Telephones

As a child I thought Button B in a public telephone box was a neat idea. After all, it held out a possibility of unexpected riches, which is why I always pressed it when I passed the box, in exactly the same way as I tried the handle of the chewing gum machine – just in case some individual had a brain so addled by constant chewing that he had put in the money, but forgotten to perform the simple mechanics required to issue the gum.

In fact, to the best of my recollection neither of these procedures ever yielded me anything. Certainly, when real money was required, one was much better off trawling the local ditches for discarded lemonade bottles which, however stagnant the water from which they had been rescued, would be redeemed for hard cash at the local shop, as surely as if they bore an endorsement from the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England saying “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of tuppence.” The bounty on Colorado beetles was beyond the dreams of avarice, but I never realistically expected to find them.

Nevertheless, in spite of failure regularly experienced, I continued to try Button B, since though I personally may never have gained money from it, I always knew someone who said they had; and very recently; and in precisely that telephone box.

For younger readers who will have no notion of what the preceding means, I should say that Button B was the equivalent of the Returned Coins button on a modern vending machine. Whilst it is now as redundant as the word ‘tuppence’ which my word processor continues to underline in the hope that I will change it to ‘sapience’, it once performed a vital function. Should you chance to ring a number that was engaged, pressing Button B returned to you the fourpence (the word processor doesn’t even acknowledge that: I am tempted to annoy it even more by using ‘fuppence’!) that you had inserted to pay for your call.

And that is why as an adult I still believe that Button B was a neat idea. Imagine it. You ring a company all of whose employees (few firms would have known what to do with an operative) were busy with other calls. And you wasted no time – you knew immediately that there was no chance you would get through. No one played Vivaldi on a Stylophone. No one told you that you were in a queue without the information you get from seeing a real queue: that there are eight people in front of you, and the one three places ahead looks like the type that will take half an hour. No one lied that your call was important to them. You did not feel the need to scream at a disembodied voice that if they valued calls so much, why didn’t they hire some extra operatives?

Above all you hadn’t wasted goodness knows how much money hanging on through all this prevarication. And what is more you could prove to yourself that you hadn’t, because just a little push of Button B and there in your hand would be the actual four coins, totally unspent.

And should you forget to do so, at least the next passing schoolchild would be happy.