Introducing our correspondent…
I am nearly 57 years old and I have been married to Bryan for 35 years. I have two grown-up children and work as a secretary in a local law firm. I love reading, my garden, my home - dare I say it I’m about as boring as it gets.
I was born in the Vale of Belvoir from parents born within a couple of miles of each other, who in their turn were came from people born within a few miles of each other. The gene pool was slightly deepened by my maternal grandfather who settled in the Vale when he was posted there as Signalman in WWI and he originated in Yorkshire.
Dad farmed, not in a grand way, no one did in those days. He followed on from his father with no one ever even hinting that he might quite like to have a go at something else. My uncles and cousins farmed in the same low key mixed farming way of what is now a bygone age but that was the world I grew up in. Jill Dewey, 2012
Jill writes:
Melton is lucky enough to have a proper cinema, The Regal.
Although only half the building it used to be - in the 1970s they turned the bottom half into a Bingo Hall - the top half remains a perfect Art Deco gem where my parents did their courting, as did I.
When I burst into tears watching the trailer last Back End, I knew it would not be the very best idea for me to see War Horse but you can’t help some people and last night, I didn’t so much watch it as live it.
The first few moments declared it a Class Act: the fields were small like they would have been a century ago. Anachronisms ruin a film for me and ripped-up hedges are as bad as Maid Marian in panty-hose.
I studied the WW1 very closely for O level – I really am that old - and have seen many documentaries and listened to eye-witness accounts. My grandfather was decorated for saving the life of a French officer under-fire, he was gassed and spent the rest of his life with lung problems. In 1919 he came home to a wife he hardly knew and a child (my father) he had never met and was expected to carry on with his life as if nothing very much had happened at all. There was no “cahnselling” in those days.
Was it the Technicolour or the scale of the Big Screen as opposed to the telly? Not sure, it just felt that for the very first time I Got It. I left the cinema feeling Grandad and I had now been properly introduced. War Horse was a ‘way-in’ to the unimaginable.
It did have a few niggles: I remain to be convinced quite how old the cottage really was. I applaud the artistic attempts at rustic accents but found very few sounded even similar. It was a tad anthropomorphic in places but then all my
Dad’s cows had names as did the calves and fields for that matter and FYI, country people do not smile like that; if and when they do smile, it is just like everyone else but in those days of course, with less efficient dentistry.
And of course, the film does acknowledge the Universal Truth: secretly, very many animals are very much nicer than very many human beings and thank goodness for Kleenex.
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