Love Fifteen Page 4

  Talkies were exactly as old as himself, which meant that men of his age had been the first to grow up with sound-films. Old people went for the stories and stars; they never seemed to care how it was done. Cuts, fades, irises and angle-shots meant nothing to them. They couldn’t bother to see when the cameras panned or tracked or hear when the music came in. For Rose, The Pictures was where she spent a few hours off, in a dream. Just back from a New Palace matinée, she could never answer the most elementary questions.

  “Called?” she’d repeat, “oh, how d’you expect me to remember what it was called? Wossname was in it. You know who I mean, that’s married to Whosit… oh dear, my memory’s going.”

  “You can’t have forgotten already? Was it in technicolour?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “What was he playing?”

  “Playing?”

  “Acting? Who was he pretending to be?”

  “Who?”

  “Wossname!”

  “Well, his wife was – um – oh, Lord – the one with the flat voice – but the brassy common one came out of his past – the peroxide blonde… or was that the second film? Why don’t you look in the evening paper if you want to know? Under the cushions on the settee.”

  “I do know. D’you think I don’t? I wanted you to remember.”

  “What for?”

  “Because it’s important. For when we get to California and start meeting the stars.”

  “I got more to think about than dappy film stars. The best part for me is tea after in the cinema café when Auntie Laura and I can have a nice chat.”

  Laura was one of the many adults who weren’t family but made out they were. Calling them by their first names was rude but ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’ was alright. Another mystery, like most of their rules, but too boring to try to solve.

  He looked back at the screen and news. F.D.R. had been elected for the third time and old Chamberlain had died. Inky did a brilliant one of him waving the bit of paper, with a super double-take when it blew away into the crowd, then saying in that vicar’s voice “‘Oh dear, I’m afraid this could mean war after all unless someone can find it”‘. The next item was Hitler and old Mussolini of the brilliant stuck-out chin meeting in Italy. Now that Hungary, Slovakia and Roumania had taken sides with Germany and Italy, England was alone in Europe. They’d been at war for a year so far but nothing much had happened here, only in London. He’d seen a recent showing of ‘Things To Come’ so knew what an air-raid would be like. Still, if the Germans got rid of some old churches and schools, we could build a new world like the one in the last part of that smashing film, all Odeons and Smiths’ Crisp factories with everyone charging about in rockets.

  If there was any kind of enemy plane within miles, the sirens went off and mostly nothing happened till the all-clear about an hour later. Our anti-aircraft guns on nearby Purdown were more frightening than the few German bombs dumped here to get rid of them after a raid on South Wales. He wasn’t sure if he’d be a coward in really serious raids and was glad their city was an officially safe area so he’d probably never find out… One of his dreams was of being taken by the Nazis and tortured to tell them the names of resistance fighters. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t hold out long. He hoped to God he’d never be put to the test. At the first sight of a thumb-screw he’d be blurting out the gen.

  There was a Pathé Gazette that ended with some quite decent juggling on monocycles, then the second film, a Hopalong Cassidy. He remembered seeing one at a children’s matinée, the first and last he ever went to, because the hallful of common titches from places like St. Werburgh’s played up all through, as though it hadn’t been a cinema at all but Double Biology.

  A slide came on over a gambling scene in a saloon to say an air raid siren had sounded and advising patrons to make their way quietly to the shelters below. A few jeered. No-one moved. Anyway it would have been hell’s more dangerous down there, next to the floating harbour. Better be up here when the bombs fell than getting drowned as well like in ‘The Rains Came’.

  In the break, the woman who’d taken him in gave him money to buy them both an ice-cream from the girl in the spotlight and they talked about Cowboy films. He told her he didn’t care for them, even as second features, preferring a Charlie Chan mystery.

  “Number One Son leglettably acquire Amelican English,” Theo said, pulling back his eyes into slits, “tly to lun before can walk.”

  This made her smile, showing her very nice white even teeth.

  “What about the better westerns,” she asked.” say, a John Ford or Howard Hawks?”

  His wooden scoop hovered above the tub of strawberry ice. This was the first time he’d heard anyone that old talk about films the way his friends did, not as though they were real or how nice the stars were. Earl Hines was typical, saying Hollywood was synonomous with rubbish, and often warned the school not to give it credence. Which meant, with a smile at the swots, don’t believe it.

  “Yeah,” he said to this unusual woman, “they’re okay. Especially when there are Red Indians.”

  “Who are, of course, the villains, scalping the lovely white folk.”

  He ate some more ice-cream.” When we played cowboys when I was a kid,” he said, “I always bagged being the Indian brave, they look so smashing.”

  “However they look, it’s Hollywood whitewashing the massacre of the only native Americans. You must know that? The extermination of a whole people.”

  “Well, if they were attacking the white settlers .. …» “

  “Settlers ? They were invaders. The natives were defending their homeland, just as we’ll do if Hitler comes here. Though, of course, we British were as bad in past times, if not worse, enslaving Africans to grow sugar in America to make the money to build the Georgian crescents of Clifton.”

  Her voice had risen. An old man a few rows in front gave her an angry glare. She returned it with interest, staring him out, then smiling back at Theo, who said: “I was going to ask that one to take me in but they mostly do it to put their hand on your leg. You have to keep moving to another seat and sometimes they follow you and keep taking your mind off the film.”

  She frowned, shook her head and gave the old wreck an even angrier glare.

  “An interesting side-effect of censorship,” she said.” In trying to make sure a child is accompanied by an adult in case he’s corrupted by a movie, they throw them into the arms of sad old queers.”

  “Old what?”

  “Any case, how can the doormen tell your age? You could easily be seventeen.”

  “D’you reckon?”

  “To me you could. Your voice is deep, you’re tall.”

  The lights went halfway down for the trailers of next week’s programme.

  “You’d think that Bloody Sergeant’s only out to stop me seeing the films I want to.”

  In the twilight he felt himself blushing to have used ‘bloody’ to an older woman. Perhaps she didn’t know it was a quotation from Shakespeare. No, he reckoned she would. She seemed to know a hell of a lot, for a woman.

  Though he was looking forward to seeing bits of the Regent’s coming attractions, he found his mind going over things this woman had said. Stowing his empty carton under the seat, he noticed she put on glasses to watch the big film.

  About five minutes later, when everyone had forgotten a raid was on, a slide told them the all-clear had sounded. A few in the cheaper seats cheered and clapped and some laughed.

  FOUR

  As the big film ended, Hazel Hampton stowed her glasses in her handbag, ashamed to see the boy notice this petty vanity. She thought he looked embarrassed too but he went back at once to studying the closing captions and cast-list rolling over a swell of lush Hollywood music that played on one’s lowest emotions and was taken up by a man rising into view on the Wurlitzer, lit by rainbow beams from the circle. It put her in mind of a U-boat surfacing in one of the British films that were trying to hide the t
ruth from the public about how badly the war was going.

  “I’m having tea in the café,” she said, “if you’d like some? It’s on me.”

  He checked the clock beside the screen and said he’d got about an hour before he was due home from sports. Only a few people walked up the aisle with them, as most had come in during the Cowboy and were waiting to see the films round. From the foyer they mounted sponge-carpeted stairs past stills of stars from Hollywood and Denham. On the balcony floor, a girl in black satinette trying to talk like someone from Sneyd Park showed them to a gold-and-green Lloyd-Loom basketwork table with a glass top held in place by chromium clasps. The boy wanted strawberry milk-shake and cherry cake. She had a pot of tea for one and Nice biscuits. The boy turned up his nose and said they didn’t seem nice at all to him and she told him it was pronounced Niece after the French town.

  He’d evidently been elated by ‘Mister Smith Goes to Washington’ and Claude Rains’s last-minute change of heart that had saved democracy from Edward Arnold.

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s good populist stuff.”

  “What?”

  He stared at her and sucked pink liquid through a straw.

  “Populist and popular. Roosevelt’s re-election proves that he and Frank Capra speak for the majority, all those dupes who want to believe the ordinary Joes can have a say in the way capitalism works. Not a view shared by the capitalists who control them, of course. For instance, Joseph Kennedy.”

  “Who?”

  “The U.S.Ambassador. During Prohibition a well-known bootlegger. He wants this film banned. He reckons it will harm America’s prestige abroad.”

  “Then he’s a grotesque. This is one of the most fantastic films ever made.”

  The last few drops gurgled as he sucked the glass dry.

  “Along with Mister Deeds Goes To Town.”

  And he changed his voice to a imitation of that star and quoted the whole speech verbatim : ‘“I was gonna give each man a horse, a cow and some seed and if they worked the farm for three years it’s theirs. Now maybe that’s crazy and I ought to be sent to an institution but I don’t think it is and” ‘ and Theo resumed his own voice, “‘I don’t think so either. I think it’s terrific.’”

  She took a Craven A from her handbag, put the corked end between her lips and lit the other. The boy stuck his tongue as far as he could into the glass and sucked pink froth. She made a small gesture to warn him that some had stayed on his mouth and nose like shaving-soap. Though she could see by the faint fuzz at his chin and cheeks that he hadn’t started using that stuff yet.

  He licked it away with a neat circular movement.

  ‘“D’you know, it was also the view of Hilaire Belloc and his fellow-progressives at the time of the Lloyd George budget that led to the Welfare state. Three acres and a cow.’”

  But he’d never heard of Lloyd George’s budget or Hilaire Belloc or read his Cautionary Verses so couldn’t enjoy, as she did, the irony of all that progressive turn-of-the-century waffle and progressive passion boiling down to the same argument as a popular Hollywood movie made by someone they’d probably have called a Yankee Wop.

  Their table by the window gave a view down Peter Street and the News Theatre, white and clean-lined.

  “Really swish building,” the boy said, “I wish everywhere could be like that. But I’ve never been inside it because News is boring.”

  Was it worth trying to explain to him that entertainment was empty and meaningless without ‘news’ to give it a social context? Probably not. Going to that expensive grammar school wasn’t likely to have given him much political awareness. He was bright but shallow. Privilege had enabled him to stay silly beyond his years. Her own class of poor kids in Bedminster grew up sooner. Had to, passed on as they were to the tobacco factory’s conveyor-belt at fourteen. And, judging by their parents, to chronic bronchitis and cancer from smoking the free allowance given the workers.

  “Don’t they teach you history in that posh school?”

  “Yeah, loads. All about kings and treaties. Hellish boring.”

  “And the British empire?” she went on, “Clive of India? The Battle of Plassey, Warren Hastings, the Black Hole? The wicked and ungrateful Indians who still don’t seem to want us? I wonder why.”

  From looking across Castle Street, he turned back to her. She drew and inhaled, held the smoke then blew it out through her nostrils in two jets.

  “What do they teach you about slavery?” she asked.

  “Abolition of the Slave Trade 1807.”

  “That’s all? Only the end of it? A school in a city built on centuries of slavery that must never be officially mentioned? Have you ever wondered why our university and most other public buildings were paid for by Wills’s cigarettes and Fry’s chocolate?” He shrugged again.” No? So where d’you think tobacco comes from?”

  “The West Indies?”

  “Yes. And chocolate?”

  “Somerdale. Keynsham, halfway to Bath.”

  “Made into bars there, yes, but –”

  “Only joking. I reckon the beans are from West Africa.”

  “Q.E.D. The slaves were taken from one to the other in chains. And the squares and terraces of Clifton were built on their suffering and torture and genocide and all they’ve taught you is Abolition 1807?”

  He’d kept the glazed cherry for last and now put it between his front teeth and bit it through.

  “Doesn’t your father ever wonder what he’s paying those fees for?”

  “Never stops, specially when he gets my fortnightly report card. And I tell him I don’t want to be there anyway.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I dare say he knows it will buy you the appearance of an education, and you’ll end with a few certificates that will put you a notch above the rest.”

  “He wants me to be a civil servant but I’m going to be a Hollywood film director. Mum’s got cousins in Vancouver, next door to California. I was going to be evacuated… then that ship went down with all those titches aboard and the scheme was stopped. I’ll get there when the war’s over but that could have saved me years.”

  She stubbed out the cork tip and said she’d only be a minute. As she walked to the Ladies, the Wurlitzer’s final flourish rumbled through the wall, merging with the town-crier music at the start of the news and the plummy commentator raving again about Roosevelt. It struck her that, when you couldn’t distinguish the words, he sounded as mad as Hitler. Or those lunatics on the Downs on Sunday evenings ranting that the end was nigh. Or, she thought as she closed the cubicle door behind her, even one or two of the Communist speakers she herself turned up to support. It didn’t seem to matter what was said as long as it reached the right pitch of demented fervour.

  Using the glass above the washbasin she renewed her lipstick, most of which had gone on the teacup and cigarette. Without knowing why, she shook her head to loosen the swept-back, pinned-up hair the headmaster had decreed. She bared her teeth and licked away spare lipstick. From a chromium compact she touched up her rouged cheeks and was checking the lines drawn up the back of her bare calves and knees with eyebrow pencil when another woman came in. Hazel let the hem of her short skirt fall and returned to the table.

  The boy had evidently been thinking and had a little speech ready.

  “My gran told me about the slaves that used to be imprisoned in caves underneath The Downs. She says that’s why there’s a Blackboy Hill. They were kept there in chains till they were sold.”

  “It’s a nice story,” she said and looked at the bill the girl had left under her saucer.” But only an old wives’ tale, so naturally your gran would tell it. No, the Blackboy was a pub. One or two negro slaves may have been brought here as novelties. One’s under a grave in Henleaze. I don’t know, a few picaninnies in Clifton dressed up in powdered wigs and breeches. Perhaps some exotic hanky-panky for the mistress. But that wasn’t how the trade worked. It was triangular, humans from Africa to America, goods from there to here
, guns and gold to Africa, and so on round again.”

  “You talk like a teacher.”

  “Probably because I am.”

  “Thought so. Which school?”