Cinema Childhood Dreams

The few remaining fragments of my dream
slip silently away, like cats behind
the garden shrubs. For once I catch one by
the tail, and find I’m shuffling zombie-like
in a wide untidy queue; funnelling through
the exit from the Forum, Kentish Town.

Moments before, Lamour, Bob Hope and Bing
passed through this place en-route to Zanzibar.
Real life now tries to re-impose control.
It fails. Who am I? Is it day or night?
I panic, then of course it all floods back:
I’m 12, and things at last seem on the up.

The queue to get in was noisy, long and tense,
waiting to see if we would make the cut
before the arm came down to say full up!
If we’d been out of luck, we’d have had to stand,
or return to Camden Town, to try the Gaumont,
using the tube to avoid the queue at the bus stop.

A stream of buskers worked the moving lines,
with us in the one and nines, as money was tight.
Musicians, jugglers, singers, men in chains,
did their brief act then came round with a cap.
I can’t recall the details of performance,
only the proffered caps and our refusals.

I do remember Wilson, Keppel and Betty,
or imitators dressed in Fez and nightshirts
scattering sand; the men up close like spoons,
doing their crazy hieroglyphic dance.
But I digress, for that was 12 years later
outside the Odeon in Leicester Square.

Around that time I joined a mobile queue
that entertained itself with songs and slogans,
every Easter, marching for CND.
To Aldermaston first, the soggy few,
then in reverse, filling Trafalgar Square
with disparate factions drawn to a common cause.

What if I’d chanced to catch a different cat?
I might have been at the Plaza, or as a last
resort the Tolmer — known as the local fleapit.
Laurel and Hardy, Arthur Askey, Westerns;
Hopalong (heard by me as oblong) Cassidy;
George Formby, Fred Astaire would do the rounds.

Then Dumbo, Disney’s flying elephant,
who turns on his tormentors, scattering them
with strafing, stooping dives; Kitty McShane
and Arthur Lucan (in drag as Old Mother Riley),
Bud Abbot and Lou Costello; an endless queue
of characters file past and take a bow.

I could’ve been at the Bedford in the Gods,
where seats were planks on steps; with opera glasses
trained on magicians, men with musical saws,
and acrobats and floodlit nude tableaux!
Top of the bill, the moving silhouette
of Phyllis Dixey, bathing behind a sheet.

As sleep returns more half-formed thoughts collide,
and from the pieces this injunction forms:
enjoy the moment, linger, look around.
Advice that somehow doesn’t make much sense
unless that first queue was a metaphor,
that exit the entrance to oblivion.

If so you can tell that worn out metaphor
not to anticipate its bloody cue.
Say I expect to stay for more of the show;
that when I leave, I’d rather not shuffle off,
and may well choose to use the fire escape;
that taking a running jump is more my style.

I know; bravado is absurd; I’d take
a peaceful end of course. But look! Here comes
a cocky looking bunch of musketeers:
D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, Aramis
would fight all odds right up to the closing credits.
They were a dream team well worth queuing for!