Cinema-Going

One afternoon in a cinema in the East Neuk when I was about nine years old. The film was Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew, the child star. A story of the famous schooners out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to fish the Grand Banks for cod. Astonishingly, the film projector, concealed in its flimsy little wooden cabin, was powered by the engine of an inshore fishing boat. It put-putted all through the ‘picture’ (as we called a film in those days): put-put in the grey fog of the Banks, and put-put in the half-darkness of the summer afternoon stalls.