Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies

It was a fabulous wedding. At least they all told me it was. I hadn’t a clue. I’d never been to a wedding before.

The lady coming towards us was an apparition in rolling breakers of white shiny stuff, surmounted in her upper reaches by wavy clouds of white net that hid her face like tumbling cumuli obscuring a pale, autumnal moon. Everybody in the crammed pews had turned to look, as she drifted down the aisle on the arm of a teary-eyed old geezer with a moustache – what was he, her granddad? – processing slowly down the whole length of the church. I gazed at her too, this ghostly bride, but I was shocked by the sight of the whole congregation brazenly turning their backs on the altar and the tabernacle and the priest who stood beside me.

It seemed, to my prim, eight-year-old eyes, jolly rude to behave that way. You didn’t turn round and look behind you in church. Even if a platoon of Protestant militia were (as seemed likely, in those doctrinaire days) suddenly to burst in, blasting assault rifles in the air, you always faced the altar when the priest was on it, doing his priestly business. It was a rule of Catholic church-going, like not fidgeting during a sermon, not remaining seated when you were supposed to kneel, or not playing with your wodge of Potty Putty during the dead quarter-hour when everyone joined the queue for Communion.

I’d been an altar server for a year or two, and I knew the rules. I was a strict little Papist gauleiter, a stickler for correct form. Any junior acolyte who rang the gold three-dome shamrock of bells in the wrong place during the Mass would get a vicious ticking-off from me or from Thimont, my friend and co-adjutant in the altar-server army, just as he had once abused my stupidity when I’d been a bungling starter on the altar steps.

Now he and I stood on either side of the priest in his white-and-gold chasuble, waiting in our off-white vestments for the dame in the pristine cloud to arrive before us. As she drew level, she was joined by a sweating chap from the front pew who had got up to stand beside her, nervously pulling his fingers as if trying to make his knuckles crack, along with an identically-dressed other chap by his side, the pair of them quaking slightly.

The priest asked the bride and groom some simple questions at dictation speed and they repeated everything he said like parrots. I wasn’t impressed. They seemed so nervous. Would the priest speak harshly to the lady if she got a word out of place? Would he say, ‘No, that’s wrong, you stupid boy,’ to the man, as the Religious Education teacher at school ticked you off if you got a bit of the catechism wrong? Would they both wind up in detention?

It was a pivotal year, 1962. The Kennedy assassination, the Profumo scandal and Beatlemania were just months off. The old world of the Fifties, had I realised it, was about to change for ever. But at home in Balham, south London, life was still shrouded in Fifties gloom. It was a monochrome time. The smell of beef sausages lingered in the hallway where I drove my Dinky Toy Bentleys at reckless speed down the banisters, and constructed Airfix models of Fokker triplanes and Sherman tanks, and supervised pitched battles of tiny plastic soldiers – British Tommies and German desert rats – with their feet disablingly clamped onto tiny skateboards.

My mother read The Lady, a shiny magazine of unimpeachably correct, upper-class rectitude, which featured small-ads for nannies and cook-housekeepers in its latter pages. I was devoted to a comic called Valiant, full of the exploits of adventurous misfits in jungles, war zones and minor-league football clubs. My father came home from the surgery in Latchmere Road for his supper at 8 p.m., drank gin-and-orange cocktails that smelt of clinics and tut-tutted over pretentious arty documentaries (like Ken Russell’s film of Elgar) on a TV show called Monitor.

Sunday family outings in our Renault Dauphine took us to wasp-infested picnics in Cannizaro Gardens in Wimbledon, the suburb where my sister and I went to school during the week. We went to church twice on Saturdays, morning and evening, as well as the be-there-or-die mandatory Catholic attendance on Sunday mornings. It was a grey, craven, mind-your-manners time, with no hint of the rebellion to come.

Back in church that day, everyone seemed to be in uniform: long grey suits with graceful tailcoats, black-and-white suits with shiny lapels, ladies’ hats with farcically wide brims and fussy arrangements of flowers that could not possibly – not in a million years, I sternly and silently informed them – keep the rain off in the event of a June cloudburst.

I was impressed to see that everyone had made an effort. The uniform at Donhead, the prep school which Thimont and I attended, was a pale blue blazer and shorts with a white shirt and white socks, and the photographs of my first day there show a boy beaming, fit to burst with pride at having joined the army of normal boys at last, after spending too long in the mixed-infants hell of the girly Ursuline Convent one road away.

At the age of eight I was an unusually conservative kid, anxious to do right, keen to conform, one of nature’s milk monitors and junior prefects. I was probably insufferable, but I knew that I knew right from wrong. The son of sternly moral, right-thinking Irish Catholic parents, I was as straight as a poker and as square as a boxing ring. I served mass in the school chapel and once a year (a head-spinning privilege) I’d be called on to make the bleary-eyed, late-evening journey to Farm Street, the London headquarters of the Jesuit brotherhood, to serve with my mentor, Thimont, at the Easter Saturday vigil Mass in front of the country’s most seraphic Catholic top brass.

My eyes were fixed on the glory of service. I had no ambitions beyond being good and perhaps one day, if I kept away from bad company, graduating to the rank of Master of Ceremonies on the high altar in Westminster Cathedral.

While the choir, at the wedding, were singing the ‘Ave Maria’, and the bride and groom were signing the register somewhere out of sight, I leaned over to Thimont, my coserver, and said, ‘Teapot, who’s the bloke in the grey suit who was at the altar but wasn’t marrying the woman?’

‘He’s the best man,’ said my friend, who knew such things.

The Best Man? I’d never heard the phrase before. Gosh. Had there been a competition?

Thimont (his name was Paul, but we were very formal kids in grammar school) explained, in his worldly way, that the best man was the bridegroom’s best friend, that he was keeper of the Wedding Ring and the life and soul of the Reception festivities, and would have to make a speech in front of all the wedding guests. He and the groom had been friends with one of the teachers at Donhead, and that was why we were there at all, serving Mass at this wedding, and that was why the school choir was currently up in the music loft, singing the ‘Ave Maria’ with a terrible, grinding slowness. We’d all been hired for the day, like a job-lot of farm labourers, by a sentimental fan of our school.

As I listened to the singing, with its listless and drooping cadences, a martinet frown creased my brow. Buck up, you chaps, I thought, put some life into it. The honour of the school may be at stake here. You cannot sing so boringly in front of someone who’s been deemed a Best Man (though he was still backstage at the time, doing his register duties). I wanted him to be impressed by us. I wanted him to admire our cadet rigour, our parade-ground smartness, our polish and swagger. But in the event, it was he who subverted all our lives. Because, in gratitude for our labours that day, he bought the choir and the altar servers tickets to see Mutiny on the Bounty.

It was my first-ever movie. I was, at eight, a virgin of the picture house. Other boys in my class had been to Disney cartoons in local picture houses, or to Saturday-morning cinema club, or even to school-holiday first-run features: they could discuss the wonders of In Search of the Castaways, and its star, the wide-eyed, beautiful Hayley Mills, every eight-year-old boy’s dream companion. I knew nothing of all this. My Saturday mornings were spent in church. My parents didn’t disapprove of the cinema as a temple of sin, they simply ignored it as an irrelevance in their children’s education. Going to the movies was something grown-ups did, by themselves as a foolish bit of time-wasting, or else as a couple at the start of a long, chaste and protracted courtship.

But it was my first time, and I was tremendously excited. Not just by the prospect of seeing a movie, but a grown-up movie at that; not just an adventure film, but one lasting three hours. Not just an evening out that would go on well beyond the bedtime hour of 8 p.m., but an evening in the West End of London, where there were pubs and ritzy neon signs – the last word in glamour in 1962 – and restaurants with dressed-up couples you could see through the windows, eating steak and drinking wine, and all the rackety bustle and hum of the capital I’d only ever seen through the windows of the family Renault, when we were taken, as a colossal treat, to see the Christmas lights of Oxford Street and Piccadilly.

The day dawned. My mother insisted I take a scarf in case the evening grew cold – a needless precaution in June. My father gave me a stiff, brand-new pound note to spend on ice-cream. At school, the form teacher Mr Breen announced there would be a special class at 3 p.m. for those attending the evening screening. What could it be? A lecture on cinema etiquette? No, it was an extra lesson on maritime history. For an hour we looked at maps of eighteenth-century exploration, we heard about colonial expansion in the Americas, we learned about the importance of breadfruit as the staple diet of South Pacific tribes and how it used to be imported to feed the slaves in the British sugar plantations of the West Indies …

Rigid with disappointment, we suddenly realised that this whole, supposedly exciting movie venture was a con. We had hoped for pirates and grog and swordfights. We’d have settled for sailing ships and people shouting ‘Splice the main-brace’ and maybe a shark attack. But instead we were going to get a dramatisation of the historical significance of breadfruit. Three hours of it. Some of us wondered aloud if it was worth the bother of going. But, we conceded, a trip to the West End en charabanc with your mates was still a better prospect than staying in, doing your homework and (in my case) saying the rosary before going to bed. So we set off with mixed feelings. We sang little songs in the coach, and pulled faces at passing motorists, the hard cases in the choir swigging bottles of Corona Cherryade and belching exuberantly.

In Leicester Square, the trees were full of chattering jackdaws, flying in and departing on black wings against the still-bright, school-uniform-blue sky. Huddled together by our coach, we suddenly became aware, for all our bravado, that this was grown-up land – a territory of strange, obscurely alarming, adult to-and-froing. It was not a place to get lost. We milled about Mr Breen, fourteen anxious acolytes around this trustworthy figure with his slicked-down, Brylcreemed hair (how his name suited him) and his youthful, big-brotherly authority.

Accompanying him on the trip was Miss Stacey, class mistress of the fourth form. She was a handsome, meringue-haired, statuesque termagant with a bosom like a sack of concrete, and a face liberally basted with orange foundation. She stood no nonsense. Her sharp blue eyes sought out tiny displays of rebellion like a searchlight. My friend Palmer swore he’d once found her and Mr Breen locked in a passionate kiss on a piano stool in the Music Room; but there were some things in life that were completely beyond comprehension or likelihood, and the idea of Miss Stacey kissing anyone was right up there with Abominable Snowmen and the Holy Trinity.

The Odeon loomed above us like an enormous temple. It took up as much space as our local church and seemed to bulge with light, eclipsing all the other buildings on one side of the square. We walked towards it in a hushed gaggle, impressed beyond words, and stopped to consider its immense beauty. Up the wall, above the huge ODEON sign, the film’s title shouted across the square in a blaze of million-watt illuminations: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. Each of the letters was about two feet high. Presumably they’d been manipulated into place earlier that day by a master sign-writer with superior spelling skills. He must (I reasoned) have a box containing the whole alphabet in red, light-up signs, but since the title contained two Os, two Ys, two Us, and – blimey – three Ts and three Ns, it occurred to me he’d need two or three different boxes to rummage in. And were there any films which had three Xs or Ys or Qs …?

I broke off this absorbing line of enquiry to register that we were standing in a great big cave that was the Odeon’s lobby. Everything about it was plush – the carpets felt four inches thick, the white walls featured a thick anaglypta, frieze-like wedding-cake-decoration motif and even the staircase in the distance seemed to lie back luxuriantly on soft pillows. It was like the soft furnishings department of Arding & Hobbs, grown to colossal size but with no merchandise in sight. Instead there was a manager in a formal tuxedo and bow-tie, and two ladies in strict red-and-white stripey uniforms selling things. One had a tray that hung around her neck on long ribbons, full of tubs of ice-cream.

‘No ice-creams until the interval,’ Mr Breen sternly informed us. ‘And everyone must spend a penny before we go in.’

The other lady sold big, glossy magazines with pictures of actors on the front. ‘Don’t bother with the programmes,’ Mr Breen warned us. ‘They’re a waste of money. You can’t be too careful in these places.’ Instinctively he had become our intrepid native scout guiding us through the jungle of the modern commercial cinema. The foyer of the Odeon didn’t look much like a jungle, though. It was more like a big sofa. The atmosphere was almost creepily tactile, like velvet or suede, something you could run your finger along, something you could almost fondle.

We shuffled upstairs, marvelling at the airy splendour of this secular cathedral, were dispatched to the Gents, were reassembled like a lost platoon, ticked off for talking and shoving, then, in a fourteen-strong group, went through the door into a profound darkness.

It was like going over the top in a war. I could see nothing but a massive sheet of screen on our left, on which a giant young woman in a gingham frock was accepting a light for her cigarette from a laughing man about Mr Breen’s age. They were enjoying a picnic beside a river. I kept my eyes on the girl, who was pretty and seemed very easily amused, and, moving forward blindly, I crashed into Armfield, who’d stopped in front of me.

‘For Christ’s sake, Walsh …’ he said crossly.

‘Sh!’ whispered Mr Breen, as our troop of choirboys and servers milled awkwardly around the Dress Circle. A grown-up woman flashed a torch at an empty patch in the third row and we filed into it like automatons.

‘Consulate,’ intoned an adenoidal voice from the screen in seductive tones. ‘Cool as a mountain stream …’

While the others took their seats around me, I stood looking at the gigantic plaque of light, transfixed, turned to stone by my first encounter with the big screen, oblivious to my co-scholars and the rest of the audience, gazing at the bright cloudless day in front of me, feeling a strange longing to get up on-stage and walk straight into it.

‘Sit down, will you?’ asked a stroppy voice from behind.

Beside me, Armfield yanked the sleeve of my school blazer. I subsided, and sat on a surface approximately one foot wide. It was amazingly uncomfortable. How, I thought, can I sit on this for three hours? Without undue fuss, Armfield reached behind my back and pushed, so that I flew forward as my first-ever tip-up seat subsided beneath me with a bump.

It had a strong spring, this seat. It was far from certain that my puny weight would keep the thing down under me. Could it, I wondered, tip right back up again, folding me in half and leaving me helplessly mewling with only my legs and school socks showing? This was a whole new territory of alarm – the total darkness, the usherette’s stabbing light, the fearsome jaws of the seat I was perched on, the huge, brightly-lit, wall-sized rectangle I’d never encountered before – that screen that drew your eye, whatever was on it, and made you forget everything else. It was fantastically exciting, all of it, better than any funfair ride. Best of all it was in colour, whereas our tiny Rediffusion TV back home showed things only in monochrome greys. I felt simultaneously lost, elated and completely at home with the enormous new world unfolding in front of me.

The words ‘Preview of Forthcoming Attractions’ appeared on the screen. They meant nothing to me, but I watched like an urchin with his nose pressed against a sweet-shop window as the faces of Leslie Caron and Tom Bell appeared – emoting, argumentative, flushed, agonised, rapturous – in a series of bleak domestic scenes and dismal black-and-white views of London parks. It was the first trailer I’d ever seen (advertising The L-Shaped Room), and although the story looked fantastically depressing, the voice-over dramatically promised that it was shocking and challenging and ‘a film for today’, so that you felt duty-bound to see it as soon as possible, despite being eight years too young (it carried an X certificate) to do any such thing.

The preview ended. Two mile-high curtains swished shut. The lights came on. Was that the end? Had we come to the wrong cinema? I could see the bright auditorium at last, and looked around. We sat, all fourteen of us plus two teachers, line-abreast across a whole row, chattering and gazing at the Odeon’s mile-high ceiling, the complicated sculptures on the facing walls, the great proscenium arch. I wondered if people – real people – came out and acted on this massive stage in front of the film while it was showing. If not, it seemed a shocking waste of the dramatic expanse before us – it was a sort of epic altar, far bigger than the stage on which I’d witnessed Puss in Boots at the Wimbledon Theatre’s panto season the previous Christmas.

Then the lights went out again, and the great curtains swished back to reveal a snarling lion. The unseen speakers took the snarl and fed it through some abysmal sonic filter so that it reverberated until the sound went down underneath where you were sitting, and made your seat vibrate. A pause, and the lion slothfully disgorged a second, basso profundo growl that was like the post-lunchtime belch with which my friend Grzedzicki could thrill his classmates, but magnified 4,000 times.

Then the title came on screen and remained there for ages, while an overture of orchestral savagery thundered behind it. Kettledrums bonged, cellos sawed like neighing horses, violins ran about shrieking ‘ding-didaling-didaling’, brass trumpets went ‘dum-da-dah!’ and, in an abrupt mood-swing, breathy woodwinds came quietly into the mix, conjuring up a moody Tahitian sunset before we were returned to rolling waves of splashy brass and chaotic surges of strings. It was tremendously exciting.

The film began. A botanical expert from Kew was strolling along the quay at Portsmouth in a tricorn hat, with a cylinder under his arm and what seemed a pitifully small sack of clothing for a long sea voyage. (My mother would never have let me bundle up my shirts and trousers in a horrible sack like that.) He encountered a gaggle of sailors, some with elaborate beards, some with rolling eyes, all destined for the HMS Bounty. They laughingly upbraided him for calling a ship a ‘boat’ and talked in unfriendly, joshing tones about the ordeal that lay ahead. The man from Kew Gardens was earnest and slightly lost, a nice guy fallen among rough, know-it-all companions. As he signed on for the voyage, leaning on a slanting desk, something about the opening scenes began to strike a chord – but I didn’t yet know what it was. The rough-diamond sailors pulled the cylinder from under his armpit.

‘Careful with that,’ he said. ‘Those are scientific documents.’

But they were merely pictures of breadfruit, which he laid out on a convenient barrel and used as part of a lecture about West Indian eating habits, not unlike the lesson we’d endured two hours earlier.

We’d been right. This was going to be an educational bore after all. Then Captain Bligh, played by Trevor Howard, appeared. He had a lined, rather cruel face and small piggy eyes, and something about his old-maidish mouth suggested he was always chewing something nasty without ever spitting it out. Dressed in white stockings, a dark blue uniform and a Duke of Wellington hat, he cut a comical but faintly sinister figure. He instantly reminded me of Mr King the sports master, whose appearance on the rugby pitch in his navy blue tracksuit was always the prelude to random acts of violence.

Fletcher Christian wafted on board. I had heard about Marlon Brando, the American actor with the cissy name. He was a real hero, my friends said, a brilliant actor, an exotic figure who probably lived in New York and knew other famous actors, and went round to the houses of famous people all the time and, you know, had lunch with them. It was important that he was American because we were in love with American things – the cars with the sharky fins, the Western guns, the tough-guy fist-fights, the space suits, the fact that, according to 77 Sunset Strip, American policemen chewed gum all the time and actually got to shoot people. Most of all we liked their accents, and sometimes tried to imitate them. They sounded like English accents on a slide, a drawling, don’t-care voice, far more appealing than the stuck-up, sit-up-and-beg accents of British people who read the news and appeared in quiz shows.

But was this really Brando, the famous actor-hero of whom I’d heard so much from my clued-up, movie-going friends? He wore a light-blue fancy-dress outfit, a comical hat and a red cloak like Superman’s, and my first reaction was of distaste: he seemed a bit of a garçon de Nancy as we called cissy actors on television. His hair was pulled back off his forehead and worn in a greasy ponytail, and his face was pulled back with it, so that his eyes were oddly slitty and Chinese – and he talked in a weird, affected, fastidious neigh of British distaste, as if he could hardy bear to say anything at all through his clenched teeth. He seemed about as heroic as the adjustable mannequin that posed in the window of Arding & Hobbs. He came aboard flanked by two ladies of fashion, one English, one French, who flapped and dimpled like flamingoes among the creaking sheets and elderly timbers of the merchantman, until they were shooed ashore by the captain.

He and Captain Bligh were soon having a row about why Brando had bothered going into the Navy.

‘The Army didn’t seem quite right,’ he told the captain, ‘and affairs of state are rather a bore …’

Ratha a bawww …