I went to the movies the other day in a town that has no cinema. Mind you, it was a Harry Potter movie, and as his countless other devotees will confirm, in Harry's world the impossible is never more than the wave of a wand away, writes Denis Tuohy
So it was fitting that I should find out about the Chamber of Secrets from a machine that has brought its own wonders to far-flung towns and villages across the country.
There it stood in its bright finery, parked in the Square in Castletownbere. On the road it looks like a conventional truck, but when it gets to its destination it can expand, in 45 miraculous minutes, into an air-conditioned, 100-seater cinema. For a few precious days, it was ours. Ireland's Cinemobile had come to West Cork.
Rain was sweeping in from the Atlantic, bucketing down - the kind of day when my mother wouldn't have minded me going to the pictures: there could be no danger of "wasting the good weather". What's more, it was Saturday morning, and during my Derry childhood that was the time of the week when I was most often allowed to go. Unless it was the run-up to Feis Doire Colmcille, of course, in which case the Christian Brothers would be sure to have a miss-it-at-your-peril choir practice. Otherwise, with luck, I would be off to the city's Rialto cinema, which belonged to the ABC group and which enrolled me and many others in the ABC Minors' Club.
Each week, as an overture to the show, which consisted mainly of westerns, cartoons and episodic thrillers, a man in a sky-blue suit would lead us in our club song. This was a set of unforgettably awful words to the tune of a Sousa march.
"We are the boys and girls
well known as
Minors of the ABC.
And every Saturday
we line up
To see the films we love
And shout aloud with glee.
We love to laugh and have
a singsong,
What a happy band are we,
We're all pals together ,
We're minors of the ABC."
We should expect no forgiveness, ever, from Sousa's ghost.
But it was not the ABC that initiated me into picture-going. More than half-a-century before the National Millennium Committee put the Cinemobile on the road there were entrepreneurs in rural Ireland who could see what the public wanted. In Co Leitrim in the 1940s a Manorhamilton shopkeeper started to show movies in a barn in his back yard. He cared little for comfort, ambience or safety, but he packed the place every night and at every after-school matinee for children like me. The seats had been salvaged from derelict buses, the films regularly snapped and the projector wheezed to a halt at least once during each performance. But none of this mattered to a five-year-old in his new-found theatre of dreams. Nothing could diminish my worship of Hopalong Cassidy, my delight in Laurel and Hardy.
Years later, during a journalistic assignment, I saw on the faces of Cuban children in a mountain village some of my own remembered rapture. They were featured in a documentary made by Cuban television about Castro's version of the travelling cinema.
Weather patterns are more predictable in his island than in ours, so the screening was in the open air. The documentary camera panned slowly across wide-eyed children, some in their mother's arms, enchanted by their first glimpse of Donald Duck. No, television is not an adequate substitute for the communal experience of cinema.
The communal experience in Castletownbere was limited only in terms of numbers. On such a foul morning not too many made it to the Cinemobile but among the happy clutches of small children and mothers I was not the only unaccompanied adult. A friend of mine, a writer who lives at the very edge of the Beara Peninsula, greeted me shortly before the lights were dimmed. She had driven 15 miles through the downpour to be part of it all. We talked afterwards of the extraordinary appeal of the Harry Potter stories, so faithfully interpreted by the film makers, and the rapt attention of younger members of the audience during the funny, sad and scary bits. As the credits rolled, after good had triumphed over evil, one little girl, aged four or thereabouts, kept clapping her hands and repeating Harry's name, softly, reverently, as though she'd just fallen in love.
With the end of that screening the whole show, which had included four other choices during the week, was over. Vincent, the projectionist and driver, got himself a coffee and a sandwich from across the street before preparing to shrink the cinema back to truck size and move on. By the end of June this non-profit venture, which is supported by organisations on both sides of the border, will have entertained audiences in every one of the Irish provinces.
"It's always sad," I said, "the day the circus leaves town." Vincent smiled. "Well, it's Mayo I'm headed for. Do you fancy a trip?"
Oh dear. So many times, so long ago, I would have gone off with the band, the elephants, the ponies and the clowns, but no one ever asked me. And now it's too late, I suppose. Still, he promised he'd come back to us in August. I'll be waiting.