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

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       1 THE CAT IN THE CRIMSON SOCK Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

      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 СКАЧАТЬ