I was well into my teens when my mum and me finally got a telephone in our house. It seems incredible to imagine these days, now that I have a mobile phone almost permanently glued to my hand. You wonder how on earth we managed to make contact with anyone, especially my grandparents who were my only other relatives. They didn’t have a telephone either, not until many years after. It didn’t seem to bother any of us!
I don’t really remember the first few calls we got. There was no such thing as cold calling. Apart from calls to my friends, I don’t think we used the phone very much at all. But I do remember some calls and not with pleasure. I remember my mum taking the call from her brother in Rotterdam to say that their mother had died. I remember where I was – at the top of the stairs – and I remember her crying. Then I started crying. “Oma” (grandma) was much loved and now she was gone. That was our Dutch holidays over. It changed my attitudes to telephones too.
There must have been so many joyful phone calls over the years, but the ones I recall most vividly are the deaths. A telephone call from my mother’s Portishead residential care home in the autumn of 1999 to say that I should travel there urgently as she was not well. I was at work and I remember my colleague handing me the phone. She was worse than “not well” when I arrived: she was dead and she’d been dead when the care home proprietor called me. I don’t recall asking why he hasn’t told me the truth, but I don’t remember being angry that he didn’t. It didn’t matter, couldn’t bring her back. And a few years later, again at work, I got the call from the same care home, but this time about my stepfather, who had been terribly ill with Parkinsons and, I suspect, some form of advanced dementia. He was dying and I should go to see him straight away. I did and he was still breathing when I got there. He had no idea who I was, the care home owner told me his breath was growing weaker. At first, I left the room, in cowardice, but then I returned to be with him as he breathed his last breath. It was an incredible experience. Not in any way spiritual, certainly no feeling that he had passed on to “a better place”. I had been with him when his life ended, that’s all. I remember the deaths, but equally I remember the phone calls.
When my mother died, I rang her brother to tell him. It was the only time I cried after she died, but he didn’t. He didn’t seem to care. He was strangely detached, it was as if they had fallen out, although I was not aware that they had. Was he coming to the funeral? Of course not, he replied. What’s gone is gone. He had never once been so see her in the UK to my recollection anyway and she had not been to visit him for over 20 years. My tears turned to confusion, but quickly anger. I later wrote and told him what I thought of him. We have never corresponded since. I think he’s long dead now.
But the phone call is the first memory. And I got to thinking that each phone call might represent bad news. It didn’t, for many years, but there was always a thought in the back of my mind that bad news was just round the corner.
Then my dad died in 2011, after a two month fight with pneumonia. I still remember the phone call on the night of 28 February when his soulmate and widow, Joy Phillips-Johansen, called me with the unimaginably sad news of his passing. Subsequently, I flew to Ottawa for his funeral which is etched in my memory forever, but it was the finality of the phone call that is the most powerful memory.
The landline hardly ever rings these days, apart from advising me that I have had an accident at work, which must have been so bad I can’t remember it, or I’ve been sold a dodgy mortgage, but when people want my attention these days they text or they email.
It’s that phone call I remember, the “where were you when John F Kennedy was shot” moment. Some moments of your life are hazy, perhaps because they are less important, but when the news comes through that someone close has died it is something you never forget and you never forget the power or the immediacy.
