Thank you to Laura from Australia, who alerted me to the existence of old Mary Stewart radio plays on YouTube, for Wildfire at Midnight, The Gabriel Hounds and children’s book A Walk in Wolf Wood. Apologies to all but by the time I read Laura’s message, the YouTube links were broken, and despite all my searching, I cannot find A Walk in Wolf Wood anywhere.

You can however listen to glorious old BBC Saturday Night Theatre productions of Wildfire at Midnight and The Gabriel Hounds, via Chesterton Radio. They each come in at just under one and a half hours.

Incredible accents of their time. And I now know from The Gabriel Hounds drama, that Stanhope (Lady Hester’s surname) is pronounced Stannup rather than Stan-hope! (I am consistently hopeless with names of more than one syllable, I still remember feeling deflated years ago while discussing the book I was reading, Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, to discover that I was pronouncing the name wrongly, it is March-banks not Mar-jory-banks…)

It is a pity that the 2020 radio adaptation of Madam, Will You Talk? by the BBC is no longer available, I do hope that there are plans for more of these in the future. At least the BBC Woman’s Hour discussion of the works of Mary Stewart, that took place at the same time as the radio play was released, is still available to listen to or download. As is the BBC Radio Four Last One episode that includes her obituary.