midnight at the oasis

tales from the past

Between 1971 and 1976 i used to get a lift to school with my father. he didn’t much like talking in the morning; instead he kept the car radio tuned to Radio 3 – except for a minute or two around 8.30 when he used to retune to Radio 2 and listen to ‘Wogan’s Winner’. the night before he would have surveyed the racing card in the Evening Standard, marking it with reference to the latest edition of his bible, Timeform. perhaps Terry Wogan’s recommendations were a final test of the correctness of his calculations? 

He was a punctual man – because of the army, he used to say. it was a good thing in a man who took you to school – i don’t think i ever arrived late. punctuality, he said, was a question of always arriving early and he used to apply the same reasoning to listening to the radio (and watching tv: he used to bunk off washing up with the old-fashioned excuse that he was ‘warming up’ the television for post-prandial viewing). 

So he switched stations a little early and we’d hear the end of one song before Wogan’s racing tip and the beginning of another, in case it was one my father liked. we already listened to ‘Junior Choice’ on Radio 2 on sundays so the likes of ‘Three Wheels On My Wagon’ and ‘Two Little Boys’ were familiar. though his interest in music mainly tended towards the classical, he did have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lyrics of 30s pop hits, as heard on the wireless with his mother. and in the early 70s two songs captured his imagination via Terry Wogan to the point of buying the single on 45rpm vinyl: the first was ‘Clair’ by Gilbert O’Sullivan – perhaps not surprisingly as Claire (with an ‘e’) was the name of my elder sister; the second was ‘Midnight At The Oasis’ by Maria Muldaur. (‘let’s slip off to a sand dune/real soon/and kick up a little dust.’)

It was 1974. the immediate thing i remember about that year was that India and Pakistan both came to England for a test series. we went to Wales on holiday in the summer and listened to the test match on the radio while we stayed in Colwyn Bay with my great aunt Kip, who still had tinned food from the 40s in her cupboard, and magazines to match. while we were were there, Turkey invaded Cyprus, which resonated with my 10-year-old self as a kind of ‘away match’ in return for the Greeks besieging Troy. sport and war were interchangeable; countries sent teams abroad, or armies.

When i’d had the stroke, 40 years later, and my marriage had collapsed, i spent nearly two years staying with my parents. my father was slowing up. i once asked him what was the scariest thing he’d had to do in the course of his national service, which was spent in germany. he knew instantly. as an officer in the Black Watch, aged perhaps 19, it had been his job once to roust the members of his platoon out of a brothel where they’d been cavorting. it was a scene i couldn’t imagine him in.

Midnight at the oasis… and then suddenly Terry Wogan’s brought to an abrupt conclusion, we’re returned to Radio 3 and – my father asks me – what instrument is that playing in the orchestra? (the oboe?) 

He’s cut himself shaving and a smidgen of toilet roll with dried blood is on his cheek. i look at it and dread the days when i will be an adult.