Dark Days

‘The Stars Look Down’ (1940) stars Michael Redgrave and is set in a North Eastern mining town in the 1930s.  Above all else, it demonstrated to me the unremitting misery of the 19th and 20^th Century coal community.  This is of particular personal interest to me.  Although I grew up in Sheffield, with steel workers as my immediate antecedents, in 1999 I moved to a traditional coal mining town.  My work put me in touch with many old miners and I found myself working in communities where mining was gone but by no means forgotten.  I have seen how the memory of dark times has been passed on down the generations, so that even decades old grievances can be brought into play without either side thinking it strange.  This is history that remains difficult to shake off.  I found it bemusing at first.

‘The Stars Look Down’ portrays a community that is downtrodden by its livelihood.  When the workers try and make a stand against the greed of the pit owners, the mine closes and they are left with nothing.  There is no alternative work.  The whole town is dragged down as people can’t afford to buy from the shopkeepers and small tradesmen.  With nothing else to kick against, they turn in on themselves.  Those who do try and find a way out – such as Redgrave’s character (Davey Fenwick) are viewed with amusement or disdain.  The will to break free has been forced out of most, they continue along a single track like a blinkered pit pony.

Redgrave by @aitchteee

 When the pit is open and working, danger is a constant presence.  The film makes it clear that many were of the opinion that mine owners put profit before lives.  It puts across a firm opinion that only public ownership will make this a safer working environment.  Daily threat of death is accepted as a hazard of earning enough to stay alive – a paradox unacceptable in the modern world. The storyline ends tragically.  True to life for so many families.  Also true to life perhaps is Davey Fenwick’s eventual return to his home village.  Even those that escaped found the world outside just too different to cope with – such was the unique character of a pit village. 

Nationalisation was achieved but it didn’t stop the accidents or the strikes.  What really changed things was the welfare state, which meant that loss of work didn’t lead to cruelly means- tested grinding poverty.  Although the towns and villages where I live and work are still struggling through the closures of two decades ago with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. This film helped me to see why I shouldn’t have been so bemused when I moved here. Perhaps if I had seen this first I would have been more prepared. 

Since moving here, I have traced my family tree and found that I have some north eastern mining blood. Cornforth and Ferryhill are my ancestral homes, and were probably not that different to the village portrayed in the film, even back in the 19^th century.  I am proud to have this blood – but glad that Great Grandma decided to seek her fortune in the big city and took her hook to Sheffield.  And now I realise just how much I should admire her for breaking free from that setting.  Strange to imagine that I did actually meet her, that this history was just in my grasp as our lives briefly overlapped. Unfortunately, she was so old that she scared me! But it just shows that these terrible lives were not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, which should be much to our shame.


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Appointment With Luck

‘Appointment in London’ (1953) stars Dirk Bogarde as a Wing Commander at a Lincolnshire bomber base.  The action takes place in the summer of 1943.  As you would imagine for a British film of this period, there is a range of familiar looking faces in supporting roles.  Quite often, you can’t put a name to the face, they are just part of your own film landscape.  In this film, one character had an extremely familiar voice, although his face was hitherto unknown to me.  The voice belonged to an Australian character, played by one Bill Kerr.  Any Hancock’s Half Hour-ites out there will know Bill’s Antipodean tones – I must have heard him hundreds of times from the radio shows.  I found it quite fascinating to actually see him, though I kept expecting him to call other characters “Tub”!

This is a serious film, focussing on a group of men who never knew if that day would be their last.  I was half expecting a squadron of stiff upper lips and blithe heroism.  I was pleasantly surprised by the very human portrayal that I saw on the screen.  It gave me the overall impression that these men were obsessed with the concepts of luck and superstition.  At the beginning of the film, Bogarde’s character (Mason) is returning from his 87^th flying mission over enemy territory.  The storyline makes clear just how lucky he is to have reached this point.  In fact he is an anomaly in the statistics.  Mason’s luck weighs heavily on his shoulders and colleagues worry for his health.  There is no logical reason for his survival, it is pure luck and he doesn’t know how to prolong it or when it will run out.  Meanwhile, other characters have their lucky charms, and talk of jinxes is common.  There is even the hint of superstition around the presence of wives and girlfriends.

Bogarde by @aitchteee 

This film demonstrates how important these concepts are to the human when they face an uncertain, pressured existence.  It shows how our irrational beliefs in superstitions and charms stems from a time when life was much less safe than it is today.  It also demonstrates, should we ever forget, just how short a lifespan World War Two aircrews faced.

We should treasure films such as ‘Appointment in London’ as part of our national war archive.  Another thought that this film led me to is that this kind of warfare was quite unique and its existence short-lived.  Aerial warfare was in its infancy in World War One, it was perfected in the Spanish Civil War and used most intensely in World War Two.  But by the end of this conflict, the pilot-less aerial bombardment weapon had been developed.  It was then not the nightly air-raids, but the constant sudden appearance of a V rocket that was to be feared.  So, this window in the lives of bomber crews needs to be kept, as our understanding of their existence and psychology recedes into a past that we can barely comprehend anymore.

To see how this film inspired one of my short stories, see my wordpress blog post: http://sarahmillerwalters.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/keep-writing/