Remembering Oliver!
I'm terribly sentimental by nature, so when I saw a Twitter post asking 'What's your first memory of going to the cinema?' I felt compelled to post it. Now you have the dubious pleasure of me sharing it with you. I was only five, but it's so embedded in my memory it's so easy to recall and it still make me tingle when I recollect it. It's a particularly moving memory because my mother took me to see it. She died in 2015 after a long, slow deterioration due to Parkinson's disease which was finally complimented by dementia. She was in hospital for the last three weeks of her life and she slipped in and out of consciousness and she was often convinced I was her father who, after being abandoned by his wife, left my mother and her sister to be raised by his mother. She never saw her mother and father again and I think this void in her life gave her love for her own children an overwhelming and deep power. The older I get the luckier I realize I was.
The first film I went to see with her was 'Oliver!', I remember the dazzling rich colour of Oswald Morris' gorgeous cinematography, the excitement of that wonderful chase and the demise of Bill Sykes during the film's conclusion. But those things are not my clearest memory.
Oddly enough it wasn't the images, it was sound and it wasn't the sound of Lionel Bart's songs. As the lights went down every child, and probably some of the adults too began to stamp their feet on the floor with increasing speed and volume in anticipation of what was to come. I just remember being infected by a surge of excitement. How could a five year old forget that?
The songs and the music clearly made some impact on me because my mother would in later years often recount that I relentlessly pestered her to buy the soundtrack. Of course she indulged me and promptly did. She took delight in recalling how, for the following months, lunchtimes became a ritual. She'd pick me up from school and as soon as we arrived home she had to play the record. I suppose it stemmed from a child's love of repetition.
The last time I saw her she was terribly confused and agitated, but suddenly she had a moment of clarity, she looked at me and said, "Have you watched Oliver! again recently?". "Of course I have Mum", I lied. "Good", she said before once again become succumbing to her anxiety. I travelled back home, and motivated by guilt, love and sensing the inevitable I immediately watched the film and I'm not ashamed to admit I cried through most of it. Two days later my father phoned me to tell me she'd died. It was time to watch the film again.
