![]() Excerpted from The Long Song by Andrea Levy. ![]() Then she stooped to grab the base of the cane once more to strike it with a further blow. Against the mother’s plaintive protest, the infant is basically kidnapped, and taken off to answer every demand of her spoilt, violent, spiteful mistress. When the serrated edges of the cane leaves dropped their abrasive grit into her eyes, she tilted her head back to permit the rain to wash them with its balm. Toiling around the sugar cane fields with her mother Kitty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), July catches the eye of Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell), the sister of the plantation owner. Such was the initial fate of July (Tamara Lawrance), the central figure in this dramatisation of Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel, set in early 19th-century Jamaica. How else can one react to the forcible removal of a child from their mother, on the whim of a selfish woman looking for a slave maidservant she can mould in her own (morally) unattractive image? In all seriousness, though, The Long Song is incredibly moving. ![]() To my mind, that makes it rather better than the frankly vacuous and anodyne Downton. I hope it’s not too flippant to describe The Long Song (BBC1) as being like Downton Abbey, but with added sadism and crimes against humanity. ![]()
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