Follow a group of children evacuated to a Yorkshire village during the Second World War, where they encounter a young soldier who, like them, is far away from home.
I was unaware of both this book and the 1970 film based on it–the original story of “The Railway Children” by Edith Nesbit. The current 2022 film was initially titled “The Railway Children Return,” but the words “the” and “return” were eventually dropped. It’s all a bit confusing, as one of the original children, “Bobbie” (Jenny Agutter), is now grown, and she and her daughter and grandson appear as characters in the current version. Nevertheless, this contemporary version is captivating, refreshingly fun, and thick with the imagination children bring to their everyday play.
I must mention right off there is much in the thread of the new plot that I found reminiscent of the much-loved sci-fi adventure film, “E.T The Extra-Terrestrial,” produced in 1982 and directed by Stephen Spielberg. In “Railway Children,” you have a group of children shipped from London to the Yorkshire countryside by their mother to escape the brutal bombing by the Germans and the dire situation of their father, who has been accused of being a spy. In “E.T.,” the children are also grieving their father’s loss and acting out their grief to the dismay of their mother, who is struggling. These new “railway” children land in a small Yorkshire village where no family can take them in because the three refuse to be separated. Enter Bobbie, previously one of the three original “Railway” kids, and she convinces her daughter to bring them into their home where she, her daughter, and her grandson, Thomas (Austin Haynes), live.
Thomas befriends the new companions, and, as children often do, they explore the town and the railroad yard nearby as the train passes daily on tracks not far from the house where all are living. Thomas Waterbury knows lots of hiding places as this is his play yard. One day, during a game of hiding and seek, the oldest Watts child, Lily (Beau Gadsdon), discovers a young black soldier hiding in one of the train cars parked in the yard. In the original version, set during WWI, this character was a young Russian trying to make his way home. In this current story, the character becomes an injured black soldier who can’t go back to his unit, though the reason he is hiding is not readily revealed to the children (see E.T. trying to “phone home”). As kids from the village are rounded up to help the soldier escape American Military Police who are looking for him, the images from the Spielberg film become even more vital: the cyclists pedaling furiously to escape the government officials and get E.T. to the arranged landing site where he will meet up with the spaceship that will take him home.
This film is delightful, and the British scenery is beautiful in the calm pastoral setting of Yorkshire. Accolades should go to Costume Designer Dinah Collin for the perfectly correct vintage clothing and the very 1940s hairstyles of the women. The story addresses the inequities involving black American service members during WWII. The setting takes you back to an earlier time and the beautiful imaginations of children who explore and make up elaborate stories to play out. I believed that EVERYTHING the children brought off to help the young soldier could have happened. Their interpretations of the situations they encountered became mine as well. The cast under the direction of Morgan Matthews brought a childlike excitement to a troubled time in history and the realization that the moral compass of children challenged by those times could be more true than those of the adults around them. The “Railway Children” was a time well spent. How often can we say that?
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