Irish mammies made the phonebox their own
EIR’S announcement that it’s getting rid of the last of the public phoneboxes reminded me of a story from 1980s London where, in areas like Kilburn that were popular with Irish emigrants, queues of youngsters would form outside the red phone boxes every Sunday evening to phone home.
The expense of international calls back then, plus the trouble of having enough coins handy, meant they’d usually look to reverse the charges. For the benefit of younger readers, for whom telephone etiquette is so completely alien, this meant that upon some prearranged signal – say three rings of the phone or a few hurried words with mammy – they swiftly returned the phone to its cradle and waited for home to ring them back.
The heroine of this tale, after patiently waiting to get to the top of the queue one Sunday afternoon, was preparing to take up the receiver when the phone started ringing. She picked it up to hear an Irish lady introduce herself before asking her to run up to her son’s flat to tell him he had a job interview on Wednesday and to get himself home to Ireland.
The Irish mammy explained that it was too late to send her son a letter about the interview and that since she had the phonebox number from his phonecalls, she had the brainwave of ringing it to see if someone in London would get the message to him.
Now our heroine was in no mood for searching out a flat on a street she’d never heard of, on the off-chance that some unknown bloke was at home, but she felt she had no option. In the Eighties, jobs were like gold dust and besides, the woman on the end of the line, tickled pink at the coincidence of her telephonic collision with a member of the Irish diaspora, was in no doubt not just of our heroine’s willingness to oblige, but also of her utter delight at the task.
I’d like to be able to say that, in the heel of the hunt, the Irish emigrant was successful at said interview, that he climbed the corporate ladder in jig time to lead Greencore or some other national success story, justifying his pushy mother’s representations on his behalf and neatly illustrating the importance of the public phonebox in Irish life. If I were to put my Cecelia Ahern hat on, I’d also add that the phone call led to a coup de foudre between our heroine and the young man that grew into marriage and a happyever-after love story.
Alas, our story ends on a more banal note: the man was at home when our heroine called with the message from mammy but there is no record of any follow-up call from mammy telling strangers in a London call box how he fared at interview.
Our story may highlight the rollercoaster of the digital revolution but it is also a prism that reveals so much about Irish identity. The formidable Irish mammy, the bonds of home and community, the fierce ambition in a society in flux and at what was then a great remove from the rest of the world, and the chance-your-arm attitude to life, which we seem to regard as one of our uniquely endearing and charming national characteristics but which outsiders often find perplexing if not downright rude and annoying.
Brian Friel and Tom Murphy have written plays about less.
The phonebox at the end of our road, or on the main drag in the village, may stink of urine and be pinned with cards of local taxi ranks and call girls. It may be obsolete, fit for repurposing as a digital kiosk or as defibrillator site. It may make for a museum piece – an intriguing symbol of 20th century everyday life for generations to come.
But phoneboxes also anchor many of us in a past when the telephone was the centrepiece of social, family and business life, and when the first bar of its shrill ring tone demanded an immediate response.
Before emails, offices were filled with the sound of ringing phones and the chatter of workers down the lines. In homes, a phone call could bring bad news of sudden death, catalysing such a mood change that the household would be enveloped in gloom. If the call came from a friend in the mood for a good long chat, a stream of laughter and talk would fill the air, prompting orders to get off the phone in case someone else was ‘trying to get through’.
TELEPHONES seemed to unravel invisible threads connecting us to our circle of friends and our small country to the wider world. They were the forerunners of mobile phones, budget travel and the global communication complex that have caused the world to contract and become familiar and made us so accessible to each other.
Millennials remember what it was like to live in the pre-digital era, when a phone call was a bit of an event, made even more unpredictable by the inability to screen calls. They are permanently plugged into their networks so they find phone calls intrusive, unnecessary and exhausting.
Gen Z, born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, won’t even make phone calls. My offspring answer the landline cautiously, as if they were detonating a bomb or about to deal with an alien. Emojis, avatars and TikTok are their preferred form of communication.
Are they more reliable than a public payphone at telling a youngster about an imminent job interview? Definitely. Would they produce the same potential for real-life drama, serendipity, human contact and entertainment? Never.