TAKE A NEW TRIP ON A CLASSIC LINE
For Jenny Agutter, getting onboard with The Railway Children’s latest cinematic excursion is a chance to reflect on past innocence and future hopes
There’s a moment in The Railway Children
Return when my character Roberta – who is now a grandmother – talks about remembering being sent to the countryside like it was yesterday. That resonates with me personally because I, too, recall first setting foot on the platform at Yorkshire’s Oakworth station when I was just 17, playing the young Bobbie in Lionel Jeffries’ 1970 film. Revisiting something from your past is both exciting and makes you realise what can be lost, because there seems to be nothing between then and now. I’ve lived in America, got married, had a child, become a grandmother myself – and yet Oakworth still looks much the same. It is as if time has telescoped.
Lionel’s film, like E Nesbit’s original book, is a celebration of innocence. The narrative takes place in the early 1900s, before the two World Wars, and everything about it conveys a childish enjoyment. I think what joins the new film, which is set in World War II, to the previous one is the way it’s told from the children’s point of view. It is about their fears, because they are away from their parents, but it also reminds us that, for them, everything is an adventure – even the difficulties and tensions, or a bomb going off somewhere. As a child, you don’t sense fully the danger of things; it’s all just life presenting itself to you.
The film is about a very particular period in history, and part of what it’s doing is teaching children today about what it was like during World War II, but I’m conscious it may also put us in mind of what’s happening in Ukraine right now – the very present reality of violence, of refugees, of loss of life. It is terrifying that, having gone through two World Wars, we’re once again experiencing something that could escalate, but we also need to know there’s a part of mankind that hangs on to the good, that will come out stronger in the end. When Nesbit wrote her book, she and other writers still believed we could create a utopian society; it was the wars that made us realise we have to live with a humanity that is flawed and do the best we can with that.
I’m sure Nesbit would have loved the idea of her characters getting another chapter, because she believed in time travel. Here, we have a new generation of railway children exploring that same track, having adventures that belong in a different era. So when I’m asked, ‘Do you remember being here?’, the answer is: yes, like it was yesterday.