Many of the other collectors he knew were real nostalgia buffs; some were into all things wartime, some still considered the 1950s a kind of golden age. One chap had been in the army, Royal Signals; he’d got into radios that way. Another – a big-time collector who’d turned his house into a virtual museum – had worked for the BBC all his life. Howard was the only one he knew of whose route into vintage wirelesses had been via the music industry. Not that he’d ever been an actual musician, but working for bands was how he’d first learned about audio. Not long after his O levels a lad called Len who he’d known a bit at school had asked him to drive a van for him for a week. He was in a band: some crap name Howard couldn’t even remember any more. Howard had spent six months with them: Harlow, Oxford, Windsor, Basingstoke. He would set up the speakers, ensure the amps and the guitar pedals were working. There wasn’t any money in it, not really, but it was easy, and more than that he enjoyed it, liked walking into a venue carrying the stuff, liked being able to see what went on behind the scenes. Something about belonging: about having a backstage pass, going through a door where others couldn’t. Pathetic, really.
The band split, predictably enough; they owed him money, so Howard had taken the old Morris as payment and gone to work for another lot. By late ’73 he had a decent van and was roadying for a band called Burning Rubber, who had an actual album out and a single that was getting some serious airtime. He could set up in under half an hour if he had to, he knew his way around a lighting rig and he’d learned how to tune guitars, too. He’d loved being on the road, travelling from place to place like some kind of vagabond; but even then he could see that you couldn’t spend your entire life like that. The older roadies he knew were pretty sad, on the whole, with their tics and scars, and the stupid sobriquets they insisted on. Sometimes he’d found himself looking at them and wondering why they hadn’t just . . . you know, got a life.
One night he met Kitty at a gig in Luton, or was it Bedford? It was hard to remember now. She’d been dragged there by a couple of friends; they were giggly, excited about meeting the band. She kept herself apart a bit, seemed to be taking everything in. He’d admired that, for some reason.
They started to go out together; he was proud to have her with him, she was different from the other girls he’d been with. It bothered him a bit that she wasn’t into music; not just the music he liked, but any music at all. But it wasn’t the most important thing in the world – in fact, it was something he’d probably grow out of himself one day, he’d thought, and anyway, no relationship was perfect. The important thing was that she told him there was more to him than roadying, that there were things he could achieve. He was still only twenty-two, and he knew she was right.
Before long he’d chucked the roadying in, found a semi in Wood Green with a big parking apron and Talling’s Vans – later Talent Haulage – was born. Settling down felt right; it was what people did – although for a while he’d considered having a go at lighting, or even sound engineering. He missed having a stake in that world, being a bit different to everyone else. Why it should have mattered he couldn’t really have said.
They got married in 1980, and Chris had come along a year later; once Jenny was born they’d moved to Finchley, where they’d stayed. It was a suburban existence, full of the ordinary pressures and triumphs, but it was a long time before he had stopped following Burning Rubber in the music papers and admitted to himself he was a man who owned a fleet of vans and nothing more.
Then one day, when Chris was still a toddler, he’d bought his first vintage wireless – more by accident than design. He was passing an antiques shop on Essex Road on the way to a pub, and outside on the pavement was a hatstand hung with gas masks, a mannequin in a 1940s dress and, on a chair, an Ekco SH25 with its iconic fretwork grille showing the silhouette of a tree on a riverbank. Incongruously, it was playing ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, and he’d been stopped in his tracks by the contrast between the wartime set and the sixties anthem coming out of it, and the vast gulf – far more than twenty-five years, it seemed – that separated them. He’d paid way over the odds for the radio, he knew now, but it hadn’t seemed like much at the time for a fully functioning slice of history.
When he got it home he’d taken it apart straight away to have a look at how it was wired. It was so simple, so intelligible. He went back to the shop the next day and asked the owner where she had got it. She put him in touch with a restorer in Kentish Town, and not long afterwards he went to his first swap meet. It was a small world, but that just helped make it navigable. He had seen immediately that it was something he could belong to.
Howard made good time, beating the satnav’s estimation by nearly twenty minutes. When he got out of the car jackdaws jinked and quacked above the narrow streets, and the Welsh air, washed by showers, smelled sweet.
He found the old electrical shop with some difficulty; he hadn’t realised that the premises had already been sold, its signage and facade replaced with a new plate-glass window framed in red. Howard wondered what it was going to be: a pizza place? a mobile phone shop? There was no way to tell. Kitty often talked about how towns all looked the same these days, the same shops everywhere. But you couldn’t hold back progress, and anyway, it was what people wanted.
Tinny music filtered out though the door, which had been propped open. The floor had been taken back to bare screed and a man in overalls was replastering one of the walls. Howard knocked on the glass frontage and stepped inside.
Grubby marks on the walls spoke of shelves packed closely together, and without the new plate-glass front it had probably been very dim. Without acknowledging him, the workman yelled ‘Gary! Gaaaaary!’ towards the back of the empty shop. Howard glanced again at his sheet of notepaper before folding it up and returning it to his pocket.
A big man bustled in through a doorway from which the door had been removed and left leaning against a wall. ‘Mr Williams?’ said Howard, taking the initiative and holding out his hand. ‘I’m Howard Talling. I’ve come to take a look at your old radios.’
The man shook his hand warmly. ‘Call me Gary,’ he said. ‘Oh, we’ve got a treat for you here. Follow me.’
Howard rather doubted it, and in any case it didn’t do to look too keen. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he said, following him towards the back of the shop. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up, though. Many of these old sets are quite common.’
‘Oh yes, well, you take a look and tell me what you think.’
Howard had expected a dim stockroom somewhere behind the counter, so when they had gone through the door at the back of the shop he was surprised to be directed upstairs. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Gary said. ‘I’ll be down here, in the kitchen. I’ve got a brew on if you want.’
‘Oh – very kind, but I won’t,’ said Howard, starting up the wooden stairs. ‘It’s all . . . safe up here, I suppose?’
‘Oh yes, quite safe. You’ll be fine.’
The stairs were narrow and dusty and marked here and there with paint. Each tread had a tidemark of old varnish worn away by feet to leave a rough half-moon. At the top was a landing of bare boards with a small lavatory leading off it, and three doors with iron doorknobs. He chose one at random.
The room had free-standing wooden shelves against three walls, one set in front of a sash window which had been painted out. The other wall, still hung with faded floral paper peeling gently from the top, had a chimney breast and a small fireplace with an iron grate. Howard looked around and found the old-fashioned light switch; a bare bulb illuminated the room.
One of the sets of shelves was almost empty, although the pattern of dust showed where objects had been removed. Howard guessed it was where the gramophones and radiograms had been stored. The other two sets were neatly stacked: there were small cardboard boxes of the type once used to hold screws, a wooden crate full of batteries and coils of wire, a cardboard box full of components and perhaps two dozen old radios, a couple still in their original
, flyblown boxes. Already Howard could see a post-war Little Maestro, a blue Dansette Gem and a couple of early-sixties transistors; they were no good to him, but if he could pick them up at a decent price he could probably sell or trade them. And on the next shelf up was the familiar rounded back of what was surely a Philco People’s Set. He got his pocket camera out, switched on the flash and began photographing the shelves. It was important to have a record before he started moving everything around.
He came downstairs an hour later to find Gary watching TV on a laptop in the shop’s kitchen. He closed the lid down when Howard came in.
‘Want to wash up?’
‘Please.’ Howard smiled and made for the sink with its two tin taps and sliver of cracked soap. The water was icy cold.
He dried his hands on his handkerchief and got out his notebook.
‘Well, I told you it was worth the trip, eh?’ said Gary, nodding eagerly at him. Howard consulted his notes more thoroughly than was strictly required. He’d sorted the wirelesses into two groups and made a third pile of parts and other bits and pieces that he could make use of. Most of the sets were so obscure that only a collector would know their market value; three, though, were well known enough that Gary could have an idea of what they were worth. Trying to stiff him on them could be a mistake; he might as well give him a good price and hope to get away with the rest.
‘There are three really good sets up there, as you know,’ he said – this was flattery, plain and simple – ‘the Hastings, the Bush and the Philco. The Hastings isn’t really my period – it’s post-war, of course, but it’s a nice example, so I’ll make an exception. I’ll give you forty for it. The Bush – you see them a fair bit, but the Bakelite’s in good nick so again, I’ll give you forty. The Philco, well, I’m sure you’ve done your homework. I’ll give you a hundred for it.’
Gary looked briefly surprised. ‘So that’s . . . let’s say two hundred, shall we? Now, what about the rest?’
Howard raised an eyebrow, but conceded. ‘The rest, well, not so good. A lot of them are what I call “car boot” wirelesses; you might get a quid or two each for them at a boot sale. And a lot of them are fifties and sixties, which isn’t my period. I was hoping for some solder, but I suppose that’s gone.’
‘Your mate took that,’ said Gary. ‘What about all the parts and the equipment?’
‘I can probably put you on to someone.’
Gary considered for a moment. Work on the shop was clearly moving on apace, something Howard had taken very much into consideration. ‘So you only want the three?’
‘You should take the rest to a boot sale. On a good day, with a following wind, you might get rid of them that way.’
‘Tell you what. Give me three hundred and you can take the lot.’
‘Like I say, Gary, the post-war stuff isn’t really my thing.’
‘Two fifty.’
‘Got a couple of cardboard boxes?’
Driving back Howard could barely believe what he’d pulled off. In the boot of the Audi were eight pre-war wirelesses – all models he’d be happy to have in his collection – plus two slightly damaged cabinets and a box of valves, knobs, capacitors, batteries and other components. There were sixteen more modern radios that he could probably sell or trade – three in their original boxes – two signal generators, an oscilloscope worth a hundred quid on its own, an avometer and a valve tester. On the seat next to him was a cardboard wavelength calculator, some ancient editions of the Radio Times and a couple of old receiving licences. Things like that were worth nothing, of course, but it might be fun to frame them and put them up on the wall of the radio room.
The showers had cleared to leave a warm evening in their wake, and through the windscreen Howard could see a hot-air balloon making the most of the thermals over Babb Hill. Rumour had it that due to some quirk of geography the locals up there sometimes got Radio Moscow coming out of their TVs and radios when the weather was right – although like all such things it was probably a myth.
I’ll get a battery in that Dansette, he thought, and I’ll take it up there one fine, dry night and find out.
Jack was toiling slowly up a path beside the young wheat when he saw Howard’s headlights flash out once as he turned off the Boundway towards the village. The field margins were coming alive around him, and it was the time of day Jack liked best. As the air cooled it was as though the young wheat exhaled, and he could smell the day’s sunshine on its breath.
It made him realise he was hungry: perhaps someone in Lodeshill grew vegetables, he thought, or perhaps the pub left their bin store unlocked. He would sleep in the little wood by the village tonight, he decided, and tomorrow he would visit the farms and find out if the asparagus was ready to pick.
As he reached the top of the rise a church bell began to toll, the old notes rolling out slowly over the darkening landscape. Jack crossed a stile onto a narrow lane that ran between the rectory’s garden and a paddock in which two horses stood as still as statues in the dusk. Ahead, the church spire marked Lodeshill’s position against the sky.
A second note joined the first, increasing in urgency, tolling the living and long-gone villagers in from the fields and farms as it had done for century upon century, gathering them in as night fell. Jack did not want anyone to see him and so he slipped into a quiet garden where he stood bell-struck, eyes closed, feeling the pull of the little church with its porch light and thinking about what it would mean to go in.
After a while the notes became again a single toll, like a passing bell, and then slowed, and stopped. The little village was folded again in silence, and the paths and roads seemed darker than before. Jack lingered until a blackbird scolded him from a magnolia, and when he moved on his face was wet with tears.
St James’s drew a regular congregation of about fifteen, though it swelled quite a lot at Christmas, and a little at Easter, too. But the monthly evensong was a different matter – which seemed a shame to Kitty, as it was by far her favourite service.
That night there were only four other worshippers: the churchwardens Bill Drew and George Jefferies, who rang the bell together; Bill’s wife Jean, who always had some morsel of village gossip for Kitty and would not be dissuaded; and one of the village farmers, a bent man now in his seventies who looked as though he could very well have tied his plough horse to the lychgate outside. They sat together at the front of the darkened church, except the farmer, who always took the rear pew no matter which service he attended.
When the bell’s last note had died away Bill switched the sidelights on and walked up the aisle, turned to them and said, ‘Alleluia. Christ is risen.’ ‘The Lord is risen indeed,’ they replied.
The service was short but had a simplicity that moved Kitty in ways some of the grander church occasions never did. It was a coming together of neighbours as darkness fell, and carried with it a flavour of a time when prayer was much more necessary, life’s dangers being so very great. She looked at the familiar heads around her, bowed in prayer, and wondered what these ordinary village people confided to their God in the silence of their hearts, and what answer they received. Once or twice she had peeked at the folded notes tucked into the prayer board at the back of the church; they were never anything but heartbreaking. ‘Pray for Gladys who has cancer’; ‘Please pray that my son will come home safely’; or, simply, ‘Pray for John’.
Now she thought about her fall in the field – the momentary numbness, the frightening sense that her legs had for a moment actually become absent – and tried to imagine writing such a note herself.
Although she did not believe in God, neither could she remain silent when the Creed was spoken. The lovely words had a resonance far beyond their literal meaning, and if the calm that she received from them was not the peace of Christ, it was enough.
The old farmer could recite each service without reference to a prayer book, and she could hear him now, calmly intoning the third collect from the dim pew behind her in his cracked
country burr:
‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only son, our saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.’
At the close of the service they sang the Te Deum, Bill’s wife giving the first note before their five untrained voices wavered through Britten’s lovely setting. At first Kitty had wondered why they bothered with hymns when the congregation for evensong was so small, but as time went one she’d come to respect the awkward honesty of the few hesitant yet brave voices setting off to do justice to the well-loved tunes, and the way that by the final line they had woven together to carry it to its close in something like triumph.
George Jefferies was in his late seventies and growing too confused and forgetful to lead the services at church. In fact, his duties beyond distributing and collecting up the prayer books were now few; but it was unlikely that he would be relieved of his role of churchwarden, which was not just a duty of his faith but a cornerstone of his life since his wife had passed away. The vicar’s wife called in on him once a week, and it was she and Jean who had arranged his meals on wheels and home help; Christine Hawton had found a local lad to mow his lawn and weed the beds, too.
Like many elderly people, George retained the persona he had presented to the world for his entire adult life – in his case, one of affable jocularity – though the animus that sustained it had shrunk slowly away, so that beyond his habitual friendly greeting he usually had very little to say. Kitty had learned not to push him beyond his capabilities or try to engage him too much in conversation; it was clear, some days, that he wasn’t sure who she was, and on others that, while he was happy enough to greet her by name, his interest in small talk or village happenings had long since receded. So she was surprised when he touched her arm as the little group filed out of the porch and into the soft evening air.
At Hawthorn Time Page 8