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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ