Watching the moon landing

Text 1: Nineteen in the Front Room, by Brenda Kilbride

An original twentieth-century memoir.

We did not own a television, so on the night of the moon landing my mother marched the four of us across the road to the Pattersons’, who did. By ten o’clock there were nineteen people in their front room, sitting on the arms of chairs, on the floor, on each other. Mr Patterson stood guard beside the set like a man protecting a holy relic.

The picture, when it came, was terrible. I had expected something like the films at the Odeon, all colour and music; instead there was a grey smudge, crawling with lines, in which a shape that might have been a ladder and might have been a fault in the tube trembled and jumped. A voice crackled from the speaker, very far away, saying words that nobody in the room could quite catch. Mrs Patterson turned the volume up. It made no difference.

And yet nobody moved. I remember the silence more than anything: nineteen people, three of them children who had been awake far past their bedtime, and not one of us made a sound. Even the baby stopped grizzling. The clock on the mantelpiece seemed to tick louder and louder, as if it too were holding its breath.

Then the shape on the screen moved downward, slowly, slowly, and stopped. Somebody whispered, ‘That’s him. That’s a man.’ My father, who had not been to church since his wedding, made the sign of the cross.

Afterwards we walked home across the road in the warm dark, and I looked up. The moon was where it always was, over the gasworks, pale and round and ordinary. But it was not ordinary any more. Someone was standing on it. I stared until my neck ached, half expecting to see a light, or a tiny figure waving, and my mother had to pull me inside by the hand.

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