Alone at the Regal

Text 1: Ninepence, by Bernard Quilley

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The first time I went to the pictures on my own I was eleven, and I had saved for it for five weeks: ninepence, in coppers, wrapped in a twist of paper and kept in the toe of my Sunday shoe. It was 1954. The Regal stood at the bottom of Church Street like a great cream-coloured liner that had run aground among the terraces, and on Saturday afternoons the queue for the children’s matinee went right round the corner and past the fish shop.

I had always gone with my brother. This time he had measles, and my mother, after a long look at me over the top of the ironing, had said I might go if I sat near the aisle and came straight home.

Inside the foyer everything was red and gold. There was a carpet so thick my shoes made no sound on it, and mirrors on every wall, so that a hundred small boys in grey shorts stared back at me with the same anxious face. The woman in the ticket booth had hair piled up like a meringue. She took my coppers without counting them, which seemed to me a tremendous act of trust.

Then the usherette tore my ticket, and the curtain over the doorway swung shut behind me, and I was in the dark.

I had never been in the dark like that, a warm, enormous, crowded dark that smelt of oranges and damp coats and cigarette smoke drifting down from the balcony. I could hear hundreds of children breathing and rustling and whispering around me, but I could not see one of them. For a moment I stood absolutely still, my heart thudding, and I wanted my brother more than I had ever wanted anything.

Then the usherette’s torch came, a small travelling moon, and found me an aisle seat, and I sat down, and the plush was soft and prickly against the backs of my knees.

And the screen lit up.

I do not remember the film. A cowboy picture, I think: horses, dust, a man in a white hat. What I remember is the light, pouring over our heads in a long, trembling, silver beam, full of drifting smoke, and the way all our faces turned up into it at once, like flowers turning to the sun. I remember thinking that I had never been so alone, or so completely part of something.

Explore how Bernard Quilley uses language and structure to present his first visit to the cinema on his own.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.