Deep now in phase 204 of Lockdown 2.0: the clear-out like never before. And amid the detritus and delight of 20 years of crammed living are relics from a simpler, sparer age – old telephones. A black Bakelite clunker with a Proustian ding of a ring, a nondescript green number ripe for a ’70s dental surgery, and a sleek red cobra of a thing that’s considered one of the most significant industrial designs of the 20th century – my beloved Ericofon, the model now a fixture in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
These silent emissaries from a not-too-distant past remind me that certain numbers can be recalled from decades ago yet not any of my children’s phone numbers. The muscle memory instantly springs back to a childhood phone number, my best mate’s. And beyond numbers I can remember voices, ghosts of distant pasts, because sound is the most evocative of senses when it comes to springing to vividness people long gone. I can recall the voice messages of old lovers on their message machines, or how they’d say hello on pickup; those cadences that would churn your stomach upon hearing them like a hand reaching out and twisting your bowels.
I remember the particular heart-lift of walking through the door of a bedsit and seeing the light flashing on the answering machine to signal missed messages; someone loves you, someone cares enough. Recall the way both my mother and father answered the phone by stating their names. My father, the old mining boss in his voice to the last weeks of his life; my mother, the elocuted smoothness of her vowels learnt in the grand ballroom of destiny reversal where she reigned supreme. My blazing grandmother, who demonstrated fierceness in all aspects of her existence except for the phone – she always sounded vulnerable as she answered, as if afraid of what the voice on the other end would bring. I’m like that now if any of my kids’ schools ring; it must be bad, something must be wrong. Phone as intruder. Malevolence. Interrupter of known life.
So many phone memories relate to teenage years. Not unusual according to Chris Bird, a psychology lecturer at the University of Sussex in England. “There’s a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. If you ask people to recall their memories from their lives, people tend to recall most things from the time when they were teenagers.”
My mother and I used a secret signal because we both loved our quiet after busy days and hated the sanctity of our spaces cluttered up by talk, except to each other. So we had a code involving three rings then we’d hang up and ring again, which worked a treat. There was the colt of a phone table by the front door. Massive telephone books with their thin, fluttery sheets of paper. The Bakelite address book where you’d push down the lever to the surname then press the button to spring open the contraption like a rabbit trap in reverse. A storehouse of memories; all those friends who’ve drifted away or have left this Earth.
In a move of public-spirited generosity, Telstra has made local and national calls from its 15,000 payphones free. I still remember calls from foreign places in dubious phone boxes and the wonder of hearing familiar voices after so long, cadences of love and longing singing you home. The strange signal as a trunk call was answered and coins saved for that moment. Ah, simpler times, when we’d lift our faces more often to the sky.
Will talking on phones go the way of letter writing? Lockdown’s given me hope it won’t. Because they’ve become a lifeline during Covid times. We have extra tinlids accompanying us all the time now, via phones; conversations stretching over hours as kids potter about, leave the room and come back to their mates doing the same. It’s all rather lovely. Connecting, moving. One silver lining of this blasted lockdown.
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