Childhood Room

Childhood Room (Re Write) Radio Times

Radio Times.

It was not that late , I was huddled up in my bottom bunk , covers , quilt pulled up tight up over my head. One ear on the pillow and a small creamed coloured ear piece in the other. This time was my time , just the warmth of my bed and my little blue , battery driven , manually tuned radio. This radio was my window on the world. A world that could not be manipulated, a world that conjured up image after imagined image, filling my head with visions of the world. Introducing my young self to culture, language and all the different jarrahs of music. I have brought the radio from an old Electrical appliance shop in Lowestoft. I had saved up the £10 over a year, birthday money , pocket money, corona bottle money. Corona bottles were a brilliant way to find money. Three pence per bottle retrieved and returned to the newsagents. I would scrawler the building sites around our house, especially in the summer. The builders plasterers, carpenters, roofers would all discard the empty bottles. Three pence not much for an empty bottle for them, to me it all added up and helped to make my first large purchase.

Nearly all of my money went into my radio fund. But I still had mustard sweets and sneezing power to buy. The day I walked into the shop and came out with my blue Japanese transistor radio is still one of my most favourite childhood memories. I had had to wait a fair few months. Trips to the coast to see my Grandparents we rare. Once a year. In the seventies Hight Street South in Lowestoft was a busy thriving street. Long before the big supermarkets took control of the shopping. Each shop would sell just a few items, but you could walk down one side and back up the other gathering all you needed for the day ahead. Everyday would start with a trip to the shops. The shop I was going to visit had been in the same place since the second world war.

It would hire out televisions, sell alarm clocks, hoovers, even electric knifes ! The front of the shop had small mental mesh a quarter up the front display window. Like a jewellery shop. Large plastic stickers were stuck on the inside advertising top brands, Yamaha, Sony, Toshiba and the inventors of radio Marconi. I would peer in through the mental mesh eyeing up the display items. This was where I first saw the radio I was going to buy a year later. The thrill of walking in that shop, the smell of the electrically equipment filled my nose, everything looked large, televisions on mental stands, their bright reflective twenty two inch screens, dark wood stained cabinets, stood scattered around the shop. Music centres, long and slender, cassette deck, record player, with a long radio dial. Plastic lids left half opened that gave these entertainment centres a mystical air, alongside the price. Much more than I could have ever saved up. But state of the art for the seventies. The radio I had come to buy with a pocket full of change was stacked behind the counter in a bright blue and white cardboard. The shopkeeper reached over and took the box of a pile of other neatly stacked radios, placed in it a brown paper bag. After counting out the money I had turned out onto the wooden counter, sliding each coin off the edge whilst counting invisibly in his head, lips slightly moving as the coins fell into his spare hand. After what had seemed like hours, and hoping that I had counted right myself, the shopkeeper smiled and handed me the bag containing my radio, his brown over coat riding up at the sleeve exposing his white cuff, as he reached across and down into my waiting hands. Tightly tucked away from view I exited the shop through the heavy front door, not looking back. This moment had taken me a year. A year of collecting bottles, saving my pennies and going without to achieve. I was going to treasure my prize. Opening the box the radio was tightly wrapped in plastic. The smell of the new electrical radio, then discovering the cream coloured ear piece , total joy. The radio it's self was small, the size of a packet of crisps. One inch thick, a slide off panel in the back for batteries. Sky blue in colour, a dial that you had to rotate with your thumb on the side wheel to tune it in. This was difficult because you needed to be precise. A telescopic aerial for 'FM' reception folded neatly into the top. My life long love of radio started that moment. My music would come live from radio Caroline, or Radio Luxemburg. Mainly popular chart music but I did listen to the world service, radio three, classical, and radio four. All broadcasted by the BBC. But Radio one and radio two had me tuned in most of the time.

The pop chart countdown on a Sunday evening between five pm till seven pm. Alan Freeman, Toney Blackburn two of the amazing disc jockeys that become very influential on my later life, when I went to work myself as a disc jockey on radio Caroline anchored in the North sea.

Football was my first love though.

My favourite the day had to be a Tuesday or maybe on the odd occasion a Wednesday. I'm sure my parents thought I was being really good, getting to bed early for school the next day, but the truth was I wanted to listen to the football commentary on radio two ! Back in the early seventies the evening kick off time would be at seven thirty, only broadcast on radio or 'Sports night' if you could stay up until eleven the same evening to watch recorded highlight's. No video, or even repeats, just the one chance to see the latest action from division one of the football league. Or the F.A cup. Nothing else was televised until regional television came around with a Sunday highlight show a few years later. So here I was tacked up under the covers listening to the match from the Victoria Ground Stoke on my radio. Arsenal had drawn Stoke in the quarter finals of the F.A Cup. Playing for Arsenal, Pat Rice, Bob Wilson, George Graham, George Armstrong. I will not go on though I still can name every player who played for Arsenal Football team during the 1970's. The game was transformed by radio. I remember it was a foggy night, I could see in my minds eye the floodlights being caught in the gloomy atmosphere as the smell of the pitch being kicked up mixed with a thousand cigarettes being smoked by the crowd. Radio brings you everything and to this day I still prefer listening to football than watching it. I can not remember the result , though I do remember Stoke winning, after extra time Alan Hudson scored for Stoke that night and ironically he was to go on and sign for Arsenal the following season. That little blue radio brought me many more moments like those. I would listen to Brian Johnston, bringing the Test cricket alive in my ear piece whilst at school. I would hide the ear piece down my sleeve and behind my rather long seventies style hair, with the main body of the radio tucked neatly between the top of my trousers and the snake belt that held them up. I was always very careful not to get caught, I would know which teachers not to push, waiting for 'play time' to catch up on the cricket score from Lords, or Old Trafford if lessons did not allow.

Radio paints the pictures in your mind. My early days were made for me by the experiences I had listening alone to the broadcasters of the day. From world history, to Slade, anything that mattered in my life was on my radio. No one would ever take that radio away from me.