‘Like a cinema,’ I add, and Fern finally gets it. ‘That must have been before my time. I don’t remember watching films in here.’
‘I do,’ says Izz. ‘They’d hang a sheet over the mural at the far end of the hall and we’d all sit round with our bags of sweets. I’m sure these movies were old long before us kids watched them. Look, there’s a few John Waynes too.’
‘Country dance competition, seventy-seven.’ Fern reads the handwriting on one of the reels. ‘Wheaton May Day, nineteen seventy-four.’
Izz says, ‘I remember Harry Boulton, the hall manager in the days when there was such a thing, was a cine film enthusiast. These must be his.’
‘Do you remember showings of these home movie reels in the hall too?’ Patrick asks.
‘Not sure, maybe?’ Izz is searching her memory. ‘If we did, I’ve forgotten.’
Fern is still pulling out reels, filming each in turn with her phone. ‘Wheaton winter dance, sixty-five.’
‘What? Let me see that.’ Izz takes the reel, then looks at me. ‘I was at this dance.’
‘You were?’ I say with a gasp.
‘For sure I was.’
It only takes a few moments to cook up the plan and it begins with me getting very overexcited and saying, ‘Dad had a Super 8 projector, you know? Back at the cottage. Doubt it’s been used in decades.’
‘We can actuallywatchthese?’ Fern looks like she’s about to float off into vintage junk heaven.
‘Maybe, unless the film’s degraded,’ Patrick throws in.
‘Will you have time to call in at the cottage before you go to your new job?’
Patrick thinks he’ll be able to manage half an hour at fourish, and we all scuttle off to our various occupations: Fern and Izz to the cafe, Patrick back to school, and me to my kitchen and the gingerbreads, except now I’m carrying a sagging box of cine films and worrying someone from the council will sniff out the fresh plasterboard and paint inside the hall coat cupboard, but for now, what they don’t know can’t hurt anyone – or, more importantly, hurt our grotto – and there’s still a lot of work to do.
The darkness in the den is cut through by the lights from the Christmas tree and the beam from the projector bulb. Everyone – Patrick, Fern, Lucy, me and Izz – has fallen silent after the excitement of retrieving Dad’s projector from the boot room in its cardboard box, gone soft and foxed with age.
There’d been a flurry of coffee making and I’d broken out my mince pies. Lucy threw a fresh log onto the fire where it’s smoking now, not yet caught.
The projector whirrs, and two reels spin slowly in the warmth: one – a red spool – feeds the machine with its thin strip of celluloid, the other – a shiny black – smoothly draws the film past the bulb and lens, sending the images bursting in grainy colour onto Dad’s rickety silver rollaway screen that took a lot of work to get straight, then spools the viewed frames safely up once more.
After years of familiarity with iPhones and streaming and HD cinema, this old technology should have ceased to surprise us, but as the spools wind and something within the projection box clunks – I have no clue what, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem – we all fall under the spell of the wonder of dust motes dancing in the shimmering rays.
The images before us change from a series of jumping black splodges against white to the stuttering wordsKODAK filmin two-foot-high type, to a slowly fading-in scene of a smiling man with a hat and cane walking in a street we don’t recognise, marks and scratches blooming all around him like black snow, and then he’s gone in a blink. Now children in summer clothes run a race on chubby legs on the school’s playing fields. There’s no time to attempt to identify any of them, they’re gone too, and a new scene begins.
A close-up of someone holding a piece of paper with the painted wordsWheaton Winter Dance, 1965jumps and flickers. The paper’s removed to reveal the scene at the village hall.
The men, all wiry in a way that speaks volumes about the working men of my dad’s generation, stew- and stout-fed, stocky but fit, are choosing their partners and leading them to the floor, and I find myself remembering the smell of Dad’s cigarettes back when he smoked, back when everybody smoked.
‘See, that’s when the murals covered all four walls,’ Izz says, and we peer to make them out, but everything’s moving too fast to make them out clearly.
There’s a panning shot of the crowd of spectators and I strain my eyes for Mum and Dad, but they’re not there, and a heavy longing constricts my chest.
Izz is silent. If she recognises any of the Wheaton folk in their summer clothes pulling faces and waving, or hiding shyly from the lens, or that one man in a suit with baggy trousers making those around him laugh while he mimes a waltz, she doesn’t mention it.
Fern’s beside Izz on the couch and Lucy’s on the floor in front of the fire, all of them clutching mugs, transfixed.
A hot smell rises from the projector. The bulb’s getting heated and I worry for the fragile film under tension between the reels. Will it hold out until Izz sees what she came to see?
The screen turns black – only a few white flashes of who knows what interrupt the dark – and Fern turns in her seat to look at me.
‘Is that it over already?’ she asks.
Suddenly, the den is aglow again, and the scene opens once more, still on the hall, and everyone applauding the end of a dance, their movements somehow accelerated to almost comical speed, all indistinguishable, a sludgy palette of washed-out nostalgia, an artist’s brush swirling in water.
