When we were kids, reel to reel tapes were the very latest in technology. It was the 60s, we were in India; things might have been a little more sophisticated in the ‘Western world’. Mum and Dad listened to the BBC news on a little ‘trannie’, but the only music we could access came from reel to reel tapes.
These were painstakingly created for us by one of our Uncles back in Australia, who taped classical music, packed the big reels in their orange and white boxes and posted them out, surface mail, in a big, slow boat to the Subcontinent.
Mum loved those tapes. Music abounded on the radio in Ahmedabad, the bustling city where we lived, but most of it was of the Bollywood variety, and Mum was more a Bach, Beethoven, Mozart kind of gal. I remember, in the years after The Sound of Music came out, being on a picnic, surrounded with happy crowds of locals listening to a boom box belting out movie tunes and mum saying, grimly, ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music’.
Our tape player (I don’t think it was called a tape recorder back then, as recording was not one of it functions) was big and boxy, metallic green and silver. I loved threading the blank end of the tap around the empty, right hand spool, slotting it into the slit in the middle and rotating it until the tape held, then pressing play. There is a distinctive metallic smell that I associate with those ancient tape players that I’ve never smelled since, but it tantalizes in my memories, evoking a powerful falling back into the feel of my childhood.
When my older sister left for boarding school I was three and had to learn to entertain myself. I would put on the classical music tapes and dance, dressed in one of mum’s oldest frocks, which reached my toes, making me feel like a princess. On my head, I draped an old nappy (which we kept, for rags – for dusting and polishing) which made me feel that, princess-like, I had long, flowing locks, not the short back and sides I actually possessed.
I would dance for hours, floating around the room in my outsize dress and nappy-hair. One time I remember suddenly realising that I was being watched, and whirling to see Mum, leaning quietly on the doorframe, gazing at me with silent pleasure.
As the sixties progressed, my sister and I became aware of movies. Three, to be precise; in my childhood I can only ever recall three films. They were My Fair Lady, the Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins, and we knew every word of each by heart.
We did see them at some point – these films were so universal they even made it to Ahmedabad (I can remember the local lads whistling and hooting at the very tame love scene between Fraulein Maria and Baron von Trapp) but even better, mum and dad acquired tapes of all the songs.
Maybe at this point in our development, my sister and I wanted to branch out from the classics, in any case, we took to these musicals with wild enthusiasm. I don’t know how those tapes survived, we played them so often, singing along. All these years later, I still know all the words to every song in those three movies.
We didn’t simply sing; we acted out entire scenes. One of our favourites was when Liesl, the oldest von Trapp, meets her boyfriend Rolf in the summerhouse and, holding his hand, runs lightly around the seats at the side in her frothy pink dress. Being smaller, I was Liesl, my sister was Rolf and I ran around on wobbly benches, holding my sister’s hand and trying to imagine I was a beautiful teenager.
We extracted weeks of pleasure and entertainment from those three old tapes. In the 70s, when we moved to Melbourne, it was the hit parade on 3XY that became the sound track to my life, and it still surprises me how well I know the words to hundreds of trite songs from that period.
Sometimes I wish my head were full of the psalms, or Shakespeare, or TS Elliot, something a little more highbrow. Mostly, though, I treasure the fact that in a girlhood that was pretty earnest, and at times lonely, I had these charming bits of fluff to keep me happy and light-hearted.
In an era were millions of movies and shows and songs are available to anyone at the touch of a button, I marvel at the delight two little girls mined from oft-repeated renditions of a total of three clunky reel to reel tapes.