In the first of a series of features about the lives of ordinary people during World War II, Piers Plowright describes how radio was everyone’s best friend

THE house was full of voices. Sometimes it was my mother arguing with the landlord in the small Welsh village we’d moved to in 1943 to get away from the bombs. But more often it was the radio: catch phrases from that surreal and liberating comedy series ‘Itma’ (It’s That Man Again) followed by gales of laughter from a live audience released for half-an-hour from the cares of war, solemn upper-class voices telling us (up to a point) what was happening in Europe and Asia, the Radio Doctor with his adenoidal advice on everything from appendicitis to wind, high-brow voices talking about things I couldn’t even pronounce and the treasured voices that brought us into the magic kingdom of radio drama.
I was aged five in 1943, so a lot of the things I think I remember may have been told me afterwards or transposed back by my later self. It doesn’t really matter. Memory, like history, is a selective business and, if I say I remember it, I do.
Let’s take the radio set. I think it was big and brown with the rays of the rising sun cut into its handsome façade and a beige cloth stretched across them. There were lots of lights and a big tuning dial and whoops and tweets and shrieks came out of the radio when you turned it. Mostly we didn’t, leaving it firmly fixed on the Home Service which seemed to have the best voices.
It stood in the dining-room and we were sometimes allowed to listen during meals. Once it saved my life. I was perched on the table, trying to hide my toast crusts in the upside-down china bowl which acted as a light shade, when my mother came in suddenly from the kitchen. Just as the axe was about to fall – wasting food was an almost capital crime – Alvar Liddell interrupted to announce a significant Allied victory and my mother seized my sister and me by the hand and waltzed us round the room.
I couldn’t understand the jokes in Itma but I could see they made my mother happy and I laughed with her. I loved the mysterious incantations usually attached to the sound of a rapidly opened or closed door: “Can I do yer now, sir?” or “It’s bein’ so cheerful as keeps me goin”, and “I’ve arrived and to prove it I’m ’ere”, along with “I don’t mind if I do sir!”
Tommy Handley, Jack Train, Dorothy Summers and Sam Costa became family friends and heroes. So did the BBC Drama Repertory Company. Later I worked with Norman Shelley, Gladys Young, Marjorie Westbury, and Carleton Hobbs and they were just as good as they sounded – though sometimes a bit surprising: Marjorie Westbury, the sexiest of radio heroines was about four foot tall and built like a small cupboard!
When I was hearing them in thrillers, in costume dramas, in fantasy, in cliff-hangers, they too had left London for the safety of Evesham where, Carleton Hobbs told me once, a notice was posted in the green-room which proclaimed: “In the event of an emergency, ladies and gentlemen of the company will please go out into the woods and lie down in pairs.”
Radio was a shrine, an echo-chamber, an aphrodisiac, a life-belt, an enchantress. At no time in its short history had it played a more crucial role. Across the world in Malaya, my future father-in-law was secretly listening to the BBC. Had the Japanese discovered him, he would have been sent to the Burma railway.
In my safe little village I too was listening for some kind of truth.
And there was one afternoon, when danger and sanctuary, war and peace, were brought together by a simple act of radio. I’d been invited to a children's’ beach party which started well but suddenly developed into a fight between me and another boy who had a knife and drew it.
I turned and ran along the sand and up a twisting path, the boy and his knife just behind me. Seeing a gate into a garden, I rushed through and up to the verandah where a group of grown-ups were huddled. “Hhh…elp!” I tried to say. “Sshhhh!” went the grown-ups. It was August 15 1945 and the radio was just announcing the Japanese surrender.
Grown-ups, me, boy with knife, garden, birds, clouds, probably the sea, stood still to listen.