Barry Hines

Kes , Threads and beyond

David Forrest, Sue Vice

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526123756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Barry Hines's novel A Kestrel for a Knave, adapted for the screen as Kes, is one of the best-known and well-loved novels of the post-war period, while his screenplay for the television drama Threads is central to a Cold War-era vision of nuclear attack. But Hines published a further eight novels and nine screenplays between the 1960s and 1990s, as well as writing eleven other works which remain unpublished and unperformed. This study examines the entirety of Hines's work. It argues that he used a great variety of aesthetic forms to represent the lives of working-class people in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the post-industrial conclusion of the twentieth century. It also makes the case that, as well as his literary flair for poetic realism, Hines's authorial contributions to the films of his novels show the profoundly collaborative nature of these works.

1

Poetry with purpose and the journey to Kes

Billy’s Last Stand, The Blinder, A Kestrel for a Knave and Kes

In this chapter, we trace the roots of Barry Hines’s literary mode of poetic realism in those works of the 1960s that preceded A Kestrel for a Knave (1968). These include the 1965 play Billy’s Last Stand, which gives an absurdist form to its social-realist content, and Hines’s first novel The Blinder (1966), its title invoking the concept of a sporting move characterised by its excellence – ironically so, given the introduction this novel offers to Hines’s consistent theme of the stand-off between sporting and intellectual pursuits in an individual’s life story. The literary promise Hines showed in The Blinder led to the filming of his novel A Kestrel for a Knave as Kes (Ken Loach, 1969). We argue that the roots of this novel’s cinematic realisation are already apparent in Hines’s prose, meaning that the film, so significant in British cultural history, is more of a writerly and collaborative venture than has yet been acknowledged.

Billy’s Last Stand (1965, 1970, 1971)

Billy’s Last Stand was first broadcast as a radio play on the BBC’s ‘Third Programme’ in 1965. The play is a sparse duologue in which a coal-shoveller, Billy (Arthur Lowe), has his simple but impoverished life interrupted by a manipulative outsider, Darkly (Ronald Baddiley). Darkly becomes Billy’s business partner, forcing him to adopt increasingly laborious and almost literally ‘back-breaking’ working practices; Billy then persuades Darkly to join him in violently assaulting and leaving for dead Starky, a competing worker who threatens their trade. At the play’s end Billy himself murders Darkly, in a desperate attempt to return to the simplicity of his past. The play thus presents an allegorical critique of enterprise and consumer culture, a familiar concern of course to working-class writers of the period, yet, as we will see, its minimalism distances it from the social realism of Hines’s contemporaries. To approach Billy’s Last Stand as a ‘lost play’ – on the basis that no recording of the TV play exists – therefore is to begin to develop a fuller and multi-dimensional understanding of both Hines’s complex creative agency and the traditions of post-war working-class writing in which his work is included.

The play was written while Barry Hines was a PE teacher at the St Helen’s Secondary Modern School in the Athersley area of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, where he worked between 1963 and 1968. It was Hines’s first broadcast work and was developed alongside his debut novel The Blinder in his spare time. Like almost all of his plays, films and novels, it was inspired by his class background and the community in which he lived and worked, as Hines put it in an interview to support the broadcast: ‘There is a man in this village who gets in coal for a few shillings. I just happened to think of him when I started writing … Billy has a coal shifting business and this other man tries to get into the business and eventually takes it over. The man represents society and Billy, the outsider.’¹ Even in the infancy of his writing career, we can begin to identify in Hines’s own interpretation of his work the development of central themes and emphases that would underpin his later, more widely known novels and screenplays, namely the relationship between marginalised individuals and the social and economic forces beyond their control. It is therefore significant that, following the broadcast, the play’s producer, Alfred Bradley, persuaded the BBC’s Northern Region to award the then 25-year-old Hines a bursary to develop his writing, giving him the time and space to write A Kestrel for a Knave.

While learning more about the context of Billy’s Last Stand and its origins helps us to gain a greater sense of Hines’s development as a young writer, a consideration of the play’s diverse modality offers a way to understand the author’s ambiguous status within discourses about working-class and regional post-war writing. After its beginning as a radio play, Hines adapted Billy’s Last Stand as a theatre production, first for regional theatre in Bolton, and then ‘upstairs’ at the Royal Court, directed by Michael Wearing in 1970, where Darkly was played by Ian McKellen. The play was received extremely well by critics, so that Hines was praised for his ‘considerable literary touch’² by Milton Shulman; his mastery of the ‘small, closely observed subject’³ by Pearson Phillips; and for producing ‘a story told with the intensity and detail of D.H. Lawrence at his best’⁴ by Rosemary Say. The near-universal acclaim for the play is telling: this was to be Hines’s only theatrical production, although Kes/Kestrel for a Knave has repeatedly been adapted for the stage, as have The Price of Coal and Two Men from Derby, but with a range of different writers and never with Hines taking the lead. Knowledge of Hines’s brief but successful career as a playwright – the play was also performed in Germany and reproduced for publication in the United States – further reveals the complex and multi-layered nature of his authorship. In chronological terms, Hines was first a radio writer, then a novelist, before adapting Kes as a screenplay, and then working on Billy’s Last Stand for the theatre, and finally for his first television play in 1971. While Hines shifted between mediums during this frenetic early period of writing, Billy’s Last Stand also shows a new willingness to experiment with genre. Indeed, the BBC Play for Today production, directed by John Glenister, who would collaborate again with Hines five years later on Two Men from Derby, differs very little from the radio play and theatre versions, although, predictably, the violence appears to have been toned down. Thus the play maintains the earlier version’s stark aesthetic and formal structure, its minimal use of location and its symbolic rather than multi-dimensional or realist characterisation.

In Billy’s Last Stand, Hines can be seen to work outside the generic tropes that would characterise his work with Loach. For example, Darkly and Billy are avowedly unrepresentative figures: Billy is a self-confessed ‘rag man’⁵ who lives in a shed, and Darkly, we are told, used to ‘get bad heads and have dos … a kind of mental strain’ (32). Both men are thus at the very margins of society and while familiar thematic interests of Hines’s characterise the narrative, including the emphasis on coal and a wider meditation on labour, and the effects of the market on the dignity of individuals and communities, there can be little doubt that Billy’s Last Stand’s allegorical nature and stark focus on just two characters constitute an experimental dimension within Hines’s oeuvre.

The play’s moral, and by extension socioeconomic, themes are communicated through Billy’s worsening physical condition and increasingly uncertain mental state as his relationship with Darkly develops. He begins the play happy with the simplicity and freedom of his working pattern, but Darkly tells him ‘it’s getting harder working on and off like tha does, things are changing’ (11). Billy, despite his suspicions of Darkly’s intentions, seems grudgingly to accept his new acquaintance’s view of the world: ‘Ar, things are closing in as tha says, tha closing in on me’ (11). Billy’s personal sense of wellbeing is thus inextricably linked to the socioeconomic determinism represented by Darkly. As the second act begins, three months have passed and we are told that:

BILLY IS SHOVELLING COAL AS AT THE BEGINNING OF ACT I, ONLY THIS TIME SLOWLY, MAKING HARD WORK OF IT. HE TAKES FREQUENT RESTS, STRAIGHTENENING UP AND RUBBING THE SMALL OF HIS BACK. (29)

Billy’s body thus itself becomes a symbol of his exploitation and subordination to the demands of the market: the more he works, the more money he makes, and the more his body (and soul) decays:

DARKLY: Thi money’s building thi security for thi.

BILLY: An’ it’s building my worries an’ all.

DARKLY: Tha talks t’opposite way round to everybody else.

BILLY: But I act same. I never used to, but I do now.

DARKLY: Nowt wrong wi’ that, is there?

BILLY: There is! There is! It means that I’m not t’same bloke anymore.

I’m nowt but a bloody fool now. What do I do first time I get a bit o’money in my pocket? I rush out an’ buy myself a few extras. Luxuries they call ’em, but before I know where I am they’ve become necessities an’ I’m on t’scrounge for summat else.

DARKLY: It’s all part of modern living, Billy lad.

BILLY: What, being in a turmoil all along? Worrying about growing old, about saving, thi mind sharpened to a razor’s edge through constant contact wi’ cash, cash! Cash! (Bangs his fist into his own palm three times). (23–4)

Billy’s anger is not just because of his self-recognition as a capitalist subject but it also enables Hines to explore, in a broader sense, the very nature of labour. Billy, we learn, used to be a miner (a byword for masculine virtue in many narratives of working-class lives, but for Hines something altogether more ambivalent), and this memory of collective working life enables Billy to philosophise on the distinction between fulfilling, autonomous labour and employment as exploitation:

BILLY: I can’t remember my back ever being as bad as this in all my years on this job.

DARKLY: That’ll be some, won’t it? When did tha start?

BILLY: I don’t know, but I can remember sweatin’ cobs ont’ face one day, and thinking, if King don’t work why should I?

DARKLY: You daft bugger.

BILLY: What’s daft about that?

DARKLY: We’ what’s getting coals in if it’s not working?

BILLY: Ar, but I wa’ employed before. And there’s a big difference in work and being employed … I enjoyed getting coals in, whereas before I wa’ employed an’ that’s different, it’s just different.

DARKLY: I don’t know what tha on about.

BILLY: I can’t explain it right, it’s just t’way I feel. (Pause) Looking back I’ve had some good times getting coals in. (33)

This reminiscence of simpler times, itself contributing to the play’s elegiac tone, leads Billy to describe his treasured collection of coals: ‘Everyone o’ them lumps brings back a memory. I spend hours looking o’er remembering’ (34); in contrast, Darkly is incapable of understanding the symbolic, affective meaning of Billy’s emotional investment in coal: ‘I’ve never heard owt as bloody ridiculous in my life’ (34), as he puts it. After the murder of Starky, Billy is provoked to kill Darkly by the latter’s threat to destroy the coals and by extension Billy’s attachment to memory and place. As the row escalates, another moment of self-recognition and clarity hits Billy: ‘Inside me, it’s all gone. There’s nowt left but a shattered crumbling shell, I’m no good to man nor beast now’ (46).

Billy’s ‘last stand’ (to kill Darkly) is a destructive act which confirms his acceptance of, and his adherence to, an inevitable and ruthless capitalist reality. To reorder Hines’s statement, Billy has now come to represent ‘society’ and he is no longer the ‘outsider’. The play’s allegorical tone, undoubtedly increased by its original conception as a radio play, invites further such readings of the representative rather than multi-dimensional facets of the characters. Thus, we might see Darkly as a reflection of Billy’s own divided self, as a wholly symbolic entity representing his anxiety about the changing world. It is also possible to see Starky as a doubled version of Darkly (the linguistic similarity is clearly intentional) or indeed as the inverse of Billy, as Darkly describes him: ‘He belongs to that breed o’ men outside o’ things. (Pause) Summat like thee, only nasty wi’ it’ (42).

The television broadcast of Billy’s Last Stand was met with acclaim equal to that which had greeted Hines’s stage version. Nancy Banks-Smith identified its allegorical ten...