Home life
In the firing line
Alice Thomas Ellis
The telephone just rang and somebody who had, indeed, the correct number asked Janet if she was the Spanish Consu- late. She denied it. I am fed up with the telephone. For some remote reason the last engineer to come and fiddle with the thing put, in the kitchen which is where we most usually answer it, a hand-set with a sort of deaf aid on it. Some of us are short-sighted, and Janet has a crick in her neck, but not one of us is in the slightest degree deaf. This miracle of modern sci- ence has to be constantly adjusted as you speak since sometimes the person on the other end is inaudible and sometimes his voice comes roaring out with the force of a water cannon. The telephone also has a curious effect on Puss. She is not an unusually affectionate cat but when one is speaking on the telephone she springs up and sits on it, twining herself round the cord, purring loudly and dribbling and patting one's face wish her paw, claws unretracted. 'Oh sod off, you stupid mog,' one mutters and the person on the other end takes offence. I've grown tired of explaining.
Patrice rang to say she had suffered another dog episode. She is dogged at the moment by dog episodes. Walking abroad one day she saw a puppy playing chicken in the main road while its owner stood helplessly on the pavement and the cars whizzed by. Dauntlessly Patrice leapt for- ward, and heedless of the danger flew to and fro until she had collared the creature.
She explained to its owner, a foreigner, that it was inadvisable to let so young an animal roam at large and he shouted at her. Sometimes the stupidity and the cru- elty of the world really gets to Patrice. She asked me who she could sue for being born and I couldn't think of anyone. I want to sue somebody about the telephone. Janet spent hours the other day trying to get through to the Arts Educational Trust. No answer, no ringing tone, no nothing. So she rang Directory Enquiries and they were engaged. Then she rang 100 and no one answered. Alfie applied for a tele- phone a long time ago. He bought the actual object himself from a shop and then asked them to come and bring him a line so he could plug it in and use it, but they said they were on strike, so he's keeping it as an ornament until they decide to up tools again.
I don't know which I find more tiresome, the telephone or the post. I keep getting letters which I really should answer, but I hate answering letters even more than I hate answering the telephone. Perhaps I should keep carrier pigeons. People write to tick me off — more in sorrow than in anger, I hasten to add, and always very nicely, but half the time they've missed the point, which is annoying. I know I smoke too much and I will give it up one day, but I don't care a bit if I don't live to be 103, and I don't get short of breath if I run for a train. I am truly sorry for the man whose lover died of Aids but I never even hinted that Heaven had it in for the love that dare not speak its name. I said that some of the practices I had learned of since Aids hit the headlines sounded highly peculiar. And they do. And I never said I thought Mrs Payne was a good thing. I don't. I said I thought she was jolly funny. And she is. Ages ago I wrote somewhere that I was going to worry more about the daughter when it came to sex than I had about the sons. I wasn't thinking about disease at the time. I'd remembered that females get pregnant; and some fatuous person wrote to accuse me of something. I don't know quite what it was, but I think she was having a sort of internal conflict with herself and I had inadvertently stepped in the firing line. I found her wildly irritating.
I've got to stop now because the tele- phone is ringing. I bet there's a letter on the mat too.
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