A Brief Encounter with Carnforth
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I spent my university years in Lancaster. One of the things I now realise is that we completely failed to take advantage of the many beautiful areas nearby, never venturing into the Lake District or to the coast, except for the odd ride over to Morecambe where there was an arts venue and a horrific nightclub. It now seems like madness not to have taken advantage of all this wonderful scenery on our doorstep but hey, we were young, dumb, and quite skint.
One journey I did make relatively regularly was across to Preston. I was in a band based there for a bit, and it also had a good indie record shop. It must have been on my way back from one of these that it happened, when either reading or daydreaming or something, I missed my stop and failed to alight at Lancaster. Realising my error, the only thing I could do of course was to get off at the next stop – wherever that was – and head back again. And so, I found myself at Carnforth station. It's funny how being somewhere so close to where you live, yet have never visited before, can be so discombobulating. But in the case of Carnforth, it was justified. The station was massive! And yet also deserted. There seemed no demand for so many echoing platforms, buildings and underpasses. I crossed over to wait for the next train back to Lancaster and thought, well that was surreal.
It wasn’t until quite some time later that I first saw the classic film Brief Encounter (1945, director David Lean, screenplay Noël Coward), now a firm favourite. Reading about it afterwards, I realised that the station in the film was the same weird station I’d missed my stop and ended up at that time as a student. Although I hadn’t got grit in my eye, or met a handsome stranger, or necked a shot of cheap brandy in the refreshment room to calm my nerves. It turned out that Carnforth had, in its heyday, been a major interchange, which accounted for its size and complexity. It then gradually died off along with a lot of its connecting branch lines from the 1960s onwards, platforms becoming defunct and some buildings semi-derelict. So that was the zombified arrangement I’d stumbled upon that day. In the intervening years, buildings have been refurbished and a small Heritage Centre celebrating the film has opened and almost closed again (thankfully its future was secured at the end of last year).
Last Friday I went to see Brief Encounter at a local cinema, ostensibly a screening for Valentine’s Day, although the film is also celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen it and yet something new seems to strike me with every viewing. The Valentine’s Day association is not unusual, after all this film has at least once been voted the most romantic ever made; though if you ask me, it is not really a romantic film at all, and I think that if it is trying to make any particular point about love, that point is a testament to the stability of enduring relationships.
Although Brief Encounter is very famous, and therefore it’s hard not to know anything about it at all even if you’ve never seen it (plus it’s so terribly, terribly, easy to parody!) I should note that the below includes spoilers. Although it is really a film that acts as a spoiler for itself; beginning as it ends, with virtually the entire tale told in flashback and narrated as an unsent letter, the anticipation of the ending the viewer knows is coming partly what drives its momentum.
To set the scene for the uninitiated - suburban housewife and mother-of-two Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), is on her usual Thursday train trip to the fictional town of ‘Milford’ to shop, to swap her book at the Boots Lending Library (!), to eat some lunch and to take in a film. Waiting on the station platform, an express train speeds by in a cloud of steam, causing her to get grit in her eye. After a rinse with some water from the refreshment room fails to dislodge this foreign body, in steps helpful bystander Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a practicing doctor no less, to do the job with his special napkin. I’m not sure how much medical training this really requires, after all I’m pretty sure I recall my mother undertaking this manoeuvre and she has none whatsoever, but Laura is nevertheless so terribly, terribly grateful. The pair are in their late thirties, although they seem older, perhaps due to both the period and to the infrequency with which this demographic is examined on screen. Both are attractive without being exceptionally or preternaturally so. Johnson, however, has an occasional wide-eyed gawkiness perfect for the portrayal of a respectable married mother behaving like a giddy teenager.
For that is what ensues – this first chance meeting is followed by another, for Alec just so happens to commute to Milford every Thursday too, for a locum shift at the hospital. Over a month or so, these meetings grow from accidental, to deliberately planned. The hours at the hospital are increasingly skipped in favour of the pictures, extravagant dining and jaunts out in the motor. Alec has a steadfast alibi – his wife Madeleine (‘small, dark, and rather delicate’) and their two young boys would not be at all surprised for him to be held up at the hospital, or even for his work to detain him in Milford overnight. Laura, however, has no such excuse for being late home, and before too long she is inventing stories for her husband Fred, phoning friends to back them up, and lying to them too. ‘That was the first time in our life together that I had ever lied to you – it started then, the shame of the whole thing, the guiltiness, the fear…’. Alec never has to face up to the deceit of the situation in quite the way that Laura does.
Part of the beauty of the film of course is that the viewer can believe in this central relationship as much or as little as they want. You can, if you choose to, believe that Laura and Alec share a truly deep connection, one unmatched by either of their spouses, and that their doomed love is a tragedy. You can believe that Alec is entirely genuine, that he didn’t know he was looking for love until it found him. That he couldn’t help it. But for me, there is just too much of a breadcrumb trail towards the opposite to take him at face value.
For a start, those hours at the hospital. Was nobody really missing him? It’s also quite a coincidence that early in their dalliance, he just happens to lunch at the same place as Laura, and bump into her there. He knows she spends her Thursdays in Milford, coming in on the train. Did he follow her? A novel I read recently, Celia Dale’s A Spring of Love (1960), also features an unscrupulous male protagonist who manages to ingratiate himself to a woman like this, appearing ‘by chance’, having sussed out a similar weekly ritual – of course this can reinforce the romantic notion that something is ‘meant to be’.
All the way through, it’s Alec who is the instigator, who is the pest. Charming though his company and their convivial conversation may be, it is he who, ludicrously, after only a handful of meetings, tells her he loves her, without articulating why on anything other than a basic level. Lean punctuates these poignant goodbyes and moments of drama at the station with sudden blasts of train horns and gushes of steam, an ominous sound of danger and threat, but from what angle?
Then there’s Alec persuading Laura to go back with him to his friend’s empty apartment, despite her initial reticence. It’s unclear whether Laura’s motivation here is more about being able to spend time alone with him, free from the watchful eyes of wandering Milford acquaintances, but from Alec’s perspective, it feels definitively sexual. Someone with Laura’s best interests at heart would surely have the decency to wait. And, when this clandestine tryst ends before it begins when the owner of the apartment returns home early, Laura runs away, and Alec starts to wonder if it’s all worth the effort. The next time she sees him, he’s got a last-minute posting to Johannesburg, leaving in two weeks, and has decided to accept. He claims he hasn’t even told Madeleine and the boys about it yet, generously telling Laura first, despite this being a decision which will upend his family’s lives.
When the pair first go to the cinema, they see a trailer for a film, which they later go and watch, entitled ‘Flames of Passion’ – (Stupendous! Colossal!! Gigantic!!! Epoch-Making!!!) this quickly cuts to an advert for a local supplier of prams. We are only a few years after Cyril Connolly’s 1938 book Enemies of Promise, in which he famously opines ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. On a less dramatic level, this conflict between domesticity and flights of imagination and fantasy is surely what Brief Encounter is really trying to express.
After all, Laura isn’t in a bad marriage. It would be easier to root for her fledgling dalliance with Alec if she were escaping an abusive or inattentive husband. She is curious, literary and musical, to a level which perhaps isn’t shared with Fred, but they seem otherwise happy, engaged and loving. It’s not made explicit whether Laura has ever experienced yearning beyond her marriage before, it appears to be something she hadn’t thought about until the opportunity presented itself. It’s that addictive mix of butterflies, of giddiness and anticipation, the wondering when and how, the future a blank canvas, so potent but also so vulnerable to sudden disappointment and heartbreak. That feeling is what just can’t be captured any more years into a long, stable relationship.
I felt suddenly quite wildly happy — like a romantic schoolgirl, like a romantic fool! You see he had said he loved me, and I had said I loved him, and it was true. It was true! I imagined him holding me in his arms — I imagined being with him in all sorts of glamorous circumstances. It was one of those absurd fantasies — just like one has when one is a girl — being wooed and married by the ideal of one's dreams - generally a rich and handsome Duke.’
The moment referred to earlier, where Laura references the first time she lied to Fred about what she had been doing, occurs while she is at her dressing table. Of course, he has no idea and carries on as usual – ‘Hurry up with all this beautifying — I want my dinner!’. He doesn’t intend this with any malice, it’s just what they do, what all housewives do. Of course, the mundanity of the request hangs heavily in the air, no match for being wooed and desired and driven off in the motor by Alec. Laura thinks of ‘Alec and me — perhaps a little younger than we are now, but just as much in love, and with nothing in the way’, but in this alternative scenario, who’s to say that it wouldn’t now be Alec asking impatiently for his dinner, years down the line? Who’s to say that it wouldn’t be Laura who is clockwatching and wondering where Alec is as he is delayed at Milford Junction inventing a hasty posting to Johannesburg to yet another dewy-eyed woman?
Despite it all though, there’s no doubt that for Laura, this is all real. It’s an opportunity to be seen on her own terms, to exist outside of her role as housewife and mother, regardless of how untenable and unrealistic it all might be. She is too good and trusting a person to be able to see through Alec, so if his intentions are indeed less than honourable, it’s best she never finds out. It never occurs to her that he might have played this game before, because doing so would shatter everything. Standing on the precipice of the station platform after Alec has left, she contemplates her own demise.
‘I meant to do it, Fred, I really meant to do it — I stood there trembling — right on the edge — but then, just in time I stepped back — I couldn’t — I wasn’t brave enough — I should like to be able to say that it was the thought of you and the children that prevented me — but it wasn't — I had no thoughts at all — only an overwhelming desire not to be unhappy any more — not to feel anything ever again.’
But she’s wrong – something does prevent her.
It’s not entirely clear where Brief Encounter is supposed to be set. Carnforth was chosen as a location because filming took place towards the end of the war, and the station was large and bustling enough to stand in as Milford Junction but located far enough from a major city for blackout to be avoidable. I’m unsure whether it’s a backdrop or the actual location, but there are some scenes at the station where a church on a craggy rock or hillside can be seen in the distance. Signs at the station point to Northern destinations, and yet the mock-tudor shopping parades of Milford itself are decidedly Home Counties (indeed, they were filmed in Buckinghamshire). Nobody speaks with a Northern accent.
Perhaps some of this was deliberate – a need for viewers to recognise something familiar in the locale regardless of where they came from. And how many women in 1945, with boyfriends and husbands away for years, some never to return, found Laura’s deep yearning for romantic love and escapism resonated with them? In the end, it is Fred who lets on that he knows more than we think, that perhaps this was something Laura just needed to go through.
‘You’ve been so very long away. Thank you for coming back to me.’
That was a brilliant piece. I need to watch the film again now!