Story tapes

My Dad liked music, liked to record music and liked 'electronics', a science which we as children did not fully understand. Crocodile clips were involved and also those baked bean tin-sized oblong batteries that seemed to sit on every shed and garage shelf in the 1980s but not since. As a result of my Dad's interests and despite of our family subsisting on benefits, free school meals, the generosity of family and the frugality of my mother, there were always many cassette tape players knocking around our west midlands home in that decade.

Later, maybe in the 1990s, we would be allowed to record the top 40 on to tape from the radio, sneaking upstairs during dinner to turn the tape over and hoping the DJ didn't talk all over the opening bars of our favourite hits. But in the 1980s the cassette recorders were used for playing stories that we had received as Christmas and birthday presents. 

I get warm feelings when I think about the many story tapes I received as gifts, ostensibly from my paternal grandfather and uncle.* One collection had Blyton stories, including Fly Away Cottage, which featured a lady with a Cornish accent telling a young boy and girl to close the door quickly because she had pies cooking in the oven. There was also a story about sprites or elves who had a magic word which went something like 'bilderooneypookyliptakina'. There was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur and, of course, Noddy and Big Ears. One of my favourite tapes was the collection Stories for a Prince which contained tales written by British schoolchildren for Prince William. My favourite story in this collection was about a bright red pillar-box and all the different people (and birds) who came to visit it, and why. The jeopardy developed in the form of a plan to remove the pillar-box and replace it with a wall box (no good for out of breath men to lean on, or robins to perch on). I can still hear the inflections in tone of the voice actor as they read me this story dozens and dozens of times. One of the warmest memories of childhood.

Gobbolino the Witch's Cat featured heavily in the Christmas-themed story tapes which read you the story and sounded a bell when it was time for you to turn the page in the accompanying story book so you could follow along with pictures even if you still couldn't yet read the words. The same Christmas book featured The Little Match Girl, which was my introduction to the heart-breaking lives of others and my earliest feelings of empathy.

One Christmas, my older sister Amanda put in an immense effort and made me a story tape as a present. She read stories (including Blunter Button!), sang songs and even wrote out and drew a story book to go with it. A gargantuan task for which I hope I showed gratitude at the time. I've certainly thought about it annually for many years since! I think I still have the book in a box in the loft, if I have the cassette I'm not sure how I'd play it.

* Years later my mum told me that she had purchased them on their behalf. One point to mum.