Read Online Priscilla by Nicholas Shakespeare - Free Book Online

into the pages of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Tolstoy. Her favourite novels at fourteen were Wuthering Heights and War and Peace .
    Her father chose many of the books: it was how he kept in touch – with regular parcels of novels. After her operations, too busy to get away, and not believing for an instant that she was dying, he had sent a daily postcard in his crabbed handwriting. Finally, she wrote back. She missed him desperately, but she had taken badly the news that he had started another family with Winnie. Gillian found Priscilla in tears just before her fifteenth birthday. SPB had written to her, announcing the birth of her half-sister, Lalage – my mother.
    Doris was unsympathetic. She put her daughter down for resembling her father too much, and blamed Priscilla for the sacrifices that she had had to make. ‘I would have left your father years before if it hadn’t been for you.’ That was a frequent gripe.

8.
SPB
    While she convalesced, Priscilla conceived the two ambitions of her life. To have a child; and to publish a book, like her father.
    She saw him in Sussex for a few days each summer, heavily chaperoned by her French governess. But in Paris, depending on favourable atmospheric conditions, she listened to him as often as possible, twiddling one of the three round knobs on Boo’s wooden wireless to the National Programme – radiated from the Daventry long-wave transmitter on a wavelength of 1554.4m. Stretched out on the couch, immobile, she heard SPB’s disembodied voice speaking ‘with the gloves off’, and immediately was pushing through the heather, breathing in smells of mud and wet tweed as she followed him on foot after the hounds, always struggling to keep up. Hunting, he used to say, was ‘the purest of human pleasures’.
    Priscilla had a lot of her father in her. She adored him, and went on adoring him, despite periods of separation and disappointment. But their relationship was complex because he was such a public figure, and had a life that did not involve her.
    While Priscilla was living in France, her father had become famous. In 1927, his rich mellow voice attracted the attention of the BBC. He made his impact as a pioneer of radio, with a belief, compellingly expressed, that withoutradio ‘ any man – but especially the workless man – is only half alive today’. The philosopher Bryan Magee told me: ‘I grew up in a working-class home in Hoxton and even I was entirely used to hearing him mentioned.’ In 1954, Magee hired SPB’s youngest daughter Imogen as his secretary. ‘When I said to my grandmother and two aunts, “My secretary is SPB’s daughter,” they were awe-struck. It was a little bit like, “My secretary is Salman Rushdie’s daughter,” or during an earlier generation, “My secretary is Somerset Maugham’s daughter.”’

    SPB epitomised Englishness: most of his many books and radio talks were celebrations of England’s history, geography, culture and language. He was – in a phrase he concocted – ‘the golden voice of radio’. ‘My voice,’ he wrote with apparent absence of irony or embarrassment or false modesty, ‘was held to be “a clean steady trade-wind blowing”.’ It was heard in corners of the Empire as far away as New Zealand, and familiar on programmes like Time to Spare , The Kitchen Front and The Brains Trust where his audience was not limited to the working class. In January 1933, The Times reported that ‘the Queen listened with great interest to the broadcast talk by Mr S. P. B. Mais recently on his tour of unemployment centres in Liverpool and Birkenhead.’
    He rose to prominence during the Depression when he came to be known as the ‘Ambassador of the English Countryside’. In January 1932, the BBC commissioned a topographical series, This Unknown Island , to encourage tourism to