October 1964—Autumn gardening with Shirley Bassey      by Peter Cole  NVancouver  ©

to be read aloud

Early spring 1962 I asked my parents if they would buy me a pocket transistor radio for my birthday a monumental expense at a time when most everyone local was living in a state of  near or perpetual poverty I told them a transistor radio was central to my sense of meaning identity and life purpose and would improve my attention span and grades and make me more sociable  plus it would keep me company while gardening  uh-huh my Dad thought what next?  

Dad developed alternative sources of income after the War besides being an electrician including importing home electronics from Japan  He could get a transistor radio cheaper than wholesale The income from his mail-order businesses helped our family at a time when WW II veterans in Canada got very small pensions and as an ucwalmicwtribal man he had to fight Veterans Affairs for 20 years to get even a miniscule pension after serving in the RCN  He had multiple serious chronic health issues and medical bills that cut into his worklife and our family life and finances  Mom’s teacher’s income was like most post-war salaries for women  it helped to sustain a family if you were thrifty—re-used recycled bought second-hand passed down clothing tools materials equipment did home gardening canning brewing baking sewing darning knitting  patching repairing refurbishing which most of us did anyway as a matter of necessity and cultural practice  

May 1962  There it was (trumpet fanfare)  my brand new Sanyo pocket transistor radio—sleek  black  plastic new— for my thirteenth birthday  made in Japan with a chrome half-plate over the built-in speaker  it fit snugly into its paper-thin leathery harness  The radio came with a beige squat single earplug whose fidelity was fuzzy mono and muffled instead of tinny squelchy and strident like the radio’s speaker because the sound had to first pass through earwax that had been compacted by the earplug  Back then most people had manners that prevented them from broad-casting radio sounds that interfered with others’ quiet enjoyment so most kids held their radio up to their ear at low volume and threw the ear plug into a junk drawer or traded it

Everyone recognized the meandering shuffle-gait-waddle of transistor-radio-listening teens—head tilted sideways at a neck-crick angle while ambling about seemingly aimlessly without displaying directional head hand or body signals on sidewalk crosswalk stairs Add to that foot tapping  head bobbing  finger snapping  hip swaying shoulder feinting  doo wop R&B swing scat jive  Public safety alerts quickly appeared  in newspapers and on public library and school bulletin boards attesting to the inherent dangers associated with unsupervised kids listening to transistor radios in public spaces while in motion  The Cold War was in full swing  the effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis still reverberated  the US President had been assassinated  the USSR  was winning the space race  a massive concrete-barbed wire wall encircled West Berlin  the Viet Nam War was escalating  and our municipal officials’ number one concern was kids listening to music at low volume while walking This is the world we were being inducted into  go figure

Jump cut October 1964  overcast cold Saturday afternoon  temperature dipping to zero tonight  I’ve been working in the garden since after breakfast while listening to the Top 40 and local bandstand playdate announcements and  deejay banter  The transistor radio is my tether to contemporary culture though I’m willingly an invisible part of it  Being shy and reserved keeps you safe from groupthink  groupknow groupdo groupwithness and having your own music source means you can be in the middle of the groove and on the periphery of contemporary life simultaneously depending on family and school dynamics  peer (and media) pressure  personal finances self image  feelings of self worth imagination sociability hermeticism You can choose to be invisible  safe from being forcibly or subtly socialized into prescribed social harmony and homogeneity templates  Music is a place of refuge a magical garden and in my life I have learned to tend that garden  I am that garden  we share one another’s breath and life-being while occupying different bodies lifeways values Standing in the cold for hours tending to the garden can teach you how to inhabit and be nurtured by the trances the earth gifts you with as music streams from around the world through the radio inspiring   the tao that you can speak of

The twice yearly garden cultivation-clean-up took (me) at least three weeks early spring and fall—all day Saturdays but only 6 or 7 hours Sundays (squeezing homework in) 2 or 3 hours weekdays with a dusting of snow or frost  October days are short cold windy overcast so you have to make the most of each minute  Digging de-clumping  weeding removing rocks and sticks all the while levelling the earth rescuing earthworms beetles millipedes and other things that live underground from being chopped up crushed injured or impaled by shovel or garden fork  manifesting buddhism’s infinite compassion and mindfulness The potatoes carrots parsnips radishes kale and brussels sprouts will still be in the ground for a few more weeks before being harvested (by me) and stored in boxes of sand in the unheated garage for the winter  I don’t know how they’re still edible after the temperature plunges to -45  The rhubarb and horse radish stay in the ground even longer because everyone knows they (and cockroaches) could withstand a first strike followed by nuclear winter  Funny how my dear bigger smarter older brother always had to do something with his best friend or train for track-and-field or practise his saxophone or join the Air Force cadets when it came time to helping out in the garden hmm  Anyway I’d probably have ended up re-doing his part  as I took the garden more seriously It had to be near perfection to please my Dad (and the ancestors he was a portal for)  Hereditary chief mentorship meant ritualizing everything always thinking acting feeling along millennial ancestral lines while obliquely evolving along mainstream settler-colonist lines   is not the true tao

To be fair to Dad he put himself into the emergency coronary unit every time he stubbornly chose to do too much of the sustained hard physical labour of gardening (that his doctors warned him against) But that was his way to do what he believed he had to do  as a father and husband  as a man defined by the time  even if it endangered his life  And it did  He was brought up as a st’at’imc  hereditary chief in our ancestral xa’xtsa homeland a thousand kilometres away and he was teaching me ceremony through the rigours of gardening helping me to teach myself through experience  He always did more than his share of everything so did Mom  He was stoic Mom more demonstrably excitable  both were level-headed though at odds as to the how of it  Mom and sister Maggie Sue always did invaluable foundational organizational work in the garden  making rows hoeing raking planting weeding thinning watering though I seem to have been elected by acclamation to be the main digger chopper weeder de-rocker and leveller in spring and fall  In time the responsibility grew on me  taking decades to internalize externalize how important that part of my life was and had always been  and how indispensible the music and chat coming from the transistor radio were for me at a deeply personal-transgenerational level  Learning to be a careful methodical gardener guided by my parents my BC aunties older ucwalmicw cousins helped me in all areas of my life into the future and past  Time spent in the garden was a seamless part of self-realization coming of age self remembering  listening to the Top 40 and deejays going through their patter was the balm that soothed my soul body spirit and 

gave me the quiet verve and stubborn stamina to perform garden-work with contentment  

which I preferred  to joy  which often felt excessive 

Averaging two point something minutes per song  plus commercials jingled by deejays  playdate info timestamped with station identification  CJCA and CHED grounded me in the baseline of early 1960s music across the spectrum after being weaned on 50s blues jazz big band pop rock crooner gospel doo wop country music (and Welsh hymns I lip synched at mamgu’s house)  So many Welsh words  ucwalmicwts sounds and in time German Russian Arabic sharing the glottal stopped deeply guttural softly liquid sonic essences requiring salivary operational efficacy so no soda crackers 3 hours before voice (woodwind brass harmonica) rehearsal or performance

The radio’s fidelity clarity continuity reception changed with one’s proximity to it and how one was grounded—clothing footware accessories one’s static electricity perspiration skin cream shampoo soap toothpaste diet ionizational conductive and electrical potentials of skin body hair if one smoked or drank all could function as aerials resistance interference mast grounding  The broadcast variables relaying  incoming radio waves  dancing with quantized electron waves  the radio’s tiny tinny aerial’s electro-magnetic outreach straining  etiolating  beyond its achievable grasp with signals from the radio station’s red light beacons antennas that in a single fluid motion  forwarded sound-as-music to station listeners  outbound to the deeply receptive far reaches of the cosmos voice oscillations quiverings squelches travelling the speed of light  to exoplanets constellations methane clouds on Jupiter carbon-iferous rainfall on Neptune and Uranus in the form of diamonds and  picked up by occupants of interplanetary most extraordinary craft  piloted by Karen and Richard Carpenter and David Bowie 60 lightyears after the fact  I imagine Shirley Bassey on that galactic journey that for me began in the garden that weekend

2 pm  the sun a cold distant orb emitting oblique autumn light filtered through frigid sundog clouds  and no bird sang  There was always a cold wind from the Arctic or the mountains this time of year  My hands and wrists were cold most of the time halfway up my forearms and neck but I felt warm because of the vigorous exercise  the flannel shirt and from being in a semi-trance torpor triggered by vibes radiating from that radio sitting on the clump of dirt by the excavated pile of rocks weeds rhizomes mycellia mycorrhiza and sticks I look at the straight level line of the dirt chopped finely to a uniform size  You could lay a 6-foot long  two-by-four on top of it and laterally rotate it 360 degrees and it wouldn’t tilt  That’s what Dad likes to see  consistency  though my greatest consistency has always been being inconsistent  but given time and miracles

A delightful concert in our back garden this weekend  a dozen performers every hour singers bands emcees deejays so far including... Dusty Springfield  Roy Orbison Petula Clark Cilla Black Tom Jones Patsy Cline  Kiki Dee  Kitty Wells Johnny Rivers  Sandie Shaw Manfred Mann Nancy Wilson  Little Eva  the Beatles  Del Shannon  Mary Hopkin  Freddie and the Dreamers  the Breakaways  Polly Brown the Staples Lulu  Helen Shapiro Beryl Barsden  Samantha Jones  Sandra Barry the Hollies Gene Pitney Martha and the Vandellas  Tommy James the Shirelles  Brenda Lee  Bobby Darin Kathy Kirby Dodie West  Jackie de Shannon  Sam Cooke  Dion Muriel Day Tawny Reed  Herman’s Hermits  Julie Rogers  the Seekers Leslie Gore  Jerry Lee Lewis the Chiffons Lonnie Mack  Barbara Ruskin  the Kinks Julie Grant Val Doonican  the Cascades  Eydie Gormé  Val McKenna Dana Gillespie  the Breakaways the Tokens a perfect

garden mix for maintaining a semi-dazed reverie of dig-chop-weed-rescue-level more to come

Out of the blue (gray skies) the Deejay announces Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger from the new Bond film of the same name  hmm Shirley Bassey?  milliseconds later  the disc drops spins needle slides over down tracks across around opens with brass woodwinds strings percussion endless dotted note sequences syncopated offbeat on point reeded emboucheured rosinned intoned brushed and beaten beltings blares whispers coos comehithers be-gone-with-yous Clear exuberant bold  brash melodical exotical brassy sassy cymry hyfryd  unapologetically Welsh like Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard Rosie Probert Myfanwy Price Mog Edwards grand gestures steeping stirring powerful dramatic self-assured soulful lustig sonorous teasing  riffs liltings of soul jazz  gospel r&b rock country opera gymanfa ganu soaring updrafting acrobatic in a background of pure transcendent Welsh children singing uncoached unconducted spontaneous  Shirley sings with her whole body spirit mind soul  performs as each instrument instrumentalist  She is the orchestra the music the conductor director the score each every and all Each orchestra member and the ensemble is alert to Shirley’s every breath pulse fibrillation smile eyebrow lift lip point sigh sign signal gesture block sweep swoop tableau the performance is a mix of West End musical big band marching band  pipe band opera and Welsh pubnight singalong                  

It began that chill October day mid-afternoon with just three amazing syllables that knocked my radio over from a distance of 8.000 kilometres gold  fing ger  in fact the ‘l’ itself was made to constitute its own phonemic intersyllablic gliding into and over the ‘d’ after lolling lingering midpalate yod position  Nothing I had heard on the radio had prepared me for the intensity of this performative explosion its theatricality operative intensity but I couldn’t place her accent which I realized can be influenced by genre context contract

No-one I’d ever heard sang like her despite there being no shortage of powerful women singers 60+ years ago —Ella  Patsy Judy Aretha Tammi Dusty Etta  Petula  Mary Joni  Mavis Brenda Diana  Julie Dionne Connie Mahalia Cilla Thelma  Lotte Martha Lulu Nina Judith Peggy Veronica Betty  Sandie Tina  Esther Barbra Miriam Gladys  Marianne Lesley Patti  and many others   She’s up there in her own universe birthing galaxies  enacting her cymreictod 

Many amazing female singers’ voices came across the pond from the UK  Ireland the US and elsewhere on radio  vinyl through cathode ray and vacuum tubes  transistors  then silicon chips and binary coding but how many of us can remember the first time we experienced at a deep and personal level the sound of a soul speaking to us  the electrical signals travelling the twisted coppery-plumbum pathways inside the radio’s rudimentary machinery powered by a 9-volt battery  They relied on tangled connective byways of twisted soldered wires redhot resistors  bits of dust and plastic insulation without ventilation to protect from overheating  carrying voices instruments and measured silences between notes  notes between silences  and it was magic 

Our childhood city had a small but proud Welsh population including my Mother’s mother (mamgu) Winnie an immigrant from Myddfai and Llandeilo born in the 1880s  Mom constantly made us aware of our Welsh and Scottish Irish Cornish heritage while my Father who did not advertise his ucwalmic/st’at’imc  heritage was proud of it  He was very laid-back it wasn’t a safe option to be visible to the settler-colonizer majority struggling every day just make a go of it   

diolch yn fowr  kukwstum’c   Dame Shirley BASSEY    ©