A Change in Fortune

 

            Whenever my mother wanted to listen to conversations that were going on in the house next door she put an empty teacup against the wall and then put her ear to it.   As she did this she would place her finger against her lips and shush me so that I didn’t start asking questions in what was then a piercing pre-school voice.   Surprisingly, because she did not seem to be all that troubled by such emotions as shame, she continued this practice as my brother and I grew older and when he was about six, he told me the teacups in our house were actually telephones.  He had been in school for over a year and was fully conversant with telephones, there being one of what seemed to him, ominous size in Sister Joseph’s office.  They were all without exception black in those days and it was years before there was a choice of red, blue or cream.   Our mother, possibly because confusion reigned as it often did for us, agreed with him.

            As far as her investigations were concerned, hard as she tried I’m not sure if she ever heard anything scandalous over the years of her teacup eavesdropping    When I thought about it later, I decided she would have greatly enjoyed being one of those early telephone operators, connecting all and sundry and listening in on the conversations of others on a daily basis.    It was especially easy, though at times hard on the back, to carry out teacup surveillance upon the neighbours because narrow terrace houses with slender partition walls seemed to lend themselves to the practice.   Apparently my Aunt Mag’s house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford was not nearly as rewarding when it came to keeping an ear to the wall, the walls themselves being far more solid and that, it appeared, could be a Real Bugger.           

None of us in York Road or the surrounding streets had home telephones in those first years after the war.   There were occasional exceptions of course such as the proprietors of the area’s corner shops but they were in a different category altogether.   Telephones were also absent from the more upmarket homes in Springhead Road and even Mrs Frost who gave piano lessons was without one until the mid-nineteen fifties and she might have found one useful.  The three Campbell girls, living a few houses along from her apparently ordered one when they became involved in running the Brownie Pack at St Botolph’s Church.   This wasn’t without incident and certainly caused a skirmish or two because in the first few months of ownership they were granted what was then called a Party Line which meant it had to be shared with someone else.   The Campbells who were admittedly an overdramatic trio were convinced that their calls were not private.   The sharer of their line had a habit of snooping they claimed.   A Party Line was clearly something my mother would have greeted with real enthusiasm but of course it was sadly something you could not guarantee by ordering in advance and in any case she wasn’t to know all this at the time.   

Although it seems quaintly old-fashioned looking back, it was to be some years before any one of us would consider a phone to be a necessity.  It might have been convenient to be able to ring the local Doctor to make an appointment but of course, conscious that his patient base was totally telephone-free he didn’t operate an appointments system in the first place which was sensible of him.   And on rainy days our mothers could have given Penny, Son & Parker on The Hill a call to place the weekly order if they didn’t enjoy chatting in the queue quite as much as they obviously did.   Shopping seemed to be a much more relaxed and social activity back then.

If you were desperate to make an actual telephone call to someone who had an actual telephone then there was always the phone box by the 480 bus stop opposite the Roman Catholic Church where, from memory, two pennies in the slot and a quick press of Button A would do the trick nicely.  If the person was not home or you got an Engaged signal then you simply pressed Button B and your money was returned to you.   I hasten to add that this was not an activity I participated in myself but I was aware via others that this was the process.  

The more tech-savvy among us had discovered by 1954 that it was possible to make calls from one red telephone kiosk to another and therefore lengthy conversations could take place between duos without having to meet up!   This was seen as a great step forward especially for local youth already involved in relationships with the opposite sex though it emerged early on that lengthy phone calls appealed more to females than males.

My grandmother had never used a telephone in her life and was extremely suspicious of them because having any conversation with somebody who couldn’t look you in the eye seemed all wrong to her.   How would you know who you were really talking to?   My mother and aunts were equally hostile towards the idea with the exception of Aunt Rose but she was married to Uncle Mervyn who was in the RAF and so apparently it Stood to Reason.   Anyway we all knew that since she married Mervyn my aunt was growing more like him every day and he was known for being Right Up His Own Arse.  Even my sensible cousin Margaret said they had become Cut Above the rest of us.   

However, by the time she got married to Jack in 1955 Margaret was herself warming to the idea of becoming a home telephone user and this was because she now worked in Dolcis Shoe Shop in Dartford where, she told me, the phone at the rear of the premises never stopped ringing and it was her job to answer it.   She said that when she and Jack moved into their new flat in Slade Green, conveniently close to the station, she was definitely going to investigate what the overall telephone installation costs might be.  I worried that she was beginning to become a little too much like Rose and Mervyn and would end up a Cut Above the rest of the family but her younger sister Ann told me that was most unlikely because her Head was Screwed On.

Growing up with so little experience of what was to become an essential communication tool was not something that generally impeded progress through life for me until I started my first job at Messrs Francis, Day & Hunter in Charing Cross Road.  I discovered that operating the six-line switchboard for one hour one day a week whilst the telephonist took her lunch break was part of my job description.   At the time this was a horrifying idea and you could say that I was thrown into the Deep End of 1950s telecommunication awareness.  Nevertheless, with support from those in the typing pool with more telephone know-how, I managed to overcome what had at first seemed an impossibility, quite rapidly.  

Over the next year or two, several members of the family discussed the idea of Going on the Phone but my mother was destined not to do so until she had moved out of York Road when the homes on our side of the street were about to be demolished.   It was at that stage that my brother and his new young wife supervised her gentle entry into the ranks of those who could place orders with the local grocer or ring the New Doctor who did not like to run his operation in the same manner as his predecessor.    I was living in a London bedsitter by then with a telephone for the use of tenants by the front door, and feeling very sophisticated as you might imagine.   No-one would have ever known that this aid to communication had not always been part of my life.

It is surprising how rapidly families like ours, at one time almost resigned  to our place at the bottom of that post-war heap could adapt to a change in fortunes.   Because it wasn’t just the telephone we took to, sadly non mobile though it was to be for decades - car ownership followed hard on its heels, with Margaret’s Jack taking ownership of a second-hand red sports car in which he drove us to Herne Bay at almost thirty miles an hour most of the way!    Uncle Harold, his father-in-law, proclaimed loudly and frequently to any of us who would listen that twenty miles an hour was fast enough for anyone with any sense and that was a fact.

  My mother said that the trouble with Harold was that he’d never been Backward in Coming Forward and by rights it was nothing to do with him so he should keep his Trap Shut.   She only said that behind his back of course.    That’s always been the way in our family.