The Day War Broke Out Page 16

  I went on to Men’s Medical Ward, A2, not knowing what to expect. I was hailed from a bed and approached the patient’s side.

  ‘Can I have a bottle?’

  I turned to another patient, who was up and about. ‘What does he want the bottle for?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘Are you new?’ the ‘up’ patient asked. I nodded.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  Alice was led to the sluice room, where the man showed her a rack of glass male urinals and a pile of nice clean cloths.

  ‘Take a bottle, cover it with a cloth and take it to that patient in bed. When he has used it, cover it again with the cloth and take it back to the sluice, empty it and wash it by holding it over the nozzle in the sink. When you’ve done that, it gets put back in the rack.’

  ‘That’s simple,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But just you wait until you get to bed pans!’ and laughing heartily, he sat by his bed and picked up his newspaper.

  Alice passed her preliminary exam. Part of the exam included bandaging.

  I had the dreaded capeline [a bandage that covers the head or an amputation stump, like a cap]. You joined two ends of the bandages together, by sewing them with the join in the centre of the head; using the two bandages crisscross, you could encapsulate the entire head.

  Anyway, after all the hard work and effort put in for the exam, I passed. Another nurse accompanied me – we took the exam together – and afterwards, we had the rest of the day off.

  Later in the evening, we got back to Southlands and we were called to the operating theatre. A ten-year-old girl had a burst appendix, which in those days was very serious. As she lay on the operating table, she said to me so plaintively, ‘I want my mummy!’

  I held her hand and said, ‘You’ll go to sleep for a little while and when you wake up, you’ll see your mummy.’

  It was all promises, promises. The little girl didn’t wake up. She died and it was left to one of the doctors to break the sad news to her mother.

  After this, we nurses had to sterilise all the equipment that had been used in the operation and wash down all the walls; there was no time to stop and think about what had happened. It was just all in the day’s work – and we got to bed at 4am that morning.

  7

  ENTERTAINMENT

  DREAM PALACES

  WHEN WAR BROKE OUT, NINETEEN MILLION CINEMA TICKETS WERE being sold each week across the UK. Throughout the 1930s, going to the cinema – or ‘the flicks’ or ‘the pictures’, as they were known in those days, had increasingly become a hugely popular form of entertainment, especially with younger audiences who could easily afford the cheaper seats at 6 or 7 pence a time.

  By 1938, following a wave of new cinema building right across the country, there were nearly 5,000 in the UK. The nation was well and truly hooked on the movies. Nor did war diminish or alter the public’s once- or twice-weekly habit of going to the cinema. Along with theatres and other places of entertainment, every cinema in Britain was closed immediately after the declaration of war on 3 September. Yet after just two days, a small cinema in Wales defiantly opened its doors. Within three weeks, cinemas across the country were open again, often playing to packed houses. Theatres also reopened for the duration of the war.

  By war’s end, despite the bombings, blackouts and innumerable wartime deprivations, around thirty million cinema tickets were being sold each week: wartime proved be a golden era for the cinema. Audiences needed their fix of escapism, fantasy, romance and glamour more than ever when the daily grind of wartime Britain seemed to overshadow their very existence. As one cinema historian described the nation’s passion for cinema: ‘When their homes were hit, they came back next morning with the bomb dust still in their hair and when the cinema was hit, they climbed over the rubble in the street to ask when it would reopen. They were more sharply affected by the film on the screen than by the conditions that reigned outside.’

  Through the war, many British cinemas were destroyed by enemy bombs. By 1945, over 300 of them had been destroyed. Yet because the era before the war had been Hollywood’s golden age of film, audiences everywhere benefited.

  Many of the new cinemas built in Britain in the late 1920s and early 1930s echoed the style of the newly built lavish picture palaces across America – palatial works of architectural art, buildings with exotic decor, plush seats and soft lighting, constructed to entertain huge audiences in comfort.

  In Glasgow, Green’s Playhouse, built in 1927, could seat more than 4,300 people. London’s Brixton Astoria (now a music venue called the 02 Brixton Academy), built in 1929, could seat 4,750; it was described as ‘an acre of seats in a garden of dreams’. The Gaumont State Theatre, in Kilburn, North-West London, which opened in 1937, seated 4,004, split between a massive l,356-seater balcony and an orchestra level which could seat 2,648.

  Until the era of new cinema building, most UK cinemas had been small, outdated affairs, jokingly referred to as ‘fleapits’. The newly built cinemas, the ‘dream palaces’, transformed the entire cinema-going experience for the audience. It wasn’t just the larger seating capacity, these were awesomely grand places of entertainment with marble stairways, built in an over-the-top lavishly theatrical style. Some were decorated to look like an exotic tropical island, or in the style of an Indian maharaja’s palace, or to resemble a Mediterranean resort.

  Many were plush, Art Deco-style picture houses, often influenced by the architecture of Ancient Egypt, with huge screens, cigarette girls, even uniformed page boys. Some of the new palaces had smart cafés and tea rooms attached; the highlight of many featured the imported Wurlitzer organ, brightly lit and rising up from the floor, complete with organist to entertain the audience during the interval. Audiences could wallow in total luxury and fantasy – reflecting the dream world of movies – for just a few pennies a seat.

  The dream palaces tended to flourish most of all in the poorer areas where a warm, comfortable environment was virtually unknown. Many in the audience were actually walking on carpet for the first time. Some opted to indulge in the sheer escapism of the dream palace for an entire afternoon and evening, watching the programme continuously.

  There were usually two films in each programme with newsreels like Pathé News and trailers in between. Newsreels had been around in cinemas since the era of silent film but became prominent in the mid-1930s: some city centres boasted small newsreel cinemas showing nothing else. Only with the arrival of TV in homes in the 1950s did the newsreels begin to disappear.

  The programmes mainly featured American films. British films were shown too, though the homegrown films, produced to a quota system, tended to be much less popular with audiences, relegated to ‘B’-movie status (the bottom half of a double feature).

  Youngsters frequently packed out the stalls in the dream palaces. The stalls were the cheapest seats (6 pence), the upstairs seats, slightly more expensive (9 pence), especially if ‘U’ certificate films (which under-sixteens could watch without being accompanied by an adult) were showing.

  Saturday clubs specially for children took hold in the 1930s and continued through and beyond the war years. Nicknamed the ‘Tuppenny Rush’, the children’s programme consisted of a cartoon, followed by a sixty-minute B-movie Western, plus a ten-minute episode of a twelve-part serial, ending with a ‘cliffhanger’. The kids would sit cheering their heroes or jeering loudly at the bad guys. Usherettes and cinema managers often had their work cut out to prevent youngsters from jumping all over the seats, or having to catch naughty non-payers craftily creeping in through the emergency exits.

  Animated cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse became hugely popular with audiences by the mid-1930s, but it was Walt Disney’s first ever animated music fantasy film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that turned out to be a mega hit with UK cinema audiences in 1937, when one-third of the country went to see it.

  Other box-office sensations in the months immediately after war was declared were the American Civil Wa
r epic, Gone with the Wind, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and the Judy Garland classic, The Wizard of Oz. British-made films quickly tended towards somewhat obvious propaganda yet they became popular too; a film called The Lion Has Wings, made by celebrated filmmaker Alexander Korda, focused on the superiority of the RAF. It became one of the top three box-office attractions of 1939.

  Joyce Storey (see previous chapter) became a regular at ‘the flicks’ in the 1920s long before she left school.

  If you were lucky, you could get into the first few rows of the sevenpences, which came halfway up the hall and just right to be able to see the silver screen without cricking your neck. Right next to the cinema was a sweet shop with bottles of sweets and an array of mouth-watering chocolates for sixpence a quarter.

  Courting couples usually got the chocs and they always sat in the balcony seats. Of course, this luxury depended on whether you were lucky enough to be going out with a young man who was in work, otherwise the pictures were right out and a walk round the park would have to suffice.

  Everybody who could afford it went to the pictures every week. The kids went on Saturday afternoon. This cost us three whole pennies and was our pocket money for the week. Ben-Hur [1925] had been blazoned on the bill posters for weeks. With a cast of thousands, it was supposed to be sensational and special sound effects had been acquired at great expense.

  Although the talkies were about to arrive in the late 1920s, the silent films were still with us and those who couldn’t read the captions often had plenty of people around them to supply the story they missed. There would be long sighs and cries of ‘Aah’ when the villain of the piece did his dirty deeds, and as the film was projected onto the screen, the beam poured down through a thick haze of pipe and cigarette smoke that we coughed and spluttered through in order to see our favourite actors appear on the screen.’

  Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Fredric March, Douglas Fairbanks and Norma Shearer were just a few of these.

  They took us into another world of glamour and romance, and escape from the harsh, drab reality of our lives. As schoolgirls, we copied the women’s hairstyles and tried to emulate them. The false became the real.

  But no film could start before the pianist arrived. He was the most important man in those far-off days of silent movies. When he arrived at the cinema and began to walk down the red-carpeted aisle, applause, whistling and foot-stamping would accompany him all the way down to the cinema pit, where his grand piano always stood. It was his inspired playing that could bring a lump to your throat when our hero was nigh unto death and our heroine ministered to him, or fill you with fear and trepidation when Indians charged the stagecoach, or prompt you to rise in your seat to urge the hero to sock the villain to death, or kick his teeth in, and to boo and shout until you were hoarse.

  Then the talking pictures arrived.

  They built a new cinema just down the road and my friend Vee and I screamed and held onto each other when the pale horse of death seemed to leap out of the screen and onto us. Everything was now larger than life and full of energy and movement. We raced down to the new cinema before school one morning to gaze at a large poster outside showing Carlotta King dancing in a flame-coloured dress and John Bowles in flowing Arab headgear from the [silent] film The Desert Song. We gazed in rapt attention then turned and ran all the way to the school gates with the bell ringing madly in our ears. Out of breath and just making it to school in time, we whispered to each other as we filed into class that we would go on Friday night, because Saturday would be so crowded, we might have to queue for hours.

  Friday, we could go straight from school as long as we let our parents know. We could take sandwiches and call on a couple of mates who lived down that way and then we would be ready to be first in the queue for the evening performance.

  As an eight-year-old in North London, Terry Gallacher (1929–2014) developed a passion for cinema that eventually led to a lifetime’s career in film and TV, first as a newsreel cameraman, then a TV news editor and eventually running his own post-production company. It all started in 1937.

  My principal visits to the cinema were on a Saturday morning. Around eight o’clock in the morning, I would approach my mother for some pocket money. She might give me two pennies, sometimes three; my dad would give me the same. On a bad week, I would have as little as threepence in total. Then I would go up to my granddad’s room and ask him if he had any money for me to go to the pictures. He would ask me to pass him his small terracotta jar, with a lid. From here, he took out some farthings and he would count out four [totalling one penny]. I had to have fourpence to get into the Moorish-styled cinema, the Alcazar, in Edmonton, which started at nine in the morning and ran until midday. Here, we would see a couple of B movies about kids and animals and then a large number of serials like Tailspin Tommy, The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon and films like Tarzan with Johnny Weissmuller.

  Of course, they were all designed to get us back there next week. Mostly these cliffhangers were cheating us. Tailspin Tommy would be plunging to earth in a dive that he could not possibly pull out of. Next week, he would be seen about a hundred foot higher and pulls out of the dive without a problem.

  The audience were exclusively children, no adults were allowed. Most of the children were restless and rowdy. Frequently, the noise of the audience would be greater than the characters on screen. At this point, the resident warder would march down the aisle, shouting, ‘Quack, Quack!’ With my fourpenny ticket I could sit in the circle, far away from the rabble below. They were so bad, fights among the roughest of them were not unknown. If I could not have got fourpence to sit in the circle, I would not go. It took me a long time to work out that the warder was shouting ‘Quiet!’ It really did sound like ‘Quack!’

  If I had a good day and rustled up another twopence, I could join the ‘Tuppenny Rush’ at the Hippodrome across the road. The management of the Hippodrome, early experts in marketing, arranged to open their performance thirty minutes after the show ended at the Alcazar. All those children, trying to go from the Alcazar to the Hippodrome, would evacuate the former at high speed, run down to the crossing, over the road and queue up outside the Hippodrome. Traffic was held up while this mob moved from one cinema to the next. The main reason for the rush was that the Hippodrome only held half as many as the Alcazar and you couldn’t risk the chance that more wanted to go to the Hippodrome than it could hold.

  In the Hip, the films were older; the rowdiest of the Alcazar audience were sure to attend (their parents probably suffered considerable hardship raising the extra twopence, just to get rid of them for a few more hours); there were broken seats, seats with the most outrageous mixtures of spilled food, forcing us to inspect each seat before sitting down.

  The projector frequently broke down, the audience would go wild. They would shout, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh’ until the picture came back. Here there was no refuge sitting in a circle – there wasn’t one – and there was no ‘Quack’ man. In the Hippodrome, there was only the occasional cry of pain as a rowdy became the recipient of a thick ear.

  The warder in the Hippodrome was silent but quite active. I don’t know why I went there.

  Sadly, the Alcazar was bombed in a very early wartime raid on North London on 23 August 1940, while the Hip was pulled down – much to the relief of the local populace.

  ‘IT’LL NEVER CATCH ON’

  Cinema had only one other competing form of mass entertainment: radio. Television was barely in its infancy in the pre-war years. Very early TV sets demonstrating pictures with sound were seen by the public at London’s Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre in the summer of 1936 but given the tiny screens with flickering black-and-white images and the outrageously high price of a set–somewhere between £50 and £125 (at a time when average earnings for a year were just £132) – it seemed unlikely that TV would ever take over from the radio as the number one form of home entertainment. (There were 20,000 working TV sets in London when war broke out �
� only for the service to be abruptly terminated in September 1939, in the midst of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, resuming again in 1946.)

  By the late 1920s, ‘wireless’ – as radio was known then – was in its infancy, but it was growing incredibly fast. Kits for home construction of a radio set were widely advertised and became hugely popular. London-based electronics firms like Lissen and A. C. Cossor Ltd were at the forefront of radio development in the UK, initially selling kits to enthusiastic amateurs wanting to build a DIY version of a radio set on their kitchen table.

  These kit sets, complete with three valves, a cabinet and speaker, were advertised at prices ranging from £11 10s to a more modest £6 5s in 1934. Given the high price, radio enthusiasts were offered ‘Convenient gradual payment terms’ (a punishing early form of credit or ‘never-never’ with high interest rates: repossession would follow after just a couple of missed payments). A fast-growing publishing industry also cashed in on the growing radio craze with specialist magazines for enthusiasts.

  But the days of wireless sets with accumulator batteries that were only rechargeable at a garage were dying. By the mid-1930s, mass production of small home radios by firms like Lissen and A. C. Cossor meant prices for a working set gradually went down: a brand-new radio could now be purchased for £5 and 5 shillings.

  By 1937, over half of UK households had a radio. Two years later, nearly nine million 10-shilling radio licences were taken out. These were the first broadcast licences, a forerunner of today’s TV licence. Broadcast licences were first issued in 1922, when the BBC began radio transmission.