sajbrfem

Due to the enormous kindness of a friend who took my girls for basically all of Saturday, I got to see a movie after the home open.


I saw *Dunkirk* which was good, but not as good as the imaginary version that *I* would direct.


Nolan interwove three stories to try to show the complexity of the event, bringing them together at the end. This made it a bit choppy – it was night time in one timeline and Tom Hardy was still endlessly flying across the Channel in the afternoon in another timeline.


I say, why stop a three stories. There was tons more that I wanted to see. You could run it chronologically over the days of the operation but show a heap more stories. The poor sods who were selected for the rear guard, for instance, must have known that they were there to hold the line as long as possible with no chance of escape. It was death or imprisonment for them.


I want to know about the people waiting at home. At first the Government tried to hush it up for morale reasons, but then realised that they were about to lose the entire BEF and grovelled for small vessels to rescue people. Pretty much everyone must have been aware that if the army was lost, Britain could expect to be invaded very shortly.


I wanted more of the arguments between French and British troops over who was to be evacuated. And more of the high level arguments between Generals and Prime Ministers in which the British pointed out that all the rescuing ships were British and the French pointed out that the mole to reach them was French.


I wanted a lot more of the action that was going on. Nolan showed an essentially clean beach with one or two corpses and some orderly lines. I believe the BEF dumped in the harbour hundreds of trucks, tanks, and crates of weapons to destroy them before they fell into enemy hands. And I wanted to see more of the clever engineers who jury rigged proto-bridges to allow people to board further out. And the guys who managed to fix the mole after it caught fire. Also, the confusion, as orders shifted constantly about where to queue for best survival and the way stragglers who had lost their mates were shoved out of the queues by troops still in their groups. Also, mostly it was orderly queuing but there were some boats mobbed and overturned; some officers threatened to shoot troops who would not turn back from overloaded vessels.


I definitely wanted to know more about the people who lived in Dunkirk. In Nolan’s version the town was deserted. Was that really the case? I thought this was a very swiftly moving evacuation – did the whole population really evacuate through German lines? It seems impossible.


And I really wanted tons more about the small vessels. Look at the ridiculous names that the little ships had – all Lazy Days yacht names or Ferry no 2 for working ships. Not, you know, fighting names.


In short, I wanted something much closer to a documentary, showing me what was happening all over rather than following a few characters.

Mary Martha Sherwood wrote “The History of the Fairchild Family” in three volumes, published 1818, 1842 and 1847. I read the first book, which is chiefly about the Fairchild children – Emily, Lucy and Henry – realising that all humans are depraved sinners in need of redemption. To quote from the first few pages:

Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild loved and feared God, and had done so, by the mercy of God, ever since their younger days. They knew that their hearts were very bad, and that they could not be saved by any good thing they could do: on the contrary, that they were by nature fitted only for everlasting punishment: but they believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and loved him for having died for them; and they knew he would save them, because he saves all those who trust in him.

The book is essentially a series of vignettes of the children being instructed on the righteous path. Emily, for example, succumbs to the temptation to eat some forbidden plums: 'no eye was looking at her, but the eye of God, who sees every thing we do, and knows even the secret thoughts of the heart; but Emily, just at that moment, did not think of God.'

Even worse, their cousin Augusta plays with candles after being told not to and is burnt alive. The stakes are high in this novel, because every sin is a step towards losing their souls forever. When Mr Fairchild catches his children quarrelling, he first thrashes them, reciting Dr. Watts's 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite' between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. Lesson learned.

The works were massively popular in the 19th century, in print constantly until 1913. There is some evidence, though, that it was not always read as intended. Lord Hamilton wrote that 'there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it.’

Frances Hodgson Burnett, perhaps a more pious child, states that she read it in two sections, first reading the religious statements because she thought she should and then reading the story for pleasure.