A Boy and his Radio by Chris Bardell

I spent three years of my childhood in France. The middle year of those was in a suburban town west of Paris. My change of school during the long summer holidays meant I was in a new place but didn’t know anyone.

My uncle was stationed abroad with the Royal Air Force, and had passed his old radio on to me. This wasn’t a pocket toy, but a proper world-band radio which plugged into the mains. It was badged ‘Crown’, and had a faux-wood speaker grille and a row of chrome push-buttons along the top. Most impressive was its tuning dial, with the promise of a dozen wavebands. I was especially interested in short-wave. I had heard you could receive radio from all over the world on that.

I spent some time tuning the around the various bands, trying to pick up any station at all. But the radio’s telescopic aerial was mediocre. Some stations were crystal-clear, but many were tantalisingly out of reach, just an echo or suspicion of a voice.

My dad explained how I could rig up a primitive dipole antenna – a T-shaped loop of wire – to improve the reception. I wandered off with my pocket money to the electrical shop in town, and bought a length of thin, blue wire. I threaded a big loop around the living room, hooking up a vague T-shape around curtain poles, picture frames, and bookshelves. I stripped off the ends of the wire and wrapped the bare cores around the radio’s aerial, sticking them down with tape.

Revelation! The Crown was now pulling in all sorts of stuff. The BBC’s World Service was always there – I knew that came from the UK, of course. But when I found something far-flung, I would grab the atlas from the bookshelf and look up its country of origin. That became part of the fun – nations I had barely heard of, cities whose names were unfamiliar but exotic-sounding.

I often heard English-language broadcasts from Radio Sofia. I looked it up – Bulgaria! I had heard about that country being ‘behind the Iron Curtain’, but didn’t really know what that meant. I knew vaguely that it was to do with politics, and that politics was something to do with how people organised their countries. But I was only nine years old, and had no real perception of the wider world, the Cold War, or anything like that. What mattered was that I had picked up a station which my atlas proved was a long way away! Anything else was irrelevant and unknowable.

I was learning French at the time, so was able to make some sense of the stations broadcasting strangely-accented French out of former colonial Africa. Another regular was Voice of America – broadcasting out of Germany, naturally. Radio Moscow would turn up every now and again.

I didn’t become a regular listener of these or any other stations, but I did scribble down their frequencies, and would tune in occasionally. The real challenge was finding something I’d never found before. An excited grin would spread across my face whenever I found something interesting or new.

I learned a little about the technicalities of radio reception – how it was affected by the weather and the time of day. I read about how short-wave signals could bounce back down off the ionosphere – the uppermost part of the atmosphere – which meant I could pick up really distant stations if the weather was good around this side of the world. The signals I was listening to might have touched the edge of space! For a boy who idolised astronauts, this was something very special.

In my teens, I discovered my talent for insomnia, and with that, Radio Luxembourg. Rumour had it that they cranked their transmitter up to 1.2 megawatts after midnight, to reach as many British listeners as possible. Even that wasn’t enough for reliable reception in the north-west of the UK, where I then lived. I would listen through an earphone in bed at night, the signal fading in and out every few moments. But the temperamental reception was part of the fun.

After moving south, the North Sea pirate stations were my favourites. Laser 558 and Radio Caroline were based on ships, retro-fitted with enormous antenna masts. Moored just outside territorial waters to avoid government regulation, they offered a taste of high-seas escapism during the dull mid-Eighties. The government even attempted to drive them off the air by stationing a ‘monitoring’ ship nearby, which intercepted any supply vessels. I liked to imagine the swashbuckling lifestyle of the pirates and their conspirators – risking life and limb to bring crates of canned food and booze across the choppy seas by night to avoid detection. Triumphing over adversity, and all under the noses of the government’s hired men! Sadly, Laser hit financial problems, and Caroline was mortally wounded by the great storm of 1987, her huge antenna snapped in half.

It’s thirty or so years since I first started tuning around radio’s hinterlands looking for something interesting. The world has changed, but radio remains a constant. I still love to plug in the headphones of a night-time and scan the airwaves, looking for anything out there – the more obscure or left-field, the better.

Radio’s reach has broadened massively as technology has advanced – thousands of stations broadcast across the internet. But there’s a certain romance only found in spinning a tuning dial and listening intently for a weak signal from another part of the planet.

Dust off that old radio in the attic, or go online and search around. Good radio is still out there, no matter what your tastes – music, talk, sport, whatever. Find something interesting and unexpected, and you too might feel a childish grin spreading across your face. I still do. Listen and discover.

THE END

cb2009