To this day occasionally when I’m in a pub, I’ll catch a whiff of that combination of the odour of stale beer and damp mortar and I’m back down that old staircase. Jock would consult his pencilled list, then point me towards various crates and ask me to fetch ‘baby’ bottles of tonic or bitter lemon, as he humped the weighty crates of light and brown ale up the stairs. I’ve often counted myself lucky that I was able to enjoy the early knockings of my childhood at a time before Saturday morning children’s television started the profitable business of distracting young people from the world around them.
Mum and I shared a bedroom on the first floor that was directly above the cavernous saloon bar at the front of the building. The bedroom windows looked out over the street with Barking Broadway just to the left. I can dimly recall being awoken by screams, shouting and the smashing of glass on a fairly regular basis, which would usually be followed by a short lull in proceedings before the familiar blare of the approaching police sirens. Then I would stare up at the ceiling bathed in the contrasting orange glow of street illumination and the blue strobe of the police lights. Being short, I mercifully couldn’t get high enough to see down on to the pavement immediately below the window. What I could see was the staggering participants being held up against the street railings for their own good. The real victims of these incidents remained mercifully out of view.
I never found such violent events frightening or disturbing; the most they brought out in me was idle curiosity. The noises were completely foreign to me, so my innocent young mind couldn’t fill in the ghastly images they represented. Conversely I found domestic arguments completely terrifying. My family were unashamed screamers when it came to their own petty rows, which they didn’t seem to mind tearing through with a wide-eyed four-year-old in the room. The legacy of this family quirk is that to this day I find it impossible to handle confrontation directly and tend to react either with glib responses or with incandescent rage. You’ve gotta love genetics.
We shared our room with an impressive wooden radiogram. Ninety per cent of the time I used it to listen to Sterling Holloway retelling the story of The Jungle Book on the Disney LP that we bought after seeing the film. As it was the only album in the bedroom for two years, it got a fair hammering. But eventually even I’d had enough of ‘I’m the King of the Swingers’. And this is how my inquisitive little hands eventually found their way to the tuner.
There are fewer sounds more seductive than the multifarious looping swooshes, crackles, squeaks, hisses and whistles of a radio being tuned in. It’s like a form of music in and of itself. I soon realised that the slower I turned the ridged ivory and gold plastic dial the more stuff I could hear. This was the first place I ever listened to the sound of a foreign voice. Without leaving my bedroom, I opened a door on another world. Overlapping stations would phase in and out with each other depending on their signal strength. You’d slide past a German bloke talking about who knows what, which would slowly give way to the sound of Doris Day or BBC news or the Russian weather forecast. Having no idea what all these strange sounds signified was part of the joy of listening. I would spend ages wandering through this sprawling audio desert up the dial and all the way back down again. None of it had any particular meaning to me, nor did it need to. The simple combination of my own curiosity and funny noises was apparently enough. It’s not a thousand miles from what I call ‘the-box-it-came-in principle’: you buy your child a vast and financially crippling toy and they end up playing with the box it came in. I wasn’t listening to the radio as was intended. I was playing the radio…
Eventually I started occasionally listening to programmes, the news being the most regular daily fare. As a child it seemed to me that the radio carried news, while our telly in the living room seemed to be mainly for wrestling, Thunderbirds, Pogle’s Wood and NASA space missions. So naturally enough I felt myself privy to information that the rest of the family were sadly denied by TV. One broadcast was to provide some much-needed grist to my eager young conversational mill. In March 1967 a supertanker called the Torrey Canyon hit rocks between the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall, spilling over 30 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. It was one of the first real headline-grabbing environmental disasters, and was widely reported on the radio. The coastline of southern England and even the Brittany Coast was devastated.
My young mind was obviously keen to impart this urgent nugget to anyone who would listen. Mum was entertaining one of her friends with tea, biscuits and ‘grown-up talk’ and I was being frozen out of proceedings.
Eventually, when I could contain myself no more I blurted to her friend, ‘Have you heard about the Torrey Canyon disaster? It’s very bad.’
The two adults stared at me in silence for the briefest moment before bursting into fits of laughter. I consider this the sole reason I never moved into current affairs as a career.
At the age of six, we lived in a shack in the scrubby Essex woodland just north of Horndon on the Hill with Bob. It was here where I crystallised the notion that the radio was something that could be listened to for the pure enjoyment of its actual content rather than just the daft noises you could get out of it. This discovery was facilitated by the shack not having any mains electricity, which precluded telly. I listened to the radio because there was little else to do in the morning, or at night. The only outside entertainment coming into the shack was weekly copies of The Beano, Dandy and Victor and the various broadcasts on what Bob delightfully referred to as ‘the wireless’.
It was in this rural idyll that he would sit me down to listen to The Goon Show. These absurd tales with their endless parade of silly voices and effects punctuated by the elegant swing of Ray Ellington and the band or the incredible harmonica of Max Geldray were the soundtrack to my woodland years. No child could fail to be entertained by such madness; even if the majority of the jokes did go soaring over my head, the joy was implicit in the sound. Bob explained to me that he had listened to it as a boy and the shows were actually over ten years old! That seemed incredible to me, that I was listening to something made before I was born.
Despite being born in the television age, 1968 for me was my radio year. In the evening we’d all sit around the radio and just listen. I’m quite glad that I had the chance to experience family evenings in the same way my parents had. On one occasion listening to The Goons, I leaned against one of the supporting beams in the middle of the room in my pyjamas and slid down it to sit on the floor. As I did so, a one-inch splinter of wood buried itself in my back. I remember Bob doing his Eccles voice in an attempt to distract me from my howling as Mum dug the splinter out with the aid of Dettol, hot water and the business end of a safety pin.
During the day the radio was always on, just burbling away in the background. So one of my first solid memories is of Jimmy Young doing his recipes, with the assistance of ‘Raymondo’. There was something almost hypnotic about the timbre of his voice and the repetition of the instructions.
‘Take eight ounces of self-raising flour…’ Then he’d say it again but slower. ‘…That’s eight…ounces…of self-raising flour.’ After he’d told you the ingredients, Raymondo would pipe up with his Pinky and Perky high-pitched voice, ‘And this is what you do…’ I thought Raymondo was hilarious when I was five.
All the while the music of the day was burying itself in my mind, only to surface again decades later when I listened to Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. It’s a really odd feeling to hear something that you haven’t heard in forty years. You feel an uneasy wave of familiarity even though the name of the song and the artist doesn’t ring a bell. The fact that radio was operating on me in this subliminal way, at a time when none of us knew what subliminal meant, has always made me aware of its power as a medium.
We moved back to Barking briefly in 1969. The only reason I am sure of this is that I remember watching Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the Moon from the vantage point of Granddad’s Parker Knoll reclining chair. I was blithely unaware
