Charlotte Higgins’ excellent article on the need to support the arts when the pandemic is over (After the war, the arts came back stronger. They can do so again now, 18 May) does contain one rather odd sentence near the end: “the war was the last time cultural organisations ground entirely to a halt”.
Today we are unable to go to theatres or cinemas. During the war, the cinema was the staple entertainment (including the marvellous Pathé News), as was the theatre. It was the proud boast of the Windmill Theatre that, even during the blitz, “we never closed”. Perhaps the Windmill Theatre was not exactly a cultural organisation, though. I wouldn’t know: I used to wonder at the time exactly what it was. But the New Theatre and Playhouse in Oxford, where we were lucky enough to have no bombs, introduced me and many others to a lifelong love of the theatre.
As for the Ritz and Super cinemas, here’s to the memory of the American soldiers, perfect strangers and perfect gentlemen one and all, who would take us in, my brother Thomas and myself, to those films where children could only go accompanied by adults.
Antonia Fraser
London
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