photo: GEttY
there a phone in your washing
machine?’ he asked.
We’d hunted for that phone for
three months. My mum had put it
in the household appliance we had
no idea existed!
I was 28 when my mum died,
too young to think of all the things
I needed to apologise for.
She stayed up late to pick me up
after nights out, welcomed my friends
with open arms, and ran round after
my brother and me like a slave.
‘What goes around comes around’- and I wish my mum had lived to
laugh about it all with me. I, too,
became a teacher and a single
parent. Having teenagers of my
own made me understand the sheer
frustration of dealing with them,
appreciate the deep joy of standing
on the other side of a closed door
and sticking my tongue out at them
or – silently – shouting back at them
to make sure I had the last word.
The thing that makes me feel better
about what spoilt brats my brother
and I were, is the deep joy my mum
must have felt on the drive to work
while she imagined us searching high
and low, day in, day out. Victories
with teenagers, I came to know, are
infrequent, but oh-so delicious.
✿The Truths and Triumphs of Grace
Atherton by Anstey Harris (£12.99,
Simon & Schuster) is out now
Where I’ve been... To the gym, where I’ve recently
taken up weight-lifting.
Who I’ve met... My daughter, the singer-songwriter
Lucy Spraggan – briefly, between her touring.
What I’ve bought... A year-long English Heritage
pass to see the fabulous castles and gardens in Kent
(where I live).
What I’ve seen... Flamenco dancing in Seville,
on a quick break before I finish my new novel.‘My funny old week’
This week’s columnist:
Author
Anstey Harris
W
hen I was 15, my
mother received an
enormous phone bill.
She was a full-time
primary schoolteacher and a single
parent. The bill was horrendous. It
was 1980 and it was into the £100s.
It wasn’t enough for my friends
and me to spend all day at school
together; we wrote letters to each
other and we talked on the phone- if our parents were out – for hours.
The second my mum left the house,
I would ring my friends.
My mum invested in a phone lock:
a small silver padlock that went on
the dial of the phone and prevented
it from going round, so you couldn’t
dial out. I’d seen a Play for Today
on the TV, though, where some
people trapped in a country house
had tapped out the number on the
buttons on the top of the phone.
I tried it and it worked.
I could merrily make calls to my
friends without my mother having
a clue. Until the next bill came...
After that, she took the phone out
completely. The box on the wall with
the bell in it still rang – tantalisingly - if anyone called, but we had
nothing to answer it with. My
brother and I would scream in
frustration as call after call came in
that we couldn’t answer. We turned
the house upside down – we looked
through drawers, under beds,
in the back of cupboards.
No luck. The hunt went on
for the whole summer while
invitations to parties, chats
with friends, gossip and
confidences just rang away
unanswered at the wall.
In the autumn, not long after
we’d gone back to school at
the end of our miserable
summer, a man came to fix
the washing machine. ‘Why’s
‘Mum hid our house phone where she
knew we’d never find it...’
It’s A Funny
Old World
COLUMN
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NEXT WEEKMelanie Blake 15
Dover Castle, Kent is
an English Heritage site