The Gift of Radio: My Childhood and Other Trainwrecks

CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to desperately seeking wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for people who want to live a simpler, more fulfilled life, but aren't sure how to get there. A little while back, I hit the buffers. Outwardly, I had a successful life, but I wasn't happy. I couldn't see much point in anything. I rarely felt at peace and thought of life as a grind that I just had to get through. I realised I was far from alone, and wondered if there might be a different, better way.

So, for Desperately Seeking Wisdom, I've been talking to some wise people. People who've managed to change, or have had changed forced upon them. What was the wisdom that got them through it? What would they say that would help others who, like me, were struggling?

JUSTIN

You know, in the grand scheme of things, all of our lives are so tiny and so inconsequential, and the things we do to each other matter a lot at the time, but in the great scheme of things probably don't. And the things that matter are the love that you maybe have at one stage for something - it's the positive things.

CRAIG

This week's guest is the BBC Today Programme presenter, Justin Webb. Justin is known for mixing forensic journalistic skills with being a true gentleman. He's cool as a cucumber, whatever the circumstances, but he had a complex childhood, brought up by a struggling single mother. His stepfather had a severe mental illness. When he was eight, he was watching the news and his mother told him the presenter was his father, Peter Woods, a man he would never meet. He tells this fascinating story in his new memoir, ‘The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Trainwrecks’. We recorded our chat next to a restaurant, so you might hear the clatter of cutlery in the background.

CRAIG

So listen, congratulations on your book. I've read it and I really enjoyed it, and thought it was great. But I just wanted to be clear on one thing before we started. [Mm] You claim in the book [Oh God] that you've never listened to a podcast. [LAUGHTER] Is that actually true?

JUSTIN

That’s actually true. Er, I've started a couple of rugby podcasts, but it just got too, um… self-indulgent, unedited, and I think actually, you know, im- immediately referencing the book, my Quaker education, I think has done something to me whereby I am genuinely more at home with silence than I am with even informative noise. So, you know, at home, although I work on Radio 4 and it pays all my bills, my wife turns it on and I turn it off, and it's [LAUGHS] and it’s pretty much the same with podcasts, and because I'm technically not able to find them very easily, then I've let them go.

CRAIG

We'll dig into all that sort of stuff about your, what you were saying about Quaker education, all that sort of stuff in a moment, but I just wanted to give you a chance to begin by saying, what is the book ar- about? It's called ‘The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Trainwrecks’. Just try and sum up what you think it's about.

JUSTIN

It's about, at its most basic level, a rather miserable childhood in the 1970s, and anyone who lived through the 1970s and particularly was a child then, will remember that it was, in some respects, a weird, miserable decade where we were still actually, weirdly, almost within touching distance of the Second World War, and what my children call ‘black and white times’, but at the same time, we were kind of getting close to Thatcher, and Thatcher was indeed around in the mid- in the mid-‘70s and you have a kind of sense of change in the air, and things needed to change.

Not necessarily politically, but just in, in so many ways. We were so sclerotic. And for a child growing up in that time, it was anyway weird, because you were still able to be abused, actually, in the widest sense of the word, by everyone. We didn't quite believe in children being children still, in the 1970s and Jimmy Savile was in his pomp and all the rest of it, although I'm not just referring really, to sexual abuse, but more widely. There was this kind of sense that kids are a bit of a bloody nuisance.

And I grew up in this weird, weird household where my mother told me one evening as we were watching the news, ‘That man reading the news is your father’, and she was obviously very uncomfortable about it, and I didn't feel able ever really to ask her about it. We just sort of carried on. He talked about the balance of payments, and the subject was changed. She had married a guy who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and behaved very, very oddly. Never violently to me, but oddly, and there was a lot of tension and, and misery in our household.

But at the same time, this weird kind of almost suffocating love that my mother had for me, and desire that I had to escape. And I thought, in a way, the story of me and what happened to me and how I kind of did escape, fitted into the ‘70s, so that's, that's why I told it.

CRAIG

There’s so much in there, we, we’re going to try and unpack all of that over the next, um, half hour or so, but what it reminded me of, first of all, it's actually a very well written book but it's also a funny book. There are points where I was genuinely laughing. The way you describe it, it's like this misery memoir that's completely awful, but actually, there are some quite - very funny moments in it, and I suppose the quote, which is quite a clichéd quote that people use a lot is LP Hartley's one at the beginning of ‘The Go Between’, [Mm] where he says, ‘The past is a different country, they do things differently there’ [Yeah] Is that what you were thinking when you were trying to remember everything?

JUSTIN

Yes, in part. As soon as I started to write it, it just amazed me how different it was, particularly when it came to my school, but also with my mother's weird snobbism, which I'm sure we'll talk about, which, which was a period thing. But we forget, I think, looking back, just how extraordinarily visceral the ability to look down on our fellow human beings was among a strata of British society, and my mother, who was never wealthy, was - always regarded herself as superior to everyone, including the Queen, who she regarded as rather common because she though the Queen had opened up her house, Buckingham Palace to the cameras in the 1960s and really, why would one do that if one were not vulgar?

So there was this weird thing in the background always, about the way to behave, and I was always taught that I was at the very top of the tree, and it was a bit of a shock, actually, then to come to the BBC and find that, you know, my accent and, and, and attitudes then quite quickly were very unfashionable, actually and [LAUGHS] it’s -

CRAIG

What, you mean in terms of speaking in a very [Yeah] RP way, and -?

JUSTIN

- yeah, I mean, I was I was taught to speak, as my mother would have put it, properly. And now, er, that's not the thing, really. In fact, I have to kind of make sure that I don't sound too much like a kind of announcer from Radio 3 in the 1950s. But that if- in her, it was enormously, enormously - it was a huge, it was a huge part of her life, in fact it was her life. In fact, I, I say in the book, it w- it wasn't the elephant in the room, it was the room. Everything we did was affected, influenced, patrolled by her snobbish view of everyone.

And yet at the same time, and this is, I guess, the heart of what the book is about, at the same time she was an extraordinary loving, humorous woman. Became a Quaker, believed in peace. In many respects would have done no harm to anyone. Indeed, was hugely driven by doing good, and yet at the same time that lived inside her with his view of humanity that divided it up into those who spoke properly and those who, who didn't.

And, you know, the, the words ‘working class’ were always muttered as a kind of - or a lower middle class, even worse, were uttered as a kind of badge of absolute horror in my house and yet, as I say, those two things together, and I think if the book is about anything, it's actually about that ambivalence, that weirdness that here in the, in the Twitter age, we are so used to putting people into boxes. You know, racist, non-racist, whatever. My mother was a mixture of the most, of things that you would find very easy to object to on Twitter, and also very easy to love on Twitter, and those things can coincide inside the psyche of an, of an individual.

CRAIG

Yeah, and there's a sense where you, the way in which you describe her is that she's a complex mix of positions and feelings that often feel quite contradictory. So, the one hand, you're saying she's incredibly snobbish about people, and yet there's a period of her life where she decides she's a Maoist. [Yes] Yeah. I mean, what on earth is that about? [LAUGHTER]

JUSTIN

Yeah, she was definitely, she had Maoist tendencies throughout her life and she suddenly discovered in later life, and, er, we, we had a conversation about football. It was time of football hooliganism being a great thing in the ‘70s of course, and it was kind of moral panic and what we're gonna do, and people suggested that they should be birched and we should do this, that and the other, and my mother, as I said, [LAUGHS] my mother just said, ‘Take away the ball’.

She thought we could ban football. I mean, this was a serious proposition. She also thought we should all wear a uniform, because ‘It's much easier, dear. Much easier if everyone just had a uniform, we knew where we were’. And, you know, the wider implications of how you'd enforce that, et cetera, ‘course she - never really occurred to her. And yet at the same time, you know, she was a, a founder member of the City of Bath Amnesty International Group.

I remember, you know, tedious evenings when I was young, while they all wrote their letters in longhand to, um, the jailers of various people in nasty foreign countries, trying to get them out. And she believed very strongly in, in, you know, the rights of individuals and all the rest of it, and yet it combined with this kind of dotty Maoism.

CRAIG

And your mother was sacked on the spot for being pregnant. [Mm] And my mother was like, told as soon as she was pregnant, she was actually a policewoman in the 1960s in London and she was sacked, where as soon as she was - or told ‘That's it, you're out’. [Mm] And it is extraordinary, thinking that in that living memory, there is, you know, that kind of thing went on, and people were treated in that way, and women were treated in that way. [Yeah] And I mean, look, it's not perfect now but wow

JUSTIN

My granny, who, um, died in, in poverty living quite close to us in, in Bath, and I talk in the book about during the miners’ strike, wrapping her newspaper to try to keep her warm. So I mean, she really was in - and we got the newspaper wrong, we put it in the wrong bit of the bed, it turned out, you know, she was -

CRAIG

How do you mean?

JUSTIN

She - well, she - she - on ‘Blue Peter’ in about 1972, there was this piece about how to keep old people warm. So, um, and you could keep them warm by wrapping them in their beds in newspaper, and so we thought we’d do it. We used to get two copies of The Guardian because my stepfather was mad and wanted his own copy, so although we had almost no money and not much in the house, actually, we had two copies arriving of The Guardian every morning, so we had a lot of newspaper.

So we took it up to Granny’s flat and we wrapped, um, the bed in it so that she could be warm, but actually, I then read Andy Beckett's very good revisionist history of the 1970s, where he reveals, he, he writes about the episode of ‘Blue Peter’ that I remember, and he reveals that the paper was meant to go over the top sheet, not over the bottom one, so we, we actually completely screwed up the newspapering over of, of Granny, but she survived, er, she survived that much.

But she was, you know, what it really brought home to me is, she was poor and she was, um, had been the wife of a very, very successful journalist, my maternal grandfather, Leonard Crocombe, who worked for Titbits, which was then a very respectable and a hugely successful sort of news and titbit magazine. Set up The Radio Times. Was a friend of Lord Reith. I mean, a really kind of moving and shaking kind of journo, magazine journo, when magazines where the, the big thing between the Wars, and made, I think, a fair amount of money.

Divorced my granny, went live in the National Liberal Club, spent all the money. She n- she never got any of it because it was before the various changes in legislation that made it possible for women to have a reasonable settlement after a divorce. So again, just as with your mum and mine, they were themselves within touching distance of an even crueller [Yeah] system.

CRAIG

And, and it's funny, one of the privileges of being in the BBC is I got to edit election night programme and part of my homework for doing that was going back and watching as many of the previous election night programmes as I could, and that I realised quite quickly, they're amazing historical documents. They're like real snapshots [That’s right] of a time, and so do -

JUSTIN

‘Now we’re going to bring you two housewives.’

CRAIG

Yeah, well, in the, in the ‘60s, there was this weird thing where, you know, you literally, if a woman was standing, you'd have brackets ‘Missus’ [LAUGHTER] after her name, if that was on the caption. But there was also, it also felt in the ‘60s quite free and energised and then suddenly in the ‘70s, it felt very, very cold, and there's a great moment in the 19’s, one of the 19- early 1970s elections, where I think it's Desmond Wilcox who's standing in Trafalgar Square, and there are thousands of people who are out on Trafalgar Square, which would never happen now.

And he's interviewing some members of the public, and he comes to the end of the line, and there's a black guy, and he says to him, ‘And, and you must be very impressed by seeing democracy in action like this’. [Yeah] And he says, ‘Well, I've lived here for 25 years’, and it was just an extraordinary moment [Yeah] of all the assumptions [Yeah] and strangenesses, [Yeah] and cultural weirdness, all coming together in one moment.

JUSTIN

Absolutely. I mean, we have in so many respects come so far, and when you look back to the ‘70s, it does feel - or as you say, it feels like another country, but an interesting country because it's still a country that we, or certainly people of our age, can kind of reach back and touch.

CRAIG

Oh, I'm interested in the point that you were making there about the effect of that, the snobism on you and how it filtered into you [Mm] and impacted you. I mean, when I was brought up, the sort of like, wider family that I was in, there was a kind of culture of being very negative about a lot of people and focusing on their weaknesses, and I sort of remember in my late teens thinking, ‘God, I'm doing this and other people don't, and this isn't good’, and I self-consciously thought, ‘I'm going to have to shift [Yeah] my perspective on this’ and I - there was a sort of awakening that the environment I had been in was not necessarily a good thing.

JUSTIN

Yeah, that resonates with me because part of the book again, is my realisation, even in the ‘70s, and again, I kind of finish it in 1980 or so, but I, by the end of my adolescence, as I was becoming a young adult, I was increasingly realising that there were all sorts of aspects of my bizarre life [This isn't helpful] - this is not a helpful; this is not right; this is not normal, not any aspect of it.

And obviously, I'm the, you know, the weirdness of my father was one of them, but actually, there were a hundred aspects of my life. The fact that my stepfather kept padlocks and, and changed the garage doors every week or two ‘cos he thought the car was being broken into. All sorts of c- weirdnesses like that, you - those are the kind of solid things, but actually the underlying weirdness was I believed to try to please my mother brought on board into my life, things about human beings that just weren't true.

And I had one particular, right at the end of my time when I'm earning money to go on my first sort of trip abroad, just before I became a student, I worked in a Black & Decker factory in Maidenhead and I'd got very friendly with a forklift truck driver, who - elderly guy who’d been there all his life, and we were giving blood one day, and he said to me, ‘Do you wanna be Prime Minister?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think I probably do’.

And I, I realised then that he was sort of, I had taken it seriously because I think I rather did, and I rather expected that I, I might be one day, and he equally thought it was a complete laugh. And I realised this was a really kind of, um, mind-changing moment. I realised not only was he joking, but actually, also I think he felt a bit sorry for me. He s- he could see that I was out of place, what was I doing there?

I seemed so oddly unsatisfied and ambitious, and yet also gauche and not very able to fit into the society of the Black & Decker factory, and he was so completely the opposite. And I realised, I think I did realise then, certainly in years looking back on it, that, that those sorts of moments are the ones where you can break out of a view of people that is [Yeah] just barmy, and sticks them into boxes into which they don't belong, and actually also hampers your ability as a human being, as a person to, to kind of come to terms with what actually is the world is like.

CRAIG

And another way, I think, of that impacting on you, you describe at one stage as being your mother's carer, [Mm] and a lot of psychologists talk about this, is that, that a lot of children from difficult backgrounds end up with the parental-child relationship reversed, and that you end up caring for the parent, and it's actually the wrong way round, and it seems to me that you experienced that, and that that is going to have an impact on the rest of your life, in terms of how you relate to other people and crucial relationships.

JUSTIN

Yeah, completely, and I, I mean, although I have sort of breezily suggested that I'm kind of over all of this nonsense now and it's [LAUGHS] and actually that, of course that's not true. It's your whole life, it’s who you are, and my relationship with my mother was very close, and in some respects wonderful because I always felt loved. And even beyond the grave, she's, she’s - she died in 2006, but even now, I think, you know, w-when I'm confident, I think a lot of my confidence will come almost directly from her love and support.

But at the same time, it was so stifling, it was so peculiar, because I knew from a really early age, that everything depended on our relationship; that there wasn't anything else in life, and she depended on it. And I could see not only that she was very important to me, but that she would be immensely damaged if anything bad happened to me, so I had to suggest from a really early age, way younger than you would normally do this, that everything was always okay. And that, of course, puts an enormous pressure on a, on a child because everything isn't [And -] always okay.

CRAIG

- make things okay.

JUSTIN

And make things okay.

CRAIG

So what you - I mean, I had lots of things happen to me in my sort of childhood and I sort of took - it's only decades later that looking back, that you are able, or I am able to say, too often I ended up in situations where I was in relationships, thinking it was my job to fix everything and sort things [Mm] and that's not to make it sound like I'm some amazing human being, you know, that's actually my psychological baggage and it isn't entirely helpful, but did you find that?

JUSTIN

Yeah, oh, very much so, and I think it does affect your ability then. What, one of the things that affects is your ability to have kind of normal arguments, actually. This is what my wife would say [LAUGHS] and I think actually, people I've known through my life would say, that I'm kind of more brittle than I should be; more affected by the suggestion that a relationship is breaking down. I mean, just in the smallest sense, is an argument about something quite moderate, and it also then reveals itself as a bit of a peculiar inability to laugh off things that are just normal in, in [And-] life.

CRAIG

Yeah, and I think that sometimes - I, I sort of recognise that and I think I've got a lot better at it, but it's almost like you have a disagreement, or something goes slightly wrong and the other person's probably shrugged it off but it magnifies and amplifies in you and you carry it for a long period [Yeah] after it disturbs you for quite a long time. And actually, the reality is, [Yeah] it was inconsequential [Yeah], didn't really matter, but [Yeah] there's [Yeah] something still bugging you. I think a lot of people [Yeah] experience that.

JUSTIN

Yeah. Yeah, and, I, I mean, none of it was obviously on purpose, and I think there were occasions where my mother did think, and I, I suspect actually, it’s possibly why I was sent off then to, to boarding school. I think she just felt it was too stifling, but there wasn't anything she felt able to do about it because she had nothing else. We had a sort of jolly, almost secret sort of relationship, but I, I just, not for a child; just not a, not a healthy way to be.

CRAIG

I wanna move on to, to your biological father [Mm] and spend a bit of time on this, if that's okay. Um, you, you referenced it earlier, you said, [LAUGHS] you were literally watching the news, [Mm] and your mother goes, ‘That's your dad’. [Yeah] So how, how old were you, and what were the circumstances?

JUSTIN

Well, the thing is, I did - to be perfectly honest, I can't remember. I have a guess at it in, a in a book. I th- I think I would have been no more than sort of seven or eight, if that. And I have this, I do have a memory of this lugubrious looking guy, slightly baggy eyes, in a light coloured suit, reading about the balance of trade, which of course was completely inexplicable to me, as it was actually the whole country. [Still is] There it still is, yeah. Er, with this kind of weird, kind of cardboard graphics they used to have on the TV, kind of slightly shaking behind it as someone held it up.

And, er, my mother saying, ‘That's, that's your father’, and I don't think we had any conversation. I think that was it. And I had this sort of woollen, red kind of almost like a sort of doll-like teddy bear, and I then after that day sometime, named the teddy bear Peter, Peter Woods was the man reading the news, and my mother sort of accepted that I did that, but we never…spoke at all.

CRAIG

You also became a journalist and news presenter.

JUSTIN

Well, yeah. But then, as I say in the book, there's what's available and interesting to you, and it's the way you're encouraged. So there is probably some sort of genetic ability that I might have to write quickly, write r- [It’s nonsense] quite fast. You would know ‘cos you were the, you were my boss. You- you’re refusing to nod or anything. [LAUGHS]

CRAIG

I never in - all these people say I was their boss, they just basically did what they wanted to, as far as I remember, but anyway. But then, but I - at that moment, do you remember thinking, ‘Wow, that's a blow’, or did you just - was it like a [Oh no] depth charge that goes down?

JUSTIN

No, no, no. Nothing like that, ‘cos nothing ever was sort of thought through, and, and nothing was ever talked about, and nobody ever asked anyone if they were happy. This was the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, so it just wasn't, er, it wasn't a thing. It was then, um… it was then a thing, not, not exactly a depth charge, because it didn't go off, but a kind of, er, unexploded bomb, I suppose, down there somewhere in the depths.

CRAIG

Did it ever go off?

JUSTIN

No, I, I don't think it did, which I don't think is maybe a good thing in, in a way.

CRAIG

But this is so interesting. I mean, like most people, if you said, hang on a minute, you’re, you're eight years old, you're watching the TV, your mother out of the blue says that's your dad. You've never met him before, you never go on to meet him and as far as I'm aware from the book, you know, he had, never had anything to do with your life. That is gonna be a - most people say, [Mm] ‘Wow, that's gonna have a huge psychological impact’.

JUSTIN

Yeah, but then, it probably did, but part of the whole weirdness of my upbringing was that everything was repressed, including that. So it instantly, I think that night that she told me, I think it instantly became a thing about which we don't talk.

CRAIG

But what do you think was going on in her head? Because she obviously felt the need [Yeah] to say it.

JUSTIN

I know. I wish I'd asked her actually. I mean, I, I never did talk to her about it ever, and when she died, I found an obituary, his obituary in, er, The Independent that she'd cut out and kept. Er, was she still fond of him? Did she feel, I don’t know, I mean, I - I genuinely don’t know.

CRAIG

And as far as you know, they never had anything more to do with -

JUSTIN

No, no, I don’t - I’m pretty sure that they didn’t, actually.

CRAIG

There is also, hang on a minute, your lover becomes pregnant. You have nothing to do with her from that, or the child from that point, paying any money or anything. I mean, that's ex- in today's standards, [Completely] that is extraordinary behaviour.

JUSTIN

Completely, yeah, and also, you, you know, not only has she become pregnant but she's lost her job. They both worked in The Daily Mirror. He was the chief reporter. I mean, it - this is the thing. Er, again, it was a different time. I'm not sure that he necessarily behaved any differently to the way a thousand other men in that situation would have behaved, and I'm not sure that my mother actually, in personal terms, felt the kind of resentment that she desperately wanted to have a child, and she got one. And I, I think in a way, you know, we ascribe both to him and, and to her, in a way, things that we feel in the modern era that they just didn't.

CRAIG

So this is a podcast about wisdom, and I think that superficially a lot of people would hear that story and think, ‘Peter Woods what a total bust’ [Mm, yeah, no, and I -] But your [Yeah] position [Is not that at all] is one of forgiveness.

JUSTIN

Oh, completely, yeah.

CRAIG

And I actually [Yeah, yeah] think, if you think about it for two minutes, [Yeah] you've actually come to the right conclusion, that um, forgiveness is about, you know, the impact on me, rather than the person you're forgiving. So, you - to me, it seems that the wise thing to do was to come to terms with it and have that forgiveness ‘cos otherwise it would drive you slightly crazy.

JUSTIN

Yeah, and I'm sure he did all sorts of wonderful things. He had a family who he loved and who loved him. Um, he had friends, he had a, um, an extraordinary career, actually. He was an incredibly able journalist and reporter and, for The Mirror and later for, for ITN and for the BBC and I, you know, there are all sorts of things about him that I don't know, and never will know, and I think it is futile, actually, ei- either personally for me, or kind of cosmically as well, to, to try to point the finger at him. I, I just think it's a, it's a worthless waste of time.

CRAIG

Cosmically?

JUSTIN

Well, cosmically because, you know, in the grand scheme of things, all of our lives are so tiny and so inconsequential, and the things we do to each other matter a lot at the time, but in the great scheme of things probably don't. And I think when you live your own life, I'm 60 now and he's long gone and so’s my mum, I think you - it kind of gives you a sense not only that things are placed in time, as we were saying, but also that we're all of us placed in time, and the things that matter are the love that you maybe have at one stage for something. It's the positive things that matters, it’s the positive things that, that stay behind, and the negative stuff er, you can focus on if you want to. I don’t -

CRAIG

There's a guy that I quite often quote, and he had a huge impact on me, called Michael Singer. He does this talk about a well-lived life, and it goes on for about 90 minutes and the first 45 minutes of it are from Big Bang to now, so 13 and a half billion years of history, and you're going, ‘This is fascinating but I'm not sure what it’s got to do with my life’, and then he drops the bomb after like, 45 minutes and says, ‘So after that 13 and a half billion years, what makes you think you matter, and what makes you think you can control anything?’ And that -

JUSTIN

And that's a comfort.

CRAIG

Yeah, [Yeah] and that was a huge moment for me, it was like, ‘God, you're absolutely right’. [Yeah] We spend all our lives worrying away about things that in the grand scheme are actually not that consequential, and actually in reality, if you can just get to a stage of letting things go and accepting things, it - life goes a lot easier [Yeah] on you.

JUSTIN

Yeah, and I did, so, you know, I, I let things go and accepted things without kind of consciously, kind of reading or thinking about it. I've just reached that stage in life, and in a way, I suppose, I also felt that because I've had a pretty good life, it would seem sort of narcissistic and silly really to, to kind of suggest that I've been particularly badly done by, and the book is not a suggestion [No, no, no] that I was hard done by.

CRAIG

And I, and you probably, you probably don't remember this, but I remember you were actually, you know, you had a very big career in BBC radio, and you were starting to do stuff in television, so it was suggested that you meet me because I was sort of editing television news at the time, [Mm] and I remember meeting you and thinking that you were a very sunny, optimistic, together kind of person, very balanced, a lot of equanimity.

And the, and the last thing you said to me was, ‘Cin-cin’, [LAUGHTER] and that always, that always sort of stuck with me that you’d, that you’d - and you were very, very English but in the [Yes] best possible way. But anyway, I wanna move on to your stepfather, ‘cos [Yeah] okay, I, I won't ask a question, you know, other than just tell us about him.

JUSTIN

Well, this is something that I have thought about in more recent times, because I think we've all of us grown up when it comes to, not only kind of minor depression and our ability to talk about our feelings and what we call our, our mental health, but also, we've talked more about proper mental illness, and when I say proper, I’m not, not denigrating what I've just talked about, but the kind of mental [The full on disorders, yeah] - yeah. I mean, the, that really does lead to people kind of raving and not being able to cope with the world.

And my stepfather was sort of borderline between the two. He was troubled, he had what was certainly a personality disorder, but then that sheared into something that was described as schizophrenia, but I think almost everything was described as schizophrenia in the, in the ‘70s, and he was, um, my mother found him in The New Statesman, so a very early adopter of that kind of way of, [Of what the classified ads] dating apps. Yeah, the classified ads. He had applied for a housekeeper, and she, stuck with me, living with her mother then in the New Forest, very isolated, Peter Woods having gone, applied for the job of housekeeper and said, ‘Would it be okay if I come with my child?’

And they ended up getting married. I don’t know anything about their romance, if indeed there was much of a romance, but anyway, they, they married and a week later, she found him pouring all the milk down the sink, er, in the morning and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘Well, I always have to do this because people poison it overnight’ and she was - had an appointment with the GP that day and she said to the GP, who also knew Charles, er, my stepfather, ‘He’s been pouring the milk down the sink’.

And the GP turned her and said, ‘I'm, Mrs Webb, I’m so, so sorry to tell you, but your husband is stark staring mad’. And this is the kind of 1970s way that these things were, were passed on, and so that was it, that was it. Um…

CRAIG

Did he have a solution to this?

JUSTIN

Er, no. None at all, other than Valium, um, quite copious amounts of Valium, and keep an eye on it, Mrs Webb, and all the best. And she coped from that day, about a week into their marriage, with behaviour that was just very isolating because, you know, mental illness is - isolating for her because of course, you can't really sort of reason with someone who believes things about the world that are not true. On a daily basis, you can probably manage the odd thing, but there were so many things that he thought [But it’s] were happening to him that I, I think she and he were -

CRAIG

But it’s so interesting, isn't it, because, and I think you see this a lot in life, is people snatch at what they think is safety and security, and actually haven't really [God, yeah] thought through [Oh my God, yeah] the consequences of that. [Yeah] So attaching herself [Yeah] to somebody who had some very extreme behaviour, fortunately it wasn't violent, [Yeah] or [Yeah] er, that abusive to you, [No] but like, he basically turned your garage into a fortress and [Yes] that kind of thing.

JUSTIN

And I think he was occasionally violent to her, and she to him, actually. I mean, it was a, it was a pretty - and he tried to kill himself one day, on my birthday when I was young, and we kind of - I can remember eating Frosties in our little kitchen and Mum saying, ‘Charles has taken some pills, so people are going to come, but don't worry, you carry on’. And I can remember, I think either she told me or I can remember the doctor, Dr Neil, the guy who initially diagnosed him, saying on the phone, ‘He's schizophrenic, not too much attempt at resuscitation’, but, ‘cos they did resuscitate him and he came back, and we never talked about it again. Again, er, this was then another of those things that you kind of never, you know, talk about.

CRAIG

And, and he w- he was convinced that people were getting into your garage, [Yeah] and minorly tampering with the car, [That’s right] like moving the wing mirrors or slightly, [Yes] opening the window or whatever?

JUSTIN

Ex- exactly. My stepfather had this kind of sense, even when you actually couldn't really see what it was, that something, he knew something had been done. So there were never - there were never anything major with the car, but the car was slightly wrong, and I can remember, I mean, I can remember people coming, and it was expensive, too, and we didn't have a lot of money - people coming and replacing our, kind of those up and over metal doors that you have on estates, with these huge kind of barn door things that would be attached, and massive padlocks, all of which I inherited.

And, and this kind of constant feeling that my household was just not like anyone else's, [Mm] and, and in a secret way, that you could never [Yeah, you can’t discuss and talk about it] really - no. [So, so] No, you couldn’t in those days. I mean, probably, you know, in fairness, I'm not sure you’d talk about it a lot now, but you certainly couldn’t [No] then.

CRAIG

And in, in my extended family, there was sort of like, attempted suicide and, and that kind of thing, and I remember that the doctor that had come to help, then coming around for dinner afterwards and everybody acting as if nothing had happened. [Yeah] It was sort of [Yeah] such a weird pantomime, [Yeah], that y- everybody knew what had happened, [Yeah] but it wasn't referenced, [Yeah] that it wasn’t, it almost like it was impolite.

JUSTIN

And I, I, I mean, I’d- the word hate is possibly too much, but I, I was sort of then groomed by my mother, my - who was pretty sick of him by now, although she decided to stay with him, into regarding him as the other. She was very pleased that I once said to her when I was young, Mummy, where did we get Charles? Where did we get Charles?’ and that, she thought was funny at the time, but I'm not actually sure that it was, or that deep down she would have thought it was funny, because it was, she, she had built this thing where he was the other, [Yeah] and I realise -

CRAIG

- and also creating you as, [And-] co-opting you as the unit with her.

JUSTIN

- co-opting me, yeah, very much so, and I think looking back, I mean, given the poor guy was desperately, desperately ill, we didn't treat him well. I didn't, she didn’t, the system didn't, nothing did. And I've, I’ve kind of really changed my mind. When I was young, I was sort of brought up to despise him, and actually, as I've gone through my life, I’ve felt increasingly sorry, not only for him, but about what we, what we did to him.

CRAIG

I'd like to move on to your school that, you know, going to boarding school, because that seems to have been a kind of solution to her, is sort of almost getting you out of this environment. And when you describe your school, or you say that you went to a Quaker boarding school, I think most people's natural reaction would be, [LAUGHTER] ‘Oh, that sounds [Yes] incredibly privileged. Must have been a very nice, easy going environment’. But actually, the way you describe it is conventionally cruel, conventionally abusive. I mean, you really do [Yeah] describe the kind of ‘Lord of the Flies’ atmosphere.

JUSTIN

Very ‘Lord of the Flies’. The place was a hellhole. You know, cockroaches in the showers. Absolutely appalling bullying. You know, physical, mental. Staff who were themselves miserable, lost control. A lot of drug taking at various stages. Tons of alcohol. A brutal, really brutal -

CRAIG

Disgusting food.

JUSTIN

Disgusting food. The whole thing was brutal and hard. Hard-edged.

CRAIG

It's so, it, it’s interesting you talking about it and reading it. I, I actually went to a comprehensive school, not that it makes a huge amount of difference, but what you described was not that dissimilar. I'm a few [Yeah, that’s interesting, yeah] years younger than you, but I mean, like, [Yeah] I remember there was a boy in my school. We all had to shower together, and there would be like, 30 to 40 boys in a shower together, and there was one boy who was quite late to puberty, who got turned on in the shower, and then that was it, his life was over.

You know, from then on, the, the [Mm] class bullies just [Mm] absolutely took him to pieces, and I remember like, his mother had written to the PE teacher saying, ‘Why is my boy’s underwear completely destroyed every time he's had PE?’ And the teacher thought that it was a good idea to stand in front of the class and read the letter out, with [Yeah] the boy still there, [Yeah] and try and get some kind of explanation, and I - it's funny that at the time, it all just seemed normal, [Yes] in the sense that that's what goes on, but also looking back, it’s like -

JUSTIN

That’d be a good title for the whole book, actually, [Where, where-] in the ‘70s, yeah, at the time [Where] it seemed normal.

CRAIG

Yeah, but where - I mean, like, where were the parents? Where were the teachers? I think [Yeah] that they actually thought, you know that that was boys will be boys, [Yeah] and [Yeah] it was violent, it was brutal. There was one kid who got so badly beaten up, you know, he was in traction for weeks, [Yeah] and amazing really, [LAUGHS] [Yeah] to look back on that, but y- [Yeah] your experience was -

JUSTIN

I mean, I can - yeah, I can remember in the third form and for, in, in touch with, I was in touch with him for this book, a guy who broke his arm hitting another boy. I mean, this was not small scale stuff, and the bullying was, um, we were told, right when we w- the first thing when we arrived, we were told, um, er, ‘You mustn't be cheeky to older boys’, and the older boys were then allowed to do whatever they liked to you if they decided that you were cheeky.

I mean, the weird thing about the school was that if you had sat down and discussed what Quaker principles were on gayness, on bullying, on any of these things, you would quickly have realised that Quakerism was not only well ahead of the game on all of this stuff, but actually is it, and, and is now a very progressive sect. I'm not a Quaker, I'm kind of lapsed Quaker, but I have a lot of respect for the, for the Quakers.

But at the same time, they allowed in this school, and I should say the school now and all Quaker schools now, I think are as modern and, and different as, as it is possible to be, but in those days, in the ‘70s, it was still possible, even for a sect that was avowedly progressive, to just turn a complete blind eye to all this complete dottiness, and it wasn't just the bullying and all the rest of it. I give the examples of the, a headmaster arrived, who I got in, back in touch with, fascinatingly, for the, for the book, and, and he said, you know, one of the first things he discovered was that people were going off at the weekend.

The older boys were taking some of the younger ones, and girls as well, actually, they were going caving, the Sidcot School Speleological Society. And what was strange about that? Well, they did it entirely themselves. They’d go off to Wookey Hole and places, and - but not to the public caves, to kind of holes in the ground, and then come back for tea, and nobody knew where they were, or anything about what was happening. I mean, it was a case as young as 12 going -

CRAIG

I’ve just literally -

JUSTIN

- that’s a ‘70s childhood for you.

CRAIG

- I've been reading Billy Connolly's autobiography, which is a brilliant book and it's very, it's a fascinating book, actually, in many ways. But he describes exactly that; that you know, at the age of 1112, going off camping and people just not knowing. And it's funny, I sometimes catch myself and I'm not sure what I think about this, is obviously none of the stuff we've been talking about is acceptable in any way, but I do sometimes catch myself thinking that you, you have a kind of, I have a kind of resilience that I [Yeah] wonder, would I have had that?

JUSTIN

Hundred percent, hundred percent, and my - my - although I write about this school, and, and it was a hellhole, particularly when I arrived, though much less of one when I left. Rather annoyingly, the bullying that we thought we'd inherit the right to run the school as, as we saw fit, actually, we didn't. So towards the end of the ‘70s when we should have been bullying the younger children, I think, I think we were less allowed to do it, which actually of course, is a, [Is a good thing] but, but it's also the case I think, that the school changed, and that in a sense, everything changed and we did, we were also, and I’m quite positive about the school to the end ‘cos I think there were aspects of it that were genuinely great.

CRAIG

So I'd like to get more explicit about learnings from all of this, and I was struck about, when you talk towards the end of the book about how you stopped childhood misery cascading down the generations, but also impacting on you, 10, 20, 30, 40 years later. Um, [Yeah] it - did you, have you come to any sort of conclusions about that? ‘Cos you, you talk a little bit about maybe not examining it too closely early on. [Yeah]

JUSTIN

Yeah. I find it difficult to work out whether it is better to examine the things or not, in your own life. There's a great moment at the beginning of the, of the Thatcher biography that Charles Moore wrote, where he quotes, is it, is it Socrates who said an unexamined life is not worth leading? Anyway, um, and Charles Moore makes the point that [LAUGHS] Mrs Thatcher’s life was colossally unexamined, and it didn't seem to matter, actually, it was still a worthwhile life, an interesting life, whatever you think of her politically. She, she did things and achieved things and had this life and never examined it.

And I, I think of my own kind of more minor life. Do, er, do you gain anything from examining it and, and looking at it?

CRAIG

The only thing I would say to, in that biography, what is clear, though, that when Margaret Thatcher left power, and suddenly she was confronted by herself, [She’s doubtful] and on her own, she was deeply, [She was doubtful] deeply unhappy. [Doubtful, yeah] And actually, she's in her loneliness and her inability [Yeah] to get over the fact that she was no longer in Downing Street. So I'm not sure she's a great example of that, and I suppose what it is for me, is that there is definitely that, you know, the drive of people who've maybe had damaged childhoods and that sort of stuff, to achieve.

But what - the examination I think, is actually in a way confronting it or dealing with it. [Yeah] So I think that what I thought listening to your book was that maybe what we're really saying is, worrying away or constantly circling something is not a good idea, [Mm] but actually, properly dealing with it and actually coming to a conclusion and letting it almost pass [Well] through you and let it go, [So I-] is a good idea.

JUSTIN

Well, I did that when I, when I decided to, to reveal who my father was, which I never had, and I'd left it, er, my mother had died so it was possible, and, and his first wife had died as well. The, the woman who would have been around when he had an affair with my mother. So I left it ‘til then, and I would frankly have left it forever. I would never have mentioned it to anyone, were it not for the fact my own children had reached an age where they would say to me, ‘Mummy's got lots of, of relatives. We've got Granny and Grandpa and all the rest of it. What - what’s the deal on your side? Who's your - who's your father?’

And I used to say, ‘Well, I had a stepfather who was, um, a bit barmy, who’s not around anymore’. And then they'd reached an age where they’d say, ‘Well, who's your actual father?’ and understanding the distinction, and I thought, I just thought, sod it, you know, it's - I want to have a kind of normal life with my own children, a normal relationship where I haven't kind of repressed or suppressed stuff. I wanna just talk about it openly.

And so I decided I, I would, and that sort of, th- those coming to terms things are then triggered by a need to find a way of living normally amongst your own normal family. But I think without that, as yes, and it’s so - I mean, this is a long way of saying I think the thing that's really rescued me, is not coming to terms with the past, but is having a reason to come to terms with the past that is the, the present and the future, is your own family.

CRAIG

Oh, that's interesting. And the quote at the beginning of the book, I think, is, is by Montaigne, [Mm] and you say that people who examine their lives discover that there's an awful lot of inanity and nonsense there, but actually, the realisation that there is a lot of inanity and nonsense is a good thing. So he's sort of saying, realise - it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, which is that sort of sense of, what makes you think you matter? What makes you think you can control things? [Yeah] And actually, when you get to that point, that's a very liberating [Yeah] moment, and actually, you feel much more comforted by it.

JUSTIN

But doesn't he also say something like, ‘But I'm not sure’ or something, at the end of that quote, which I - really appealed to me that, because I'm not, I'm not sure. I'm not really sure about anything I've written in this book, in the sense that I, I - it’s just not a manifesto either for how to be, or how I should be. It’s kind of an exploration of weirdness without necessarily reaching any kind of firm conclusions, actually. It's, we’re, we’re all of us kind of finding a way through everything, and we're finding a way through everything in different contexts, so the context of the ‘70s or the context of now and social media and all the added pressures and weirdnesses that there are now, that there weren’t, that weren't then.

So I'm not sure that I, I'm not able at the end of it to say, ‘This I did and I'm glad I did’, or ‘This I thought and I'm glad I, I thought’. I'm not as clear as that, to be honest.

CRAIG

But you've, you've come, er, it's interesting, actually, we met, um, a, a couple of months ago, and you revealed at lunch that you'd written this book, and you said, you know, ‘But I, but I'm not really interested in sharing’, and I was like, ‘Well, you’ve just written a whole bloody book. [LAUGHTER] You must be quite interested in sharing and think it's quite a good idea’.

JUSTIN

Yeah. I'm a kind of weird mixture, actually, of desperately wanting to talk about these things and, and realising that I haven't, for very long periods, and sometimes, you know, quite surprising to the most almost shocking people I've known through my life, who’ve said, ‘My God’

CRAIG

But I wonder if that is that st - I wonder if that is the residue of that kind of 1970s mentality [Definitely] that you just don't talk about it? [Yeah] So I just wonder [Yeah] if that’s still sticking to you?

JUSTIN

Oh, a hundred percent, yeah.

CRAIG

But, but actually, it seems to me when you do talk about it and when you're very open and you're very honest, that actually, not only does it feel like a relief to you, but I think it's also a relief to other people, because it's like, [Yeah] they go, ‘Well, my weirdnesses, or the strange things that happened to me, it - you know, there’s somebody else who's been through that kind of thing, and actually worse, and they’ve found ways of articulating it and dealing with it, and that's good’.

JUSTIN

Yes, I th- I think that's completely right, and I think, you know, the ambivalence of it, as you were saying, you look, you look back on those times and, and in many respects, they were awful. But at the same time, in some respects, they were quite freeing from things that we have to cope with now. And I'm kind of, I'm very aware that there is, although no one ever asked us if we were happy, when we were children in the ‘70s, and that sounds kind of a bit callous, actually, in some respects, was it actually a better way [Well, there’s cert- there was a-] of dealing with, with life and with its vicissitudes, and all the rest of the - [There was a head teacher -] not this endless kind of false -

CRAIG

- in the papers recently, of that school, what school is it? Summerhill? I can’t remember the exact name but basically, where you get to choose whether you go to lessons or not - [Yeah, yeah, Summerhill, A. S. Neill] and she was saying -

JUSTIN

My mother wanted me to go there. Thankfully, couldn't afford it. [LAUGHTER]

CRAIG

God, what book would you have had as a result of that? But an- but she said something and interestingly, there was that, you know, we're living in a culture now where kids are always asked if they're happy and they're okay, and she thinks that's not - the pendulum swung too far the other way.

CRAIG

Way too far, yeah. And may- maybe there was some moment between the ‘70s and now where the pendulum was exactly in the right position, but I, I don't think it's, I, I mean, you know, here I am talking with my background and, er, people are welcome to say, ‘Don’t be so silly’ but I, I think the, er, obsession that we have with - and, I, I have this myself too, the kind of, er, if not asking them and sort of looking at them 24 hours a day and saying, ‘Are they okay? Are they happy?’ I, I think it leads to the opposite, actually. It leads directly to unhappiness because people are not happy. You go through periods in your life where you’re pretty damn miserable, er…

CRAIG

And is that question really about them, or is it actually about yourself? [Yeah] That you know, like, you’re, you're worried that [Mm] somehow you might be doing something wrong? Or, or i-in a way, it's a slightly selfish question, isn't it, [Yes] sometimes? This is a podcast about wisdom, what people have learned from lives and what sort of, they could pass onto people, and we end each interview by asking people if there was one piece of wisdom that you could pass on, er, to other people, what would it be? What would yours be?

JUSTIN

I think it will probably be, and it is, God knows, wisdom is not the, quite the right word, but it is something I've been asked occasionally by women friends I've been close to, close enough that they've known a bit about my background, and they've said to me, ‘I'm not in a stable relationship’, or my - ‘I don't like the man’, or whatever. Or ‘I haven’t got a man, but I'm really desperate have a child. Knowing what happened to you and your life, should I do it?’ And I can think of a couple of occasions where I've said, ‘Yeah, absolutely do it. Have the baby. Go for it. It won't be easy’.

It's not easy to bring someone up on your own. It's an odd relationship. The mother son relationship can go a bit off the rails, but ultimately, it's worth doing because for you, your life will be richer, and for them, who knows? Who bloody knows what will happen to you in the end? You know, my mother would be, um, giggling and great pleasure if she could see me with as an august personage as you, sitting here, talking in this way. A Knight of the Realm and all the rest of it. I just -

CRAIG

There’s no need to take the piss.

JUSTIN

You know, you've got [LAUGHTER] you’ve got this kind of sense of just the weirdness, the wonderfulness, of you never quite knowing what will happen, and there are all sorts of reasons we live in quite a cynical age where you might say, ‘Oh, well, you know, climate change and all’ - there are a million reasons not to give birth and a million reasons to be depressed, but there is just this thing in humanity, and this thing particularly, I think, in women and in motherhood actually, that really matters. And, um, so yeah, my, my, my actual advice that I have a couple of times given, and I'm, been very glad that I've given it, is go - go for it.

CRAIG

Thanks to Justin for sharing his amazing story. His book, ‘The Gift of Radio: My Childhood and other Trainwrecks’ is published by Doubleday. It's a great read and I can't recommend it highly enough. If listening to this has raised any issues for you around suicide, please go to the Samaritans website for further help. Please like and subscribe to this podcast and tell people about it. You can also visit our website, desperatelyseekingwisdom.com.

Next week's guest is the award-winning political journalist, Isabel Hardman. Her story of dealing with extreme trauma and a very public breakdown is really worth hearing.

ISABEL

Actually being able to deal with that lack of perfection is really important in life, because life does not go according to plan. For me, I'm never gonna be recovered. I don't think I'm gonna be cured from PTSD, but I am going to get to a point where I've learnt how to deal with it.

CRAIG

Isabel has some really practical tips that are useful for everyone. I'm Craig Oliver, and this is a Creators Inc production.