My Secret Diary (5 page)

I went to so many films – most of them pretty dire
too! There were lots of cinemas in Kingston then,
but each only had one screen. The Granada and
the Regal and the Empire were all perfectly
respectable, but Kingston Kinema was a total
fleapit. It showed arty, less mainstream films, and
we sometimes went there too, though we weren't
supposed to.

The Kinema attracted Dirty Old Men – far dirtier
than the ones who hung around Maxwells music
shop. The pitch-black of the Kinema made them
bold. They'd shuffle along the empty rows and sit
right next to you. You'd strain as far away from
them as possible, staring up at the screen, heart
thumping. You'd keep telling yourself it was going
to be fine, he wouldn't
do
anything, but then a
clammy hand, repulsive as a jellyfish, would slither
onto your knee. You'd jerk your knee away from it,
trembling, but you knew that hand would come
back. Sometimes it changed into a crab and tried
to scuttle underneath your skirt. Then at long long
last this would galvanize you into action and
you'd grab your friend and sidle down the row away
from him.

Why on earth did we put up with this? Why
didn't we complain loudly and go and find an
usherette? We were all as hopeless as each other –
Carol, Chris, all my other friends: we sat paralysed
with shame and fear while these hateful men
dabbed at us disgustingly. It was as if
we'd
done
something bad and embarrassing. We might joke
about it afterwards, even getting fits of the giggles,
but at the time it was terrifying.

So why did we
go
to the Kinema? Well, we wanted
to see those arty movies, a lot of them X-rated. They
would probably be considered very bland kids' stuff
nowadays. We were so totally innocent, even a Cliff
Richard film could shock us. We all wanted to see
his new film,
Expresso Bongo
, because it was set in
Soho where all the strip joints were.

Friday 22 January

In the evening I went to see 'Expresso Bongo' with
Carol at the Regal. We saw tons of girls from school
there, all dressed up pretending to be sixteen. Jill,
Susan and Joyce were there in the 'ninepennies'
and Jill told me afterwards that she had seen Peter
there and he had smiled at her. She also said that
Joyce had asked Susan and her to club together and
buy some cigarettes. They reluctantly agreed, but
Susan wouldn't smoke any. Jill had three and
wasn't very impressed, but Joyce finished the lot
off! I think she's only 13!

P.S. 'Expresso Bongo' was very good.

I was too shy to write in my diary about the
astonishing scene set in a Soho club where you saw
topless showgirls. There was an audible gasp from
the cinema audience as this line of girls jiggled
across the screen. They weren't even entirely
topless: they had little stars in pertinent places,
presumably stuck on. It must have been pretty
painful removing them each night.

You didn't get topless models in newspapers
in 1960, not the papers we had at home anyway.
You didn't get girly magazines openly displayed on
newsagents' shelves either. The only bare breasts
I'd ever seen were on African women in the
National
Geographic
magazine. Those
Expresso Bongo
girls
made a big impression on all of us. We talked about
them excitedly at school the next morning.

Mostly our film-going was a lot less adventurous.
I seemed very easy to please. On Monday 4 January
I went to see Tommy Steele in
Tommy the Toreador
and pronounced this film 'very good.' The next day
I saw Norman Wisdom in
Follow a Star
, which I
said was 'very funny'. You would have to tie me to
my seat to get me to watch either film now.

Carol and I went to the pictures two or three
times a week in the holidays. We went after school
too, sometimes with Sue and Cherry. They lived in
Kingston too. Sue literally lived next door to me,
at number eleven Cumberland House, where we'd
both lived since we were six.

This was 'a better class of council estate',
according to my mother – and she did her
level best to bring me up a better class of
child. Sue's mother, Nancy, was equally
ambitious for her daughter. No other children
in Cumberland House had such white socks
and blouses, such polished brown sandals, such
expensive school satchels.

Sue and Nancy had heated arguments
nowadays. Nancy wouldn't let Sue use make-up
and still liked her to wear smocked Viyella dresses
with long blue socks and flat shoes, whereas we
were all allowed lipstick and eyeshadow, nylons and
little heels. Sue secretly used her birthday money
on her own lipstick and nylons and spent two
minutes in the ladies' toilets each time she went
out, turning herself into a teenager.

Cherry lived in a flat too, but it was part of a
very large house further down the road. When she
was a little girl she'd had a pageboy haircut, but
now she had a blonde ponytail that bounced as she
walked. Cherry was part of a different teenage
world altogether. She went riding, she joined a
tennis club, she sang in amateur Gilbert and
Sullivan productions. (Biddy perversely sneered at
these harmless middle-class hobbies.)

I'd been friends with Sue and Cherry when we
were children but they'd gone to different
secondary schools. However, now we were in the
third year (Year Nine), Coombe had expanded and
Sue and Cherry started going there too.

Thursday 4 February

After school I went to the pictures with Sue and
Cherry. Carol still has a chill. It was 'Please Turn
Over', and all three of us enjoyed it very much. Julia
Lockwood was in it who I quite like. In the film she
wrote a book called 'Naked Revolt' about her
suburban family, with some shocking results. It
showed you excerpts from the book, and I would have
given anything to have been able to read it. The other
film was good too; it was called 'The Desperate
Man'. Conrad Phillips (William Tell) was in it, and
also a very attractive girl called Jill Ireland.

You got good value for money going to the
pictures in 1960. There were always two films,
the main feature film and then a shorter film,
usually a thriller. In between you got Pathé News,
introduced by a noisy cockerel, and a ten-minute
documentary called
Look at Life
. If you had nothing
else to do, you could sit there in your red plush
seat watching the entire programme all over again.
You'd only have to get up when they played the
National Anthem. It sounds so strange now, but
they truly did play 'God Save the Queen' after every
cinema performance, and everyone stood to
attention, looking solemn.

Thursday 11 February

After school I dashed home and changed, slapped
some powder and lipstick on my face, called for Sue,
and then we went to the flicks. We met Carol there
and saw 'A Summer Place' with Sandra Dee and
Troy Donahue. It was quite good, but a little too
dramatic. Everyone seemed to have a love affair
with someone else, and crept hand in hand to the
boat house, beach or park respectively. It was rather
like a women's magazine story, taking you to the
bedroom door and no further.

I don't think I knew much about what happened
behind
the bedroom door at fourteen, but I wanted
to sound sophisticated.

I nearly always went to the pictures with my
friends. Harry had taken me when I was a little
girl but we didn't go anywhere together now. I
did
occasionally go with Biddy:

Saturday 13 February

Mum said she wanted to see the film 'The Reluctant
Debutante' so we went together. On the way we went
into the Bentalls' record department. I saw P. Wilson
and Y. McCarthy in turquoise duffel coats, extremely
tight jeans and cha-cha shoes being cuddled by a
group of horrible spotty teddy boys. 'The Reluctant
Debutante' was very good, and Mum and I also
enjoyed the other film 'Watusi' very much.

Oh dear, it would have been
so
much cooler to
be wearing a duffel coat and tight jeans and
cuddling a teddy boy rather than going to the
cinema with my mum.

The following Saturday I 'went to see "Pillow
Talk" with Carol and Sue'.
Pillow Talk sounds
sophisticated, but it was a frothy comedy. I vastly
preferred the next film I saw,
The Nun's Story
,
with Audrey Hepburn. Audrey made thousands of
girls decide they wanted to be nuns, although
sadly no
real
nun ever looked so ethereally
exquisite in her veil and wimple. I fell in love with
Audrey like everyone else, but the nun's vow of
obedience appalled me.

Monday 22 February

In the evening I met Carol and we went to see 'The
Nun's Story'. It was a really wonderful film, one
of the best I've seen. It showed you what a nun's
life is really like. I know one thing, and that is that
I would never make a good nun, not even a
makeshift one. Never, never could I have such sheer
obedience; if I think I am right I cannot obey humbly
but I must argue my point. But humility is the
quality I lack most. If anyone says anything
humiliating to me, something inside me is hurt and
angry and tells me to hit back at that person with
cutting remarks. Besides, I could not bear a life
minus men and children
.

I saw delicious melodramas like
Conspiracy of
Hearts
with Carol – but occasionally I went to a
comedy with Chris. We saw
Please Don't Eat the
Daisies
– and sang '
Please, please,
don't
eat the
daisies
' up and down Coombe's corridors for weeks
afterwards. We had a lovely cosy day when we went
to see
School for Scoundrels
.

Thursday 19 May

I went home with Chris at dinner time. It was
raining, and we had to wait for 4 buses. When we
eventually got to the Keepings' we were absolutely
drenched. For dinner we had liver, baked beans,
cauliflower and new potatoes; then rhubarb and
evaporated milk! Very nice! Then we did our maths
together, and then caught the train to Kingston, and
saw 'School for Scoundrels'. It was very funny, but
Chris and I laughed far more at the other film
which was meant to be VERY SERIOUS. The main
character was called Julian Caesar, his best friend
Marc Antony, another friend Brutus, his girlfriend
Portia, and his enemy Cassius. How daft.

It could well have been a brilliant contemporary
reworking of Shakespeare but clearly it didn't work
for us! We must have infuriated everyone sitting
near us, going giggle giggle giggle, but only half the
audience seemed interested in watching the film:

Sitting in front of us were these girls and teds
snogging (if you'll pardon the vulgar expression)
and Chris and I are positive that one of them (the
one on the end without a boy) was Jennifer D!

Oh dear, how awful to be the one on the end
without a boy!

I wasn't a particularly religious girl, but I adored
the film
The Ten Commandments
. In an age long
before videos and DVDs it was a rare treat to find
a film repeated after its original release. I saw
The
Ten Commandments
was on again at the cinema
and begged Carol to go with me.

It was extremely long, but we watched
enraptured. It was filmed very solemnly, with
the actors frequently standing still as if in a
tableau, gesturing bizarrely, but we soon got used
to that. It was very stirring when they were
building the pyramids and Moses saved the old
woman – she's actually his real mother but he
didn't know this.

The colours of
The Ten Commandments
were so
rich and beautiful and the miracles themselves
seemed wondrous. In our age of computer-generated
trickery the parting of the Red Sea would
probably seem pretty pathetic – but I held my
breath when Charlton Heston made his way
through those waves. The whole cinema whispered,
'
How did they
do
that?
'

The film was about the very good and the very
bad – and I'm afraid I was mostly on the bad
guy's side. I thought irreverently that the film's
Voice of God was a little like the voice of the
Wizard of Oz. I quite liked Charlton Heston as
Moses but I vastly preferred his enemy, Yul
Brynner, playing bald, sexy Rameses, who was
unhappily married to dark, scheming Nefertiri.
She was one hundred per cent a baddie, a callous
murderer, but Anne Baxter, who played her, was
so beautiful that I thought her wonderful. I didn't
want to be blonde Susan Wooldridge any more. I
wanted to be dark and sultry with long shiny black
hair and crimson lips.

I went to some classic adaptations with the
wrong attitude entirely. Carol and I hadn't read
D. H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers
(and
Lady
Chatterley's Lover
hadn't even been published yet)
but we thought it would be pretty sexy. We watched
the film restlessly and grew impatient at the end.

'What a swizzle. It wasn't a
bit
sexy,' I said.
'I don't think much of D. H. Lawrence.'

But sometimes these adaptations worked
wonders.

Saturday 23 July

In the afternoon I went to the flicks again, this time
with Sue, and saw 'Wuthering Heights', on at the
Kinema. It was very good, and at the end I could
hear Sue sniffling away as if her heart was broken.
I think I will read the book, as it is one of the classics
Miss Pierce told us to read.

I read it that summer, waking up early every
morning and reading for hours until I reached that
beautiful last paragraph.