Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer, traveler and philosopher.

His crowded life has experienced many episodes,

a childhood in South Africa, a period

as a member of the Bloomsbury set,

several years as a Japanese prisoner of war. and after all that, another life almost as a writer,

filmmaker and advisor to a prince and a prime minister.

Now almost 90 he's revered as one of the great spirits of our age.

A man whose wisdom and experience as well as his belief in the therapy of wilderness and solitude

make him a commanding and respected figure. He is Sir Lawrence Vanderbilt. I have this image of you, Sir

Lawrence, as a small boy because I know that you were a dreamer, Joseph Dreamer they called you sitting in your mulberry tree

dreaming what did you dream about did you dream that you were going to do wonderful things

in your life or were they idle dreams? I don't think dreams were idle.

In my mulberry tree I used to, I spent reading and thinking there, but I had already been

launched in the direction of listening to stories and telling stories

and having a feeling that the whole of life was a story.

What kinds of stories? Well the first ones that lodged deeply

with me I heard from my nurse. She was the first and most important people in my life.

She was one of the few surviving authentic Bushman,

that is the first people of Africa, one of the oldest races in the world,

which has been cruelly made extinct and she launched me in

...