In the aftermath, rag and bone merchants wend their miserable way through the dust and rubble.
Director Steve McQueen (Twelve Years A Slave, 2013) carefully crafts the story of Rita (Saoirse Ronan with a perfect East London accent and lovely singing voice), a single mother whose 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan, a brilliant actor, selected after a huge search) is evacuated by train with hordes of kids being taken to the countryside to safety.
George becomes the film’s central character when he, wanting to be with his mother, takes his life in his hands and jumps from the moving train, setting off on a perilous journey to be reunited with her.
“I came across this image of a young black boy on a platform with a cap on and a massive suitcase, about to be evacuated,” director McQueen explains to Adrian Lobb in The Big Issue.
“I had wanted to tell a story about the Blitz and the Second World War. But I wasn’t interested in Churchill or Truman or Monty. I was interested in the people on the ground. People who had lived through this narrative.”
The peril Londoners experienced every moment, air raid sirens going off, bombs falling, is vividly captured, through the eyes of Rita, the people she works with, her life at home in Stepney with George and her dad Gerald (Paul Weller), and through a brief glamorous scene in a night club where blacks entertain a crowd of upper crust people in a scene reminiscent of the Titanic just before it struck the iceberg.
Racism is shown as part of the fabric of 1940s London, with George being one victim of it.
His father was deported to his home in Grenada after being falsely accused of starting a street fight, before he and very blonde Rita could marry.
George doesn’t regard himself as black until he meets heroic Ife (Benjamin Clementine) a Nigerian warden who takes George on his rounds and gets him a bit closer to home.
While George inches his way home, desperate Rita distracts herself by helping out in a shelter set up by a socialist community organiser, played by little person Leigh Gill as real-life Jewish shelter marshal and activist Mickey Davies.
Shelter marshals keep the peace underground while looting and corpse robbing go on at street level, George by now having been thrust into an Oliver Twist-like gang of terrifying thieves.
With the strong hand of McQueen holding it all together, the film belongs to brave young George.
He stands his ground when confronted by bullies, tells them they’re all mouth and no trousers, and, like his mum, he never gives up.
★★★★★
