My other reason was slightly more shady. There was a small cash sum I could draw on for ‘Entertaining regular patrons’. What this meant in practice, was delivering an ice cream tub to a few of them during the intermission, ‘With the Management’s compliments.’ As my Ice Cream Sales Account rarely seemed to balance, this could prove very useful for remedying deficiencies.
One mystery I never managed to solve was the inordinate number of ladies’ shoes that found their way into the cinema’s Lost Property cupboard at the end of each day. My apprenticeship as an usher had shown me how many female patrons would gratefully slip off one or both of their shoes as soon as they’d settled in their seats, while the variety of other items that turned up in the cupboard had demonstrated how the steep rake of the auditorium floor could cause any objects placed under a seat to slide forward beneath the row in front, and sometimes further.
I could understand why the retrieval of some of these might be neglected as not worth the trouble, but shoes? To deepen the mystery further, in all the hours I spent bidding a managerial farewell to patrons as they made their way out of the cinema, I never came across one who emerged shoeless.
What’s more, although a regular Saturday night patron known to the Gaumont, Watford, staff as ‘Rear Row Rita’ once contacted our Lost Property with a view to recovering a missing pair of pale pink panties, we never once received an enquiry in respect of missing shoes. They would pile up in the cupboard and every now and again we sent a representative batch of them to the Salvation Army.
After I had been at the Gaumont, Watford, for a while, Kine Weekly printed a few paragraphs about me, headed ‘Britain’s Youngest Cinema Manager’. If that was so, it was mainly because most of the other managers were now in the forces and, sure enough, late in 1942, I received my own call-up papers.
The Gaumont staff, plus those at the Town Hall Music Hall, which I was also managing by then, combined to present me with a splendid fitted leather suitcase as a leaving present. We had a boisterous party and the following noon, I turned up, as ordered, at the Induction Centre, RAF Padgate.
Two days later, I was back in the Gaumont foyer. Padgate, for their own good and sufficient reasons, had deferred my enlistment, instructing me to return whence I came, holding myself ready for recall at twenty-four hours’ notice. The Hyams Brothers had not yet found a replacement, so they asked me to stay on until the RAF was once again ready for me.
The fitted leather suitcase was an embarrassment. I offered it back but, on behalf of all of them, Sidney Courtenay the organist, who had been acting as my stand-in, insisted I keep it. A couple of months later, when the RAF hauled me back again, this time for keeps, the staff of the two theatres clubbed together again and I found myself trying to wave away a pair of silver hairbrushes. When I pitched up at Padgate again, I must have been the most luxuriously equipped recruit in the intake.
For several years I dickered with a screenplay based on an encounter I had during my initial RAF training at Blackpool. It happened after I woke up one morning to find my face and entire upper body had turned bright red overnight.
Realising it was some kind of rash, and remembering the instructions they had dinned into us for such emergencies, I packed what they were pleased to call my ‘small kit’ and took myself off to the downtown Medical Inspection room.
This was a former lock-up shop where, after waiting an hour or so, I exhibited my reddened areas to a bored Medical Officer. He took a cursory glance, lifted a phone, muttered into it, ‘I’m sending you a recruit with rubella’ and turned me over to his orderly.
In the outer office the orderly explained that rubella was German measles, then gave me a chit and told me to make my way with it, preferably not by public transport, to the RAF hospital at Lytham St Annes.
And it was on my recollections of what I found when I arrived there that I wanted to base a film story. As soon as I presented my chit, a nursing orderly conducted me to a small ward and suggested I get into bed. As I did so, I noticed that the ward contained three other occupants, all of them congregated in silence at the other end of the room, eyeing me attentively. As soon as the orderly left, one of them – I later discovered his name was Smithy, a tall, skinny fellow, with a long, melancholy face and a lantern jaw – asked me, a little apprehensively, what brought me there. Opening my pyjama jacket, I displayed my gently glowing torso, adding, ‘It’s German measles.’
They came closer and inspected it with considerably more care than the Medical Officer had done. Then, as one, they moved away again and held a long, whispered discussion. Finally they returned to my bedside and introduced themselves. The other two were named Olly and Ted, but it was Smithy who, with some hesitation, announced that they had agreed to risk taking me into their confidence.
Lowering his voice he explained that the reason they were there was that the three of them were in the final stages of ‘working their ticket’. The phrase employed to describe activities aimed at illegally obtaining a premature discharge from the Services. They had all chosen to take a medical route towards this objective and, as each of them had now spent several weeks building up an elaborate case history, they were understandably apprehensive that I might in some way upset their plans. I gave them what reassurance I could and spent the rest of my hospital stay watching their meticulous charades with some fascination.
For Olly, an ebullient Londoner pining for the delights of Tottenham Court Road (‘To think that right now me and my bird could be tanning the floor of the Paramount’), was aiming to make his escape on the grounds of a sudden loss of hearing, brought about by a bomb explosion while he was on leave. To this end he was training himself not to register any change of expression at sudden, loud noises and to gaze uncomprehendingly at any remark addressed to him. The other two were assisting his deception by unexpectedly banging mess tins together nearby, or sharply calling out his name when he had his back to them, monitoring his neck muscles to make sure they betrayed no involuntary twitch. They rarely caught him out.
Ted had set himself a more uncomfortable task. Finding he had a facility for vomiting at will, he had decided to starve his way out of the RAF, throwing up at the first swallow of any food they placed in front of him. He subsisted on midnight snacks made up of scraps the other two secreted from their own meals and chocolate bars from their sweet rations. By the time I joined them, he was looking a little gaunt and his complexion was an unhealthy yellow.
Smithy had chosen the loneliest path. Electing to make his escape by the psychiatric route, he would feign sudden raging outbursts, become prostrated by violent headaches and was given to prolonged and inexplicable bouts of silent weeping. ‘Always real tears,’ he told me proudly, indicating the streaks they made down his cheeks.
For three days I watched them playing their parts, becoming more and more intrigued by their ingenuity and their attention to the fraudulent detail they brought to their individual stratagems. Then just as I was finding myself totally caught up in their efforts, I woke up one morning to find my skin had returned to its customary porcelain hue. The moment the medical staff saw this, I was told to gather up my small kit and ordered to return to my unit forthwith.
From that point on, my participation in their story ceased, leaving me feeling both disappointed and frustrated. Over the weeks, months, then years that followed, the three of them still lurked in my thoughts and I never stopped wondering if all that carefully plotted dissembling had produced results and which, if any, of them got away with it.
That concept of ‘getting away successfully’ came back to my mind when, sometime in the early sixties, I saw The Great Escape, probably the