Today, I was reading ‘A Murder Is Announced‘ (1950) by Agatha Christie and instead of focusing on who murdered whom and how, I found myself thinking about telephones and my vanishing past and what it means.

There’s a scene in the book when the police inspector receives a call while he’s at someone’s house. This is 1950, so of course the call comes to a landline and is answered by the mistress of the house who then returns to the living room to let the Inspector know the call is for him. Christie notes wryly that the telephone (there is only one) has, with true Victorian sensibility, been installed in the hall. That Christie found this amusingly old-fashioned seventy-four years ago made me smile because, twenty years after her book was published, my home still had that setup.

The house I spent my teens in in the 1970s was the first place that my family had lived in that had a phone. The phone (we also had only one handset) was installed in the hall because, well, where else would you put it? Who needs privacy when they’re on the phone? 

To use the phone, you sat on the telephone table, a low-slung wooden thing with an oblong cushion that was connected to a raised box that the rotary dial handset sat on and which had a space below to hold our telephone book, the telephone directory, the Yellow Pages and a pad for taking messages. It looked a little like this (except with a fabric cushion, mahogany wood and spindle legs).

Realising that this once taken-for-granted, every-home-has-one, dedicated piece of furniture is now something that anyone born this century would have to have explained to them, like an object in a museum, reminded me of how old I am and how quickly my past is vanishing.

Later in ‘A Murder Is Announced‘, a woman in her sixties expresses her grief at having lost the last person who remembered her from when she was a child. She tells Jane Marple that this death makes her feel very alone. Marple, who is old and frail, replies that she has been living with that kind of loneliness for a long time and that it isn’t mitigated by the presence of nephews, nieces and younger friends.

I can feel that kind of loneliness coming.

Fortunately for me, my wife and I are the same age, went to the same school and have shared our travels for more than forty years. That shared context makes it easier for us to understand each other but the older we get, the fewer people are left who remember the world we used to live in.

It struck me that the telephone is one of those objects that means something to my generation that needs to be explained if it’s to be understood by anyone under thirty.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my not-for-some-years-yet wife and I maintained a long-distance relationship. I was at college in one town. She was in another. We stayed in touch by writing letters, which had its own rewards but which wasn’t always enough. We talked regularly on the phone (think weekly not daily) and to do it I, and sometimes she, had to find a telephone box to make the call from at a pre-arranged time.

It turned the call into an event. Something to be looked forward to. Something that was a sign of as well as a means to intimacy.

The physicality of those public telephone boxes is imprinted on my memory: the bright red paint, the weight of the door, the smell which, if was lucky, was only damp and nothing worse. the condensation on the little panes of glass in the winter, the heavy handset, designed for the convenience of right-handed people, the coin slot that needed to be fed endlessly and the light that made me visible to passers-by as I tried to convince myself that I was almost in the same room as the woman whose voice I needed to hear.

How do I explain how that felt to anyone born this century?

It seems the key objects of my past are becoming ghosts that only I can see.

I don’t want to live in the past or be haunted by it but I would like to share it.

So here’s ‘The Phone Box On The Corner‘ by Brian Bilston which I think captures the emotion of times past and acknowledges the changes with a smile.

It struck a chord with me. See what you think.