The New Telephone

It was Monday morning when they came. About half seven, I’d just turned the sign to Open and was setting out the newspapers, Express at the front, Mrs Barker gets cross if it’s buried under the Mirrors, when I heard it.

A lorry. A big lorry. Now, we don’t get many of those down our street. Delivery vans, yes. The occasional tractor when Thomas Hargreaves, our local farmer, needs to get past. But this was something else.

I stepped outside, still had some papers in my arms, and there it was. Bright red, sitting on the back of a flatbed lorry.

The telephone box.

We’d known it was coming, of course. There’d been a notice in the parish magazine. “The General Post Office is pleased to announce...” But knowing and seeing are different things.

I knew the whole village would have something to say about it before the day was out.

Funny how news travels, even without a telephone.

Bert Hancock came out of the King’s Arms, that’s our pub, and Bert’s the landlord, already in his shirtsleeves, drink in his hand.

Probably just tea.

He shouted across the green. “Arthur! What d’you make of it, then? Progress, is it, or just another nuisance?”

I said I’d reserve judgement.

~ ~ ~

Mrs Barker was first through the shop door. Earlier than usual. She has a sixth sense for anything that might be worth disapproving of.

Modern nonsense, she said. It would bring undesirables. People telephoning at all hours. Noise. Disruption.

I pointed out that you make calls out, you don’t receive them. She looked at me as if I’d said something foolish.

“Fourpence a call,” she said. “Fourpence! I could buy a quarter of humbugs for that.”

She could. She does. Every morning, regular as the church clock.

~ ~ ~

Young Tommy Pritchard came running across the green on his way to the village school. Cap on crooked, tie halfway round his neck, socks round his ankles. He hasn’t got his bicycle yet, though he’s saving hard. That boy always tears around like something’s chasing him.

“Mr Jessop! Mr Jessop!” he said. “Have you seen it? How does it work? Do you put money in? What happens if nobody answers?”

I explained about Button A and Button B. You put your fourpence in, dial the number, and when they answer, you press Button A, your money drops and you’re connected. If nobody answers, you press Button B and get your coins back.

Tommy did the calculation. Fourpence, he said. That’s eight gobstoppers. Everything’s measured in gobstoppers with Tommy.

Then he went quiet. Very unusual for Tommy.

I could tell he was thinking about something. You could practically see the wheels turning. So I asked him.

He said he’d been thinking. If someone makes a call, and the other person doesn’t answer, and they forget to press Button B... that fourpence is just sitting there.

“So I’m going to check,” he said. “Every time I pass. And when I get my bicycle, I can check them all.”

A tour of other people’s forgetfulness. Funny, the things that stay in your head. Read that somewhere years ago.

I told him he’d make more money sweeping my floor.

“I’d sweep it every day if I had to,” he said.

“I don’t need much, Mr Jessop,” he said. “Just more than I’ve got.”

He grinned and ran off to tell his best friend Billy Harrison. I watched him go.

His dad’s been away a while now. His mum manages. I suppose I sort of look out for the boy, in my way. Give him the odd job when I can. Sweeping. Carrying. Anything for a penny or two towards that bicycle fund.

Keeps him busy.

So perhaps he doesn’t turn out like his...

No. He’s a good lad, Tommy.

Miss Truelove came in at eleven, as she does every Monday, for her copy of Woman’s Weekly. She taught Violet Pemberton and me at the village school, and I don’t think she ever quite stopped. Even now, she could make a man of fifty-eight feel he should sit up straight.

She stood by the window for a long moment, looking at the telephone box. She said she remembered when the post office got its first telephone. 1923. Violet’s father, Mr Pemberton, said it would change everything. They all thought he was exaggerating.

And was he, I said.

“No,” she said. “He was quite right. It just takes longer than you expect. It always does.”

She paid fourpence for her magazine and went on her way. But at the door, she turned back.

“Progress, Jessop,” she said. “You can’t hold it back. But then, you wouldn’t want to.”

~ ~ ~

Dr Mortimer stopped by around lunchtime. She’s the only one in the village with a telephone at home, has to be, I suppose, for emergencies.

She looked relieved. She said did I know how many times she’d been fetched out of bed at two in the morning by someone hammering on her door. She said this box would save lives.

She bought The Times and a packet of Spangles.

“Purely medicinal,” she said, with that look doctors give you when they know you’re not going to argue with them.

~ ~ ~

The Reverend Cavendish came by in the afternoon. Our vicar. St Michael’s. Quiet man. Bookish.

“Afternoon, Arthur. A packet of mints, please,” he said.

By mints, he meant Polos. He thought they sounded more respectable that way.

He said he’d been thinking about the telephone box. Connection, he said. That’s what it was really about. Reaching across distance. Hearing a voice when you can’t see a face.

He said, “Not so different from prayer, when you think about it. Reaching out to something you can’t see. Hoping to be heard.”

He looked out at the telephone box on the green.

“That little red box,” he said. “It’s just another way of reaching out to someone. Same as the church, really.”

I’d never thought of it that way.

“Most people don’t,” he said quietly. “But that’s what vicars are for. Finding God in unexpected places.”

At the door, he turned back.

“Do you suppose God has a telephone number, Arthur?” he said.

He didn’t wait for an answer.

“No. I shouldn’t think He does. More of a letter writer, I imagine.”

And off he went, Polo clicking against his teeth.

And then, mid-afternoon, Violet Pemberton came in.

Violet runs the post office. Has done for thirteen years. We were at school together, back when Miss Truelove was young Miss Truelove and the world was a very different place.

She was standing there, looking a bit flustered.

“Afternoon, Violet,” I said. “Everything alright?”

She said something about being fine but she was stumbling over her words. Then she seemed to remember why she’d come. Tommy had done a job for her at the post office, she said. She’d brought his ha’penny for the fund.

I put it in the tin for her. Tommy’s bicycle fund. She didn’t leave. Just stood there, looking about the shelves.

“Do you fancy a picnic?” I said.

She went very red. Very red indeed.

“The Picnic bars.” I pointed to the display where she’d been looking. “They’re new. Just in from Fry’s. Peanuts, caramel, raisins, wafer, all covered in chocolate. A bit of everything, really. All for thrupence.”

She seemed relieved. Or disappointed. Hard to tell with Violet sometimes. She said yes, she’d take one.

She held out a sixpence. I went to give her the thrupenny bit change. She held her hand up before I’d even reached across.

“Keep it,” she said. “Put it in Tommy’s fund.”

On her way out, she said something about the telephone box, how her sister Dorothy in Australia was too far to telephone. But perhaps one day.

“Some distances can’t be closed with a fourpenny call,” she said.

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that. But she left with her Picnic bar, and I went back to restocking the sherbet lemons.

Odd visit, though. I didn’t think Violet had much of a sweet tooth.

~ ~ ~

Closing time came. I turned the sign, pulled down the blind, and put the kettle on.

The telephone box stood on the green in the evening light. Nobody had used it yet.

It was nearly seven when I heard it.

I was outside, bringing in the crates. And there it was. A sound I couldn’t quite place.

Then I realised. The telephone. In the box on the green. Ringing.

I walked across the road.

I stepped inside. Picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” I said. “This is... the Hartley Green telephone box.”

The lady on the other end said, “GPO testing. Can you hear me clearly, sir?”

I told her I could. The line was clear. She thanked me and I replaced the receiver. The first call to Hartley Green.

But I’d answered it. I’d been the first voice from Hartley Green to travel down that line.

I pushed open the door and stepped out into the evening air. The village was quiet. Smoke rising from chimneys. The smell of someone’s dinner drifting across the green.

I thought about what the Reverend had said. Connection. A direct line to anywhere.

And I thought about Edith. My Edith. Five years gone now. What I wouldn’t give for a direct line to her.

But some distances can’t be closed. Not with fourpence. Not with all the fourpences in the world.

The Reverend called it connection. I’m not sure what I’d call it. But whatever it is, we’d had it long before that telephone box arrived.