Mad about flowers

“The English, so visually blind in most ways, are mad about flowers” - John Berger

Some serious work got done in the garden last weekend. Such effort for a space approximately 30 feet by 15. The urban garden indicates more about our predicament than I think we’d like to know.

It got me thinking about my favourite tape right now, which contains Lindsay Anderson’s 1957 documentary about the old Covent Garden flower market,Every Day Except Christmas.

Given that my horticultural expertise is limited to identifying about a dozen of the more common flowers, it’s a curious choice. But then, it’s a glorious documentary; precise, unfussy and respectful. That it looks wonderful helps; Anderson and cameraman Walter Lassally gorge themselves on the lyrical evocation of urban space and the harsh poetry of normal faces in close-up.

But it’s the tone of the piece that moves me to tears. Anderson, though heading up the Free Cinema movement that called for an unflinching acceptance of the detail of everyday experience, is far from being a brutal realist. He is endlessly fascinated by the details of working life, cataloguing and describing the rhythmical movements of labour like some displaced 1930s poet.

In fact, the style is most reminiscent of the previous high-point of British documentary, the work of Alberto Cavalcanti and Humphrey Jennings. Every Day Except Christmas is, in effect, a belated prose continuation of Night Mail andCoal Face.

There’s no Auden, of course, to render the motion of these working men and women into rock-solid, echoing verse. Anderson does more than adequately without, using the soft Welsh voice of Alun Owen to caress the viewer into friendship with the characters who turn up, including one particularly noticeable sequence in the open-all-hours cafe.

As the porters take a well-earned break for a cuppa in the small hours, the voiceover introduces the other customers, who drift in ‘from who knows where’. The obvious queerness of many of them easily covers the gap in the narration, and this too is moving, these chaps who pass in the night sharing the warm snug with the workers.

Throughout, the cold shot of gritty reality is ladled over with Anderson’s warm, warming milk of human kindness. It may be too sweet for some, but this type of understated solidarity is the only kind of sentimentalism I can really bear.

I can’t put it better than John Berger in his Sight and Sound article ‘Look at Britain!’ (the Ford-sponsored series for which Every Day Except Christmas was made):

‘There is the image of Bill unloading and stacking boxes, the camera moving with each box across the necessary two yards, this is not the hardest work but we are given the measure of it. There is the image showing the experienced way of getting a sack of potatoes up on to the shoulder. There are the old women flower sellers searching for the cheapest blossoms that with their blarney must earn them their livelihood. There is the boy with thoughts in his head heaving boxes of flowers piled high on top of it. There is the quickest way of polishing an apple. There are the big buyers, busy, shrewd and utterly practical; the earth and what grows thereon is a commodity. There is the moment when the night ends; a new city day, accordioned, not cuckooed in. Above all there is the work, the crooning, clowning, smoking, and again work, of the young porters who have restless hopes on the far side of their knowledge.’

Every Day Except Christmas is available on the Free Cinema compilation.