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to her strident lead, yet they seemed to quietly harmonise. Although their relationship was never apparent to the students, he was in fact Anna’s lover. Tall and thin, with a patient temperament, he’d studied to be a scientist at Oxford but found himself enjoying the rewards from teaching working-class kids how to act. Charles was everything we weren’t: upper-middle-class, well spoken and gentle, but contrary to the fashion of the time, neither he nor Anna attempted to be one of us or change themselves to suit. Yet the respect that they received was palpable.

      Anna’s technique was praise mixed with discipline and she delivered it for just two shillings a lesson. Even if your kernel of talent was extremely small, she would highlight it and sing its praises.Many of the children had never experienced approval or encouragement and this was hard for them to trust, but very quickly their spirits grew.

      Her method was improvisation. We never looked at scripts or texts, and Shakespeare or Pinter were never mentioned, although Martin Luther King and Gandhi may well have been. We were, on the whole, not literary creatures, and generally frightened of books or anything that resembled schoolwork, so, without any level of condescension, Anna cleverly built her classes around what we could create ourselves. She would get us to play out mini-dramas based on problems that we all knew uncomfortably well: communicating with teachers or parents; issues of unfinished homework or coming home late; and, more importantly, bullying.

      It might begin with one of us playing the role of the Parent and the other the Child returning from school or play, trying to hide the fact that he or she is suffering; a simple exercise that was set in the world we knew. As a by-product we’d gradually learn how to deal with those situations and, by acting them out at Anna’s, exorcise any frustrations that we felt in real life. It was a kind of gestalt therapy by default, spooling out our inner anxieties, giving them a voice and, to a certain extent, freeing us of them. Acting is about tapping into one’s emotions and, with Anna’s kids, the emotion that poured out initially was anger.

      At that time, we were mostly young people from the poor side of Essex Road, but Anna’s would gradually become a meeting place for the different classes and cultures of the Islington kid. The borough was divided into two distinct sides by its main road, which ran from Newington Green to the Angel. On our side, the treeless streets of council accommodations, rough and rented; on the other, the leafy lanes of mortgaged Georgian homes, proud and well-proportioned. Here, three families to a house; there, one (plus, of course, an au pair or two). The child of the printer will also meet the child of the professional at Dame Alice Owen’s grammar school, but that is for the future, a future that will have Anna take her theatre across the Islington divide and lose it to a group of trustees, and the attractive standing girl and the fat one from the sofa become household names. But for now we are at the beginning, and it is gloriously innocent.

      ‘I’m going to be in a film.’ Stephen was behaving quite normally considering his news.

      ‘What is it?’ I asked.

      ‘It’s called Junket 89.’

      He was about to take on the lead role in a Children’s Film Foundation production. His mother seemed unimpressed and carried on with her tidying, but then, to our parents, born before the age of desperate celebrity-craving, it was all childish frivolity, and to be too excited would only encourage us to let it get in the way of normality. A picture of Stephen’s father looked on stoically. I glanced at the upturned glass on the Ouija board. It remained unmoved.

      As for me, I was amazed and envious. Every Saturday morning from the age of six, I’d walk up the Essex Road to the Ancient Egyptian styled ABC cinema. In my jeans pocket (not Tesco Bombers, but some equally cheap market-stall pair) I’ve two bob, round my waist maybe a snake-belt, on my feet possibly Trackers (the ones with the animal footprints on the sole and the tiny compass in the heel—on the other hand, it could have been the later design, Grand Prix, with the racing-car tyre I Know This Much (4thEstate) 22/7/09 13:44 Page 31 tread), and in my mouth an anatomically pink Bazooka Joe. I was on my way to Saturday Morning Pictures.

      I was an ABC Minor and would faithfully belt out the song that began the morning’s programme: ‘We are the boys and girls well known as the Minors of the ABC…’ as about two hundred of us, wired to the tits on Jublees, Munchies and Kia-Ora, infested the cinema with such virulence that even the toughest usherettes would scurry off to cleaning cupboards for a couple of hours and smoke themselves sick. But the manager, in our case a balding Uriah Heep, hard bitten and seasoned from years of abusive children, would have no truck with us urchins, and if the noise became too much—which was inevitable, given the combination of parental absence and unnatural food colouring—would halt the film in a second, march down the aisle in his tired maroon blazer, and threaten us with early expulsion into the light.

      The first half of the programme had not changed since my father was a boy and invariably started with a cartoon. This was followed by a non-sequitous episode of either the 1930s Flash Gordon or the original 1940s ‘fat’ Batman serial, and then a Western. In accordance with some long-forgotten lore of cinema, the cavalry coming meant you had to lift your seat and drum your feet rapidly on its underside until the manager turned the lights on or the cavalry arrived.

      The programme would always end with a Children’s Film Foundation movie. This might be a fifties, black-and-white, gritty, Osborne-for-kids, kitchen-sink morality tale, with a gang of malnourished children with dirty knees finding a stolen FA Cup or whatever else would have them and a dog scurrying over a bomb site; or it could be a full-colour, contemporary story, set in a world where children looked like us and were always right.

      The CFF had been making movies for Saturday mornings since 1951, all shot on 35mm and aiming for a high quality of directing and acting. Junket 89 was to be their next production and it would co-star a thirty-six-year-old Richard Wilson—who would later become popular as the grumpy old man from One Foot in the Grave—as an absentminded science master, and my mate Stephen as his eponymous pupil. The other child roles and minor parts were all to be filled by Anna Scher kids and, as I would soon find out, that would also include me.

      The story has Junket stealing a ‘matter-transporter’ from the science master and keeping it in his locker, number 89. It allows its user to ‘jump’ to different locations. A ‘returning device’ is in the shape of a cricket ball, a ruse to end up at Lord’s Cricket Ground and have the real Gary Sobers appear as himself. On the way there are many high jinks involving two stupid bullies who get their comeuppance, a tap dancing mummy’s boy whose mother (played wonderfully by Fanny Carby, one of the original members of Joan Littlewood’s company) becomes embroiled in some clothes swapping with the headmaster, and the Benny Hill-style appearance of a sexy French maid.

      I have a tainted recollection of filming Junket 89 that summer of 1970. The producers and the director, Peter Plummer, had been coming to watch us at Anna’s and picked their leads without auditions. I was to play one of Junket’s classmates, a non-speaking role but one that required quite a few filming days. Around then I became the brunt of some hurtful teasing, or, more correctly, bullying. I was a skinny new boy, not good at football, shy with girls and getting lots of attention from Anna. I was very close to Stephen and always sat next to him, all of which prompted two or three of the lads, including a spiteful one named Norman, to decide I was a ‘poof’ and ‘definitely queer’. I didn’t even know what it meant. For them, Anna’s ‘therapy’ wasn’t quite working yet. One day’s filming became horrendous for me, with some brutal teasing. I wasn’t physically scared of them, just humiliated, a painful experience that still makes me wince to remember. The pain had everything to do with separation and not belonging. The next day I didn’t want to return.

      The meeting place for everyone was on the corner by the post office opposite my house, where a bus would take us to the set. I peered through the net curtains and saw them gathering there like a storm; all friends; a clucking gang. My mother was having none of it, and to my horror, marched across the street to talk to Anna. I cringed as the main antagonists watched the conversation. Oh my God, she’s made it worse. I will be killed if I go there now. I sank lower behind the sill. She returned, and with a tone oddly sharp, considering she was on my side, told me that it’d be all right and to get over there now. With stomach-churning

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