Ethel & Ernest

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Firstly, it acts as a useful historical guide, for both children and adults. This occurs not only by displaying some of the most famous moments of the twentieth century, but also by showing them from the perspective of Briggs’ parents. Consequently, we hold an emotional investment in events that we normally only contend with in written form, which typically offers far less scope for emotion and empathy. Ogni capitolo è scandito da decenni (‘30-‘40; ‘40-‘50; ‘50-‘60; ‘60-‘70) per poi giungere al capitolo finale, che comprende solo il 1970-1971. There is so much humor and tenderness in this book. The love Ethel and Ernest have for each other is epic and perhaps even more so given that Briggs is focusing on the mundane, every-day stuff of life (even during wartime).

Now, I had always thought that such carefree joy could never be replicated in the workplace. You can, therefore, imagine my delight when I found out that Age UK London had partnered with Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Content Group to put on a free showing of Ethel and Ernest for forty-five older Londoners at The Soho Hotel. Especially once I discovered that I would get to come along for the day out – and in the last week of “term” no less! As with all Briggs’s subsequent titles, the book is full of autobiographical elements and references. His own childhood home and Loch Fyne holidays appear regularly and he himself pops up in the follow-up, Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (1975). But friends knew another side to Briggs – loyal and playful, an inveterate practical joker. Lord once made the mistake of confessing to a dislike of dogs in the presence of Briggs, thereby immediately committing himself to becoming the recipient of all manner of canine-related gifts on subsequent birthdays and Christmases. Like so many of his characters, Briggs’s grumpiness never quite managed to conceal an underlying warmth and kindness. In 2017 he was appointed CBE.

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When I was in Junior School, there would always be one day in the final week of the Winter Term which was basically a free-for-all. To celebrate the run-up to Christmas we were allowed to miss lessons, bring in board games, and eat party food. It was glorious. But the best part of the day was always the moment when our teacher would wheel out a twenty-year-old television set for us all to huddle round and watch an animated film together.

The story takes place in London, England from the 1920s through 1971. We meet Ethel who is a maid who one day she sees a man from the window who is riding a bike. He waves at her and she blushes that a man is paying attention to her. He tells her that his name is Ernest and then asks her out to go watch a movie. After that encounter they become a couple and soon enough they get married. She quits her job and becomes a house wife while Ernest works as a milkman. We enter the 1930s and the times are rough during these period because of high unemployment, recuperating from WWI, and economic depression. Poignant, funny, and utterly original, Ethel & Ernest is Raymond Briggs's loving depiction of his parents' lives from their first chance encounter in the 1920s until their deaths in the 1970s.Ethel and Ernest are solid members of the working class, part of the generation (Brokaw's "Greatest Generation") that lived through the tumultuous era of the twentieth century. They meet during the Depression -- she working as a chambermaid, he as a milkman -- and we follow them as they encounter, and cope with, World War II, the advent of radio and t.v., telephones and cars, the atomic bomb, the moon landing. Briggs's portrayal of his parents as they succeed, or fail, in coming to terms with their rapidly shifting world is irresistably engaging -- full of sympathy and affection, yet clear-eyed and unsentimental.His final book was consciously intended to be just that. Compiled across several of his last years, Time for Lights Out (2019) is a poignant, funny and deeply honest exploration of the experience of ageing and reaching the end of life, in the form of a collage of verse, drawings and random thoughts. Such prejudices, still not entirely eradicated today, were commonplace at art schools of the time. Although he bemoaned his tutors’ failure to recognise a “natural illustrator”, the formal training that he received imbued in Briggs a strong sense of structure and of the importance of good draughtsmanship. These equipped him well in book illustration, although he left the Slade with what he saw as a poor sense of colour and a dislike of paint. When he eventually arrived at the film version of The Snowman, he expressed pleasure at how it so faithfully and painstakingly replicated his coloured-pencil technique, despite the massively labour-intensive approach that this necessitated.