After the 1930 World Cup it took a long time for the European players to arrive home from Uruguay. One Romanian was injured and had to stop off on the way home for surgery. The family in his small Carpathian village assumed he was dead. He arrived home on the day of his own funeral. Hi mother, not unnaturally, fainted and fell into his grave on seeing his ghost.
All of this could have been easily avoided with one phone call.
Has anything in the last few years, at a quotidian level at least, changed its character quite so much as the phone call.
I can remember when we didn’t have a phone. I expect we got one about 1968. A memory of accompanying my mother in 1967 – obviously; I couldn’t be left to fend for myself aged five – through the passageway to Wainbody Avenue and down to the junction with Coat of Arms Bridge Road where stood the red frame, white light of the telephone box.
Making a phone call was a a big deal back then. Phones were kept at the foot of the stairs on a low-lying table with the phone directory beneath it, the Yellow Pages and the White Pages. Once a week for a while, the next door neighbours’ teenage daughter would come round and make a call to her unsatisfactory boyfriend. She’d leave the correct amount of money – 3d and later 3p – which my mother accepted; she was less keen on the neighbour’s knee length fake leather boots and tan mini-skirt. She had to sit at an angle on the second step of the stairs to avoid me catching a glimpse of something my young brain wouldn’t have known how to deal with anyway.
By the time I’d got to university we’d completely run out of money as a family. If you can call my mother and me a family. There was a silver lining – I got the full grant, no questions asked. Conversely, we couldn’t afford a phone any more. So twice a week for many years, in fact until she died prematurely aged fifty-eight, I’d phone a predetermined box at a certain time. This was not a foolproof arrangement. When I started work, there were meetings, to take the most obvious example. I frequently had to resort to writing a letter, if I knew about a meeting a few days in advance.
If you watch the film Control, perhaps the most startling difference between now and then is that Ian Curtis is always looking for a phone when he’s on tour. I seem to remember Rob Gretton got the job as manager partly because he had a phone.
I’m on holiday now in Europe. I don’t feel out of touch any more, and chiefly because of the phone in my hand. 30 years ago, after travelling through Europe with my friend Nigel, there was no way for me to let my mother know I was going to be 24 hours late arriving home. No phone. Prone to catastrophising at the best of times, she assumed I’d died in some unknown Greek train disaster.
Phones are incredible devices. Here is not really the place to expatiate on how we’ve become trapped by the thing that once set us free. But life’s full or ironies, and that’s another one.
