THERE WAS A MAN who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.

Did you know about this? I say to my father. There was a German linguist who went round the prisoner-of-war camps in the First World War with a recording device, a big horn-like thing like on gramophones, making shellac recordings of all the British and Irish accents he could find.

Oh, the first war, my father says. Well, I wasn’t born.

I know, I say. He interviewed hundreds of men, and what he’d do is, he’d ask them all to read a short passage from the Bible or say a couple of sentences or sing a song.

My father starts singing when he hears the word song.Oh play to me Gypsy. That sweet serenade.

He sings the first bit in a low voice then the next bit in a high voice. In both he’s wildly out of tune.

Listen, I say. He made recordings that are incredibly important now, because so many of the accents the men speak in have completely disappeared. Sometimes an accent would be significantly different, across even as little as the couple of miles between two places. And so many of those dialects have just gone. Died out.

Well girl that’s life in’t it? my father says.

He says it in his northern English accent still even though he himself is dead; I should make it clear here that my father’s been dead for five years. We don’t tend to talk much (not nearly as much as I do with my mother, who’s been dead for nearly twenty-five years). I think this might be because my father, in his eighties when he went, left the world very cleanly, like a man who goes out one summer morning in just his shirtsleeves knowing he won’t be needing a jacket that day.

I open my computer and get the page up where, if you click on the links, you can hear some of these recorded men. I play a couple of the Prodigal Son readings, the Aberdonian man and the man from somewhere in Yorkshire. The air round them cracks and hisses as loud as the dead men’s voices, as if it’s speaking too.

So I want to write this piece about the first war, I tell my father.

Silence.

And I want it to be about voice, not image, because everything’s image these days and I have a feeling we’re getting farther and farther away from human voices, and I was quite interested in maybe doing something about those recordings. But it looks like I can’t find out much else about them unless I go to the British Library, I say.

Silence (because he thinks I’m being lazy, I can tell, and because he thinks what I’m about to do next is really lazy too).

I do it anyway. I type the words First World War into an online search and go to Images, to see what comes up at random.

There’s a row of uniformed men standing in a kind of choreographed curve, a bit like a curve of dancers in a Busby Berkeley. They’re holding their rifles three feet, maybe less, away from another curved row of men facing them, kneeling, blindfolded, white things over their eyes, their arms bound behind their backs. The odd thing is, the men with the rifles are all standing between two railway tracks, which curve as well, and they stretch away out of the picture, men and rails, like it could be for miles.

It resembles the famous Goya picture. But it also looks modern, because of the tracks.

There’s a white cloud of dust near the centre of the photo because some of these kneeling men are actually in the process of being shot as the photo’s being taken (EXACT DATE SHOT). And then there are the pointed spikes hammered in the ground in front of every one of the kneeling prisoners. So that when you topple the spike will go through you too. In case you’re not dead enough after the bullet.

Was never a one for musicals, me, my father says.

What? I say.

Never did like, ah, what’s his name, either. Weaselly little man.

Astaire, I say.

Aye, him, he says.

You’re completely wrong, I say. Fred Astaire was a superb dancer. (This is an argument we’ve had many times.) One of the best dancers of the twentieth century.

My father ignores me and starts singing about caravans and gypsies again.I’ll be your vagabond, he sings.Just for tonight.

I look at the lin