Bill Douglas FilmFest: Day 1

Movie: My Childhood
Year: 1972

and

Movie: My Ain Folk
Year: 1973

Bleak, desolate, almost unceasingly grim--"My Childhood" is the first installment in the Bill Douglas Trilogy. It's the shortest of the three--clocking in at just under 50 minutes--but it pacts enough pathos and bare-naked emotion to fill a running time twice as long.

It's 1945. Jamie (Stephen Archibald) and Tommy (Hughie Restorick) live a meager and isolated existence with their maternal grandmother in Newcraighall, a Scottish mining village. The frail and permanently beshawled grandmother is given to wandering outside, and when she appears at the gates of the local school, Tommy, the son of one of her daughters, walks her home. Meanwhile the younger Jamie, the son of her other daughter, scavenges for coal.

Jamie's affection is reserved for a black cat, and Helmuth, one of a group of German P.O.W.s who he visits while they work in the field. Tommy alternates between hostility towards the boy, who appears to be his brother, and friendship. When Jamie asks after his mother and father, Tommy tells him of his own mother, now dead. Back in the fields, Jamie uses a children's book to teach Helmuth English.

Tommy visits his mother's grave, exchanges hostile glances with a neighbour walking a dog, and is visited by his father, who brings him a canary as a birthday present. The grandmother orders the man to leave, and he cycles away as Tommy chases after him. In her anger, the grandmother tries to destroy the birdcage, and Tommy is forced to conceal it. Jamie is given sixpence by the neighbor with the dog.

Discovering that Jamie's cat has killed his canary, Tommy kills the cat. Having been told that the neighbor with the dog is his father, Jamie follows him to the house next-door to where he lives, which is occupied by the man's doting and possessive mother (Jamie's paternal grandmother). Jamie and his maternal grandmother take a bus to visit a woman he discovers is his own mother, who has been committed to an asylum, and who gives no sign of recognizing the visitors.

The end of the war is marked by a village bonfire, but it also leads to the departure of Helmuth. Tommy attempts to comfort the despondent Jamie, but then discovers that their maternal grandmother has collapsed and may be dead. Jamie runs out of the house until he reaches the railway, seems to contemplate suicide, but when he jumps from the railway bridge he lands in one of the open carriages of a goods train. The train takes him away from the village and in a final act of defiance, Jamie spits.

For those of us who have grown up in the relative luxury of the last few decades, it's hard to imagine the type of existence that Jamie and his brother had to grow up in. Absent parents, compounded by desperate poverty--it's positively heart-tugging to watch them try and go about their way. Jamie especially, who broods for his parents, is seen as an afterthought--except in his friendship with Helmuth. And even that has to end; for Jamie, what is there to look forward too? Why even try?

"My Ain Folk" picks up the the narrative after the death of the boys' maternal grandmother. An attempt is made to take Jamie and Tommy, who we find now is not Jamie's brother but his cousin into care, but Jamie tales shelter in his paternal grandmother's house. She tells a welfare officer that the boy is welcome to stay, then subjects Jamie to an angry tirade about how his mother ("a hooer") ruined her son's life.

The complex patterns of family relationship only gradually becomes clear: Jamie's grandmother lives next door to the house where her favourite son (Jamie's father) lives with Agnes, who the grandmother hates, and the couple's son. The grandmother's house is also occupied by her other son, just returned from the war, who is himself carrying on an affair with Agnes. When his grandmother attacks the neighbouring house while brandishing a knife, Jamie runs away, but is brought back by a policeman. His ill-treatment includes being forbidden to use the toilet and being shut outside in the snow, and his misery is compounded when he learns from his grandmother that his mother has died in the asylum to which she had been committed.

Like his cousin, Jamie appears to gain some solace from visits to the cinema, and does finds a companion when an ambulance brings his paternal grandfather home from hospital. However his grandfather is too weak to stand up to his wife, his longstanding relationship with a woman in the village makes him the constant subject of his wife's taunts, and the old man becomes increasingly despondent himself.

Having received a letter from Tommy, Jamie visits him in the Edinburgh care home in which he has been placed. He is accompanied by Tommy's father, who uses the occasion to justify himself for not taking his son home with him. Jamie is given the key to his old house by his grandmother, and told to look for the pearls apparently hidden there by his mother. He finds what he believes to be a set of pearls hidden in a pillow, but buries them in a coal heap, earning him a beating from his uncle when he denies finding anything. The uncle is later thrown out the house by Jamie's grandmother, the antagonism between the grandmother and Agnes culminating in a night-time fight between the two women. Having met another woman, Jamie's father drives away with her. Jamie's grandfather dies, and Jamie is taken away to the Edinburgh care home.