Whistle Down the Wind

Expressions // Reason To Believe: Whistle Down The Wind

The first time I saw Brian Forbes’s Whistle Down the Wind when I was about 14, I briefly entertained the idea that I’d had some ground-breaking epiphany about the film’s religious overtones – something hitherto unaddressed in any criticism, some PhD-worthy proposition about “obscure Biblical parallels”.  I realise now – in fact, I likely realised not long after said “epiphany” – that this wasn’t quite the perceptive take I thought it was, not least because, yes, it has actually been discussed at length in criticism, but also because the film itself goes to great lengths to ensure we’ve grasped its allusions; in short, to render those allusions anything but “obscure”. From reimaginings of Peter’s denial, the Last Supper, and the crucifixion, to the playful interweaving of John Henry Hopkins Jr.’s “We Three Kings” in the score, one need hardly be a theology student to recognise its many glaring references to the New Testament.

Thirty-three years after the film was released, a journalist for The Independent wrote one of a series of ‘Location Hunters’ articles about the enduring popularity of the village of Downham and the surrounding areas in which filming took place.  In his article he describes the film as something of a ‘slightly cringe-making, saccharine juvenile classic’.  I concur that it is indeed a juvenile classic, but given that this is one of my favourite films of all time, I take issue with any accusation of cringe-worthiness.  I agree that it likely treads a very fine line – any film that dares to directly confront the idea of Jesus’s return and feature children in the lead roles must surely risk the charge of sanctimony – but through a combination of exceptional casting, a haunting, poignant score, and brilliant, brooding cinematography, it stops short well short of mawkishness and didacticism, and arrives instead at sheer brilliance. 

The film opens as three siblings, Kathy, Nan, and Charles Bostock (played by Hayley Mills, Diane Holgate, and Alan Barnes) stealthily follow surly farmhand Eddie (played by Norman Bird) as he lopes along a riverside looking for an appropriate spot to drown the sack of kittens he’s evidently been tasked with disposing of.  The landscape through which the children tread is a bleak one; mud squelches underfoot, and trees stripped of leaves jut sharply into the grey sky, ripe for rebirth.  Indeed, we might infer that spring is approaching from Charles’s proud announcement at the dinner table slightly later that he’s eaten 198 eggs since last Easter. 

After a detour through their village, and a near-miss with Mr. Bostock who wants to know what Charles has beneath his coat (to which Charles cleverly responds “me pully”), the children reach the relative secrecy of the barn in which the kittens can be cared for, and in which much of the action of the film will take place.  Nan asks her sister who will look after them, and the following exchange ensues:

Charles: Jesus.
Kathy: Don’t talk wet.
Charles: Yes he will then, because that woman told me.
Kathy: What woman?
Charles: That woman from the Sally Army. That woman. I asked her to look after it, and she said Jesus’d look after it.
Kathy: Well, what does she know about it?
Charles: She knows because she lives in his house.
Kathy: How can she when he’s dead?
Nan:  Ooh, our Kathy.
Kathy: Well, what’s up? He is, isn’t he?
Nan: But fancy saying. You’ll have something terrible happening now.

That terrible ‘something’ takes the shape of escaped criminal Arthur Alan Blakey (played by Alan Bates), who happens to have sought refuge in the Bostock barn just moments before Kathy arrives to bring their family cat to nurse her unwanted kittens that same evening.  The cat screeches and the score intensifies as the fugitive referred to in the closing credits as simply ‘The Man’ just about crumples into view.  Kathy edges backwards and whispers a tentative, ‘Who is it?’ into the darkness. Blakey’s face is partially illuminated by the moonlight, and there appears to be congealed blood about his forehead. Dazed, exhausted, and evidently a little frustrated by his discovery, he can only groan ‘Jesus Christ’, before collapsing onto the hay.    

For Kathy, this introduction, compounded by the anxiety already instilled in her by that earlier conversation, is quite enough for her to believe unquestioningly that Blakey’s exasperated interjection was not an interjection at all, but rather a declaration of his identity.  What follows is a narrative seen largely through the eyes of three children who, thanks to a combination of naivety, fear, and, I’d venture to say boredom, come to believe that Jesus has returned, and is hiding in their barn. 

The exploration of belief this story necessarily demands grows increasingly nuanced as Kathy, Charles, and Nan each reach their own conclusions about their visitor.  Their interactions with each other, and with Blakey, become characterised by a marked contrast among the ways in which they demonstrate their faith (or lack thereof, as the case may be).  Kathy, rather stunned by that initial fear, clings more desperately to the illusion than her siblings. Determined to keep her discovery a secret, she shares it only with her sister, Nan, whose prosaic (and very Northern) enquiry, ‘Is he stopping?’ on hearing of their esteemed guest is among the first of many indicators of the children’s willingness to accept something as miraculous as Jesus’s return and treat it as though it were an everyday occurrence.  

Where Kathy and Nan are willing to trust immediately, Charles’s faith is of a more interrogative nature; such a bold claim should surely be provable, should be able to withstand scrutiny. Why should he believe?  Initially kept out of the secret, he finally happens upon his sisters standing over Blakey in the hay and asks, ‘Who’s that? Who’s that fella?’  His sisters respond that it’s Jesus.  Clearly sceptical, he inspects the unconscious fugitive from a safe distance and says, ‘No it isn’t’, citing the man’s attire as a reasonable enough argument: ‘Jesus wore a long dress’, after all. After a brief back and forth in which his sisters both maintain it is Jesus, Charles, despite his initial misgivings, is eventually won round.

Nowhere in the film is this contrast in faith among the siblings better exemplified than the scene in which Charles and Nan arrive at the barn to tend to their respective kittens. At this point Blakey is unseen; recumbent, presumably, on the raised platform of the hay loft. Charles, anxious and unable to find his kitten, shouts up to Blakey, who, in what appears to be a permanent state of exhaustion, cannot bring himself to even pretend to share Charles’s concern.  Charles is confused; he gave Jesus his kitten to look after, and didn’t the woman from the Salvation Army assure him that Jesus would do just that? The image of the small boy standing helpless in the centre of an empty, shadow-flooded barn, craning his neck toward the figure he cannot see, is a fitting evocation of man’s desperation for meaning in the face of an unanswering and unanswerable God.   

Charles’s agitation soon turns to distress when he finds Spider’s lifeless body in the hay.  ‘He’s dead, he let it die,’ he says tearfully to his sister, before running out of the barn.  Nan remains and, sympathetic to her brother’s grief yet still utterly composed, kneels down and cradles her brother’s dead kitten. She looks up to the hay loft and asks, ‘Has he gone to Heaven, Jesus?’ She receives no reply. She looks down at Spider the kitten. ‘You’ve gone to Heaven, haven’t you?’ She decides.  That unprompted declaration is such a simplistic yet utterly incisive illustration of our own desire, if not our need, to explain what we cannot understand, to derive comfort from the thought that if things must die, there nonetheless must exist some incomprehensible structure of meaning beyond our earthly lives.  The reality of life and the finality of death are simply too bleak to countenance without these ‘answers’.

The tension between Charles and the other children reaches a critical point at his birthday party, the last supper scene of the film.  By this point, all the children in the village are in on the secret, and it is during a game of blindman’s buff that Nan accidentally lets slip to her aunt that the extra piece of cake in her hand is ‘for Jesus’. 

No longer willing to participate in the fantasy, Charles, in a symbolic gesture, lowers his blindfold and breaks the ensuing silence by announcing, ‘It isn’t Jesus. It’s just a fella.’ Mr. Bostock (who, unlike his children, has been following the unfolding police investigation in the local paper) looks on in stunned horror, and it seems this is all the information he needs to confirm his fear, and the party is over. Kathy rushes to the barn to warn Blakey that the adults have contacted the police. 

When she arrives, Blakey, now resigned to his fate, leans against the interior wall of the barn, and Kathy, on the outside, strains to call up to him through the high window.  She’s frantic, desperate for him to know that she isn’t his betrayer,  for him to forgive Charles, to know if he’ll be able to “get away this time”.  His answers are characteristically non-committal and monosyllabic, but when she tells him she has sent for “loads of other children” to come and support him,  his face contorts with shame and he blinks hard to hold back tears.

The Jesus/salvation allegory is therefore artfully subverted by the very fact that it is Kathy’s (and the other children’s) faithful, unconditional love that leads the Jesus figure to seek forgiveness and redemption himself. The flicker of a confused, very precarious relief in Blakey’s face during as Kathy assures him during their first introduction, ‘We’ve not told anyone’, and the guilt with which he then looks down at the smashed wine bottle he was all too ready to use as a weapon against three defenceless children is the first suggestion of his gradual softening towards his young hosts. The final confirmation of this character arc, and one of the most iconic scenes of the film, is of course the crucifixion pose he freely assumes in order to be frisked by police officers, silhouetted in black against the slab of white-grey sky as the mass of anxious children (and a clearly overwhelmed police force) look on from behind the gate.  

As Blakey is taken away by the police and the children disperse, the credits roll and Kathy’s father approaches her and gently escorts her back to the house, presumably for a very long and grown-up conversation.  We could never know how Kathy or Nan or any of the other children would react if and when they found out the horrible truth about The Man, and I think it’s important that we don’t see that moment of realisation.  Ending the film on that knife edge between innocence and experience is what makes this such a succinct story of old and young, light and dark; it’s what makes Whistle Down The Wind the perfect articulation of childhood innocence and the darker realities of human life that inevitably come to subsume it.