Music and powerful memories

Music and powerful memories

We teenaged boys came home from boarding school one holiday to find that Dad had bought an electric record player AND several long play vinyl records. 

Hard to get in the Kenya of the 1950’s.

We played them to death. Our friends came round to help Poor Judd die over and over in “Oklahoma!”. 

Our imaginary girlfriends knew it was “all or nuthin” with us because we sang it to them.

The girl on the cover of the “Reverie” album was a focus for the inarticulate longings her music evoked on peaceful evenings when Mum and Dad would be reading and our large buffoon of a dog would be wishing he was allowed to lie on the new living room carpet with us.

At the Kisumu Yacht Club we kept time rowing our dinghy around the hippos to get to a favoured fishing spot singing selections from “Continental Juke Box” and “The King and I”.

The same records were there the next holidays and the next. Our parents never could afford more than that first bonanza. But we were very happy to sing hum and whistle along with our old vinyl friends. Mum and Dad often joined in. Without us realising it, they became the signature tunes of a time in our young lives when everything was good.

That time did not last long. Within a few short years my brother and I were sent to England to continue our education and we lost touch with our friends.

We didn’t see our parents for long stretches. We became adults.

Dad had a stroke. It made him short tempered and frustrated.

Mum grew weary looking after him. For me, some years swallowed up an unwise marriage and divorce.

My brother went hiking through Europe and Asia. 

My sister went to Australia.  She had a baby, triggering a family emigration to Brisbane.

I was in my sixties when Mum couldn’t cope any longer looking after Dad and he moved to a nursing home.  

While helping Mum to rationalise her junk I found the record collection. It was all there. “Oh Mum, do you remember The King and I? When was the last time you played this?”

“Ever such a long time ago, in Kenya dear, I think. Before we went to England.”

Mum’s birthday was coming up, so a record player was the perfect present.

We set it up in the living room after her birthday dinner, excited to be listening to our old friends once again.

But a strange thing happened. As soon as the familiar songs started playing I was taken right back to that happy time. It should have been fun, but I was overcome by a profound homesickness for a time and place that existed only in memory.

Tears were streaming down my face. Embarrassed I looked around. Mum was also teary. She smiled at me “Let’s try a different one.”

So I put on another record. It had the same effect. Mum was embarrassed too.

 “Perhaps we’ll play them another time dear.”

But from that moment until she died, the records remained untouched, the player unplayed. I have the records still. I haven’t played them either.

Roger Wooller 29/10/2013