Listen with mother | 22 June 2017

This week’s column is dedicated to my mother who loved her radio and encouraged us to be listeners. Without her, I would not be qualified to do this. My earliest memories are of sitting under the table while my mother sewed and the theme tune of Listen with Mother echoed through the house. The radio, an old valve model which took a while to get going and whose half-moon dial promised to send us signals from Lahti and Motala as well as Reykj’vik and Kief, was switched on not all the time, that would have inured us to its pleasures, but on and off for a regular sequence of programmes, day by day. We read, of course we read, but it was radio that really lit up my imagination, stories of Roman soldiers transplanted to Northumberland, of the robin singing in a secret walled garden and the strange world that sickly Tom entered after the midnight bell had tolled.