Towing the party line

Living on a farm can be quite an isolated life, and the telephone was an important link to the outside world.  If you wanted to get hold of the exchange at the post office, you had to turn the handle at the side of the phone about seven times in quick succession and then give the number to a disinterested lady on the other end.  Some things never change!  Once connected, she would interupt you at three minute intervals, this being the standard charge time.

Our large, wooden phone was mounted firstly on the wall in our sun porch and next to the bathroom door in our old house.  It got struck by lightning one year just as I was taking a bath, and a ball of fire the size of a soccer ball flew straight through the door and passed right in front of me.  Scary stuff!!  In our new house, it was situated on the wall near the left hand corner of the hallway.  A large highly lacquered rectangular box with a handset on the one side and a handle and earpiece on the other.  It also had two round bells at the top which rang when you received a call.  The earpiece was designed so that others could listen into the conversation taking place.  Unfortunately my sisters and I fought over it so much that my mother had a hard time hearing anything at all, so a lot of the time she banished us from the hallway.

We belonged to a party line, which interconnected the adjoining farms.  We each had a special "ring tone", ours being a short and three longs,  so it was tring, triiiinnnggg, triiinnnggg, triiinnnggg.  My uncle's next door was four shorts, so his was tring, tring, tring, tring, and so on.  All the farms on the party line could all call each other up at no cost.

One night my father and I had to take a small child and his mother to the nearest hospital.  He had accidentally poured a pot of boiling water over himself and required immediate treatment.  The hospital was just over and hour away, but by the time we had repaired the punctured tyre and replaced the snapped fan belt, it was well into the night before we arrived at the hospital.  My father gave my mother a call to tell her that the child had been admitted and we were now on our way back home.

Shortly after that, my mother received a call from our next door neighbour Mr. P, who asked with great concern how each of us was.  Hearing that everyone was fine, his curiosity got the better of him and throwing caution to the wind, he blurted out that he had just been listening in to their conversation, and couldn't understand what was going on, so he got his wife to listen in.  She too could make neither head nor tail of it, so he thought the only thing left then, was to call us directly and get the whole mystery cleared up.

I think there is a certain amount of caring in the farming community, coupled with a equal amount of inquisitiveness, or the feeling that perhaps others lives were a bit more colourful than their own.  Whatever the reason, my mother thought it was hugely funny and never failed to recount that conversation with great hilarity.   As for the little boy, he fortunetely recovered, and was well enough to come back home, after having spent a month in hospital.