Free In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas Page B

the army.
    Pill seemed almost orientally attractive but, being timid, I more or less obeyed her, although I have no doubt my more daring younger brother knew its ways fairly well. Once, impetuously, I ventured into this casbah wearing my Wolf Cub uniform and hiked right through its sin-strewn streets without anything untoward happening to me. One of its major lures was a cinema called the Gem where the entrance price was a penny. The combination of excitement and economy was powerful. Clutching my brother's hand I took him there, or more probably he took me. We sat on splinter-ridden benches while the silent doings featured in The Mark of Zorro flickered like bats across the well-darned screen. There were several fights among attending children, and a full-grown woman stood up shouting filth at the pounding pianist and violently hoofed the door as she went out. Eventually a patently important man in a bow tie and frock coat imposed himself between the projector and the screen. Throwing his arms sideways he bawled: 'Stop pictures! Stop orchestra!' The pianist, glancing around to see who else might be playing, stopped in mid-clatter. 'Right-o,' volleyed the man. 'It 'as come to the management's notice that you kids 'ave been bringing fleas into the Gem. I'm up 'ere to tell you that you bring the buggers in – then you'll take the buggers out!'
    After this brief and obviously heartfelt decision the pianist began to wobble again on the keys and Zorro rode again across the stretched and grubby sheet. A man wrote to me recently from the same building. It is now an office block.
    My mother was mortified when she heard of our visit to Pill, but hygiene quickly replaced wrath and she avidly searched our heads. She loved the cinema especially films featuring Edward G. Robinson of the rubber scowl. She went to see Brother Orchid four times. After our adventure at the Gem she announced that a new picture palace was opening in Newport, the Maindee Supper Cinema, a sophisticated place where, she asserted, you could eat off trays during the performance. Unfortunately, she had misread it. It was only the Maindee Super Cinema.
    When I was eight I was allowed to go on the bus to the Odeon Saturday Morning Club, a hell-on-earth of screaming, rampaging kids where I relished every moment. The first film I believe I ever saw was a Popeye cartoon and one of its images kept itself locked in my memory for years. Popeye and Olive Oyl were walking down a street of mean houses, he just like my father, whom he somewhat resembled, holding his sailor's kitbag. At the bottom of the street, a poetic detail in the corner of the screen, some matchstick children were playing ring-a-roses around a lamp post, its circular light beaming down upon them. I recently passed a television shop and there, on a screen in the window, was that same scene. I remembered it perfectly.
    Sometimes on Saturday afternoons my mother would take Roy and me to the cinema. We usually had to see what she wanted to see, which often meant some weepy love story or, yet again, Edward G. Robinson, who like Popeye had an odd, squashed likeness to my father. The images that come from those remote afternoons at the pictures are, however, not always those from the screen. They are of leaving, at five o'clock in winter, to the lights of the town reflected on rainy roads, of tram cars clanking and of the prospect of going home to tea.
    There were times, although they became fewer, when my parents declared some sort of armistice and we briefly became the sort of family that I read about in 'Sunny Stories'. They were so unusual as to be noteworthy.
    My mother was one day at her washing board, looking out the misted window over the rooftops to the town beyond, wistfully, perhaps, or it may have just been the vapour from the steaming tub. One of my playmates had acquired a set of miniature blue dungarees, bib and brace, brass buckles and all, and I wanted a similar set. To my surprised satisfaction my