‘Shut up, you drunk lump.’
‘Oh, Sandy, I love it when you talk dirty. Get me a brandy, Sandy, and then we’ll be jamdy.’ He laughed again.
‘We can’t leave him,’ Sandra said.
‘He’s not going to ask you to marry him like this,’ I murmured.
‘This might be the best chance I get,’ she whispered.
Danny was staggering to his feet. ‘How about a drink?’ he said.
‘What shall I do?’ Sandra said.
‘Let’s walk him back to the Corn Exchange,’ I suggested. ‘See if we can find someone to take him home.’
Sandra grabbed Danny’s arm and wrapped it round her neck. He blinked hard and shook himself like a wet dog. ‘OK, girl,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
Sandra passed me her handbag and slowly we left the pub.
People were milling about on the steps of the Corn Exchange. Mick was chatting to some girls who worked in Boots. Jeff was tinkering with his scooter. I could hear live music, a blaring saxophone and crashing cymbals, and I wanted to be inside.
Sandra tried to lean Danny against a lamp post. ‘Go and collect our coats.’ She thrust her ticket into my hand. ‘We’re getting a taxi home.’
I pushed my way into the hall. The place was packed. Geno Washington was singing, ‘Oh, Geno!’ and people were joining in, swaying and clapping.
I retrieved our coats and elbowed my way back through the throng by the stage, past the smoochers dancing, towards the doors. I was almost there when Ray grabbed my arm and swung me round. ‘You came!’
I held out the coats. ‘It’s home time.’
‘Five minutes.’
I didn’t want to leave, even if his jumper looked like his mum had knitted it. I might even have danced with him, but I shook my head and wove my way out.
Danny, Sandra and I walked up to the railway station to find a taxi. We would drop Danny at his landlady’s and then we’d carry on home, Sandra said. In the queue I held back a little so they could talk. I could see Sandra smiling as Danny stroked her face. When we reached the front of the queue, Danny opened the taxi door with a flourish. I slid into the back seat and Sandra followed, tucking her coat round her to make space, but not too much, so that Danny could squeeze in beside her. Danny bent down then slapped his forehead theatrically. ‘Oh Sandy, guess what, I forgot. I’ve got to deliver some stuff.’
‘Now?’ Sandra said. ‘I thought you won the fight.’
‘Yeah, now. No, not to him. Another . . . contact of mine. So . . . bye.’ Danny puckered his lips in a kiss, then slammed the door. We watched him stagger into the station.
‘Do you want to go after him?’ I said. ‘Keep him out of trouble?’
‘There’s no point. I bet he’s just going up West.’ Most of the boys we knew went up to the West End of London when the Corn Exchange closed, to the Flamingo or the Marquee, clubs where they could hear more music, take more drugs and maybe have another fight or two. ‘Danny didn’t want to see me home, is the truth of it,’ she said sadly. The taxi drove past the bus station. ‘He said he’ll see me next week. But that could mean anything. Still,’ Sandra tossed a coin in her hand, ‘he gave me half a crown to pay for the taxi.’
‘That’s almost like getting engaged, in Danny’s terms,’ I said. Two and six was a big commitment.
‘Of course, I did just lend him five bob.’ She looked down at her bare left hand. ‘Do you think he’ll ever ask me to get engaged?’
I wanted to say, ‘You’re the Catholic. You’re supposed to believe in miracles.’ But as we passed a street light I could see her mouth making a funny shape, as if she was going to cry, so I said, ‘You don’t know. He might. He should do – you’d keep him on the straight and narrow.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I would.’
The taxi dropped us at the shops so Sandra’s mum and dad wouldn’t ask questions. We walked up to her house together, said goodnight and I carried on up the road.
*
The house was quiet when I got indoors. The telly was off, Mum and my sister Judith were in bed, but Dad was still up, sitting in the front room with his bulky faded red copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Collected Works. I didn’t know anyone else whose dad read plays. ‘Good time, love?’ he said.
I thought about the evening. We had scarcely spent ten minutes in the Corn Exchange. There’d been Danny’s fight in the Dolphin, I’d seen a dress I liked, Ray had asked me to dance and Sandra and I had extravagantly taken a taxi home. ‘Not bad.’
CHAPTER 2
The Orpheus
Six months earlier
SANDRA’S OLDER SISTER, MARIE, became a mod first, so it was natural that Sandra should be a mod, and even more natural that I should be a mod, too. Sandra and I had been best friends for years, since our family had moved onto the estate. She lived across the road, four doors down, and though we’d always gone to different schools, because she was Catholic, we’d played together after school and in all the school holidays. We went bike riding, we made dens, played schools, put on plays. We’d even written a newspaper, the Hayfield News, that we handwrote and sewed together, then delivered to the houses around us.
Marie and her friend Deirdre were three years older than us, but they had been our friends. They would come into town with us on Saturday mornings, and to the pictures, the Odeon or the Regent, on Saturday afternoons. But now we hardly saw them, Marie was courting strong, and when we did see them they were full of snide comments about our clothes – too ordinary, and the way we did our hair – too messy, and our age – too childish.
Sandra and I agreed that if all mods thought like that, who’d want to be a mod? But we did want to be mods. We watched Ready Steady Go!. We liked the clothes, we liked the dancing, and we loved the music. We wanted to be part of it, we wanted to be mods. And where we really wanted to go was the Orpheus, the mods’ coffee bar in town, with its jukebox and frothy coffee and scooters parked outside. Then and only then would we be able to call ourselves mods. But we didn’t dare step into its dark, dangerous depths.
Sandra was almost ready to leave school, and I was a year younger, when we first slid into the Orpheus. We were hovering outside, as we always did when we came into town, pretending to look in the art shop window, trying to catch the atmosphere of the coffee bar below, straining to hear the music, yearning to go inside.
As we stood listening to the final notes of Paul Jones’ insistent harmonica on ‘5-4-3-2-1’, rain began to fall. Now we had an excuse for standing there. If Marie came past we could say we were sheltering under the awning of the art shop.
Some mods puttered up on their scooters, parka hoods over their heads. As they parked, one boy’s scooter toppled onto its side. As he tried to pull it upright, he fell over too. He stood up, soaked with rain, oil stains on his parka. The others laughed. They were jostling and pushing each other, then they ran inside.
Sandra and I looked at each other. ‘If they’re going in looking like that, we might as well go in too,’ she said, in a natural way.
‘We’re not even wet,’ I said.
We stepped off the street into a dark narrow corridor. On the left was the entrance to the art shop, and at the end of the corridor was another door – the door to the Orpheus. The boys had disappeared, clattering down the stairs. The faint pulse of music came up through the floor. It was the Hollies asking us to ‘Stay’. ‘It’s a sign,’ Sandra whispered. She pushed open the door which led to a narrow landing and the staircase down to the cellar. My heart started pounding. This was it. We were here at last. We were going into the Orpheus. This is where the mods were, with their stylish clothes and good music. This is where our lives would change. We held on to the rail and stepped slowly down the steep, twisting staircase.
There was hardly any light, and at first there seemed to be nothing but walls and pillars and a counter. Then I realised I was looking at reflections in the smoky mirrors on the walls. It was much bigger than I’d imagined – it was the cellar area of
not one, but two shops. Groups of mods stood around tables or sat on leather benches looking like pictures from the pages of the Evening News. Boys slouched in green parkas, in dark suede or leather coats. They were clean-shaven; their hair was short and smart. There were fewer girls, but they too wore suede jackets and had short, neat hair. One girl in a black leather coat strolled round the room. Her hair was backcombed; it was almost a beehive. That wasn’t right for a mod. That was rocker girl hair. Surely she was in the wrong place, she should have been in the Long Bar, the rockers’ coffee bar. But people seemed to like her, greeting her, or waving a hand as she passed. The hair didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps the mod rules weren’t as strict as I thought, perhaps they weren’t as strict as I wanted them to be. I gazed round the room. One girl leaned casually against the counter, stirring a cup of coffee. Her hair was swinging and shiny, Cleopatra-style, like Cathy McGowan’s from Ready Steady Go!, the look Sandra and I were aiming for.
Apart from the Cathy McGowan girl and the girl with the beehive, everyone seemed to be engaged in conversation. They all looked sophisticated and confident. Someone flicked a glance towards us, taking us in, judging us. My brown suedette jacket, which had seemed quite modern and stylish outside, now felt like the cheap imitation it was. This is why we shouldn’t have come. We weren’t ready. We didn’t have the money to carry it off.
Sandra walked casually over to the counter on the right of the staircase to order us a drink, while I lingered at the foot of the stairs, shrinking against a pillar, afraid someone would talk to me, hoping they would. The record had ended and now every eye seemed to be turned on us, the new girls. I wondered where the wet scooter boys had disappeared to. Why was no one looking at them?
But then the thin, high guitar notes of a song that I waited for every night on Radio Luxembourg snaked out of the jukebox, ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers’ by Tommy Tucker. I knew the words to this record. I loved this record. On Radio Luxembourg the sound was thin and tinny and faded in and out. But here, the song filled the room, rolling over every surface, bouncing off the walls. It was an overture, an introduction.
A boy appeared round the corner, dancing on the tiptoes of his Hush Puppies, his long suede coat flapping, weaving his way between the tables, singing along with Tommy Tucker. He danced up to me. ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers,’ he sang into my face, opening his eyes wide. He took my hand. I looked round quickly for Sandra, thrilled, terrified, worrying that he would say something about suedette, or my hair, or my age, as he began slowly jiving with me, turning me under his arm. Then abruptly he dropped my hand and danced away.
‘That was Blond Don,’ Sandra murmured, appearing beside me with two glasses of milk. ‘Marie says he pops pills like they’re sherbet lemons. You’re lucky he didn’t push some purple hearts down your throat.’
‘I don’t think I need them,’ I said. My heart was racing from the dancing.
I thought that Blond Don with his long suede coat and his bleached white hair was the epitome of what being a mod was all about: careless, showy, a hint of danger, a good dancer. But that was before I met Tap.
*
For some weeks we didn’t go back. Sandra said the reason no one had talked to us, apart from Blond Don, and that didn’t count, was the CND badge on the lapel of my jacket. It was the expensive 2s 6d one, small, black and silver. But it was a badge. She said it let us down. The unwritten rule was that if you were going to wear badges you had to wear a lot on your parka, and you had to be a boy. And you didn’t have to care about what the badge represented. But I believed in banning the bomb, and I was proud of the badge.
I said if there was a reason no one spoke to us it was because they didn’t know us and because I was wearing a suedette jacket and not a suede one. ‘So it was your fault anyway,’ Sandra said.
But then the warm weather started and we went, on the train, to Southend. With my saved-up Christmas and birthday money I was able to buy myself mod. I chose a royal-blue twinset and a grey fan-pleated skirt. Sandra bought a pink jumper and a pinstriped skirt. Now we didn’t need the second-hand dresses Marie and Deirdre had sold us, with their insecure belts and strange, pale colours, and sunshine meant we didn’t have to wear jackets at all. We were set.
We began to go to the Orpheus regularly. We started to recognise the scooters and their owners – the maroon GS, the cream LI with sky-blue panels, the green Vespa with silver bubbles. We said hello to Jenny, the Cathy McGowan girl. One day Blond Don called me by name. ‘Hey, Linda, where’s your mate Sandra?’
‘She’ll be down in a few minutes.’
He knew our names. He’d asked about us. We were in. And now it seemed as if we’d never been anywhere else. We went to the Orpheus every Saturday, and on school nights we’d drop in after our tea when our mums thought we were across the road, watching each other’s telly. We put records on the jukebox. We chatted to Brenda behind the counter. We looked at strangers who walked in. But I still wore my badge.
I was wearing the badge the day I spoke to Tap for the first time. It was carefully attached to my new nylon mac. Although I was worried about making permanent holes in the lapel, the badge was important. As I walked over to the counter, Mick’s friend Jeff came up behind me and asked me to buy him a glass of milk. Then he laughed. ‘Only kidding. What do you want?’ Jeff was doing a building apprenticeship. A small shower of plaster fell from his sleeve onto the counter as he called Brenda and ordered two glasses of milk.
‘I’ll have one too.’ Tap was suddenly there at my side, looking cool in a pale blue Fred Perry and grey mohair trousers. He was Chelmsford’s biggest mod. He leaned forward and brushed a flake of plaster from my shoulder. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘What are you wearing?’
‘It’s a badge. A CND badge.’
‘Not the badge, girl. The badge is the best part of it. I mean this.’ He tweaked my sleeve.
‘It’s a nylon mac.’ Nylon macs were all the go. Navy-blue nylon macs.
‘But what colour do you call that?’
I had so hoped it would work. ‘It’s caramel,’ I said. Mum had bought it at a jumble sale. I had altered the hem and changed the buttons. ‘Caramel’s coming in,’ I said, lifting my chin. ‘It’s going to be really big.’ I looked into his eyes. They were very blue. ‘That’s what I heard, anyway.’
He shook his head. He grinned. ‘I think you heard wrong. Where you from? Frinton-on-Sea? ’Cos it ain’t coming in here.’ He looked at me. ‘Well, I suppose if it never comes in, it never goes out.’ He stroked another piece of plaster from my shoulder. ‘I’ll get hers,’ he said to Jeff. He put some money on the counter and walked away.
‘He didn’t,’ Sandra said when I told her.
‘He did.’
‘He must have thought you had dandruff and needed a bit of help,’ she said. ‘Why would he talk to you?’
‘We were discussing fashion.’
‘He felt sorry for you,’ she said, ‘’cos you fancy him and you’re wearing a brown mac.’
‘I don’t fancy him,’ I said. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘Yes you do, everyone knows Tap. You fancy him! Not that it’ll do you any good,’ Sandra said.
Tap came and went in the Orpheus. He worked in The Boutique, the best men’s clothes shop in Chelmsford, and weeks went by and we didn’t catch sight of him.
‘See?’ Sandra would say, occasionally. ‘He’s in London all the time. Probably got some fancy bird up there. He can’t be doing with girls in nylon macs from Frinton.’
Then we started to go to the Corn Exchange on Saturday nights. All the best groups came, The Who, the Yardbirds, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and the solo singers, David Bowie, Wilson Pickett, Memphis Slim. As the weather got colder Sandra lent me her suede jacket, which she’d had for her birthday, while she wore her leather coat which she’d bought with her first month’s wages. And then finally, with pocket money and a loan from my mum, I bought my own suede.
And I pinned my CND badge onto the collar. So
metimes people didn’t notice it at all, but then, if I was putting on my coat to go home or to go for a walk round town, someone would ask, ‘Ban the Bomb? Do you ban the bomb?’ There’d be a pause and then, ‘Do you believe in free love?’ And suddenly I’d feel serious and out of place. But I still wore it.
CHAPTER 3
Meeting Sylvia
BUT I NEEDED MORE CLOTHES. I’d worn the blue twinset so often I’d had to darn the sleeve, and the fan-pleated skirt was a bit saggy now. My suede was great, even with the big wide sleeves, but you couldn’t keep your coat on all the time. I needed cash, but I owed Mum the money she’d lent me for my coat and my birthday wasn’t for ages.
‘Why don’t you do some babysitting?’ Mum said. ‘You used to babysit with Sandra.’
‘We didn’t babysit,’ I said. ‘We didn’t go into people’s houses. We went out.’
Before Sandra started work, when there was nothing else to do or if we were hard up, we would run errands for people, shopping, posting letters, getting keys cut. Sometimes we took the babies on the estate for walks. We got threepence or even sixpence out of it, but more often just a glass of squash and a big thank you. Once Sandra had the nerve to ask for a shilling, from some posh people who lived in The Lane at the top of the estate with a granddaughter who had curly hair and always needed to go to the toilet. ‘We earned this,’ Sandra had said. ‘All those pennies we had to fork out down town.’
‘Mrs Brady says Mrs Weston could do with a hand looking after her grandson during the holidays,’ Mum said. ‘And Mrs Weston is a person who really needs some help.’
I knew about the Westons. Mrs Weston worked in the grocer’s with Mrs Brady, Sandra’s mum. Mrs Weston, her daughter Sylvia and baby Mansell all lived together in the Crescent. When Sylvia was away in hospital, or just ‘bad’, she couldn’t look after the baby. Sandra and I had taken him out once or twice before, and Sandra had sometimes gone to their house to babysit. ‘Sandra can’t do it now she’s at work,’ I said, quickly.
The Saturday Girls Page 2