P D James

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2002

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

P D James was born in Oxford, later moving to Ludlow on the Welsh Borders where she experienced a childhood which she says had more in common with a Victorian childhood than anything today. She was a well-behaved, quiet child who entertained herself and her siblings by telling and writing stories. Phyllis attended an old-fashioned grammar school where she enjoyed English lessons. She says "I knew I was going to write books".

Because of financial pressures at home, she had to leave school at sixteen, first following her father into the tax office, then in a theatre where she met her husband, who was training to be a doctor. World War Two intervened and, because her husband returned from work in the Medical Corps with a severe mental illness, Phyllis had to be the main breadwinner, working as principal hospital administrator at the North West Regional Hospital Board, London in charge of five psychiatric hospitals. It wasn't until she was thirty-nine years old, whilst working in the hospital, that Phyllis began her first novel, Cover Her Face. "I knew it was something I was going to do, and it was just that life was so busy I didn't get round to it". She chose the name P D James because it looked good on a book jacket, and crime genre because she didn't want to draw on autobiographical details.

The book was immediately accepted by a publisher, and in 1979 she gave up her other jobs to become a full-time writer, focusing on Detective Adam Dalgleish of Scotland Yard as her main character. P D James was awarded the OBE in 1982, she has chaired the Booker Prize panel of judges, has been on the BBC Board of Governors, was made an Associate fellow, Downing College, Cambridge in 1986 and made a Life Peer in 1992. Her books have made her a household name and she is now working on her 17th novel.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Opening Chorus of the St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Luxury: Pencils and paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. She published her first novel, Cover Her Face in 1962,
0:29.5	and in the ensuing 40 years has produced a steady stream of crime novels that have put her in the front
0:35.1	rank of her craft. But that's not all she's done. For a large part of her writing
0:40.0	career she was a senior civil servant and since retiring from that has been active in the
0:44.8	Lords, a governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council and chairman of the Booker
0:49.1	Prize judges. Her considerable achievements are very much her own.
0:53.4	Her childhood, she says, was a period of almost constant anxiety.
0:57.8	She left school at 16.
0:59.4	She lost her husband to mental illness.
1:01.5	My most valuable trait, she says, is tenacity. But what's got me
1:06.3	where I am now is courage. She is Phyllis, better known as P.D. James. How much courage did it take Phyllis in the first place to start writing?
1:16.0	Because you didn't exactly have a deal of time on your hands, did you?
1:19.0	No, I didn't so.
1:20.0	I was a late starter for all sorts of reasons being 19 when the war broke out and
1:24.8	having to support my two daughters and husband when Connor was ill and it does
1:30.1	take a great deal of tenacity and determination I think to begin that first novel.
1:34.6	Because otherwise you go on thinking one day I'll write it and you never get around to it.
1:38.4	You don't.
1:39.4	In fact you realize that sooner or later you're going to say to your grandchildren of course
1:42.2	what I really
	...

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