大象传媒

My grandfather had a gramaphone but during the war it was virtually impossible to buy records or new gramaphone needles.
His favourite song was 'Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes' and he had a recording of this which he would play frequently. During the Blitz a number of bombs were dropped over Kent and the shockwave from one of these bombs knocked over the shelf where all of the gramaphone records lived and they were all broken. The only record to survive was the recording of 'Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes', which happened to be sitting on the gramaphone at the time. With it being impossible to obtain new records this one song became the sondtrack to my mother and uncles' early lives.
With gramaphone needles also being hard to come by my grandfather used to re-sharpen his diminishing number of existing needles until they could no longer be used. I believe that at one stage he even sharpened up a small nail to use as a gramaphone needle!
'Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes' lasted until the end of the war, although I can only imagine that by then it must have been so heavily worn that parts of the song were probably unrecognisable.

Paul Geddes

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