Michael Frayn

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Hello there, Ramona Koval here with The Book Show on ABC Radio National. Today, a new book from English writer, Michael Frayn. Well known as a novelist and playwright who's always presented widely varying kinds of work. Did you ever see his farce, Noises Off, a very funny slapstick comedy, and so different from two more recent plays, the cerebral Copenhagen, about a meeting between two of the founders of quantum mechanics, and Democracy, about the East German spy who worked for Willy Brandt.

In the 1960s, his first two novels won major prizes and his latest one, Spies, won him the Whitbread novel award in 2002. He's also a translator from the Russian—lots of Chekov and Tolstoy amongst others. Last time we spoke, it was about a non-fiction exploration, The Human Touch, when Michael Frayn returned to his roots in philosophy—that's what he studied as a lad—this time in a non-fiction exploration of questions that have underscored most of his fictional work, the relationship between existence and human consciousness. What can we know? What is real? What do we mean by the self? He even said in that book, 'Reality is the child of man's imagination.'

And now, as usual, Michael Frayn has produced an unexpected book: this one, My Father's Fortune, the story of his early life in the family headed by his father, Tom Frayn, a man who was born in straightened circumstances to a family with hereditary deafness. All his siblings were deaf and he had to support many of them, leaving school early, getting into sales, ending up selling that marvellous new stuff, asbestos. After a family tragedy, as you'll hear, he had a somewhat difficult time with his eldest, Michael. But Tom Frayne ended up leaving a fortune for his son, but not in the form of conventional monetary riches.

Michael Frayne joins us from his home in London. Welcome to The Book Show again.

Michael Frayn: Hello! Nice to be back.

Ramona Koval: Well, Michael, this is unexpected, partly because, well, we didn't realise that you were going to write a memoir, but I must say, when I've spoken to you before you seemed to be a little resistant to highly personal talk. What made you...?

Michael Frayn: It was a surprise to me. I didn't realise that I was going to write a memoir and I have been resistant to it. The idea started with my children, who are now middle-aged, and they said to me, 'We know very little about our grandparents. Why don't you write it down before you've forgotten it yourself?' And I was very resistant, because I thought 'this is going to be just a pious chore, a rather tedious exercise,' but once I got started and began to find out something about my father's early life I got more and more drawn in. And it eventually became an extremely emotional experience to me. It was a very disturbing one and I was completely taken over by it.

Ramona Koval: Before you did the book—I mean, if someone said, 'Tell us what was your mother and father like?' or, 'Where were you from?', did you have a sort of very short kind of description, a line about, you know, 'My parents were just sort of lower middle class people,' or 'My father was...'

Michael Frayn: Yes, I could have told you a bit about them, but... I mean, I always knew that my father came from a very modest background, but I didn't realise quite how poor the family were until I started doing the research and discovered from the census return how many of them there were crammed into two rooms in North London. And his background was much more difficult than I'd ever imagined and his story of making himself a successful salesman was more dramatic than I'd realised. He was also set much worse problems in life. His father was a drinker and couldn't really support the family and my father left school when he was 14 and had to support his mother. And although he met my mother when he was 18 and she was 14, and they fell in love immediately and never had eyes for anybody else apparently, they had to wait 11 years to get married because he felt he couldn't get married until he could—because he was supporting his mother and he felt he couldn't get married until he could support his wife as well. He rose to that challenge. He did it. And he never complained about it. And as soon as he got married, his wife's family collapsed—same reason, basically: his wife's father, his new father-in-law, was feckless, couldn't support his wife—and his new mother-in-law moved in with them and stayed with them for another—I can't remember—another 12 years. And he never complained about that. And then in middle life he, like the rest of his family, went deaf, very deaf indeed. And working as a salesman if you're deaf, particularly if you're selling something technical, like roofing and rainwater goods, which he was, must be fiendishly, absolutely fiendishly difficult—endless, endless labour every day, trying to hear what technical questions people were asking you. But he did it and once again, I never heard him breathe a word of complaint about it.

It seemed to me that I hadn't realised, hadn't quite taken the measure if him. I mean, there were very affectionate memories of him, but I hadn't quite taken the measure of him morally. I think he was a good man.

Ramona Koval: He was a good man and the way you write about him is with a great deal of affection. In fact, you know, you're very hard on yourself as a young boy. As affectionate as you are about him now, you didn't feel that way so much when you were growing up, but we'll come to that in a moment. Can you tell us how you inhabited the small boy's world of your house and your street? You've done it a bit in your novel Spies, but taking yourself back to this house that you lived in and the special use of the various rooms; for example, you didn't use the lounge room.

Michael Frayn: No [laughs]. Everyone's got idiosyncratic arrangements in their house and when you start to think back and remember your childhood, the more you remember, the more you remember. I mean, one memory draws out another and you suddenly find you're back in that house again, but this time seeing it with something to compare it with, some more experience in life. When you're a child, nothing's surprising because that's the world, that's all you've come across, so it's not... whatever is going on around you, however weird by any other standards, doesn't seem weird to you. But once you look back, having had some experience of life and the rest of the world, you can see how idiosyncratic and odd things were. And we weren't all that... we were a fairly ordinary family, but it just... the little, little weird ways of living in a house. And I see now with hindsight, having discovered a bit on my father's background, is that his whole use of the house and the garden, his whole experience, having moved out to the suburbs, comfortable suburbs, from North London, his whole experience of that suburb is a way of using the house and garden, was affected by his upbringing. Having been brought up in very cramped circumstances, he found it quite difficult to expand into a full-size suburban house.

Ramona Koval: Yes. You say though that you took the telephone seriously; it wasn't just something that was in the hall. Tell me about how you remember the approach to the telephone.

Michael Frayn: In those relatively early telephone days, when not many people had telephones—this was in the 1930s and early 40s—lower middle class families kept their telephone in the hall, where it was extremely cold and uncomfortable. And it never occurred to anyone to actually put it in the living room, you know, where it was warm and you could sit in an armchair to use it. But we didn't actually have a hall, so it was put in the nearest equivalent of that, which was the front room that we never used. And it was kept on the window ledge, and the only way you could get at it—it was an old-fashioned candlestick phone. Do you know what I mean? With a microphone on top of a long column; very, very heavy, and made of cast iron—and the only way you could get at it to use it was to perch on the arm of the sofa that we never sat in—you never sat in the sofa, but you just sat on the arm to use the telephone. But then, we almost never used the telephone. I can remember my father talking to some of his business associates on it, almost no other use of the phone at all.

Ramona Koval: As we've said, your father sold Turner's Asbestos Cement and it was a time when asbestos had no vices...

Michael Frayn: Asbestos was the wonderful stuff: it was fireproof and it was waterproof, didn't rot. You absolutely couldn't do anything wrong with asbestos.

Ramona Koval: And of course, your father tended to bring a lot home.

Michael Frayn: Yes, he brought the samples home and gave them to me to make camps and toys out of, and I sawed them up with a hacksaw or hammered holes in them with a hammer and punch and filled the air with asbestos dust.

Ramona Koval: And these were days when cigarettes could be good for your throat, too.

Michael Frayn: Absolutely. My uncle, my wonderful, lovely uncle, used to come every weekend, he worked for a cigarette company, and he used to bring lots of free cigarettes with him and the air was full of asbestos dust and cigarette smoke.

Ramona Koval: During the war, where your father was a fire warden, there's sort of elements of Dad's Army in the way you describe how things were.

Michael Frayn: Well, he was never in the Home Guard because he was deaf, so his contribution to the war effort was being appointed local fire captain, that was organising the fire watch against incendiary bombs in the street. And it was, everyone was... the fire captain was issued with a long-handled shovel, very famous in British mythology, and a bucket of sand and a stirrup pump. Um, and of course the children used the stirrup pump to spray each other in the garden, so that never got used for spraying on incendiaries. And when finally an incendiary did land in the street, I don't know how my father found the long-handled shovel—I don't think he ever found the bucket of sand, I think my sister and I had used that as well. Though he did get the incendiary put out, so that's something.

Ramona Koval: The book is in a couple of parts. The first part is this sort of childhood that we've been describing, or you've been describing, and sort of partly could have been an Ealing comedy sometimes. And then the terrible thing happens and after the war, your mother dies, she dies suddenly of a heart attack, I guess, when she's in the middle of talking to her mother and having a glass of wine, about to have a glass of wine. And this is, I suppose, quite shocking to a modern reader, because when your mother dies, you never speak of her again. You say she's airbrushed out of the historical record.

Michael Frayn: Yes, I think that was the style at the time. It wasn't for lack of affection; it was an absolutely shattering blow, obviously to my sister and me, but also to my father. And that was his next great challenge in life, was coping with the death of his wife, which was not only a terrible emotional blow but a great practical one, because he had to think of some way of getting my sister and me looked after, and that was a problem that dominated the next few years. But I think it was then thought that you shouldn't upset children by mentioning painful subjects to them. So my sister and I were not allowed to go to my mother's funeral and my... I don't think my father ever talked about her again, and my sister and I couldn't, because we didn't have a word for her. We couldn't call her our mother, because that's ridiculously formal, we never had. And we couldn't use the word we'd always used for her because it just seemed too painful I s'pose. Yeah, it was curious, it was curious.

Ramona Koval: And you write in a very moving section, you say you couldn't say, 'Mummy' for 65 years and then you wrote it, and there it was on the page.

Michael Frayn: Yeah, it was I think the first time I managed to think it about her in all that time.

Ramona Koval: After this time, you're still a very young boy, you're sort of 12, 13, 14, 15... You know, it's very sad for the reader to look at the way you sort of acted out, I suppose, now. You... I suppose you took it out a bit on your father.

Michael Frayn: Yeah.

Ramona Koval: You were kind of... you weren't doing that well at school. I mean, it's obvious now about why. But you talk about this fantastic experience you had with Mr Brady, the teacher, and what he gave you. Tell us about Mr Brady and what he introduced you to.

Michael Frayn: Well, I was going through a very bad patch at school. It was complications: Because of the death of my mother we'd moved around a lot from school to school and class to class and finally decided the best way to get on with people in the class was to take the mickey out of the teachers, which of course stopped me doing very much work. And then one day, a wonderful teacher in the school called Mr Brady, who I think had no formal teaching qualifications and taught in the most eccentric way by just... He was an Irishman, he sort of, he used to sort of ramble on in the class about whatever came into his head. And he used to read... Well, first of all he used to read my essays out to the class—he'd mark them all 30/30 and read them to the class and that gave me colossal... that was the sort of first thing at school which gave me some self-confidence. And then he would read poems out to the class and although we were a fairly philistine bunch, I can remember the class falling absolutely silent as they listened to him read 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'.

And then one day he read Shelley's 'Ode to a Skylark' and for some reason, that absolutely caught my imagination. And by the time he finished reading it, my whole vision of the world had completely transformed. I realised that it was a totally different place than the place I'd always imagined and [I] started writing poetry, with my great friend at school. We discovered music and poetry together and we, between us we turned out thousands and thousands of lines of poetry, though we were so ignorant we didn't realise that poetry can not only be rhymed—we wouldn't have bothered with rhyme, we were above such things as rhyme—but we didn't realise that the poems that we admired so much by Shelley and others were metrical, we'd had no understanding there was such a thing as metre. But it was really just prose broken up into lines, and when suddenly we did discover there was this possibility of metre in poetry, we were stunned and it did rather slow our production down.

Ramona Koval: Yes, well you say that many years later with your first published book, which was a collection of humorous columns, you dedicated it to Mr Brady and then you discovered...

Michael Frayn: Yeah. The only book I've ever dedicated to anyone was that one to Mr Brady...

Ramona Koval: And you found out where he lived.

Michael Frayn: Yeah I found out where he lived—he'd then retired—and my wife and I took it to him and he and his wife gave us tea and he was extremely nice and charming. He obviously couldn't remember me and he couldn't remember how kind he'd been to me in the past, but there you are. Why should he? Teachers have a great many pupils and a great many of those must be people they help out and perhaps they never do quite take in how big an influence they're having on the lives of their pupils.

Ramona Koval: Do you think that it was because he was giving you 30/30 and maybe he was giving you 30/30... was it partly because he knew you were suffering too?

Michael Frayn: Yeah, I think very probably. I shouldn't think my essays were terribly good, but I suppose I... they were probably, they probably had something. I'd always had some sort of gift for writing, but he did seize upon that and see that was a way of, a way of getting through to me and encouraging me, yeah.

Ramona Koval: On The Book Show here on ABC Radio National you're with Ramona Koval and I'm speaking with Michael Frayn about his memoir, My Father's Fortune.

So all this time that you are discovering poetry, with your friend of course—we should mention Mr Lane, because it was Frayn and Lane, wasn't it? Lane and Frayn.

Michael Frayn: Michael Lane, absolutely, Michael Frayn and Michael Lane. Yeah, I'd completely... It was so close that we became interchangeable; no one could remember which was Michael Lane and which was Michael Frayn.

Ramona Koval: And you describe... It was almost a love affair, wasn't it, with him?

Michael Frayn: It was. It was a sort of, it was a sort of love affair, yes. I managed to embarrass Michael many years later by doing some interview like this and wondering whether it had been a sort of homoerotic affair. I have to say there was absolutely no physical expression of it, possibly because we didn't understand that such things were possible, we were very ignorant. And I talked about that in the interview and by this time he was—also talked about how we'd been communists at school—and by this time he was a senior civil servant in Canada and he was rather embarrassed to have all this brought out and he had some difficulties with his superiors I think.

Ramona Koval: But he sounds like he could take it on the chin, though, surely?

Michael Frayn: Oh he did, absolutely, yes. No, we've remained friends...

Ramona Koval: He couldn't have changed that much from when he was a boy.

Michael Frayn: We've remained friends and he's been very nice about the book and he's... I sent him an early draft to read and he made all kinds of suggestions about it, yeah.

Ramona Koval: Well then what happens as you're developing into a young communist and writer, where is your father in all of this? Does he...?

Michael Frayn: Well, my father... I was a great disappointment to my father. What he really wanted was a sporting son. He wanted... He loved cricket and he wanted, really wanted a son who was a good cricketer. And I was useless. I was absolutely hopeless. I had no interest in it and I couldn't do it. I couldn't hit the ball with the bat; I couldn't catch the ball. So I'd always let him down in that kind of way and then in adolescence I became this terrible intellectual snob, interested in poetry and music. And he must have found me absolutely insufferable. And it was really quite a slow process in late adolescence that we found our way back to each other, that he accepted my tastes for what they were and I began to understand something about him and accept him. And we became, we became quite close. I was extremely, extremely fond of him.

Ramona Koval: You talk about the car being a very important bond between you.

Michael Frayn: Well he was, he used the car for work. I mean, he drove all over South London in the car, really; the car was supplied by the firm. And the car was something he could offer me. He could offer me a lift up to London, or offer to drive me somewhere, or whatever. He actually liked being in the car. He was a very good driver. And then of course he taught me to drive in it. And so that was, that was, you know, a concrete expression of how he could help me in some kind of way. Whether I was being simply, when I was younger, just being a failed cricketer or when later I was being this dreadful intellectual snob, I still needed lifts up to town.

Ramona Koval: Was it also sort of the car as a private space later? Because he got himself involved in other... After your mother died, he sort of coupled up with a couple of other women, didn't he?

Michael Frayn: Um, well he... [Laughs]... It's a slightly odd way of putting it...

Ramona Koval: Yes it is.

Michael Frayn: He's married.

Ramona Koval: Sorry, married, yes, yes, of course.

Michael Frayn: He married another woman, yeah, I think from mixed motives, but I think one of the motives, I see with hindsight, was because it would seem like a solution to the problem of getting my sister and me looked after. It seemed like a good solution, because he married a widow who had longed to have children, couldn't have children, and he was a widower with two children. It seemed like an ideal solution, but it didn't work out terribly well.

Ramona Koval: She may not have longed for those two exact children.

Michael Frayn: [Laughs] Um, no. Certainly not my sister and me—we were quite difficult. But eventually she got on extremely... I get along with her quite well. I mean, as the book makes clear, one of the problems was that she was... well, she's now called bi-polar, I think, manic depressive. And she was really... it was quite difficult. But I got on relatively well with her because I was, by this time I was 15, 16, 17, I was a bit too old to be too deeply affected by it and had a bit of distance, be able to be reasonably independent about it. But my sister had a very intense relationship with her: first of all intensely antagonistic and then intensely close; they got very close and became extremely close friends and then fell out again and became intensely antagonistic again.

Ramona Koval: Well, Michael Frayn, another amazing teacher that you also describe in this book is I suppose what we could call now a spastic language teacher.

Michael Frayn: Yeah. Well, you wouldn't say a 'spastic' now, you would have done then. It's not the term that's used now. But—what's the correct term now? [Cerebral palsy], isn't it?—but I think that's what he was. And he was the most remarkable man, because he taught modern languages and he taught me French and German in the sixth form, in spite of the fact that he couldn't speak clearly, couldn't write properly, couldn't walk...

Ramona Koval: And how did he do it? And how did you learn it?

Michael Frayn: Sheer bloody force of willpower. He was just determined to do it. And he was a colossal lesson in life of what you can overcome and what you can do if you're really absolutely determined to do it. And it wasn't just me he taught, he taught generation after generation of boys in the sixth form and he taught us modern languages and got us through our exams, got us into university, and more than that, got us actually interested in French and German literature.

Ramona Koval: And you went then to be really interested in Russian and became a Russian interpreter via the national service, and translated it from Russian after that.

Michael Frayn: Yes, although my spoken Russian is now terrible.

Ramona Koval: And wrote a novel I think about a Russian interpreter.

Michael Frayn: I wrote a novel called The Russian Interpreter, yes, yes, yes. That was based on a trip to Russia I made as a student, as a civilian student. All the material came... Yup, that was the background to that novel. But, yeah, I've gone on being interested in Russian and, as you say, translating Russian. My spoken Russian is now terrible, but I can still read it well.

Ramona Koval: You come back again and again to this idea of unpaid debts and you use that sort of phrase perhaps three times: 'Another of my unpaid debts.' Tell me how you think about these unpaid debts.

Michael Frayn: Well I suppose probably all children feel that about their parents, don't they, when they think about it. I mean, when you're a child, you take it for granted that you're loved—I mean, if you're lucky enough to be loved, as I certainly was—and you take it for granted that your parents look after you and do things for you. You don't even realise they're making sacrifices for you, putting themselves out, giving up their lives to making sure you've got a good life. And then when you think about it as an adult and you look back, you begin to understand a bit more about this, but often by then it's too late to do much about it. Not always. Some people have parents who live very long lives and have to be looked after in their old age much as children are looked after by their parents, but my mother died when I was a boy and my father died at the age of 70, 30 years ago—is it 30 years ago? No, 40 years ago, 40 years ago. Ah! So I didn't have either the... I wasn't set the task of looking after my parents in old age and I didn't have the opportunity by doing that to repay my debt to them for looking after me. So I do have a sense of unpaid debt, yes.

Ramona Koval: Do you think this is part of the result of writing this, that you have recognised this sense of debt, or you feel as if you might have begun to pay it back by writing about it?

Michael Frayn: Ah, it's a good question. Um, I think I had a sense of debt before I began this book, but working on the book did focus it. Um, a lot of people have said since I wrote the book, 'Well, have you at any rate achieved catharsis by writing this book?' Well, I'd like to claim I have, I'd like to claim a sort of a good purge by writing it—I don't quite feel that. If anything, the book has sort of stirred everything up again, rather than made me feel I've got... Another great modern term is 'closure'; have I had closure from the book. And I don't feel I've had closure. I really feel it's opened up lots of things that I haven't thought about for years, and probably should have thought about.

Ramona Koval: Is it important for you as a writer to have those channels opened up?

Michael Frayn: Important as a writer...? Well, I can't say I've ever thought about it in kind of utilitarian terms. Um, will it sort of help the next book if I do all this? I didn't even think...

Ramona Koval: No, no, no, it wasn't something that you cast ahead, 'Shall I do this for it to help?' It's really on thinking, on reflecting about what the effect of it might... what the effect might be, having done it.

Michael Frayn: I don't know. It's very difficult to know what has an effect on oneself. It's easier to see it in other people. I simply don't know. I'm now writing another book of a completely different sort. There's absolutely no relation to the tone or the content of this one, so it hasn't had any immediate effect in that way, but who knows, in the long term perhaps, yes.

Ramona Koval: When your children read this book, do they understand a bit more about you? Do they say, 'Ah ha!' That's why my father Michael Frayn is like that.'

Michael Frayn: Well, they certainly do. They've been extremely supportive about it and very, very nice about it, and I've had extremely loving messages from all of them about it and been very, very touched. Yeah, so that's been one of... One of the nice things about writing it is partly reaction from my children and also from some of the other people who appear in the book, the few remaining relatives I've got who knew my father.

But I've also had a lot of letters from people I'd never heard of before, who knew my father in life and have written to tell me their memories of him. And they're all affectionate. And I was really extremely touched particularly by one letter I got from someone who'd been in hospital with my father the first time my father was in the hospital with cancer, having a very bad time, having a tumour cut out of his bladder, and he was really very reduced. And I had a letter from someone who'd been in the next bed to him, and he'd been a young man, been a student at the time who was in hospital having his appendix out. And he was a long way from home and he said my father realised that he was missing home and missing his parents, although it was not a very serious operation, and my father kept an eye on him and was... looked after him like a father, in fact. I was extremely touched by that.

Ramona Koval: Mm. Mm. During the memoir, reading the memoir, I could see that part of your novelistic mind was going to, trying to recreate scenes that you might not have been able to do because you weren't there. Or you play with a bit of dialogue, like as if you were writing a play, sometimes, when you try to imagine the conversations.

Michael Frayn: Yeah. Yes.

Ramona Koval: How different has it been writing this from some of the other writing?

Michael Frayn: Well, I've tried—as I've explained in the book—I've tried to be as honest as I can. There's not very much documentation. My father was not a writer or a diplomat or whatever, so there's no great correspondence or set of diaries to draw on. There's some public documents, like birth certificates and census returns, and I've got a lot more out of them than I expected, but mostly I've had to draw on my memories. And it's very, very difficult to know what one really remembers and what one remembers being told, what one remembers remembering, so that the memory has sort of changed in one's own head over the years—extremely difficult, however much one is trying to be honest. And it's also—and I've been talking about this since the book came out, because it's a very live problem—the process of remembering and inventing lie very close together in the mind. When one tells a story, whether one is telling it because one is making it up, consciously making it up, or whether one is telling it because one believes one is remembering it, one is selecting things and putting them together because they make a sort of coherent chain, they make a coherent whole. So, in a sense, a story tells itself.

And there's a wonderful book by Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—I'm sure you know it...

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Michael Frayn: ...and in the introduction to that she says although she has tried to be absolutely as honest as she can, she simply doesn't know quite what she has remembered and quite what she's made up. And I have to say I'm not quite sure where the boundary is in my book.

Ramona Koval: You have the use of your own journals that you kept as a boy, or some of them.

Michael Frayn: Well, occasionally. They're only extremely intermittent. So I've used them where I could, but there wasn't much of them.

Ramona Koval: And how did you feel reading them? What did you think about the young man who wrote them?

Michael Frayn: Well I laughed and laughed and laughed. They are so pompous and self-important [laughs]. I must say I just sat there sometimes almost crying with laughter when I looked at them. When I looked at some of the poetry I wrote at the age of 16, 17, it's extremely [laughs]... It's like watching water vapour floating in front of one's eyes; it didn't have any sort of definite content at all.

Ramona Koval: But you have to start somewhere, don't you, Michael Frayn?

Michael Frayn: You have to start somewhere.

Ramona Koval: Don't be so hard on yourself!

Michael Frayn: [Laughs] Well, no. Hard on myself... It's just rather comic when you look at it. No, as I say in the book, you've got to start somewhere and I think most people, probably, most writers, if they look back at their early writings either wince or cry or laugh, and I mostly laughed at mine. I've mocked, joshed my father quite a lot in this book, and I plainly feel affectionate about him. I think the least I could do is take the piss out of myself a bit as well.

Ramona Koval: Well, tell me about this fortune that your father left you. What did he leave you?

Michael Frayn: Um, he left me... Well, he didn't actually leave me anything, because he never wrote a will [laughs]; it was absolutely not his style to make any kind of arrangements for the future or any kind of... Any of the standard middle class arrangements in life of buying things and owning things and making contracts and wills he never understood at all, so he never made a will. So he didn't actually leave me anything formally. I inherited a few bits and pieces that people have passed on, like the odd watch and things. But what he really left me is a childhood. And till my mother's death, I have to say a happy childhood, and even after that he found... he went in to bat for me, to use a metaphor he would have liked, and although he knew absolutely nothing about education and didn't care about many of the things that schools and universities stood for, he did manage to get me, by his sort of skill as a salesman, into a decent school that got me into a university. And also I inherited some of his characteristics. One of the ways in which he dealt with his deafness was through humour, because if you keep saying funny things, if you make jokes and so forth, you don't really have to listen to the answers. People just laugh, or they don't laugh, and you keep the conversational initiative. And maybe, since I've written a lot of stuff that depends on humour in my life, maybe I acquired some of that from him.

Ramona Koval: Well, Michael Frayn, I'm sure your father would have been very, very proud of you.

Michael Frayn: Well, I think he would have probably had mixed feelings and rather mixed feelings about being joshed in the book, but I feel very proud of him.

Ramona Koval: And Michael Frayn's book is called My Father's Fortune: A Life. It's published by Faber and Faber. And Michael Frayn, it's been very lovely to talk to you again.

Michael Frayn: Very nice to talk to you, Ramona.

Publications

Title: My Father's Fortune

Author: Michael Frayn

Publisher: Faber and Faber