Night at the Cinema

No matter how many times I wrapped the fleece around my fingers they just couldn’t get warm. As the sky darkened overhead I slunk down into my deck chair and hid my nose in my jacket. At least the headphones doubled as ear muffs. The cinema screen flickered from colour to black and white and the family in front cheered.

I had come on a whim. I liked the idea of being on a roof, the view of London looked incredible and I didn’t know anything about the film other than it was from the 1940s and called Hue and Cry. On the other hand the family in front, who made up the majority of the audience that night, had come because ‘dear old dad’ was in the film. One lady passed around a tin of travellers sweets whilst another commented that she remembered them being forced to watch it as kids. A man replied that he’d never actually heard the line and they all happily nagged each other to ‘shut up this time’ so that they could actually hear the line instead of all pointing out ‘that’s him, there he is!’

Naturally the rest of us had pricked up their ears at the thought of having the descendants of a famous actor in our midst and as the characters rolled onto the screen one by one I could tell that we were all playing a silent game of guess who. About halfway through, just as I became more interested in whether the glittery thing in the sky was a planet or a satellite, a cheer went up from the front seats.

Dear old dad had come on screen said his line and gone.