FICTION ADAPTATION: BRITAIN CHANGE

The poem I am using Red Phone Boxes by Adam Kammerling:

Between Haywards Heath and Gatwick,
there's a trackside clearing deep in scrub
where thirty red phone boxes stand in an arc.
Their positioning, deliberate and deep in woods,
makes a Pagan ritual: red hoods, torches, prayers
to bygone England, a sacrifice of rabbit.


On Lewes Road in Brighton, a red phone box has been
nudged to death by a long, slow storm. 19 of 26 windows
smashed, chunks chewed out its frame, old conquest’s names
graff-tattooed on face and back. DIO, COST, MSG, ERKS.
Anti-fash stickers melt on its skin. At the box's top,
four waspish crowns glare out like weary compass points.
They don't know how their house got into such a state.


No one will ring their folks from this phone box,
pleading for a lift home from town. No one will make
emergency calls, no one will organise drug deals.
Children won't dial the operator, ask for McDonald’s delivered
to the bench up the street. The phone box thought itself
quite the host, but its stories dried up like we ran out
of coins. It remembers civilians queued, as it stood
proud red and British as 'sorry'. Baffled now
by Lewes Road, it can't understand the brightness of olives
in windows of the Turkish market, cannot pronounce 'baklava'.
It doesn't understand why people don't buy more crumpets!
Its skin is dirty, smudged with the 80's failures that won't wash out.
Walk past. You'll catch a whiff of whatever administrative alkalines
are eroding the NHS's base, border control trucks, ganging round
tube stops, dopplegänged high streets, town to town, the dog shit gag
of business and its flatline swagger. No one wants to stand inside that smell.
This phone box loiters on Lewes Road in the robes of pre-war Britain,
humming like it hasn't washed for sixty-five years. COST and ERKS
hang their names with 'fuck you' tacks, will not be condescended to,
will not be scrubbed out, they scorch this square of ground,
guard it with spray cans, till a new totem stands in its place.


And when we are dead and passed
into History's sideways wink, a young woman, snorkeling in an underwater
forest, between the ocean and the old airport, will find an arc of phone boxes
standing on the lake bed and remembering them from books she read
as a child, dive down to see those bones of ancient Britain up close and move amongst them like fish through pillars of pink coral.

Researching Phone Boxes and Britain during the 20th Century

The underlying theme of the poem Red Phone Boxes by Adam Kammerling is Britain and how it has been changing immeasurably in the past century. There have been many iterations of what we know as red phone boxes there have been more than 6 main designs that emerged throughout the 20th century beginning with the K1 in 1920. The most circulated model though is the K6 which is the one people recognise. This model was first introduced in 1936 designed by Giles Gilbert Scott it was a cheaper smaller model that took up less pavement space. This is the model that Kammerling was most likely talking about in his poem.

K6 model phone box

This is most likely the model which Kammerling talks about being on Lewes road and in the arc of 30 phone boxes mentioned in the poem. This is therefore the one I had in mind when thinking in terms of time frame and how long the phone box might have been stood there on Lewes road. As this model was first produced in 1936 I have looked at this being the start point. So taking this into account there are big events that may have happened during the phone boxes tenure. World War II being the first major event, followed by such things as the Cold war, Suez Crisis, increased immigration, technologies meteoric change, the internet, the end of phone box usage al together. I imagine it would have started like the picture above and ended up today as this:

K6 looking slightly worse for wear

One of the big changes in Britain has been the increased immigration into the country from all over the world. This subject is touched on more than once in the poem which did lead me to believe there was possibly an anti-immigration type of reaction from the phone box. I have personified the phone box by making it a person instead of just an inanimate object. This does allow me a lot more room to work with, also gives an actor to try and play an inanimate object with emotional reactions. If I were to go down that route I could reference films like This is England or American History X which both show examples of people who are totally against immigration and welcoming different cultures.

However I do believe the poem is not anti-immigration or racist so I have got my actor to portray emotions more a kin to disbelief and confusion rather than negativity to the change.

I think reading through the poem the general feeling is one of sadness from the phone box as to what Britain has become in the past 80 years or so. The whole of Elizabeth II reign so far which has seen the most dramatic changes in what Britain means to us and to the rest of world. Loss of most of the once largest Empire on the plane has changed whether for the best or for the worse this is a matter of opinion, but all the while this phone box has looked on.