I suspect they've changed their mind on the need for a trimphone in the intervening years. Getting a phone was very exciting for a little me though, though absolutely no one was allowed to use it. You even reached for it and DON'T YOU DARE USE THAT PHONE! would wham right into your ear. Even if my mother was at work, she knew, and boy could her voice travel. Other than me, it's the only thing in my family that has travelled.
I saved up all that non-phone goodwill until I was at university and I had a girlfriend who gone back to the US for the holidays.
Thirty-odd years later my mother is still bringing that bill up. I would mind less, but I paid that bloody bill. All £750ish of it.
When I was a Small, I was dragged out of the house of a Sunday evening, down to the phone box where my parents would call my Granny and Aunt ( they lived together, the daughter having never left home ). They were posh and had a phone in the house.
'Banff 2698' they would say, on answering.
Over the pips, we would shove coins into the apparatus to enable a conversation.
Around my final years of primary school, late '70s, I got home from school to find Mother Dear hopping from foot to foot with excitment.
'Can you see anything different?' she gasped between squeals of pleasure.
No, I could not.
Then it was pointed out. The trimphone basking in the Spotlight of Glory.
Like you say, it was Not to be Used upon pain of death, except for the weekly call to Banff 2698.
Some years later, in the mid-80s, I returned home from my first year at Uni, with an Apple ][ computer and a 300 baud modem in hand.
I rigged some clandestine phone extension wiring to my room, and used the dial-up connection back to the uni mainframes to play Dungeons text-based games.
My parents got a bill for several hundreds of pounds which they could not understand.
I stirred my cornflakes furiously, and shuffled off quietly.
They complained to BT that there must be some mistake, and after some negotiation they got a substantial discount on the bill.
I think I did eventually fess up to that one.
