I have met many people of my generation who claim that as children they disliked Punch and Judy shows. Some felt that the ‘swozzled’ voice and basic script were irritating or patronizing; others disliked the violence towards women, or towards children, or in one case towards crocodiles. I have no doubt that out there somewhere was an incipient vegetarian who abhorred the sausage fixation.
I however was much less politically precocious. I just could not stand the fact that they never started on time.
The procedure was this. On a board outside the seaside booth would be chalked “Next performance 2.30.” I would arrive at 2.15 and sit on the beach with a sprinkling of other early birds. We would sit patiently, even though we realized we were missing time which could be spent paddling or in crenellating sandcastles. I did not have a watch at that age, but even if the clock on some public building was not visible the bush telegraph would announce that it was 2.30. And immediately…nothing would happen.
I can now try to reconstruct the thought processes of the Professor, trying to maximize his audience – the more bodies, the more pennies. He presumably decided that the longer he could keep a crowd there, the more likely it was that others would join it; whereas once the show had started people would walk past muttering that there was no point going now since they had missed the start. Or it may have been that he was working alone and needed to collect the pennies before entering the booth, and anyone who joined from then on would be able to freeboot.
But all I knew at five years old was that a promise had been broken. Had my time been now and my nationality American I should have been straight off, struggling under the weight of the chalkboard, to consult my lawyer as to whether a contract might also have been broken.
I concede that in an age when only the rich or those who had retired after 50 years service would possess a watch, it was reasonable for a show to begin “when the sun is past overhead” or “in the cool of the early evening”; but in the 1950s, as now, what is the point of having a watch accurate to the nearest second if you are incapable of being punctual to the nearest fifteen minutes?
Worse still are those who attempt to manipulate time to suit their own deficiency. The lady who lived near me, in whose garden I used to play with her children, and whose clock I used to rely on to be home in time for tea, throughout her life kept it twenty minutes fast. I thought she was strangely eccentric. I have met too many since who do the same thing to continue with that delusion.
The old are much better at punctuality than the young. The truth of this was recognized by a friend of mine who, whenever we were waiting for the younger members of a committee to arrive even though starting time had long passed, would lugubriously announce: “Why did the October Revolution take place in November? Because they were waiting for the under 40s to turn up.” He had actually begun by saying “under 50s” but had made the concession to me – not because I was under 50, but because I pointed out that Lenin was 47 at the time of the revolution, and unlikely to have been tardy.
In my opinion the reason for this can be summed up in one word; not ‘Punctuality’; not ‘Conscientiousness’; but ‘Buses’. My generation was reliant on public transport, which, without the aid of Mussolini, ran pretty much to timetable. To be one minute late and miss a bus was a major inconvenience. Indeed in rural areas it would almost inevitably mean not going anywhere at all. Buses were infrequent in country villages. In fact, the inhabitants of one village near to my own, where there was precious little entertainment at any time, would come to the gate, watch the bus go by, and go back in again, nothing else exciting being likely to happen for the next three hours.
Indeed my first experience of the cinema was being taken there because there was no bus back to the village for two hours, and we therefore had time to kill on a wet night in Bury St Edmunds after the shops had shut. Unfortunately to make sure we caught the next, quite probably last, bus home we needed to leave before the end of the film.
But I learnt punctuality.
