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(VII)

Hippy Children

by Jeremy Sandford

A New Age Traveller mother searches for her children who were inadvertently separated from her in a police charge. The anarchic Traveller lifestyle, which she originally adopted almost by accident, frustrates her at every turn ... yet also exhilarates her.

(VII)

Hippy Children

Melissa and her children are new to the travelling scene to which they’ve been introduced by Paul, a ‘New Age’ Hippy Traveller. During a police raid on a hippy celebration at a stone circle solstice gathering, Melissa is separated from her daughters and Paul. The film follows her desperate attempts to get her family back together again in a world without telephones, official help, or fixed addresses.

As they live through the poignant and powerful experiences of this gripping and passionate yarn, some of our audience will be asking, can it be right for parents to bring up their children, who have no choice, in this sort of environment? The film will make no judgement, although some of our viewers may make a judgement ... one way ... or the other.

This is an epic tale of loss and search around Britain. Melissa is inadvertently separated from her children, embroiled in a nightmare odyssey to find them again, through a Britain that may well be unfamiliar to most of us, the world alternately bucolic and cataclysmic of the New Age Hippy Travellers. A world in which traditional boundaries between good and evil, black and white, become blurred ... and magnified. There is something larger than life about many of our New Age Hippy Travellers and in our film they will, some of them, be playing themselves. Beyond their world so rich in heroics, and squalor, stretches that other world. They perceive it as grey, the world of the ‘straights’, that’s you and me.

Now that the Criminal Justice Act has criminalised so much of their lifestyle, the film is an intimate glance at life inside the converted and partially converted and totally non converted horse boxes, tents, buses, lorries, fire engines, tipis and all the other vehicles and edifices that the Travellers have claimed as their homes.

We shall be showing the beauty of some of the countryside they pass through; and the ugliness and pollution of other bits. Ditto with their lives.

Road movies are easiest shot in the summer but aesthetically and dramatically there may be a merit in shooting this film in winter when the cold begins to grip and times are hard for all Travellers.

Jeremy Sandford

Hippy Children

Narrative Treatment

Teaser: When we first see Melissa (27), she’s walking towards us down a suburban street, carrying her daughter Moonshine (4). She seems the typical suburban mum; but her life is about to alter drastically.

Paul (36) is a new age hippy traveller. His decrepit living vehicle is parked on a bit of waste land down the road. Paul and Melissa become acquainted and, once she’s persuaded him to have a bath, Melissa finds herself attracted to him.

Her life is more precarious than it looks. Though she and her children live in a house, she’s been unable to keep up mortgage payments on it since her partner left her. The bank is about to foreclose. Something about Paul’s description of the travelling life appeals to her. She has, really, no other viable options. With a mixture of desperation and recklessness, she decides to accept Paul’s proposition that she and the children go on the road with him - just for a while.

Rather by accident than design, Melissa finds she has joined the multifarious world of the new age travellers; the world of the

Hippy Children

At a Stone Circle at dusk, in the fitful light of fires and lanterns, shabbily dressed and half-naked hippies are dancing to very loud techno music.

It’s a scene that is fascinating and charismatic, an intriguing part of contemporary Britain that will be unfamiliar to most of us, colourful and exotic, there is a sense of wild abandon and some larking about. There’s also the squelching mud and the darkness, a feeling of menace and strangeness.

We pick out Paul (32), an uncouth, grimy, but sexually attractive hippy, and in another part of the rave, Melissa (27), our protagonist, Paul’s improbable girlfriend, a little out of place in a very white blouse put on specially for the party. Melissa is fresh to the New Age Traveller scene and is slightly nervous, feeling she perhaps bit off more than she could chew when she threw in her lot with Paul, but she’s doing her best not to show this and seems happy enough as she jigs around.

Sitting on a seedy sofa with much of its stuffing gone, we see Lynn (13), Melissa’s attractive daughter, being handed a joint by a likely lad her own age. Lynn takes a long puff and has a coughing fit.

Sara (6), Melissa’s second daughter, is now running up to her mum, in her smart party dress looking quite small and vulnerable in this wild gathering.

“Mum! Moonshine’s crying!”

She leads her mum to where Moonshine (4) lies on a tatty sofa beside one of the stones.

In the sky overhead there suddenly arrives the deafening roar of a helicopter, sweeping the rave with its powerful headlamps. The hippies round the stones find themselves in the midst of a charge by police officers who are breaking up the celebration. Melissa, carrying Moonshine and flanked by Sara, is being driven, with scores of others, across a fence with barbed wire on top by police officers with riot shields and batons drawn.

An hour or so later the straggling crowd, some shabby, some brightly dressed, arrive back, tired and hungry, in the woods, where their living vehicles were left.

There is a feeling of relaxation and sheer exhaustion here as the hippies, most of whom have been up all night, light campfires, change their clothes. Melissa confesses to Paul that she was frightened. She didn’t see it as part of the deal when he persuaded her to go on the road with him. ‘Oh, you get rutting used to it,’ Paul assures her. ‘Anyhow, it only happens once or twice in a rutting fuckoff while, they’ll leave us alone now.’

The children wander off to play and Paul goes to score some grass. Suddenly this peaceful, almost idyllic scene is shattered by an unexpected second charge, this time by what seem to be actual thugs. They are, in fact, Securicor Guards and vigilantes. Some windows of the hippies’ living vehicles - converted horse-boxes, buses, ambulances, trailer caravans - are being smashed.

The charge is so sudden that scores of families are caught unprepared. As the line of ‘thugs’ advances through the woods towards her and she realises her kids are now caught behind the advancing line, Melissa is at her wits’ end. Hearing the sound of smashing glass and seeing at least one vehicle on fire, she realises at the least she had better save Paul’s bus. An inexperienced driver, and all the time shouting for Paul, Lynn, Sara, Moonshine, she climbs into the bus, switches on the ignition and is driving Paul’s bus to get it out of the way of the thugs, vainly and desperately calling out for her disintegrating family. She wants to stop to wait for them, but is being driven on and not allowed to stop to wait for the children and Paul to have time to find her and join her again.

Her children, who had gone to play by a stream, are scooped up out of harm’s way by Cleodi, a young mother nine months pregnant, who takes them off in her horsebox.

Melissa’s family has been torn apart and, at the end of the first five minutes of the film, she is in the midst of its major predicament. How, in this world without fixed addresses or postal service, with hostility rather than support from police and social services, and being constantly evicted, will she ever get her little family back together again?

They’re all at various points, in various vehicles, in the same long convoy as it snakes down the trunk road. There are a number of buses, some ‘trashed’, some immaculate, flat tops with large loads wrapped in tarpaulins, cars, conventional but battered caravans, a mobile crane.

Sooner or later, we imagine, they’ll all be able to stop and sort themselves out. But at a roundabout, a police officer is splitting them off into groups of six, sending them off in different directions in order to disperse them.

Desperately Melissa tries to explain, as she sits at the driving wheel of Paul’s bus, that she’s lost her children and is very worried. She must be allowed to stop to give them time to catch up with her. But her pleas go unheard. Further behind in the convoy, in Cleodi’s horsebox, Cleodi, Sara and Moonshine are forced to take a different route to that which we know Melissa took. The little family has been projected into limbo.

Alternating scenes through our film will show Melissa’s increasingly desperate attempts to find her children and Paul, her partner. To start with, in her innocence, she believes it will only be a matter of hours. They, for their part, are all trying to get back with her and not succeeding. What will be the outcome?

Lurching down the road in Paul’s bus, Melissa sees a layby with some Travellers she recognises from earlier stopped in it. She immediately stops the bus and gets down to ask for help and advice.

Melissa, from a professional class background, initially thinks of going to the police. But seasoned traveller mothers, who are more experienced in the ways of the road than she is, point out that in the world of the travellers the police are enemies, not friends, and at the drop of a hat will ‘public order’ or ‘criminal justice’ them, impounding their vehicles and taking children into ‘care’. And wasn’t it one of these same police officers who put a truncheon through the back window of her bus earlier today? Distracted though she is, Melissa has to recognise the logic of that.

Someone asks her whether she’s all right for money - ‘Are you on the dole?’ ‘Yes,’ says Melissa, ‘since me and my partner split up.’ ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ ‘You’ve got your book?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well then, you can cash it wherever you are for two fortnights, saying you’re on holiday. After that you’ll have to go back to home base to pick it up. You’re with Paul, aren’t you?’ ‘Meant to be.’ ‘You’ll be back with him soon, then he can take you. Doesn’t Paul do a bit of dealing as well?’ ‘Not as far as I know.’ ‘I think he does. That must bring in something.’

Melissa may come from a fairly conventional background, but she is also like a wild animal, the archetypal mother desperately in search of her lost children. Her search, of which many scenes in this short outline will be omitted, becomes increasingly disorientated, frantic, and sometimes illogical.

Almost at once, Melissa loses her most important asset. She’s never driven a large vehicle and it gets out of control and, after a hair-raising spin down a hill, Melissa jumps out just before it turns over in a meadow. She is lucky to escape unhurt.

Melissa staggers through woods and comes upon a Brew Crew Parkup, a heavy metal type traveller site which she knows many of the routed hippies were heading for. The initial conversation here is about the high to be got from pig tranquilliser. Initially intimidated, Melissa puts a brave face on it and asks whether any children separated from their parents have arrived here. Her worst fears are endorsed when, sitting amid mud, despair, cans of Special Brew, and hearing that Lynn is 13, a guy says suggestively, “Send her this way, we’ll look after her.”

In fact what is happening to Lynn, if Melissa but knew it, would give cause for even more worry. She’s been lured into a commune run by Ariel, a sinister young/old man with guru and crowd gathering tendencies, who claims he is a healer, from the planet Venus, ‘specialising in bringing back people from the edge of chaos’. Lynn, becoming worried by the vibe here, is befriended by a lass her own age and says she’s thinking of leaving. “You’re too fuckoff late,’ says the lass.

Paul arrives back home to his scrapyard. The yard is filled with old vehicles and Paul immediately starts trying to make one roadworthy in order to go out to look for the kids and Melissa. He turns to see that two yobbos have set his tent on fire. He tries to rescue his belongings and gets himself burned in the flames.

In her converted horsebox, parked at a beauty spot, Cleodi is giving Sara and Moonshine their tea and trying to find out who their mother is. As we follow Cleodi through the film we will become increasingly involved in the search of this ex-art student, nine months pregnant, to find somewhere safe to have her baby.

Melissa is told some Romani Gypsies have some information about her children. She goes to visit them but it becomes clear the children are not here and never have been. She exclaims, “I must be going.” “Going where?” ask the Gypsies. Melissa, in a very desperate state, says, “I’ll just go on from place to place. Everywhere that the Travellers stop. Somewhere I’ll hear news of the children. If I go far enough.”

The Gypsies point out that the children may have already been taken into care and Melissa is flabbergasted a moment. Then she says, “Then someone will be able to tell me about them - and where it happened. And where they’ve got to.”

Melissa hitches a lift with a convoy of travellers, her children are not with them, but someone tells her that they think they heard that her children were picked up by Cleodi and her address. Melissa is high with happiness and leaves suddenly. She’s made a decision but we don’t at this point know what it is.

Cleodi gets a visit from Zoe, an ante-natal visitor, and Cleodi, worried that she may ask questions about the children, has hidden them behind the bed. The visit goes OK but a police officer arrives and explains that since there are six vehicles, they must go at once before he ‘public orders’ them. In vain, Zoe points out that this is unfair since the sixth vehicle is hers and the one thing a pregnant woman needs above all others is peace and quiet. More police arrive. Despite her pleas, Cleodi and the children are forced back on to the highway.

Ariel gets a buzz from seducing pubescent girls and now he targets thirteen year old Lynn. In his bender tent, he has put acid in her tea and then tries to seduce her.

Melissa has many further adventures which I do not at this point propose to recount in detail. Her search for her children takes her through people living in concealed dwellings underground, or on decrepit boats in creeks, communities of bender tents and buses with desperate occupants hooked on heroin (‘chasing the dragon’), all that threadbare (and sometimes joyful) world of the hippies, the dispossessed, the homeless, wanderers so much a feature of contemporary Britain and so little known to the general public. The money from selling a candlestick is spent, the post office for some reason refuses to cash any more giros, she’s totally frustrated, at her wits’ end, dirty and exhausted.

Melissa arrives at The Orchard, a farm with thirty hippy households; idealistic people aiming to live at peace with Mother Earth, and in harmony with their neighbours, the opposite end of the spectrum from the Brew Crew Parkup we saw earlier.

Melissa collapses and for three days sleeps without waking. At length she wakes. Steve is sitting, watching her. Melissa is keen to continue the search, but kindly and caring people are looking after her and point out it would be foolish to go now as she has influenza.

While getting back her strength to continue her search, Melissa learns something of the idealism that infuses many of the more romantic New Age Hippy Travellers.

She helps with bread making in earth ovens, vegetarianism, chanting, ‘absent healing’; But Melissa is sceptical about some of these and is especially doubtful when invited to take part in a ‘sweat lodge’, an American Indian form of Turkish bath or sauna, taking place in a tent and which has to be done naked.

In other areas she is quick to learn. Evangeline points out that the apparently random wanderings of the New Age Travellers are in fact keeping from extinction traditional rights which are part of the British heritage. Unlike in Portugal, Italy, Ireland, there has in this country been no major redistribution of land over the last century. Yet, if divided ‘fairly’, there would be two acres for each child, woman and man.

A blot on an otherwise peaceful landscape is the ‘Drongo Camp’ in some nearby woods. These are people who were originally thrown out of the orchard and they now often compromise it with their anti-social ways. One day Melissa takes a wrong turning on her way back from the ‘shit pits’ and, at the drongo camp, by chance comes upon her former partner, Paul. Her initial excitement turns to dismay when she finds he has fallen a victim to drugs and spends all his time drumming incessantly with a group of ‘crusties’. She realises with a certain numbness that he’s lost to her and the children, at any rate for the moment.

Cleodi’s long line of attempts to find somewhere safe to have her baby ends when, with the two young children in tow, she staggers into a tipi on a very wild night; “Excuse me, may I come in? The thing is, my pains have started and I’m looking for somewhere safe to have a baby.” She then collapses. The group of people in the tipi gather round to help her.

The Orchard appears to be a ‘safe’ parkup, but one day the inevitable eviction takes place, a spectacular occasion with scores of police officers and Securicor. Part of it is televised and Melissa, who has by now become a much more politicised person than before, angry at some of the questions from a television interviewer, pushes him into the mud, on camera. The incident later crops up on regional news and millions see it.

Amongst those watching regional news is Lynn who thus is able to discover where her mother is and, escaping from Ariel and his bed in the bender...

In the midst of the melée after the television interview, out of the darkness there comes a call; ‘Mum! Mum!’ Melissa is being questioned by a police officer. Her ears pick it up. Steve, an old fashioned ‘peace and love’ hippy, very grubby, wanders in between them smoking a joint and ‘accidentally’ knocks over the lantern, and this gives time for Melissa to disappear into the darkness.

‘Mum!’ Lynn whispers from a car just down the road and Melissa jumps into the car beside her. Lynn drives her mother out of the eviction’s orbit, to a desolate area where many of those who were evicted have ended up. Then they have a good hug. ‘Whose car?’ ‘Oh, Ariel’s. I nicked it.’ ‘Does Ariel have a telly then?’ ‘Yes, he watches it all the time. From a car battery. In his bender.’

Melissa asks whether ‘Sue and Terry, Newport’ means anything to her. She’s been told the children are there. One thing is, besides the well-known Newport there is another much smaller Newport. Steve is passing and they try it on him; ‘Sue and Terry, Newport.’ ‘Yeah, it’s a crack factory.’ ‘What?’ ‘Crack factory. They call it Sioux Territory. Very remote valley.’

Over in Tipi Valley, known as Sioux Territory, Sara and Moonshine are singing ‘My Mum’s a Hippy, So Am I’. Cleodi is nursing her new baby. All around her, tipis are being dismantled. They’ve just had a visit from a council enforcement officer who is about to come back and Public Order them. He showed particular interest in the children. ‘We’ve got to get Sara and Moonshine away, anyone any ideas?’ Nasrudin says, ‘This is extraordinary. A deja vu. I dreamed last night I was arriving, in the night, with two little girls, at the Sioux territory.’ ‘Good idea. They’ll be safe there. Can you take them?’ ‘Course I can.’ ‘How are you travelling?’ ...

‘So, Sioux Territory,’ says Melissa thoughtfully. ‘How are Lynn and I going to get there?’ Steve is hovering. He offers to take Melissa and Lynn in his bus to find the children but clearly there is a price to be paid. After some agonised heart searching, because she had been so longing to spend this first evening with Lynn, Melissa climbs into his filthy bed.

Next morning, she goes to find Lynn. Melissa is flabbergasted when Lynn tells her she has decided to put herself into care. She’s been into town early and explained her predicament to the social services. She wants to go to school and be ‘ordinary’. Melissa asks her to stay just one more day.

Steve’s bus is going at last. Jerkily he’s driving it along the trunk road. Melissa is beside him, perched on the area that houses the gearstick. Both are thoughtful and silent after last night’s events and in addition Steve is wondering whether the occasional judders that shake the vehicle are bad news or not.

Lynn is behind them in the bus, not saying much. Melissa hopes/believes that Lynn has forgotten about putting herself into care.

Steve has veered out to pass another large vehicle and there is the sound of an impatient driver behind. They pull back to the inner lane and a large inter-city bus passes them, flashing its lights.

Steve: Rutting Roadhogs!

He steps on the accelerator and now they’re driving close behind the inter-city bus.

Steve: Look at those fuckoff kids. Well, at any rate, they seem happy.

From Melissa’s point of view we see the windows of the back of the bus ahead. Two children are in the back window, waving and gesticulating wildly. They are Sara and Moonshine!

Melissa: Steve, Steve, it’s the kids! My kids. Look!

She’s waving excitedly back at them.

Melissa: It’s Sara and Moonshine! Quick! Make the bus stop! It’s them!

She presses her hand down on Steve’s horn.

Melissa: Flick your lights! Make them stop! Overtake them!

Meanwhile she’s miming at the children to get their bus driver to stop. Steve flashes the lights and tries to get his bus to go faster. The vehicle gives a spurt forward, the children are jumping up and down, thrilled. There is a small clank from the engine, Steve’s bus loses speed.

Melissa: Oh no! Steve, overtake them!

But their bus continues to lose speed and the distance between them and the inter-city bus is increasing. Expressions of unbelief and grief on the faces of the disappointed children.

Melissa has already opened the door of the bus to be able to shout the better and now, as Steve’s vehicle jerks to an ignominious halt, she’s out on the road, waving after the bus. The bus finally disappears round a bend. Then she’s venting her fury on Steve who’s climbed out to join her, kicking Steve and they are having a blazing row by the roadside.

Melissa: It’s always the same. Why the fuck can’t you get a vehicle that goes!

Melissa strikes him in fury. Behind them the engine emits a pathetic puff of steam. They are too busy with their recriminations to notice faint cries of :

Sara & Moonshine: Mum! Mum!

The children have evidently succeeded in getting their bus to stop because now, joyfully, Sara and Moonshine are running back down the road towards them.

They jump into Melissa’s arms and mother and children go into an embrace and, with tears of joy, Melissa is crying.

Sara: Mum, we had cocoa pops and cocoa with cream and sugar.

Steve is going at the carburettor of the vehicle with a sledge hammer. As our little family enjoy their reunion we see Steve start the bus and jerkily get it to travel the hundred yards or so, followed by Melissa, Lynn, Sara, Moonshine, into a Greasy Spoon Café carpark. It’s a way out place, a portacabin in the middle of a concrete wasteland where many long distance lorries are parked. The bus engine jerks again to a stop.

Moonshine: Chips. Can we have chips, Mum?

Melissa and the younger children go into the café, Melissa still crying with tears of joy as she orders the chips. The children exchange glances, a little shy of her.

Meanwhile Steve is working on the vehicle. He misjudges the moment to remove the radiator cap and there is a gushing jet of water.

In a phone booth at the side of the café, Lynn is telephoning, unnoticed by Steve or her mother.

The misty evening turns into night, the traffic gets rarer and then almost non existent. Melissa and the two youngest leave the café. Moonshine clutches a grubby giant toy rabbit she’s been given.

Lynn helps the children to bed in the bus. Melissa puts on the kettle. Steve is still outside, tinkering. It seems that they’re going to be having an evening of happy family reunion.

But Lynn is sitting by the window, waiting.

Much later that evening, a car comes into the forecourt. It is Fran, a young rather vulnerable looking pretty social services worker, come to take Lynn into care. This is the moment Melissa has been dreading and Lynn has been waiting for, and she goes quickly out of the bus before her mother notices. Fran puts her arm protectively round Lynn’s shoulder and tells her to get into the car. Lynn has evidently been telling Fran some fairly lurid (and truthful) stories of her life over the past weeks and Fran clearly feels the other children are also in danger.

Melissa has realised too late what is going on. She comes out of the bus towards the car to try to persuade Lynn not to go. Fran intercepts her and to Melissa’s surprise is polite and friendly. She says that the council does have a mandatory duty to monitor children at risk. There is also an emergency hostel ...

Melissa at this moment is shaken by anger, verging on fury. What is this straight world whose values she’s rejected but which is so powerful that even her own daughter is abandoning her for it? One thing that perhaps will strike a chord in the Gypsy in all of us is that the road itself has effected its potent magic with her and she’s joined the ranks of those who, throughout time, have chosen a wandering life, whatever the odds stacked against it because there is really no choice, it has been pre-decided deep within them. She’s exhausted, strung to breaking point, not processing reality objectively. Her personality has developed a long way from that rather diffident Melissa who first went on the road with Paul. Angrily she rejects Fran’s offer.

Fran’s response is to ask; ‘May I have a quick look in the bus?’ Melissa thinks (rightly) that Fran may be planning to try to take Sara and Moonshine as well. Melissa runs back to the bus to protect Sara and Moonshine and gets into bed with them.

Following her, Fran is approaching the bus. But Steve realises what is happening, gets between Fran and the bus and says;

Steve: (to Fran) Get out of my face.

Fran and Steve eye each other and Fran backs down.

Fran goes to the car and starts the engine.

Lynn: Bye, Mum!

From Melissa’s point of view we see the car edge back onto the trunk road and drive away with Fran and Lynn.

Melissa and Steve know that officialdom will be back sooner or later to check out the other children. As the film draws towards its close, we see Melissa desperately cuddling her children, sitting up in the bed, while Steve works frenziedly on the engine, trying to get it going so they can drive away out of trouble.

Melissa is now nearly hysterical with fear that the other children may be taken away as well. She shouts towards where Steve is working outside the bus;

Melissa: Steve, if you don’t get this fucking thing going, they’ll come back and take Sara and Moonshine as well!

Sara and Moonshine start crying, but almost immediately, with a roar, the engine starts up. Steve outside, and Melissa and the children inside, shout in ecstasy.

The sounds of the engine get louder and more regular and the bus shakes as Steve climbs into the cabin and lets off the brake. With a jerk, throwing them all sideways, the bus begins to move forward. There comes a ferocious pounding and banging on the side of the bus. The bus slows a little.

Melissa: Drive on, Steve, you drongo, or they’ll get us!

As the bus jerks forward again, the side door swings open. Melissa clutches the children, terrified. But it is Lynn who hurls herself into the bus and into her mother’s arms!

Melissa and her daughters are in floods of tears as the bus, hurtling them all around, gathers speed. Another lurch as Steve gets into a higher gear and the bus is surging forward, not along the trunk road, but along a smaller country road at the back of the café.

We may pull back into the sky to show the now diminutive bus escaping along the little country road, through the early morning mists and, as our view enlarges to include the trunk road, the flashing lights of minute police cars and council bulldozers travelling at speed and with urgency; friends to some, but enemies to others. Who knows whether they’ve come after Steve, Melissa, or the children? One thing is for sure, however fast or far they travel, Melissa and Steve have given them the slip - at any rate for the moment.

Hippy Children

Principal Characters

Some Other Characters

Kindly Old Quaker (72)	From the best of Christian motives, he befriends the local travellers and tidies up after them. He stands bail for them in court and is viewed as a great nuisance but also treated with respect and almost affection at the local police station.
Ariel (40)	A sinister youngish man with crowd gathering tendencies, fancies himself as a guru and claims he is a healer, specialising in bringing people back from the edge of chaos. There are thirteen in his group, he gives lectures to them at intervals that he calls ‘satsang’. They live communally and quite well on their collective giros.
A Romany Gypsy
Angry Householder
Ante-Natal Visitor
Dee Dee (42)	A beautiful though harassed farmer’s wife in the dilapidated but historic farmhouse which has been in her husband Robert’s family for centuries.
Robert Grayburn (42)	A disgruntled farmer, went to a minor public school. Good looking. Lives in squalor.
T.V. Interviewer
Fran; a Social Worker	Young, pretty, vulnerable.

Appendix

Teaser to begin the film

Suburban Street Outside Melissa’s House

Melissa (32) carrying Moonshine (4), walking towards us. Our view widens to include Lynn (13) and Sara (6), also part of the group. Melissa is a typical good-looking suburban Mum coming back home with her children.

Melissa’s Point of View

A semi-derelict hippy (‘New Age Traveller’) living vehicle parked, smoke pouring out of a bent chimney. Sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking a roll-up, Paul (36), Paul’s dog, ‘Tea Bag’.

We close in on Paul, scrawling on a grubby envelope ‘Lisence appli...’ The biro breaks. ‘Shit!’ mutters Paul. He leans forward to stick the half finished notice to the windscreen with bits of stamp paper. He looks beyond and sees:

Paul’s Point of View: Melissa’s Front Gate

Melissa flashes him a shy smile - the vehicle is an anachronism in this ‘respectable’ street. She and the children turn into her front gate.

Paul’s Living Vehicle

Paul jumps out.

Paul: Excuse me.

Melissa’s Front Garden

Melissa turns.

Paul: Can you spare us a loan of a pencil or biro? And maybe a drink of water?

Melissa: (friendly but guarded) Not drunk, are you? It’s not to add whisky to?

Paul flashes a ‘friendly’ smile. Melissa looks a moment at her daughter, Lynn, wondering what she thinks about it. Melissa’s looking again at Paul, wondering. She notices something and from her point of view we close on the top of a half whisky bottle sticking out of his coat pocket.

In Melissa’s Front Room, 10 minutes later

Melissa pouring whisky from the half bottle into a cup of tea in front of herself and Paul. They are sitting round a typical smart suburban tea table. Paul wears a grimy boiler suit, part of which seems to have been doused in axle grease.

Melissa: Why don’t you smarten up that old monstrosity out there?

Melissa (27), smartly dressed, but there is a touch of Katmandu about what she’s wearing. Gentle to her friends, she is capable of anger and power towards her enemies. Full of fire and a feminist. Subsequent to the break-up of a relationship she has been living on the dole. Her father runs a small business importing and/or delivering cars for oil rig workers in Scotland, but she doesn’t have a marked Scottish accent.

Paul: (with a smile) Will do. I’m getting ten litres of marine standard gloss soon as a deal I’ve set up is completed. Going to paint it in rainbows, and the Moon Goddess. I could do some painting here for you if you want.

Paul (32), chaotic, loutish in appearance and most typically lost in the huge guts of some lorry or bus engine, covered in grime. He has his own oxyacetylene welding equipment and seems an almost infernal character as the sparks pour from his welder and hideous sounds emanate from his angle grinder. He is short spoken but intelligent, with a chip on his shoulder, a ‘Scorpio’ character. Through his life he has collected objects of all sorts, the bigger the better, i.e. mobile cranes, low loader trailers, scrap iron, etc., and these objects follow him or are abandoned round Britain. He’s also a busker on Irish whistle and persistent drummer. Has a dog called ‘Tea Bag’.

Melissa: Thanks for the offer.

Lynn: We’re getting evicted.

Paul: Getting thrown out of here?

Melissa: Me and my boyfriend split up. The bank’s foreclosing on the mortgage.

Paul: Rutting bastards! Won’t the dole office help you?

Melissa: They did. Did give us the money to pay the mortgage, but ...

Lynn: Mum spent it on getting the stereo fixed. And those ...

We see large numbers of fluffy toys.

Lynn: (indulgent towards her Mum) Fluffy toys for my sisters.

Paul: And what about the Council? Won’t they ...?

Melissa: Just offered us a place in a communal hostel.

In Paul’s Living Vehicle, one hour later

A hurricane lantern lit in the gloom. Grimy but quite cosy. Melissa, Sara, Moonshine, Paul.

Paul: Some do, some don’t. Depending on what sort of rutting people you meet, what the locals are like, you know. Some people are very sort of understanding towards it and others, like, are just totally don’t want to know really. Horrible to you. But I feel a lot better in myself now, ever since I got out of the houses. Definitely, I feel much happier in it. Like, you know, it’s mine, I own it. It can go where it wants.

Melissa: (doubtfully) I suppose it’s quite homely really, isn’t it?

Paul: (at this point only half in earnest) Move in with me yourselves if you want to. Till you get yourselves together.

Melissa: (at this point only half in earnest) I’ll think about it.

The Street, some days later

Angry Neighbour: It’s been six days now. And this used to be a respectable area!

Melissa: (standing at her door) I’m sorry, I know it’s parked outside but I know absolutely nothing about it!

She turns back into the house and enters:

Melissa’s Front Room

Melissa: Where would the girls sleep, anyway?

Paul: Up on the rutting platform. You’ve not been up there. It’s quite cushti. That’s where my kids sleep, when I have them.

Melissa: (surprised) You have kids?

Paul: Yeah. Two. But I hardly ever get to rutting see them.

Melissa: And where would I sleep? (Of course she knows the answer).

The Street (or unkempt garden), some days later

Melissa is pulling Paul’s grubby T-shirt off and he is resisting.

Melissa: Into the washing machine! Into the washing machine!

She succeeds and runs with the T-shirt into the house, leaving a half naked Paul behind her.

Melissa’s Kitchen

Paul, now only in his pants, a handsome though slightly embarrassed and grubby man, leaning against the churning washing machine.

Paul: There’s other things that I’d like to show you. Things you never dreamed of.

Melissa: You don’t know what I dream about.

Paul: Give it a try. Solstice is coming up soon.

Melissa: What’s Solstice?

Paul: What’s Solstice! (just slightly contemptuous at her ignorance) I’ll show you Solstice. Join the crowd. You’ll be among rutting friends, not fairweather phonies like you’ve so far spent your life with. And you’ll see rutting good things and rutting bad things that you never rutting dreamed of!

Country Bus Stop; Sara and Moonshine

Tipi person sees Sara and Moonshine on to a long distance bus and pays for their tickets.

Rundown Site; Melissa, Lynn

OPTION ONE:

Melissa sitting by a sleeping Lynn, waiting to tell her the news.

OPTION TWO:

Melissa comes to tell the sleeping Lynn the news and finds that she is gone.

On a Trunk Road; Melissa, Steve, Lynn

Possibly run sound of start of this one over previous scene.

Steve’s bus is going at last. Jerkily he’s driving it along the trunk road. We see a road sign - A4609. Melissa is beside him, perched on the area that houses the gearstick. Both are thoughtful and silent after last night’s events and in addition Steve is wondering whether the occasional judders that shake the vehicle are bad news or not.

OPTION ONE:

Lynn is with them in the front seat, not saying much. Melissa hopes/believes that Lynn has forgotten about putting herself into care.

OPTION TWO:

No Lynn.

Steve has veered out to pass another large vehicle and there is the sound of an impatient driver behind. They pull back to the inner lane and a large inter-city bus passes them, flashing its lights.

Steve: Rutting Roadhogs!

He steps on the accelerator and now they’re driving close behind the inter-city bus.

Steve: Look at those fuckoff kids. Well, at any rate, they seem happy.

From Melissa’s point of view we see the windows of the back of the bus ahead. Two children are in the back window, waving and gesticulating wildly. They are Sara and Moonshine!

Melissa: Steve, Steve, it’s the kids! My kids. Look!

She’s waving excitedly back at them.

Melissa: It’s Sara and Moonshine! Quick! Make the bus stop! It’s them!

She presses her hand down on Steve’s horn.

Melissa: Flick your lights! Make them stop! Overtake them!

Meanwhile she’s miming at the children to get their bus driver to stop. Steve flashes the lights and tries to get his bus to go faster. The vehicle gives a spurt forward, the children are jumping up and down, thrilled. There is a small clank from the engine, Steve’s bus loses speed.

Melissa: Oh no! Steve, overtake them, you arsehole!

But their bus continues to lose speed and the distance between them and the inter-city bus is increasing. Expressions of unbelief and grief on the faces of the disappointed children.

Melissa has already opened the door of the bus to be able to shout the better and now, as Steve’s vehicle jerks to an ignominous halt, she’s out on the road, waving after the bus. Then she’s venting her fury on Steve who’s climbed out to join her. The bus finally disappears round a bend.

Melissa and Steve are having a blazing row by the roadside.

Melissa: It’s always the same. Why the rut can’t you get a vehicle that goes!

Steve: But I’ve only just met you!

Melissa: Yes, but I know your type.

Melissa strikes him in fury. Behind them the engine emits a pathetic puff of steam. They are too busy with their recriminations to notice faint cries of :

Sara & Moonshine: Mum! Mum!

The children have evidently succeeded in getting their bus to stop because now, joyfully, Sara and Moonshine are running back down the road towards them.

They jump into Melissa’s arms and mother and children go into an embrace and, with tears of joy, Melissa is crying.

OPTION TWO:

Film ends here.

OPTION ONE:

Film continues as overleaf:

Closing Credits Begin

Behind Credits;

By the Trunk Road; Melissa, Steve, Lynn, Sara, Moonshine

A person from the bus now approaches and, unheard by us, is enquiring of Steve what is going on. Steve evidently satisfies the enquirer who is returning to the bus.

Sara: Mum, we had cocoa pops and cocoa with milk and sugar.

Steve is going at the carburettor of the vehicle with a sledge hammer. As our little family enjoy their reunion we see Steve start the bus and jerkily get it to travel the hundred yards or so, followed by Melissa, Lynn, Sara, Moonshine, into

End first part closing credits

Greasy Spoon Café Forecourt and Interior

It’s a way out place, a portacabin in the middle of a concrete wasteland where many long distance lorries are parked.

Moonshine: Chips. Can we have chips, Mum?

Melissa and the younger children go into the café, Melissa still crying as she orders the chips. The children exchange glances, a little shy of her.

Outside;

Meanwhile Steve is working on the vehicle. He misjudges the moment to remove the radiator cap and there is a gushing jet of water.

Phone Booth

Lynn is telephoning, unnoticed by Steve or her mother.

Begin second half closing credits

Cameo Sequence or Stills

A series of little scenes, set in time about half an hour apart.

Perhaps these are punctuated by speeded up sequences of traffic outside the café (or in the forecourt) showing the advance of a misty evening into night as the traffic gets rarer to almost non existant.

Outside;

Steve still tinkering. Lynn walking back unnoticed.

In Café;

Melissa and the two youngest leave the café. Moonshine clutches a grubby giant toy rabbit she’s been given.

In the Bus;

Lynn is settling the children down in the bus.

Outside the Bus;

They are all outside, pushing it over rough ground into a more remote part of the forecourt.

Inside the Bus;

Melissa puts on kettle.

Outside;

Steve kicks the bus engine and climbs in to join the others inside. Melissa is getting Sara and Moonshine to bed.

Inside (later);

Steve is cooking a cup of tea or stew. Lynn is sitting looking out of the window.

End second part of credits

Inside Bus (later);

It is now much later on the same evening or night and from Lynn’s point of view we see a car come into the forecourt.

Outside;

Fran, a young rather vulnerable looking pretty social services worker, drives towards Steve’s vehicle. She parks alongside and is getting out of the car. Lynn is already moving out of Steve’s vehicle towards her. They shake hands and Fran puts her arm over Lynn’s shoulder, looking towards the bus.

In the Bus;

Melissa has realised too late what is happening. Reverse shot from Melissa’s point of view.

Melissa: Lynn!

Outside;

Melissa moves towards Fran where she stands with Lynn.

Fran: Good evening, Mrs Meacle, may I have a quick look in the bus?

Melissa: Er ...

Fran: (to Lynn) You get in the car.

Fran walks towards the door of the bus where stands Steve.

Steve: (to Fran) Get out of my face.

Fran and Steve eye each other and Fran backs down.

Sara and Moonshine: (at window of bus) Mum!

Melissa runs past Steve up the steps into the bus. Fran is climbing into her car. Melissa is getting into bed with the children with an arm round each of them.

Lynn: Bye, Mum!

She gets into the car. Fran doesn’t seem to know what to do and is evidently wondering whether to go to talk to Melissa. She thinks better of it, climbs into the car and from Melissa’s point of view we see the car edge back onto the trunk road and drive away.

Melissa sits cuddling Sara and Moonshine and as the car goes out of sight says (or in voice over);

Melissa: Goodbye, Lynn!

Jeremy Sandford FanClub Archives
Almost all of the content of these webpages is copyright of the estate of
Jeremy Sandford, RIP.
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