As she walked down the street she came to a cinema which was showing a film called The Cowboys starring John Wayne. She decided to go in and bought a ticket for the balcony. When she sat down it disturbed her to find that she was the only person in the whole cinema. Not only was there no one in the balcony seats, there was no one – not even children – in the stalls. She felt rather frightened and wished that she had not come in till later but after all she had paid her money and couldn’t go out again. The red curtains were still drawn and for a long time there was nothing but music to which she listened impatiently, now and again looking behind her as if expecting that someone would come in and attack her. Eventually the music stopped and there were some advertisements, one of which showed a young girl riding a horse through a mountain stream and which after all turned out to be an advertisement for cigarettes. ‘Cool as a mountain stream,’ breathed the sexy voice of the sponsor. She herself didn’t smoke. Her mother hadn’t believed in girls smoking: her father however smoked a pipe. When he was finished working for the day in the distillery he would read the paper for a while and smoke his pipe and then fall asleep. She herself was the only child and had perhaps loved her father more than her mother who had often told him that he ought to have a better job with his abilities though as a matter of fact his abilities weren’t all that extraordinary except that he was good with his hands. He could make or repair anything. He had made a chair for her when she was a child and later he would make toys for her, wooden animals of all kinds. Her favourite was a squirrel which would climb the chair on its clockwork machinery.
The credits came on the screen for the big picture and she realised that she had read a review of the film in the Observer which she bought every Sunday. She also bought the Sunday Times. Her father and mother used to get the Sunday Post and they would spend the whole week reading it, not missing a single story. In her own job as a teacher she would use the Sunday Supplements for projects. One of her projects was on the Motor Car, though she couldn’t drive.
The film turned out to be rather a good one, at least at the beginning. The title The Cowboys had to be taken literally for it was about boys, not about men. John Wayne, a rancher whose cowhands abandoned him in order to join a gold rush, was a stern man who had lost two sons partly because he had been too strict with them. The film showed him becoming attached to the boys and learning how to handle them in a human manner with the help of a coloured cook. On the drive too the boys learned to become men. They were attacked by some ex-jailbirds who killed the unarmed Wayne after he had refused to kow-tow to them and had then driven off his cattle. The last part of the film she wasn’t sure of. It showed the boys setting off grim-faced after the killers and one by one detaching them and murdering them and finally manoeuvring the survivors into a trap where they shot them all. The leader of the killers had got his legs entangled in his horse’s stirrups and pleaded to be freed but one of the boys fired a shot into the air which so frightened the horse that it dragged its rider along through a river till he was drowned. She wasn’t sure about this last part. Nothing surely could condone violence and if there had been someone with her she would have argued about it. But there was no one there.
Many years before while her parents were still alive she had fallen in love with a man who owned a shop at the time. He was very handsome and very glib but what she took for cleverness her parents took for falsity. He used to take her out a lot especially to the cinema but most of the time she had to pay for their outings. She didn’t
