(9) LIFE BEGINS AT FOUR A.M.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 12

(9) LIFE BEGINS AT FOUR A.M.

"LJ OW shall we celebrate our wedding anniversary?" "How about two minutes’ silence?" An anonymous wit dropped the cartoon bearing this caption into Aunt Daisy’s mailbag when she reached her 21st anniversary as a commercial broadcaster. She was delighted. Like the Scot who enjoys the myth of his own parsimony, she likes best the jokes about talkative women. "When I started to broadcast commercials," she says, "I told my husband that each one was only a hundred words. He said, ‘Impossible, Daisy! You couldn’t use less than a thousand words to ask for a cup of tea.’" Rarely has the voice of Aunt Daisy been silenced. There was one period of three months, during a lecture tour of the United States and Canada, and: another shorter period when a severe cold deprived her of her voice. On both occasions her daughter Barbara took over the programme. Exact reproduction of Aunt Daisy’s broadcasting technique would, however, be almost impossible. She prepares most of her material in the afternoons, ransacking her files for information and recipes, testing products, or watching manufacturing in progress. "When you advertise so many unrelated products," she says, "you have either to have seen them made or to have’ read about them whether they’re in your field of interest or not. Plenty of things I have mever any idea about, especially electrical things, but I have to find out."

When there are difficulties to master, Aunt Daisy runs over her material again in the evening. But as an early riser, she prefers to be early to bed. "I try not to work at home too much," she says. "One gets too duty-struck. Soon after the news at night I begin settling down, but I may tell you I very frequently get up in the night and make a cup of tea." Mest mornings begin for Aunt Daisy at four o’clock-never later than four-thirty-with a cup of tea in bed, In the quiet before dawn she reads one of the quarterly books she receives from the Bible Reading Fellowship. "Years ago," she says, "the Queen Mother appeared in the Albert Hall ' advocating the Fellowship and backing it up. That made me join. I’ve learnt so much through it. It’s not qa matter of reading a word or two and feeling holy. There’s something for every day, and it’s deep. It’s clever." From this reading usually comes Aunt Daisy’s invariable preface to her session, her Thought for the Day. Daisy’s own personal prayer for the day is as characteristic of her as the pastel blues she habitually wears or the ebullience with which she greets the morning: God, give me sympathy and sense, And help me keep my courage high; God, give me ,calm and _ confidence, And, please, a twinkle in my eye. By the time broadcasting begins, with the 6.0 a.m. news, Aunt Daisy is bathed

and dressed and preparing breakfast ("I like an egg every morning, though I eat only the yolks") for herself and her son Freddie, who still lives at home. She is at the studio by a quarter to eight-more than an hour before she goes on the air. The cheer of her earlymorning greeting to the staff is matched only by that of the breakfast session announcer. She is on Christian-name terms with everybody, a popular figure always ready for a joke or a pleasant word or three with anybody. Each year she. buys a Christmas cake for 2ZB’s staff, and another for the taxi-drivers who take her to the studio. Getting down to work, Aunt Daisy riffles again through her notes, arranging them in the proper order and making a final decision on which item from the morning paper: will serve her best for an introduction. At ten minutes to nine she obliges the technician with .a@ microphone test, and at five to nine a speaker in the studio is turned on so that she may hear her cue. "At that time," says Aunt Daisy, "I always go out for a last-look at the weather. It’s amazing sometimes; there’s been a beautiful day when I left home, and when I look again it’s pouring with rain. Or vice versa, Of course, the weather round Cook Strait is very local. I’ve said it’s a beautiful morningreally lovely-no wind. And someone tang up afterwards and said, ‘Well,

Aunt Daisy, just when you were telling us how beautiful the weather was, it was blowing like mad out here at Miramar.’ " At nine o’clock exactly, the studio gongs sound, the announcer introduces the network broadcast of Aunt Daisy’s Morning Session, a recording is played of "Daisy Bell," and Aunt Daisy goes on the air. She dislikes being observed at work, and curtains are drawn across the glass-fronted studio. Behind this screen she goes into a kind of trance, with no one for an audience but the technician in his cubicle, "I shut my eyes to keep everything out," she says, "so that what I have to talk about is clear in my mind. I try to know what I have to say so well that it will simply pour out, without my looking. I open my eyes to tick off each item, but otherwise I’m just telling people. I want them to know I mean it. I care about it! I’m sincere and I want them to know about these things." This inward need to convince, Aunt Daisy confides, is the reason she sometimes runs over time. "The Service is very good and indulgent to me," she says, "but every few months I get a letter "saying they’re sure I will co-oper-ate, but I have been going over time once again. I’m very very careful for the first few weeks after the letterbut, oh, I do forget." Though shy of onlookers, Aunt Daisy has never felt shy of the microphone. "Mike fright" is unknown to her. "The only nervousness I ever feel," she says, "is when I come off the air and I think, ‘Oh, I should have done that differently,’ I often forget things till afterwards. I’ve never been altogether pleased with myself." IGID confinement to a half-hour pro_gtamme makes Aunt Daisy nostalgic about her carefree early days in radio when it was a cardinal sin to cut short any broadcaster who still had something to say. The problem was rather to find people who could happily fill the gaping hours. "It was in the early days that things happened," she says. "Everything goes quite well now and is very very smooth. It’s almost too efficient!" Under an individual contract with the Broadcasting Service, Aunt Daisy is not housed in one of the department's congeries of buildings. After her Morning Session, she leaves 2ZB for the office of Aunt Daisy Radio Advertising, in Lambton Quay. Here, with the help of her secretary-invariably referred to as Grace-she answers mail and dezls with the morning spate of phone calls e

from sponsors, friends and inquirers. About eleven she adjourns to a cafe nearby for coffee and ‘sandwiches. "Then I have nothing more till I get home," she says. "That’s usually about four in the‘afternoon, because it’s easier to get a taxi then." Since she was blown about by the wind at Kelburn terminal, Aunt Daisy avoids the cable-car. "By dint of being careful," she says with huge satisfaction, "I’ve paid off the mortgage on my house and I can now afford a taxi. But it was a marvellous thing to live so near the cable-car. I could get there in two and a half minutes if I ran. "But the day I had the accident was very bad. It was not only windy, but gusty. I was standing on one foot and a half when a dreadful gust blew me against the side of the shelter and banged my eye hard. When I got to the studio the boys all said, ‘How’s the other bloke?’ But they made me a cup, of tea, and I did the Session all right. I: told my listeners, ‘It’s very gusty this morning. Be careful. It blows people about.’ " AUNT DAISY’S relations with her sponsors are happy. "The other day one sent me a_ bouquet," she says, "which contained every flower in season or out. It was so tremendous that the taximan carried it up the steps for me at home." Mostly the sponsors have reason to hand out bouquets. During rationing, for instance, Aunt Daisy gave a recipe which made liver-an _ unrationed meat-more palatable. From end to end of New Zealand, butchers sold out of liver within an hour. She has a similarly moving effect on other lines of merchandise. Other tributes are less welcome. So many people used to telephone asking

her advice that Aunt Daisy now has an unlisted number. "But now," she says, "they still see the name Basham in the book and they ring up Barbara. A lady got her out of bed one frosty Saturday at twenty past seven! She was going to the races and wanted to know how to get a mark off her clothes! Really! You know, they wouldn’t dream of ringing a butcher, at his own home, at the weekend, and asking for some _ chops! Imagine! "When my husband was alive he’d answer the phone and say, ‘No, of course I won’t ask her that! What a cheek!’ He used to say worse than that actually, but I couldn’t say those words here. He didn’t mince matters at all." Aunt Daisy’s two-storied house in North Terrace, Kelburn, is not the kind of "ideal home" one might expect of a household sage. In the sunny upper story, she has her bedroom, a dining room, "which does duty in every way, and contains the refrigerator, among other things," and a built-on kitchenette equipped with stove, sink, and an old-fashioned dresser with drawers and cupboards and cup hooks, "I have nothing at all up to date," she says. "I don’t have all those beautiful things the girls have nowadays. People have often wanted to change it, but I wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t be bothered. I must live quietly." Also in the interests of quiet living, Aunt Daisy has largely given up the heavy round of luncheon addresses, and the openings of shows and bazaars which she performed for many years. Her recent opening of the 1957 Otago Advances Fair, when she drove through the streets preceded by the St Kilda Band and hailed like visiting Royalty, was an exception.

The speaking engagement Aunt Daisy remembers with most amusement took place many years ago when she worked for Lewis Eady’s station in Auckland. She arrived late for an ad-

dress to a group of ladies at St Heliers, creating some apprehension that she had met with an accident. The truth was that she had, by a defect in the (continued on next page)