The Joy of Six 1527

"In the Wigan constituency, which has always been Labour-held but where Reform picked up 24 out of 25 seats in last month’s local elections, the governing party’s by-election message is focused squarely on Burnham. It is a cartoon of his face emblazoned across leaflets and Correx boards, along with the words “ANDY FOR US”. Labour branding is limited, pretty much, to what is legally required." Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the Labour campaign in the Makerfield by-election.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley interviews Gisèle Pelicot, whose courage transformed the debate around abuse, about survival, reclaiming confidence – and shutting down the tools of sexual exploitation.

Flip Chart Fairy Tales notes the end of the right's state-shrinking dream: "Far from Brexit being the cue for the Thatcher revolution’s last phase, it may mark the end of it altogether. ... It’s no wonder the small-staters are so exercised. They have now realised that tomorrow belongs to someone else."

"When you launch a product that's designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn't that you haven't told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them." Brian Phillips nominates the 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech.

JacquiWine praises Rumer Godden's novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita: "I loved this evocative, immersive read, a psychologically astute exploration of the impact of a woman’s adulterous affair and subsequent divorce on her two adolescent children, fourteen-year-old Hugh Clavering and his younger sister Caddie, who is almost twelve."

"Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was raised in a railway carriage in a field in Leeds in a family full of inventors, free thinkers, and social reformists with connections to women's suffrage." Eleanor Tait talks to Duncan Fisher about his father, the man who invented Spirograph.

Lion & Unicorn: Children, bombsites and Innocent Sinners (1958)

Thanks to Lion and Unicorn for publishing a piece from me on British films about children and bombsites, and on the film Innocent Sinners (1958) in particular:

So dangerous did bombsites become for boy actors that Jon Whiteley ventured on to them twice and got caught up with a murderer both times. In Hunted (1952) he comes across Dirk Bogarde dumping the body of his wife’s lover, while in The Weapon (1956) he finds a gun, accidentally shoots a playmate and, thinking he has killed him, goes on the run. In reality, it’s not the police Whiteley needs to worry about but a villainous George Cole, who used the gun to kill some years before and now fears detection.

Rumer Godden on the invisibility of children in 1956

Embed from Getty Images

Another passage from Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, the novel filmed as Innocent Sinners:

It was a strange thing that up to the age of seven children were noticeable in Catford Street; the babies in their well-kept perambulators and the little boys and girls in coat and legging sets were prominent, but after the age of seven, the children seemed to disappear into anonymity, to be camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in; as if they were really the sparrows the Misses Chesney called them they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them. 

At fourteen or fifteen they appeared again, the boys as big boys that had become ha become somehow dangerous – or was it that there was too much about them in the papers? – the dirty little girls as smart young women, with waved hair, bright coats, the same red nails and lipstick as the dancer in the bus queue; they wore slopping sling-back shoes and had shrill ostentatious voices. The Street prickled with the doings of these boys and girls, as it had admired and petted the babies, but the children were unnoticed … not even experienced mothers like Mrs Malone knew all they did.

An Episode of Sparrows was published in 1956. When I read these observations, I was reminded of two things.

The first was that my mother used to say that when she was a child – this would have been the Thirties and Forties – if you saw an adult you were likely to be told to have a wash or run an errand, so you tended to avoid them.

The second was an episode from the Children's Film Foundation presentation Operation Third Form (1967). In this film, a gang of children (with John Moulder-Brown and Roberta Tovey to the fore) help an old scrap dealer who is their friend when he's accused of stealing their school bell. Exploiting their invisibility, they trail the real thief.

At one point their activities threaten to attract the attention of the police, whereupon they form themselves into a crocodile and march along the with scrap dealer apparently in charge of them. A crocodile of schoolchildren with a teacher? They can't be up to anything, reason the police. As soon as they've gone, the children make themselves invisible again.

That would – the world of An Episode of Sparrows – has gone, but every change brings both gains and losses.

The Joy of Six 1346

"The miscarriages of justice are extraordinary. One victim is a gay make-up artist with no apparent gang affiliations, just some tattoos related to traditional Epiphany celebrations. Another is a 27-year-old delivery driver with a work permit who lived in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and children: he was arrested as he stepped outside his house. A former professional goalkeeper living in Phoenix, Arizona, was detained because of a tattoo showing his support for Real Madrid." John Perry on the victims of Trump's disappearing of alleged gang members.

Britain is not alone in struggling to build major infrastructure projects: it's a problem that many countries with systems of common law share. Dan Davies, in an important report, asks why this is and looks at what can be done.

Lottie Elton says water companies are using the same deceptive tactics as Big Oil and Big Tobacco.

Research shows that obtaining a degree tends to make students more socially liberal, little is known about what drives this effect. Elizabeth Simon, Daniel Devine and Jamie Furlong investigate.

Elroy Rosenberg marks the 50th birthday of Picnic at Hanging Rock: "Weir’s film is a haunted repertory of beautiful dreams, heraldic visions, memories gained and lost. If Lindsay had ensured her ambiguous ending would be respected, she could do nothing to prevent a cast and crew of great artists from feeling their way into the gaps of her story. The result was an art film with an Australian touch, ever beguiling all these years later – a film which, after five decades, still belongs to its viewers."

Hugh Scofield searches for the French hotel where Rumer Godden and her family stayed in 1923 - a holiday that inspired her novel The Greengage Summer.