Film - The Railway Children Return (2022)

This is the only incarnation of The Railway Children I’ve seen and it feels as though they’ve added the race issues to bring it up to date. The story is set in wartime when children were sent to rural areas to be kept safer from bombing. An account I’m familiar with as children sent to my home town Bedford is credited with kick-starting the excellent (now private) schools we still have. 

The three kids from Manchester are sent to random strangers in Yorkshire. With the rural setting and completely different accents, it may as well have been Australia in this radio age when people rarely travelled. They made friends with Thomas, their new housemate and grandson of Bobbie (the character played by Jenny Agutter in the 1970 film), who had a penchant for looking out for German spies. Except they only found an American soldier hiding from his bosses out of fear of how they treat black soldiers. Abe (KJ Aikens) appeared on the screen a fair bit and seems to be lower down the credits than he deserves. 

Still, the Railway Children sequel seems closer to the truth and a bit further away from the first family-orientated film. Apart from acknowledging black American soldiers, there is a welcome history lesson on the suffragettes. 

The Railway Children Return also makes me think of Dame Stephanie Shirley’s story as she arrived on one of the last trains from Europe that evacuated children to the UK.

7/10