I’ve hardly dared switch the radio on over the last few days so blissful has been the quiet engendered by the Ash Crisis.
I’ve hardly dared switch the radio on over the last few days so blissful has been the quiet engendered by the Ash Crisis. The absence of noise is uncanny; this new soundtrack of life so deep, stretching way up into the empty skies. Why spoil it by turning on the radio? Yet an election looms, my sister’s stuck in Sri Lanka and I discover that my mind is just too addicted to grazing on news and ideas, facts and opinions to stop listening.
On Saturday night, Terence Davies, the film-maker, produced his first documentary for radio, Intensive Care (Radio 3), a meditation on his much-loved mother and his struggle to leave home and find his creative voice. It was, like one of his elegiac, magical films, fuelled by memory and lit by love. Davies himself was the narrator.
At first his measured, almost artificial delivery was rather irritating, but gradually his careful knitting together of memories of childhood, the songs his mother used to sing, the poetry of Auden, Sassoon and Betjeman, and an underscape of clocks ticking, children playing, snatches of Stravinsky and Shostakovich, drew me in. His voice acquired a musical quality like listening to a carefully paced recitative.
Davies forces you to slow down, to pay attention to the insignificant, to hear the difference. ‘It is the small things that hold the weight of memory,’ he says, using his script as if it is a camera and he the director, looking down through the lens, each word or phrase creating not just the image within the frame but also what is implied beyond it.
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