Multiple-choice reading

When Owen Mallory’s history teacher set his class a project on their home town, most students went to the library. Owen, then fifteen, went to his great-aunt’s flat with his phone and asked her what Carrick had been like when she was a girl. She talked for two hours. “I’d lived next door to her my whole life,” he says, “and I realised I knew almost nothing about her.”

That conversation became the first episode of Before Our Time, a podcast in which Owen interviews older residents about the town’s past. Eighteen months later, there are forty-two episodes. Guests have included a bus driver who drove the same route for thirty-eight years, a woman who opened the town’s first launderette, a retired midwife who delivered, by her own estimate, about a third of Carrick’s population, and two brothers who remember the night the old cinema burned down.

Owen admits that the early episodes are hard to listen to. The sound quality was poor, and he interrupted his guests constantly. “I had a list of questions and I was determined to get through them,” he says. “Then I’d listen back and hear someone start to tell me something amazing, and me cutting in to ask about something else.” He now writes only three questions before each interview, and he has learnt to leave silences. He also bought a second-hand microphone with money from a weekend job. “People fill them. Usually with the best stuff.”

Finding guests was not easy at first. Many older people were suspicious of a teenager with a microphone, and some assumed he was selling something. The breakthrough came when the manager of a local day centre let him put up a poster and spend an afternoon chatting over cups of tea. After that, word spread. Now he has a waiting list, and recently a man in his nineties phoned to ask, rather sharply, why he hadn’t been invited yet. Some guests now arrive with photographs or old newspaper cuttings.

The podcast has found an audience Owen never expected. Some listeners are local, but many grew up in Carrick and moved away decades ago. One woman in Canada wrote to say she had heard her late father’s name in an episode about the town’s football club and had cried in her kitchen. The town museum now keeps copies of every recording, and a nearby primary school uses them in history lessons. Owen reads every message he receives and replies to most of them himself, usually late at night once his homework is finished.

Not everyone has been so enthusiastic. A few listeners have complained that some guests’ memories are inaccurate, and Owen accepts that they sometimes are. Two guests once gave completely different years for the cinema fire. Rather than cut either version, he kept both and added a short note at the end of the episode. “It’s not a history book,” he says. “It’s people remembering. Getting things slightly wrong is part of how memory works, and that’s interesting too.”

Owen, now seventeen, is studying for his final exams and hopes to study history at university. He has no plans to stop recording, and he has started training two younger students to help. The biggest change, he says, has been in himself. “I used to think old people were a bit boring. I’m embarrassed about that now. They’ve had whole lives, and most of them have just been waiting for someone to ask.”