I’ve always been a dreamer. In the days when I was scarcely taller than the hay grass, I was never a skinny child in a faded frock and pinafore, but the Princess of the Hay Field, or Queen of the Kingdom of the Cowshed, or wherever I had trailed my father that day. And later, when other village girls began to “walk out” with village boys, their whispered he said – I said accounts left me unmoved. I was waiting for something else to find me. Something not necessarily better than my family life in Haverth, since I loved both people and place, but definitely different. Something that might happen to the people I knew who didn’t live in Haverth but lived inside my head. They were not farmers or shopkeepers or blacksmiths. They were the people in the films.

Ever since I had seen my first moving picture as a little girl in the church hall at Aberaeron, I had never stopped being amazed by the sight of real people moving on a flat white screen. One of Mam’s favourite stories was of her own first visit to what she called the “kinema”, years before. “We couldn’t believe it!” she would say. “People were running up to look behind the screen, trying to see where the pictures were coming from, and how they moved, just as if they were living. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

At the old “kinema”, the people and horses in the film had walked jerkily, and unnaturally fast. The picture had flickered – brighter, then dimmer, then brighter again – as if illuminated by a guttering candle. It had seemed to struggle to stay within the bounds of the screen. “Bits of it would be on the wall,” recalled Mam, “or on someone’s face. It was funny, really, though marvellous as well. We were like children, watching those silly comic films that only lasted about five minutes, and clapping at the end, as if the people who made them could hear us!”

To me, even though the black and white made the world on the screen look so different from real life, it was still a miracle to see faraway places, sport and dancing and acrobatics, buildings and machines and animals. And what I loved best of all was that the pictures, or in my brother Frank’s slang, “the flicks”, were so new. They made you feel you were truly alive, striding through the twentieth century in a skirt shorter than any your mother or grandmother had worn, and with a head full of possibilities never before imagined.

Nowadays, the people on screen walk at the right speed, though the picture still flickers and jumps about a little, and even stops altogether sometimes. Frank, whose fascination for films leans more to the mechanical side than mine, met my questions about this with scorn: “What, do you think a film is shown by some sort of magic, girl? No, they are shown by a machine, and a machine can’t see what it’s doing, can it?”

I had to admit the truth of this. “So if the film stops, and the machine goes wrong, a man has to be there to see to it, then, has he?”

“Of course,” said Frank, adding with authority, “he’s called the projectionist.” Then, with longing, “I think he’s got the best job in the world.”