Podcasts · Secret Life of Books
Back to School 3: A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
· 1 h 24 min · Episode 139
Episode Back to School 3: A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.In 1969, six years before the Sex Pistols formed and punk broke, a 15 year old boy from Yorkshire called Billy Casper flicked at v-sign at the world. A photograph of that moment became one of the iconic images of late 20th Century Britain, appearing on t-shirts, posters, graffiti, and - of course - a book cover.
Billy Casper wasn't a real boy. He is the anti-hero of Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, published in 1968. The book is a masterpiece in its own right, but owes its status in part to the film adaptation made immediately after it came out. Director Ken Loach, working with Hines as scriptwriter, decided to make the film exactly where the book is set - in and around Barnsley, a coal-mining town in Yorkshire. The boy in the poster is, in fact, 15-year-old David Bradley - a local working-class boy without any acting experience, whose father worked in the mines. David Bradley and Billy Caspar are almost inseparable in our imaginations. And so that famous photograph, taken on set, became the image used on the cover of future editions of the book.
A Kestrel for a Knave changed school stories forever. Billy is a semi-literature child living in a state of neglect on a housing estate. His school is a bad secondary modern, where the pupils are physically and psychologically abused by their depressed teachers. What makes Billy’s life worthwhile is his love of the countryside, and the kestrel hawk he has managed to raise and keep in the garden shed.
What Billy wants is to fly his kestrel, but the world keeps getting in the way - his brother, teachers, school bullies, even the Youth Employment Officer. Hence Billy’s iconic v-sign - the ultimate statement of his refusal to participate in anything society has to offer.
Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave
Ken Loach, Kes
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