My Desert Island Delightful books

Vera Brittain was the mother of British politician Shirley Williams, who was formerly a Labour/SDP, then Liberal Democrat MP and is now Baroness Williams of Crosby. Vera grew up in the years before the First World War, when it was still rare for girls to get a full academic education and go to university. She lost a fiance, a brother and several close friends to the conflict and temporarily abandoned her academic career to serve as a nurse, in hospitals in the UK and overseas.

The horrors she saw deepened her pacifism and after the war she worked to support the League of Nations that eventually became the United Nations. Testament of Youth is the first part of her story. It is vivid, poignant and engrossing, full of passion and often anger at the pointlessness of war and those who see it as a solution.

I have read this book many times and could not be without it on my island. When I was working in Belgium, I made a special trip to find the grave of Roland Leighton, Vera's fiance who died alongside so many other talented and gifted young men and seeing those long rows of white headstones made the book a very personal experience.

It is hard to believe that I once hated this book which I originally had to study at school. It was only when I read it at leisure, several years afterwards that I learned to love it, and it became a lifelong favourite - I am on my third or fourth paperback copy, others having been mislaid and at least one disintegrated!

It is the story of a lonely and orphaned child, of cruelty and hardship and of love found, lost and found again. What sustains it and makes it attractive is the spirit of the narrator to accept life as it is and make the best of it, however disagreeable. This might well be a good lesson to learn in the imaginary circumstances of being a castaway!

This was the movie poster from 1944 with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

Jane Eyre, Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, 1944 - Giclee Print
12 in. x 9 in.
Available from AllPosters.com

I remember quite clearly how I came to read this book over 25 years ago. My Mum used to buy books from Readers Digest when I was very young, but these always seemed old-fashioned and boring. Then one day, I ended up staying unexpectedly with her for the night with nothing to read, so I re-visited her book selection and found 'A Town Like Alice'.

When I started to read, the contrast between the title and the emerging plot became tantalising. I knew little about WW2 outside of Europe other than that gleaned from American films and TV who never mentioned what happened to people working in countries over-run by the Japanese. And I never knew till then that one of my uncles saw the pathetic figures that emerged at the end of the war, from Changi jail in Singapore.

The heroine of the book, Jean Paget, has unexpectedly come into a legacy from a great-uncle. It sounds so little in modern terms but is sufficient for her to leave her job and go back to the place that she spent some of the war to thank the people of a village in Malaysia (then called Malaya) who helped her and her friends after their Japanese guard died.

The story opened my eyes to many things. The horrific cruelty of the Japanese to prisoners-of-war, What Australia was like in the 1940's and how people can be resilient and resourceful. I realised that I had visited a place - Kuantan - where some of the book takes place on a holiday to Malaysia - it is now a thriving tourist destination but the beaches of the east coast are as beautiful as ever. I have also been to Singapore where the infamous Changi area is now the site of the city's zoo.

Jean and her group of women and children, the families of rubber-planters and civil servants, are marched around Malaysia because the Japanese don't have a prison camp for women and no-one wants responsibility for them. On their way they meet some Australians, also prisoners who are driving trucks for their captors, moving war supplies. One of them tries to help Jean and her group with tragic results.

The Australian part of the book is Jean's later adventures transforming a tiny run down Australian town to a thriving community. It is a shining example of capitalism at work. If you give people money by investing in creating just a few jobs, the economy snowballs very fast and everyone's standard of living is raised.

I am going to say no more about the plot, because the links between the different parts of the book are so surprising. 'A Town like Alice' will make you cry, rail against the evils of war and warm your heart. It is a history lesson, a study in micro-economics, a survival guide and even a travel brochure.

Please don't pass it by as I almost did. It has been filmed and has been a UK TV series and I have enjoyed it in all its entities. Even if I am marooned alone on my island, at least I am free and not a prisoner of war by accident.

The pic is from the TV series with Bryan Brown and Helen Morse - this is the link to buy - Amazon don't seem to have it -
TV Memories

My second husband from whom I am now separated was kind enough to give me a compendium of A.A, Milne in a single volume. It has no possible use as a survival guide as some of my other books might be, it is just pure escapism and comedy.

Reading about Winnie-the-Pooh going woozle hunting with Piglet would remind me what it is like to walk in the snow. The other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood and its environs would bring back memories of English woodlands, wildlife and other landscapes.

A.A. Milne somehow manages to give adults 'permission' to be a child again, whether by reading his work alone, or reading aloud to children.

You are sitting on the white sands of your desert island, the sun is hot and a few yards away a blue tropical sand gently caresses the shore.

What you actually long for is the English countryside, maybe the wilder parts of Yorkshire with grey rock outcrops on high and windy hills. No tropical storms but icy sleet and snow. These are the 'wuthering heights' of the title. You can see how wild it is in the top pic. This is the ruins of a farmhouse called 'Top Withens' which is said to be the model for the farmhouse in the story - Heathcliff's home.

The characters are equally strong and rough, even the heroine Catherine is an outspoken and fiery young woman, but also vulnerable. She rejects the hero Heathcliff thinking him not good enough for her, yet they are as certainly equals and soulmates as ever there were two people made for each other.

Sometimes you are attracted to a character because you see your own qualities and your own mistakes in them and maybe that is why I return to this book and would choose it for this context.

I could also indulge in memories of the original 1939 movie with Lawrence Olivier and Merle Oberon.

Get this poster at AllPosters.com

Trying to sum up the plot of this amazing fantasy trilogy is utterly pointless. Most people will have seen the films that are an unexpectedly true reflection of the books.

I might well have to seek refuge from storms in a cave as Tom Hanks did in Cast Away and will want something totally absorbing and time-consuming to read by the light of a fire.

Tolkien crafts an entire alternative universe in these books, creates some great characters and paints amazing pictures of the landscapes he has invented. Step into his world and lose yourself.

The Lord of the Rings - Poster - Cauty, J.
Dimensions - 24 in. x 36 in
Available from AllPosters.com

This, and other Arthur Ransome books are usually thought of as childrens' books, but by some chance I never discovered them until I was 18. I had recently become the girlfriend of a young man with several younger brothers and sisters and who was the owner of a sailing dinghy. David eventually became my first husband and started a love affair with sailing that lasts to this day. Even though we are divorced and I remarried, that interest kept us as friends. I am proud of the fact that the love of sailing has passed down a generation and two of his nieces are showing skills that could put them in a future Olympic Squad.

David had read the adventures of Susan, John, Titty and Roger and their friends Nancy and xxx when younger, but kindly lent me 'Swallows and Amazons' and Ransome's other books which I devoured while I should have been doing homework. It was actually quite hard to decide between this book and 'We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea', another favourite.

Looking at the stories objectively, they are a picture of how children lived when it was safe to go off on their own, even camping overnight and sailing without adult supervision. I remember being allowed to go on long bike rides around South London streets in the late 1950's, streets which are now the haunts of drug addicts and gun-toting gangs - well at least, if you believe the UK tabloid press. Ransome's books are set much earlier than that - Swallows and Amazons was first published in 1930.

'Swallows and Amazons' may encourage youngsters to take up sailing rather than sitting in front of a computer or TV which would be a good thing. The description of how the children, with the help of their mother, construct simple tents, and other basic survival techniques, could help me on my island. I won't be able to sail or row over to a farm to get milk for my morning tea, even if the farmer would give me fresh unpasteurized milk without falling foul of EU and food hygiene regulations!

I don't have a family of my own, but I have introduced the books to children of friends and they have loved them. It seems the sense of adventure, self-sufficiency and independence is more important than an up-to-date setting. The book has a moral aspect in that the children help the recovery of some stolen goods and exact their own comic 'punishment' on an uncle who has been less than kind but turns out to be a nice person in the end.

If I chose 'Wuthering Heights' to remind me about the wildness of the British Isles in my exile, I would choose this book to remind me of the gentler English landscape, of the rolling green hills, deep lanes, and verdant farmland of Dorset and Somerset. This is Thomas Hardy country. Dorchester, the county town of Dorset was used in different guises for several of his books.

Here is Bathsheba Everdene, another self-willed heroine who makes mistakes in love, abandoning Gabriel Oak, the humble shepherd who truly loves and understands her for the colourful, but treacherous Sergeant Troy. To spite him, she accepts the attentions of yet another admirer and marries for money and status.

Here is the best of English prose that is nearly poetry in places as it describes landscapes, people and emotions, and of course Hardy was a poet too.

There is tragedy, and drama but also a happy ending which might cheer me up in my solitude.

'Last night I went to Manderley again' are the unforgettable words that start 'Rebecca'. The curious thing about this book is that we never know the name of the narrator. This unnamed woman becomes Max de Winter's second wife when he impulsively proposes to her after a very brief and not particularly passionate relationship - although she does mention a few kisses.

Our narrator is not a woman of the world, and we know nothing of her upbringing except that she is an orphan and had been travelling as the paid 'companion' of a spoiled, vain and unpleasant older woman.

She knows that Max's first wife died in a tragic accident and that he owns a large estate in Cornwall, but he seems to have concentrated on telling her more about the scenery than the life she is going to lead. Arriving at Manderley she is met with a critical and intimidating company of servants. Having been little more than a servant to Mrs Van Hopper, it is very difficult for her to adjust to her new life and she makes many mistakes and her painful self-consciousness is in every page.

The most difficult of the servants she encounters is the formidable Mrs Danvers who was not only housekeeper, but personal maid to the first Mrs de Winter and clearly resents the new bride's presence with a vengeance. Mrs Danvers' hatred and distrust of Max de Winter becomes clearer and gradually a mystery unfolds around the true circumstances of Rebecca's death.

Poster from the movie starring Joan Fontaine and Lawrence Olivier
Available from AllPosters.com

There are descriptive glimpses of the Cornish countryside and of Manderley itself, some of it (including the house - pictured here) based on Daphne du Maurier's own home area.

This is a book to read in one sitting, be engrossed in and feel yourself part of. You too will walk Manderley's clipped lawns, a spaniel gambolling at your heels, smell the rose garden and the azaleas, and look across the bay where Rebecca met her end.

I would have to take a recording of the whole of a 'Last Night of the Proms' - a truly British occasion - just the second half of the traditional 'Last Night' programme where the audience (the promenaders) sing AND dance along to 'The Sailor's Hornpipe', 'Rule Britannia', 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'Jerusalem'.

'Imagine' - John Lennon - thinking about a world without wars or conflicts between human beings about what they believe would be a good thing on a desert island and I would wonder what I would be going back to.

'Bohemian Rhapsody' - Queen - I could play air guitar and teach myself to sing like Freddie Mercury with no-one but the tropical birds to scare off and no-one to laugh at me.

The soundtrack of the movie 'Flying down to Rio' - I'd imagine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and waltz and foxtrot around the sand. Might also remind me of my favourite TV programmes Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars.

Flying Down to Rio, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, 1933
Click to buy this photo at AllPosters.com

Judy Collins - Farewell to Tarwathie - Judy Collins has such a beautiful simple voice. Here she sings the words of a young man leaving his family and lover to go off to cold seas and hunt the whale. I would be reminded of cold places which might cool me down in the heat and also of the things I believe in and have campaigned against - cruelty and 'crimes against the planet'. I might well wonder if climate change might raise sea levels and wash me and my island away altogether.

'Teenage Kicks' by a band called Lady Winwood's Maggot - this is a quirky and unusual band from Hampshire who play at our sailing club at least once a year. The song was a hit by the Undertones, a punk band from 1978. The Maggots' version just happens to be the ring tone on my mobile, but I don't suppose that would survive a shipwreck and is a favourite of my estranged husband John. So, it would have a LOT of memories wrapped up in it.

'Music' from nature - just a few minutes of British garden birds, the blackbird, thrushes, robins etc.to remind me of waking up at home on a summer morning.

'As Time goes By' - as sung by Rod Stewart on his American Classics album. It's the theme song of my favourite movie, Casablanca and I could amuse myself by re-enacting all of it and seeing how much dialogue I could remember.

....and if the waves threatened to wash away my music collection, the one I would run to save would be the 'Last Night of the Proms' .