TIME TRAVEL

This tape has been hanging around the family archive for 50 years. On it is my dad, thoroughly enjoying being a dad, singing nursery rhymes with my baby sister (now 53) and the rest of his daughters, all with beautifully clipped vowels. There's me at 11 or 12 doing the announcing (and sounding, as another sister says, like the young Princess Elizabeth addressing the Children of Britain). And there's a few seconds of dad playing boogie woogie piano with me doing a left hand stride bass line that he taught me. I can hear (though my younger sisters might not pick it up) that dad was parodying radio programmes of the time - particularly Singing Together and the Goon Show, and he had a really lovely light tenor voice at 35, though it deepened later. At the weekend, B borrowed a reel-to-reel tape recorder, retrieved, restored and cleaned the tape up and now my sisters, my mum and I all have a copy on MP3 and CD, and have cried buckets over it. Dad died five years ago tomorrow which seems like yesterday, but it's lovely being able to listen to him again.

It must have been at around the same time as this photo was taken.