Reading A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines, was exhilarating. Here was a writer of clarity, economy and depth who was describing a world so familiar, yet largely unrecorded. And he made you smile. What great good fortune for those of us who were able to make the film of the book.
Barry wrote of his pit village in South Yorkshire: the children, the working men and women, the woods and fields, schools, mines, pubs and clubs. He loved language and his ear for the dialect and its comedy was pitch perfect. Like all great writers, he could write a couple of lines of dialogue and the characters would spring from the page in vivid reality.
Barry and I worked on four main projects together and some that didn’t make it to the screen. He was a joyful collaborator. Laughter was never far away when working with Barry. We would sit together at casting sessions relishing the variety of people we met, particularly the comics and singers from the club circuit.
Barry understood class politics, the irreconcilable conflict between workers and employers. His book The Gamekeeper, which we filmed, captured this exactly. The title character is an ex-steel worker who now protects the land of the aristocracy and chases off his former workmates. A life in the open air for him means social exclusion for his wife and family. Is he changing sides or swapping one form of exploitation for another? Barry loved such contradictions. As I knew him, his commitment to socialism never wavered.
The terrible illness that robbed him of many productive years and was so painful for those close to him was a loss to us all.
