And When Did You Last See Your Father?

by William Frederick Yeames

The oil-on-canvas picture, painted in 1878, depicts a scene in an imaginary Royalist household during the English Civil War. The Parliamentarians have taken over the house and question the son about his Royalist father. Yeames was inspired to paint the picture to show the crises that could arise from the natural frankness of young children. Here, if the boy tells the truth he will endanger his father, but if he lies he will go against the ideal of honesty undoubtedly instilled in him by his parents.

The boy in the pictures is based on Yeames' nephew, James Lambe Yeames. Behind the boy, a sobbing little girl, probably the daughter, waits her turn to be questioned. The girl was based on Yeames' niece, Mary Yeames. At the back of the hall the mother and elder daughter wait anxiously on the boy's reply. The scene is neutral: while the innocence of the boy is emphasized by his blond hair, open expression and blue suit, the questioners are also treated sympathically; the main interrogator has a friendly expression and the sergeant with the little girl has his arm on her shoulder as if comforting her. The painting is now held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Madame Tussauds in London has a life-size waxwork tableau of the scene, faithfully reproduced from the painting.

'Peoples of Europe, protect your holy heritage'

Britannia is clearly identifiable, followed by (from left to right) Italia, Austria, Russia, Germania and (standing for France) Marianne. The angel is the Archangel St Michael. This painting by the German artist Hermann Knackfuß in 1895 was a present by Kaiser Wilhelm to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. It represents the challenge to Christian Europe to unite against the godless "Yellow Peril" of the East.

Another Country

I saw this film on an old DVD that had been given away free with some Sunday 'paper. I just managed to save it from the recycling bag.

I must say, I hadn't expected much, but it was still bitterly disappointing. It's beautifully set and, up to a point, quite attractively cast. Colin Firth, it turns out, was marvellous even when he was cute. Rupert Everett, similarly, turns out always to have been awful. But there's Guy of Gisburne from Robin of Sherwood as well, smouldering away in the background looking blond and posh and, well, just smouldering. And there's even a young Cary Elwes - not even bothering to act, but just being posh and cute and lovely and sweet and smiling oh-so-nicely and... Ahhhh!

And I suppose the rest of the film could so easily have been like that - a sort of Sound of Music with cricket. And one can feel that it's what the filmmakers really wanted to do. But the convention by the 1980s was that beautiful blond young men were always evil, beautiful old schools were evil, the mililtary and the British Empire were always evil - and buggery was a beautiful, liberating thing.

Oh, fuck it! It's moral drivel from beginning to end. It's a film about communists in England at time when England already knew about the horrors of Lenin and Trotsky. What makes it worse is that it was made at a time just when the whole gruesome Soviet experiment was starting to fall apart. (Having said that, the BBC made The Curse of Fenric virtually as the Berlin Wall was tumbling. For failing to gauge the mood of the times, no one has ever beaten the British media-Establishment - and that, in some ways, is a comforting thought.)

The film's moral inadequacy has an inevitable knock-on effect on its characters. The "good", leftwing characters are almost all drawn hideously badly. Everett is supposed to be a sympathetic gay character but he's not: he's the most annoying, snivelling excuse for a gay stereotype ever seen. And Firth is a splendidly enjoyable prick, but he never grows or develops. Just to expand on that unfortunate metaphor, his character remains limp throughout: he starts out as a prick and carries on as a prick all the way until the end - when he's still a prick; and there's never any clue as to why he's a prick. He's just a prick. And a Marxist prick at that!

The goodies are of course gays in denial and sadists and militarists and (worst of all!) praying Christians. Again, the inadequacy of the writing is such that we don't even find out whether they're supposed to be hypocrites or fanatics. All we're supposed to take away (or rather, because this is a film that was really only ever playing to the gallery, it's a prejudice that we're supposed to take to it) is that Christianity and the military are yucky and nasty. And that's all there is to it.

The most interesting characters in the film are Fowler - who is played by far and away the most handsome young hunk on display - and his favourite fag. The fag himself is a standard-issue, handsome little prepubescent love-muffin. But he is the only character towards whom anyone in the film shows any genuine affection or tenderness, and Fowler is the one character who shows it. (It's just one line: 'All right, Tomkins! You've done a decent job on my boots.' or some such.) But then a film that really explored the human condition, and tackled the emotional relationships - hero worship vs. emerging paternal fondness - between young men and younger boys, in school or out, would have been unthinkable in pro-Marxist 1980s Britain.

It would be even more unthinkable now.