RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32209, 30 January 1970, Page 18

RANDOM REMINDER

SOUND AND FURY

Is there a harsher, more dreadful sound in the world than a telephone jarring one to wakefulness in the middle of the night?

With most people, there are immediate thoughts of disasters and dire tidings; why otherwise would someone be calling in the small hours of the morning?

We had a telephone call very early one recent morning, and heaven knows how long it had been ringing before we took off from the prone position as if the bed was on fire. Others in the

house made it clear, later, that our progress down a dark passage was not accomplished without several unhappy and noisy collisions with the walls, and

that the footwork was thunderous and, in fact, sounded like a herd of angry elephants. And of course, the very moment we snatched the telephone from its cradle,

there was a click at the other end: the caller had become tired. We were tired to start with, but we remembered, then, that we had put in a call to a Dunedin man expected here in a Christchurch

hotel and had asked in one of our madder moments, for him to call us when he arrived, no matter if it was late.

But we didn’t remember the key to the whole situation until we were reminded of it when we returned to the couch. We had been away overseas last year for some time, and a charitable family had installed, for our comfort and ease, a telephone beside our bed. How could we possibly be expected to remember that, when woken from a deep sleep . . . we’d only been home about two months.