Jim Appleby: Past Times

"There might be a thousand movies on the box," writes Stan Coxon, now living in Essex, "but there's hardly one of them worth watching apart from the Humphrey Bogart ones. The rest of the stuff is aimed at teenagers."

I sympathised, but then started to think about being a teenager at the movies.

There is no feeling quite like the one you get when you manage to get into your first 'grown-up' show at the cinema - unaccompanied.

Once upon a time 'grown-up' meant over 16, for that was the age you could see an 'A' film without an adult. Below that age, you were reduced to hanging about outside the foyer looking for an adult - any adult - to take your money and buy your ticket.

'Will yer take us in, mister (or missus)?' was a constant chorus. This is not an arrangement about which today's parents would be happy, and quite rightly. But since kids of eight now routinely watch video nasties at home, it's an academic problem.

Talking of academies, there used to be a special training school (it was said) for box office staff at which they were trained to weed out all those who were under 16.

They were probably trained to spot that look of guilt which no 14-year-old can disguise when pretending to be two years older.

The training school did its work well. If you were a mere 15 years and 364 days old, you hadn't a hope in hell of getting past one of these glass-fronted guardposts.

But time brings its own solutions, and one year, suddenly, amazingly, one of our number became 16.

Tommy was a railwayman and would come home and tell us all about the mysterious world of work among the locomotives and the pigeons from the roof of Forster Square Station which found their way into pies (meat was off ration, but expensive).

Then one day he woke up and found himself a man (at least by the definition applied by the British Board of Film Censors).

We were overjoyed. At last we could get in to see just about any film we liked. We had our own pet adult, who would vouch for our good behaviour and keep us under control.

With a song in our hearts, we set off to the Marlborough in Carlisle Road to see The War of the Worlds, which was said to have excitement, monsters and scantily-clad young women. We really fancied the monsters.

Now there was one snag in all this. Tommy was not what you'd call tall. In fact of the half dozen of us, he was shortest by a head.

Nor was he particularly mature (he was rumoured to sleep with a teddy bear).

But that was nothing to do with it. He was 16 and could take us in to see War of the Worlds. Couldn't he?

Oh no he couldn't, decided the dragon in the box office. "He doesn't look 16," she said.

Tommy produced his National Union of Railwaymen membership card. This cut as much ice as a Satanist Society handbook at the door of the Vatican.

Argue as we might (and we were pretty good at that) we weren't going to get in.

We wandered off disconsolately.

It was years before I saw War of the Worlds, and that was on television, and the monsters weren't scary, and the scantily clad starlets were a bit tame. But if we'd seen it at the age of 14...

Looking back, we were the victims of our own honesty. We had Tonto with us, and he was heading for six foot even at the age of 14. Being of Italian descent, he even had the beginnings of a moustache.

Tommy's fair-skinned, Irish face hadn't a hint of bumfluff.

If Tonto had said he was 16 he wouldn't even have needed to borrow Tommy's union card.

So not only was the law an ass, but honesty wasn't always the best policy.

It was a hard lesson to learn.

Five years from the end of the world

As 1999 approaches, all eyes and imaginations turn to the Millennium. But how many are turning their thoughts to Judgement Day?

That, according to the prophetess Joanna Southcott, will be in 2004.

The coming year marks the centenary of the closing of the last Church of the Believers in Joanna Southcott, here in Bradford. She herself had died in 1814, the year before the Battle of Waterloo, but her influence was a long time waning.

She was born in the West Country in 1750 and raised in the Anglican faith but at the age of 42 discovered she had a gift for prophecy. This was a popular hobby at the time, and Joanna began writing down the words she said she had received from God.

They seemed to predict more wars between England and France - though since they has been at each other's throats for a good 600 years or so at the time, this came as little surprise to anyone. Nor did the prediction that they would become friends (alliances in Europe having always been pretty fluid).

She seemed to forecast the First World War, and the occupation of Jerusalem by British troops (by then very few nations had not claimed Jerusalem at one time or another, from the Romans onward).

And she warned that land would be the best investment 'during the troublous times'. Presumably provided it wasn't in Jerusalem, which is still an estate agent's nightmare.

All this went down pretty well with a growing band of 'Southcottians', and then Mary announced (at the age of 64) that she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit and would give birth to a son, to be named Shiloh, on Christmas Day 1814. Alas neither Mary nor the non-existent Shiloh, were to see any more Christmases.

But after her death, the legend continued. During her life she had assembled a bunch of papers which were placed in a sealed box. The papers, said supporters, contained the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

Trouble was, their author insisted that it could only be opened in the presence of 24 bishops or 24 virgins. The joke at the time was that the bishops weren't a problem, but finding the virgins...

The sealed box finished up in Bradford in possession of the Jowett family.

Being a Bradford family they retired to Morecambe and took the box with them.

It may, or may not, now be in the British Museum.

But if there is a prolonged peal of thunder on December 31, 2003, followed by a trumpet call, don't say you weren't warned...

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.