For various tedious reasons to do with mixed-up train times, I spent yesterday afternoon making an unscheduled drive down from the Scottish border to London. It was a doozy: flash floods and stationary traffic around Newcastle; roadworks and single-file shuffling past Luton; a fed-up three-year-old riding pillion. Seven long, long hours it took me, in the end. What made it bearable was Radio 4's superb programming.
Sunday afternoons on the sainted R4 are a booklover's pleasure garden. From 3 o'clock to 4, I listened to the second instalment of their classic serial, The History of Titus Groan, and was reminded of just how rich and alarming Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is – I haven't read the books since my late teens, but this fine adaptation brought everything – Steerpike's chilly treachery, Flay's cracking knee-joints, the pitiful horror of Sepulchrave's descent into madness after his precious library is burnt – pouring back. From 4pm until 4.30pm it was Open Book, Mariella Frostrup's weekly roundup of all things literary. This Sunday there was an odd, oddly sweet interview with Al Murray (yes, him), in to talk about his great, great-grandfather, William Makepeace Thackeray (yes! really) whose bicentenary it is today, and the second part of a series looking at the history of women's writing over the last 100 years, concentrating this week on women's fiction in the 1930s and 40s. More of that later.
At 4.30pm, there was an absorbing half hour on the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose 150th anniversary it is this year, direct from a festival in celebration of his work held at Dartington Hall – the arts centre that was founded at the behest of the man himself. Then, after a break for various news items, a profile of Rupert Murdoch (in which the literary theme was kept up via the comparison of the Murdoch family's travails to a Shakespearean drama – there's even a hashtag calling for refurbished Shakespeare quotations on the subject), and Pick of the Week, which pointed listeners towards this fortnight's brilliant Book at Bedtime, Ross Raisin's Waterline, there was Afternoon Reading at 7.45pm. And this week – what were the chances? – it was one of my very favourite short stories. Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party, a deceptively horrifying account of the death of a farm worker which threatens – but only momentarily – an extravagant summer party, is shot through with Mansfield's trademark bleak brittleness, and was read beautifully by Romola Garai.
Honestly, it carried me down the motorway. I rarely get the chance to listen to the radio in the daytime these days, so it was a genuine treat to find myself with nothing else to do. Very depressing then, to hear on Feedback as we pulled up at our front door, of a programme shakeup that will see the network's short stories cut to one a week. Though maybe it's not too late ...
But back to happier matters – and that edition of Open Book. As part of its series on women writers, the programme is asking for listeners to write in with their suggestions of overlooked or undervalued titles by women writers. As a thankyou to R4 for an afternoon that proved enjoyable against all the odds, I'm passing on the request: if you have a favourite that you think deserves to be rediscovered, email them with your forgotten female classics. I gave the question some thought during Open Borders (5pm-5.40pm) and decided mine would be The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, a quiet, curious gem of a book in which, following a discreet advertisement in The Times calling for "Those who Apppreciate Wisteria and Sunshine", four women spend a month in a castle on the Italian riviera and find ways to become at ease with themselves. I highly recommend it, particularly if you're recovering from a bout of pleurisy, as I was at the time. Which would be yours?
