Saturday afternoon was children’s time at the Nepean Theatre in High Street. Kids would flock in from all over. There were very few adults game enough to front up to the noise and chaos and when they did, they sat well away from the stalls.

Parents were happy for their children to either go with their friends or with an elder sibling because Penrith was a safe town and they were in no danger. Most of us walked to the flicks, as they were called; Penrith was not very big. Those who rode their bikes there, and some did, could leave them at the back of the theatre, knowing they would be there when the session was over.

This is how it all worked. First up, when the lights dimmed, would be a trailer of the next attraction and then two or three cartoons. Tom and Jerry and the Bugs Bunny troupe were the most popular, although when Mr Magoo came on the scene, he was a sensation.

The serials

Then would come the serial. A serial was a story that had fifteen to twenty episodes, each about twenty minutes long. The stories were mostly the same – the hero or the heroine or both would find themselves in a progression of perilous situations, with each episode ending in a cliffhanger – the hero or heroine literally going over a cliff and crashing onto the rocks below, or they were trapped in a fire or explosion, or the plane went down or the boat sank. Sometimes there were two separate cliffhangers in the episode. There would be no apparent way out and you would have to wait until the following Saturday to see how the plot was resolved. It always was, often in an unbelievable way, but hey, we were kids and didn’t have Ipads, phones or game consoles to amuse us.

Serials were always in black and white as Technicolour was too expensive for these productions which Hollywood used to turn out by the bucketful.

Popular serials were Deadwood Dick, Holt of the Secret Service and Don Winslow,  but my favourite was The Shadow. Lamont Cranston was a respectable businessman by day but at night he would don a black cape and wide-brimmed hat and become The Shadow and fight crime wherever he found it. He obviously had a busy life – working during the day, busting crime at night. Wonder when he slept, because he also had a girlfriend, Margo Lane.

The films

The projectionist would then show a film, sometimes two depending on the programming. They were B grade movies and sometimes worse and most often were in black and white. They covered various genres – westerns, adventure, science fiction and what passed as horror in those days.

There were lots of comedies too. Abbott and Costello and The Three Stooges, still funny today. Other series comedies like Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule – not so much. Tarzan movies were popular but the actors who played Tarzan kept changing.

Westerns

Most frequent and popular were the westerns. The hero could be a cowboy, a cavalry leader, a scout, even a tenderfoot – a naive newcomer from the East who soon proved himself in the tough life of the West. The hero also had an offsider who tended to be comedic rather than heroic.

The plots were consistently predictable. The hero would get in tough spots, the heroine, if there was one, would end up in peril, the hero with the aid of his sidekick would get out of trouble and rescue the heroine and all was well. Hero triumphant, villains vanquished, boy gets girl.

Best of all were the cowboy films. There were various cowboy stars who made a series of movies – Gene Autrey, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Tim Holt.

Unfortunately, Gene was also a singing cowboy with a guitar packed on his saddle and he would break into song at inopportune moments.

As well as a sidekick, the cowboys also had a favourite horse which would sometime do tricks at the cowboy’s behest and would often bite or kick the sidekick to great hilarity. Gene Autry had Champion the Wonder Horse, Hopalong Cassidy had Trigger and Roy Rogers’ horse was Topper. Roy also had a wife in real life who would sometimes play his love interest in the film.

A curious thing about the horses was that they sometimes changed appearance and occasionally colour but they retained the same name. Mrs Rogers stayed the same.

Discipline and the Jaffa Roll

As you could imagine, the audience was very noisy and there was a lot of shouting, cheering the goodies and booing the villains. If a horror film was showing there were often shrieks of terror, real and feigned. If things got out of hand, Ben the theatre usher was always ready to calm things down with a rap of his torch on the unruly offender.

At some stage during the session, somebody would open their packet of Jaffas – the hard orange ball lolly filled with chocolate – and roll them down the aisle. They made a great noise on the hard wooden floors. If Ben spotted the offender, they were ejected from the theatre.

In retrospect, Jaffa rolling was a silly thing to do. Somebody leaving the theatre in the dark could easily have slipped on one.

Racism in the films

There is a lot of concern today that films, television, and computer games and apps are having a bad influence on children, but things were no better then.

Films and serials in the 40s and 50s were blatantly racist, particularly the westerns. The heroes were always white, and native Americans, usually called ‘Indians’, ‘Injuns’, or ‘Redskins’ were always the enemy. On the odd occasion that they were not, they were portrayed as renegades, helping the white man against their tribe, or as poor and pitiful, shuffling around a cavalry fort. Their wives were usually referred to as ‘squaws’. When they had a prominent role in the film, the part mostly went to a white man who was made up appropriately and often badly and spoke in some Hollywood version of pidgin English. Phrases like ‘white man speak with forked tongue’ and ‘we smokum peace pipe’ come to mind.

They rarely won a battle except when they slaughtered women and children and were inevitably vanquished by cowboy heroes or cavalry. And there was a lot of riding around in circles and whooping and hollering.

Other cultures were treated just as badly. Mexicans spoke in atrocious accents and were mocked. Asians spoke in sing-song voices and wore outlandish clothes.

And women were patronised and stereotyped. The usual heroine was blond, pretty, docile and both eager and ready to please the men. Older women were often shown as hard and nagging. If a woman had a career, it would either be as a schoolmarm or a floosie in a saloon. Occasionally, they were given a heroic role but inevitably got into a perilous situation by being foolish or ‘womanly’ and had to be rescued by the male hero.

Did all this influence our attitudes? It probably did to a greater or lesser degree. Research shows that my generation, the adults who were once kids at the Saturday afternoon matinees, are probably more likely to have rigid attitudes towards other cultures and the role of women than do younger generations.

Death by television

Television changed our entertainment habits. As more families began to buy television sets and screening hours increased, it was easier and cheaper to be entertained at home. The television stations bought up old stock of B grade films and began to screen them. The cartoons that we had seen at the picture show reappeared on television in the afternoon. Sure, we had seen them before, but whoever complained about seeing a cartoon a second time, or even multiple times?

So we stopped going to the Nepean Theatre on a Saturday afternoon and the theatre eventually closed.

But the mystery was gone. You couldn’t roll Jaffas at home, you didn’t need to look behind you to see if Ben was walking towards you with his torch, and there was no fun in booing and hissing on your own, or with just your family around.

They remade The Shadow as a movie in 1994 but it wasn’t very good. Who knows, maybe Netflix will run out of stock of current series and buy up the old serials for a new generation. But I suspect that the current crop of kids, more worldly than we were, would dissolve into fits of laughter at the Shadow and our other heroes.

My friends and I were dead keen on cricket when we were going to school.

After mucking around in various back yards and endangering the family gardens, we started to play cricket on the road in Evan Street.

There were not many cars in Penrith back then and most people made do without them. Penrith was only  small and the built up area didn’t go much past Jamison Road. Kids walked to school and commuters walked to the station or rode bikes to work.

Shoppers too could walk to the shops as the shopping area was mainly confined to High Street, in between Evan Street and Station Street. And as most of the shopkeepers delivered, orders could be left at the store and those who had phones could phone their orders in. There were also neighbourhood shops like the one run by Mr Hamilton in Castlereagh Street or Mrs Morrows’ in Derby Street where groceries and other consumables were sold.

So we would set up a cardboard box  to use as stumps in the middle of Evan Street and when we saw a car coming, we would just move the box and step aside until the car went past. We always had plenty of time. Traffic was sporadic and often ten minutes or so would pass before the game was interrupted.  Less stoppages than a present day Test Match.

A struck ball would occasionally roll along the gutter and disappear down the waste water inlet. With luck, it would roll down into the big storm water drain that ran across the spare paddock next to George Innes’ house in Evan Street. The rule was that the person who had hit the ball had to climb over the fence into the paddock and get down into the drain and find it. Mr Innes always kept one or two cows in that paddock but, luckily for the ball seeker, they were never fierce.

Sometimes the ball got stuck in the inlet and you had to put your hand into the hole to see if you could extract it. Otherwise, you had to wait until the next big storm washed the ball out into the drain and hope that you could find it.

George, the cockie, who watched the games from his cage on the front verandah, soon learned to mimic the word ‘Howzat’. His frequent misdirected appeals were always turned down.

Our parents’ concern about increasing car traffic caused us to eventually move our cricket game to the footpath in Lethbridge Street.

This was not altogether satisfactory as the narrowness of the footpath and its proximity to the fence hampered our ability to play shots to the off side (or to leg if one was a left-hander). A lofted shot across Lethbridge Street was not ‘over the fence is six and out’ but more ‘get the hell out of there’ because it was quite likely to hit a window in Mrs Fitch’s house which was on the corner of Evan Street.  After a couple of broken windows, we had to abandon the hard ball and substitute a tennis ball. And you still had to field on the road. There is now a pathology practice where Mrs Fitch used to live.

We then decided to build our own grass cricket pitch. Bluey Mahon lived in Lethbridge Street and his house had a really big back yard. We cleared the back of the yard and laid down some grass, borrowed a hand roller and we soon had our own cricket ground. We borrowed the roller from the Edwards family who owned a bakery in High Street and who had a clay tennis court at the back of their shop. We had to roll the roller across and up High Street and along Evan Street before turning up into Lethbridge Street. It was hard work.

Being irresponsible, we didn’t keep up maintenance on our fine grass cricket pitch and after a few months of constant use, it was more of a dirt wicket than a turf one. Bluey Mahon bowled  fast off-cutters and at times the ball would rise suddenly off the rough surface of the wicket. You could say that bodyline had come to Penrith.

We never ever had enough players for teams, despite rounding up younger brothers, the occasional sister and a dog or two, so it was all about individual performances.

Unfortunately, the pitch backed onto the Willis’s back yard and there was only a strand wire fence between the two properties. A fast ball missed by the wicket-keeper was likely to end up in Mrs Willis’ vegetable garden which was right next to the fence. Mrs Willis was very tolerant but even her patience had limits and we had to put up some wooden palings to block the ball.

As we treated this as a proper cricket pitch, the ordinary laws of cricket applied rather than the customary rules of backyard cricket – there was no tip and run, you could get out first ball, you could get out LBW, and there was no nonsense about one hand-one bounce. We did however have a limit of six that you could run on any shot because if the ball was hit over the bowler’s head (Wiggy Mort’s favourite shot), it could end up in the long grass in the next paddock and take a long time to find.

One day Fatty Morphett took the world’s greatest catch. His real name was Ray and I  never understood the nickname because he was big and muscular. He was later nicknamed Elo (for elephant), surely more appropriate. Ray was fielding at point, reading a Phantom comic when the ball soared towards him. He reached over his head and plucked the ball from the air, without dropping the comic or even losing his place in it. No Test cricketer before or since, to my knowledge, has even taken a catch while reading a comic.

As a group of us used to walk to school together and Bluey’s house was the last pick up spot, we would occasionally, if Bluey’s parents were not home, make an executive decision to absent ourselves from school that day, and spend it playing cricket. That was called ‘wagging it’.

I think Bluey’s house is still there and I wonder if the pitch still exists. We should put up a plaque or something.