I remember spending Saturday mornings at Cinema Club

It was the early-1950s, I was 11, and Mum was having a mental breakdown. I didn’t know it then, and yet when I think back the signs were there.

It was the year Dad decided to take us to the country to live. His solution was to leave the dusty streets of town, and build a home at Cuckoo Lane.

We moved to a remote acre of ground in Gloucestershire. We had no house, but lived in a brick garage while Dad built it. The house had 10 rooms, three below ground, so it was pretty special. We also had an orchard and a stream at the bottom of the garden. This move meant I could no longer walk to the cinema — a place that had become my favourite treat.

Saturday mornings were Cinema Club. It cost us sixpence, and it was a noisy and crowded way to spend a few hours. The audience threw balls of paper, apple cores, and anything that could be launched; I tried to dodge the missiles while my younger brother looked for a fight.

During the summer months I met sophisticated French exchange students. They were a couple of years older than I was, and seemed very exotic. They were darker of skin and much more likely to try and kiss you. I got kissed a few times that last summer in the city. On reflection perhaps it was good that we moved. The warm darkness and all those hot foreign boys might have been my path to destruction.

When we moved to the country I had to find a way to get to a cinema again. It involved catching an unreliable country bus, and if you missed the last one it was scary walking along empty lanes to home. Then I got an old bike and was able to cycle there. I watched my screen heroines and tried to be like they were, which was a futile delusion for me.

At about that time I heard jazz for the first time. It was the year I went ‘exotic’ or tried to be; I modelled myself on the Latin looking screen idols I saw. I listened to crackling jazz stations on my radio, and asked Mum for a peasant blouse to wear. I loved the ‘new look’ fashions, the sweeping skirts.

I was growing up; I was changing and yet was not even aware of the changes. I left childhood behind that year, but still have some vivid memories of the innocent times. Sitting in the back seats of our car and my brother and I singing as we went home from the beach, windows open, warm winds blowing our hair, skin tight and burning from the sun, and the gritty rub of sand in our shoes, it is a happy recollection, but sad the innocence is left behind with childhood.

How did you spend your Saturday mornings as a child? Share your memories with us.

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