Life after retirement at the BBC

Also this week: savage cuts at Radio 4, and woman as temptress.

Photo by Kelvin Hudson/Millennium Images

What are you doing now? I am often asked – the question dreaded by many non-earning women throughout their lives. How boring to define people by their jobs: lead a different kind of life, my children advised. After those endless BBC meetings, how could I demur? So here I am, reading and writing poetry in this glorious early-autumn sunshine and collecting my four-year-old grandson from his first week in school.

My hand is warmed against the stone,
the garden wall retains the heat,
a quiet pocket hidden there
like love.

I was shocked to discover that some primary schools have to treat specialist teaching of subjects such as music and art as “enrichment activities” rather than fundamental to a child’s education – and require fundraising to pay for them.

A home for all

One way I still connect to public life is through London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, where I am a trustee. St Martin’s, which is run by the inspiring Sam Wells, is rather uncategorisable; it does so much. I remember it from my youth for the friendly shelter it granted us South Africans protesting against apartheid outside South Africa House on Trafalgar Square. Now I know that culture infuses the atmosphere, with regular top-notch musical performances ringing out. Even in its dedicated work with the homeless, great care is taken – for instance, plans for a new building project to house homeless women, 18 Keys, include a beautiful, therapeutic garden. And this week St Martin’s will launch the Children’s Plinth, a fifth to add to Trafalgar Square’s four, which will live in the lightwell and feature artworks from an annual competition. It kicks off with The Dog Who Went to Space, by Mila, aged 15.

Searching for truth

The enquiry into the Lucy Letby case made me think of my friend Julia Mortera, a forensic statistician from Rome. Her work in probability, together with others, was influential in overturning the conviction of an Italian nurse accused of killing patients. Now the Royal Statistical Society is arguing that the way statistics are used in court needs to change. Julia says that people don’t understand statistics. They want certainty, but even DNA cannot always deliver that. Why is it so hard for us to accept that in all areas of life we have to live with uncertainty, and must understand and welcome nuance and complexity?

In memoriam

We found ourselves in Germany as the summer came to an end, at the same time as Keir Starmer. Olaf Scholz and Starmer made a stolid, almost interchangeable pair, both glumly managing decline. In contrast, we were in a festive mood, guests at an anniversary party on the banks of the Rhine. Between courses a young opera singer sang George Gershwin’s “Lorelei”. Looking out of the window at the great river flowing past, I was swept up in that image, enduring, ineradicable, of a woman luring men to their death: woman as temptress, Adam and Eve; why must it always be our fault? We sent a video to Roger Vignoles, the accompanist and an old friend, who instantly returned a link to his earlier version, recorded with Sarah Walker.

Roger found himself playing with the soprano Joan Rodgers at the Austrian ambassador’s home at a recent memorial for the pioneering journalist Hella Pick, who died earlier this year. The event underlined how Hella had at last found it in her heart to forgive her exile to the UK on the Kindertransport in 1939.

“We have been very close,” she said to me in hospital just before she died, and we were. She was a demanding friend. Once, she came to visit us in Wales and insisted on walking up the hazardous higher slopes of Sugar Loaf without her stick, while playing with our dog Momo, of whom she was very fond. At last I persuaded her to lean on a rock, where we drank strong coffee from a Thermos, just as she liked it. I remember her delight at the calls and dives of the skylarks.

Words to live by

When I left the BBC a few years ago, I dropped from public life like one of those skylarks plunging to Earth. How lucky I was, looking back, to escape these savage budget cuts. My mantra, in the words of Matthew Arnold, had been to find and broadcast “the best which has been thought and said in the world”. The best radio requires funding.

Gwyneth Williams was controller of BBC Radio 4 from 2010 to 2019

[See also: Linguistic soup in Trieste]