When I was 4 or 5, we lived in a house on Sunset Avenue in Zanesville. I only have a few memories of that house and things that happened there – we moved to Cincinnati when I was seven. One memory I do have of that house was the telephone. It was in the kitchen, on the wall just to the right of the door from the hall. I remember that if you used that phone, you had to ask the operator for the number you wanted – there wasn’t a dial. I doubt if I ever made a call from that phone, though in my mind is a memory of making ‘joke’ calls from it. That makes no sense at all, of course, because if you phone someone to tell them that if their nose is running, they should hurry up and run after it, the operator will not only know who you rang but also who you are! I think that ‘memory’ is a conflation of my knowing the phone and my remembering hearing about my father making ‘joke’ calls when he was young.

When we moved to Cincinnati (because Mommy and Bill we’re going to go to the University for Patty to study, interior design which changed to architecture fairly quickly, and for Bill to study Business), we had two telephones, but only one line. One phone was in the living room, the other in my mother’s bedroom. The phone number was something like, University 123456. I don’t have a clue what anyone else’s number started with in that big city – ours was University because we lived not too far from the University of Cincinnati. We lived there from 1950 to 1958 with a year or so in other places during Mommy’s second divorce. (Yes, in those days, Patty was Mommy.)

She divorced her second husband, Bill, in 1955/6, the ‘quick’ way, by taking herself and her 3 daughters to Reno, (known as The Biggest Little City in the World!). For the Reno part of that time, we lived at a ‘dude ranch’ called The Whitney Guest Ranch, along with other women who were seeking to get away from their husbands and the occasional man (but we never knew why he was there). We didn’t have a phone in our ‘unit’ (two rooms with a galley kitchen and a bathroom), though there was a phone in the main house if we needed one. It didn’t play any part in my life and I don’t even know or remember where it was situated.

From Reno we went to Palm Springs for about a month to visit Mommy’s dad and his second wife (divorce runs in the family!) After that we lived in a sort of ghost town called La Quinta, which is now quite a large inhabited town, but, at that time, housed very few people. I think we might have had a phone there but we didn’t seem to have much reason to use it so, no memories. From there we went back to civilisation!

Back in Zanesville for a few months, our phone was our grandmother Ethel’s phone. I seem to remember the prefix word to the numbers in that neighbourhood, was Gladstone, but I could be wrong. Anyway, in that house we hadn’t much need (as kids) for a phone as all our friends lived within a few minutes’ walk. Then, for a short time, we lived in a small satellite area of Columbus, while Patty tried out the University of Ohio’s architecture school. We may have had a phone, probably did, but I knew no one to ring so that one isn’t in my memory at all.

We returned to Cincinnati in December of 1956. UC’s architectural school was better than Ohio U’s, obviously, and we had the same phone number for the rest of the time we lived in America. I used that phone, a lot!

I turned fourteen in April, 1957. Not only was I a teenager – I’d been a teenager for a whole year! There were suddenly masses of people I needed to ring – girl friends, of course, but mainly BOYS! And I hardly remember any of them! I remember Joe, who rang me once (I think) and a guy who had a car! called Dave, or maybe Dale. There was Bob, (who fell down his cellar stairs into a sheet of glass and needed surgery on his wrist), there was Todd who fancied me but whom I disliked, and Bill, who was a good friend.

In August, 1958 we came to England, where I have lived ever since. For 6 weeks we lived in a boarding house (I think I have written about that, before), then we lived for a whole 7 or 8 years in a ‘luxury flat’ in Bayswater. (My American readers mostly won’t understand what a luxury flat was in 1958. The ‘luxury’ was that we were furnished with hot and cold running water, had heat coming from the radiators in the cold weather, had an indoor toilet and bathroom and a gas fridge big enough to hold a pint or two of milk, a block of butter, a bit of cheese, a tray of ice cubes in the exceedingly small freezer inside the fridge and maybe, some bacon wrapped in paper. Also, there was a lift (elevator) which was necessary as our flat was on the sixth floor. These luxuries were, indeed, luxuries in the year 1958 as few people had any of them! Few people had central heating or hot water at the turn of a tap (faucet). In fact, we didn’t realise how luxurious having these items was until we moved again. Since this is about telephones, I won’t carry on with this particular thread but I’m sure I’ve already written about these things, or I will at a later date.

We had to wait a few months to have a line installed for our phone. The number, eventually, was BAYswater 2544, but in the interim we had to use the pay phone in the lobby of the block of flats. I had a new ‘love’ interest called Ashley who lived in outer North London somewhere. On many evenings I would take my 3 pennies down in the lift to the pay phone, put them in the slot, dial his number and, if he answered, push button A. We would talk for 10 minutes or so then say good night. (It was a very innocent love!) (If no one answered you pressed button B and got your 3d* back.)

Soon enough, Ashley disappeared into the wilds of north London and I met my next boyfriend – a school mate – who was called Mike Katz. I didn’t have to ring him as he lived around the corner in a flat in the Bayswater Road, but if I had had to ring him I could have because we finally had our phone installed!

I have mentioned this phone in a previous post when Shaun rang Lance Percival. I imagine I used the phone fairly often. My most vivid memory of that phone, though, was the phone calls which came from an anonymous ‘heavy breather’! He not only breathed heavily from time to time but talked, asking some very personal questions. I would chat away about what we had for dinner, how school was progressing etc and, after several calls, he gave up on our number.

Next was the phone we had in our flat in Chiswick, west London. I don’t remember the number but it started with 995-. My main memory of that particular phone can be found somewhere in my archives but I’ll give you the gist – it was Christmas morning, Patty and Judy had spent the night before Christmas getting plastered and Patty decided, in the morning to go upstairs to sleep, leaving me to cook (as usual).

There was a phone jack in the bedroom and our one phone was plugged in up there so, when it rang around noon on Christmas Day, I ran up the stairs to answer it. When I entered the bedroom, I found my mother on fire! Or at least, the bedclothes lying on her chest were smouldering! She had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand and it had fallen out of her fingers as she slept.

I started shouting at her, trying to wake her up and, at the same time, pulled the smouldering blankets off her and answered the phone. it was Walter Roberts, a family friend, wishing us a Happy Christmas! I quickly told him what was going on, hung up and kept on shouting to the dead-to-the-world Patty, who did NOT LEARN HER LESSON! (Even when she lived on her own in the early 2000’s, she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand but, luckily, she had bedclothes that didn’t burn much, which had been given to her by the local fire department!)

We moved, after 8 or so years, to Ravenscourt Park and stayed there a year. I know we had a phone, there, because one night I tried to ring it and no one answered. This was scary as I knew that my mother, my two sisters and Veronica were there as I had left them there only an hour or so earlier, to take a friend to her home in south London. On my way back, I had a flat tire just on the edge of Clapham Common and tried to ring home to let them know I would be some time. I rang from a garage who, luckily, were able to help me change the flat tire. I was really worried, though, as I resumed my drive home. What would I find when I got there? A blazing inferno? My family disappeared? A note to say they had all rushed to hospital with my little girl?

Nope, none of those things. All of them were fine, asleep in their beds, not at all concerned that it had taken me so long to get back!

Next it was West Malling where we lived from 1972 to 1982, (the longest we lived anywhere til then!)

We had a landline with the prefix 0732, until prefixes were changed all around England, in our case by adding a one between the zero and the seven – I’m not sure why. We also had huge phone books listing private and business numbers. Nowadays I don’t think there are phone books in the UK – we can look up numbers on the internet!

When Julian and I met, we bought a house in East Malling and still had an 01732 number. We lived there for about 12 years – staying put for an even longer time! Patty wasn’t happy that I wasn’t living with her any longer as she didn’t drive and was living in a rural area but she had a phone – and she got good use out of it, ringing me sometimes three times a day!

When mobile phones came in, what a boon that was! I didn’t have one for a while as we had more important things to spend our money on but, eventually, I had Veronica’s cast off Nokia when she changed to a BlackBerry. I particularly liked having a mobile after Chloe was born and I was travelling between West Malling (yep, we’d moved back there!) and London to do grandma duty once a week or so. I loved the ability to be in touch in case of emergencies. (Once, when I was much younger and a new mum, I had left my baby at nursery and was worried (anxious mum!). I was walking down a London street on my way to work when I heard a phone ringing inside a house that I passed and was convinced that it was the nursery ringing me to report an emergency! I knew it couldn’t be real, I knew it was silly to believe that, even for a second, but I did! I’m not quite such an anxious mum, now, thank goodness!)

Now, of course, I have my very own, second-hand iPhone. I keep it charged (normally), and use it mainly for WhatsApp and texts but I forget to add money to my account! Two days ago I had to go to a dentist some miles away to have a root removed. It wasn’t bothering me but my dentist near home thought it could cause me some trouble in the short term, which would then become a long-term problem. Julian drove me there and said he would probably park near the sea and do some sketching and to ring him when I was finished.

The dentist was lovely and funny – and gave me an injection in the roof of my mouth which was neither lovely nor funny but it did dull the pain of the very quick root removal. I thanked the dentist and went and sat in the waiting room, took out my phone, and tried to ring Julian. But, I couldn’t, because there was no money on my phone. (I should have realised several days earlier when I tried to send a reply text to someone and it wouldn’t go…..and wouldn’t go…..and wouldn’t go. Being old and silly, I hadn’t even suspected the cause!)

So, I decided to add £20 to my phone. But…..the bank decided that that was the moment to check that it was really me adding money to my phone and sent me a text to make sure it was me. I had to send back a text with YES or NO. But I couldn’t send a text because I had no money on my phone😩

In the end, I left the dentist’s office, found the nearest bus stop, got on the Loop (the bus that goes around Thanet in both directions and has a stop near my house) and went home.

Except – just when I was turning the corner into Seafield Rd I realised that I didn’t have my key! As we had planned to come back together we didn’t need to take two keys.😲 Luckily, my next door neighbour has a key to my front door; unluckily, she wasn’t home. So I went to Mick&Lin’s house, borrowed a phone to ring Julian and waited with them ‘til Julian got home. It was only when I went to the loo that I looked in a mirror and saw………a woman whose mouth was drooping on the right hand side just like she was having a stroke!

All the people I passed in the road, all the people on the bus, they all saw me at my very worst! and will never know why I looked like that!

*3d – 3 pence in old money!