We had our own travel machine and it never failed to transport us, twice a week, to adventure, excitement and realms of experience that fused imagination and reality. You climbed high steps to enter it, bought tickets at passport control, you were, mostly, always reverential to the crew, and you just knew that warp drive was situated way up the back, behind the toilets.

Our transporter, our magic carpet to far off places and times gone by, was the Brynaman Public Hall - cinema, theatre, library and snooker hall, all rolled into one. The interior design was Art Deco, à la 1930s, it could hold an audience of hundreds and it had a stage that was wide enough to take Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound when they first came in. In fact, my father's one and only visit to the cinema was when Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound arrived. The film was The Command, a perennial Seventh Cavalry versus the Native Americans, or the Indians as they were known to us then. He didn't enjoy it.

He said that he could see the join where the three projections spanned across the stage to form one screen and he was also discomfited by the stereophonic surround sound of the arrows coming from behind him, or so it seemed to him.

There were usually two films each night, a support, shorter offering and the main feature itself. They were split by the trailers of films to come, Pathé or Movietone news, and local adverts, some of which were written or scratched by hand.

The films were all changed on Thursdays so you could have two magic carpet rides a week. The ice cream ladies came around during the news and trailers, offering vanilla wafers or vanilla tubs - no choice - until choc ice and the Orange Maid lollipops entered the scene. Children usually sat in the front three rows, under constant supervision by Phil, a local man who acted as usherette, or Mr Jenkins, the Manager, whose shout of ‘QUIET!' from the balcony could stop dead a herd of buffalo on rampant stampede. Indeed, any really unruly behaviour could result in the film being stopped, the theatre lights put on, a sharp lecture from the side of the stage and a dramatic, physical exit for the guilty - or anyone who looked vaguely guilty, through the side door in the alley that led to the ‘fish and chips' shop.

The first film I remember was The Mudlark a depressingly dark feature about an orphan who lived aside the River Thames in London, who, somehow managed to get into Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Victoria, or, at least, I think it was Queen Victoria.

Sometimes we were frogmarched to the cinema as an entire school, if the feature was deemed educational. I well remember Treasure Island with Robert Newton, he of the rolling eyes, as Long John Silver. Berian Evans, a good friend of mine, who was rarely allowed to go to the cinema, got very frightened when young Jim Hawkins was chased up the rigging by a particularly nasty pirate with a dagger in his mouth. Mr Rheinallt Thomas did, eventually, get Berian out from under the seat.

The Dam Busters was another, starring Richard Todd as Guy Gibson. Nowadays it would be regarded as a piece of patriotic jingoism, but it was very exciting. In fact, as we walked back to school, we tried to keep in formation, each of us a pilot in his own Lancaster. This kind of play acting was second nature to us, because after every cowboy film, especially if the Cavalry were involved, we'd all dash out of the Public Hall on horseback with our Colts firing madly. It was hardly fair because our Cavalry had always about a hundred and fifty in the troop, but the poor Cheyenne or Sioux would only have four or five and they would usually be visitors to the village.

Ah, I well remember my halcyon rides on that magic carpet, the Brynaman Public Hall Art Deco cinema. It's still there, opening its window on the world, or indeed, several worlds. In fact, the new seats are particularly enticing. Try the ‘courting doublers' at the back of the balcony, they're sure to move a relationship to a new plane.

I could go on to mention the Public Hall theatre productions, the eisteddfodau, the two table snooker hall and the room that once housed the public library, but they are for another time and another place.

Roy Noble