Quiet Family Circle
“And the King was so delighted that the beggar had DF’d the wicked bootleggers’ QTH that he let him marry his only, beloved daughter, who was not only the most beautiful girl in the world, but who also had 294 countries confirmed. And, for a wedding gift, the King gave them a kingdom of their very own, with a complete rhombic farm, six-element, optimum-spaced beam on all bands and sepa-rate, solid-gold transceivers for every band and, instead of control knobs, the transceivers had huge diamonds and they all lived happily ever after. …”
NOT the Best of Spock, but it was the only bedtime story Jonathan understood and the only one he was likely to hear.
He had been three when the dreaded amateur radio virus attacked our home and, like the Plague which had decimated London three centuries ago, struck down the family, one after another. Jonny’s elder brother, Laurie, aged eight, could still faintly remember the happy times when a radio was a thing you switched on to hear the news, an antenna waved on the head of a moth and New York was three thousand miles away. But Jonny knew nothing else. This was his world. Daddy studied code and theory with the blinkered concentration of a Pilgrim Father stalking his first Thanksgiving Dinner. Laurie, who must copy everything Daddy did, entered the new element supremely confident that it would hold him up like the Dead Sea. Mother, inured by then to a dozen equally unlikely obsessions into accepting amateur radio as yet another phase in the Hard Day’s Night that was her marriage, was uncommitted. This could be no worse than photography, movie-making, wood-turning, model boats, electric trains, rug-making, and the applecider-honey cult. Or could it?
