Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

       On the days I could fiddle ninepence out of Mam’s change when I did the errands, I would race down to the Forum Cinema, no matter what film was being shown. This was our bolthole, our escape from the sour face of school, work, or parents. It was our shrine to the imagination, its dream-like version of reality an antidote to the boredom which was Broxtowe. It was a haven for all the youth of the neighbourhood, and in the cold and stormy winters of the early 1940s it was as warm as a nest.

       The reek of cigarette smoke floating over our heads was particularly comforting. The aroma of girls moistened by strategic dabs of Evening in Paris scent, bought at Woolworth’s for sixpence a phial, induced a kind of mass arousal in youths new to sex. If we couldn’t get off with a girl after this fragrant stimulus, we would take our disappointment out on the film.  At moments of high passion on the screen some kid always farted. Others yelled obscene sex instructions to the dopey looking hero as he mooned over his virginal sweetheart.

       On hungry evenings, when tea was a distant memory, meals on the screen tortured us.  Why were Hollywood cakes always cliff-sized? And why were they always so rich and creamy when we needed a detective to find the grit-like currants in the thin slabs our mams brought home from the Co-op? There were times when we would have swapped those same mothers for a plate of Hollywood’s monumental confectionery.

       Even worse, as we moved deeper into our teen years, was having to watch stars like Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis light a king-sized cigarette then stub it out after just one casual puff. Light-puff-stub.  Light-puff-stub.  On and on it went in film after film, these legends wasting the world’s supply of cigarettes while the khaki-fingered addicts in the Forum scorched their lips on half an inch of Woodbine.  But such torture was a price we were willing to pay. After all, it was the Golden Age of the cinema, and we its faithful acolytes.

       To us, LIFE was spelled USA.  The films taught us that it was an exotic land where every dad had the wherewithal to buy his kid a car the size of an aircraft carrier - where every kid might find the end of a rainbow.  Even the street bums of the Bowery and the share-croppers of Oklahoma had an apple-pie time and struck it rich somewhere along the highway. In the USA, everybody wins in the end. That’s how Hollywood showed it up there on the hypnotic screen of the Forum.  How many times did we see the Jewish kid from the ghetto pound  on the  rented piano until he was recognised as the genius who wrote the melodies nobody could forget?  And that skinny brat with the pigtails and the wire on her teeth, the one who looked like Judy Garland or Gloria De Haven - how many times was she transformed into a wide-eyed, beautiful Broadway star?  Yes, the beautiful was possible in the USA.  That’s what the Forum showed us, and what we wanted to believe.