How Ken Loach scarred a child actor for life: “These people were so cruel”
The British actor David Bradley will always be tied to his excellent performance as a teenager in Ken Loach’s widely admired 1969 kitchen sink drama film Kes, which was based on Barry Hines’ 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, written by Loach, Hines and Tony Garnett, who also produced the film.
He plays Billy, a young boy from a dysfunctional working-class family in a poor part of South Yorkshire known for its contributions to the coal mining industry. He’s considered a “no-hoper” at school but finds a way to enjoy his life when he adopts a fledgling kestrel he affectionately names Kes.
Bradley once opened up on Loach’s methods as a director and admitted that, on occasion, they were a bit too much to handle. “He would play tricks to see if he could get a reaction,” the actor once told The Guardian before noting that he was convinced the director had a person hide with a hidden dog to chase Bradley down the street.
Another scene in Kes has Billy and a set of his fellow schoolboys receive several lashes of the cane as a punishment for their poor behaviour. Bradley and the other young actors were told that Loach would cut the scene before they were indeed struck, but the director did not provide the young lads such grace.
He later explained that he wanted to achieve a sense of reality in the film, so he decided to actually have his actors caned. “You can’t imitate that expression, the point at which the cane strikes the hand,” he said via The Guardian. “So we just caned them, really.” Painful, yes, probably a bit too much as well, but also undoubtedly contributing to Loach’s unique sense of believability.
However, perhaps the cruellest of all Loach’s “tricks” surrounds the film’s tragic ending, where Billy’s brother, Jud, kills Kes, to Billy’s dismay. Ahead of the scene, Loach told Jud actor Freddie Fletcher in earshot of Bradley to go off and kill Hardy the kestrel so they could use the dead body for the film.
However, Bradley had a suspicion that the crew of the film, even Loach, who had previously demonstrated his questionable methods, would have it in them to actually kill an innocent animal. “I just couldn’t believe these nice people could be so cruel,” he said. Of seeing Hardy alive and well, the actor noted, “I said to them: ‘I knew you wouldn’t kill him! I knew you wouldn’t!’”
Bradley often shows up at screenings of Kes, but he has never been able to bring himself to watch the end of the film because he finds it too upsetting. “I have to apologise to audiences,” he said, “I say to them: ‘Please excuse me if you see this shadow walking out at the end; it’s just too much to stay behind.’” So, the young actor went through his fair share of torture in Loach’s classic movie.
