Listening to the Radio

As a child I used to listen a great deal to the radio. I loved listening especially in bed when the light had been turned out. My pride and joy was an ancient machine, what we called in those days a wireless. It had four great knobs for controlling the stations, which were listed in three illuminated columns - towns and cities that I had never heard of - from a great part of my known world.

Being so ancient it was worked by valves, great lamps in which the filaments glowed red hot, suffusing my bedroom with a warm glow as I lay there in the dark. I knew that somehow they made the sounds that came out of the grill on the front.

When I was very young I thought that some person or homunculus must be living in the cabinet and this accounted for the instructions about not tampering with the interior. A miraculous person, I thought, able to survive without food or water for long periods, small enough to live in a radio cabinet and possessed of a thousand voices and a miniature orchestra. And all for my benefit!

Later of course I learned about loudspeakers but the voices booming out of the set and filling the darkened room always gave me an electric tingle. Some sounds even remain with me to this day and when they flit across my mind in an idle moment I am transported back to my early childhood. Music on a Friday Night, the signature tune to a detective story and a radio play about global cooling.

Global cooling is not something that we here about very often these days. But in its way it must have been as terrifying - indeed more so - even than today's warnings of the world heating up. The story I remember was set in Greenland, I think, at the end of that period in the early Middle Ages when, for a reason that never seems satisfactorily to be explained, the world became almost as warm as it now is.

But then of course it suddenly got colder again - a lot colder. So cold in fact that in the middle of the seventeenth century the Thames froze each winter and fairs were held on the ice - a period that is now referred to by some as the 'little ice-age.'

It seems that all sorts of folk had migrated to Greenland, for some reason, during this warm period when the balmy weather allowed the growing of every kind of northern crop. Even vines were thought to grow there.

But then the winters became colder and the summers too. The snow fell earlier and earlier and melted later and later - until - and this is the bit that I remember from the radio - the mother of the family began to predict when the end would come. Something I think she had discovered in some early writing - one of the Icelandic sagas perhaps.

This was when the snow would fall but wouldn't all melt away, even in midsummer. So that when the snow fell again the following autumn it would be falling already on last year's snow. This, she said, would be the end. It wouldn't matter that the patch of unmelted snow might be no bigger than a pocket hankerchief, next year the snow cover would be larger and it would go on growing until all their fields and all their homes were obliterated beneath its great white blanket.

For some reason that image, painted by the radio in my darkened room, has remained with me to this day. And now, of course, we face the reverse problem. Not the snow refusing to melt, but the snow refusing to fall and what snow and ice there is melting away at breakneck speed.

Mountain glaciers around the world, so the UN is telling us have been melting these last few years one and a half times faster than they were in the 1990's. These glaciers are the sources for many rivers upon which people depend for drinking water, agriculture and industrial purposes.

Rather than being smothered in water by way of a great blanket of snow, we shall all be smothered in a threadbare covering of dust.

Posted by Fennie Somerville