Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Music Our castaway today is one of Britain's leading novelists.

She's a winner of both the Guardian and the Whitbread Fiction Prizes,

and has several times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Her work's been variously described as outrageous, exhilarating, and beautifully malicious.

She's also a successful painter, and moreover, in the view of some observers,

she's a genuine English eccentric, and she is Beryl.

Beryl, can we deal, first of all, with this thing that several reporters have made about the remark they made, that you are, in fact, eccentric. Do you think you are eccentric? Not in the slightest. They remark the fact that you have a dummy called Neville Chamberlain who sits at your breakfast table. Is this true, yes. but I got him for a purpose, you see. I got him because I was writing a book. It's a book about Adolf Hitler. I always wanted to make figures. I like making things, you see. And at one point, I was going to make the whole of Suzanne's card players out of wax, but I never got around to that. So I thought, well, I i'll get one figure and he turned out to be adolf hitley had a mustache the people who made him went too far and got enthusiastic

and after a bit i couldn't sort of live with adolf so i he looks quite like neville chamberl so i

turned him into neville and he sits at the table the table. I move him round the house, yes.

And sometimes in the summer we put him on the front step for a bit of an airing. Also you have a stuffed dog and a stuffed bison in your hallway. He's a buffalo. A buffalo, I'm sorry. That was a bit of mistake. The buffalo is a bit of a mistake. See, where it came from is not from being eccentric.

I had an ex-husband who worked at Liverpool School of Art, who was a teacher.

And when that revolution... You see, where it came from is not from being eccentric. I had an ex-husband who worked at Liverpool School of Art, who was a teacher.

And when that revolution came about where you didn't draw from life,

they broke huge statues, Michelangelo, you know, sort of casts of statues.

They burnt those beautiful butterfly cases.

They threw out, you know, squirrels in cases.

And I heard about this.

And I said, well, don't let them do that.

I like those sort of things.

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