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.
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.
Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.
…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.
There are very few dates from the early part of my life for which I can write a dated Ogblog piece.
But family folklore, even from a virtually-sports-free household like my parents’ home, kept the memory of this day alive for me.
My parents had been invited to a “watch the final party” in the street – Woodfield Avenue in Streatham. I suspect it was at the house with the biggest TV and my guess is that would have been the Benjamins at No 36 or the Levinsons at No 42; probably the former.
Goodness only knows what the other parents did with their children, but the party was to be an adults only affair and mum wanted our cleaner, Mrs Nugent, aka Nunu, to babysit for me.
Strangely, Nunu and her family also wanted to watch the final, but they were willing (possibly even keen) to have a toddler – me – with them. So basically I was bundled off to Nunu’s house. I think it was in Tooting.
For reasons that I am unable to fathom, it seems that my hosts, the Nugent family, were not interested in making a fuss of me to their usual level. I tolerated this for a while, but towards the end of the second half of the match I started to seek more Nugent attention than was forthcoming.
I don’t think Ted Nugent was among them, but I might be mistaken
Mr Nugent, perhaps unwisely with the benefit of hindsight, told me that the match would be over any minute and that we would soon indulge in activity more to my taste. At that point everyone was in a good mood. England were leading 2-1.
They thought it was all over…
…but unfortunately for me and for the Nugent family, an inconsiderate West German (named Wolfgang Webber, I now learn) scored a 90th minute goal, levelling the match.
So when someone from the Nugent family broke it to me that the match was not in fact over as scheduled but that there was to be a further 30 minutes of play, to which they wanted to devote their almost undivided attention…
…I am told this did not go down too well with me.
And quite right too. Why can’t these idiots conclude their football matches on time as promised? Daft sport.
Anyway, the rest is history. An hour or so later all was smiles, celebrations and cup presentations.
I never really did reconcile myself with soccer football after that.
But the strange thing is, my preferred sports, cricket and tennis, tend to have matches that last much longer than soccer matches, with score-related, i.e. temporally-indeterminate breaks and endings.
I know that my parents had especially fond memories of this holiday. They had a few holidays overseas together before I was born; this was the first of those.
The photo album is dated October 1958 but dad says on an early part of the Standard 8mm film that it is early November, so I guess the holiday spanned the timeframe set out in the headline.
No doubt they enjoyed their third wedding anniversary on this holiday – [insert your own joke along the lines of “000-errr, leather wedding anniversary” here]. I am posting this on 6 November 2022, which would have been their 67th wedding anniversary, which is quite a number with which to conjure. Star sapphire, apparently.
But I digress
Anyway…
…dad’s 8mm film of that holiday is probably his masterpiece in the matter of such holiday films. It has a full soundtrack with dad’s (Peter’s) voice transferred from the original standard 8 film. It includes many scenes from the Côte d’Azur, including Menton, Nice and Cannes. Also a trip to Grasse.
One highlight is dad (Peter) lighting a cigarette using just a magnifying glass. Another highlight is mum (Renée) showing off her legs. But the real highlight is at the end, where you see their car being driven onto the air ferry – there was a brief period when ferrying your car to France by air was the fashionable way to go! Here and below is a link to that classic vid:
As a child, I loved looking through our holiday pictures and films, including my parents ones from before I was born. The video of this one was my personal favourite.
While some of this was going on, in the spring of 2022, what would have been mum’s hundredth birthday had been and gone.
Within a bundle of papers I dug out while examining the various other stories, I found my mother’s birth certificate. I think it is a somewhat mysterious one.
It appears that my mum’s birth was registered as having occurred on 2 May 1922 on 22 May 1922. It seems that my Grandpa Lew subsequently took the trouble to traipse to the registrar’s office, seek and obtain a dispensation from the Registrar General and thus, some five weeks later, on 26 June 1922, the birth certificate was corrected to 1 May 1922.
This seems to me to be a lot of fuss for a minor correction. What’s in a day?
Perhaps Grandpa Lew thought 1 May to be an especially desirable date of birth. It is Labour Day after all and I know that he (and possibly the immediate family) would have seen that as a significant date for political reasons. Or possibly it was a more simplistic superstition, thinking that the first of the month was auspicious. Or might he simply have spotted it as a mistake and felt honour/duty bound to have an official document corrected.
Almost as mysterious is the fact that my mother was registered with the single, simple forename Renée. There was no precedent in either the Marcus nor my Grandma Beatrice’s family for such a name.
Indeed, I remember as a child there were cousins in the family (Sadie Moliver being one I remember in particular) who were convinced that mum was really named Rene not Renée and insisted on pronouncing her name in the more colloquial, single-e-no-accent manner.
The birth certificate proves that mum really was registered as Renée, but why?
I can only imagine that my grandparents were naming her after a well-known person, much in the manner that certain names crop up these days when a singer, performer or sports personality becomes iconic.
I can only find a couple of Renées who might have been thought of as stars at that time. Renée Adorée has a proliferation of acute accents, in my opinion and certainly looks the part.
Renée Adorée
But I think Renée Adorée’s silent movie fame in the UK would have been limited that early in the 1920s, even if, like Grandpa Lew, you have a couple of nephews, Sid & Harry, in the cinema orchestra business.
A better bet might be Renée Mayer, who had been a child star, a star of stage and was also making it in the silent movies in the UK in the early 1920s.
