Private Passions

Everything else was expected. The ­intensity, the fine poems, the odd ­comments about playing mother as a child ("I used to resent the doll forced on me"), the classy music choices. Then came the AC/DC. "It's an auditory painkiller for me," Frieda Hughes ­told Michael Berkeley on Private Passions (Radio 3, Sunday). Berkeley tried to take it in his stride. "For a girl that arrived on a 250 Suzuki ­motorbike," he said, "I shouldn't, perhaps, have been surprised." There was a dark energy about Hughes that was ­irresistible. She described how she works as a painter – "I'll dance along the canvases with the brushes" – and referred repeatedly to how driven she was as a child to be a great pianist, the best writer, the best artist. ­Mention of her mother, Sylvia, was brief and devastating. She didn't know of her ­suicide until she was 14. Frieda then read one of her poems that mentioned "the bones of all the babies I refused to bear, buried in the back of the mind". It was impossible not to like her. What I enjoyed best was that she switched so hungrily between light and shade. She read out grim lines from her poems, and then described Holst as an everyday ­solace: "I could even do the filing, and not notice some of it".