ANOTHER VOICE
The strange, moving yank upon our imagination of a sound from the past
MATTHEW PARRIS
Can we hear a silence? The question has a more-than-Zen significance. I once heard a very nail-biting silence indeed. I had recruited the shy, thoughtful youth doing work-study in our Times office at Westmin- ster and his more outgoing sister, Elizabeth, to join my pals and me on a charity parachute jump in the East Midlands. Only on signing young Lachlan's application form in loco parentis had I realised that his father was the proprietor of my newspaper. Nobody in the office had said so.
I was on the ground when the siblings jumped. You know when a parachutist is leaving an aeroplane because the pilot cuts his engine. For just a few seconds all noise stops. I watched as a tiny, ant-like black dot dropped from the little plane high above me. That would be Lachlan. Then another. That would be Elizabeth. From each, five seconds later, the full canopy spread. Silence ended, engine whine resumed. Both landed without mishap. Later I mentioned to Lachlan that I had not known his surname when first he asked to join our charity jump and, on learning it, had become extremely anxious lest his or Elizabeth's parachutes fail. Lachlan asked mildly whether it might have been reasonable to hope for some concern for a safe landing regardless of parentage.
I thought of that loud five seconds' silence today as I listened to a compact disc on sale from the British Library, custodians of the National Sound Archive. The disc, The Century in Sound, contains 47 tracks which, for one reason or another, could be called historic. The 25th was recorded in 1944 and lasts 41 seconds, of which 18 sec- onds are a total blank. The blank is the silence. The sound before the blank is the engine of a German V-I bomb above Lon- don, which then cuts. The sound after the silence is the explosion. Somewhere in the city today there may be an NCP car park which, had Londoners but known it, that dreadful silence presaged.
This CD is fantastic. How strange, how moving, how direct is the yank upon our imagination of a recorded sound from the past. Like smell, sound seems to reach straight for the feelings without tarrying in the intellect en route. A recorded noise seems somehow more proximate to the reality it recalls than a recorded picture. An advertisement placed in this magazine for this CD would reach readers, every one of whom, almost without exception, would be enthralled by the archive. Let this page be such an ad.
Alongside that 18-second silence there was another track which had the hairs on the back of my neck tingling. From 1918, and the Royal Garrison Artillery, comes what claims to be the only live recording of a battle dur- ing the Great War. It is a gas-shell bombard- ment: only a few seconds. A tense shout is followed by a confused putt-putting series of thuds. Why, throughout all that prolonged and terrible conflict, with the art of record- ing already well advanced, was no archive made at all — or none which survives? With what horrors, and with how many millions now dead, does this tiny fragment of noise serve as our last remaining link?
I was astonished to discover just how Welsh Lloyd George sounded. A remark- ably clear recording of his 1909 speech on the Budget was made to popularise mea- sures perhaps as revolutionary as any of those more sensational political acts we now remember better. His rather clipped little voice hardly does justice to the depth of the idea. Could that be among the reasons we have rather unjustly forgotten Lloyd George? Certainly the theatricality of Churchill's delivery (his 'This was their finest hour' speech is included here) reminds us of his flair for being memorable. Listening to the wartime prime minister, I can hear why my father still finds the memory so inspiring; but I pick up a trace of what Evelyn Waugh so excoriated in his description of the 'sham Augustan prose' of whom he was later to describe as 'simply a "radio personality" who outlived his prime'.
A tantalising disappointment is a 1934 recording of a fascist rally at Olympia, addressed by Sir Oswald Mosley. Turn it up loud to get the full blast of the cheers of adoration of 12,000 supporters at the rally. You can just catch them chanting out his name as he enters the hall: 'M! o! s! 1! e! y! MOSLEY!' — and then he begins to speak.
I wanted to hear more. I long to under- stand better what excited people about this apparently unlikable phenomenon. Instead we hear the shouts of what was obviously an organised attempt by the Left to wreck his speech, and then a much later recording of one of the wreckers' recollections of the brutality with which they were treated by the Blackshirt 'ushers'. But we know about that: lots of people in Britain opposed the fascists. Lots supported them, too though we prefer to overlook it. I want to know more about them — some of our par- ents and grandparents — and their leader. The British Library seems to have suc- cumbed to an ahistoric spasm in choosing the familiar over the mysterious, the Library's very choice illustrating our contin- uing unwillingness to think properly about where democracy might have taken us, why, and how.
People had different voices 80 years ago. This seems especially true of the upper classes. Regional and working-class accents and timbres seem little changed — the countrified drawl of a witness to the Titanic's sinking sounds quite contempo- rary though recorded in 1936 — but the chattering classes chatter differently now. I had supposed the old-fashioned way of talking might have been rather grandilo- quent, declamatory, booming. Instead we hear a succession of tight, clipped, slightly childish little voices, as though constricted by an overtight corset or garrotted by a bow-tie. From Chamberlain declaring war or the 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth (`and my sister, Margaret Rose') encouraging other children to keep their spirits up in 1940, this is not unexpected. But to hear Sir Ernest Shackleton in 1909 or Christabel Pankhurst in 1908 using such small voices, quite unable to project, was a surprise.
In Amy Johnson it is a pleasant surprise. I'd expected a rather heavy, perhaps matronly, delivery. Instead, from her 1930 The story of my flight', emerges a sweet- sounding girlie-girl voice, talking about her aeroplane like a favourite teddy. 'Jason is a dear, he's behaving splindidly. Look, how he's withering this tirrible dust storm just outside Beghdad.'
These fascinating fragments are just shards — tiny bits of painted china, often fractured, which happen to have survived. Nobody then was setting out to take it all down and keep it. Are we now? So often it is the commonplace which perishes because nobody thinks it worth keeping. What voices, what noises, commonplace to us in 2000, are vanishing unrecorded into the ether, leaving future generations unable to recapture how it sounded?
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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