Virtual Daddy

I don’t have a lot of memories of my father. He died of lymphoma in his late forties, when I was eight and, until he became really sick, he had the kind of job that meant he worked…unusual… hours.

My father was a radio announcer and manager of our local ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio station, which meant he would be up well before the crack of dawn to present the Breakfast programme. He was also away for what seemed to be weeks at a time, to other regional stations in country New South Wales for reasons I don’t actually know. All of this resulted in precious little time with our dad, although he tried to make it up to us when he could. I remember getting a bicycle for one of my birthdays, that he had secretly built in his under-house workshop, and I still have a wooden dolls house he made for me. We would go camping on a beach-side block of land that we owned back then, with the intention of one day building a house there. A memorable family story is of our dad bursting out of our tent after an afternoon nap, insisting he was late for his radio shift, forgetting that he was on holidays. I’ve also worked in radio, and that fear of being late is a powerful one!

As a well-trained public broadcasting radio announcer, he had a mellifluous voice and a cultivated BBC accent (required at the time) - it was the 70s, and everyone had to sound as if they had just leapt from their polo pony after tea with the Queen. Every week at school we would turn on the radio to hear a children’s music programme, and my daddy would sometimes introduce it. Where other families made home movies, he often made recordings of his radio work and family life - I have illustrated this story with an audio recording of my bedtime routine when I was clearly very little - you can even hear him putting on my nappy!

His children’s programming would often include BBC recordings of classic children’s books, which brings me to my bedtime stories. As he would go to bed very early, or be away from home (later, he would be in the city receiving treatment for the cancer), he would provide cassettes of audio book recordings, copied from records from work. My strongest memory is having a portable cassette player in my room, and my dad putting on a tape of The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham, a dramatised version. After he died I would go on to perform in a ballet of the book. The very British adventures of Mole and Ratty, Badger and Toad, would lull me to sleep in my Australian room, shared with my older sister, under a massive fig tree.

As the cassettes were originally records, the story would start with the hiss of a needle being dropped into the groove, and be punctuated with pops and crackles so familiar to record lovers. You would try to fall asleep before the tape ran out, because getting out of bed in a freezing cold room to turn then tape over was just too hard.

I have my own daughter now - she is about the same age I was when my dad died, and I am about the same age he was. I read to her every night, sometimes she reads to me, and sometimes I put on audiobooks for her to listen to - the Stephen Fry readings of the Harry Potter books are popular, although it’s not always about what is read, or who is reading. It is sometimes about simply who is there and that there is a story, and that story is a shared one.

While my dad wasn’t always there to read a story, or record a story, his legacy is a love of the recorded voice. Even now I have hundreds of audiobooks on my phone so wherever I am, I have access to a story. And in the night, if I am sad or simply can’t sleep, I tuck my phone onto my shoulder, turn the volume way down so only I can hear it, and put on a book.