Cinema: A Fable for Children

Once there were two little boys named Harry and Davy, one eight and the other five, whose father was killed in the Boer War. Their mother died soon after, and they went to live with their father’s people on a farm in Nova Scotia.

Their grandfather, who met them when they arrived in town, was a tall old Scotsman with a craggy face and eyes so deeply set that it was hard to tell whether they were kind or fierce. “Have you et?” he demanded gruffly. The boys said yes. “Have you watered?” They said yes. Then all three started off to the farm on foot. Once outside town, grandfather stopped and took off his boots—”for thrift,” as he explained, since they were the only pair he had—and walked the rest of the way barefoot.

Grandfather’s farm was a few rough buildings set at the edge of a clearing. Grandmother was an old woman dressed in black, with a face almost as hard as grandfather’s, but her eyes were kind and her hands were gentle as she fed the boys and undressed them for bed. Grandfather frowned on play and thought the boys should learn to work. “When I was their age . . .” he often used to begin. Grandmother knew that Grandfather didn’t mean to be unkind, but often he seemed rough because, as he had once admitted to her helplessly, “I can’t think of anything to say to them.”

Harry and Davy played every day, all the same, because they couldn’t help it. They threw stones in the brook, and ran after the goats and the hens. But grandfather made them let the goats alone, and as for hens, as Davy said sadly one day, “They won’t play.” What Harry and

Davy wanted more than anything in the world was a dog—like one Harry had once known called Rover. But when they asked grandfather to get one he only laughed harshly and said, “You can’t eat a dog.”

One day Harry came home from school with something wonderful. It was a beautiful, golden-haired baby that he had found lying all alone in the woods. “It’s our baby now,” he told Davy thoughtfully. “We’ll keep it for a year or two, until it’s got a mind of its own. Then it’ll hit the trail and there’ll be no stopping it.”

Nobody could be told, of course, for fear grandfather would forbid them to play with the baby, the way he had with the goats. So they kept it in a lean-to in a secret part of the woods, and fed it on stolen milk (“You got to wet its whistle,” Harry explained, “near every hour of the day”), and changed its diaper the way Harry had seen his mother do with Davy. At night Harry slipped out of the window when everyone was asleep, and went to the lean-to “to protect [the baby] from the wolves.”

Davy was delighted to have something to play with. He whistled to the baby, and never tired of inspecting it. “You got some good fat on you, baby,” he said. Harry named the baby Edward, “after the King,” but Davy called it Rover.

Then one day the dominie came calling to ask why Harry had not been in school for quite a while. When Harry could give no explanation, grandfather locked him in the woodshed for the night. As soon as the others were asleep, Davy climbed through the window and bravely set out for the leanto, but the woods were terrible in the dark, with noises and awful shapes, and Davy began to cry. Seeing that he was too young to go, Harry realized that the game was up, and told Davy to tell grandfather the whole story. Horror-struck, the old man ran out to the leanto, and stared at what his eyes could hardly believe, while Davy ran after him. screaming in terror, “Don’t eat it. grandaddy! Don’t eat it!”

A court of inquiry was held, of course. The whole countryside had been in an uproar of search parties ever since the Hooft baby had disappeared; but when everyone realized that Harry had meant no harm, the case was dropped. “You’ll be let off, boy,” said his grandfather, and sent Harry home.

When the old man himself reached the farm, he was barefoot, and carrying no boots. He had sold his only pair for $13, which he stiffly handed to Harry with strict instructions to buy a dog.

The story of Harry and Davy has been made into a surpassing movie, The Little Kidnappers (J. Arthur Rank; United Artists), directed by Philip Leacock and written by Novelist Neil Paterson (Man on the Tightrope), whose script is a fable as deep-going and sweet-running as any on the children’s shelf. The innocence of the children. Jon Whiteley as Harry and Vincent Winter as Davy, pierces the heart like a spring morning, and Duncan Macrae and Jean Anderson are fearfully true to life as the boys’ Scottish Calvinist grandparents. The photography, by Eric Cross, fills the background with a balmy, natural murmur that seems to heal the young hearts as soon as they are hurt. All in all, The Little Kidnappers is one of the half-dozen best movies ever made about children.