Radio Valerie Grove

Scandals of the recent past, preferably with literary or Hollywood connections, are popular with writers of radio drama.

Harold Pinter used to snarl that there would doubtless one day be a Haroldand-antonia movie. There hasn’t been a film yet, nor one about the similarly scandalous story of Kingsley-and-jane but, on Radio 4, we’ve just had a play called Festival by Sarah Wooley. It centred on the night Elizabeth Jane Howard met Kingsley Amis at the 1962 Cheltenham Literary Festival: a marriage-breaking coup de foudre for both.

Howard was the festival director that year. Invited to improve its formula, she flung herself into the project. (One of her brilliant ideas was that they should sell the writers’ books! Nobody had thought of such a thing before.)

She gathered an impressive cast of authors, including Agatha Christie, Carson Mccullers and E M Forster, plus two of her ex-lovers – Laurie Lee and Romain Gary – to participate. Then, to her fury, the Sunday Telegraph invited ‘Kingsley bloody Amis’, to be on

her panel discussing Sex in Literature.

‘He’s going to ruin everything,’ she protested. But there was a dinner after the event, where they sat next to each other; and stayed up talking and drinking till 4am. This is all in Jane’s memoirs. When he kissed her, she wrote, ‘I felt as though I could fly.’ Amis affected to be less affected. But he was smitten, and the affair was violently passionate, leading to their ultimately doomed marriage.

Wooley is a clever writer, whose excellent work includes radio plays about John Osborne’s Damn You, England letter, and Bette Davis in a Tennessee Williams movie; and I greatly admired her stage play Old Money, seen at Hampstead in 2010. In detail and in dialogue, Festival was historically accurate and well written – apart from a couple of clunks (people in 1962, least of all Howard, did not say, ‘She’s battled ill health for years’, and certainly never ‘for free’.)

But there was another quibble. In real life, Howard sounded frighteningly posh (Amis admitted to being awed by this) with her patrician profile and vaguely disdainful air. Her voice was smoke-fuelled, almost gruff. So Melody Grove, who played Jane as a sweetly chirpy and girlish character, too light-hearted to convey real anger, could never convince me that she is a twice-married woman of the world, recently involved with Arthur Koestler, C Day-lewis, George Weidenfeld, Cyril Connolly and Ken Tynan, bearing the bruises of her vulnerability, despite having the sharp mind of an unsentimental novelist.

I know real life is always more complex than any artistic interpretation can suggest. But the living memory of the characters in this drama is still too vivid for us not to mind.

The World Service is a good companion night and day, offering (like R4 Extra) a vital escape from Brexit discussions. I recommend The Compass: Living with Nature, a soundscape or audio-journey by Chris Watson (a wizard among wildlife recordists) of life in the Maasai Mara. The noises are of birds before sunrise and terrifying elephants at midnight, roaring lions and laughing hyenas, sounds of plain, mountain, forest, wind and rain. ‘Rain is life; it means everything starting afresh; it brings hope,’ said the velvetyvoiced Saba Douglas-hamilton with perfect timing, just as the rains here interrupted our heatwave.

She was brought up in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya, with a pet mongoose and even a tame vulture. She is the daughter of the zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, and therefore granddaughter of the unforgettable Prunella Stack, a heroine of mine who ran the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, and who – widowed twice over when still young – radiated a stoical resilience, goodness, well-being and intellectual strength.

Hurry: download this mesmeric, atmospheric treat.