Posted by Jeremy Bamber at Wednesday, April 01, 2015"
One of Mums other interests was her love of movies, something which she explained to me had come from her being posted to India during the War as a member of the Auxiliary Nursing Yeomanry. She’d been stationed in Calcutta. Mum explained that it was so hot and humid that to escape the heat the girls would all go to the cinema, one of the few places with air conditioning – that way they could have some respite from that infernal, relentless heat.
Mum was never one to splash out money on herself, it wasn’t about being frugal, she
simply found being selfish impossible – but spoiling the children was fine.
Mum didn’t go to the movies on her own, but taking Sheila and I and a couple of our mates to the pictures, with interval ice creams and toffee popcorn, was all fine and dandy. Thing is, looking back now I realise we went to see lots of films that were right up Mum’s street rather than out and out kids stuff. We saw children’s movies too but also lots of Westerns I seem to remember, and Mum would enjoy discussing the films with us afterwards, over milkshakes and banana splits in a small tearoom over the road from the cinema.
I think Mum should have been a teacher as she loved explaining about Geography and History and the moral aspects of films. She was genuinely interested in what Sheila or I thought about a particular issue and we had many discussions after our visits to the cinema.
We continued to catch a movie or two with me, Sheila and Mum, but by my twenties it
tended to be just Mum and I. We would pick what we would go to see carefully as Mum didn’t like the explicitness of many films. It wasn’t because she was in any way a prude; it was because she couldn’t stand lazy film directors who put in unnecessary sex scenes. Mum had watched so many great films by amazing Hollywood directors that she reasoned she could tell the difference between a good movie and a movie using lazy techniques. We’d laugh about it, as it was incongruous with her farmer’s wife image that mum was this high-brow movie critic, but it was something she did know a great deal about.
Mum loved Robert Redford, I was into Clint Eastwood, but not in the same way!"Posted by Jeremy Bamber at Wednesday, October 28, 2015"I know people might think it odd that dad and I often called each other ‘Mate’, it was an in joke between us. This began in 1980.
Both dad and I enjoyed the movies and from the age of 12 onwards we’d quite often go to the cinema together. Once I’d learnt to drive and had my own car we’d go to the cinema a little less often as I used to like taking a friend instead. Bringing your dad along if you were hoping for a kiss and a cuddle just wasn’t cool, even I knew that. It sounds so corny thinking back that my taking a young lady to the pictures might have led to something more than friendship, but I had no idea how to do this dating malarkey way back then.
Going back to dad and I, on our movie going days we would always catch the new James Bond film when that came out. We both loved Paul Newman and Robert Redford films and Clint Eastwood too. So anything that they were in we’d go to the cinema and see together."
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