Hello I'm Krusty 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 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. On her desert island this week is a writer of books on food and how to cook it. Jane Griggson. Jane how important is music in your life?

I couldn't pretend that it was a dominant part of my life.

You listen to records a lot?

Not a great deal. I listen to them occasionally.

And then they mean a great deal to them when I do listen to them.

Have you any musical skill yourself? Do you play an instrument?

No, but I used to sing and that's why I've chosen mainly singing records of taking into the desert island.

Where did you sing? In a choir?

Well, I started off at school, when I sang in the choir.

And then when I went to Cambridge, I joined the Cambridge University Musical Society which was really the sort of astounding musical experience,

the first astounding musical experience I had

a been grown up during the war in a country school

and just having heard the radio

I had really very little knowledge of what music

could feel like when you were actually in the middle of it and I went along to this first

meeting of this huge choir there are about 300 people in it and we were handed copies of Bark Mass in B Minor and I just sat down and

opened it and looked at it and saw a lot of parts written down and knew the one I was

supposed to be singing and then Boris Ord waved his baton and suddenly all these mouths opened

I was in the middle of this incredible sound which was really one of the greatest experiences of my life, I think.

It was suddenly in the middle of the bark mass in Bimee with it all going on all around

...