The Box Office
By STRIX
Once, however, it was a box office; there is a little guichet in one wall, and underneath it a ledge or sill on which we deposited our sixpences and across which the lady inside handed us our tickets. In those days the but stood at the en- trance to the village hall and here, every Satur- day night, there used to be a film show. These entertainments afforded us an exquisite enjoy- ment.
Arnold, my grandmother's chauffeur, worked the projector; somebody tinkled away on the piano; there was a great deal of facetious audience-participation. 1 he film that made the strongest impression on me was a serial called Tiger-face, and it must have been a pretty good film, because there were at least ten episodes, of which I in the course of one holiday could hardly have seen more than four. The central figure—I can't remember whether he was the hero or the villain—was a sort of outlaw, clothed from head to foot in black tights, who for reasons which escape me had stripes painted all over his face; thus bedizened, and mounted on a pie- bald mustang, he led the Baddies (or it may have been the Goodies) into and out of many a tight corner in semi-precipitous country which the horsiest girl present claimed was very similar to that hunted by the Devon and Somerset. His exploits were loudly cheered; one of the nice things about silent .films was that you could make as much noise as you liked without drown- ing the dialogue and thus losing touch with developments on the screen.
Then there was Snub Pollard. We didn't expect to get the very best programmes in the village hall, and I always assumed that Snub Pollard was an obscure comedian, nowhere near in the same class as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton and the other giants of those days; but recently, to my great delight, I saw a television programme in which bits of his films were shown and dis- cussed, and learnt that he was once quite famous. When last seen he had been a good deal older than I; it was disconcerting to find that he had become much younger.
Snub Pollard, I gathered from the television programme, is no longer alive. Arnold, who as it were brought him to us, is: an old, old man who, when we meet and after he has got me in focus, still delivers that vaguely naval salute which it was once fashionable for chauffeurs to execute as they flung open the door of the limousine and welcomed their employer aboard.
It is difficult to recognise in this wraith the man whom as children we held in a certain dread—the ramrod figure with a spiked moustache and a rasping Cockney drawl who, if anything (it was generally us) put him out of humour while he was driving, used to sway from side to side in a curiously sinister way, like a cobra about to strike. But behind the frail, shrunken, gentle veteran I, at least, can see again the for- midable, the indeed almost demoniac pilot of the open Panhard whirling us homeward at any- thing up to twenty miles an hour along the twist- ing roads of Ardnamurchan, whither in those days the Strixes migrated in August. 'You give me a 'ead-ache; he used to say with weary venom when we were more than ordinarily annoying. He was a brilliant mechanic.
For most of the audience who laughed at Snub Pollard or cheered when Tiger-face surfaced on the sky-line (a thing he was constantly doing), the Saturday film show represented their only con-. tact with show business during the week; the jeunesse dorde in the sixpenny seats—the rest were threepence—were not wholly dependent on these iron rations of entertainment because they. were occasionally taken to the theatre in London, though this was forbidden during the last two weeks of the holidays by a form of quarantine regulations.
Today, I suppose, parents who deliberately re- stricted their children's viewing-time to two hours. a week would be regarded as tyrants, if not as• monsters; and they would deserve this, for it is only among the blind that the one-eyed can be king, and it would be easier to turn my tool- shed back into a box office than to re-create the conditions under which it offered, in return for sixpence, the entrée to unalloyed bliss.
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