Invoking a childhood long past sometimes recalls the funniest memories.
Because our mother was confined in the psychiatric hospital, our father had no option but to take his two small children to the cinema with him.
He had for some unaccountable reason developed a love of the cinema.
In those days, in the early nineteen-fifties, there wasn’t the hard and fast rule about what kids would be allowed in to see, so we ended up sitting in the darkened cinema watching all sorts of horrors which passed for normal everyday life, and all sorts of magical glitter and laughter and dancing and singing which passed for normal everyday life. Whether Barbara Stanwyck was shooting her victims, or Betty Davis menacingly threatening, or Marilyn Monroe on a window ledge, or a frantic German mother searching for her lost son in war-torn Berlin, or Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire soaring in the air in satins, feathers, and tails, or Joan Crawford in diamonds and furs about to throw herself in the sea, or Ida Lupino climbing to deafening music, or John Wayne circling the wagons, or Marlene Dietrich as notorious rancher…………..well, you know what I mean.
The funny thing was, Dad spent very little time watching the picture.
The screen was obscured by thick cigarette smoke and the large heads of adults towering above us in the seats in front. We would upturn the seats and sit precariously on the edge.
Dad would disappear, and leave us there. On one occasion my little sister asked me what the man was doing to the woman pressed up against the wall with a look of resigned disgust and misery on her face. I couldn’t really tell her. “SShussh !” someone hissed when I said: “They do that in Chicago…….”
Then one time when we were sitting with “Wall’s ice-ream” wafers dripping their artificial contents down on to our clothes, someone came in late and opened the door to the brightly lit foyer, casting a huge elongated shadow on the wall. We didn’t notice for a second, until everyone began to laugh and point……… and then we saw it. A man, whose silhouette looked very much like Dad’s seemed to be wrestling with the silhouette of the lady who carried the tray of cigarettes and ice-cream and lollipops. I didn’t know she also sold bras, but there it was, plain as the nose on your face, passing hands in a great shadow stretched to breaking point along the wall.
The light disappeared. The laughter and shouting went on. I heard my father’s name called out several times. He rushed back to his seat.
The ice-cream lady’s torch jittered nervously, and she wobbled past us with an air of recovered dignity, until she caught her heel in the worn carpet. She must have been out in the wind, I thought, because her hair was all over the place. She was a complete mess.
“Ice-Creams ! Cigarettes ! Sweets !” she called out shrilly, until someone asked her for something else. I couldn’t hear what it was and the whole cinema broke into rowdy laughter.
Our visits to The Plaza Cinema on North Road stopped for while, but very soon the whole routine resumed and went on for several years.
There is no sign of The Plaza Cinema anymore. The bronze doors and marbled foyer and ticket kiosk are gone, along with the building which created escapist magic for dull lives.