Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
More unusual visitors at our garden pond and although my cut-out characters now bear little resemblance to the Patrick Stewart and Richard Tolan as Joby and his dad in the Yorkshire Television version of Stan Barstow’s Joby, they have the folksy quality that I was after for my Redbox Gallery show.
They’ll be sitting on a riverbank, a folding screen of two A1 sheets of foamboard. Time to get out my largest brush, a varnish brush, to add the indigo blue of the Calder.
Photograph from TV Times, summer of 1973
“I just selected this,” novelist Stan Barstow told me, as he gave me a well-worn Pan paperback of Bright Day, “as perhaps my all time favourite novel, certainly my favourite of J.B. Priestley’s, but it’s quite a suitable subject for you as it involves ‘disenchantment with the celluloid industry’, and part of it is set in pre-World War I ‘Bruddersford’, so you should be able to get some subject matter locally.
“Also, as it happens, I believe Yorkshire TV are in the process of filming a version of it at the moment, so, if you were stuck for costumes and sets, perhaps they’d oblige.
“Don’t worry about the cover illustration, which is nothing like. The story is so beautifully constructed and flows in such a fascinating way that illustrations seem irrelevant anyway.
“Apologies for biro marks.”
Stan had used the copy when he dramatised Bright Day for a BBC Radio 4 play. He’d met J.B.Priestley and more or less got him to admit the Bright Day was his favourite amongst all his novels.
He gave me this in the 1970s and his reference to me being disenchanted with the celluloid industry probably means that it was after my three or four months’ stint working as assistant background artist on Martin Rosen’s animated version of Watership Down in 1976. With the publication of my first book looming, I was making efforts to put together a folio to show the range of my work, which for the past few months had consisted entirely of drawings of the interior of Cowslip’s Warren!
I loved Priestley’s description of the first room that the would-be writer in the novel sets up for himself, as I’d recently settled into a similar room, which had to serve as both studio and bedroom, in a shared flat and was enjoying attempting to start making a living from writing and illustration. I liked one of the minor characters in the story, Jock Bamiston, who ‘does nothing of any consequence’ but through it all:
‘remained cool and amused yet friendly, like a well-wisher sent to us from some other and nobler planet’.
ONE OF THE OPENING events in the Flock to Ossett arts and crafts festival is a rehearsed reading in Holy Trinity church of John Godber’s new adaptation of Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving. It works well with just six actors – two playing Vic and Ingrid and the other four taking all the other roles; a dozen or more characters.
As with the novel, the story is told from Vic’s point of view; he’s the only character who can break into a scene and tell the audience how he feels about the way things are going. That’s something that you miss out on in John Schlesinger’s film version and in the television adaptation that Stan himself made in the 1980s. The dramatic device of talking directly to the audience doesn’t fit well with the kind of everyday realism that a director needs to create as a believable setting for the the story in a screen version but on stage you’re not in the actual locations, so the audience is already having to use its imagination to picture the characters on a bus, in a drawing office, in the park and so on, so there isn’t the same jolt that you might get if a character turned to the camera and explained how they felt in a gritty northern drama.
This limitation must have occurred to Schlesinger because his next film was about another young man working in a northern city, Billy Liar, but in that we keep drifting into the alternative reality, a minor European principality, that the hero keeps escaping to in his imagination.
Introducing the read-through, Godber explains that he took all the dialogue he needed directly from the novel, adding only a handful of words of his own, but there’s a Godber feel to this adaptation in the pace, the ensemble playing, the vividly sketched characters and the humour.
But really that’s all in the original novel too. I think that the reason that I hadn’t realised, for example, that there was so much humour in the novel, humour that comes from observation of character, was that I read it when I was Vic’s age -about 21. The main thing that I took away then was how easily Vic went from being free and independent, with all sorts of ambitions in his life, to seeing control of his life slipping away as others, particularly to his mother-in-law who is truly scary but not in a pantomime villain kind of way.
At twenty one, just starting at the Royal College of Art and with no clue as to how I’d support myself through my work, let alone a surprise instant family and mortgage, it read like a cautionary horror story.
I can see the wider picture now and smile, even while I’m sympathising with Vic and Ingrid’s dilemma.
Links; Theatre Royal, Wakefield; John Godber Company; Flock to Ossett
WRITER Stan Barstow died yesterday, aged 83. Recalling his early life in an obituary in today’s Guardian, Ian Haywood quotes him as having said: “There were no writers in the family (there were, in fact, few real readers).” Haywood continues:
Barstow began to feel the real frustrations of his regional and cultural isolation. He regarded these feelings as symptomatic of the exclusion of the working class from literary tradition: “We had the temerity to think we could write but [had] no teachers and no models.”
I was lucky because, growing up a couple of decades later in his hometown of Horbury, we had Stan himself (left in my illustrated diary for Sunday, 4 June 1972 ) as a role model; a local writer with short stories, novels, television series, radio plays and one movie, John Schlesinger’s production of his novel A Kind of Loving, to his credit.
As a final year student at Leeds College of Art, researching my degree project about Horbury composer William Baines, I called on him (cycling down Hall Cliffe with my research in a hold-all hanging from the handle-bars, in the sketch in my diary, right).
His son Neil (left, who later read the part of William Baines in my Radio Leeds documentary about the composer) asked me to call back the next day when I chatted with Stan for some hours about Baines and ‘all sorts of local things’. On the Monday I popped down again and saw Stan’s wife Connie (right) to leave him a copy of Eric Parkin’s record of Baines’ piano music.
Here’s the piece he wrote for my leaflet on The Yorkshire of William Baines:
‘I was born a few doors along from William Baines in Shepstye Road, Horbury; but he had been dead for six years by the time I arrived on the scene. He was, in fact, exactly contemporary with my mother and it’s odd to think of her still alive and William dead all those years. But consumption and the like nipped off
many a young life in those days: my mother’s talk of her youth is full of references to parents who “had eight and buried three”. And, of course, it’s tempting but futile to speculate upon how Baines’s talent might have developed had he survived and been with us, in his seventies, today.
‘I probably saw William’s father, though I doubt that I ever heard him play the organ, for I went into the Primitive Methodist Chapel no more than a couple of times. The Highfield Methodist Chapel was where I spent the Sundays of my youth. There were four Methodist chapels within a couple of hundred yards along Horbury High Street in those days: the two I’ve mentioned and the Wesleyan and the Congregational. What their precise differences in belief andform of worship were I never knew, but it was only much later, after the Second World War, when their separate congregations began to fail, that three of them (the
Congregational holding on to its independence) amalgamated for survival. A supermarket stands on the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel now.
‘How quiet Horbury must have been in William’s day. I remember it as quiet enough in mine, for although I was born into the age of the internal combustion engine it was half a lifetime before bypass roads and six-lane super highways. An attractive little town at that time, compact, stone-built, sitting on the hill above the Calder, with green fields all round it. In the evening a one-armed lamplighter made his rounds; in the early morning you would be stirred out of sleep by the clatter of colliers’ clogs passing under the window. Not much different, one imagines, from William’s time, for although his youth and mine were separated by a terrible war, change came much more slowly than in the years since 1945.
‘A puritanical town, of course. What other could it have been under that great weight. of Methodism? Drink was a blatant evil, sex a vast unmentionable mystery. It’s perhaps fortunate that William was a composer, rather than a writer, for music carries few of the moral associations of literature. He’d have had a hard time putting the truth on paper in those days. His departure from his birthplace was not the kind of exile D. H. Lawrence had to seek from a not dissimilar environment, and his future, had he lived, would surely not have been plagued by the kind of persecution Lawrence suffered. But that is speculation again, and we should be grateful for what, in his short life, he left us to enjoy.’
Memorial Park
Today the last of those Methodist churches is surrounded by a cordon of wire fencing panels and scheduled for demolition. The Baines memorial plaque that hangs there will be moved to the former Primitive Methodist church hall. Plans to rename Horbury War Memorial Park, otherwise known as “Sparra’ Park” in honour of Stan are currently stalled.
Stan gave me so much encouragement and down to earth advice about writing and publishing. He wrote the introduction to my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield, published in 1978.
In the 1980s I helped out at a Save the Children craft fair, organised by Connie at Flanshaw, drawing portraits of people in conté crayon on Ingres paper. Stan volunteered to be drawn and I suggested that he should use the finished sketch as the frontispiece for his collected works.
He drifted back 20 minutes later: ‘Richard, can you make a change to this? – You’ve missed out the twinkle in my eye.’
I added a highlight in white crayon. Sure enough, the portrait needed that twinkle. That’s how Barbara and I always think of him – with a twinkle in his eye!
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