valve radio
(3,300 words)

The Valve Radio: long extracts from this monologue were broadcast in April 2002 on BBC Radio Scotland's 'Still Lives' programme (producer: Anna Magnusson)

On my study shelf sits an old, wooden, valve radio. It dates back to the 1950's, to the time before I was born. My parents bought it in Hull, where they lived for some years after they had arrived from Pakistan by ship in the spring of 1955. The radio does resemble a ship's radio, with its dark glass face and its textile loudspeaker cover, its four knobs in black bakelite and its twisting, bronze wire aerial. Its cherry-wood body is redolent of a certain kind of domesticity which persisted through the 1960's, but which already was eroding as portable, battery-operated 'transistors' replaced the heavily-wired pieces of furniture which valve radios were. So in some respects, by the time I came to know this object, it was no longer cutting-edge technology and had come to seem slightly archaic, a bit like the familial memories and occasional possessions which my parents had brought with them from the old country. I'm keen to avoid the post-modern pot-hole of nostalgia, of shallow cataloguing, of bogus knowledge. The importance of the valve-radio to me as a person and as a writer, is not rooted in nostalgia for a vanished childhood, but in the constant, unsettling sense I carry with me of the possibility of creation from silence.

Picture the black plastic On-Off knob on a valve-radio being turned through clicks. Feel the machine come alive. Valves are like people; they take a little while to warm up and glow and so when you switch on the radio, it's almost like waking up in the morning or else, paradoxically, like the pleasant slippage from tiredness into dream! You're emerging from the darkness of silence, of mundanity, into a world of graduated light and sound. I love the gentle hum which the electricity makes as it fires through the tungsten; it is as though the machine possesses a heart and circulation and by extension, a brain and a soul. Like Frankenstein's monster, perhaps the soul of a machine derives, firstly, from the hands that built it and then later, from those who, over the years, operate its mechanism. It was built in Cambridge by a company called 'PYE' and it has the ubiquitous seal of Empire, 'Made in England' emblazoned across its frontage. Yet it was owned and used by me, by my family, my brothers and sisters and parents. The portable transistor radios, with their poor short-wave reception, were very much workaday machines geared-up mainly for MW and VHF. They ruled the sitting-room and kitchen, but this older, valve radio always sat on my parents' bedside cabinet.

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Back then, in Paisley, we would listen most often either first thing in the morning (especially on Saturdays and Sundays) or else last thing at night. Either alone, or with the rest of the family, I would sit on the floor, my back against the cold metal frame of the sprung bed, the slightly stale smell of the threadbare carpet rising up my nostrils and would listen avidly to the sounds coming from above; the voices, the music which emanated from the grey-brown loudspeaker. Pale amber light from the streetlamps filtered through the layers of curtains which covered the windows. Behind the radio-glass, the light shone steadily in primary green and red; unlike the later, techno-manic need for juddering movement, this machine had poise and it acted as a magnet, not in the all-consuming sense of a TV set, but more like a fire-hearth in the middle of a cold, Scottish winter. As a young child, you exist very close to the ground. You notice minute changes in the state of the soil or the road. You do not edit the panoply of sensation and you attribute all invisible voices to your parents. To someone who recently had moved north from dry, east-coast Hull, the pungent smell of freshly-fallen rain on tarmac seemed a specifically Scottish sensation.

All these years on, when I close my eyes, I can still see the sound of the valve radio, I can still feel its warmth against my tee-shirted forearms. The scent of my mother's perfume, the sound of her voice, coming over the airwaves, in Urdu or English or Farsi. Words, the sounds of which I understand even if I do not comprehend their meanings. Still today, at night, you can pick up short-wave bands from all over Eurasia and from North Africa too. I love the way you can twiddle the knob and discover, say, an Arabian station broadcasting Middle Eastern pop or classical music and then, out of the blue, your world is invaded by some wheeling news broadcast from Helsinki and then, moments later, back comes the gentle sound of the Arabic ud or the mellifluous tones of Om Qulsum, the veteran chanteuse of the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian axis. And I suppose that's what we're talking about here; the interplay of various aspects, different voices, of world civilisation, and radio is all voice; through it, even the inanimate lute can be heard. You see, I do not believe in boundaries on maps, either on paper, through the air or in the mind. Consciousness is continuous, pantheistic. I have lived always in this continuum and sometimes I have suffered for it. It took me years as an adult to get back to where I once belonged, to that state of childhood where my understanding of this was immanent. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why while television, with its oddly-static iconisation of the image, has suited so aptly the purposes of oppressors, whereas radio has tended to be the medium of subversion, of movement and subtle questioning, whether from within, or outwith, the 'borders' of one's 'own' nation-state.

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Tuning, through my wooden radio, to the worlds beyond my head, paradoxically is an act of exploring my own genetic memory. My family were from Pakistan and before that, from India's 'Taj Mahal city' of Agra and on my mother's side, from Kabul, Kandahar and Herat where my ancestor, Ahmed Shah Abdali, founded the state of Afghanistan in the C18th. Before that… who knows? There's a family legend that the Indian part of the clan migrated, some thousand years ago or more, from somewhere in the Arabian peninsula. It's a romantic notion, but I have learned not to disparage oral histories; again and again, the evidence has demonstrated that oral memories alter less over time than written, and suffer less from the ramifications of Trotsky's famous dictum about 'history being written by the victors'. One day, perhaps, I will journey physically back into myself and into those lands and peoples from which my ancestors were derived in a novelistic quest for - what, exactly? It is not merely a search for self-definition, though that is part of it. The act of spinning through the world's voices is a seeking out of rootedness, of a sense of connection. This desperate need to communicate with someone, anyone, is the basis of why I write. I want to move people, to make them think, I want to engage them with characters and ideas for which I am a conduit, a receiver. And then, I want them to construct worlds in their heads, miniature universes strung together in almost Kabbalistical fashion, with nothing more than words, voice, breath. As a writer, I am a magpie, a jack, a dilettante, a master of nothing. The eleven dimensions of the multiverse are my compass and yet, at the centre of this vast machine, as the mediaeval Persian poet, Farid ud-din Attar wrote, lies 'a pearl which cannot be pierced'. Through my old valve radio, my blown glass mind, I am searching for unbreakable pearls. Like a pilgrim, I am writing towards the core of all tales which might also be the centre of myself, for that which I am, I cannot hold, it slips through my fingers like sand, like breath. Recently, while researching a C12th Persian Sufi poem, I discovered that the name, 'Margaret' comes from the Persian word for 'pearl'. I doubt whether very many Margarets are aware of this origin of their 'Christian' name, but it is a fact that in Scotland, 'Pearl' is a commonly-used nickname for Margaret - another example of voices living on where the rational, the written, has long faded away. As a writer who is at base a poet, a shaman, it is this stuff of humanity that intrigues me and it is as likely to be found in the random spin of a radio dial as in a thousand-page tome.

Back to my box of voices. Apart from long and medium-wavelengths, there are two short-wave bands and then four other bands; one of these being labelled, in billiard-green letters, 'Maritime'. Even the word seems archaic and brings to mind the scent of freshly-starched, summer naval cotton and that strangely mythic period in the mid-Twentieth Century when Britain, through rapidly divesting itself of a millstone empire, somehow seemed poised on the brink of a new, white-heat, techno-nationhood. Optimism was the order of the first two-and-a-half postwar decades, particularly if you were young and had progressive views. Peoples around the globe were freeing themselves from oppression and there was an excitement, a frisson, which communicated itself even to a young child living in an industrial town in rainy Scotland. The perfect, lilting English of stations from the USSR and China provided alternative views. Like their Western broadcast opponents, they wanted to communicate a sense of happiness and success and so the voices would be pitched a tone or two higher than normal conversational frequency and they would seem always to be on the brink of breaking into song. It was the stuff of dreams. Where were those places with strange names? Schwartz, Horby, Lopik, Hilversum, Kalundberg, Athlone, Motala, Lahti, M. Ceneri, A.F.N., Sundswall, Vigra, Muhla'ker, Rennes… they sound like extracts from an Esperanto dictionary, or a Conrad novel, perhaps. More abstractly, where was 'Light', or 'Third', or 'West'? Where was 'Home'?

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At that time, Alba seemed still to be dwelling in the 1950's, in terms of both the way people looked and acted and the dominant sense of greyness. The men all appeared to be around fifty years old and the women had utilitarian, WW2 hairstyles. Everyone wore slightly mis-shapen, dark green clothes and the sky, the air, the trees were always autumn. Only the voices carried singularity, yet even they bore a sense of oppressiveness; it was strange kind of alienation which I felt as I clung tenaciously to my English accent, as subconsciously I modelled the way I spoke on the voices coming out of the radio. On one level, I did not want to fit in, I wanted to sharpen my awareness of difference. The valve radio developed my sense of the intense, hermetic privacy of childhood. I would rather have been alone with a book than playing with friends who seemed at best, provisional. The realities of 60's and 70's Scotland was one of raw racism; being horribly insulted on an almost daily basis, for a decade or more - my formative years. This was the era of skinheads, the ascendant National Front and that highly-educated yet dangerously demagogic politician, Enoch Powell. This cold Purgatory in which I was an outsider drove me into private worlds where I played all the characters and could control the flow of events and love. The valve radio gave me an aural sense of being transported elsewhere. Yes, it was an escape. When I glued my ear to its loudspeaker and pressed my youthful eye right up against its hard, black glass, I felt there was a world which danced like the flame of a candle in alabaster and that this world was not parochial Glasgow. It was a world where black and brown people could be more than bus-drivers and visiting doctors who had become humbled by their unspoken yet cast-iron state of guest-hood. I half-expected, by some cosmic inversion, to pick up, from some long-defunct station, the voices of the dead.

My elder siblings used to listen to the valve-radio a lot, only like many of their peers, they were tuned, not to Radio 4, but to the pirate-ship stations like Radio Caroline and then, after 1967, to Radio One. The house became filled with the strains of psychedelic pop and rock music which merged with the Indian film-songs that my father had recorded on a reel-to-reel tape machine (also valve-powered). My parents were from that generation which had invested emotionally, politically and psychologically in the mid-C20th rationalist dream. This was the zeigeist which produced King, Guevara and an army of scientific meritocrats who believed in the power to change humanity through education, dialectical argument and progress. My elder brother and sister were never hippies, but for them, television and music and the laziness of moderate opulence tempered their actions, their world-view. We lived in a cul-de-sac loop built in the late 1920s, in an area of Renfrewshire which at that time, lay between towns in a kind of white collar green belt. From the Royal Afghan household and the white poetic dreams of Agra and Lahore to dank copses and coo-pats and the diorama of magical, disused railway-lines. I had no concept, really, of 'East' and 'West'. For me, everything simply existed in a state of strange compatibility. Back then, I took all of it for granted - it was simply the soundtrack of my childhood - yet all of that polyglot of sound became part of me and subconsciously, like the key to a piece of music, it mediated my outlook on the world. Even to this day, much of my writing roves such terrains of strange connections, teasing out ley-lines, stave-lines and probing ever for bedrock. For me, the valve radio has never been a static place of nostalgia, rather, like all really good still-lifes, it was, and remains, a conduit to other worlds, worlds within and outside of myself; it is my looking-glass, my white rabbit, my guiding bird.

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Many years later, at the beginning of the 1980s', that most pusillanimous and unimaginative of decades, I was a rather introverted and immature medical student who did not really enjoy what he was doing and who yet felt obliged by some inner demon to pursue it. Years of psychological racism had insinuated the belief in me that basically I was stupid, ugly and intrinsically inferior. And so, to fight back in some way, I was driven to excel and into a profession in which my physical appearance was less likely to be an issue with people and also one in which I might acquire at least a minimal degree of respect. The valve radio had long been consigned to the loft. For some years, within myself, I had kept the volume right down, fearing that if I allowed it freedom to roam, it would take over and weaken my almost Calvinistic resolve to eschew all things artistic. Looking back, I know now that the creative imagination is an immensely powerful entity and that at some level, I must have sensed this and so, denied it. Yet in spite of myself, I began again to listen to the music of that earlier phase, perhaps as an escape, but I think more because I heard in it a sense of adventure, a possible narrative where the mind and spirit might be stretched in non-linear directions. This was something which I had never found in medicine, other than perhaps at the outer (or should that be 'inner') reaches of biochemistry where the imagination could be permitted a kind of inherent freedom to engage with matter and ideas. The valve radio had never really gone away but was still playing inside my head, a multiverse of stations, of songs, of lutes and mysteriously unintelligible yet haunting voices. It had become the music of my spheres. And I began to seek out those orbits which as a child I had inhabited naturally and as a matter of course; I began, as it says in the Jefferson Airplane song, to 'feed [my] head': I immersed myself in music, especially as it pertained to the Mediterranean-Caspian-Mesopotamian nexus, and in books which were really long poems in similar (geo-)meter; voices from times past, or those which lay beyond time, the mythic voices which underpin all writing, all art, these were the sounds which I had imagined might somehow be captured in the whorls of my ear as I had pressed up against the stiffened cloth of the loudspeaker. The howling winds and seas of shipping broadcasts when I felt I could almost hear the screech of the gulls alternate with the blasts of foghorns in the mist, the hermeneutic tap-tapping of an unidentified, black-and-white Morse-coder, broken peaked cap and index finger crooked on black metal trigger as the New Mexican sand blew in through swinging saloon doors. It was a never-never land inhabited by the spirits of the broadcasters and of all those individuals who listened in far-away countries at the same time as I. I would fantasise - and still do - about turning the polarity of the solenoid and somehow transmitting outwards to those people, something of myself or some common element into which we had tapped.

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All of those voices which so enthralled me, many years ago, are still playing out among the stars. This is partly what my art is about; this is partly what I am about. Perhaps after we, as a sub-species, have reached the point of extinction, perhaps millions of years after that, our radio voices, still valve-warmed in the cold, black vacuum of space where sound is not, will be picked up and listened to by some wiser beings who will marvel at our folly and maybe, just possibly, at the beauty which danced on the tips of our fingers.

The radio now sits on my bookshelf, in my study, about three feet from the shell of my personal computer. The latter is switched on for most of the day, as I attempt to spin words into tales, into some sort of poetry, while the valve radio remains darkened, de-animated, silent. When I was asked to construct this piece, late one night I had the idea of trying to tune in again. I had thought that the radio was unplugged and that I would physically have to cradle it across the room and re-connect it. When I turned the On-Off knob, however, the glass lit up and my study was filled with the crackling cough of the place between stations. Instantly, I was back in communion with this machine in a way which I could never be with the cold silicon-and-plastic of my grey, impersonal computer. My PC will never be an organ of sense. It will never hold out the possibility of magic.

I once wrote a story about a man who finds an old radio in the basement of a bombed-out house in the middle of a war-zone. He presses the button and miraculously, the machine sputters into life. He hears the sound of voices, singing and the voices belong to the dead. Through this, the music which transcends, he attains some kind of redemption. The voices and the lives in my radio are the worlds which feed my imagination and which shape my writing. Perhaps writers simply re-write their own lives as those of others, perhaps the whole play with words is a deconstruction of our own existence; the pain we have felt and the joys become the dreams we dream. I did not realise it at the time, but now it occurs to me that perhaps in the mindscape of my writing, the valve radio is my alchemical machine.

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