The Gift of a Radio
My Childhood and Other Trainwrecks
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The Gift of a Radio
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Narrated by:
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Justin Webb
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By:
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Justin Webb
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
Justin Webb's childhood was far from ordinary.
Between his mother's un-diagnosed psychological problems and his step-father's untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn't much better.
And the backdrop to this coming-of-age story? Britain in the 1970s. Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and Free. Strikes, inflation and IRA bombings. A time in which attitudes towards mental illness, parenting and masculinity were worlds apart from the attitudes we have today. A society that believed itself to be close to the edge of breakdown.
Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is a portrait of personal and national dysfunction. So was it the brutal experiences of his upbringing, or an innate ambition and drive that somehow survived them, that shaped the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now?
©2022 Justin Webb (P)2022 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"Brilliantly illuminates the horrors and absurd snobberies of those times. A very fine memoir." (Jonathan Dimbleby)
"Moving and frank.... A story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s." (Misha Glenny)
A story of survival in an age of ambivalence
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Loved this book
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It was a wonderful and amusing read. I am a West Country girl and loved all the local references…
Nikki
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Messed up parents, appalling public school, loneliness and isolation only redeemed by radio; then a lurch for freedom, surviving a road smash and joining the BBC. I enjoyed it and it is beautifully written and read but there's a lot of sadness amidst the love. I hope he's a happy family man now and life has been good to him as an adult. That would make a good book - but I doubt Larkin would enjoy it as much.
Fascinating - Larkin would love it.
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Justin Webb’s childhood was over-filled with suffocating love from and for his unhappy mother Gloria and both of them bound together lived in the shadow of his stepfather Charles who had been diagnosed as ‘mad’ just after he and Gloria had married when Justin was two. Charles had a serious mental illness which in the 1970s was not talked about or helped, so he went on casting a terrible pall over his wife and step son’s lives driving dangerously making outings in the Hillman Minx a nightmare, filling cupboards with padlocks and playing Brahms loud in the early hours to block the voices in his head. No wonder that when he swam out from the beach until he was just a speck, Justin – and he suspected his mother too – were disappointed when he returned to shore.
Gloria ‘s complicated life didn’t go right: a father who abandoned the family, failed and tragic relationships including an affair which at the age of 37 blighted her career and resulted in Justin, all of which produced a woman obsessed with class scorn – particularly of the lower middle class who, amongst an endless catalogues of sins, pronounced words wrong and went on coach trips wearing beige or were merely called Don. Even the television had to hide its shameful commonness in a cupboard brought out for special viewing.
Later Gloria sent Justin to Sidcot boarding school in the Mendips only 40 miles away from their home in Bath , a Quaker School which in that febrile 1970s when society as he says were all at sea, the school was viperous nest of cruelty, violence, rule breaking, filthy basement lavatories (Justin had learned never to say ‘toilet’) where all manner of offences were committed, ineffectual teachers, abuse of vulnerable pupils ,and drunkenness which hours of Quaker silence for self reflection did nothing to assuage. Discipline was haphazard at best with boys allowed to go off caving ill-equipped and unsupervised and serious offences and pupils’ needs, ignored. (But local Rugby games with grown men in Bath were lawless too according to his descriptions).
But he survived and made it to the LSE and a distinguished career as a BBC journalist. The details of his unusual childhood (but then what’s usual or normal when it comes to childhoods?) are riveting and startlingly vivid; the account of his near-tragic bus trip to Greece as a student is a cameo piece on its own. But what makes the whole even more satisfying are his intelligent musings based on his thoughts honed over the years (he’s 61 now) on the changing mores of the 1970s which now seem like another age, probably incomprehensible to those who have not lived through them.
I can’t recommend it more highly - and the author is also a first rate narrator.
Brilliant
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