My parents did not drink alcohol, my father claiming he had seen too much damage done by over-imbibing men in the 14th Army in India and Burma, where he had spent several years of the war. My mother’s father had been an alcoholic, struggling to overcome it, perhaps, when he died at a very young age, leaving my grandmother, with three young children, and only a penny farthing to her name. From then onwards, my grandmother would go out at the crack of dawn, with her widowed sister, Aggie, sometimes taking my 10-year-old mother with them, to clean public toilets, a disgusting job, which no-one would ever choose as a career. This was her only means of bringing in a few pennies to feed the family. They were so poor.
However, when, once a month, for a one-time showing, a movie, or a “bio-scope”, as the local Afrikaners called it, arrived in the village of Darwendale, in the Rhodesian bush, that was cause for celebration. My brothers and I knew that we would all go together, with our parents, to see this family-friendly film, usually preceded by a few minutes of cartoons, too. It was exciting, doubly so the first time we went, since we had never seen a railway carriage being used as a cinema! This mobile cinema travelled by rail from one distant place to the other. It was a railway carriage, in which all the seats faced the same direction, towards a temporary screen, and where an old projector would be mounted at the other end. Of course, films were in black and white, very scratchy, jerky, often blurry, and we would be so frustrated, when the reel of film would break, which it did regularly, or when the sound would refuse to work at all.
Still, we kept our hopes high (after all, there was little else to look forward to in the way of entertainment) that, next month, when the railway bio-scope rolled into town, it would work perfectly. Of course, we would all be there once more, excited as ever by the prospect of watching a new film!
