On The Same Wavelength
Beverley Stevens
Word Count 711
When the interview panel of men in suits and a woman from human resources asked, “What language do they speak in Mexico?” I confidently answered, “Mexican”. Not a hint of a smile from any of them. So it wasn’t till I got home and replayed the scene for my husband that I realised that my impeccable logic was, in fact, an enormous blunder.
Still, they offered me the job as assistant to the two engineers who scheduled the transmissions – the transmitters, their power, direction and shortwave frequencies – for broadcasts by the BBC World Service. The engineers figured out the best times for each language, and then out went the programmes to places with evocative names like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Belarus.
The BBC was an august and worthy public service organisation, a trusted source of impartial news and information. But what really sold the job to me was the jolt of connection on making eye contact during the interview with Mike, one of the engineers I’d be working for. It was a moment of recognition of a similar analytical, somewhat idiosyncratic mind. There would come a time when, alone together in the computer room, we shared sweets and our knees grazed as we debugged Fortran programs.
Mike and Geoff, the two frequency management engineers, had an office in Bush House, a Grade II listed building that overlooked the formal symmetry of the semicircular Aldwych. I shared the office next door with Raymond, a grizzled bachelor close to retirement who wore moth-eaten jerseys. Like our heavy wooden desks, he was a weatherworn fixture who’d been there forever. His entire task was to monitor sunspot activity and its potential disruption to shortwave broadcasts. I suspect my colleagues felt sorry for me, having to spend my days with him, but I didn’t mind. I liked the concentrated quiet, and we engaged in occasional conversations about Jane Austen novels and his favourite heroine, Emma. Plus Raymond paid me the enormous, if misguided, compliment of saying I looked like Princess Diana. It was 1981, and while our hairstyles were alike, the similarities otherwise were few.
Each year, the head of the schedule unit headed abroad to a coordination meeting with the BBC’s counterparts, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America. There they resolved clashes of colliding transmissions and negotiated the set of shortwave frequencies they would each use for their broadcasts in the coming year.
On my long daily commute, the busy traffic-filled streets and the crowded carriages of the London underground were obvious from the start. But as time went on in the job, a vivid picture formed in my mind of ever more noise from invisible radio waves and television transmissions passing through buildings and bodies and brains. I became uncomfortably aware of a murky mess of never-ending, criss-crossing messages in the unseen world all around me, a hidden threat to the higher consciousness and inner serenity I was seeking.
And I minded the thinking that saw the air waves as a resource to be used, competed for, and claimed by man (for all the engineers were men). If you were allies, the frequencies were divvied up and doled out after a civilised diplomatic tussle. If you were the enemy, you countered with interference on the same frequencies, so listening was spoiled by constant static, garble or overtalking. I assumed our adversary was the only one to employ such nefarious tactics, though it turns out, according to official reports available on the internet, that the UK used buzzing, chugging, bubbling, clicking, whistling and hissing noises as jamming signals, while Russia added balalaika and choral folk music to the mix. But no such devious plans were evident in the complex schedules I helped draw up in pencil on outsize sheets of paper.
I was only vaguely aware of the gentlemanly haggling and the no-holds-barred competition for dominance of the air waves being part of the Cold War. It’s only looking back that I realise that international shortwave broadcasting was a key propaganda weapon, colonising the air waves to sway the thinking of people in contested parts of the world. It’s only now that I see I was playing a role, even if it was a small one, in the politics of the day.
Beverley is a Kiwi writer based in Wellington, New Zealand, who is working on a memoir in essays. Her work has been published in Landfall, Headland, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, the Longridge Review, and the Brevity Blog. She's currently employed part-time as a web copywriter and editor. Her web site is designit.co.nz