Research Note 7: The Telephone and the Monkey Puzzle Tree
I don’t think I have a particular artistic style — not in the way that the great painters and artists of the past did. I doubt anyone looking at one of my films would immediately say, That must be a McClean. 🤔
If there is something that connects the work I make, and have made in the past, it may simply be that I am drawn to things that have been remembered, carried forward or somehow come through. Stories told aloud. Objects that have absorbed the evidence of their use. Small, unofficial archives that were never intended to become archives at all.
In my father’s generation, much of people’s spare time when they weren’t working in the fields or playing football was spent playing tricks on one another and then recounting those tricks for years afterwards, . It was a kind of currency. My father had many such stories and told them again and again throughout his life, laughing heartily each time as though he were both telling and hearing them for the first time.
I was sure the stories had lodged permanently in my memory after hearing them repeated so often. But without Dad here to tell them, much of the detail has faded, and I wish I had written more of them down.
When I was a young girl, I sometimes went with him in the evening when he visited friends and neighbours in their houses. Back home, this was called going on your ceilidh. Before television, this was how people entertained one another on long evenings. They talked politics, mostly in my father’s case, told old stories and yarns, and discussed relations: who had married whom, who their people were, how one family was connected to another, who had left the country, where they had gone and whether they were coming back.
Books and newspaper cuttings passed from house to house. Information travelled through conversations and visits. It was a kind of local network/intranet before there was any talk of computers.
Not everyone had a telephone then either.
When we lived in the middle of Beragh village, on Main Street, we rented a house from a former headmaster who already had a phone installed. The number was Beragh 343. As children, when we lifted the receiver, we were taught to say:
Hello, Beragh 343.
Neighbours sometimes came into the hallway holding a few coins and asked whether they could make a call.
When we moved up the street to the house at the top of the town, the telephone number came with us. We were still Beragh 343. My father had the ingenious idea of attaching the telephone to a wooden board fitted into a hole cut in the wall between the kitchen and his tiny shoebox of an office. The board could swivel, allowing the telephone to move from one room to the other.
It was a clever arrangement, and the telephone was heavily used over the years.
Dad had connections in Belfast and further afield, and people called him at all hours to talk. He did not drink alcohol himself, but there were many nights when he held long conversations with men who were under the influence. Dad listened and let them talk.
As we grew older, the telephone became important to us children too. School friends called, along with interested boyfriends or girlfriends. I remember being so embarrassed when someone rang to speak to me because there was almost no privacy. If Dad was not in his office, you could swivel the telephone through the wall and take the call in there. If he was in the office and Mum was in the kitchen, there was no way around it. The conversation became much shorter and contained far fewer words.
The wooden board behind the telephone gradually became covered in writing. Names, telephone numbers, doodles, calculations and passing marks accumulated across its surface made with biros, markers and even Tipp-Ex! In other words whatever mark maker was near at hand. Mum also wrote down the dates on which she changed the Calor gas cylinders used for the cooker.
Those dates seem very ordinary, but they record something too: kettles boiled, dinners made, a household moving through time. The board became a record of daily life without anyone deciding that it should be one.
I filmed it when I made Movements Recollected in 1999. As a hand swivels the telephone board, my voice-over says, “And the telephone moved from one room to the other.” It always gets a laugh.
Looking at the telephone now, I also realise that my own life has spanned a particular period of transition. I remember a world in which communication depended much more on where you were: the house you visited, the fireside you sat beside, the telephone fixed to the wall, the person who happened to be in the room when it rang. Then came the car, television, mobile phones, the internet, each changing not only how quickly we communicate, but how we move, meet, wait, listen and spend our time.
Of course, there is nothing unique about my period of transition. Every generation lives through changes that reshape ordinary life. New technologies alter more than the objects around us; they alter our habits, our bodies, the buildings we make, the work we do and perhaps, the way we understand the world.
The physical circumstances of those earlier visits remain vivid to me: travelling in the car with Dad, the particular smell of each house, the fireside, the family pets, the hospitality, the people moving in and out of the room while conversations unfolded.
Perhaps my attraction to archives is not coincidental. None of this was written down or recorded in the way that a census form was. No one was asking who had gone on their ceilidh that evening, what was said, or whether something spoken there later changed what someone thought or did.
Nearly fifty five years later, I would love to read a transcript of a conversation between Frank McElroy and my father in the early 1970s, when I sat quietly in the corner of the sitting room and listened.
I remember another evening, years later, when I accompanied my mother and father to visit my father’s sister and her husband. As the evening progressed, one yarn following the other, I realised that the light outside was fading.
I looked through the window and watched the giant monkey puzzle tree slowly disappear into the darkness. Eventually, the only light I could see in the room came from the glowing tip of my uncle’s cigarette.
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