While walking along Silom Road the other day, I spotted a young lady making a call from a phone box. Now you don't see that very often these days -- a Thai woman without a smartphone. She must have been in a state of distress. Perhaps she was calling the police station to inform them her smartphone had been stolen.
It got me thinking about the last time I made a call from a phone box in Bangkok back in the Stone Age. I remember making a call from a box outside the old Athens Theatre on Phaya Thai Road. After putting the coins in and dialling, there was total silence.
I then noticed a young couple looking at me with some amusement -- that's when I realised that the telephone cord had been totally severed and I was standing there like a total idiot holding a phone receiver which was not attached to anything.
It could have been worse. A Thai gentleman in Bangkok some years ago was jailed for three years after being found guilty of assaulting a telephone. Apparently he had just been fired from his job and when he went to make a call from a phone box and the phone didn't work, he went bananas and tried to strangle the wretched thing.
Ring my bell
Our household in Reading acquired its first phone in the late 1950s. Before that we had to use a red public phone box which was about a 10-minute walk away and sometimes a fruitless journey if the vandals had got there first. Even if it was working, it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences as it smelled like a public urinal thanks to the local drunks.
The phone in our house was a standard black issue which took pride of place in our tiny hallway next to the front door. The historic inaugural call was made by my mum to her mum, launching the first of a thousand such conversations.
About 15 minutes later we were sitting in the kitchen enjoying a celebratory cup of tea, when we got the first incoming call. It was an extremely shrill ring and my dad nearly fell off his chair in fright. We sat there frozen for a moment, until mum said something like "Well, I suppose we had better answer it", looking at me.
I dutifully picked it up, carefully announcing "Reading 72959" and at the other end was grandma, wanting to talk to my mum again about how exciting it was to have a phone.
We lived in a cul-de-sac and few people on the street had a phone. It wasn't long before neighbours came in to make their own calls and for a few months our hallway resembled a telephone exchange.
Sex in the city
While working in London in 1968, not far from Soho, I discovered phone boxes were also the home of thinly disguised advertisements by ladies of doubtful virtue.
Use a phone box anywhere near the West End and plastered on the windows, you would be greeted by messages advertising "French Lessons", in which no textbooks were required, "Danish Blue" which was definitely not a cheese and "Eve From Eden" who was more likely to be Bertha from Bethnal Green.
These ladies adopted what were regarded by the English in those days as a "exotic" names like Lola, Scarlett, Celeste, Crystal and Tiffany.
These days they have become more professional, leaving expensive-looking business cards, dubbed by the media as "tart cards" which are even regarded as something of an art form, aka "Tart Art". However, whether you would regard a card offering "Steamy Rubber Fantasies With Charlotte'' as an art form is up for debate.
At the third stroke …
In those early days I remember dialling 123 for the Speaking Clock just for something to do. You would hear the dulcet tones of Jane Cain, a telephonist chosen by the Post Office as "the girl with a golden voice" who became a minor celebrity. She would proceed to announce every 10 seconds "at the third stroke the time will be …"
The Speaking Clock became a part of English culture and one episode of Fawlty Towers has a furious Basil berating a telephone operator because the Speaking Clock was constantly engaged. It was even the subject of a Tom Stoppard play, If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank, in which a man whose wife went missing years before, calls up the Speaking Clock and realises it's the voice of his long-lost wife, Gladys. Quite intriguing.
It still apparently attracts an amazing 12 million calls a year, although a sizeable proportion are reportedly on New Year's Eve when people want to get the countdown exactly right.
Bob Dylan's dream
The Speaking Clock even gets a reference in Bob Dylan's terrific Talkin' World War III Blues from his 1963 Freewheelin' album. Dylan is relating to a doctor about a scary dream in which he is the only person left after World War III.
One verse goes: "I was feelin' kinda lonesome and blue/I needed somebody to talk to/So I called up the operator of time/Just to hear a voice of some kind/'When you hear the beep it will be three o'clock'/She said that for over an hour/And I hung up."
The way the world is going, we could all soon be experiencing Bob Dylan's dream.
Contact PostScript via email at oldcrutch@gmail.com.
