Cats and Dogs
It’s a straightforward business this oral history. Not much to worry about. You just set up your recorder and carry out your interview. But, of course, it’s not. For a start, background noises aren’t always easy to eliminate. Things do go wrong and often or not, it’s animals that cause the problem.
I recall doing an interview with an old Korean War veteran in his small flat in Eccles. I had just started the interview and like any good oral historian, I put my headphones on to check if the sound levels were correct. I’d not heard any off-mike sounds until then, but I could now clearly hear the interviewee’s small aquarium buzzing away in the background. I asked if we could stop it. He said ‘Okay, but I can only stop it for about 20 minutes. After that the fish will die.’ This was clearly not going to make for a good interview. Anyhow, he kindly turned the power off and we got on with the interview. We clean forgot about the fish. After about half an hour or more, he suddenly shot up out of his chair. He’d spotted a fish floating on the surface. He was in a panic. He put the power back on. Fortunately the fish resuscitated and after a couple of minutes swam off. You can imagine the state I was in, thinking I’d killed this guy’s rare tropical fish.
Well, I thought these things only happened to me until our East Midlands regional advisor, Cynthia Brown, began one day to relate a few funny things that had happened to her while doing interviews. And that sparked a succession of stories, many of them animal-related:
Many years ago, I went to visit someone who had two Jack Russell terriers. I could hear them barking as I got near to his door, and he shouted ‘Hang on a minute while I shut the dogs in the kitchen’. He did, but I could hear them hurling themselves against the door and the scraping of claws as they slid down it. After a while they were quiet and he said he would let them back in. One of them then jumped up on my knee and was eyeballing me about an inch from my face, and the other just sat on the floor in front of me going ‘Grrr, grrr, grrr…’. It was unnerving to say the least! The moral of this particular tale is that if you are nervous of dogs, as I was even before this, just say so and ask if they could stay in another room!’
Our Yorkshire regional adviser, Clare Jenkins, also had an animal story, hers even more bizarre:
I was interviewing a couple of women in India (for a Woman’s Hour feature) and, as is so often the case in India, you have to make allowances for the pretty-constant racket: motorbikes revving up outside flats, constant honking of car horns, maintenance men drilling directly below the window or next door, etc. So, I was taking all that into account and asking for windows to be closed – and for their dog to be put into another room because of its barking. Then halfway into the interview, I heard this ‘Mynah! Mynah!’ coming from very close, though I couldn’t see anything. In the end, I asked if they could hear it and one of them said, ‘Oh, that’s our pet mynah bird. She was asleep under your chair!’ So she had to be put into another room as well.
And then there are cats. Poor Cynthia just seems to attract animals:
My other animal story involves a Siamese cat belonging to an interviewee. They are usually quite aloof, but this one was very friendly. We eventually managed to get it off my knee and started the interview. This was in the days when I used a minidisc recorder – and at one point the cat lay down on top of it so that I couldn’t see if it was still recording. It then started to purr loudly. This was bad enough, but my interviewee could then be heard saying ‘Get off will you, just get off’. Anyone listening to the (audio) recording would think I was attacking her – so I felt obliged to say something along the lines of ‘For the benefit of the recording, the cat is lying on the mini-disc recorder’. We agreed to edit that bit out – and when I went back to interview her again the cat was banished to the garden and spent most of the interview tapping on the (firmly closed) cat flap.
Sarah Gudgin in London was another to experience the less endearing qualities of dogs:
One very feisty interviewee was a tricky character and not one to gainsay. Despite my suggestion that his elderly dog might like to go out, he insisted on having the bull terrier in the room. Throughout the interview the dog produced rich rancid farts and on the recording it could be heard intermittently groaning and licking its balls VERY loudly and enthusiastically! At the end of our time together, after we had said our goodbyes and I was walking to my car, the interviewee shouted up the road, ‘Thank God, they sent me someone working class and not a bloody academic to interview me!’ I was never quite sure whether this was a compliment or not.
So, that’s cats, dogs, birds and fish but Cynthia takes the prize for she also had to deal with rats. This time, however, she was the interviewee:
I was interviewed at home several times for the British Library/National Life Stories ‘Oral History of Oral History’. I tried to keep potential interruptions and background noise to a minimum, but needless to say it didn’t always work out. Now and again, the doorbell would ring, and – more often than not – I would get up to answer it with the microphone still attached to me at one end and the recorder at the other. On one occasion it turned out that the postman had gone to school with my daughter, so it would have been rude not to exchange updates on our families and who was now doing what… My interviewer was very understanding – but one of the less easily identified background noises came when we were rat-sitting for someone on holiday when an interview was scheduled. I know that not everyone likes rats, and I did check with the interviewer in advance. He was quite happy about it – but the cage was too big to move to another room, and there was nothing I could do about the noise of them constantly shuffling around in the sawdust or happily munching on their pieces of fruit and veg!
