No outside radio signals can be received in this valley but print does comes in, both the newspapers and magazines, and they whetted our appetite for radio. This led to the setting up of two amateur broadcasting groups one of which uses the rooms above the shop. The first station was in our rival, Gatewell, and that made it even more important that we should have our own station here in Crothal. My former self had seen the advantage of having a Crothal signal, helping them to set up and letting them use the upper floor rent free. That the upstairs was meant to be living quarters and the access is internal might seem to be a disadvantage but it has proved otherwise.
Our facilities are minimal. Our one studio is the largest room upstairs its walls draped with old curtaining for sound absorption. We have no isolated control booth. Any adjusting of the two microphones and the turntable is done at a panel in the studio itself. The evening’s producer is right there in the studio as are those waiting their turn to perform. Silence has to be the rule except in the children’s programs where the younger children can hardly be expected to keep quiet. The producer must communicate with gestures and hasty notes.
Broadcasting hours are 4.30 pm to 10 pm and the programs are entirely amateur. First, the children’s program with various ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts.’ There are always birthday greetings with any littlies present singing, “Arpy arpy ber erf day.”And yes, there’s an Uncle Ralph. The position was definitely not sought. June Opie, our ‘Aunt June’, came down the stairs one afternoon in a panic.
“Can you sing?..Do you know any poetry?..Any stories?………..Well!…………….Can you do anything at all then?….I’ts urgent!” Someone hadn’t turned up.
Maybe I could dredge my memory for some Smokey Dragon. My outside father used to tell Ruth and me Smokey Dragon stories when we were squirts. Smokey hatched from an unrecognized dragon’s egg that we had carelessly thrown into the lounge fire. There in the midst of the fire was a baby dragon happily chewing on one of the glowing coals. Smokey grew, as dragons will, and became big enough to take us on his back in flight. Naturally, we were the heroes of the stories, catching baddies, performing rescues, all that sort of thing, and across the way in that storyland lived a Mr. and Mrs. Nasty who were constantly complaining about Smokey while hatching nefarious schemes to get him for themselves. Naturally, Ruth and I outsmarted them every time.
Now Smokey performed another rescue and he was a hit. I have long since run out of the remembered adventures and been forced to make up my own stories with children in the studio slotted in to take the spotlight. Ruth and I used to prompt Dad with, “Waaaarn daaaay,” thinking that the rest of story must follow automatically once we’d helped with the start. Now children in the studio are grouped around the microphone to give me that same ‘Waaaarn daaaay’ push-off.
There is a downside. Women come up to me on the street.
“You’re Uncle Ralph aren’t you? The one who tells those stories on the radio.”
“Yes.”
“My children just love your stories.” They gush and my inevitable reaction is to blush! Me in my early thirties and I blush! Men don’t blush! And it usually gets worse.
“Your children are lucky to have a father like you.”
“But I don’t have any children.” Why can’t I just say ’thank you’ and leave it at that?
“Well you should have.” Could this be at the prompting of our puppet masters?
I don’t usually hang around for the rest of the program. Local news and stock and produce prices at six followed by a program of phonograph records borrowed from Holroyd’s Music Shop who are given the appropriate plug in return. The rest of the evening is made up of talks on local and wider issues, singers and musicians of varying ability, occasionally a short play. It is a mark of distinction to be heard on the air. Music teachers are keen to have their pupils perform as illustration of their teaching skills. We also have our share of mothers with infant prodigies. Overall, an entertainment of variable quality with the occasional panic and hasty fill-in and yet better than might be expected. We are the woman who, with next to nothing in the larder, manages put a tasty meal on the table.
I am finishing a Smokey story when I find Aunt Fay in my face gesturing that she wants me to stretch the story a bit. She holds up two fingers. ‘Can I give her another two minutes of it?’ And I do. It appears that the two little girls, piano duetists, who were to be next on the program have gone to the bathroom and locked themselves in. Panic probably. The two minutes give Fay enough time to talk their teacher, silently of course, into playing “The Teddy Bears Picnic’ extempore which she does with variations until the infants are prized out. A copy of ‘A Child’s Garden of Verse’ has been thrust into my hand, I am announced, and recite from it while they are being organized at the piano. Another announcement and the program continues as if nothing has happened. We have become real troopers. It is a matter of pride that we have never had a break in the program. Gatewell with better facilities…they are the bigger town…cannot say that.
Our success belongs to our invisible producers, the women who spend their afternoons putting the program together: cajoling the less than eager: who make its running seamless. Their men, committed to the important role of making a dollar, do not have the time. They are women who could organise universal chaos, could manage a buffalo stampede. Maybe our country would be in a better state if they had been running it. But the world is not yet ready for them.
The children’s programs can be announced by a woman, one of the aunts, that is to be expected, but the later, more serious, parts of the program must be announced by a man. That a woman is feeding him exactly what to say and when to say it, is getting performers to the microphone on cue, is keeping everything to time, doesn’t count. The announcer is the face of the station and that face must be a man.
Since the upstairs was originally the living accommodation of the shop owner, the stairway is internal and access is through the shop. That hardly matters. Not here in Crothall. I just ask them to make sure that they shut everything off and make sure that the front door is properly closed when they go.
Actually, I always know exactly what the night’s program is going to be. There is no phone upstairs and the women arranging the program, and there’s always two of them, spend much of the late afternoon monopolising my shop phone to make sure that everything is still on track: that those who promised will be here. They have to be at the shop because that’s where people know to ring. If one has to go upstairs for something, both go. The same is true if one must go to the bathroom, two must go. Two can be with me but not one alone. They are each other’s moral guardian. Crothall is a small town. People talk. Doubtless these women talk about each other when apart. It’s not that I have a reputation. A married woman alone with a single man is something not done.
There is a pool of eleven women and I have come to know them well simply by being part of the scenery. The home-cooking they bring with them goes with the contents of my coffee pot and the desultory conversation. They sit on the spare stools at my bench and I’m right there. It would not do to make any overt move toward friendship, and certainly not to flirt with them, nor for either side to ever admit friendship. And yet we have become friends.
It’s not just the bluffs that confine us. There is also the ‘done’ and the ’not done.’ I have never seen a man here hold his wife’s hand in public. Hardly a scandalous act but it’s just not done.
And I am more than friends with one of the women, Jan Holcroft. Jan and June Wiley are the unlikely team who run our thursday program. They work well together and refuse to work with anyone else. June is blonde and bird-like in movement with nicotine stained fingers and a slight stain in the hair above her forehead. Everyone smokes here. She is a scrawny women who looks as though her skin has shrunk to put her insides under compression. The sinews in her neck stand out so starkly that it upsets me to look at her. I find her entirely unattractive and know that she has only herself to blame but I can’t help feeling for her, worrying about her.
Jan is almost her opposite. A large woman. About two June’s worth. Not overweight but large framed and one of those immensely capable women whom men see as a threat and denigrate. She’s married, of course. The difficulty is that Jan and I relate to each other which is something that we definitely do not need. Something in each of us has spoken to that same something in the other. And! She’s old enough to be my mother. I’m sure that she understands it no more than I do. It’s sort of brother and sister but much much closer. Certainly closer than I was to Ruth my natural sister. Can anything be hidden in this town? June for one must wake to it. The gossip will love it.