Forbidden Rooms and Electrotat
I appreciate it's a bit odd for someone in their 40s to be talking about their childhood. But I'll have a go.
One of my first set of enduring memories was a forbidden bedroom. I was likely 5 or 6. This was one of those "single bedrooms" you tend to get in a family home, and was painted pink for me originally. At some point I was moved into a much larger room to share with my brother, and the pink room remained.
Only this room was now filled with phones. Not nice, neat boxes all stacked up. A giant pile of office handsets that piled to the ceiling, engraved with that evocative original British Telecom logo:
I have memories of trying to climb it, and then a giant avalanche of phones would flow into another corner of the room and I'd get caught, and taken out of the room. A lot of the phones were that beige plastic, with orange buttons, mixed in with office handsets.
I found out much later that normal people didn't have spare rooms filled with office phones. And my father, who presumably was responsible for these phones for work, takes a mild interest but is now baffled at people who are interested in this. You see, his dad was a railway engineer. So trains are his childhood joy, not phones. He still is trying to work out how to remortgage the house to own one of these. Phones were partly a toy (he did create his own version of the Black Box and gave it a different name) but an adulthood toy, not one that inspired childlike wonder.
Would I have been the same person I am now without that forbidden room? Do other people have these sorts of key memories underlying their interests? I do wonder.
