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there been a competition?

      Thimont (his name was Paul, but we were very formal kids in grammar school) explained, in his worldly way, that the best man was the bridegroom’s best friend, that he was keeper of the Wedding Ring and the life and soul of the Reception festivities, and would have to make a speech in front of all the wedding guests. He and the groom had been friends with one of the teachers at Donhead, and that was why we were there at all, serving Mass at this wedding, and that was why the school choir was currently up in the music loft, singing the ‘Ave Maria’ with a terrible, grinding slowness. We’d all been hired for the day, like a job-lot of farm labourers, by a sentimental fan of our school.

      As I listened to the singing, with its listless and drooping cadences, a martinet frown creased my brow. Buck up, you chaps, I thought, put some life into it. The honour of the school may be at stake here. You cannot sing so boringly in front of someone who’s been deemed a Best Man (though he was still backstage at the time, doing his register duties). I wanted him to be impressed by us. I wanted him to admire our cadet rigour, our parade-ground smartness, our polish and swagger. But in the event, it was he who subverted all our lives. Because, in gratitude for our labours that day, he bought the choir and the altar servers tickets to see Mutiny on the Bounty.

      It was my first-ever movie. I was, at eight, a virgin of the picture house. Other boys in my class had been to Disney cartoons in local picture houses, or to Saturday-morning cinema club, or even to school-holiday first-run features: they could discuss the wonders of In Search of the Castaways, and its star, the wide-eyed, beautiful Hayley Mills, every eight-year-old boy’s dream companion. I knew nothing of all this. My Saturday mornings were spent in church. My parents didn’t disapprove of the cinema as a temple of sin, they simply ignored it as an irrelevance in their children’s education. Going to the movies was something grown-ups did, by themselves as a foolish bit of time-wasting, or else as a couple at the start of a long, chaste and protracted courtship.

      But it was my first time, and I was tremendously excited. Not just by the prospect of seeing a movie, but a grown-up movie at that; not just an adventure film, but one lasting three hours. Not just an evening out that would go on well beyond the bedtime hour of 8 p.m., but an evening in the West End of London, where there were pubs and ritzy neon signs – the last word in glamour in 1962 – and restaurants with dressed-up couples you could see through the windows, eating steak and drinking wine, and all the rackety bustle and hum of the capital I’d only ever seen through the windows of the family Renault, when we were taken, as a colossal treat, to see the Christmas lights of Oxford Street and Piccadilly.

      The day dawned. My mother insisted I take a scarf in case the evening grew cold – a needless precaution in June. My father gave me a stiff, brand-new pound note to spend on ice-cream. At school, the form teacher Mr Breen announced there would be a special class at 3 p.m. for those attending the evening screening. What could it be? A lecture on cinema etiquette? No, it was an extra lesson on maritime history. For an hour we looked at maps of eighteenth-century exploration, we heard about colonial expansion in the Americas, we learned about the importance of breadfruit as the staple diet of South Pacific tribes and how it used to be imported to feed the slaves in the British sugar plantations of the West Indies …

      Rigid with disappointment, we suddenly realised that this whole, supposedly exciting movie venture was a con. We had hoped for pirates and grog and swordfights. We’d have settled for sailing ships and people shouting ‘Splice the main-brace’ and maybe a shark attack. But instead we were going to get a dramatisation of the historical significance of breadfruit. Three hours of it. Some of us wondered aloud if it was worth the bother of going. But, we conceded, a trip to the West End en charabanc with your mates was still a better prospect than staying in, doing your homework and (in my case) saying the rosary before going to bed. So we set off with mixed feelings. We sang little songs in the coach, and pulled faces at passing motorists, the hard cases in the choir swigging bottles of Corona Cherryade and belching exuberantly.

      In Leicester Square, the trees were full of chattering jackdaws, flying in and departing on black wings against the still-bright, school-uniform-blue sky. Huddled together by our coach, we suddenly became aware, for all our bravado, that this was grown-up land – a territory of strange, obscurely alarming, adult to-and-froing. It was not a place to get lost. We milled about Mr Breen, fourteen anxious acolytes around this trustworthy figure with his slicked-down, Brylcreemed hair (how his name suited him) and his youthful, big-brotherly authority.

      Accompanying him on the trip was Miss Stacey, class mistress of the fourth form. She was a handsome, meringue-haired, statuesque termagant with a bosom like a sack of concrete, and a face liberally basted with orange foundation. She stood no nonsense. Her sharp blue eyes sought out tiny displays of rebellion like a searchlight. My friend Palmer swore he’d once found her and Mr Breen locked in a passionate kiss on a piano stool in the Music Room; but there were some things in life that were completely beyond comprehension or likelihood, and the idea of Miss Stacey kissing anyone was right up there with Abominable Snowmen and the Holy Trinity.

      The Odeon loomed above us like an enormous temple. It took up as much space as our local church and seemed to bulge with light, eclipsing all the other buildings on one side of the square. We walked towards it in a hushed gaggle, impressed beyond words, and stopped to consider its immense beauty. Up the wall, above the huge ODEON sign, the film’s title shouted across the square in a blaze of million-watt illuminations: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. Each of the letters was about two feet high. Presumably they’d been manipulated into place earlier that day by a master sign-writer with superior spelling skills. He must (I reasoned) have a box containing the whole alphabet in red, light-up signs, but since the title contained two Os, two Ys, two Us, and – blimey – three Ts and three Ns, it occurred to me he’d need two or three different boxes to rummage in. And were there any films which had three Xs or Ys or Qs …?

      I broke off this absorbing line of enquiry to register that we were standing in a great big cave that was the Odeon’s lobby. Everything about it was plush – the carpets felt four inches thick, the white walls featured a thick anaglypta, frieze-like wedding-cake-decoration motif and even the staircase in the distance seemed to lie back luxuriantly on soft pillows. It was like the soft furnishings department of Arding & Hobbs, grown to colossal size but with no merchandise in sight. Instead there was a manager in a formal tuxedo and bow-tie, and two ladies in strict red-and-white stripey uniforms selling things. One had a tray that hung around her neck on long ribbons, full of tubs of ice-cream.

      ‘No ice-creams until the interval,’ Mr Breen sternly informed us. ‘And everyone must spend a penny before we go in.’

      The other lady sold big, glossy magazines with pictures of actors on the front. ‘Don’t bother with the programmes,’ Mr Breen warned us. ‘They’re a waste of money. You can’t be too careful in these places.’ Instinctively he had become our intrepid native scout guiding us through the jungle of the modern commercial cinema. The foyer of the Odeon didn’t look much like a jungle, though. It was more like a big sofa. The atmosphere was almost creepily tactile, like velvet or suede, something you could run your finger along, something you could almost fondle.

      We shuffled upstairs, marvelling at the airy splendour of this secular cathedral, were dispatched to the Gents, were reassembled like a lost platoon, ticked off for talking and shoving, then, in a fourteen-strong group, went through the door into a profound darkness.

      It was like going over the top in a war. I could see nothing but a massive sheet of screen on our left, on which a giant young woman in a gingham frock was accepting a light for her cigarette from a laughing man about Mr Breen’s age. They were enjoying a picnic beside a river. I kept my eyes on the girl, who was pretty and seemed very easily amused, and, moving forward blindly, I crashed into Armfield, who’d stopped in front of me.

      ‘For Christ’s sake, Walsh …’ he said crossly.

      ‘Sh!’ whispered Mr Breen, as our troop of choirboys and servers milled awkwardly around the Dress Circle. A grown-up woman flashed a torch at an empty patch in the third row and we filed into it like automatons.

      ‘Consulate,’ intoned an adenoidal voice from the screen in seductive tones. ‘Cool as a

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