Jim Sullivan: As I Remember Volume 2

Tandem Press

$24.95

More tales from Jim Sullivan's Sounds Historical programme, which has been running on National Radio every Sunday night since 1992.

There is an innocent decency, almost a quaintness, about these voices and the stories they tell which really do toll the bell on the way we've changed as a society.

Sure there have been technological changes (we should praise the heavens for automatic washing machines, after reading Jean Ronchi's account of washday, 1920) but the changes we notice as we read these little gems of memory are of tone as much as anything.

It's something to do with the pitching-in mentality: children had chores, often quite heavy ones; and during the influenza epidemic of 1918 people volunteered in droves to help the sick, sometimes at the expense of their own lives.

There also seemed to be a sense of wonder about the world, imparted in stories about life before electricity, about the first time hearing a radio, about going to the movies in the 1930s, or a school trip to Wellington.