Linger Awhile

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13 November 2003. I fell in love with Charlotte Burton the first time I heard her voice, months before I actually met her. This was back in 1966 when she was at Radio Essex, Britain’s Better Music Station on Knock John in the Thames Estuary. Her voice had an elegant eroticism that was effortless; that it came to me via pirate radio gave it the added charm of the forbidden. I bought the nautical chart of the estuary and revelled in its esoterica. The unseen Charlotte became for me a princess hedged about with buoys and soundings and magical names. Knock John Tower, the old World War II fort where she worked, was shown, with the eponymous sandbank and channel as well as Barrow, Long Sand, Fisherman’s Gat Precautionary Area, and other names that sang in my mind while my fantasies rose and fell with the tides.

When I finally met Charlotte she was exactly as she sounded and from the first moment everything was as I hoped it would be. We were married and had ten good years together. We were faithful to each other and I had no mid-life crisis. Then she died. Nobody talks about end-of-life crises but they do happen and twenty-seven years after Charlotte’s death I fell into one at the age of eighty-three. I needed some technical help with it so I bought a bottle of expensive whisky and went to see Istvan Fallok at Hermes Soundways in Soho.

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