ABSTRACT
Children are everywhere in post-war British cinema. They play on the bomb sites and the empty streets; they get lost, make unsuitable friends, go to school and are attended to in hospitals and children’s homes. In 1959, Room at the Top was calling on a familiar image when Joe Lampton discussed life and death with a small girl playing with her dolls in the ruin of his bombed out home. But if children literally run through the films, there are also changes in how they are treated and in the explanations of childhood that are offered. This chapter explores those changes and will focus, in particular, on the position of the young child in the family. Writing on British cinema of the period has tended in its discussion of the representation of youth to focus on juvenile delinquency and the rise of the teenager. Writers such as Hill (1986) and Landy (1991) have pointed to the ambivalent use of the teenager in social problem films to represent the attractions and dangers of affluence, sexuality and the influence of the mass media. In this chapter, I hope to complement such work by focusing on the discourses of care and responsibility that surround the younger children and that provide explanations for their behaviour and plans for their well-being. ‘Family’s an awful responsibility,’ Lucy tells her husband William at the end of the 1945 film They Were Sisters, ‘a responsibility, yes, but don’t let’s make [it] an awful responsibility,’ William responds reassuringly. In looking at how some of the films of the period handled the issues of childcare and the family, we will test whether Lucy’s anxiety or William’s optimism was the more justified.
