'....[My mother] had given up most of her professional piano playing, but kept on her Saturday afternoon job as 'pianny wumman' at the children's matinees of 'The Picturedrome' near the top of Easter Road. A supermarket now occupies the site of that picture-house that I knew so well. The piano was in a curtained corner to the right of the screen, and there were chairs and stands for the fiddler and cello-player who played in the evening along with another pianist.

My mother and I sat in the darkness, with the hooded light of the music stand and the screen flickering above, or I could look for a seat in the front of the house if I liked. The children got in for a penny each, infants-in-arms for nothing. You would see a boy staggering past the box-office, carrying his wee sister, nearly as big as himself.

They read the printed bits of the picture out loud in unison, as if they were in school, and shouted all the time. When the baddie was creeping up behind Pearl White, they all cried 'Shoat!', and when she got the better of him in the last episode of the serial, after I don't know how many Saturdays, they cheered with all their might. But my mother gave them a good pennyworth of music, mostly from memory. Sometimes she put a novel on the stand and read that, while she kept playing just the same.