A first telephone call

Text 1: Four Miles of Wire, by Cordelia Haworth

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

March 9th. Today I spoke to my father across four miles of fields, and he was not there.

The instrument has been fixed upon the wall of Uncle Edwin’s counting-house since Christmas, and Uncle speaks of it as other men speak of a racehorse. It is a box of polished walnut about the size of a family Bible, with a little handle at the side, two bells on top like a pair of startled eyes, and a black trumpet hung upon a hook. A wire runs from it out of the window, along a line of poles beside the canal, all the way to the mill at Thornley, where Papa had gone this morning on purpose to be spoken to.

Uncle turned the handle as though winding a barrel organ. The bells rang. Then he gave me the trumpet and told me to hold it to my ear, and not to shout, for I should only deafen the gentleman at the far end. That the gentleman was my own father made no difference to his instructions.

At first there was nothing but a seething, like a kettle a long way off, or the sea in a shell. Then, out of the seething, a voice said my name.

I cannot describe it properly. It was Papa’s voice, and yet it was not: thinner, smaller, as if he had been folded up very small and posted inside the instrument. It was close against my ear, closer than he has ever spoken to me in my life, and at the same time it came from somewhere impossibly far off. He asked whether I could hear him. I said yes. He asked again. I said yes again, louder, and Uncle frowned. Then neither of us could think of a single thing to say. We had four miles of wire between us and nothing to put into it.

At last Papa said that it looked like rain at Thornley. I told him it was raining here. We were both so pleased.

He came home at six, wet through, and I found myself shy of him, as though we had only just been introduced.

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