I smiled all the way through Viv Groskop’s article (The hunt for a missing date, the numbers I’ll never forget: we’ll never match the magic of a landline, 2 August). It all rang true, so to speak. Never mind four digits, our family landline in the 1960s was three digits, which are embedded in my brain. Then we moved to a town and had five digits, which later became six, no less. On answering, Mum spoke these slowly and carefully until she identified the caller, then her voice could be pure joy if it turned out to be an old friend.
Ours was wall-mounted by the front door and, as Viv says, it was a sort of gateway to everything else. I remember waiting all day for a phone call from a boy I liked, willing the phone to ring until I realised Nan had cut the line while pruning the roses. It turned out to be not the best match, so maybe Nan knew a thing or two about landlines and boys.
Catherine Suttle
London
• We’ve had a landline phone ever since I can remember, going back to the early 1930s. It was placed by the front door to enable people to have a private conversation without disturbing the rest of the house. By contrast, my grandparents’ phone in their three-storey terrace house was on the sideboard in the rarely used dining room, where it stood out among the heavy furnishings and solid dining table. At least it would have stood out, were it not for the bulky tea cosy that covered it, because a “naked” phone was “not nice”. The bell was in the hall.
Dan Zerdin
London
• In 1968, aged 18, I started work as a telephonist. When a caller asked for the boss, I said “who’s calling?”, then put him on hold and “plugged in” to the boss’s line. “Tell him I’m out,” was the reply. Things got busy. When I got back to the caller’s line, I’ll never forget blurting out: “He says he’s out.”
Janette Ward
Tarrington, Herefordshire
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