“Dad needs some hydraulic fluid for the tractor, can you go and get some at Hamilton Brothers on your way home?”
The call came and off I went, naïve and unknowing about what was about to unfold.
As I arrived and got out of the car, an innocuous looking van pulled in. It had an antenna. I asked the usual stupid question of the driver, “Is that for CB?”. “No”, he replied cheerfully, “although I’m into CB too, that one is for two metres”.
I had chanced upon a ham radio operator.
Fifty years of suppressed interest came to the surface. “Is there a club around here that I could go to?”
“Sure”, said Jason who had revealed himself as MM3HQC, “Thursday night at half past seven at the St Ninian’s Church Hall, just appear”.
That chance encounter is how it began. A cheery guy in a van. I never did get the hydraulic fluid.
The interest in radio communications had started with The Man from Uncle. Or U-N-C-L-E as the secret organisation was known. Napoleon Solo would pull out a pen, press a latch and an antenna would pop out. How wonderful that he could call Mr Waverley so easily in 1964.
With the words “Open channel D”, worldwide communication was possible, instantly. How could this be achieved?
Walkie talkies were available in the UK at that time albeit somewhat under the counter at McLaughlin’s TV shop in Back Sneddon. A pair were duly requested from Santa and the first radio-induced heartbreak took place. Santa apparently couldn’t afford them and the news that he was really my Daddy shocked me to the core. I never trusted my parents again after that.
Great Aunt Jean made it worse by donating to me a gorgeous megalith of a valve radio in a beechwood cabinet. Hours sitting by the light of the tuning dial was how many a dark winter evening passed. Names like Luxembourg, Hilversum and Berlin graced that dial. The world was opened up.
Further heartbreak was to follow when the set was discarded by my mother in a house move out of a spacious tenement flat to a new but smaller house where we would have our own front and back garden. Fat lot of use that to the young listener. I had to console myself with a newly-invented cassette recorder.
Fast forward fifty-odd years and Jason took all that heartbreak away. There existed a Radio Club, nearby.
Breezing in full of false confidence the next Thursday evening, I announced “Hi, I’m Graham. Jason told me about this place”.
Stunned silence? Folk looking the other way? Not at all. “Come away in”, said a cheery white bearded gent. That was the moment that I met Jimmy Stirling. Maybe Santa existed after all.