One to Four

Bickerstaff Community Radio broadcasts on 106.1 FM from two rooms above a carpet showroom on Prendergast Street, and between one and four in the morning, Tuesday to Saturday, the person in the second of those two rooms is Rowan Kestle.

The studio is nine feet by eleven. There is a desk with a fader panel that was secondhand when the station bought it in 2009, two microphones of which one works properly, a monitor showing the playout software, a second monitor showing the phone queue, a kettle that is not supposed to be in there, and a window with a blind that Rowan has never once raised because the view is the flat roof of the carpet showroom and a security light that comes on for cats.

She gets in at half past twelve. The evening show ends at one and is presented by a man called Dennis who does folk and who leaves the studio immaculate, chair squared to the desk, headphones coiled, a note on the pad if anything has gone wrong. In three years Dennis has left forty-one notes and Rowan has kept every one of them in a drawer, for reasons she would find hard to defend.

At two minutes to one she puts the headphones on. At one minute to she brings the fader up on the bed — a low sustained thing she found on a library disc and has used every night since her fourth show, so that there are now people in this town for whom that sound means half past midnight and a lit kitchen. At one exactly the red light goes on above the door, which nobody outside the room can see, and which she has never got used to.

"It is one o'clock," she says. "This is Small Hours on Bickerstaff Community Radio, 106.1. I am Rowan and I will be here until four. The lines are open, they are open the whole time, and if you are up, you are not the only one."

That is the same every night. She wrote it in her first week meaning to replace it and has now said it something over six hundred times, and the one occasion she varied it — a Thursday, tiredness, she said if you are up, hello — the phone queue filled in ninety seconds with people ringing to ask if she was all right.

The first record is always something without words, and has been since the beginning, and is one of about four rules she has for a show that she would otherwise describe as having none. She learned that in about the third month: at one in the morning a voice arriving on top of a voice is an intrusion, and people are not listening to a radio show yet, they are listening to a room that has a radio in it. The words can come at ten past.

Bickerstaff has a population of nineteen thousand and a transmitter that gets 106.1 out about seven miles on a good night, which takes in the town, the three villages on the ridge, eleven miles of the eastbound carriageway, the industrial estate, the infirmary, and — on certain nights, for reasons nobody at the station can explain — a stretch of coast forty miles away that has produced exactly three callers in seven years.

The audience figures for one to four in the morning are not measured, because nobody measures a community station's overnight, and the station manager, Prit, has said more than once that this is the single greatest professional freedom he has ever been given and that he intends to protect it by never asking.

What Rowan knows about who is out there she knows from the phones, and from that she has built a map of the town at that hour which she believes is more accurate than anything the council has.

There is the bakery on Fern Row, where the ovens go on at ten past two. There is the infirmary, where the night staff on the two long-stay wards have the radio on at the desk and where somebody once held a phone up to a window so that Rowan could hear the rain on it. There are the taxis, of which there are four working past two on a weeknight and eleven on a Saturday. There is the twenty-four hour garage on the roundabout. There is a security office at the paper mill with one man in it and a wall of monitors.

And then there is everybody else, which is the actual audience and is much larger and is almost entirely silent: people awake in houses. Shift workers eating a meal at the wrong end of the day. New parents. People in pain. People whose sleep went wrong at some point in the last few years and has not come back. People who have had bad news that afternoon and for whom the night is a thing to be got through in segments.

Rowan has a phrase for them that she has never used on air and has said aloud exactly once, to Prit, in the kitchen of the station, at four in the morning: the ones who are not going to ring.

"Then you are doing it for people you will never hear from," Prit said. And Rowan said that a bakery on Fern Row does not know the names of the people who eat the bread either, and Prit said that this was the most northern thing anybody had ever said to him, and put the kettle on.

The show is built out of records, callers, and what Rowan calls the middle, which is her talking, and which is the hardest of the three and the one she rations.

The records are hers to choose. There is a station playlist for daytime and there is not one for overnight, which is either an oversight or the kindest thing anyone at Bickerstaff has ever done for her. She plays whatever will sit at that hour, which turns out to be a narrower category than she expected and one she can describe only by example: yes to a piano, yes to a soul record from 1971, yes to almost anything sung by somebody over sixty, no to anything with a chorus that insists.

The callers she takes off the second monitor, which shows a name, a first line typed by whoever is on the desk in the outer room, and a duration. On weeknights there is nobody on the desk in the outer room, so Rowan answers the phone herself in the two minutes and forty seconds of a record and types her own line, and has become extremely fast at it.

The rule about callers is Prit's and predates her: nobody goes on air who has not spoken to a human being first. It is not about swearing. It is because a community station at three in the morning is, unavoidably, a phone number that a person in real trouble may ring, and the number of times in seven years that this has happened is nineteen, and on none of those nineteen occasions did the person go on the radio.

Rowan has a laminated card taped inside the desk drawer with four telephone numbers on it. She has used it seven times. She does not talk about it and the one interviewer who ever got near the subject was told, politely, that it was not a story and that if he made it into one she would not do the interview.

The middle is the rest, and the middle is where she has changed most. In her first month she talked the way daytime presenters talk, which is brightly and continuously, and she listened back to a recording of her ninth show in a car park and was so appalled she nearly gave the slot up.

What she does now is slower and much plainer, and the single most useful thing anybody ever told her about it came from Dennis, of all people, on a Friday at one in the morning, on his way out with his coat over his arm: "You keep starting sentences as though somebody has just come into the room. Nobody has just come into the room, love. They have been in the room for two hours."

The last hour is different from the first two and everybody who has ever done an overnight knows it.

Between one and two, people are still awake from the day before. Between two and three, the shift workers own it and the phone is busiest and the show is at its most cheerful, because a night baker at half past two is at work and in a good mood and wants to talk about the football. Between three and four, something changes that Rowan has never been able to name and has stopped trying to: the calls get fewer and much longer, the records get slower without her deciding it, and the people who ring at ten past three are, more often than not, people who have been thinking about ringing since one.

She plays out at four with the same bed she came in on. "That is Small Hours for tonight. I am back tomorrow at one. The news is at four and then it is Ashleigh with the breakfast, and if you are still up in an hour, you were up all night, and I hope it was for a good reason."

Then the red light goes off and the room is a room again, and this is, reliably, the worst ninety seconds of Rowan Kestle's day.

She does the log. She squares the chair to the desk and coils the headphones, which she started doing in the second year without noticing that she was copying Dennis, and if anything has gone wrong she writes a note on the pad, and she has written eleven of those in three years and Ashleigh has never mentioned one of them.

Out through the outer room, down the stairs past the carpet showroom, and into Prendergast Street at nine minutes past four, where it is either raining or it is not, and where in June it is already getting light at the top of the street and in December it is as dark as the middle of the night and will be for another four hours.

She walks home. It is twenty-two minutes. She has done it something over six hundred times and she has never once been bothered by anybody, which she is aware is not the universal experience of a woman walking through a town at four in the morning and which she attributes, without any evidence at all, to the fact that a reasonable proportion of the people out at that hour have been listening to her.