READER’S STORY

By Danielle de Valera

WAY back in the 1950s, I had an aunt who didn’t know how to use a public telephone. Or any telephone, for that matter.

Whenever the phone rang in our house and a total stranger came on the line saying, “Is that the Ellis household?”, I would know to call my mother:

“Mum, Auntie Nellie’s on the phone!”

Big and buxom with red hair, Nellie would simply corral the first person walking past in the street and get them to ring for her, pressing the correct change into their hands along with the phone number, written on a slip of paper.

To look at, she was the very antithesis of her husband Joe, my mother’s brother. He was small and fine, like a Spanish dancer. He also suffered from anxiety, but his was of a different kind from his wife’s.

Whenever he came to visit my mother, he always caught a bus that would get him to the railway station 45 minutes ahead of the train on which he would return home.

“Why don’t you wait here and catch a later bus instead of sitting on that windy platform for threequarters of an hour?” my mother would complain. “It’s cold today.”

“Arrh, you can never tell with trains,” Uncle Joe would say. “They’re not always on time.”

Before his retirement, Joe had been station master at Rosewood, a small township 57km out of Brisbane on the rail line to Toowoomba. He still lived there.

Those were the days when the station masters used Morse code to communicate between stations. This was quicker than being connected through the local telephone exchange, “Number, please”.

In its day, it was a kind of texting using sound. You had to know morse code, which consisted solely of dots and dashes.

The station masters also shifted all the large cumbersome rail signals by hand. Forget one, and you could derail an entire train.

Engine drivers knew which small stations to approach slowly, train whistle shrieking, and which ones were worked by station masters who Push the button and hear the coins drop. Public phones have all but disappeared. liked a drink or were known to sleep on the job. Joe was right in a way. In his day, the trains weren’t always on time.

At 22, I could not understand my aunt’s terror of public telephones. (Needless to say, Joe and Nellie did not have a phone in their house.)

I had been using phones since I was a child, standing on the ledges inside the phone booths to reach the mouthpiece, which was set into the apparatus on the wall and completely unconnected to the piece you held to your ear.

“What’s the problem?” I’d ask my mother.

“All you have to do is pick the earpiece up, listen for the dial tone, drop in your two pennies and dial the number.”

“Well, she can’t,” my mother would reply.

Now, sitting lost sometimes in front of a computer, I can’t help remembering Nellie. She’d grown up in an era without phones, just as I’d grown up in an era without computers.

“Darn this new-fangled technology!” she’d often say.

I sometimes find myself echoing her words.

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