Delivering the letters

..."So I went to Carlisle (eleven miles away) that would be in 1934, and I biked..... off I would set on the bike to Carlisle to be there at six.  Well I was always there before six.
Then I had to bike back [to Wigton at the end of the day].  Well, I started at six o'clock and we sorted the letters into postman's walks and then after we had finished sorting into postman's walks we used to go out to our own postman's walk and clear the boxes, prepare them and about an hour after seven o'clock we would be packing our bags and going out to deliver the letters we had got ready.  And we would be back about somewhere about half past nine and ten o'clock in the morning.  And then we used to have half an hour for a meal and then we went back again and did another delivery of letters and parcels.  And in those days there were three deliveries of letters in the town area of Carlisle, there were three on Monday to Friday and on Saturday there were two deliveries.  Now there's two deliveries Monday to Friday and on delivery on Saturday and it's quite possible as time goes by that there will only be one delivery Monday to Friday -- but I don't think I'll be in the Post Office when that happens.  I think it will come because of the telephones.  People are using the telephone more now if their friends have got telephone and they have telephone, well they're not writing letters.  And the people that are writing letters are mostly oldish people that haven't the use of the phone.  They're dying off very quickly and if it wasn't for bills and circulars well I don't know what a postman would find to do."

Henry Fell, Carlisle postman.
Speak for England  Melvyn Bragg

The telephone call

"He had gathered his feet under him preparatory to getting up when his telephone rang.  In other places in the world, one understands, telephones are made to ring in outer offices, where a minion answers the thing and asks your business and says that  if you will be good enough to wait just a moment she will 'put you through', and you are then connected with the person you want to speak to.  But not in Milford.  Nothing like that would be tolerated in Milford.  In Milford if you call John Smith on the telephone you expect John Smith to answer in person.  So when the telephone rang on that spring evening in Blair, Hayward, and Bennet's it rang on Robert's brass-and-mahogany desk.

Always, afterwards, Robert was to wonder what would have happened if that telephone call had been one minute later.  In one minute, sixty worthless seconds, he would have taken his coat from the peg in the hall, popped his head into the opposite room to tell Mr Heseltine that he was departing for the day, stepped out into the pale sunlight, and been away down the street.  Mr Heseltine would have answered his telephone when it rang and told the woman that he had gone.  And she would have hung up and tried someone else.  And all that followed would have had only academic interest for him.

But the telephone rang in time; and Robert put out his hand and picked up the receiver."

The Franchise Affair  Josephine Tey