The Telephone Caller

    When I lived in London, back in the 1970s, single young women would share apartments.

Photo by Charlota Blunarova on Unsplash

       This was not at all strange in itself – London had then, as it still has now, a crushing housing crisis, and for women of twenty-something, starting out in careers in which we already accepted as a given that we were to be paid less than our male colleagues, it was the only way we could afford accommodation. What was, in retrospect, not only strange, but, seen through the spectacles of the twenty-first century, naïve verging on the jaw-droppingly idiotic, was the way in which we found other young women to share apartments with.

       We would advertise for them in the newspaper. Whenever one girl would leave a flatshare, the remaining roommates would club together to buy an ad in The Times or The Evening Standard: “Fourth girl wanted for airy, or cosy, or well-appointed, or relaxed, flat in Shepherd’s Bush, or Putney, or Notting Hill, £12 per week, own room, amenities not included.” If someone were interested, they’d call the number of the shared telephone landline that we’d  leave on the ad, we’d ask them a few cursory questions, what age they were, what they did for a living, how they spent their spare time, and then, if they seemed like a social fit, we’d invite them to the flat for an interview.

       On an appointed evening, a stream of ten or twelve complete strangers would arrive at our front door. We’d invite them in, show them the lie of the land, explain whose bedroom was where, detail who was, and who was not, likely to be spending her weekends staying with her boyfriend, point out the various closet spaces, identify the creaky floorboard on the landing and the window that never quite fully closed, and generally give them, not so much a tour, as a potential house burglar’s best ever Christmas gift, wrapped in shiny paper with a sprig of mistletoe tucked neatly underneath the bow.

       When we’d all agreed on the candidate who had charmed us most effectively, we would telephone her, invite her to the flat again, and, with no further investigation, hand over to her the extra keys to our front door, confident that she would behave as a law-abiding citizen and responsible member of our community; the others, we would expect to melt back into the crowds of London, never to be seen or heard from again.

       Astonishingly, this system worked. I never either read or heard of anything bad happening to anyone because of it; I shared several flats myself in my twenties, have made through them a couple of friends who are still among my dearest to this day, and the very worst experiences that I ever had through them, were with one girl who insisted on throwing neon blue cleaning agent down the lavatory, which was hell on a hangover, and another who would invariably try to switch television channels to the religious music program on a Sunday evening when the rest of us were watching All Creatures Great and Small, back when David Tennant’s father-in-law was young.

       The only real problems we ever ran into were the spate of obscene telephone calls we’d regularly receive following the advertisements. The sort of men who would do that sort of thing would trawl the flatshare ads looking for likely numbers and call them, at first pretending to be a friend of one of the group to draw us into conversation before veering off into such suggestions as we can leave the reader to guess. These calls were never actually frightening, as the sort of people who found it interesting to make them also lacked the imagination to say anything truly shocking, and not even in the 1970s were we dumb enough to include our street address in any of the ads. But they were extraordinarily annoying, and in the few weeks after placing an ad we would routinely adopt gruff and forbidding telephone voices on hearing a strange male voice coming down the line.

       One quiet afternoon during a flatmate changeover, I picked up the telephone to hear a man say, confidently, "Hello, how are you?"

       Oh, lord, I thought. Here we went.

       “Who are you?" I snarled, using my most hostile tone.

       The person owning the voice chuckled faintly. “It’s Nick!” he said, audibly amused at my ferocious reaction.

       Now, this was different. Nick was my flatmate Joanna's new-ish boyfriend, a delightfully warm and kind young man with whom I happened to share both an Irish background and a fondness for silly jokes. I liked Nick: several decades, a solidly happy marriage to Joanna, two sons and four grandchildren down the road, I still do. I began to relax.

        "Hello, Nick!" I said. "Sorry about that, I'd thought you were one of those pathetic little obscene telephone callers."

       There was a cold silence at the other end of the line. Oh, dear, I thought, I've hurt his feelings.

        "They're such a bloody nuisance," I explained. "And you have to ask yourself what sort of sad and dreary little people they must be that they have no better way to entertain themselves than by making unpleasant calls to strangers? I'm sorry I thought you were one of them."

       The chill in the silence deepened. Nick was, and is, a regular churchgoer, and a man who quite rightly prides himself on the upright morality of his character: it seemed that I had actively offended him.

        "What impossibly boring excuses for a life they must lead," I continued, thinking to mollify him by emphasizing the difference between his personality and that of the obscene caller. "Can you imagine having nothing better to do than telephone strange women to try to upset them with your feeble little childish fantasies? I wonder if they know how we laugh at them afterwards? I suppose I should feel sorry for them, but they’re just such a pest."

        Icicles now hung in the air. Nick, I now remembered, had grown up with brothers and now worked at a male-dominated government office: he did at times seemed a little thrown by the … let us call it refreshing frankness … of the conversations between four young women sharing living quarters.

        "Anyway," I continued, abandoning this clearly thorny topic in pursuit of a more pleasant one, "Joanna’s out now, but is there anything I can do for you, Nick?"

       There was a further silence while I heard Nick tightening his lips.

        "I want," then said Nick, who was not, it now appeared, the Nick I had thought he was, the Nick who helped old ladies across the street and was falling in love with my friend, but a different Nick, one who was now addressing me in tones of profound, personal, and actually quite dignified offence at my wanton lack of sensitivity, "to rip your panties off."

       And hung up in high dudgeon.

       I wonder what obscene callers do for their jollies now that we all have caller id?