24 At the end of the line

It was in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, that the telephone box arrived, bringing a touch of modernity - and an incongruous splash of red - to Whimsey. The locals, barely out of the dark ages, were unimpressed when a phonebox appeared on the village green. They regarded anything new with suspicion - as they still do today - and were quick to voice their grievances. A local historian and pedant called the new phonebox an “unnecessary excrescence”. The vicar of St Breville’s denounced it as “ungodly”, voicing his suspicion that it could undermine the power of prayer.

It’s hard to stop progress and, predictably, the objections came to naught. Over the next few years the phonebox went from ‘indefensible’ to ‘indispensible’, even for those little-travelled locals who could communicate with all their friends and family merely by walking around the village and knocking on a few doors. For example, when an unattended chip pan burst into flames, a sharp-eyed neighbour dashed to the phonebox, called the fire brigade and averted a potential tragedy. On another occasion, Hayden’s father heard the phone ring in the phonebox and, on a whim, answered it. So beguiled was he by the female voice at the other end of the line that he asked her out on a date. Unfortunately, she was phoning from Dundee.

Telephones soon appeared in our homes too, with the handset taking pride of place on a ‘telephone table’ in the hall. But the phonebox on the village green offered something that most of us couldn’t get at home: privacy. There are some conversations we didn’t want to be overheard. Lovers poured out their hearts over the phone until they’d emptied their pockets of their last copper coins. Extra-marital affairs were organised, in conspiratorial whispers, and tearfully ended. Salacious gossip was spread, along with the implausible instruction to “keep this to yourself”. By the time of the Summer of Love, and the Winter of Discontent, the phonebox had embedded itself into the fabric of village life. How, we wondered, had we ever managed without it?

Then mobile phones arrived, and in the time it took Tony Blair to fail to find any ‘weapons of mass distruction’, our phonebox went from valuable lifeline to anachronistic relic. The red paint started to peel, and no one came to repaint it. When the coin box was emptied every month, there wasn’t enough money inside to buy a telephone engineer a pint of Old Profanity in the Farrier’s Arms. Two years ago a notice appeared, announcing that, unless there were any valid objections, BT would shut down the phonebox and take it away. Our local councillors were in two minds about what to do with it. We could let BT remove it. Or slap a preservation order on it. Or just bow to the inevitable: plumb it into the main drain, and mount an illuminated sign - Gents Urinal - on the top.