I probably heard him

 My father passed by the Cacti and around the corner of the house to the back of the property. I probably imagined him pausing to survey the yard before approaching the back steps. To his left would be the small shed where his prized tools were stored (“Not to be touched for any reason. Ever!”). Below that small shed, the garage, which opened onto the back street I had so recently run along carrying the dead weight of my bleeding younger brother. I say opened, but in the few years we lived there I only recall that happening merely once or twice. Not ever having a car in the family, it was instead full of all sorts of things. Perhaps that was the introduction to my slight hoarding instinct that occasionally strikes me in these later years. That certain need to have things I don’t really need, but would hate to throw away. One thing I remember seeing in there was old office telephones.

I have mentioned my father worked for the Post Office. One of the reasons we moved around the country as much as we did. I have also mentioned that this was at the time when the Post Office was also a bank and it was also responsible for housing much of the telecommunications of the day. When I worked for the Telegram delivery section (more on that in a later blog), I recall attending several times a week the main room of the telephonists. Where several rows of women, and some men, sat all day at the banks of the holey boards. In front of them a collection of small plugs on cables which would be pulled out and plugged into any one of the multitude of holes in front of them. All the while issuing brief comments to the caller, “Stand by please”, “Connecting you now”. Not only did they make those comments, but usually they would be continuing conversations with persons on either side in between this. They would say something,  listen to the caller requests, acknowledged the caller request, pull out one particular plug and run it to a particular socket, to put the caller in touch with a more distant operator or to an actual number, and, back to the conversation they were having with the person on each side.

It was a wonderful thing to watch. The complexity of the telephone system, the sheer volume of people employed to connect the thousands of telephones in our town. And to consider this manual dance of connections was being performed in cities all over the world, from rooms of hundreds of telephonists, to the small country operator, the world spoke to each other because these people put them in contact by manoeuvring a plug from one socket to another.

(continued tomorrow)