Only One Woman

by Christina Jones

  Everything’s so flipping ancient here. The music is all oompah oompah bands and James Last, and don’t get me started on their fashions. Dear God! They make Mrs Fowler look like something out of Vogue. If I don’t get away soon I’m going to end up looking like a frump without any idea of what’s hip any more. When I go back to England they’ll think I’ve stepped out of the dark ages. Scott will die of shame.

  Stella’s Diary

  November 19th 1968

  The letter from the Churchill Hospital came today on Mr Glendenning’s headed notepaper. I am to go into hospital on Sunday 8th December. My operation will be on Monday 9th.

  In 20 days’ time. Not even three weeks!

  My hands had been shaking as I opened the envelope. They shook even more when I read the letter.

  Mr G’s secretary had also sent a copy of the letter to Dr Kingston. It was headed Miss S Deacon – Major Surgery. I hoped, especially after the way she spoke to my mum, that she felt bad about it – ‘women’s troubles’ indeed!

  Mind you, to give her her due, she’d been pretty damn quick about prescribing the pethidine tablets. And what a difference they’d made! Although, like the Feminax, they also came with dire warnings about overdosing and being habit-forming. But they were so effective that I only needed to take one when the pain started and I was usually fine for the rest of the day. I wished I’d had them months – no years – ago!

  So – this is it. I know now – a major operation – on December 9th. The day I die. I won’t even be alive for Christmas. Not much time to get well, meet my tall, dark, handsome stranger from over the seas, and become Harbury Green’s answer to Scarlett O’Hara.

  I tried to laugh at my foolishness but only manged to cry. Again.

  Renza’s Diary

  November 20th 1968

  I got another letter from Scott today, sent from Leighton Buzzard where they have been staying for a few days whilst they sort out recording and prepare for France on New Year’s Eve, though they’re going back to Jersey for Christmas first. Apparently Zak and his girlfriend Maureen – not sure which one of the many she was – have broken up and Joss and his girlfriend – don’t think I met her, just various groupies – have split as well. Joss found out she’d been two-timing him. What a laugh.

  Scott’s had his hair cut a little, as it was so long that Stephan said the French might not let them into the country. They get funny about long hair and think everyone with long hair is a hippy and drug addict. The French are weird.

  He apologised that his Mum’s not written to me about Christmas and said she was a bit flaky at times – whatever that means. Anyway it definitely means I won’t be going; but I knew that. I’m learning to live with disappointment.

  But Scott is going to send me the tapes of their recording sessions. Last Saturday he said they went to London to audition for President Records and they also went into their head offices to sing some of their own songs for them, without music, which was recorded on tape as they did it. Scott thinks it went well. The singer from a band called ‘The Action’ is sending them some songs he’s written for them to consider recording, and Scott thinks if all goes well, they’ll be recording for President soon. The company liked Narnia’s Children’s own material but think it is L.P material more than singles. They loved the group image and personalities a lot.

  It’s all so exciting, I wish I could be with him and enjoy it with them all. Yvette would blow a gasket if she knew what was going on, but she’s never answered my letters so I don’t know if she even got them. The last I heard when I was home she’d got engaged to an officer cadet and had gone all posh! Her Mum will be in seventh heaven, it was her dream that Yvette would marry a ‘someone.’

  ‘If I ever did become famous I think my first thought would be to put some money in the bank and also of course spend some, lots, on you’ Scott wrote. ‘And if Narnia’s Children ever broke up, I’m sure I’d find another band because I love this scene, it’s far out and too much for me to finish with it’.

  Scott’s letter went on to tell me that his father liked me and sent his regards. And apparently Scott had been in touch more since he took me to meet him and Philippa. So something good came of the visit. His dad told him that they’d been a bit sad when I visited because a dear friend, who had been a stewardess and in the Munich air disaster, had died, and they were going to her funeral soon after our visit. This was the flight that Manchester United were on when so many died.

  ‘From Friday we’re playing five nights in a row, starting with The Penny Farthing in Leicester, so it is going to be hectic before we go back to Jersey where we’re big stars now you know!’ I couldn’t help laughing at this. ‘We were coming back from a gig the other night down the M1 motorway which is groovy, and we stopped off at the Blue Boar which is a very famous group cafe – every group goes there, it’s so hip – and we saw Frankie Vaughan and his wife and also Charlie and Inez Fox, the American brother and sister duo....cheap thrills!’

  I can’t stand Frankie Vaughan, but I’ve heard of Charles and Inez Fox....so cool. Scott’s so lucky to have such an exciting life when all I have is flipping housework, looking after the kids and hanging out with old people and old blokes who keep trying it on with me in the Mess. I told Scott about a couple of them who had groped me when my Dad was in the same room for heaven’s sake!

  Scott said he’d kill them if he ever got his hands on them. He also said his father had just sold his house and was buying one only about a mile away, and Scott was hoping to pop down and see them at some point and wished I could go with him. I’ll pass on that I think! I’d love to see Scott – but his father.....oh no!

  I cried (I seemed to do that a lot these days) when I read the next lines in his letter telling me he loved me and missed me still.

  ‘I remember asking you to marry me, of course I do. I remember feeling like I was floating on air when you said yes. I hope and pray you’ll always feel the same and one day we can get married. Thanks for those weeks we had together, I hope we can spend more time together, like the rest of our lives, very soon. If you did manage to get over to see me I wouldn’t let you out of my sight and I would never stop kissing your lovely mouth, nibbling your little ears and …...well you come over and find out!’

  I had a dreadful thought as I read this. What if Mum had read it already? I was going to be in for it big time if she had. A feeling of dread swamped me, and the lovely feeling Scott’s letter had filled me with evaporated in a flash.

  Stella’s Diary

  December 7th 1968

  In 48 hours I knew I’d be dead.

  ‘So,’ Vix, sprawled on my bed, looked across at me, ‘what are we going to do tonight?’

  I shrugged. ‘No idea really. I’m just so scared. I sort of just want to stay in with you and Mum and Dad.’

  ‘What?’ Vix frowned. ‘Stella Deacon – are you mad? You reckon this is going to be your last Saturday night on earth, and you want to stay in?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t know really. What would you do if you were going to be dead on Monday?’

  Vix rolled over on the bed. Her vivid orange mini-dress rose up to groin level and she grinned. ‘Oh, I’d run away and marry Mick Jagger and live in a fairy-tale castle on an island in the sun and eat nothing but cherries and chocolate.’

  I laughed. ‘And that’s an awful lot of stuff to pack into 48 hours. No, seriously, Vix… what should I do?’

  ‘Do you hurt today?’

  ‘No. The pethidine is still working well. I can take another one later.’

  ‘Then you should go out,’ Vix sat up again. ‘Get really, really dolled-up. We’ll go out and go mad and have the best night ever. Something to remember.’

  ‘I’ll be dead so I won’t remember anything anyway.’

  ‘No, but I will.’ Vix smiled gently at me. ‘I want something lovely and happy to remember you by. We could go into Oxford. There’s probably a dance on at the town hall, or there’s bound to be some reall
y good bands at the Orchid Rooms or Wheatley Bridge, or – ’

  The Saturday night trains between Harbury Green and Oxford were lively affairs, always packed with like-minded night-club and dance-hall goers.

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve still got to get ready, so it’ll be pretty late to get a train into Oxford. Everything’ll be half over by the time we get there.’

  Vix nodded, scrambling from the bed and heading towards the door. ‘True. I know how long it takes you to get ready. So what about going over to St Barnabus? I think I saw in the local paper that they’ve got a dance on there tonight. Might be a group we’ve heard of and you can interview them and earn some money from it.’

  I shrugged. ‘Not much use to me when I’m dead.’

  ‘I’ll use the money to put flowers on your grave every Saturday night as a memorial.’ Vix grinned. ‘Look, hang on – you start making yourself beautiful and I’ll go downstairs and nick the paper off your mum.’

  ‘OK. If there’s something on at St B’s, we’ll go. It won’t be too far away if I feel ill and need to come home, will it?’

  Vix hugged me and rolled off the bed.

  I shuddered. Because now I knew it was going to kill me. Well, it probably wasn’t – but the operation I was having on Monday was. I knew it.

  Obviously, I’d never been admitted to hospital before, never had an operation before, but my uncle Maurice had died on the operating table. OK, years and years earlier – but as far as I was concerned that was what hospitals and operations did – killed you.

  I was going into hospital tomorrow and the operation was on Monday. I knew I was going to die under the anaesthetic. I’d go to sleep and never wake up again.

  With a familiar feeling of dread I started to plaster on my make-up.

  ‘There!’ Vix said triumphantly, barging back into the bedroom waving the local paper, ‘Told you! Oh, you look great – very glamorous, black suits you now you’re so skinny – and there is a dance on at St B’s. Some group called Narnia’s Children – ever heard of them?’

  ‘Nope.’ I shook my head carefully, holding my second pair of false eyelashes in place, waiting for the glue to dry. ‘No, me neither. Probably not much use you interviewing them, then. But even if they’re rubbish we can still have a good time,’ Vix started backcombing her Cilla Black hair in the mirror over my shoulder. ‘Oh, my ends won’t go right… I need lacquer here – have you got some Sunsilk or something? Ta…’

  We both choked in the wild whoosh of sticky hair spray.

  ‘Oh,’ Vix wiggled the tail comb and teased her hair upwards, ‘and your mum and dad think it’s a good idea if we go out tonight. Especially as it’s only at St B’s. Take your mind off it, they said.’

  My poor mum and dad were as worried about the operation as I was, I knew it. I could see it in their eyes however hard they tried not to show it. Being an only child, much-loved and spoiled rotten. I think that made it worse for them. If I’d had brothers or sisters it might not have been so bad if, no when, I died on Monday.

  ‘And,’ Vix mumbled, pouting as she applied another coat of my Miner’s Barely There lipstick, ‘they said I’ve got to make sure you have a good time. So, that’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Thank you. You’re the best friend in the world. Please don’t ever forget me.’

  ‘I’d never do that – and now please shut up! I’m not going to cry tonight – and neither are you.’

  No, I thought, I wasn’t.

  My last Saturday night on earth…

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I was thin and pale, which I liked. I’d lost loads of weight since the stomach pains started. I couldn’t eat much anymore. Still, thin and pale was fashionable, and looked good with my Dusty Springfield heavily-kohled eyes and my blanked-out lips.

  Tonight I wore black: a very, very short black silk dress – no more than a tunic really – with long, tight sleeves, and pin-tuck pleats and hundreds of tiny buttons down the front. Because I liked to look different, I usually made my own clothes, but this was an old lady’s tea dress I’d bought from the Oxfam shop in Oxford’s Broad Street and adapted by slashing several feet from the length and taking in the waist – and tonight I’d added dangly purple earrings, black fishnet tights and long black thigh boots.

  Then concentrating hard, I used my eyelash glue to stick a sparkle of silver glitter over my cheekbones, and purple star sequins in arches where my eyebrows had been. Tonight, though, I owed it to myself to pull out all the stops.

  I stood back and surveyed the effect. Hmmm – almost as good as Julie Driscoll. Almost…

  Just my hair to sort out. I fluffed and combed and flicked and back-combed.

  I swooshed Sunsilk everywhere and nodded. Nothing moved. My hair was a mass of rigid spikes and layers. Bernice – bless her little cotton socks – would probably have a fit. It looked OK.

  I scrabbled across my cluttered dressing table for the perfume. It was Le Train Bleu this week. Like most of our friends, Vix and I always wore Picot Perfume. Either Le Train Bleu or Akabar or Pagan which we bought in Boots in Oxford on pay days.

  ‘We both look amazingly beautiful and glamorous and fab,’ Vix said as she had a liberal dab of scent too, then pulling on her leather coat as I draped my fun fur jacket round my shoulders. ‘St B’s here we come…’

  St Barnabus was our local boys’ school. It was only a five-minute walk away from my house – which meant my dad didn’t have to come and collect us at the end, which he sometimes did if we went to clubs further afield than Oxford – and they had a huge hall with a stage and hired it out for Saturday night dances about once a month. It was always packed – the groups were usually good, sometimes quite big names – and everyone from our village, and all the other surrounding villages, crowded in.

  Vix, bless her, had put Jeff, her long-term boyfriend, on hold to be with me tonight. My last Saturday night alive. Because, to be honest, by now Vix had also decided that Nanny Ivy’s predictions had been, as I’d always thought, a load of hokum.

  Today I’d been alive for 20 years, 2 months, 1 week and 5 days – and on Monday I was going to die. But tonight I was going to live. For the last time.

  Gulping down my prescribed pethidine pill, I kissed mum and dad goodbye, patted the dogs and the cats, picked up my homemade shoulder-bag – black beaded taffeta, encrusted with multi-coloured sequins and embellished with hand-sewn satin stars – and Vix and I were off.

  Outside, it was a glittering, freezing December night. The sky was clear, velvet black with a zillion stars and everywhere shimmered beneath the layer of heavy frost. No sign of snow, though. I loved snow. I’d hoped I’d see snow again before I died. Not much chance of that now. Not much chance of anything anymore.

  Stella’s Diary

  December 7th 1968 – continued…

  After a short walk, we joined the queue outside St Barnabus’s hall door, chatting with friends, admiring – or otherwise – each other’s outfits – stamping our feet, our breath like smoky plumes in the icy air. After a few minutes of shuffling, we were in, and having paid our money, we dumped our coats in the cloakroom, bought the obligatory beaker of orange squash – there was a no alcohol rule at St B’s as it was school premises but it never mattered because everyone just got high on the noise and the music and the excitement – and headed for the hall.

  The dusty green curtains were pulled closed across the stage in the gloomy, moody darkness. Tiny lights twinkled in the ceiling and from one of the deepest, darkest corners, the DJ was playing an early Monkees hit. St Barnabus always put on a good night, and certainly knew how to create an atmosphere.

  The place was packed. Most people had nabbed one of the chairs that were lined up round the outside of the floor, claiming them with handbags and drinks. A few mini-skirted girls were dancing – always the same ones – in front of the stage. Vix and I grinned at each other. We called them the Dolly Rockers and we knew they’d be the ones trying to get off with the group’s sing
er later – even if he looked like Quasimodo’s much uglier cousin.

  Vix and I found a couple of vacant chairs right at the front to the left of the stage.

  ‘Sit,’ Vix said, balancing our beakers of squash. ‘We’ve got ringside seats for when the group – what are they called – oh, yes, Narnia’s Children – comes on. And as you’re not going to rush off to interview them you can camp here all night if you don’t feel up to dancing.’

  I nodded. Vix made my journalism sound very grand. It wasn’t really. A couple of years ago, I’d been asked by the teenage magazines to contribute pop group interviews as well as my short stories. I loved it.

  I’d met and interviewed a lot of really big names and famous chart groups – like the Rolling Stones and The Move and Marmalade, and Amen Corner and The Walker Brothers and Status Quo, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and The Herd and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch – as well as several big-time club acts like The Alan Bown Set and Simon Dupree and The Big Sound and Argent, and many up-and-coming bands too.

  The magazines always bought my interviews and the extra money paid for my holidays, make-up, records, books and clothes. Vix always came along with me to these gigs – we’d had some really great adventures on our nights out, been to some top venues and met some fab people.

  Of course, whatever Vix thought, the short stories and the pop interviews were really only my pin-money hobby. My proper job was still, and probably always would be – well, until I died on Monday of course – as a civil servant.

  I’d been signed off from work indefinitely now, depending on the outcome of the operation and the length of my recuperation period, the personnel lady had said kindly. I could have three months off on full pay, and a further three months after that on half pay, if the hospital thought I needed it.

  I hadn’t bothered to tell her that it didn’t matter too much as I wouldn’t be coming back to work when I was dead.