Film fun in a grey world...

A long time ago, in a world of 100 watt overhead bulbs and freezing cold bathrooms, there lived a boy who learnt to dream. The reason for his dreaming was that his real life was grey, as grey as the pullover his Nan had knitted him for Christmas, wrapping it in old newspapers rather than the brightly coloured wrapping paper that they sold from the shop at the end of the road. He needed colour; a life away from the falling leaves and rattling windows and magpies cawing from the grey tiled rooftops. But where would he find it?

One day his parents bought a new bureau from the Friday Man, paying for it on tick at 6d a week. It was made from cheap wood and had a pull down desk top front with shelves and individual compartments for envelopes, pens, and stamps. There were sliding glass doors at the bottom which were always falling out, but the middle of the bureau was an open shelf. For a while that shelf was an empty dark hole of nothingness, a void waiting to be filled. The boy wished that it was full of dreams, but it continued to hold only dust.

A few weeks later Auntie Clara from next door, who wasn’t his aunt at all but a lifelong friend of his mothers, knocked on the back door carrying an old cardboard box. Usually she didn’t bother to knock, but the box was far too full of books and so heavy that she couldn’t turn the handle. The box held old dreams; Film Fun annuals from the thirties and forties and Film Studio annuals with glossy portrait shots of Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Donat and all the leading ladies of the day. The books smelled of dust and the edges of the pages were yellowed with age, but to the small boy they were a whole new world and they fitted perfectly into the empty shelf hiding the dust with their colourful bindings.

I kept those books for years, reading the adventures of Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown, and Tom Mix over and over and gazing at the photographs of Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietritch, and Gene Kelly until they were imprinted on my mind. Those old books caught my imagination and at night I’d dream that I was a player in the stories they contained. The world was never grey after that.