3 The Americans were exploring wild new frontiers while we were working out how to say ‘A handbag?’.
4 A disinfectant whose smell is inextricably bound up with the smell of sick.
5‘Evening all.’ It wasn’t much of a catchphrase, but after watching this TV series no child could pass a policeman without saying it.
16
The Big Picture: Part Two
I LOST MY innocence in the damp smoky stalls of the last great palaces, the ones with interiors the size of bus garages. There was a post-war reek about those rows of curve-backed seats with ashtrays, the peeling art-deco ceilings lined with partially fused stars, the handful of silhouetted patrons sprouting out of the stalls like tombstones. Cinematically speaking, I was a child of the sixties, but still spent my time in the picture houses of the forties.
I read books on the history of film, and discovered that it had long been a risky business. Prior to a back-spool being invented for projectors, the highly flammable nitrate stock unwound into a wicker basket that would periodically burst into flame. On 4 May 1897, at the Paris Charity Bazaar near the Champs-Elysées, wood and canvas booths had been constructed in the style of a sixteenth-century town, and a cinematograph caught fire. One hundred and forty distinguished guests were burned alive. The cinema industry had already been having trouble finding favour with the public, but this high-profile disaster set it back years.
The cinema projector remained a dangerous item long after the invention of the back-spool, because it depended on the burning of a magnesium-alloy stick which illuminated the footage as it passed. The stick had to be wound forward manually by the projectionist as it burned down, and if the film jammed it blistered and ignited in the heat. This system remained in place until well into the sixties, and in some cinemas until much later. It seemed bizarre to spend so much money developing sophisticated film techniques, only to print them on to a flammable strip that had to be clawed through a clanking mechanical device the size of a Victorian boiler.
One evening, on my way in to see Pirates of Blood River, I picked up a recruitment leaflet at the ABC that said ‘Become a Cinema Manager!’ Inside the folded A4 sheet was a picture of a man in a two-tone lime-green polyester suit and matching tie, looking very pleased with himself. This is what the copy beside it said:
Your Schedule as a Cinema Manager
Thursday – A chance to see your new film.
Friday – Check local advertising for misprints.
Saturday – Meet and greet visiting film stars on publicity tours. [Unlikely, seeing as this was in suburban Blackheath, not then known as a playground of the stars.]
Sunday – Check confectionery stand and re-order ice creams.
Monday – Pensioners’ matinées will keep you on your toes!
Tuesday – Cinema washroom hygiene check and another chance to see your film.
Wednesday – Your day off, and a well-earned rest!
Hurrah, I shall become an ABC Cinema manager, I thought, but first I’ll get Mum and Dad to take me to the pictures regularly. They’ll fall in love properly this time, holding hands in the dark sharing Kia-Ora1 and Maltesers,2 and everything will be fine.
Except that didn’t happen because Kath had to work, so my father and I started going by ourselves twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays (the programme changed on Thursdays). The ABC Blackheath and the Greenwich Granada were both within walking distance of Westerdale Road, but we always managed to miss the beginning of the support feature because Bill took ages locking up his motorbike or had to refix a nut that had become loose.
As a consequence, I saw hundreds of films minus the first twenty minutes, and so had to extemporize some sort of plot device that would place the characters in the situation I found them upon arrival. The one that confounded me most was They Came to Rob Las Vegas, because by the time we had seated ourselves, the cast were already stuck inside an armoured car that appeared to have sunk underneath the desert sand. I could not work out how these people had got themselves into such a situation. For years after, I remained at a loss to explain what an armoured car was doing underground.
I watched all sorts of popular rubbish, but often found reasons for liking films that others had overlooked. I was quick to notice that the music from many of the Carry On films was wittier and subtler than any of the scripts. It turned out that the co-composer, Bruce Montgomery, also happened to be the brilliant crime novelist Edmund Crispin, who created one of fiction’s greatest detectives, Gervase Fen. He and Eric Rogers quoted everything from Giuseppe Verdi to Percy Grainger in their slapstick soundtrack scores. It was a tradition that continued for years. Much later, I noticed that the theme to Carry On Matron echoed part of The Beggar’s Opera, presumably because one of the film’s subtitles was The Preggars Opera.
Bill’s taste ran to Elvis movies, of which there seemed to be several thousand, all exactly the same and all featuring a scene in which Elvis sang to a girl while driving along a back-lit road in a sports car the size of a carnival float, late-period Jerry Lewis movies when he was at his most shrill and imbecilic, and films shot in Cinerama to make up for the fact that they stank. On Sundays there were ancient double-bills, usually St Trinians, Norman Wisdom, horrible old cowboy films and threadbare medical comedies designed to test the faith of the most devout cinema-goer.
My mother had more genteel, if somewhat conflicting, tastes; the first two proper films she took me to see were 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. We veered between Hamlet and South Pacific, That Darn Cat! and Becket, Nicholas Nickleby and Monkeys Go Home. She did not think that this was any odder than my father sitting through three-quarters of an Elvis movie before watching El Cid. Kath freely admitted that her ideal film would probably have starred Richard Burton and Mitzi Gaynor.
When it came to films, the family was profligate with its praise, in awe of Technicolor and hopelessly uncritical, although my mother had a lower threshold for comedies, most of which she regarded as unnecessarily silly. She couldn’t handle slapstick at all. ‘That’s not acting,’ she would say, tightening her cardigan in disapproval, ‘that’s just showing off.’
There was something quintessentially common-sensical about English films. The heroes wore woolly scarves. They strode upstairs with a purposeful air. They drank lots of tea and were polite to ladies. They said ‘Oh … hello!’ when greeting other members of the cast, as if bumping into old friends.3 Even when they were married to their co-stars in real life, like Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, they never indulged in granny-frightening sexual banter. They lived and worked in small English towns where no riff-raff was tolerated, and where policemen stopped single women in the street to ask what they were up to. I came to prefer the dubbed, squeezed and censored Italian films that ran as B-movies, and was able to see lurid giallos like Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet and SF-tinged capers such as Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. Cut to bits, lackadaisically dubbed into Americanese and scratched to buggery, they always featured blonde Euro-starlets like Elsa Martinelli and Virna Lisi in heavy eye make-up and white kinky boots. English girls just weren’t like that. They were more like Una Stubbs.4
The ‘Pah pa-pa-pa, pa-pa pa-pa’ of the white Pearl & Dean temple heralded the arrival of pinkly faded ads for restaurants whose stern middle-class voiceovers always began, ‘Come to the restaurant where the service is friendly and the food excellent. Come to the restaurant in this high street,’ cutting to a badly superimposed address over a generic shot of a hugely coiffured man in wide lapels and his miniskirted bird, eating orange spaghetti in front of radioactive wallpaper.
In post-war England, there was something apologetic and embarrassed about my film heroes. They wore pullovers and drove Morris Minors. They sounded like the Speaking Clock. They smoked pipes and told their wives, ‘You’re looking a bit peaky, darling.’ It was a long way from John Wayne. I wanted to see more cowboys and dinosaurs, but instead got Rita Tushingham wandering around in black an
d white.
The problem was paradoxical: I related to English films, but was drawn to the dumb chromium-plated gorgeousness of Hollywood. American films had embraced the power of the image. England was still obsessed with words. I was obsessed with words.
Thinking about it, I realized that most English books for boys were filled with the adventures of explorers, sea captains, hunters, generals and brave, self-sacrificing men and women. They were never disreputable. The catalyst for most adventures, in fact, seemed to be an unforgivable breach of manners on behalf of the villain.
Before I was born, England had produced more than its fair share of costume dramas, both in literature and on screen. There had been a rush to translate the classics and the great historical stories on to film. Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII had been followed by films about Nell Gwyn, Rembrandt, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Henry V, Caesar and Cleopatra, Nelson and Isadora Duncan. Between them were social comedies, morality plays, dramas, musicals, filmed versions of the great Dickens novels, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, work from Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, A. J. Cronin, Graham Greene, Terrence Rattigan, John Braine, H. G. Wells and Nigel Kneale. But by the time the sixties rolled around, the nation was reconnecting with a largely ignored underclass, and would soon become obsessed with soaps like Coronation Street.
I wondered why England lagged so far behind the rest of the world when it came to producing cinema, until I discovered a sobering fact. By the time the English authorities decided to tear down the doors of Newgate Prison, London’s notorious seven-hundred-year-old lair of highwaymen and cut-throats, America was already showing its first motion pictures to delighted audiences. It was one of those peculiar historical overlaps that seemed impossible but true, like the idea of Oscar Wilde travelling by tube, or the fountain pen being invented after the telephone.
The country’s venerable traditions held everyone back from entering such a technologically innovative field as cinema. A crippling war had shut down production, the limitations of Odeon and ABC exhibition reduced choice, the property boom hastened the end of large auditoriums, and English cinema was allowed to slink silently away. There was a paralysing stiffness in old English films that didn’t really fade until the late fifties. I could see it in the actors and in my parents, who clearly aspired to be Celia Johnson and John Mills. The only difference was that my mother would never try to chuck herself under a train for unrequited love, any more than my father would attempt to trek across North Africa. If anything, they were more like Moira Lister and Sid James.
I knew the screen lied. As a child I saw two real-life celebrities in the flesh. At the Lord Mayor’s Show, my mother held me up above the barrier to see Dick Van Dyke driving Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the head of the parade. I was shocked to discover that the actor had a bright-orange face, and seemed to be wearing a brown wig made for someone with a smaller head.
Worse, Frankie Howerd had once stepped from a rather old, rented Rolls Royce to open our local fête. Curiously, he too had an orange face and a wig held on by clearly visible sections of tape. He was also extremely camp in a pleasant auntie-ish way, and as he was a film star everyone loved him. Had he tried not being famous for half an hour and merely walked to the shops for some fags, the locals would have kicked him unconscious.
Cinema retained its ability to grip. The defining features of being a very small boy in a very large auditorium were:
The sound, which boomed in an eerie lighthouse-in-the-fog fashion that could induce melancholia in the happiest scenes.
The bored ice-cream girl, whose sulky glossed lips and sleepy eyes made a Drink-On-A-Stick appear provocative.
A pleasingly musty smell that has now vanished from cinemas, possibly due to the invention of upholstery shampoo.
And of course, the possibility of being tampered with by a man in a gabardine raincoat.
Eventually, low-budget English films played in London cinemas that were far too grand to support movies with such low production values. This anomaly became apparent when I noticed that the curtains of the Odeon Woolwich were more luxurious than the film I was watching.
No matter. An education in the world of adult storytelling had been initiated. Now I could go home and tell Kath all about the films I’d seen, instead of her always telling me. I decided to fill my Letts Schoolboy Diary5 with reviews of all the films I sat through, awarding them between one and four stars. If I couldn’t illustrate the reviews with stills, I would do the next best thing: re-create the scenes with cardboard scenery and six-inch-high plasticine models, then take Polaroids of them. I would use black and white plasticine for the monochrome movies. It never occurred to me that adopting this hobby over, say, constructing an Airfix Messerschmitt would make me appear as mad as a bag of cats.
Just as I had predicted, it took my father longer than he thought to put the motorbike back together that night, and we ended up missing the first twenty minutes of The Cracksman. By the time we arrived, Charlie Drake was trapped in a sewer, but we had no idea why. Perhaps now, I thought, I would be allowed to go to the cinema alone. At least that would mean I would no longer have to spend my evenings in the kitchen watching my father taking the clock to bits before putting it back together again and finding he had three cogs left over. And I might even learn something about storytelling in the process.
It occurred to me that I was all set up for the rest of my childhood. I was happy enough at home, doing well at school, there were cinemas and bookshops near by, I could fill a thousand notebooks with drawings and stories, and my parents could carry on arguing into the next century as far as I was concerned, because I no longer wanted to be a cinema manager: I wanted to be a scriptwriter, and if no one could show me how to do it I would have to teach myself. I’d seen The Parent Trap. Good God, it couldn’t be that difficult. All you had to do was remember to leave a gap where Hayley Mills could sing a song on a banjo.
The future looked great, provided everything stayed exactly as it was.
And then we were forced to move out of our home.
1 A drink in a plastic tub you could slurp dry and then bang with your fists, scaring everyone.
2 Purchased in boxes because they were sophisticated, until you dropped them all over the floor.
3 In Horror Express, Peter Cushing greets Christopher Lee with a cry of ‘Well, well, look who’s here!’ as if they had just bumped into each other in the studio canteen.
4 Finest hour: squeaky girlfriend in Summer Holiday.
5 Listed important calendar dates like ‘Public Holiday in Tonga’.
17
Running Away
ON THE BALSA-WOOD model in the Perspex box at Greenwich Town Hall, the Council’s planned six-lane motorway went straight through East Greenwich, splitting it in two. On either side of the grey band, smiling plastic figures in hats strolled past as if taking the air in Monte Carlo. In the middle of it was the spot where our house should have been, so it stood to reason that we would have to move.
Number 35, Westerdale Road was to be compulsorily purchased and knocked flat, along with the whole end of the street. This meant destroying the furniture shop, the bakery, the grocery, the newsagent and the launderette, and chopping the town into two halves, separated by a roaring, stinking channel that would be impossible to cross. It meant wiping a London village off the map and covering it with a very wide bit of Tarmac.
Incredibly, nobody complained. Not so much as a leaflet was produced arguing against the plan. There wasn’t even a meeting held in Farmdale church hall entitled ‘Town To Be Demolished For Six Lane Motorway – Good Or Bad Thing?’ Did everyone hate living here that much?
Of course, at a time when everyone was smashing up every last bit of the past and either replacing it with hardboard or shovelling it through a letterbox on It’s A Knockout, the motorway was perceived as progress. So what if it didn’t lead anywhere and killed a community in a manner that everyone would be complaining about thirty
years later? A rallying cry for the future had been raised: What do we want? A road to nowhere! When do we want it? Just as soon as we can get out of the way of the bulldozers!
The future was coming and the car was king. Beeching1 had closed all the railway branch lines that merely served annoying little villages, supermarkets needed supplies and motorways were to be built everywhere, especially pseudo-American freeway-type roads on stilts that looked stylish when carved out of balsa wood, painted white and put in a Perspex box in the mayor’s office, but which proved to be less ideal when they were constructed in concrete next to your bedroom window, and became covered with soot overnight from the exhaust of passing trucks delivering Vesta Chow Mein to the Co-op.
If you had asked any of the architects whether they thought kids might start stabbing each other or doing drugs in the ominous shadow of the underpasses, or whether lives would be destroyed in quieter, more desperate ways than ever before, they would have raised their eyebrows incredulously and waved you from their presence, reciting mantras of progress. Everyone wanted a car, didn’t they? Everybody wanted fabric softener and tinned cocktail sausages? Well, there was a price to pay for status. Westerdale Road, Farmdale Road and Ormiston Crescent could boast just four cars between them, and one of those had been on blocks since the days of petrol rationing. Just imagine a world where everyone had a car!
The instruction to move came from the government in the form of a terse two-paragraph letter, so the residents of East Greenwich went into cap-doffing mode and did what they were told, assuming that those in charge knew better than they. A very thin man in a black astrakhan coat came around and peered into the rooms of Number 35, marking ticks and crosses in his book.
‘Oh dear,’ he said, peering gingerly into the garden. ‘We really must get rid of these outdoor lavatories.’
‘That’s the only place where I get a bit of peace and quiet,’ said Bill indignantly.
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