I’M ALMOST CERTAIN that I saw it at the Regal; but it was over fifty years ago, so it is possible that I did in fact see it at the State Theatre, which showed mostly ‘art’ films. I am almost positive that I did not see it at the Carib, where my siblings and I often sat happily through Saturday afternoon matinees. I am going to go with the Regal Theatre, where I saw many a movie and quite a few stage-shows featuring some of my favourite Jamaican singers like Toots and the Maytals, Marcia Griffiths, Judy Mowatt, Alton Ellis and Roy Shirley. Once, in that same theatre, I even saw a live reading of Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Boy Growing Up’, by the famous Welsh actor Emlyn Williams. For the record: the city of Kingston once had over twenty active, well-supported theatres and cinemas, including three drive-in theatres.
Perhaps because I come from a very big family I’d learned from an early age to cherish any time I spent alone, and this would explain why I’d thought nothing of going by myself to the Regal one Saturday afternoon in 1963 to see A Taste of Honey.
The movie had been adapted from the play by the British writer Shelagh Delaney. I did not know this then, but she was eighteen years old when she wrote it, just a few years older than I was at the time I saw it, and Shelagh Delaney never knew this, but she changed my life.
It was many years after seeing that film that I read about Shelagh Delaney. She was considered ‘ineducable’ and failed her 11-plus four times, but through sheer determination made it to grammar school only to leave early to find employment in a number of dead-end jobs.
But somehow Shelagh Delaney, as I understand it, knew that she was a writer. She had a father who was a great storyteller and two grandparents who instilled in her a love of language and, long story short, she went to a play one night because she’d been introduced to drama at school by a teacher who’d seen something in her. Shelagh Delaney went to a play that she found boring, pretentious and condescending, and said to herself, I can do better than that, and went home and wrote A Taste of Honey, which started as a novel, but, as she was young and wanting to be out and about and going dancing, she took two weeks off from whatever going-nowhere job she had at the time, and turned the novel into a play that won her a BAFTA award. She went on to produce plays, short stories, films and TV scripts up until she died at the age of seventy-one.
Some years before I saw A Taste of Honey, I’d had another experience similar to my epiphany in the Regal Theatre that Saturday afternoon. This had happened in an English literature class at school, when we read The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett who had been an art student when she’d written and illustrated this engaging story for children. That book was one of the first set in modern times that I’d ever read in which the main characters were solidly working class. The father of the Ruggles family was a dustman and the mother took in washing and ironing, and there were seven children.
As one of nine children, I found it reassuring to know that such families lived in England, a country you would assume – if you were to judge by most of the books we’d been given to read in school up till then – was populated mostly by lords and ladies, and by chimney sweeps and serving maids who would rise with some effort to one day become lords and ladies. I would never have known then about families like the one Eve Garnett wrote about if I had not read that book – families who were lower down on the economic ladder than my own. My father worked at the telephone company, where he installed telephones; Mr Ruggles was a dustman. My mother was a gifted dressmaker while Mrs Ruggles took in washing and ironing. My parents employed a woman to do our washing and ironing. So while I did identify with Eve Garnett’s book, which won the Carnegie Medal and is now regarded as a classic of children’s literature, I am ashamed to admit that I felt somewhat better off than Lily Rose and her brothers and sisters, just as many of my friends in high school, who lived in really nice houses in upper St Andrew, felt they were better off than me because my family did not.
But that Saturday afternoon in the Regal Theatre (I’m going with the Regal Theatre, especially as it, like most of Kingston’s movie theatres, no longer exists) I was glad that I’d gone to see A Taste of Honey by myself because I remember being so moved that I could not stop crying. I identified fully with the character of the teenage girl who was a gifted artist racked by self-doubt, anxious about the level of her own intelligence and about her place in life.
I was both fascinated and appalled by the mother who goes off and marries a fancy man leaving the girl to fend for herself. The girl becomes pregnant by a handsome Black sailor who goes off to sea, presumably never to be heard from again, and the girl is then befriended by a young homosexual man who tells her ‘You need somebody to love you, while you are looking for someone to love.’ They move in together and he begins to look after her and to prepare for the arrival of the baby. The movie ends on a heart-wrenching note as the bad mother, who has been abandoned by her new husband, comes back into her daughter’s life and forces out the young man who had been tenderly making arrangements for the birth of the baby. The girl is played by one of the brightest stars of 60s British stage and screen, Rita Tushingham, who also played the daughter of Dr Zhivago and Lara in David Lean’s gorgeous epic Doctor Zhivago.
Another reason this movie is transformative was recently revealed to me by the writer Caz Phillips. When the girl asks him where he was born, the Black sailor replies that he’s from Cardiff. This is the first time that a Black character in a film ever identified themselves as British.
It took me a long time to understand why I was so moved by A Taste of Honey, but I finally figured out that it was probably the first film I saw where I felt sympathy for the humanity of every single one of the characters, even for the careless living mother who was the exact antithesis of my own. My heart ached for the young gay man, who demonstrates more maternal concern for the arrival of the baby than the pregnant girl does, and the scene near the end, where the awful mother hands him back the bassinet he’d bought for the baby, was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.
There was not a lot of happiness on offer in that film; still it proved to be one of the most important experiences I would ever have in a cinema, because I decided to myself as I sat there in the dark that no matter what I was going to do with my life I would somehow try to honour the humanity of everyone, no matter how strange, how different, how not-usual. Jamaican society is notoriously homophobic, and I credit that movie with helping me to honour the humanity of gay people and of people who do not fit in.
Shelagh Delaney was pronounced ‘ineducable’, but was able to produce work that affected me so deeply that I ended up sitting alone in a cinema after everybody else had filed out, trying hard to compose myself enough to go outside and face a world where most people would not understand why a simple thing like a Saturday afternoon matinee could make me weep as if a close friend or relative had died.