Phone Box Hero

Phone Box Hero

For four years, from the ages of 18 to 22, Paul Slazenger lived in a phone box. One of the cast iron red monstrosities that are still a mainstay of the British tourist industry. The village of Skitterham, which might have been forgiven for feeling that the blight of homelessness was best kept off the high street, like so many of the other nearby towns, decided instead that Paul was a lovable eccentric. Eccentricity was the word that was used, in those days, after all, by people still oblivious to the rise of terms like neuro-divergent. 

It helped, as well, that Paul had used to be a hero. At the age of 13, Paul had dived into the river, in a flood, and rescued a younger boy who had gone in after his dog. He was briefly in the papers, and even on the telly, although his flat affect and tendency to answer questions in great detail protected him from the worst excesses of media attention. People in the village still remembered that, and it probably accounted for their tolerance.

Paul’s father was nowhere in the picture, and his mother moved away a year or two after the incident, taking her only child off to the city. When Paul first reappeared in Skitterham, at the age of eighteen, the people who recognised him might have been guilty of talking about him more than to him. He’d always been a strange child, after all. He wandered up the High Street and around the town, sat on the swings or sheltered in the library from the rain, when it was open. When Mrs Gibbon in the library asked how he was, he told her he was well, although still sad from his mother’s death, that he was happy to to be home, that he had never loved the city, that he was going to stay with friends. No he couldn’t join the library yet, but he was keen to do so once he had the full address. She thought no more about it.

Nobody knows where he was sleeping, in the first few months. People got used to having him around before they ever realised he was homeless. The weather had been mild, and he must have coped under a hedge somewhere. He had a little money, at the start, and was buying lunch most days in the cafe and, in hindsight, using their bathroom. Only when the weather turned icy did people start to see him curled up in the phone box, with a blanket wrapped around him.

The phone box itself was already a source of some disquiet among the village. The phone inside had not been functional in over a year, and there were some within the community who were willing to say openly that they really did think that the parish council was in a dreadful state if it couldn’t manage to arrange such a basic amenity as this. A phone box was part of the fabric and traditions of village life, after all, and a broken phone box was a clear symptom of how threadbare that fabric had become under the parish council’s stewardship.

The members of that body had protested that they were actively engaged in a campaign to reinstate the phone, but would also privately admit that British Telecom showed little sign of budging from their stubborn insistence that the phone showed no regular pattern of use. When the council pointed out that the phone had been out of order for over a year, the company responded that they knew this full well, and could provide the date and time that they had disconnected it, but that no calls had been made or received by that phone for eighteen months before that date, and that as such the disconnection had been a necessary part of modernisation of the nearby exchange.

The truth was that the village had only been alerted to the broken phone because some local hooligan had written BROKAN on the windows in spray paint. Had they known who was responsible, and had they questioned him, the further truth would have come out that he had only done this out of anger, when his plan to make a hoax 999 call had been frustrated.

There were people, certainly who did feel that Paul should not be allowed to sleep in the phone box, but they disagreed on where he should maybe sleep instead, and in the absence of consensus they were undermined by some who, remembering the child who nearly drowned, offered what help they could in other ways. Paul would come back to his phone box to find that someone had left a duvet, or a pillow, or a jumper, or some food.

To begin with, the support he got was most often anonymous, but there were also people who would champion him more openly. Mrs Gibbon in the library would always make him a big mug of tea whenever he came in, and presented him with his own library card, with his address in their database as “The Phone Box, Skitterham Village”. Her daughter worked at the new gym and fitness centre, which probably explained how it came about that their little pool was rechristened as “The Paul Slazenger Pool”. Paul was given honorary lifetime membership of the gym, and could swim or use facilities for free. This meant that he also had a toilet and a shower available whenever they were open. There had once been a public toilet in the high street, of course, muttered the people who remembered it, and looked darkly towards any members of the parish council they could see nearby.

Paul was grateful to his supporters at the library and the gym, and would tell them so with great deliberation. He knew that people struggled to read emotions from his face, and that using his words was needed if he wanted to share how he was feeling. There were a few people around the town who were happy to chat with him. He would ask about their days and talk about his reading. He was currently obsessed with local history, and was devouring everything the library had on how the village had changed across the decades and the centuries. He could reel off the rough age of almost every building, every street. He spent hours poring over the old maps, and could sketch out from memory the road layouts before they built the supermarket or the bypass.

He always picked up any litter that he saw, as he meandered round the town. He noticed things, and he remembered them. He was able to let Mr Vernal, who ran the flower stall in the market, know that the young man fiddling with the lock of that bicycle by the railings was not the same boy who had locked it up there earlier. Mr Vernal grabbed the young man by the collar, demanded to see the key to that bike lock, which he could not produce, and dragged him into the police station by the scruff of his neck.

The people who disapproved of Paul, and who felt that he must surely be to blame, by now, for their village’s lack of a working public phone, finally despaired of the parish council and went above their heads. The village of Skitterham fell within the jurisdiction of a nearby town called Wrungley, and they turned in desperation to the officers of Wrungley Town Council. Specifically, they addressed their concerns to a Mr Edward Lodge, who would soon be up for reelection and who imagined that firm action on issues like the homeless and rough sleepers might be just the shot in the arm that his campaign could benefit from.

Mr Lodge was very happy to give generous assurances that he would most certainly get the problem sorted out with all efficient speed. He was less happy, when he visited the village and discussed the matter with a wider range of people, to discover that the original deputation that he had met with had not appraised him of the full picture of Paul’s story. He had expected that his wish to get things sorted out would be received with generous acclaim, and was aghast to find that his target was treated by many as a lovable eccentric, or worse yet a hero.

Poor Mr Lodge retreated back to Wrungley with a heavy heart. His vote pleasing plans now felt like they might be more of a help to his opponents. He cursed the hasty assurances that he had given, knowing that doing nothing now could be as bad a choice as any. He had no option, and anyone could surely see that no councilman could just stand by and leave a vulnerable young man living in a phone box.

The person he had not yet spoken to was Paul himself, but he worked for two more days behind the scenes before attempting that. When he and Paul finally met face to face, he planned it with great care. He found out what he could of Paul’s routines, spoke to those that knew him, and contrived to meet him in the library. Mr Lodge had three aces primed and ready, but he met Paul not with the steely resolve of a trained negotiator, but rather with the affable kindliness so often affected by men of advancing years when seeking public office. He introduced himself, and explained the responsibilities of his role. He asked after Paul’s health and well-being, and listened patiently to all the answers. Finally he laid his cards upon the table. His first card was a place for Paul in a hostel outside Wrungley, where he’d have two hot meals a day and a warm bed and a room of his own. His second card was a chance to join a training programme that would equip a young man like himself with the skills and qualifications needed to become a productive member of the local community. His third and final ace, his trump card, was that he had already presented all of this to another person, and had sold them on his plan, had convinced them that the hostel and the training really were better for Paul than living in a phone box, and that person was Mrs Gibbon.

Paul was by no means certain. He did not want to move away from home again. He quite enjoyed the comfortable routines that he had built here, for all that a warm bed and regular hot meals did sound appealing. In the end, and with the help of Mrs Gibbon, Mr Lodge talked him around. Yes, he would give it a try.

In his defence, Paul did give it a try. He tried for almost a month, and then, when he had no more trying in him, he came home. It was cold, that first night, having lost his duvet when he moved out, but another appeared from nowhere during the following day. It appeared that the village would still have him. He tried going for a swim and they still let him walk through the turnstiles with no charge. It was like he’d never been away.

Two days later, he walked into the library and sitting there waiting for him was Mr Edward Lodge.

Mr Lodge explained quite calmly that this situation was not tenable. He had read the statutes left to right and front to back and there was absolutely no way within the law, library card or no library card, that a phone box could be accepted as a residential address. There was no choice left to him, and he could see no other option for Paul’s situation. There were no alternatives. They would have to register it as a business address instead.

Paul would need to be properly employed by that business, but the parish council did seem happy that having a good pair of eyes on the High Street might cut down on petty crime. Graffitiing of the local phone box, for example, had dropped right off in the last year, only picking up again when Paul had moved away. They were considering “Neighbourhood Watchman” as a possible job title. The salary would not be much, but he could afford hot meals and some small luxuries, as befitted a productive member of the local community.

And so Paul served in that capacity for over seven years. He did move out of his phone box, halfway through that time, although it still served as his office. When he finally gave up as watchman, to move to his new job in the local museum, he was sorely missed.