The cinema

After the last two depressing posts I thought I’d write about something more fun – going to the cinema. We called it ‘the pictures’ or ‘the flicks’ when we got older and wanted to sound more cool. We had two cinemas in our small town and sometimes my parents took us to see the latest ‘blockbuster’ films. They were usually musicals or biblical films: South Pacific; The King and I; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Inn of the Seventh Happiness; Genevieve; ‘The Ten Commandments’; King of Kings; Spartacus; do you remember any of those? Better still were the Elvis and Cliff Richard films. Blue Hawaii; Jailhouse Rock; GI Blues; Summer Holiday etc. This was major entertainment for us and incredibly exciting.

My, how things have changed since then! You got two films – the main film preceded by a small production ‘B’ film usually in black and white. Virtually no adverts but sometimes you got some sort of short world-wide newsreel film about post war developments in Gibralter, Aden or somewhere I’d never heard of. Before the film started, there was a man sat at an organ in front of the curtain. He was playing to entertain us. He and organ would slowly disappear through a trapdoor when it started and emerge again at the interval. A lady then walked down the aisle with a tray (it had a small lamp attached so you could see the goods) full of ice-creams, iced lollies and crisps to buy. No bucketfuls of popcorn, Pepsi or burgers at inflated prices then. The ice-cream was usually in a small waxed cardboard tub and you got a flat wooden spoon to eat it. I’d scrape every last morsel of out of it and then chew the wood to get the last atom of flavour. Sometime we got a Jubbly, which was frozen orange juice in a weird triangular shaped waxed box. It was almost impossible to get into and you’d end up trying to bite the thing open.

People were allowed to smoke and there were small ashtrays on the backs of the seats. They swivelled around so they could be emptied. A lot of men wore trilby hats in the 50s and the worst thing for a child was getting one of them sitting in front of you. At the end of the film they played the National Anthem. People would already be getting up and making there way up the aisles but as soon as it started, everyone would freeze in their tracks and remain silent. I remember being totally puzzled by this weird behaviour and any communication with my parents was totally without a response until it had finished. It was like pressing the pause button on the DVD player. I was often amazed when we got out to find that either daylight had become night-time or it was still daylight and after the two or three hours of darkness inside I expected it to be dark.