To Tulse Hill by Third Rail

Is it a different world this side of the Thames?  Many of us in south London like to think so.  After all, everything south of the river, even right up to Southwark and Lambeth, has traditionally lain beyond the immediate authority of the Cities of London or Westminster over the water.  Partly this is because, in the old days, the diocese of Winchester once came all the way up to the river, so that the South Bank, though actually directly overlooked by St Paul’s Cathedral across the river, lay under the jurisdiction of a see sixty miles away.  All through the history of London the Thames has made all the difference: for instance, it was to avoid trouble from the authorities that the theatres of Shakespeare’s time decamped to their transpontine position.

These administrative and ecclesiastical boundaries all seem quite faded now. Today, the mass of ‘Greater London’ sprawls greyly to horizons north and south alike, and elects a single Mayor (who is not to be confused with the Lord Mayor of the City of London). Not without considerable hesitation can Vauxhall or the Borough be described as being in Surrey, a name which now calls to mind rural red-tiled gables,  or downs descending into denes.  Indeed, how laughable is the name ‘Surrey Quays’ for those old docklands of Rotherhithe, left stranded as they are by the ebbing of their historical county?  In recent years even the insatiable developers have crossed the river, hungry to thicken the skyline of south London, too, with their towers.

All the same, there are certain ways in which the Thames still constitutes a barrier between central London and its southern suburbs, and which have no counterparts to the north.  The swathe the river cuts through the city tends towards the south; it still has an isolating effect on Lambeth and Southwark even as it leaves the north contiguous with the centre.  South Londoners wishing to reach the city proper still have the river to cross first, and this means, in contrast to north Londoners, that they know the sensation of crossing the river into the city, into the heart of things.  They shoot out onto one of the bridges aboard a bus or train, or even slide into Blackfriars railway station, with its new platforms spanning the water — and the sky widens without warning, a panorama unfolds along the Embankment, the Houses of Parliament sail clear — and then they come to land in the heart of the city.  Even if few will murmur that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’; even if the feeling can be dulled by habit, it never vanishes entirely, and will last as long as the river itself.  Those coming to the West End or the City from the north, however, miss it altogether.

The Tube, of course, provides southerners with several ways to sneak into London without acknowledging or noticing the river.  But, as we are keen to point out, most of us are in any case a long way from the nearest Underground station.  There is always some sort of change needed from the world of south London to the world of central London.  The Underground network is heavily biased towards and largely contiguous with north London, whereas it hardly ventures south of the river (apart from the bold, incongruous and ultimately rather ironic adventure of the Northern line, through Britain’s longest railway tunnel, to Morden, the Underground’s most southerly station).

Yes, as well as crossing the Thames, the majority of south Londoners going ‘up to town’ have a definite threshold to cross: there is for us a clear moment of arrival in London.  North Londoners, however, can generally pile straight onto the Tube, and are already in the system when they set off from their home station.  In their tunnels they see nothing, poor souls, and apart from the entry to these tunnels their journey into the city crosses no perceptible boundary.  Perhaps this is why ‘Metroland’ is a phenomenon of North London rather than South.

Christian Wolmar’s enjoyable history of the Underground, The Subterranean Railway, offers several explanations for this imbalance in provision between north and south. [1]  For instance, the geology of south London is notoriously difficult to tunnel through.  Apart from the obvious obstacle posed by the Thames, Tube tunnelling was defied almost until the new millennium by the the deposits of gravel that overlie the typical London clay in this area, sometimes to a depth of ten metres.

South Bermondsey station

Wolmar also explains that, by the time that the Underground had begun to expand beyond central London at the turn of the twentieth century, the city’s south had already gained its dense network of suburban railways.  It was North London that had greater need of transport connections, having been neglected by the builders of the lines out of Euston and King’s Cross.  These companies had bigger fish to fry than Edgware or Barnet: their sights were set on the big prizes — Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh or Glasgow — and they needed to send express trains as far afield as they could, and as quickly as possible.  They did not concern themselves with the more trifling places in between, and constructed their lines accordingly, forging northwards with a smattering of intermediate stations and only paltry connections between east and west.  Speed and directness were everything: ‘There we were aimed’ was Philip Larkin’s impression, racing from Hull towards London straight up the East Coast Main Line.  It was the Underground that was to fill in the gaps.

In Kent, Surrey and Sussex, the situation had been different.  Across these counties no siren song floated from any industrial belt; no ‘fields of apparatus’, no ‘furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen’ beckoned the top-hatted industrialist.  The only sources of traffic comparable to the likes of Liverpool and Newcastle were Portsmouth, the trans-Atlantic port of Southampton and, further east, Dover or Newhaven, with their Continental connections.  The other main destinations, such as Eastbourne, Brighton and Hastings, generated a different kind of traffic from the northern cities, local and regional rather than heavy goods or long-distance expresses. (Kidner called London and South Western main line ‘from its earliest days a line for farmers, military men, bishops and high class tourists’). [2]  Moreover, because all of these destinations lay within a hundred miles of the capital, there was relatively little to be gained by sustained high speed, and, in turn, less to be lost by stopping in between.

Neither did the geography of south London and England encourage fast railways.  Instead of straightforward natural courses, such as the Thames presented to Brunel as he went westwards, the builders of railways to the south met almost immediately with long dissuading barriers of high ground.  The first is the ridge rising eastwards from southern Battersea towards Norwood and Sydenham, but beyond lie the North Downs, the Weald, and the South Downs, which can be punched through only with difficulty.  For example, the line from Tonbridge to Hastings passes through eight tunnels in the thirty-two miles of its length.

Thus the companies in the south laid speed aside in favour of a different goal: comprehensiveness of coverage, and not only for the passengers’ sake.  The railway barons were competing with each other for territory as much as for traffic, and often proved themselves willing to build new lines simply to pre-empt their rivals.  What was more, the fewer pickings south of London meant that there was less to be squabbled over, and this was how the suburbs, considered an obstacle north of London, came to be seen in the south as a market in their own right.

All this produced in this part of England a distinctive railway map, the unsung tangle of surface railways on which we have relied ever since.  A dense and wayward network it is, particularly those lines in London’s immediate suburbs and leading directly southwards towards Sussex that were known under British Rail as the ‘South Central Division’.


Geographical map of suburban south London railways, created with use of information © OpenStreetMap contributors

Here in the south is the realm of the ‘rolling English rail’, to paraphrase Chesterton: none of the self-containedness or single-mindedness of the north.  The southern suburban lines criss-cross each other like a board game, before sneaking alongside the main lines to run into startlingly grand termini (Waterloo, Victoria, Charing Cross, London Bridge).  They are inclined to diversions, to duplicating each other merrily and to winding circuitously around obstacles.  Who could blame London-bound travellers on the Tattenham Corner branch for being rather more doubtful than Philip Larkin about where precisely they are ‘aimed’?  Another difference with the North is that physical rail connections between lines are more common than on the Underground, so that trains can in theory be sent along a greater variety of routes.  All around the network it is possible to glimpse chords and spurs and sidings leading off round bends, curving away to who knows where?

This game of joining-the-dots has plenty of practical advantages.  One is the relative ease of travel eastwards and westwards, which can usually be done without having to go via central London.   This perspective of North London shows how all the railways (even the Tube) run quite independently of each other along north-south axes, so that the most practical route from (say) Mill Hill Broadway to Winchmore Hill involves either going all the way into London and out again, or resorting to the bus.  Their unrelenting linearity also restricts north Londoners to a single terminus.  Meanwhile, South London railway stations often enjoy direct services to two or sometimes three different London termini.  It is unusual to have to change trains more than once or twice between any two given south London stations.

And there are quirks and curiosities to match any of the Underground’s.  We have unusual and historic stations such as Peckham Rye or Crystal Palace, both of which see the phenomenon of London-bound trains departing in completely opposite directions.  Then there is Vauxhall, from whose name the Russian word for railway station comes, and Clapham Junction, the busiest station in Britain by the number of trains passing through.  And there is no shortage of memorable names: Gipsy Hill, or Penge West, or Elephant and Castle, or Tooting.  After staring for long enough at a map of the network, patterns loom forth and swirl around, such as the symmetry between Battersea in the west and Bermondsey in the east, echoed neatly by the nearby stations of Queens Road Peckham and Queenstown Road Battersea.

Clapham Junction, unusually quiet

Yet amid these uncritical remarks of mine must be heard another voice, as of a great multitude of passengers, wailing and gnashing their teeth, and saying, ‘But these trains are always late!  And slow!  And overcrowded!  And expensive!  And unreliable!  And late!’  And lo, their lament is far from groundless.  The same layouts that open up the variety of destinations and connections also produce conflicts in movements.  A case in point are the flat junctions, which send trains right across each others’ paths, hamper acceleration and constrain the timetable.  At most stations, the price to pay for the choice of routes is a frequency of trains far sparser than on the Underground.  The guiding principle in south London is this: everything is possible, but only once every half-hour.

The system’s complexity also displays its weaknesses by falling to pieces whenever anything goes wrong.  Disruption is rarely contained along one line or in one area, but spreads like wildfire across the congested network.  The failure of a single set of points can cause chaos in an apparently unrelated part of the network; spectacular delays can be accumulated over only a few miles.  And of course there is the South London trundle: first the hopeful acceleration to about 15mph, then the application of the brakes, slowly but surely gnawing away at the speedometer, slowing and slowing the pace nearer and nearer to a crawl, drawing closer and closer the inevitable red signal and yet always in denial: the signal refuses to change until progress has juddered to an emphatic 0.  And so on and so forth, all the way home. 

Since all railways, representing a noble ideal as they do, are difficult to construct, maintain and improve, most of these problems will remain unresolved for many years to come.  In the meantime, one radical way of surviving commuting, I have found, is to become interested in it.  After all, there is often plenty of time to sit and contemplate the network, even if that time is seldom set aside voluntarily.  Who knows, the long meditative silence of a signal failure might lead some fellow-passengers, not yet thoroughly hardened, to acknowledge that South London’s railways have a certain distinctive atmosphere.  Could it even be said that South London is made distinctive by its railways?  If the best way to see any landscape is by rail, in South London the railways themselves form some of the best aspects of the landscape.  For one thing, they maintain corridors of woodland that ought to be unthinkable this far into London, bringing the countryside deep into the city (just as roads, conversely, are take the town out into the country).  Someone unfamiliar with the area might reasonably think that from Streatham to Peckham Rye stretches a kind of wild garden, populated by occasional gables and chimneys.  Who knows: maybe the last boughs and branches of the old Norwood or Forest Hill are hidden away the in railway cuttings.

North Dulwich station

The suggestion of the rural is enhanced by a feature of the infrastructure: the system of electrification, which supplies power not via bristling overhead catenary but through a discreet ‘third rail’ at ground level.  This arrangement is relatively unusual for main line railways and has practical disadvantages of its own, but it does leave branches and sky unencumbered.  As a matter of fact the electrification programme, undertaken by the Southern Railway in the 1920s and 1930s, was really the only marketing campaign successful enough to mark out these railways as a rival to the Underground.  The Art Deco promise of refuge in suburbia,  brought within comfortable reach by the ‘Southern Electric’, did for the south what ‘Metroland’ had done for the north, and the slogan’s euphony even earned it a footnote in (north-Londoner) Betjeman’s poem ‘Love in a Valley’.  (Betjeman even mentions the third rail in that poem: ‘White down the valley curves the living rail’, he declares from his Coulsdon perch.)

I have wondered if this south London atmosphere exists most completely at Tulse Hill station, a place whose position can only be described as the very middle of deep south London.  The area it serves is much like the rest of the city, except for having served as an unlikely poet’s paradise for Jason Strugnell, Wendy Cope’s spoof 1980s alter ego.  The station itself is in many ways the South London station par excellence: it is a complete muddle.  It has the word ‘Hill’ in its name, for one thing; it has direct but distinctly unhurried services to two different London terminals, Blackfriars and London Bridge; it lies at the convergence of several different routes, and its capacity is constrained irredeemably by two overbridges at each end of its platforms.  (One of these, which crosses the South Circular, was the country’s second most collided-with overbridge last year).  Once a day at mid-morning Tulse Hill even has the quirk of a single Parliamentary train to Streatham Hill (no return).  Finally, after standing on the platform, having stared for long enough at the maps during the aeons of bleak winter-evening delays, there is some satisfaction to be gained in observing that from Tulse Hill the points can theoretically be set so that trains might set off in opposite directions, along quite different routes, and yet be able to reach either London Bridge or Victoria stations without having to reverse.  When the station was first opened, which will be 150 years ago next year, I doubt there seemed any particular reason for it to have been placed where it was.  Now the passenger whose train rounds the excruciatingly tight bends and lumbers at last into Tulse Hill has at least the assurance of being completely lost.

Here then in one place — and Tulse Hill, of all places — is a collection of features that are South London’s own.  On life goes, without anybody noticing; on the railway clunks.  Nobody notices that in north London there is nothing quite like it to be found.  Whether that is a shame or a relief is not necessarily the most pressing matter of the day, but it is enough, I think, to justify my claim that there is something special about the world this side of the Thames.

Tulse Hill station: a two-pronged approach from the south

References:

[1] Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway (London: Atlantic, 2004), p. 14

[2]  R. W. Kidner, The Waterloo – Southampton Line (Oakwood, 1983), p.7.

‘O the mind, mind has mountains’: Pixar, the Poets and the Teenager

This post has somehow ballooned into a 2,000-word tract.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I have said anything that will spoil the film for those who have not seen it, nor given away the plot beyond about the film’s half-way mark, though I let slip clues to the mood of its resolution.  Put simply, two hours spent watching the film is recommended over two hours trying to read my review of it. 

Film fare at the university Cathsoc on Shrove Tuesday was Pixar studios’ Inside Out.  I suppose I had been expecting something fairly light after all those pancakes.  Yet here I am a week afterwards still puzzling out this unusual film.

Inside Out has been selling itself on the point of its being set mainly inside the main character’s own head.  Riley is an ordinary American girl, with a strong and steady mother and father, who has been steered through her eleven years (and counting) by five characters who are her emotions personified: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust.  They oversee her mind, react to all she meets, influence her actions, send off a daily consignment of memories to the archives and engage themselves perpetually in a well-intentioned squabble for the upper hand.  The apparently whimsical premise is rather like the Numbskulls series in the Beano comic, except that, for all its bright colours, for all its lashings of humour and for all its characteristically American warm-heartedness, this is a not a trivial film.  It has something serious to say to adults and children alike.  In other words, it does not reach over the heads of the young audience but has two rare qualities: firstly, it is a children’s film which takes itself seriously because it takes its young audience seriously, and secondly it remembers most of the time, as it also speaks seriously to an older audience, that both old and young are in the same room.

Inside Out’s first triumph, in my view, is its astonishing animation.  It is slick without quite being too rushed and lavishes detail on the viewer.  No stone is left unturned in recreating wan sunlight on concrete or the cold yellow sweep of street lamps through a moving car.  Most impressive of all is that, out of nothing but pixels under a computer’s bonnet, it is now possible to breathe the very subtleties and shadows of emotions into a character’s face: the face falling, the collapse into laughter, the dawning of disappointment, the hesitant brightening of hope, the dance of dozens of movements or half-smiles or twitches or blinks in conversation, and (crucially, as it turns out) the zero of numb expressionlessness.  Even in this age of commonplace technological wonder it is amazing to watch.  The personified emotions may be very clever on their own, but they are, after all, (deliberately) undisguised stock characters.  The really remarkable achievement is their way of mingling and moderating each other in the heroine’s expressions.  The whole film has surely been designed to show off this animation; at any rate, it certainly depends upon its success.  I think the ambitious gamble has paid off.  

I am hoping that it is all right to link to this short extract from the beginning of the film,  which gives a better impression of its cleverness than the trailer does.

Then there is the film’s setting, the landscape of the mind.  They have the most important thing right: its scale is enormous.  The five emotions sit dizzyingly high up in a sort of control tower, from which they and the viewer can see miles of shelves of long-term memory in the distance.  There is also an archipelago of ‘islands of personality’, great floating citadels to Riley’s particular strengths and talents, which are (if I remember properly) ‘Family’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Hockey’, ‘Honesty’ and something like high spirits.  Between these and the control-tower yawns a dark void, a hopeless pit of forgotten memories.  They have depicted Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines exactly:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

The mind is not a mere safe or chamber.  It is its own country.  Yes, this scale is completely right: yes, this setting is entirely fitting, as the film’s audience will have known, in fact.

Having built up this mountainous mythology of the mind, the directors have kept the narrative simple.  All that is made to happen to Riley is that her family moves from the Mid-West of the U.S. to San Francisco in California.  Yet the setting’s palette means that this realistic uprooting and her understandable struggle to settle in her new home can be depicted in scrupulous, meditative detail.  In Riley’s mind its effect is literally upheaving, even seismic.  Setbacks and threats, real or imagined but all of an unfamiliar potency, suddenly come thick and fast at home and at school.  The five emotion characters struggle to maintain control over the mind.  There is a panicked tussle over the memory-mechanism, and then there is catastrophe: the Joy character — the sole optimist — and the Sadness character — a combination of Eeyore and King Midas, who cannot help tainting anything she touches with a contagious blue gloom — manage to catapult themselves out of the control tower, across the mind’s chasm and into the archives of memory, hopelessly far away from any influence over their charge and leaving to hold sway over the mind only Fear, Disgust and Anger who, as might be expected in spite of their efforts, cannot sustain Riley’s character by themselves.  One by one, her ‘islands of personality’ begin to founder and topple; a tectonic catastrophe threatens and weakens her whole person.  (How puny and trivial San Francisco’s immense Golden Gate bridge, seen in opening shots, is made to seem now).  That is the plot seen from the inside.  From the outside, and from the perspective of her parents, she withdraws into herself, turns her back on her surroundings and slumps into disillusion.  Come to that, the narrative can be stated more simply still.  The move to California jolts Riley’s mind into a new age: her growing up enters a painful phase.

This linearity and simplicity of narrative leaves plenty of room for a remarkable richness and dignity in the portrayal of her character which, it is also worth noticing, also provides the film’s setting.  This richness of character is its fourth and crowning triumph in my book, and the reason why I think so many people have found it so powerful.  Just as the animation shows the emotions mingling in Riley’s face, so their overall effect is to mingle in her character.  Inside Out’s heroine is at intervals joyful, sorrowful, disgusted, angry, fearful, or somewhere in between, but remains always plainly the same person.  She is exalted and deepened where, in many modern children’s books and films, characterisation often suffers from being crowded out by over-complicated narratives.  Even though I had trouble keeping up with the frenetic dialogue (once a line is missed it is gone), I can see that such slickness is justified here.  It makes sense for these emotions, being the voices in Riley’s head, to chatter away at the speed of thought: their speech, perhaps along with the musical score, is the very sound of her thinking.  (The film’s dialogue outside the mind is very well paced and particularly cleverly delivered).  The distinction between first person and third person is gloriously vague. The result, then, is a meticulous and self-unconscious chronicle not only of a character’s actions and words but also of her every thought.  It might even be possible to treat this film as a moving portrait instead of as a story, and to be content with studying and contemplating a single character, painted as richly as any in literature, for its two hours’ length.  

I have longed for a work of literature for children (for I think this is literature) that is brave and serious enough to do something like this.  I have often thought that the most moving stories work on this sort of scale, painting the apparently prosaic or normal in monumental colours without taking leave of a realistic world, and by making characters deep enough to let their young audiences almost befriend them.  Such literature triumphs because it upholds human dignity — as I persist in believing all literature ought to, one way or another — by portraying its majesty.   For majesty is the cornerstone of Inside Out, in spite of its psychedelic appearance.  Riley’s loss of heart, manifested on the outside only in despondency and flouncing (which I thought her parents indulged too much!), is actually the interior landscape’s very ruin. The doomed realm of childhood imagination is depicted as a sprawling rubble-strewn demolition site, leered over by lofty cranes; the collapse of an ‘island of personality’ is always slow, grave and noble, more terrible than the foundering of a battleship, or the schism of an iceberg or indeed a San Franciscan earthquake.  ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, and, come to that, O it carries enough quests and perils for a trillion trilogies, even at eleven. 

For all that I praise the film, I must also admit to being unsettled by it.  This is not really the directors’ fault but the fault of the culture that engulfs Pixar Studios and audience alike.  I have two criticisms to make of the film’s powerful depiction of growing up, which I think is what most moves its older audience.  Firstly, curmudgeon that I am, I find myself deprived of the film’s cathartic relief because I do not see much hope in the culture into which Riley is about to graduate.   The end of the film shows that the screen-writers are uncritical of the principles, and the implications, of modern Western teenager- and adulthood.  When Riley is more than once given the line ‘I’ve got to go’ — just before some setback, always ‘I’ve got to go’, words delivered casually but which become profoundly haunting once they are recognised as a refrain — it really feels like a permanent farewell.  This is why I find myself hoping that they do not attempt a sequel and instead leave Inside Out alone atop a plinth of its own.  My second regret is that this growing up produces in her mind nothing short of revolution, rather than a less traumatic formation — or, in other, broader words, I lament that she must be delivered up to teenagerhood without comment or criticism.

I am compelled to wonder why the growth from child to adult must now, since the invention of the teenager, necessarily involve more ruin and revolution than mellowing and deepening.   Why a campaign of levelling and rebuilding, rather than a programme of refurbishment and extension?  Why must the teenage attitude be one of self-repudiation, a developer’s instead of a gardener’s?  We have all surely seen it happen: young people, feeling compelled to rebel against themselves, vandalise any part of their character they perceive as childlike and re-engineer themselves aggressively into almost a different person.  In fact, one of Inside Out’s finest strokes is to look briefly into the mind of a worldly, eye-shadowed-up ‘in-crowd’ girl from school during the credits.  Underneath the façade her emotional characters are wailing, ‘We’re a complete fraud; do you think they can see through us?’, ‘It’s so tiring being cool’, and so on.  Teenagers will go to such lengths because they are now even more afraid of being thought childish than of being thought stuffy.  Of course we must all in the end put aside childish things; of course we squirm at some of the things we have said and done in childhood; of course the teenager plumbs depths unknown by the child; of course we must arm ourselves for the adult world.  But why is that adult world so unforgiving of childhood at present?  What is the attitude, I wonder, of the ordinary modern man to his boyhood, or the ordinary modern woman’s to her girlhood?   What does the adult do with the child’s spirit and ambitions?  Do we remain loyal to the principles, if not the practice, of youth?  (Shouldn’t we?).  What do old and young versions of the same person have in common?  Were such a thing possible, could they any longer have a sincere conversation with each other?  What would the child think of the teenager’s later policy of disinterest, scoffery and sullenness adopted precisely in order to spite the old earnestness, enthusiasm and high spirits?  

In response to Wordsworth, who was able to sing

My heart leaps up when I behold 
  A rainbow in the sky: 
So was it when my life began, 
  So is it now I am a man, 
So be it when I shall grow old
    Or let me die! 
The child is father of the man: 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who might have been joking, went to the trouble of cementing into a triolet his view that ‘the words are wild’, scoffing ‘Suck any sense from that who can’.  Supposing Wordsworth was certainly not joking, though?  If the child is indeed father of the man, then the parental authority against which the teenager actually rebels is not, in the first instance, that wielded by the real mother and father.  The struggle is more against the authority of the childhood self.  This is why, in Inside Out, Riley’s personality must be torn down and demolished rather than refurbished from within; why there must take place not merely a broadening and deepening of the mind but its wholesale razing and rebuilding.  Watching the film, I thought this dramatic, even violent depiction of the end of her interior childhood was unwarranted except, of course, by cinematic purposes.  Surely we ought to grow up more steadily, more slowly, more gently, than that?

There is, of course, a sorrow about the necessary fading of childhood that is sewn into us irrevocably.  I do not take these lines, also by Wordsworth (from his Intimations of Immortality, set vividly to music by Gerald Finzi) altogether as the whole truth, but they are very moving, and perhaps we all know what he means:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar:

        Not in entire forgetfulness,

        And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

        From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

        Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

        He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

    Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

And how about the note struck here (by Cecil Day-Lewis, in his poem Walking Away), also sounded in  Inside Out’s ‘I’ve got to go’ refrain:

                                                              … I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

For all its pain, felt by the self and by others, the farewell to childhood is necessary.  Why, though, must our culture insist on so high a price, paid in full and not in instalments, as ransom for the passage into modern adulthood?  Why must it harden children so swiftly into so hollow a cynicism; why must its economics compel parents to leave their children for days on end in nurseries and child-care; why must even its entertainment exclude the young for the sake of adults’ freedom to snigger?  Why should we not revere childhood to the point of costing ourselves and society something?  We might even keep in mind Herbert Howells’ titanic Hymnus Paradisi, which, as I have written about here, he saw fit to consecrate to his small son, lost suddenly to polio at the age of nine?  Why should we not say of the child, with Eliot, 

Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…

… So that the reverence and the gaiety

May not be forgotten in later experience,

In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,

The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure…  ?

I ask all these questions, but see no good answers.

Comparison of Inside Out to the age that has produced it also makes me restless because it throws light on all the good things that Western culture — not simply American culture, though this is an American film through and through — is capable of if only it tried.  Why do we not make more films like this instead of the catastrophic waste of money and time and talent there is, I am tempted to fume, on idiotic, violent or lurid films that trample human dignity in a stampede for fame and wealth?  Pixar has produced a justly popular film (and incidentally made a great deal of money) without graphic violence, almost entirely wholesome humour and, apart from three rather surreal scenes that might alarm very young children, no gratuitously upsetting scenes.  (I should say that there are upsetting scenes, but they are not gratuitous!).  Why can we not have more films with fine actors and symphonic musical scores, dispensing with the low and the sordid but confronting the great questions of the spirit and soul, elevating the detail of ordinary life, depicting the fortress of a traditional family deepening and strengthening in love even in crisis, and underlain by an uplifting vision of human life and dignity?  Whole swathes of this film resound in a majestic minor key that, astonishingly for a children’s film, never quite resolves wholly to major.  If I had seen it at the age of its intended audience — as the reviewers interviewed here on BBC Radio 5 have done — I suspect that I would impulsively have declared it film of the century.  It is tempting to do so even now.

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Further viewing / listening:

Readers who have seen the film might appreciate this.