Welcome back to ‘The Railway Children’
The beloved 1970 film is getting a sequel. No wonder, says Ben Lawrence, its message of optimism endures through the decades
Agutter’s natural aura of decency conjures up a forgotten England
Its famous reunion is the biggest emotional gut punch in British cinema
‘Daddy, my daddy.” These words, cried out by Jenny Agutter as Bobbie, near the end of the 1970 film adaptation of The Railway Children, have been etched on the nation’s heart for half a century. In an extraordinary slowmotion scene, we see Bobbie drawn to the train station for a reason she can’t quite articulate, and through the swirling steam on the platform she sees a tall silhouette, familiar but not overly so. Gradually, she realises it is her father (played by Iain Cuthbertson), sent to prison for reasons that are never made quite clear and now a free man, his reputation restored. She runs towards him, her wish fulfilled, and ours, too. For Bobbie’s optimism drives the film. The message that cuts through is that however difficult life is, things will get better. It is a message that still strikes us today.
No wonder then, at the announcement yesterday of a sequel, The Railway Children Return, which moves the story forward nearly 40 years from Edwardian England to the Second World War. Agutter will play an older version of Bobbie, and the plot involves a new group of children, evacuees in Yorkshire, who encounter a soldier; like them, he is a long way from home.
So why are we so enchanted by this tale of three middle-class English children – Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis – whose comfortable lives are interrupted when their father (unbeknown to them) is sent to prison and they must endure a very genteel sort of poverty in rural Yorkshire? Only last week, it was announced that Jacqueline Wilson would be modernising E Nesbit’s original, for publication in September. There have been four TV adaptations and several stage versions. For Agutter, The Railway Children is a consistent presence in a long career. She first played Bobbie for the BBC in 1968; then, after her most famous appearance, in Lionel Jeffries’s film, was the saintly mother in a television adaptation for ITV in 2000. Agutter’s natural aura of decency and beautifully crisp, anachronistic vowels have become part and parcel of this story’s ability to conjure up a forgotten England, an England that perhaps for many never existed.
The strange thing is that Nesbit, one of the greatest-ever authors of children’s fiction, wrote far better books than The Railway Children.
Her fantasies such as Five Children and It (a model for Spielberg’s ET) and The Story of the Amulet are dazzling feats of the imagination involving time travel, magic rings, strange creatures who grant wishes. Her Bastable books such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers blaze with the familiarity of chaotic, complicated family life. The Railway Children, however, is formulaic, reliant on too many discrete episodes (presumably because the story first appeared in serial form) and that famous ending is oddly muted in the text. Its appeal over the past half century is thanks to the 1970 film, rather than Nesbit.
Its popularity on release at the UK box office is partly due to the fact that it is brilliantly made. Jeffries was better known as a comic actor (he was Grandpa Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and never came close to repeating this astonishing directorial debut. The individual scenes alternate between the downright dramatic (when the children try to prevent an oncoming train from crashing into a landslide) and the light-hearted – any time that Phyllis (Sally Thomsett, exuberant and indefatigable) takes centre stage. But there is also the human heart that beats throughout the film, ending in that famous reunion, perhaps the biggest emotional gut punch in British cinema.
But the original film of The Railway Children was successful, at the time, for less obvious reasons, too. It feels inspired by the cult of Edwardiana that had sprung up in the mid1960s, which was epitomised by The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, the vintage boutique I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, and the BBC adaptation of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. It is also a homage to the age of steam, which had ended only a couple of years before Jeffries made the film. With the death of the steam train died a certain element of romance, and so the film becomes a sort of wish fulfilment on another level, keeping alive a gentler-paced Britain before high-speed trains screeched through the countryside like angry wasps.
Looking at the film now, nostalgia still plays a part. Even those of us not old enough to remember steam trains are quickly beholden to their stately charm. Seeing the Old Gentleman (William Mervyn) wave to the children every day from his firstclass carriage on his journey to work brings with it a reassurance – his reliable greeting offering a glimmer of hope to their uncertain lives (and, of course, it turns out that he is instrumental in bringing their father back). The countryside, too, is idyllic. Even if it has its dangers (schoolboy Jim hurts himself in a railway tunnel during a paper chase) there is a reassuring community that is never far away. Here is the eternal Edwardian summer, at least in our minds. We can watch this film and pretend that it is forever 1906, the horrors of the subsequent decade delayed indefinitely.
But, above all, I think the residual power of the film rests with the children themselves. As good-hearted as Bobbie is, she is not perfect. When she decides to have a charity whip-round in aid of Perks the stationmaster (Bernard Cribbins), he is horrified, thinking that she is patronising him because he is poor. These kids are fallible: they squabble, they play pranks. Their mother (Dinah Sheridan) sometimes despairs. And yet they are also heroic.
Their situation has given them an underlying sadness, but they have a make-do-and-mend attitude and we respond warmly to their resilience, knowing that they will be rewarded. This is all in contrast to the complicated and sometimes scandalous life of Nesbit who brought up two children, fathered by her husband and his mistress, as if they were her own. The Railway Children is Nesbit’s fantasy of a domestic life which eluded her, complete with happy ending.
The film reinforces that and, above all, makes us feel that their uplifting story can be the narrative for our own lives – if we wish it hard enough.