Today is a really big day. That is why I have just finished servicing and polishing my father’s old Ferguson. See how it gleams! Savour how it smells!
Hear how it thunders when I start it up!
I haven’t given my old man’s Ferguson such a seeing to in the 15 years since he died, when I took it from his place and brought it to mine. I should say here (since it has just occurred to me that unlikely pictures may be forming in your mind’s eye), that it is not an old Ferguson tractor, it is an old Ferguson wireless. It was given to my parents as a wedding present in 1935, and a very snazzy present it was; I stress this only because younger readers may think of a wireless, if they even know the word, as a titchy plastic box you clip onto your belt for jogging. They may never have seen a walnut and rosewood number the size and simulacrum of a Sheraton sideboard, standing on four sturdy cabriole legs, with six brass knobs on the front to fine-tune three enormous dials that glow in three different colours to let you know they’re in business, we are Long, Short and Medium, sir, begging your pardon, sir, and we are here to serve you, we await your pleasure, sir, you have only to twiddle. It is a wireless worth getting married for.
And, culturally speaking (which it did), it brought me up. For the first dozen years of my life, much of what I learned and most of what I enjoyed came to me through this huge speaker cunningly fretworked into, for some reason, a spray of roses. Even after 1950, when my old man bought a TV set as big as a wardrobe (whose giant oak doors nevertheless revealed a screen as big as a fag-packet), thereby so filling our little front room with electronic carpentry that only two people could ever watch or listen at a time, the third having to stand in the hall, it was the radio that did the business. Not only did it teach me more of this and that (though not, in those Reithian times, the other) than any schoolteacher ever did, it also entertained me better than anyone I ever knew: it seamlessly graduated me from Uncle Mac and Toytown and Just William and Norman and Henry Bones – subtitled The Boy Detectives, despite the fact that Norman was queenie old Charles Hawtrey and Henry was matronly old Marjorie Westbury, a weekly Radio Times revelation that not only never bothered me at all, but probably did much to explain the infinitely elastic unbigotry for which I am a byword today – to Take It From Here and The Goon Show and Ray’s A Laugh and Hancock’s Half-Hour and all the myriad other comic masterpieces from the Golden Age of Ears.
I look at the Ferguson now, and I hear it then. See these three dials? Clock not only all the poignantly yesteryear Anglophone stations, Hilversum and Daventry, Allouis and Athlone, and, yes, Valetta and Cairo – there is a map of the world on the back of the set, faded now but still half pink where once it was half red – but also Oslo and Ankara and Prague and Paris and Breslau and many a polyglottal dozen more. Oft in the stilly night, I used to creep past the door rattling in concert with my old man’s nostrils, and pad downstairs, and switch the Ferguson on, and wait while the dials began slowly to glow and the valves to hum and the speaker to whistle as I spun the dial in search of microphones a thousand crackling miles across the night. I learnt a lot of French that way, and doubtless no small smattering, now sadly lost, of Lapp and Urdu.
It was, of course, only mine exclusively in the wee small hours: in the huge large ones, it served all three of us. Sometimes in pairs: since it took two people to move it so that my mother would have room to put up the ironing-board, I would occasionally hang around to listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary; tricky for her, because, though she enjoyed having me there, the script would from time to time daringly offer a mildly gynaecological moment, and my mother dreaded questions. Care for another pairing? Me sitting with my old man as the football results came in and he checked his pools coupon, not because I chose to but because my mother knew if I was there he wouldn’t swear.
But the proper pairing for today is one I didn’t join. It was just them. You know why today is a really big day? Because it is Neville Chamberlain’s birthday. If he were alive today he’d be 134, and people would pay good money to look at him, but when he was 70, what people did was listen to him. And it was on this Ferguson that he told my parents that no such undertaking had been received and in consequence this country was at war. Which is why I have fettled it. I rather fear it is time to switch it on again.