Misty frequencies: the radio soundtrack of my life

This is one of a series of essays commissioned to commemorate RNZ's 100 years on air in Aotearoa.

These days our father would have been called a ‘geek’. In the 1950s however, he was just another mild-mannered bloke tinkering with machinery in his dingy workshop under the house.

During the war Dad signed up for the NZ Air Force. He dreamed of becoming a flying ace like the legendary RAF hero Captain Douglas ‘Tin Legs’ Bader. Alas, poor eyesight let him down, so he trained as a radio operator on a Lancaster bomber at Wigram.

Lucky for us he missed the actual combat. His only war wound came from falling off his bicycle on his way to visit our mother, who had fled her forestry camp upbringing in the Catlins and was working behind the counter in a cake shop near the base. Dad was a humble man, too shy to ask her out, but she became suspicious when he turned up everyday for a custard square. She had dreamed of romance with local hero, Charles Upham (VC and Bar) but she eventually accepted this was highly unlikely and besides, she liked the way the shy custard square bloke looked in his uniform.

After they married Dad earned his electrical engineering ticket and started working at Post and Telegraph in Wellington, a job he enjoyed for his entire working life.

I’m no psychologist but I know Dad had endured what these days is called ‘a dysfunctional childhood’. I reckon that machines offered the certainty he craved. When he wasn’t at work, he spent most of his time under the house, exploring the magic of valve radios, crystal sets and short wave. Long after we had gone to bed we would hear disembodied voices seeping up through the floor boards, snatches of foreign language woven through eerie theremin swoops and storms of static.

It wasn’t long before Dad’s affinity with technology became common knowledge among our neighbours. Soon there was an endless stream of visitors coming through the garden gate and down the side of the house to the basement, bearing all kinds of broken electrical goods; toasters and vacuum cleaners, hair dryers and lawn mowers for Dad to fix. My personal favourite was the cute guy from up the road with a quiff and an electric guitar. It was a new one for Dad but an hour or so later, lingering hopefully, I heard the distinctive refrain of Apache seeping up through the floor boards.

Remember there was no cheap imports back then and stuff had to last so Dad was kept busy. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a good dad, even if his idea of family fun was to get us all to hold hands and then run an electrical charge through us – not enough to do much more than tickle but probably a cause for child abuse accusations these days. He helped my brother build a crystal set radio and then later a two-transistor radio in a chocolate box lid, when solid state electronics were becoming more common. Both of these were too weak to power a speaker so they listened to them together on a shared earphone.

In the 1950s and 60s radio ruled. Kiwis were still suffering from ‘the tyranny of distance’and people used to hang out at the wharves, just to watch ships come in over the misty horizon for proof there was another world out there. There was no TV. World news was something you watched at the cinema once a week between the cartoons and the feature. Magazines and vinyl records could take months to arrive. Radio was our main link to the outside world, penetrating our physical isolation.

Not satisfied with one outlet, Dad eventually wired up the entire house so that we could enjoy the radio experience in every room. 

Our first valve radio was a serious piece of furniture; a cathedral-shaped art deco beauty of elegant, burnished curves and exquisite veneers. It glowed like an altar in the corner of the living room. On Sunday mornings, when the children’s stories were on, I would put my face up against the gold baize covered speaker to feel Tubby the Tuba, Peter and the Wolf, the Little Engine That Could and The Ugly Duckling vibrating right through me from its mysterious depths.

The radio was always turned off during tea as respect for my mother’s labour over a hot stove but when the dishes had been done, we would gathertogether in the living room for a shared auditory experience. The good thing about radio was that you could do other things while it was on and so you would have Dad helping my brother to build a Spitfire out of balsa wood, Mum ironing endless piles of laundry, my sister flipping through movie magazines and me drawing anatomically correct horses with butterfly wings, while Reginald Bosanquet read the news from London in his dulcet tones. 

As a family we favoured comedy and lucky for us it was the Golden Age, a cornucopia of canned laughter and posh accents winging their way across the ocean via the BBC World Service. Hancock’s Half Hour, Life with the Lyons, Beyond our Ken, Flanders and Swan, and of course the manic absurdity of the Goons. My personal favourite was My Word, a simple panel format where Frank Muir and Denis Norton wove elaborate shaggy dog stories out of simple phrases, displaying a dazzling ability for word play – “and then suddenly out bored motor!” Unfortunately, I can only remember the punch lines.

In those days radio programming represented a rather conservative and narrow understanding of New Zealand society. With virtually zero unemployment, dads were presumably at work in the morning, so mums were provided with motivational programmes “Good morning, good morning, good morning…” designed to enhance their ability to be excellent homemakers, even as they mopped and scoured. Later, when they had sunk down exhausted on the sofa, they could lift their spirits with the torrid adventures of Portia Faces Life. These limited options, however created a sense of community and shared experience. Doctor Turbott (fresh from suppressing the Mau Mau Rebellion) ensured that doctors’ waiting rooms werefilled with worried folks, convinced they had the symptoms he had vividly described in his Malady of the Week. Before Lotto, Selwyn Toogood gave us hope that we might rise above the multitude, like the folks who lived in the flash house up on the hill at the end of the road. On Saturday afternoons, in our rented house teetering high above the city, we could experience the strange stereo effect of Winston McCarthy commentating the rugby from the Basin Reserve while the actual roar of the crowd rose up from the valley below.

Although it was not long enough after the war for many New Zealanders to embrace the Japanese revival, Dad was fascinated by the surge in technological productivity that followed the US occupation. “They’ve taken all the stuff we threw at them and fashioned it into clever things to sell back to us.” Not to be outdone, he built a radiogram from the circuit boards up in the early 1960s. It was mono, but he futureproofed it by having an extra speaker mount for when stereo came along. It had high quality components for playing records and listening to radio. What was impressive was that he not only assembled the electronics, but he also built the polished mahogany cabinetry.

For a while there our family fun was to sit around the dark while he demonstrated the power and depth of the speakers through re-runs of musicals like South Pacific and Oklahoma, courtesy of his membership in the HMV Record Club.

Those halcyon days came to an end in 1964 when television finally arrived in New Zealand. We experienced the strange phenomenon of passing shadowy figures, clad in thick over coats and scarves, huddled in the cold outside downtown appliance stores for a glimpse of Bonanza or the Avengers through the windows.

Yet while our neighbours soon sat around awestruck in their own darkened lounges, Dad set about building our set from the circuit boards up. No transistors, all valves in those days. It was an educational experience for my 12-year-old brother, who helped to assemble the chassis the circuitry sat on. It went for months with bits spread out across the kitchen table as Dad calibrated and tested it and my sister and I moaned and sighed, pining for the sight of Diana Rigg in her white vinyl coat and boots. Building the bloody thing took so long in fact that it felt as momentous as the moon landing when Dad first tuned in the dialogue from an old film being broadcast on TVNZ. The ghostly rolling images followed and we were instantly hooked – bravo Daddy – but then we would be just getting into something and he would notice aminor flicker on the screen and rush over to shut it down and dismantle the bloody thing, right there on the shag pile.

TV signalled the end of family life as we knew it. Or so our mother predicted with uncharacteristic vehemence, hovering in the doorway to where we sat in the dark like blue-lit, bog-eyed ghosts involved in a satanic ritual. She was right of course but little did she know how bad things would get.

Fortunately for me (and the other post-war babies) portable transistor radios appeared in New Zealand about the same time as we developed a teenager’s craving for privacy. Once Dad had shown me how to fashion an antenna from a wire wrapped around the casement stay I retreated to the sanctuary of my bedroom to lose myself in the music shows that promised adventure, freedom and mayhem elsewhere.

The English actor Rupert Everett put it well when he said that, ‘there is a tipping point in the life of an exile…when the place you were desperate to flee from becomes a romantic memory'. I was a slow learner but eventually, after many years of being bombarded with three hundred channels and nothing on, as Bruce Springsteen once described American cable television, I finally discovered the subdued cadences of Radio New Zealand filtered through the expanse of distance and time, penetrating the cacophony from 3000 miles away.

Who would have thought that the price of wool, the racing commentary, the daily bird, snow on the desert road but otherwise fine, Po KarekareAna and Country Life would become the siren song finally luring me home?

Only to discover the virtues I had boasted of during my exile concerning my island paradise had not been immune to the creeping stain of consumerism and globalisation. Post and Telegraph was no more, along with a big chunk of the welfare state, most of the decent society and any notion of a fair go for the average bloke. Yeah, but at least you can get a decent cup of coffee on Ponsonby Road, people were quick to console me.

Luckily, Mum and Dad had passed on by then and their wish not to make a mark on the earth ensured they would not both be revolving in their graves. But for me, life had made a full circle and once again radio had become my sanctuary. Shunning the plethora of blustering talkback hosts, the homogenised playlists, there, near the top of the dial I found RNZ, seriously under-funded and under threat but still valiantly shoring us up against the tsunami of globalised media, still celebrating the diversity of our unique national identity, still a bastion of resistance in an increasingly commodified media landscape.

“What have you got there?” I heard my father say, as I downloaded the app for RNZ to my phone. He adjusted his spectacles and squinted over the miniaturised parts he had dismantled on the kitchen table. “Well, I never! So that’s what they meant by vertical integration!” He examined each of its elegant, perfect components with whistles of admiration, with no hope of ever putting it back together again.

Susy Pointon is a writer and filmmaker living in the Hokianga.