RADIO & EMILY
The bus was empty when it arrived. Emily’s was the first stop. The 7 miles to Towcester took 50 minutes as the bus snaked through the countryside, stopping at every village to pick up more school kids. The return journey felt even longer, by the time she arrived in Weedon Lois, Emily’s legs had welded themselves to the sticky leather seat. It was 1976 and Emily had just turned 15. She’d asked for a radio for her birthday so when she opened her present she had to hide her disappointment. It was a radio, but a 30 year old radio. It had been her father’s. It didn’t have FM and the Bakelite was the same dull red as her school bus. Emily’s dad, sensing her mood, said the radio had served him well. And so it came to serve Emily well. ‘It became quite a friend’, with the isolation that came from living in a small village, the radio gave her solace. At night she listened to Annie Nightingale. A few years later she left home for University St Andrews. Her halls of residence was a cacophony of fancy stereos playing Pink Floyd, Ultravox, Dire Straits and David Bowie. If you listened hard you could just pick out Grinderswitch’s ‘Pickin’ The Blues’ introducing the John Peel show on Emily’s old Murphy radio.
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