APTED'S 7UP SERIES

I’ve not been meeting my self-imposed goal of getting a thousand words a day into this blog for two reasons. One is that I reinstalled my operating system, which meant parts are missing or do surprising things, so I’ve been trying to figure it all out. The other is that I’ve been absorbed in the 7Up series of movies about kids in England. I’ve heard about these five films for a long time and always thought they would be interesting, but to sit here in prairie Montana at age 68 and watch these English kids grow to nearly fifty has an enormous impact.

One falls in love with them. No actors could ever duplicate this long arc of near-grub-dom through awkward metamorphosis to first flight to the high glides of maturity and then the beginning of a slow sinking back to earth. At the end of this set of films some are a bit bald, wrinkly, and quite a few are, um, hefty. Esp. the women. Tony, that energetic little rascal, remains true to his nature right on through his life -- still running hard, still riding horses as fast as they will go, and loving his children so much that it interferes with their discipline. Suzie, who made us worry about her for being a “poor little rich girl”, finds true love and suddenly blooms into a regal and balanced woman.

John, who seemed to some so priggish and so invested in the wonderfulness of England, turns out to have deep roots in Bulgaria which he honors and develops by taking medical supplies into orphanages and hospitals where babies are so wizened and twisted that his wife, daughter of the former British ambassador to Bulgaria, turns her head to hide tears. (Darrell Kipp made a visit to Bulgaria and came back humbled -- when I make noises about my ‘umble ‘ouse, he tells me it is “Oh-pulent” compared with a Bulgarian one-room stone cottage furnished with a bed built into the corner -- to save the wood for three legs -- peg on the wall for one’s other set of clothes, and small wood stove on which to fry the single egg. There is barely enough to keep people alive, half-starved.) John is one of three little boarding school boys. Of the three Latin-singing boys, one turns out to be a hip and enlightened character (Charlie) who becomes a BBC producer. Andrew is the sort of steady person we all depend upon, keeping the world orderly. It is the upper-class boys who end up outdoors, digging gardens and taking walks with the kids.

The set of three little public school girls turn out to be quite separate, though one is more different than the other two. Michael Apted, the force behind this series, says he didn’t see feminism coming or he’d have looked for more little girls. I’d say it came along and gob-smacked him anyway. The three little girls are tough, sensible and intelligent. They say they chose their own ways and they did. Two of them ended up single parents -- the fathers seem to wander off, not quite necessary after getting the kids started. Of course, the loss of their paychecks hurt. None seem to make child-support payments.

The two little near-orphan boys who make you ache to gather them up when they are seven years old in their children’s home, turn out to be big, competent, child-loving men. Symon shows no sign of his mother’s tendency to depression but he does start out with a quiet life, a shy wife, and a cold job in a sausage factory -- then later he doubles back to a much more vivid woman and begins to take classes. Paul goes to Australia and finds a woman who loves him dearly -- the effect is something like the blossoming of Suzie when she found her husband. But it’s even stronger because of the broad Australian land, the redeeming beaches after all that British rain.

The two who seemed most different from each other -- steady, devoted Bruce the mathematician and Neil the wild, homeless, boundaryless man of fancy and yearning -- become good enough friends for Neil to give a prayer at Bruce’s wedding to a woman who seems truly his soul mate, very much worth waiting for. In my opinion, this series says about as much about the importance of successful love and marriage and about the blessings of children as it does about class structure in Britain. (Incidentally, these two are the most religious.)

Native Americans note the damage that boarding schools have done to their sense of family as well as being miserable places to live. But many of these people are boarding school students and “only” children, some of them sent off at quite a young age, and yet they are dedicated to their children, raise them without nannies and boarding schools, seem to understand “family” even as they remark they hardly knew their parents.

The East Enders have a strong sense of themselves as a category and a culture: mom-loving, out for a good time, ready for a scrap. Strangely, the East End just disappeared under a tide of Middle Eastern and Far Eastern people. The original denizens scattered, those in Scotland saying it feels a bit like home. Bruce, the upper class boy with tendencies to mission work, only has to stay put and the needy masses come to him since he ends up teaching in the East End. He does go to Bangladesh where he is big, solid and blonde among the darting slim big-eyed people. Always focused and imperturbable, a steady anchor in a shifty world.

Nick, the little farm boy in muddy Wellies, ends up in Wisconsin with a brilliant and beautiful wife. He’s a physics full professor, but he says, even after publishing two books, he’ll never be as famous for his science as he is for being in 7Up. And then this remarkable man, who moved me deeply, talked about the country hills where he grew up as a place where the clouds flowed across the sky, the water rushed across the land, the air moved around the grazing animals -- everything always in transition -- “poetic really,” he says. Then he remarks with perfect logic, that his physics work, which is the behavior of plasmas, is the same. There’s a sense of symmetry and fulfillment.

By the last movie the subjects have either opted out or have come to accept Apted as a sort of weird relative who shows up every seven years to make them cry and admit secrets. They reproach him a bit, and they are pretty clear about their limits.

Thousands of people write to these folks, recognize them, think about them and worry about their well-being. Attachment is a strange human phenomenon. We become so invested in images of people who are quite real but far away and no longer as they were, going about their business apart from the viewer all the years between the filming, never knowing the viewers -- though Neil says he’s become fairly close friends with some who wrote to him. When the earliest deaths come, they will hit many people hard. Me included. It seems that life itself is a kind of art form.