Brief Lives Read Free Page A

the foyer every evening in dinner jackets, dress shirts and bow ties. We lived in Camberwell, in one of those narrow Georgian houses now sought after by the sons and daughters of merchant bankers. We thought the house was just an ordinary house, rather dark, with too many stairs, and not much of a garden. My mother, who was highly strung and tired easily, disliked it: she dreamed of a modern flat, in a suburb like Ealing or Golders Green, with a fitted kitchen and central heating. I loved the house, which was the only one I had ever known. I played quite happily, as a child, on the landings or in my small bedroom, bounced a ball against the wall in the garden, which also contained a coal shed and an outhouse. There was an elderberry tree at the end, where the garden overlooked a narrow alley which ran out into the main road, and I would take my chair and sit underneath the tree, pretending I was in the country. I hadno notion of what the country was like, for I rather think we never took a holiday: Father made a point of being on duty, as he called it, and Mother was a nervous traveller. Although restless and over-imaginative, it suited her to stay at home, to leave the house only when necessary, to do her shopping or to see a film. The cinema satisfied her cravings for a better life, revealing to her a world of possibilities, of luxury and extravagance, in which all one needed was a pair of dancing feet, a pretty face, or a singing voice which would captivate the man of one’s dreams and secure one’s heart’s desire. My mother believed in these things, and I did too.
    Our lives were shaped by the cinema, both in a physical and a moral sense. The appeal of the cinema in those days was its classlessness. The heroine was, more often than not, a plucky orphan, at most a modest dancer on a chorus line, or a shop-girl with blonde curls and a gift for repartee. The convention was that the hero should be of more elevated rank, that he should be astonished, beguiled, and finally swept off his feet by this spirited little nobody, who nevertheless was always impeccably turned out, spruce and provocative in her puffed sleeves and her silk stockings, as very few real working girls had the energy or the resources to be in those hard times. In virtually every Hollywood comedy there would be a villainous comic chorus of snobs, with cigarette holders and archaic hats—usually the hero’s mother and a discarded fiancée or two—all of whom would be vanquished by the heroine’s pertness and the hero’s sincerity. There would, inevitably, be an offer of marriage, for they were very moral tales. A girl won through by charm, or personality, not by influence, while if the hero ever had any base idea of seduction he was soon reformed by the virtue demonstrated by the object of his fascination—itwas never, ever, passion—until such time as the knot was tied, to the accompaniment of a full-blown song and dance extravaganza.
    Those innocent films of the late 30s and early 40s influenced the outlook and the behaviour of a generation or two of young men and women. Girls with no experience whatever learned to be provocative, and boys, with even less experience, to be dashing. In reality they were fledglings, playing at desire, and finding the game delightful, arguably more delightful than the real thing, which they learned about much later, sometimes with bitterness, sometimes for life—for divorce was thought to be a disgrace, something not even to be contemplated—and without any sign of
singing
or dancing. Women with small children always appeared to me to be middle-aged when I was a child, while the cinema was the world of eternal youth. I learned, when I grew older, that eternal youth is too precious a delusion ever to be relinquished: it has to find a place somewhere, be enshrined in a myth, an ideal, even a fantasy. In those days before the war we lived a dream of innocence that the war years did not entirely shatter, even when we had