Our Line : the script
by Hannah Bruce for HB&Co
Our Line script by Hannah Bruce
Our Line script by Hannah Bruce
Jade plays Jade, Nellie and Announcer
Helen plays Hayley and Announcer
Jade: 40 year old woman from Darlington
Jade only ever appears in the actual world. We hear her on the platform, in the train. She’s a real life person!
She speaks to her friend Hayley on the phone (who lives in Darlington but isn't from there originally), and refers to both her young niece Kim (we don’t ever hear Kim) and her friend Mike
Nellie: Nellie is from Darlington, but she is a narrator who we hear close inside our head. She commentates on the world, and is not a real-world person so much as a filmic narrator. Hers is a more poetic, reflective voice. Nellie is the voice in our head that we all have - the voice we debate things with and argue things out with.
Mr Johnson: cared for Nora when she was an old woman, he is now an old man himself. We never hear him.
Mike: Jade’s friend / lover. We never hear hm.
Hayley: Jade’s friend. We only hear her on the end of the phone.
Kim: Jade’s 7 year old niece. We never hear her.
Announcers: both on the tannoy in Darlington station, and on the train itself.
Scene 1 (approx. 1.45-2mins)
Studio recording
starts 6mins prior to train departure
Announcer (Helen AND Jade do a version) – plain song style chanting over tannoy, like a psalm or Methodist preacher:
The 5:30 to Newcastle
is at Platform 10.
A no-show conductor
on the free:15 to York,
The 3:thriving
delayed
til champagne thirty.
(Picks up speed
at quarter past caffeine)
The 5:flirty to Newcastle,
The 6:Thrifty jeans and Haribo
Middlesbrough snacks
a cuppa in cattle class,
Hen:party
10:50 Nifty
with bright red lips.
Diva-Donnie has a Bust replacement,
fuss and debasement,
The 5:15 unforeseen
Tweet @northernrailorg
Seat: @teenageNailBlog
Durham at 9:15
Byzantine, aquamarine
Lecture o’clock tick-tock.
Toe to toe with Darlo-Donna
(mountainous and wild
Tuesday’s child)
Wednesday’s service
Has minor delays
The 8:08
Grey, harrowed and late
The 8:15 umpteen wait
The 9:02 YES
This is you
socketed mobile
headphones
a view
Carriage B
Carriage D
Carriage E
Do you see?
Do you? Do you see?
Close and shocking: whooompf!
All tickets please
Scene 2 (approx. 2mins)
binaural, recorded on platform
starts 4mins prior to train departure
This conversation is one sided, and shouted by Jade into her phone above the station noise as she paces around on the platform (N.B. this scene can be improvised, exact script is not essential. Key themes highlighted):
Jades phone rings. She answers:
Hiya Mr Johnson,
Yes. I'm ok, how are you?
Oh, yeah I do remember him. Is he with you now?
I’ve got the cake for later – I couldn’t get the raisin one, but you like the lemon one too don’t you?
You know the project Kim has to do, about my family - ?
No, it’s the family history one, about Nora, my great grandma. Aye.
I looked at the map – she lived near a place called Booze. I was laughing about it, I thought it was a bit ironic cos – methodists don’t drink do they?
So from when you knew her, does this all make sense:
Nora was born in 1884
Her dad was a lead miner, and a Methodist preacher – is it right he built the Langthwaite chapel?
Aye, he was a busy man Abraham wasn’t he - ten kids and preaching and lead mining.
The family moved from Arkengarthdale to Shildon when lead prices collapsed in the 1890s – which put Abraham out of work. So Nora would have been between 10 to 15 years old then?
And she got married in 1909?
Aye. Oh, Bargain Hunt, fair enough. OK Mr Johnson, well I’d better go too, cos I’ve got to board the train… Yep, Bishop Auckland.
Yes I’ll bring the cake later. Bye.
When the train is ready for boarding, the train theatre steward puts on their hi vis vest and stands near the carriage door with a sign saying “please board now” or something similar!
Covers the two mins prior to scheduled departure time
In the meantime, we continue to hear the sound of Helen humming (recorded in the studio) so that people don’t think their sound has stopped. She sings a version of Train Song (Vashti). She can be singing along with a recording.
Scene 3
Audience sitting on the train.
Sound bursts into our head at the scheduled departure time of the train
Byker Hill, The Young Tradition (2min, plays in full?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl_tmCo-vyc&index=11&list=PLf7SuZDrr8B5f7YNLdz2T-I9BK25Ajzf7
Nellie speaks:
[1min ish]
Have you ever watched someone looking out of a train window?
Eyes flickering against the speed, the movement punching their eyeballs.
Looking far away is less wobbly.
Can’t resist trying it, can you?!
And if the sun’s right, there’s the reflection of the carriage in the window,
a faint ghostly pattern of faces imprinted on the landscape.
[further Helen humming interspersed? But this time Byker Hill]
I never met my great grandmother Nora, but she hovers around the edges of my mother’s memory. A tiny woman, she died when my mam was about 7. She remembers her baby teeth coming out at the time.
[we are probably at North Road by now]
Born 1884, married 1909, there are still little pockets of things left from Nora's day that you'll see. The North Road workshops. The Railway Hotel built in 1909. Waiting Rooms (that are still waiting, probably for ladies to start wearing hats again), and rusting steam engines.
Scene 4 (total 8mins)
45secs ish
Nellie continues:
Arkengarthdale is where Nora grew up. I didn’t even know how to pronounce it when I first saw it on the map. I picture Nora as a child singing. Not the dirgey hymns of my childhood – she’d have been belting out Methodist harmonies. ‘We sing our faith. We acknowledge our belonging to each other’. That sort of thing.
Abram, was her dad’s name.
He built Langthwaite chapel – I got the brochure off Rightmove from when it was auctioned this year. There are Estate Agent photos - I try to imagine Nora in them, like photoshopping a ghost, but I can’t picture her in colour. I can't picture her on these platforms.
As far as I know, my great grandmother never had her photo taken as a child. You had to be old enough to know how to keep still, else you’d blur. Maybe she just loved to move.
Kathryn Tickell: Small Coals and Little Money / Wild Berries (2mins 34)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WhIoM5USc
[over the top of the music]
Nellie:
The click of the shutter
catches her
licking her lips.
She pinches her wrist
and flicks her eyes to the green
of the dale
beyond the frame.
Lets pretend the world
can remain
as green as this.
[music ends]
[next section 1min]
Nellie continues:
Do you have proper photo albums anywhere? They’re sort of historical now, don’t you think? There’s so much weight in an old printed photo, as opposed to the light brush of a finger across a screen. I used a sepia effect on a selfie the other day, just to see what it felt like, to look at an old version of me. I thought I might catch a glimpse of Nora that way.
Nora’s house in Shildon has PVC windows now, and a smart pebbledash surface. I try to imagine her inside, her hands peeling potatoes as fast as mine can swipe and tap an online map - hundreds of old lead mines near Arkengarthdale I found, and hundreds of small coal mines around Shildon and Bishop Auckland. This rumpled green surface all around you hides stuff. Treetrunks deep down, straining against a black earthy sky. Seams. Veins. Silence. Scars.
[min list approx 1.5min]
[combine with Helen humming Byker Hill]
[insistent and persistent]
Jade and Helen, each do versions that are voiced and unvoiced:
Sturtfit Hall Level closed 1883,
Fremington Mines closed 1883,
Black Vein Level,
Scatter Scar Hush,
Booze Wood Level closed 1903,
Gooseneck Level closed 1870
Gutter’s Level closed 1881
Shildon Lodge Furnace Pit, closed 1937
Shildon Coal Company Ltd, closed 1924
South Shildon, closed 1958
Middridge, Eden Pit, closed 1880
Thickley, closed 1944
Blackboy closed 1923
Tunnel Drift, closed 1955
Adelaide, Jane Pit closed 1924
Deanery closed 1869
South Church Drift closed 1938
Auckland Park South Pit, closed 1921
Coundon, closed 1908
Bishop’s Park, closed 1938
Quarry Drift closed 1955
Etherley Lane Drift closed 1938
[this section over the top of the mines litany]
Nellie continues:
And in the midst of all these closures, the congregation - impoverished lead miners and farmers - gather contributions for a new chapel costing £1,631.
I find that level of belief astonishing.
That community of people all investing in something they believe, something they hope for, something they fight for - I don’t know what a contemporary equivalent would be. The closest I can come is Jezza’s crowdfunding campaign! This collective action was the equivalent of every poor mining family contributing £600 of today’s money.
The Watersons – The Good Old Way (3mins 29secs, cut to 2mins 15secs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9qlI6hQYy0
[Take first 2 verses (0-1:23) and then cut and pick up the final verse (starting at 2:44)]
[we have probably reached Heighington around now]
Scene 5
[approx. 3mins 15secs?]
approx. 1min 30secs
Nellie continues:
When I think of Nora, I get an essence of her crashing like a wave in my brain and subsiding again. Just a wordless impression that rises and falls, faster than a description. Some snip or rush of her personality buried in the word - Nora. Surprising that a name can be so full of meaning. Do you get that with anyone? Someone close to you, or someone you remember but haven’t seen for ages?
If you had a photo
right here
in your hand –
or a face reflected in the window next to you -
who would be in it?
Are they posing?
Caught laughing in the rain?
Someone who won’t keep still?...
I’ve imagined Nora so many times that I’ve worn a pathway to her character.
I’ve created memories of her, and she’s just how I want her to be.
There are some days when
I submit to a particular type of seductive aloneness:
Throw my eyes against sandstone bridges,
Shake my bones into the Newton Aycliffe track
And whistle my thoughts as a warning to trespassers.
Sometimes, its enough
simply to look out of the window,
and let my thoughts
hover
in the treetops.
Vashti Bunyan – Train Song (1966) 2mins 16secs
About a train heading north (perhaps intro guitar starts under the text above…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGD78mWcss
[Text comes in at 1:50 over humming, hopefully roughly coinciding with us pulling out of Newton Aycliffe station???]
1min 45secs text below (but approx. 10 secs overlap with music)
Nellie continues:
So Nora and the family leave Arkengarthdale for Shildon, cart and horse, according to local myth the community waving a white sheet in the air to allow their goodbye to linger as far as eyesight can stretch, the seams of Lead running out beneath their feet and morphing into coal dust, and finally into the shining metallic tracks of an explosive railway industry…
I wonder if Nora ever found herself alone
Even for a moment?
How did she understand space,
or privacy,
or community,
in that small house on Waverley Terrace, amidst a family of 10?
Do you ever steal a moment for yourself?
I wonder
About Nora
facing the prospect of loneliness -
a track stretching ahead of her
oppressive in both rhythm and routine.
Not an occasional dull-sky loneliness,
but an existential type,
a form that throws responsibility at you and requires things of you.
Loneliness that surrounds you with people who don’t see you,
That demands you care for ageing parents,
manage a house,
look after other people’s children,
insists you are
invisible
even before you’ve begun.
25 years old, a sense of panic rising.
Roughened hands.
Perhaps that’s why she decided on Albert.
[perhaps a little bit of Helen half-singing some of the Beyonce track?! we probably have a few seconds here for a transition…]
Scene 6
[continuation of the 5mins journey from Newton Aycliffe to Shildon, we’ve already had 1min45secs, now we have another 3mins15secs]
Jade on the train – binaural, talking on her phone
Hayley's part of the conversation heard in the audience's head, close in their ear, denoted in brackets
This conversation can be improvised. As realistic as possible without talking over each other. Highlighted bits are essential to include, but don't need to keep to script.
Hayley – can you hear me?
(I can hear you – can you hear me?)
Yeh, can you still hear me now?
(yes)
Listen to this:
[playing the 1909 track, play about 15secs binaurally in carriage, then cut it off as if Jade has turned it off]
http://playback.fm/year/1909/
Banda da Casa Edison – Choro & Poesia
It’s a top 10 hit from 1909, isn’t it brilliant?
(You’re crazy you are! Where’s it from?)
Google! It sounds so old, I love it!
(I can’t hear it properly Jade, you’ll have to play it to me later.)
[exasperated] I know, its cos I’m on the train.
(where are you?)
Coming up to Shildon soon.
(you’re so weird, why are you playing me this?)
Because it would have been around the right year, when Nora and Albert got married
(Who?)
My great grandparents, Nora and Albert – I just love that old scratchy record sound, really fuzzy and crackly.
(Vintage chic… is this for Kim’s school project?)
[someone else in the carriage starts playing Beyonce on loud speaker. It starts quietly, volume gradually increases over the duration of scene. Approx first half of Beyonce track needed i.e. we need 1min 45secs. ]
Beyonce – Naughty Girl (3mins 30secs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZuJ_OHBN78
Yes, I’m really into it. You’re not going to believe it, but I’ve discovered they weren’t married when she got up the duff.
(WHAT? You can’t tell Kim that!)
I know! she’s dead nervous anyway, poor thing, so I think we’ll keep the “unplanned-turn-of-the-century-pregnancy” bit out of it thank you very much..
(Not really 7 year-old-appropriate. So wasn’t that really shameful in those days?)
Yeah –she must have been about 6 months pregnant at the wedding – IN 1909!!! - but they moved so mostly nobody knew. The family history was kind of ‘edited’ but Mr Johnson let the cat out the bag the other day. I think it was the cake getting him over excited.
(He’s dead funny sometimes isn't he? Still got a few years in him!)
Yep, such a drama queen! But I’ve always wondered why there weren’t any photos of the wedding – I mean I assumed it was because photography was expensive, but turns out there was another reason altogether!
(Bloody hell)
I ended up going round to mam’s and looking for photos of Nora, no luck.
Listen, are you going to Mike’s thing later?
(yeh, what are you wearing?)
The red top with that loop thing.
(Oh, your lucky pulling top then eh?)
Might as well! Should be a wild one!
[Beyonce track jumps into our ear loudly, then slowly fades out]
Scene 7 (7mins)
[1min 10secs]
Nellie speaks:
Mostly, the choices we make pass without recognition,
sometimes seized in retrospect and
wrestled into a respectable shape.
Justified and made safe.
As this train
hefts forward
Towards the end
(a tired metaphor)
this is a moment for reflection
and bravery.
The wrinkles on the back of Nora’s hand
like cracks
into another era
A time of tin baths
and influenza
The veins
like coal seams skimming beneath
earthy skin
The tendons
like train tracks
throbbing a slow deep shunting rhythm
of steam-filled air
When did you last make a choice that mattered?
That shaped your life?
A choice that insisted you be brave?
Nellie continues:
1min text
Albert is a draughtsman.
He has clawed his way up
since 13 years old
and now lightly skims the surface above
this hollow space
of leaden-limbed men.
Not for him a darkness untouched
by electricity
no lungfuls of particulate air.
Instead the railways
score his life
into the English landscape.
Albert is a star of the modern age
steaming into history,
on track
for glory.
Calculating engines
the length and breadth of a country carved up by tracks.
He arrives on the South coast,
to the whistle of the Lord Nelson class,
knotted hanky hats and
the handbell of the Wall’s icecream bike.
His last young blink surveys
seaside and donkeys
in tinted vintage tones.
His death
fabricates Nora anew,
and crafts
a school aged
breadwinner.
Announcer: Helen
[30secs]
We will shortly be arriving at Bishop Auckland. When you leave the train, please ensure you take all your personal baggage with you, including nostalgia, and any family photographs. When exiting the station, please ensure you retain your ticket to operate the automatic floodgates of memory.
Nellie speaks:
next section 1min 30secs text only
There’s a filmic moment
I’ll try to describe.
Train window
becomes camera.
25 year old Nora
stands in freeze frame
under Shildon’s shadow
hand halfway to her face
hair blown across her eyes.
I circle her
like I’ve stepped into a paused game -
I view her from the side, the front, above.
I smooth her hair…
pour my care
into this delicate action.
This is my remembrance
my act of acknowledgement,
an impossible meeting.
I look into the dull dale light
as the finest rain waits in the air for its chance to fall.
Together we remain still.
This is the moment I pause in my mind
A moment that hangs in the balance
Whilst some tiny, subtle, delicate scale nudges as lightly as sieved flour powdering the air -
This
is the moment
when Nora
makes
a choice.
Peter Tickell, Rain Shadow (fiddle) 3mins 17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_i8uCkX6U
[music comes in under final 30 secs of this text above]