to backlisted with or without adverts if you prefer to listen to it without adverts you can join us on our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted where you also get bonus content of two episodes of lock listed the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.