Louisa Young, writer

Private Passions

Writer Louisa Young reflects on the profound influence of family, music, and history on her creative life. She discusses her upbringing in a

Key takeaways

• Louisa Young's childhood was deeply influenced by the music of César Franck, which taught her about narrative tension.
• Her memoir, 'You Left Early', details the emotional toll of navigating a relationship with an addict.

Main topics

• Musical influences on writing
• Family history and heritage

Notable quotes

You've got to be what you are, Louisa, whatever you are, you've got to be it.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a moving meditation on how personal trauma and c

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:07) Thank you. Speaker 2 (0:22) Family is at the heart of the work of the writer Louisa Young. Her first book was about her grandmother, Kathleen, a sculptor who was also the widow of the Antarctic explorer Captain Scott. She's written five books for younger readers with her daughter, Isabel, under the pen name Zizou Korda, including the best-selling Lion Boy trilogy. She's also written an acclaimed memoir, You Left Early. a true story of love and alcohol, about her relationship with the composer Robert Lockhart. And her most recent book, The Golden Hours, continues the much-loved Cazalet Chronicles, the sequence of novels written by her aunt, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Louisa, we're going to listen to music by Chopin, Arvo Pert and Puccini, but I think we're going to start with César Franck. Speaker 1 (1:15) Yes, this is a formative piece for me as a human being and as a writer because my father loved it very much and it was one of the records that we had back in the day when people didn't have that many records and it absolutely inspired me as a tiny child. I would put this on or get grown up to put it on. And then I would just thunder around the sitting room, hiding behind things and leaping out. And it was all about bears and forests and mountains. And it'd be me, you know, running away from having a bath in my vest and pants, just scampering and imagining. And the one thing I realised that it taught me was almost everything I know about plotting and about waiting and sneaking and then whack the reader on the head. So I owe that to Frank. Speaker 1 (3:00) You've got 20 minutes of that and all that tension building and then the restraint and then a little more fluttering and then something comes in from the side and it still makes me want to dance around. Speaker 2 (3:10) Delayed gratification. Speaker 1 (3:12) Absolutely, absolutely. And that works whatever art form you're operating in. Speaker 2 (3:17) It's a fine symphony. I Speaker 1 (3:19) love it. Speaker 2 (3:19) Part of the first movement from the symphony in D minor by César Franck, performed by the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Tell us a little bit, Louisa Young, about your early life. Your father, Weyland, was, I think, a politician? Speaker 1 (3:36) Yes, he was a working peer in the House of Lords for the Labour Party. Speaker 2 (3:40) And he was also a writer, as was your mother, Elizabeth. Both of them cared deeply for the environment. Yes, they did. Both campaigned for nuclear disarmament. Your father helped establish a department for the environment. Speaker 1 (3:52) Yes, one of those voices that if only we'd listened to them way back when. And Speaker 2 (3:56) your mother, I think, wrote about maritime law. Speaker 1 (3:58) Yes, obsessed with Muses of the Sea. Speaker 2 (4:01) What were they like, your parents? Speaker 1 (4:03) They were an absolute team. They got married straight off the back of the war, aged 24, had five children in ten years. They were very idealistic. Dad was the public face, an absolute charmer, and Mum was the sort of backroom boiler, both incredibly intelligent, and both with that post-war thing of we can do better and we will do better. which, you know, was a sense in the 60s, certainly, that was what was meant to be happening. Things were improving. It seems we've lost track of that slightly. Speaker 2 (4:34) Loving parents? Speaker 1 (4:35) Very much so, but a lot of children, so it was often more general than specific. Speaker 2 (4:40) Both your parents loved architecture and wrote a book together called Old London Churches. So is history a big part of your life growing up? Speaker 1 (4:49) Absolutely. Respect for old buildings. There's a very firm belief that nobody had the right to knock things down. Who are you to think that you're the person who's allowed to destroy it? Speaker 2 (4:58) And your parents spent a lot of time in Italy before you were born. Speaker 1 (5:03) Yes, I'm still resentful about that. I'm terribly jealous. The fifth of six children and the older ones all got to live in Rome in the 1950s. I mean, what could be nicer? But then everyone had to come back to England and go to school and things like that. So I missed out on those particular halcyon days. Speaker 2 (5:22) Well, the next piece could not be more Italian. Speaker 1 (5:25) Oh, I love this so much. Some people present it as the first ever pop song. It's from the 13th century. Apparently Boccaccio was very keen on it. And it's a song sung by washerwomen, and it's either about a girl promising a man that she'll give him a handkerchief, or it's possibly about King Alphonse of Aragon promising particular-sized pieces of land to the Neapolitans and then going back on his promise. Speaker 2 (5:52) Well, here it is performed by Roberto Muralo. Speaker 4 (6:19) me me Speaker 1 (6:54) We had this on a little Halfway between a single and an album-sized, very heavy record from the 1950s. And again, it was absolute soundtrack of the childhood. Speaker 2 (7:06) The washerwomen sounded a little lacrimose there, didn't they? Speaker 1 (7:10) Well, you know, what they're actually singing is You Promised Me Four Handkerchiefs. But, you know, deep meanings in the handkerchiefs. The Speaker 2 (7:19) refrain of the washerwomen of Vomero. a 13th century Neapolitan song performed by Roberto Murollo. As you said, you were one of six children. What was it like being in such a big family, Louise? Speaker 1 (7:33) Well, actually, we had another five cousins living at the bottom of the garden for about six or seven years. And during that period, I was the youngest, and I have to say it was heaven because they were all running about all over the place. They had lots of friends. They had music. Everyone was always coming home with something, saying, listen to this, listen to this. And I was just staring up at everybody going, wow, look at the world, amazing. It Speaker 2 (7:58) must have been like living in a rabbit warren with two households and that many children. Speaker 1 (8:03) It was delightful. But a lot of them were old enough to be going out and doing things. Speaker 2 (8:07) And your dad played the piano. Speaker 1 (8:10) He did. He had wanted to be a composer, but... Then the war came, he went into the Navy and came back, changed from studying music at Cambridge to studying history and decided that, you know, the world needed to be a better place and he should concentrate on that. Speaker 2 (8:24) Were there other musicians in the family? Speaker 1 (8:27) We all sang lots of rounds in the back of the car during long journeys, all that sort of thing, lots of folk songs. But generally, I mean, I learnt the piano for 12 years and completely hopeless. Unfortunately, no talent whatsoever. The boys in our family, several of my nephews and my brother, played the trumpet beautifully. But the girls, we couldn't really get our heads around instruments. Speaker 2 (8:49) This next piece is from that time because there was, I suppose you'd say, a brother-in-law who was a rather eminent musician. Speaker 1 (8:57) Yes, so this is my sister Emily's husband, Simon Jeffs, who founded the original Penguin Café Orchestra, which their son Arthur has now inherited. Speaker 1 (9:08) Simon was one of those amazing people that my big siblings brought home. And one Christmas he arrived with 10 copies or 15 copies out of many needed for our big family. We all got the album, the first Penguin Cafe Orchestra album for our Christmas present. And this song is from a later one. This is from the period when I was briefly their tour manager, which was a lot of fun as well. So this reminds me of him. He died too long ago, too young. But that's the gift of musicians, isn't it? They leave you these beautiful, beautiful noises to enjoy. Speaker 2 (9:41) What's the name of this song? Speaker 1 (9:43) This is called Southern Jukebox Music. Speaker 2 (10:44) Having people in your life at that stage, like Simon Jeffs, must have been very inspiring. Speaker 1 (10:51) It really was. Because I looked around and I saw what people did and my parents wrote books and Emily was an artist and my other siblings creative and doing their things and Simon making records. And you just think, oh, yes, this is what people do. And when people talk about kind of family connections or something, you think, well, of course, children look at what the big people are doing and they assume that they'll do the same thing, which is why it's so important to keep all those things open and available so that everyone can look and see and think, yes, I can do that. Speaker 2 (11:22) Aged 17, Louisa Young, you met the composer Robert Lockhart. Tell us about the meeting. Speaker 1 (11:29) He was coming down the stairs in a college in Oxford. He'd just arrived there from Wigan Comprehensive to read music. He was one day younger than me and I'd just finished my O levels. So he was already rather advanced. Anyway, he was leaving, I was arriving, he came back and played Chopin. And that was me, done for. I'd never met a northerner before. Speaker 2 (11:54) After university, you lived in a squat for seven years in Battersea, doing all sorts of different jobs. Speaker 1 (12:01) Oh, well, it's that thing when you have a very high-powered education, which I did, and you know what you've got to do, which is your homework and pass the exams. And you've never really done anything else. Then you fly off the top of it, having scrambled up this ladder in tent, and then like, wee! And then it's like, now what? And it was the beginning of the 80s, and so I was surrounded by people thinking that the correct thing for a 21-year-old to do was to become a management consultant. Nothing of that aspect of it made any sense to me whatsoever. So I ran away and lived in a squat and became a dispatch rider and played double bass in a busking band as a waitress and all that sort of thing, and read a lot. and ran around and then sort of settled down rather after a few years and started to get into journalism. Speaker 2 (12:47) What sort of articles were you writing? Speaker 1 (12:50) My first regular gig, you'll be delighted to hear, I did a shopping column for the Tatler. Speaker 2 (12:55) Plus pieces for The Guardian, Marie Claire and the Motorcycle Press. Speaker 1 (13:01) Yes, I was a lady motorcycle journalist, which was lovely, and I had an enormous Harley Davidson and rode round in black leather. Speaker 2 (13:10) Now, during that time, you met the country icon, Jolly Cash. Speaker 1 (13:14) That was so wonderful. It was before he was famous again and after he'd previously been famous. And there was a magazine that was giving me the sack and basically they gave me a nice trip to America as a kind of compensation kiss-off. So I got to visit Tammy Wynette. In fact, I went in her car with her husband and I answered their phone in the car in 1986. The phone was about the size of my head. And I went to Johnny Cash's house, same one you see in the film. And we had an absolutely lovely time because basically he didn't want to talk and was giving me sort of three word answers. But he didn't want to be rude. He was just a bit grumpy. But then he realized I really did love his music. And so he decided instead that he would just take requests. And I mentioned a song. He said, oh, you like that song, do you? And