This evening I finished reading "No Way But Gentlenesse" by Richard Hines.
Raised in Hoyland, South Yorkshire, Richard was born into a coal mining family. He had an older brother called Barry who became famous for writing "Kes" in the late nineteen sixties. That novel was later made into an iconic film.
It was all about a boy called Billy Casper who had little going for him but he managed to capture a young kestrel and train it. He called the bird Kes.
As an English teacher, I taught "Kes" to several classes over the years and it became a standard GCSE English Literature text. One of the things that I always loved about that novel is that it portrayed a coal mining community with understanding and compassion. Barry Hines's lived experience was his principal source.
"No Way But Gentlenesse" is a personal memoir in which Richard Hines recalls his early encounters with kestrels and how later he was employed as the falconer during the filming of "Kes". The book also maps Richard's personal development from being an educational failure to becoming a university lecturer here in Sheffield where he lived with his childhood sweetheart Jackie and their two children - John and Kate.
I believe that Richard and Jackie have now moved down to Sussex to be close to their daughter and her family but until fairly recently they lived just fifty yards from us near the junction at the bottom of our stretch of road.
West & South Yorkshire and the Black Country got into my soul long ago.
ReplyDeleteSo the Barry Hines novel and the Ken Loach film spoke to me as well.
Hines wrote about rural life in his novel The Gamekeeper (reissued 2022).
By the 1968 Hines and Barstow were the only novelists of substance still
living in the North, though there were good poets (Bloodaxe & Carcanet).
Sid Chaplin had worked as a miner but was in London writing for The Guardian.
Alan Plater stuck to his native Hull but made frequent visits south for TV work.
Stanley Middleton lived all his life in Nottingham, a grammar school teacher.
Catherine Cookson, Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, Braine, David Storey had all left.
To live in post-industrial Britain is to be haunted by dear happy ghosts,
but ghosts nevertheless. So I was touched to read about Richard Hines.
Today the last industrial novelist is James Kelman, who lives here in
Glasgow. A writer of genius like Beckett. Best short story writer in English.