Tales from Long Ago No. 3

For some years in the 1970s, I was employed as a social worker in a medical centre in what a rather grim town called Blackburn in West Lothian. The social work team included a kind and sociable clerk called Cathy, who was also a rather puritanical adherent of the Church of Scotland. One Monday she told me that she and her husband had gone to the cinema at the weekend to see the film Emmanuelle under the impression that it was a biblical epic. It soon became apparent that this was not the case, and Cathy told her husband that they had to leave because the film was “dirty”. He responded that they should not waste the money they had paid for their tickets. Impressed by this spirit of frugality, she agreed to stay. “The things they did - I would never have imagined”, she said. 

I suspect her husband was rather less innocent in this episode than she believed.