The container all this magic came in was a small brown box made of a plastic called Bakelite. It had an on/off switch, a volume control and a station finder. That was all. But I couldn't have imagined life without it.
When we were travelling, the radio was my link to another world. Sitting on its shelf in the wagon (caravan) it opened a door for me into the lives of the "settled people", the people who did not travel with shows, fairs and circuses, but lived in the houses in the towns we visited.
I had no idea how they lived in real life, because we rarely stopped anywhere long enough for me to make friends with them. But radio comedies and dramas told me that they were a lot like us in many ways - except that they never hitched up their homes and moved them on from place to place.
My favourite show was a morning children's program called Listen With Mother. It was a half hour show comprising songs, stories and games, an introduced by a woman with a sickeningly sweet voice who always said - "Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin..."
Some of the stories featured two teddy bears called Tingha and Towser, and while I can't recall much about the stories, the names stick because I called my first teddy bear Tingha.
I got him for Chrismas, on a freezing morning when my dad was digging snow away from the caravan wheels and my mother was heating up the stove to cook Christmas dinner. We had recently acquired a portagas stove (it was called Calor Gas in those days) and she was determined to give it a workout with the traditional turkey and pudding. My father had bought a new tank of gas the day before - he didn't want it running out halfway through cooking!
I unwrapped my presents on my bunk bed and the first one I opened contained a small teddy bear with shiny blond fur. He looked exactly as the stories had described Tingha so that became his name. He sat by my side through Christmas dinner, which had turned out well.
Tingha went everywhere with me in a small carrycot, wrapped in a blanket against the cold weather, or sitting up to watch the world go by in fine weather. But like me, he was an Only...until couple of Christmases later when I was given another bear, a larger brown bear with a grumpy expression.
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