The Railway Children Return can't fail to show Yorkshire at its finest - Jayne Dowle

Its premiere, at The Picture House Cinema, Keighley, last Sunday, received a rapturous welcome, putting Yorkshire on the map once again for its seemingly boundless ability to provide the most beautiful backdrop to any screen production.

It’s probably fair to say that we all need something to restore our faith in human nature right now. And the tale of three evacuee children from wartime Manchester, Lily (Beau Gadsdon), Pattie (Eden Hamilton) and Ted (Zac Cudby), who arrive in the same village where Roberta (Jenny Agutter, reprising her role in the original) and her daughter, the local school’s headmistress, played by Yorkshire’s Sheridan Smith, certainly promises to do that. The children, plus Roberta’s grandson, Thomas (Austin Haynes), whose father is away fighting the Germans, discover an American soldier, Abe (Kenneth Aikens) hidden in one of the railway engines in a siding.

I haven’t seen the film yet, so I can’t tell you what happens next, but if the original is anything to go by, no doubt a few tears (including mine) will be shed before everything turns out well in the end. With a quality cast, including John Bradley (Samwell Tarly in HBO’s epic drama serial Game of Thrones) playing bluff station master Albert Perks, it can’t fail, really.

And it can’t fail to show Yorkshire at its finest. The film, shot on picturesque locations such as Oakworth Station and the Brontë Parsonage, is produced by Jemma Rodgers, who used to live in Haworth.

We must wait until 2023, it’s reported, until a new tourism body for Yorkshire is launched. Until then, this new film will do an excellent job of promoting our region. I’ve already had emails from friends in London enquiring what it’s like to stay in Haworth, where the Brontë Parsonage suffered loss of visitor income during the pandemic. According to the director, the settings – gritty and rugged and resilient and passionate – define the film’s feel, while the region’s heritage railways are “a gift”.

This will hopefully provide the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, a five-mile long volunteer-run heritage railway in the Worth Valley, with a much-needed boost, raising its profile and coffers. It will also promote tourism in Haworth and the surrounding villages and countryside, and even further afield across the region.

In Harrogate, for example, Bettys Café Tea Rooms has created The Railway Children Return Gift Box – a limited-edition £40 gift box filled with edible goodies including a milk chocolate train and a golden guinea.

Rodgers says that her film is also about children’s resilience, and growing up too fast. More than 80 years might separate the experiences of wartime evacuees and today’s youngsters, but resilience and growing up too fast are two highly-relevant and relatable issues they will totally understand. I’d say too that, like the original, the film will also be about adulthood and how experience shapes us – and sometimes, sours our view of the world.

With a husband who worked away for long periods of time, I identified immediately with the mother left to hold the fort. I felt her anxiety, and frustration.

When the absent father, in prison for a crime he did not commit, finally comes back to the heartfelt cries of “Daddy, my daddy!!!” I was in floods of tears.

This latest film will explore parenthood again for sure, but also address how the actions of adults – and the consequences – can seem unfathomable, even frightening, to children.

Because the story is seen largely through their eyes, we are able to see as they see. This shift in perspective brings about a deeper understanding of individual experience and family dynamics. Idealised it may be, but this kind of ‘soft power’ as political theorists call it, often has more impact than any amount of angst-ridden, brow-beating drama.

There will be those who carp, no doubt, about the whole premise of The Railway Children Return, and say that the plot sounds derivative of 1961’s Whistle Down the Wind, in which Hayley Mills’ character, Kathy Bostock, finds a fugitive in a barn. There may also be comments about its ‘woke’ characterisation; GI Abe is a black character. Let’s not spoil it by too much dissection. I think that it would do us all good to remember that this very special new release sets out with the most simple and positive of premises.

“It’s about family, through friendship,” says Rodgers. “I hope it brings a sense of hope.” And right now, we all need hope, possibly more than ever.