The Front Parlour, by Marjorie Mottershead

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

This novel is set in a Norfolk village in 1934, when small telephone exchanges were often run by a local woman from a room in her own house.

The Saxlingford telephone exchange stood in Thirza Mallett’s front parlour, behind the post office counter and beside her late father’s clock, and by the end of each day she knew more about the village than the rector and the doctor put together.

She sat at the switchboard in her best cardigan, the headset clamped over her hair like a crown, and when the board buzzed she had the plug in before the sound had died away.

‘Saxlingford exchange,’ she said, in the bright, polished voice she kept for the board, a voice far sweeter than the one she used to her sister.

At ten past eleven the rectory rang. The rector asked for a nursing home in Cromer, and then, because the call was put through and nobody could see, Thirza did not take out the listening key. She learned that the rector wanted a room for the spring. She learned that he had not told his wife.

She wrote nothing down. She never did. She kept the whole village in her head instead, every engagement and overdue bill and quarrel about a hedge, filed as neatly as the plugs in their brass rows.

That afternoon Mrs Ruddock, the rector’s wife, came in for stamps and asked, too casually, whether her husband had made any calls that morning.

Thirza counted out the stamps one by one. ‘Not a single one, Mrs Ruddock,’ she said, and smiled her switchboard smile, and when a letter with a Cromer postmark came the next morning, she carried it up to the rectory herself and slid it under the study door.

What impressions does the writer create of Thirza Mallett?

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.