Cornering the urine-stinking stairwell at full pace, we would race out of our building and across the road, over a fence and were out into the fields and trees that edged the public housing block where I grew up. It was on this abandoned land that we built forts of branches and tall grass and where teens and pre-teens together learnt about collective play, nettles that sting, bullying big kids and all things not under the nose of an adult. We routinely played until it was too dark to run. Our pocket of wilderness was bordered by our housing estate, the canal and a used tire stock yard, yet it was always big enough to loose yourself in.
Havana, here in Oakland today, cannot walk to any countryside, nor does she routinely take off with other kids to play hundreds of yards from her home.
In Ken Loach's 1969 film, Kes, the main character lives in a mining town, a knot of urban poverty deep in the South Yorkshire countryside. Kes tells Billy Casper's story. Billy is fourteen and will be done with school in a few short weeks. His older brother, with whom he shares a small bed, is already working in the local coal pit, a fate Billy is resisting. The tenderness of Billy’s story is his relationship with the young Kestrel he has taken from its nest and trained by a falconry book he stole from a local town store.
Yesterday Havana and I watched Kes. All my conscious life I have been watching the authentic story telling of working class life, in its full depth and humor, as told by director and socialist, Ken Loach. While the British Film Institute rates Kes as the 7th best movie of the twentieth century, it was only this year that Kes has become available in the US on DVD. In many ways I have been waiting to see this film for 20 years.
The joy of Kes, for me, was not just in the insights of the the rich content of the film but moreso in sharing the movie with Havana.
Havana took in the emotional roller coaster of this boy's life: his abusive older brother, his torn clothes that set him apart from the other working class kids, the brutality of the teachers and the great love and respect he had for his Kestrel. Kes is rich in truth; in the complicatedness of truth.
Education, in Kes, as it has always been for the poor, consists of a series of cold facts to be swallowed whole and inseparable from the series of punishments for those unwilling or unable to consume the facts.
In one memorable scene a young boy is sent to the principal’s office with a message from his teacher. The hurried principal herds the boy into his office alongside the boys awaiting a caning, mistaking the kid's pleas with the empty excuses that preempt harsh punishments. At one point in the nerve wrecking two minutes of lecturing before their punishment, the boys almost break out into hysterical collective giggling at one of the more bizarre aspects of the principal’s rant, before offering out both hands to be whipped. Later, when Billy has a quiet moment with a fairly decent teacher, the teacher laughs at the story of the messenger boy being mistakenly caned and Billy explains, “but the boy was really crying.” Again Billy brings us back to reality: the world from the view of the small, the abused, those not in power.
Havana loved the scenes where Billy is in an open field alone with Kes, his bird. Billy's glove would be held high and the Kestrel sweeping to and fro would dance around the air above him. But as the story unfolds, Billy's tenuous joy is endangered. Havana asked me why the one decent teacher in the movie, who had described Billy's falconry as one of the most wonderful things he'd ever seen, had not been there to help out Billy. That's how life often is, I replied.
Kes mirrors the beautiful tenderness and sensitivity of children and their ability to survive the harsh realities of poverty and the hostility of the adult world.
