Bio. 2 Tuppenny Rush.

Bio. 2 Tuppenny Rush.

I’m minding daughter Emily’s triplets. Oliver is working his Nintendo, Juliana is surfing doll-dressing sites and Michelle is curled on the sofa chatting on her cell about boys at school and I’ve drifted three thousand miles and seventy plus years away.

Mrs. Pavelly was a widow who lived one street away from me in Romford, England, when I was a kid. She needed money, so she opened her own sweet shop, using a rear window of her house to display the candy. You had to walk down the alley between two houses to get to her back garden to study them. Packets of white candy cigarettes with red tips cost a penny, sherbet and lemonade powder with black licorice straws were a halfpenny. Hard gob balls were a farthing; they changed color as you sucked them so you had to take them out frequently to admire them. There were boiled sweets, toffees and foil covered chocolate money. 

Money was key to everything. A penny (1d.) was worth about half a cent. There was also a ha-penny (½d.) a farthing (¼d.), tuppence (2d.) thrupence (3d.), sixpence (6d.) called a tanner and a shilling (12d.) called a Bob. Only grown-ups had larger sums. (The abbreviation d comes from the Roman silver penny, the denarius).

My weekly allowance was sixpence until I was 12 and started a paper route that paid five shillings a week. I usually bought peanuts from Mrs. Pavelly, as a big bag only cost a penny. Saturday afternoon was the week’s high point, the Tuppenny Rush.

Volunteers at Romford Wesleyan Church rented movies for kids. They showed them on Saturday afternoons in the hall next to the Church. Doors opened at 1 PM and at least an hour before, our rowdy bunch crammed into the yard outside. (Kids are much less rowdy en masse now. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time quietly watching TV, gaming etc.) When the doors finally opened, tuppences were collected and we ran in to get chairs near the screen.

The movies were black and white. They were stacked in big reels, each in its own can, next to a 16 mm projector. The screen was a spread-eagled sheet knotted to rope at the corners. After each movie, the film had to be re-spooled. This gave lots of intermission time for throwing peanut shells or careening around the hall. Pea-shooters could get you thrown out, so they were only used discretely.

The movies involved audience participation. Buck Jones, Tom Mix and other cowboys won lots of bar fights and always beat the Indians or bad guys in the end and we cheered on the slaughter. The triplets would have called Harold Lloyd a nerd, but he was always in hot water. “Look out, he’s behind you” we’d yell. He never listened. Felix the Cat was OK. but I liked adventure stories best. Tarzan would grab a hanging vine and swing from tree to tree in the jungle. Romantic scenes brought on a chorus of kissing noises made with the mouth and forearm.

The most exciting stories were serials. At the end of one episode the heroine was tied on a bench and a huge buzz-saw blade slowly came nearer. In another ending the hero was in a tiny cell and one of its walls was slowly moving closer to squash him. We had a whole week to worry how they could be saved or how they’d clean up the mess before next Saturday’s tuppenny rush.