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I might be showing my age, but I maintain you shouldn�t judge a body�s age by their musical taste. That body may, like me, have older siblings. For example I can sing along to the lyrics of all Buddy Holly�s splendid songs and he died the year after my birth. Oops! So now you can work out that on Christmas Day 1966 I was eight years old. This was the Christmas my elder brother pestered my no nonsense parents to give him records (that�s the black plastic discs we had before CDs and MP3s) in place of the usual board games and jigsaws.
Music fell off the bottom of my parents� priority list and so the family record player was a second hand red and cream box affair the size of a microwave; the type now found in heritage museums for the amusement of children who giggle in wonderment at primitive beings who hadn�t yet evolved to wear earphones twenty four hours a day.
The record destined to become my Christmas anthem and Motown Classic was �What Becomes of the Broken Hearted� by Jimmy Ruffin. My brother played it first thing Christmas morning before breakfast and again a couple of minutes later. The big red box had a black retaining arm used to stack records before dropping them onto the turntable one by one. When this arm was pulled back it acted as a repeat switch and would replace the needle on the record over and over again until the arm was yanked into the correct position over the turntable. That Christmas Day the black arm remained back and Jimmy repeated his tune twenty or more times until Dad put his foot down pretty near to the box. Things worsened on Boxing Day when Dad returned to work. The song repeated all that week until big brother and the rest of the household were sick of it.
And yet we weren�t sick for long. At the time and throughout my teens I never realised it was a sad song because as soon as the familiar first three notes sound I am weeched back to being eight years old on Christmas Day with my warm family. Back to my chocolate smoker�s set I received every year until political correctness banned them; lighting my chocolate pipe with my chocolate matches and lighter and peeling the wafer thin paper off the foosty chocolate cigarettes that tasted like nothing I�ve tasted since. Back to wearing my new combustible flannelette Christmas jammies and padding bare foot across the freezing lino floor, carrying my plastic hot water bottle filled to the brim with scalding water, scrambling under tight tucked blankets before Mum, singing along to our song, opened the bedroom window to let the fumes from the paraffin heater escape into the Christmas night.
� Moira McPartlin
Reproduced with permission
Moira McPartlin currently lives just outside Glasgow , but travels extensively with work. She started writing five years ago to relieve the boredom of airport lounges. She enjoys writing short stories and her passion for mountaineering and travel provides plenty of material for non fiction articles. Moira has yet to have any work published, but lives in hope. She is currently working on her first novel.
