Northumberland, 1994: six years after the pit closed, the men of Blakemoor sit up all night guarding their show leeks, and a Javanese doctoral student sits up with them. By morning one prize leek has been slashed, the village knows more than it will say to the constable, and she has to decide whether an old miner's flickering eyelid is a tic or a signal meant for her.
by Clifford Geertz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A Screenplay in Two Sequences
Blakemoor, a pit village in south-east Northumberland, September 1994. The colliery closed six years ago. The leek show has not.
RATNA SUDARMONO, 29, a doctoral student from Yogyakarta, spending a year at Durham
GEORGE ROBSON, 71, retired hewer, three times winner of the Blakemoor leek show
KENNY HEDLEY, 56, secretary of the show committee, the last man taken on at the pit
MAVIS ROBSON, 68, George's wife, keeper of the tea urn
MR. ELLERBY, the judge, up from Durham
PC DAWSON, the village constable
OLD MAN, SECOND OLD MAN, MAN, regulars of the Miners' Welfare
EXT. BLAKEMOOR ALLOTMENTS — NIGHT
SUPER: Blakemoor, Northumberland. Friday, 16 September 1994.
Behind a pit-yard fence with no pit behind it any more, forty sheds stand in rows on ground that was once spoil. Most are dark. Six have a low orange light in them: paraffin light, the colour of men who have decided not to go to bed.
RATNA SUDARMONO (29) comes along the cinder path with a torch she has not switched on, because she has not yet worked out whether a torch, here, is rude. The anorak is a man's, borrowed, and reaches her knees. She holds a notebook the way other people hold a ticket.
She stops at the gate of plot 14. The shed door stands open a hand's width. Inside, the tick of a heater, and a boot.
RATNA
Mr. Robson? Mr. Hedley said that I might sit—
The boot withdraws. The door opens the rest of the way. Nobody says come in. After a moment she decides that this must be how it is said, and goes in.
INT. GEORGE'S SHED — CONTINUOUS
Six feet by eight, and built against a glasshouse, which is the point of it. A Valor heater. A flask, two mugs, one of them for show. The inner door to the glasshouse is propped open, and beyond it, under a tent of hessian sacking on a frame of canes, a hurricane lamp burns low over a trench of black soil. Four leeks stand in it, thick as a collier's forearm, their white barrels bound in collars of drainpipe, their flags laid back like the ears of something asleep.
GEORGE ROBSON (71) sits on an upturned crate in the doorway between shed and glasshouse, facing the leeks, as a man sits by a bed. Cap. Big hands. A scar at the hairline gone white with the rest of him.
Ratna takes the other crate. She opens the notebook.
RATNA
How large are they?
GEORGE
How large d'you want them?
RATNA
I mean in what measure. Weight?
GEORGE
Inches.
She writes inches. He watches her write it, as if it were a thing worth watching.
RATNA
And the prize, if one wins?
GEORGE
Pans.
RATNA
Pans.
GEORGE
Set of pans. Stainless.
She writes that too. George pours tea into the mug that is for show and hands it to her, and so it is no longer for show.
RATNA
The seed, the heater, the paraffin. A whole year. It must cost more than pans.
GEORGE
Aye.
(beat)
It does that.
His left eyelid flickers, twice, quick, in the middle of the word, the way a moth touches a window. He does not seem to know that it has happened. He drinks his tea.
Ratna looks up at the eye. It is still now. She looks down, and writes.
Rain begins on the glass, lightly.
Footsteps on cinders. KENNY HEDLEY (56) puts his head round the door: anorak, committee badge on the lapel, a torch that is always on. He has the manner of a man with a clipboard, though he is not carrying one.
KENNY
Just seeing the visitor's settled.
GEORGE
She's settled.
KENNY
(to Ratna, slow and loud, as to the deaf)
Now, pet. You'll not touch the leeks. Nobody touches another man's leeks, that's rule one. Rule two, nobody goes on another man's plot after dark without he's asked. Rule three—
GEORGE
She's not touching them, Kenny.
KENNY
I'm only saying the rules. She's writing it all down, she wants it right.
(to Ratna)
And you can put this in your book an' all. Number nine'll go a hundred this year.
RATNA
A hundred—?
KENNY
Cubic inches. Length to the button, girth at the middle, and Mr. Ellerby works it out on the card. There's men in this village never had a hundred.
(at George)
There's men never will.
GEORGE
Who's been measuring it, Kenny?
KENNY
Nobody's been measuring it.
GEORGE
Then how d'you know?
A pause, in which Kenny discovers that he has no answer he wishes to give.
George looks at him, and his left eye closes and opens: slower than before, and this time it goes somewhere, across the shed, to Kenny. Kenny's left eye does the same, back. Something has been paid, or agreed, in a currency the visitor does not carry. Kenny withdraws his head. His torch beam swings away down the path.
Ratna, who has seen the same eyelid do the same thing twice in five minutes, makes the same small mark in her notebook twice.
INSERT — THE NOTEBOOK
In a small upright hand, under the date:
Men guard vegetables. Mr R. has a nervous tic.
BACK TO SCENE
George turns the lamp down a quarter-inch, and turns back to his leeks.
INT. GEORGE'S SHED — LATER
The heater lower. The rain stopped. Ratna asleep sitting up against the planking, the notebook shut on her knee, her pen still in it to keep the place.
George is awake. He has not moved, except that the flask is emptier. He takes out a pocket watch: three minutes to three. He puts it back.
From down the path, not loud, a sound: a short wet crack, like a stick of celery broken inside a cloth.
George hears it. He does not get up. He screws the cup back onto the flask, taking his time over the thread.
Ratna wakes, sees his face, sees that it is listening, sees that nothing else about him is. She grabs her torch and is out of the door.
EXT. CINDER PATH — CONTINUOUS
She runs, forty yards, in an anorak made for someone larger. At last her torch comes on. It finds wet cabbages, a water butt, a gate standing open: plot 9.
EXT. KENNY'S PLOT — CONTINUOUS
The sacking tent has been dragged back off its canes. Kenny stands over his trench, his own torch pointed down into it.
Of his four leeks, the best — the one nearest the path, the one a man would show a visitor — has been cut through the barrel on a clean slant. The white flesh stands open and wet in the torchlight. The flags lean.
Kenny turns. His torch finds Ratna before it finds anything else.
KENNY
You.
(beat)
What are you doing down here?
RATNA
I heard— Mr. Hedley, I heard something, and I—
KENNY
Did you see anybody? On the path? Did anybody go past you?
RATNA
No. Nobody.
Kenny takes this in. Something in his shoulders comes down an inch.
George arrives along the path at the pace of a man walking to the post office. He stops at the edge of the trench. He looks at the cut. He looks at Kenny. He looks, for longer, at the cut.
KENNY
The night before. The night before, George.
George says nothing. He lowers himself, one hand on the gatepost, until he can see the leek at the height of the leek, and he stays there, as long as it takes to read a pay slip.
Kenny's right hand, which has been in the air all this while, goes into his anorak pocket and stays there.
Ratna's torch is still on the slashed barrel. George, rising, reaches over without a word and presses her wrist down, gently, until the beam lies on the cinders.
It lies there now on Kenny's boots, and on the pocket, and the shape the hand makes inside it.
Kenny's own torch stays where it was: on the leek, open and white, the brightest thing in the gardens.
CUT TO:
INT. BLAKEMOOR MINERS' WELFARE, MAIN HALL — MORNING
A hall paid for by miners' pennies and painted since by nobody. Down the middle run trestle benches draped in black cloth, and on the black, in pairs, lie the leeks: washed white, their roots combed out like a beard, their flags laid back along the cloth. Each pair has a card with a number on it and no name. Everybody in the room knows the names.
At the far end MAVIS ROBSON (68) keeps a tea urn the size of a small boiler, and so keeps the room.
MR. ELLERBY (60s), up from Durham, in a tie nobody in Blakemoor would wear on a Saturday, works along the bench with calipers, a tape and a card. He speaks to no one. That is what he is for.
Ratna stands inside the door, the anorak over her arm, the notebook in her hand and the pen not moving. The news has come down Front Street ahead of Kenny, and it goes along the hall in pieces of two words, under the breath, between cups.
OLD MAN
Nine's gone.
SECOND OLD MAN
Kenny's?
OLD MAN
Last night.
The door bangs. KENNY carries the slashed leek in both arms, level, wrapped in a damp tea towel. He lays it at the far end of the bench, away from the numbered pairs, and unwraps it. The slant cut has gone brown at the lips. Beside it he props a card in his own capitals: NOT FOR JUDGING.
A half of bitter appears at his elbow from the bar hatch. Nobody saw it ordered. A hand comes down on his shoulder, then another.
MAN
Shame, Kenny.
KENNY
The night before. That's what I can't get over. The night before.
It is more notice than Kenny Hedley has had in this room since the day the pit shut, and he wears it like a good coat that somebody has lent him.
George is by the wall under the honours board, cap on, a cup in his hand. He does not go over. The room is doing that for him.
INT. WELFARE HALL — LATER
PC DAWSON (40s), helmet under his arm, comes in and goes straight to the urn, which is why he has come. Mavis has his tea poured before he gets there.
PC DAWSON
Bad business at the gardens, I hear.
MAVIS
Is it?
PC DAWSON
Kenny's leek.
MAVIS
Oh. That.
He turns with the cup to face the hall, pleasantly, as a man turns to a view.
PC DAWSON
Not that it's a police matter. But if anybody saw anything.
Nobody did. The hall looks into its tea.
PC DAWSON
(pleasantly)
Somebody said there was a young lady down the gardens last night.
Kenny's glass stops on its way to his mouth. Nobody turns to look at Ratna, and they all manage it together, so that she feels it like a draught.
She looks across the hall for help. George looks back.
His left eyelid comes down and goes up.
Last night she gave that movement the same mark in her book twice. The book is shut in her hand now. The constable is waiting, and he is being very patient about it.
RATNA
I was in Mr. Robson's shed.
(beat)
I am afraid I was asleep.
It is true, as far as it goes. The hall hears how far it goes.
PC Dawson looks at her a moment longer, a Northumbrian constable looking at a Javanese graduate student in a pit welfare hall, and he has no form for it.
PC DAWSON
Aye, well. It's the sitting up that does it.
He drinks off his tea, sets the cup down by the urn, nods to Mavis, and goes. Kenny drinks. Across the room a conversation picks up in the middle of a sentence, as though it had only been holding its breath.
Ratna lowers her eyes to the floorboards, by herself.
INT. WELFARE HALL — BENCH — LATER
Ellerby straightens. He writes on the card, then pins a red rosette to a pair numbered 23: two leeks as thick as a collier's forearm, their barrels still ringed faintly where the drainpipe collars sat.
ELLERBY
First, number twenty-three. Ninety-six and four-tenths.
The applause is short, the kind a room gives to good weather. Ninety-six. There are men in this village who never had a hundred, and it turns out one of them is George.
Kenny, club secretary, puts his half down and does his duty. From under the committee table he brings a long cardboard box and carries it the length of the hall to the wall where George stands.
KENNY
(formal, for the room)
On behalf of the committee.
GEORGE
Thank you, Kenny.
George takes the box and holds it. On the lid, in blue: SIX-PIECE STAINLESS SET. He weighs it in his hands, as a year's paraffin might be weighed.
Then he gives it back.
GEORGE
For your Brenda.
Kenny's right hand goes to his anorak pocket, finds only the pocket, and comes out again. He takes the box in both arms.
KENNY
She's wanted a set.
GEORGE
Aye. I know she has.
A beat of quiet. Then somebody laughs, and the laugh is general and warm, and Kenny's ears go red to the rims.
Everybody in the hall has seen a man give away a prize. Not everybody sees what has been given, and the ones who do go back to their tea. Ellerby, from Durham, sees nothing at all. He is folding his tape.
INT. WELFARE HALL — AT THE URN — CONTINUOUS
Ratna brings her empty cup back. Mavis takes it, rinses it, fills it again without asking.
MAVIS
He's never had anybody sit up with him but me. Thirty-one year.
RATNA
I did not know.
MAVIS
No. Well.
(handing it over)
Bring your own flask next year, pet. He'll not share twice.
RATNA
Next year?
MAVIS
You'll want to see if he gets his hundred.
Ratna looks down the hall. George, at the wall, with nothing in his hands now, is looking at her.
She tries it. She sets out to close her left eye alone. The right one goes with it. Both shut tight, her nose wrinkles, her mouth pulls sideways with the effort, and her whole face takes part in something only one eyelid was meant to do.
Mavis laughs out loud, a single bark over the urn. George laughs. It is the first time we have seen it: the head goes back, the cap tips, and for a moment he is much younger and not at all polite.
INSERT — THE NOTEBOOK
The same page, the same upright hand. One line drawn neatly through the second sentence:
Men guard vegetables. Mr R. has a nervous tic.
Beneath it, nothing new.
BACK TO SCENE
George is still laughing. In the middle of it his left eyelid goes, twice, quick, all on its own.
Ratna sees it. She does not open the book. She drinks her tea.
FADE OUT.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Cliffordō Geertziō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Clifford Geertz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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