‘A Certain Amount of Mush’: Love, Romance, Celluloid and Wax in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

In 1951, my mother won a Claudette Colbert lookalike contest run by a local cinema.¹ Colbert was the star of Hollywood films such as It Happened One Night (1935) and Since You Went Away (1944). My mother was a 20-year-old bank clerk in Bournemouth. She had entered the contest at the encouragement of her fiance, an ex-serviceman on an engineering course, who was within just under a decade’s striking distance of becoming my father. My parents had met at a dance organized, I suspect, by the Young Conservatives. While my mother and father’s relationship to conservatism was always ambivalent, they maintained an unwavering love of cinema and music throughout their married life. Cyd Charisse, Gene Kelly and Alastair Sim were perennial screen favourites, with Sophia Loren and Steve McQueen adding a certain frisson in the 1960s. Musically, Glenn Miller and Vera Lynn dominated the playlist on our Electrohome stereo. And in 1976, an ocean away from Bournemouth, mooching around a school fundraiser and at that point looking for love in all the wrong places (mostly Patti Smith’s Horses and the film Rollerball) I watched, with a mixture of embarrassment and admiration, my parents dance with extraordinary grace to a live band playing ‘Moonlight Serenade’.