I CAN’T RECALL EXACTLY WHEN, BUT somewhere about 1936 when I was eleven-or-so years old, here in English Middle-Class Colonial Natal, we were all told at school to be sure to listen to the wireless at eight o’clock one certain night because the King was going to speak to his Empire.
It was a great day, but listening had to be at night because that’s when the newly discovered Heaviside Layer became activated a hundred-or-so miles above the Earth, you see. Nobody knew what this layer was made of, some said it was factory smoke, some that it was Marie biscuit crumbs, but it allowed shortwave radio signals to bounce off back to the ground far away over the horizon. Other waves just vanished into space.
Be that as it may, the SABC did a heroic job and captured all the shortwaves and rebroadcast them as medium waves and now we could all huddle round our wireless sets with great big glowing hot valves set at the 42-metre wavelength and hold our breaths in expectation until suddenly there he was! The King himself! In London! It seemed he was speaking in bed with blankets pulled over his head and a finger up his nose, but it was him, I mean he, all right, talking to us straight in real time!
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