This incident caused a long-term rumpus in our family. I’m not sure my mother ever forgave me for it.
I recorded about two-and-a-half minutes of childish nonsense…
…with friend or friends unspecified…
…on Mummy’s Tape.
She only had one tape, bless her, which I inadvertently desecrated that day.
Mummy’s tape comprises some of her favourite tunes and songs, recorded from various sources on the radio, probably over several years in the early to mid 1960s, around the time of my infancy.
Here is a link to the Mummy’s Tape track listing.
Just in case anyone is interested, I have also uploaded Mummy’s Tape in its entirety, within this piece – click here or below:
Mum reckons I carried out the horrendous act of desecration when I was about four.
Here is the offending two-and-a-half minute clip.
The clip itself reveals little. I was clearly very young when I did this – I think mum’s “about four” estimate is about right. We (I am with at least one, I think probably two friends) mostly seem to be making noises to take pleasure in watching the recording level lights on the family Grundig dance.
I guess I had been carefully watching what my parents (mostly daddy) did when they recorded me stories so I could listen in their absence, click here or below for an example of that…
…and I thus worked out how to record through the microphone. A non-trivial matter on a Grundig TK-35 I can tell you.
Mummy never let me live this down. A well-known bearer of minor long-term grudges was my mum…and boy did this grudge come back to haunt me for the rest of her life.
For a start, precious tapes, which meant those that mum (and to some extent dad) treasured were kept in a drawer in the living room cabinet that was out of bounds to me until I was much, much older.
But more importantly, subsequent minor infringements of various kinds (and there were many) were often “bigged up” with reference to the tape desecration incident, e.g.:
“you’ve never paid due respect to my property…do you remember that time you completely ruined my tape?”
Well, of course I did and do remember the incident in the sense that I was regularly reminded of it. But I was very small when the incident occurred and have no recollection of the actual playful episode, in which, presumably, I was showing off to a friend or friends and we played with the equipment for a while…
…two-and-a-half minutes or so to be a little more precise.
All the evidence suggests that there was actus reus for the criminal damage to Mummy’s Tape, but in truth I cannot believe that there was an ounce of mens rea for desecration. I doubt if I had even understood, by that stage, the difference between a blank tape and one that had recordings on it which might, if someone surreptitiously recorded on that tape while no-one was looking, would be permanently interrupted with inappropriate material, for the rest of all time.
Indeed, there is evidence that I took pains to avoid recording over anything – there is about 40 seconds of blank space between the previous recording on the tape and the start of my childish recording – so I guess I did have a careful listen to make sure that I was recording on blank tape, not over-recording anything.
At this juncture readers, especially younger people, might wonder what on earth all the fuss was about. Suffice it to say that editing tapes was an even less trivial matter than recording them in those days, which is why most amateur recordings of that era are diffuse with blips and occasionally lengthy intervals of inappropriate material.
I guess mummy carried on recording her tape and only discovered my childish interruption later, by which time it was, in her terms, too late to rectify the problem.
She could, of course, have recorded any material of her own choosing between two-and-a-half minutes and three-and-a-quarter minutes over the space and my material to reinstate her tape as a continuous one of her preferred music…
…but it was far easier and more fitting, instead, to kvetch or broyges for several decades.
I don’t like to point the finger at anyone else in this sorry tale, but something tells me that Andy Levinson might also have been at the scene of the crime at the time; possibly Fiona also. But only I have suffered a lifetime of guilt and shame as a result of two-and-a-half minutes worth of seemingly harmless, childish fun.
Not bad technical skills on the tape recorder at the age of four though – eh readers? This is, unquestionably, my oldest surviving self-made recording; quite possibly the very first one I ever made.