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| Penguin UK film tie-in edition, 1983 |
That afternoon, Mick walked into the city. He visited the Jobcentre first, but it was closed. 'DUE TO LACK OF STAFF' it said on the door. He stood in the doorway while he buttoned up his denim jacket and decided what to do next. Sweet wrappers, crisp packets and sheets of newspaper tumbled past on the pavement. Mick managed to read a few headlines as they went by. One said: WAR DECLARED ON SCROUNGERS. A police car cruised by and Mick looked up and down the road busily, as if he was about to depart, rather than just loitering there with nowhere to go. He could not go home yet: his mother would still be in and she would accuse him of not looking for work. But he could not face traipsing round all the firms again and seeing the same NO VACANCIES signs on board after board, or meeting gatekeepers and receptionists who, with a supercilious look and smug shake of the head, seemed to revel in his misfortune. It was humiliating. It made him feel ashamed: like a beggar.
The Novel: It is 1981 and Mick Walsh and his best friend Alan Wright are about to leave school after sitting their A level GCSE exams, a decision made after they were assured by their careers counsellor that possessing this qualification would vastly improve their chances of finding good jobs when they were ready to enter the workforce. But this advice, like so much in the UK and in the northern city of Sheffield they call home, was a lie. The
national economy is on the brink of collapse, marked by widespread
factory closures and mass unemployment, violent race
riots and — overseeing and sometimes directly inspiring the chaos — the repressive Conservative
government of Margaret Thatcher, a politician who
believes that the poor are poor only because they 'choose to be' and has come to power on the promise to slash funding to
vital social services, cripple the trade unions and sell off what have previously been publicly
owned utilities to the highest private bidders.
A fortnight after leaving school Mick, Alan and their friends find themselves fronting up to their local Jobcentre every day where they're told by its chronically overworked and under-resourced staff that there are no vacancies for lads of their age anywhere and, worse, that this is likely to remain the case for months if not for years to come. With nothing but time on their hands and nothing much in life to look forward to, this new generation of the long-term unemployed spend their days loafing in bed, roaming aimlessly round the city or, when the weather gets too cold, sitting for hours over a single cup of tea in the local cafeteria until they're chased out by its unsympathetic manager. They have no money, no prospects and no real lives to speak of, while their parents are technically no better off than they are despite being gainfully employed, living as they do with the constant threat of wage cuts and the possibility of lay offs hanging uneasily over their heads.
Nor are Mick and his friends able to find any relief in their physical environment — an environment, thanks to a seemingly endless series of budget 'adjustments,' that is coming to resemble a war zone in a third world country, filled with rubbish and the rubble from unfinished apartment blocks and council improvement projects that have been abandoned due to lack of funds. Theirs is a landscape essentially the same as that described by George Orwell in his dystopian 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four — bleak, crumbling, dominated by poverty and want and facing increasing instability as families struggle to put food on the table and are forced by necessity to move elsewhere to search for work.
Even when Mick does get sent for a job interview at Uttley and Parsons, a local engineering firm that has advertised for an apprentice fitter, it turns out to be another exercise in futility. Although he makes it to the final round of interviews, he's ultimately denied the position, causing him to vent his frustrations by kicking over his broken motorcycle and wrecking the few objects contained inside his parents' largely empty garage. (The family car has long since been sold off after being deemed an unnecessary luxury by Mick's dad.)
Like Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, Mick finds some relief from his troubles in the arms of the opposite sex, becoming involved with a girl named Karen Lodge whom he meets at a dance where he and Alan go to spend what little dole money they have left at the end of the week on beer. But the excessive consumption of alcohol and the fights it invariably provokes are no substitutes for the chance to earn a decent living and, in Mick's case, finally have the funds required to get his beloved motorcycle back on the road. Hard choices need to be made and Alan, remembering the military recruitment films they were shown during their final weeks at school, does what so many other young men in their position are doing and enlists in the army. Mick is tempted to follow his example but is forbidden to do so by his parents who understandably have no desire to see their only son used as a cannon fodder in Northern Ireland or anywhere else that Mrs Thatcher may decide to send British troops in an effort to assert the nation's waning military might and boost its flagging morale. (She would blithely send British troops to die in the Falklands War one year after Looks and Smiles was published.)
Mick stays in Sheffield, continuing his fruitless search for work and eventually breaking up with Karen who, unlike him, has a full-time job in a local shoe store. Their relationship ends on a sour note after she insists on attending a football match with him,
only to find herself relegated to the status of an unwanted
burden that Mick is wary of being seen with by his mates. (This is a prime example of Hines' honesty and at no time does he make Mick or his friends appear as martyrs. They are always presented as ordinary young men with the usual flaws and foibles all young men possess.) Although he attempts to console himself with beer, football, daydreaming and jeering at most forms of adult authority, Mick finds himself trapped in a routine now rendered even emptier and more demeaning by the loss of his best friend. Only when Alan returns to town on leave does his life briefly improve, his interest piqued by tales of Alan's exploits as a 'squaddie' and the various sexual escapades he's enjoyed with the allegedly more amenable women who live 'down south.'
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| Michael Joseph first UK edition, 1981 |
Alan's return to duty sees Mick re-examine his decisions to remain in Sheffield and stay on the right side of the law. When another friend suggests they break into the local Working Men's Club through its broken emergency door, Mick reluctantly agrees, walking off with several cartons of cigarettes they subsequently offload to a dodgy bookmaker for £175 — much less than the purlioned merchandise is worth, but more money than either of them has ever seen let alone had inside their pockets in their lives.
This illegally gained windfall allows Mick to finally repair his motorcycle, providing him with the means and the excuse he needs to try to reconnect with Karen. But Karen has her own problems to contend with, chief among them being the daily struggle to arrive at work on time with so many bus services being cancelled due to cutbacks and her mother's plan to remarry following her separation from Karen's lorry driving father. Things come to a head when Karen and Mick, who has stopped by to plead his case with her, are discovered naked in her bed together. After fighting with her mother and fleeing their tiny council flat, Karen is found in the street by Mick who offers to drive her to the southern port city of Bristol where her father lives. Once there, Karen tells him, she will move in with her father who, she has no doubt, will welcome her with open arms. She will then find a new job and a flat of her own and keep an eye out for a job for Mick who, in time, will be able to leave Sheffield and move south to live with her.
The trip to Bristol is an eye-opening journey for Karen, exposing to the hard truths of her father's life with his new partner Jenny and their infant son. Although her father allows Karen and Mick to stay with them overnight, it soon becomes obvious that the idea of Karen moving in with him on a permanent basis is out of the question. With nowhere else to go, Karen and Mick are forced to return to Sheffield, arriving there late the following afternoon and returning to their respective homes after agreeing to meet up again that evening at the pub.
But all is far from well in the Walsh household. Mick's parents are angry with him for traipsing off to Bristol with some strange girl on the spur of the moment without any motorcycle insurance or even the valid license required to pilot his machine. And it turns out they have some discouraging news to share with him. After months of speculation and silent worrying, Mr Walsh has now been laid off from his job, leaving Mick's mother as the only wage earner in the family.
Mick absorbs this setback as he has absorbed every other problem that life has dumped on him, finding some comfort in his continuing relationship with Karen and Alan's return to Sheffield on leave prior to his re-departure for the war zone that is British-occupied Belfast. Alan has been hardened by his time as a soldier but, despite this, Mick can't help but regret that he didn't join his friend in the army — a regret that Karen, who insists that things will improve if he will only keep on trying to look for work, is quick to question, adding that they will be finished as a couple if he decides to enlist. She goes on to suggest that Alan is trying to break them up, an idea hotly denied by Mick who nevertheless finds it impossible to deny the truth of what she's saying. Joining the army represents radical irreversible change, something Mick desperately craves after enduring months of failure and frustration — a point depressingly emphasized when he returns to the Social Security Office the following day to sign the document that will allow him to collect his weekly dole money, only to discover that its queues are growing longer by the day.
Looks and Smiles was described by one reviewer as "A quietly devastating portrayal of human waste" and that is what it is — a graphic reminder of a time when the British working class were subjected to a particularly harsh form of economic rationalism implemented by a government determined to do everything in its power to stigmatize and dehumanize them while simultaneously doing all that it could to consolidate and increase the wealth of the ruling class. The book often reads like a piece of stark dystopian fiction, filled with sharply drawn images of hopelessness and decay as business after business shuts its doors and finding paid work becomes a rarely bestowed privilege rather than a basic human right. Of its three main characters, only Alan successfully emerges from the trap that life in Sheffield has become. But he does this at the cost of his freedom and at the risk of dying a violently premature death at the hands of the IRA.
The reader is left wondering if the lives of Mick and Karen will ever substantially improve, if the lives of the children it is implied they will go on to have together will be any different to or any better than their own stalled, perpetually compromised lives. Sadly, it's difficult to believe they will. Barry Hines was too canny a novelist to suggest that meaningful social change was possible without being accompanied by significant and committed political change. Looks and Smiles is first and foremost a political novel, but a novel that does not rely on slogans or polemic to paint what is a damning portrait of a society determined to steal everything, including but not limited to their dignity, from those least able to afford to part with it.
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| BARRY HINES, c 1969 |
The Writer: Although he published nine novels, one collection of short fiction and several works for stage and radio, Barry Hines was arguably best known for his cinematic collaborations with acclaimed British director Ken Loach. Their first project, the 1969 film Kes based on Hines' 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, remains a well-loved classic of social realist cinema, a film that has lost none of its power to affect and outrage the viewer after more than half a century.
Hines' work, like that of his fellow northern novelists David Storey, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow, is imbued with the gritty working class spirit of its Yorkshire setting, presenting the reader with an undiluted vision of what were often very hard lives marked and sometimes redeemed by a dry and mischievous sense of humour. It is no surprise that Hines rejected an offer from the Disney organisation to film A Kestrel for a Knave on the proviso that it be granted the right to change its ending so that the bird of the title lives rather than meets its end at the hands of its young protagonist's brutish older brother. Hines instinctively understood that the lives of the people he wrote about had no place in them for predictable happy endings.
Melvin Barry Hines was born in Hoyland Common, a small mining village near the town of Barnsley in West Yorkshire, on 30 June 1939. He was the son and grandson of miners and would have entered that perilous trade himself had he not been academically gifted enough to earn himself a scholarship to the grammar school in nearby Ecclesfield. He had in fact accepted a position as an apprentice mining surveyor and was poised to enter the industry when a neighbour, upset that he was not utilizing his full potential and wasting an opportunity that the sons of many other miners would have killed to obtain, sent him back to school to take four A-levels and before going on to train as a teacher. It was while he was teaching Physical Education at a school in Barnsley — and contemplating a possible career as a professional footballer after he was offered a trial by English club Manchester United — that Hines began his debut novel The Blinder, writing the bulk of it in the school library after the students had vacated the premises for the day.
The Blinder, based on Hines' own experiences as a cocky young football prodigy, was published in 1966 following the broadcast by the BBC of two short radio plays he had written. The novel brought him to the attention of film and television producer Tony Garnett who offered him the chance to write a script for the popular BBC Wednesday Play series. Hines turned the offer down, explaining that he had a new novel he needed to write and taking a leave of absence from his teaching job to write it far from home on the Italian island of Elba. This book became A Kestrel For A Knave and remains the most popular novel he ever published, one that Garnett and his friend and collaborator Ken Loach wasted no time securing the film rights to. The film's success led to more offers of work in films, radio and television, including three more collaborations with Loach that saw him become deeply involved with the production process, even to the point of having some say in the casting decisions. The last of these collaborations was Looks and Smiles released in 1981 — a project that would go on to win the Young Cinema Award at that year's Cannes Film Festival.
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| BARRY HINES, c 2001 |
Hines continued to combine the writing of novels with film and radio work through the 1980s, penning the script for the award-winning speculative drama Threads that imagines life in Sheffield following a nuclear war. Released in 1984, the telefilm was nominated for seven BAFTA awards the following year, winning the prize for Best Single Drama Program. (The program was so graphic that it was not re-screened on British television for seven years.) His penultimate novel The Heart of It appeared in 1991, telling the loosely autobiographical story of a successful screenwriter who returns to the mining town he was born in to visit his radicalised miner father. It was followed in 2000 by a final novel titled Elvis Over England, an attempt to portray a different, more comical side of life in the north that received mixed reviews and came as a perhaps disappointing end to what had been a notable literary career.
A collection of Hines' short fiction titled This Artistic Life was published in 2009, the same year he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and entered a care facility in his childhood home of Hoyland Common. Married twice and the father of two children by his first wife, Barry Hines died in his native Yorkshire on 18 March 2016.
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| French film poster, 1981 |
The film adaptation of Looks and Smiles, co-written by BARRY HINES, directed by KEN LOACH and starring GRAHAM GREEN as Mick Walsh, TONY PITTS as Alan Wright and CAROLYN NICHOLSON as Karen Lodge was released by Kestrel Films in 1981. It may be available to view via your preferred streaming service, as may Kes (1969) which was fully restored for the prestigious Criterion DVD Collection in April 2011.
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The Lonely Londoners (1960) by SAM SELVON
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