I saw the movie Big hopes, in black and white, 1960s, during a family Christmas party. It was a life changing experience. No matter how many versions of the film I have seen, this is the only one I remember. No matter how many family Christmases I’ve experienced (about 80 now), this is the family Christmas I remember best.
Let me set the scene: it was 1961. I was 18. I was home for Christmas, completely by accident.
Christmas has always been a big event in our family, too big, with all the slightly exaggerated traditions and rituals. We lived in a musty, dusty old house where the floorboards creaked in winter and the windows froze from the inside. At Christmas we always had a lot of guests. There was a lot of fun and games; Charades were a favorite. There was also a certain tension in the air – in fact, there was tension in the family. It has always been this way.
After the war, the number of divorces quickly quadrupled. Collateral damage from war, you might call it. My father was in Baghdad in 1945 when he received a letter from my mother saying that she wanted to leave him and marry the man she had met and fallen in love with. I was two years old at the time, and my brother was four.
As soon as the opportunity arose, my father – his name was Tony Bridge – came home on maternity leave to persuade my mother not to leave him. He took her on a bike ride to Southwold, where they had been happy together before the war. They were both actors and traveled around the country “on mission.”
Unfortunately, Tony’s plan didn’t work. My mother didn’t change her mind. She decided to leave and took me and my brother Peter with her. So we grew up in a divorced family with a stepfather: a certain Jack Morpurgo, a writer and publisher.
Of course, among the English middle class of the time, divorce was considered a disgrace. Peter and I grew up with a new surname, Morpurgo, and soon had a half-brother and half-sister. We were the Morpurgo family.
Peter and I knew we had a different father, but his name was never mentioned. He became a ghostly father, a silent father. We’ve never seen him. If we ever asked our mother about him, which we did more and more often over the years, she simply refused to tell us anything about him. “That was then,” she said. “It’s now. Let’s not talk about it.”
Tony, our real father, made the decision, as we later learned, that he did not want to “play” with the fact that he was our father. It is better for us to grow up if we have a new father, a new family, so it is believed, without a surrogate father. Since he was abroad for most of the war, he hardly knew us, and we didn’t know him at all.
Since it was difficult to find work in the theater after the war, he soon emigrated to Canada, where he found work and achieved great success in Stratford, Ontario and then at the Shaw Festival Theater in Niagara. We never saw Tony. He was never mentioned. Peter and I sometimes dreamed about him alone.
In 1961, the family got its first television. Two channels, black and white and small. It took forever to heat up and continued to flicker, but it was a miracle! Like many families at the time, we all gathered around this new toy with excitement. My stepfather did not approve of us and gave us the quota. But as a literary man he supported the BBC’s dramatizations of Dickens at Boxing Day tea.
So, with a supply of scones on the plate and warming by the fire, we all sat and watched. Big hopes “Children, aunts, grandparents, all of us.” I sat in a chair next to my mother, and everyone was delighted. This is the best beginning of any Dickens book. Pip, a boy living on the moors, takes a shortcut through the village graveyard on his way home as darkness grows around him. He is afraid and we are afraid.
Then a scary figure emerges from behind the tombstone and grabs his hand. Most of us know this story and are waiting for the moment. It’s Magwitch, an escaped criminal with rattling chains. He has wild eyes and the face of a wolf. The watching children scream. My mother is shocked and grabs my hand. “Oh my God,” she screams. “This is your father, this is Tony!”
One or two members of the stepfamily immediately leave the room. The genie is out of the bottle. Phantom Father is in the room! Soon everyone will leave except my mother, Peter and me. We watch together in silence. And I think. “This is my father?! My father is a very convincing convict. Does he really look like that?”
When we were twenty, Peter and I finally met Tony, became friends with him, and found our father. The last time I saw him was in Niagara at the Shaw Festival. He was 80 and still playing. I was there to see him in Arthur Conan Doyle’s play about the last surviving soldier at the Battle of Waterloo. Monologue at the age of 80, and he was true to the word and tone.
Video from Big hopes We saw that Boxing Day 1961 may not have been the great David Lean, but it was beautifully made. And of course Magwitch was really great.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.