averilburystedmunds: Wicked Little Letters

Olivia Colman as Edith Swan

Edith Swan with Rose Gooding.

To the cinema to see the above Olivia Colman film which was greatly enjoyed by the audience in Screen 1 in the Abbeygate Cinema. I always go in the afternoon and only go when the seating plan online shows me, reassuringly, that there are many viewers disinclined to view on my particular afternoon. So imagine my amazement when I entered to a virtually full cinema. A popular film then, partly explained no doubt by the expectation of lots of salty language! And a thoroughly enjoyable plot based on real incidents in Littlehampton, Sussex in 1921 when filthy poison pen letters began to arrive at various addresses. The so-called Littlehampton Libels became a national sensation, debated in Parliament, causing prurient outbursts in newspapers and local outrage. The language is often funny but the emotions powering the narrative, are not.

Much-maligned free spirit Rose Gooding
Played by Jessie Buckley.

The apparent victim and recipient of some of the letters was Edith Swan, a church-going, meek and sweet-natured, clean-living lady who lives with her parents. A wholly respectable spinster, no less. Her next-door neighbour, Rose, a single mother and unrepentant, nonconformist free spirit who loudly swears and shouts as she drinks in the local pub, as noisily free and carefree as the men around her, is considered deviant, not only by her neighbours but also, when the finger is pointed, by the police too. They choose to explain away evidence showing Rose is innocent, sufficiently long for her to spend two periods in jail. Edith is meanwhile elevated to angel status as she smiles demurely and mutters Christian asides of tolerance and forgiveness.

The original P.C Gladys Moss.
Also the first woman P.C.
to ride a motor cycle in her work

A mixture of DIY sleuthing and sustained clever observation and deduction by the only [the very first] police woman in Sussex are successful. P.C. Gladys Moss is routinely ignored or insulted by her police colleagues and the locals. She quickly pinpoints the culprit and despite constant brush-offs from her police boss, eventually

P.C. Gladys Moss with neighbourly sleuth.
Anjana Vasan is Gladys.

manages to expose Edith. The film does also clearly convey the position of women in the Twenties; the first woman in the police force in Littlehampton is treated as less able than her male colleagues by the public and her boss. Non-conforming women are viewed as almost certainly deviant while the ideal woman conforms, agrees and tries to please. Interestingly, I have read somewhere that Gladys Moss, this very first policewoman in Sussex now has a blue plaque dedicated to her in Worthing in Sussex, for her pioneering work in that difficult role.

Edward Swan, Edith's father.

An interesting element in the story [some might say, the whole basis of the narrative] is the outright bullying and control exercised by Edith’s tyrannical father of whom both her silent mother and the eagerly obedient Edith, are frightened. He treats his daughter cruelly, giving her outlandish childhood punishments like writing out 200 ‘lines’ and wholly restricting and controlling her behaviour by barking commands and restrictions in the wholly ‘normal’ expectation of obedience. I think this is now referred to as compulsive control, often witnessed in marriages that break down but here utilised with relish by the father. This is a chiefly light-hearted film but it is, effectively also, a story of a toxic family dynamic which Edith attempts to survive. The subsequent rage experienced by Edith emerges in the entirely untypical language [for her] of the anonymous letters she writes. Her fury, long repressed, has to find an outlet and after 40 years or so of unending control and domination by her father, she finds an escape in the writing and release of the letters. She discovers a secret joy in the shockingly obscene language she can secretly use to hurt and upset others; here is a hidden therapeutic power Edith stumbles on which nurtures her self esteem and represents her little silent victory over the forces of control and coercion.

This could have been a much darker, perhaps more interesting, film though probably not one to fill Screen 1 at the Abbeygate on a wet Saturday afternoon!