Flashbacks Without the Lights

I'm sitting in the cinema.  Seat at an angle.  I expect the previews, but the picture in my head whirs into focus instead.  The six other Monday-nighters think it's the big movie.  The summer blockbuster.

There's my Dad, the square-jawed film star, and me, the cheap sidekick, taking a greyhound for a walk. Early Ealing Studios perhaps or maybe one of John Grierson's slices of black and white grit.  We pass a heap of rubble on a stretch of waste ground.

Life is hard without technicolor.  Our house was condemned as unsuitable for human habitation, escapist humour or grace before the war was even a twinkle in Adolph's eye.  A damp and dirty infestation fit for heroes.  My mother cooks on one iron ring that swivels reluctantly over the open coal fire.  The production values are good.  Her dream, she says, is to have two iron rings so that she can boil potatoes and worry some stew at the same time.  This is so authentic.  The portrayal of life on a raw, broken-glass edge of a wall, with nothing worth stealing on either side.

The black and white flickers into colour tints.  For on this waste ground there grow a few lupins.  Purple spikes that drain to yellow and then cream at the tips.  The scene goes fuzzy, goes grey, out of focus.  The sound falters, out of sync.  All seven of us stamp our feet.  I look round at the other six.  Whose film is this, anyway?

The picture becomes clearer.  The words are struggling out of pre-Dolby time.  Does someone speak?  'Let's pick some and take them home.  Nobody will mind.'  Who says that?  Does my Dad read his script with feeling?

'Would your Mum like these?'

Maybe he thinks the two rooms are so dingy, a gas mantle glowing desperately onto the central fly-paper yellow and sticky with with black flies, that a few flowers will brighten up the place.  What is the motivation here?  Coal mining - dirty and dangerous - poor pay - demoralising - here is a free gift of nature.  Does he think he can make amends for the nights my mother and I, as a four year old, turned the sharp corner into the dark, empty, midnight street, wishfully thinking that this would be the moment he might return from his drinking and womanising with some money still in his pocket.  Perhaps the director wants an act of kindness here.  Remorse flitting across hardened features.
Audience reaction: wet popcorn.

I cry tears for the boy that was me - the child actor who needs protection from this harsh script, from the absence of love in this man's method acting.  I need this man, this Kirk Douglas chin, this Robert de Niro darkness to say: 'Yes.  Let's pick those for your Mum.'  Even at that age the child star knows that people have flowers in their houses.  He has heard it talked about on the radio and seen it in a cartoon at the Palladium.

The scene is re-taken, re-edited, like some false memory,  Get it right.  I can't stand this.  My chair flips up.  I move back a dozen rows.  The cinema has emptied.  Now, I can hear more clearly.

FATHER:  I think they're called lupins.

BOY:  Take one home for Mum.

FATHER:  (Pulling back on the greyhound's lead)  Don't be stupid.