White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  Even now, in the midst of my turmoil, what he’s suggesting about adoption is anathema to me. I just don’t want to have a baby. Full stop. Go through with it? He must be crazy. Yet at this point in time, he’s my only hope in the world: this grim, ageing figure of rigid authority in his stiff, three-piece suit, the remnants of his dark wavy hair plastered carefully to one side, his hateful rubber gloves now lying in a steel bowl on a side table. I detest him, his judgement from on high, his power over everyone round here. Yet he and he alone has the knowledge, the power to help me. I ask him again, what can I do? ‘No. There’s nothing,’ he says, his words clipped and curt. ‘Girls like you should be grateful for whatever help you get when you have the baby. You can to go to the hospital and get it all checked out in two weeks time.’ More furious scribbling on the beige card.

  He doesn’t say, ‘Get out now.’ But his body language as he continues to write, ignoring my presence, nudges me to leave. So I teeter out in my brown pointy stilettos, through the packed surgery, past the wailing Bash Street kids of Dalston, out on to the grey, ever-depressing world of Sandringham Road, its once proud and splendid Victorian family houses now derelict and war-ravaged, crammed with immigrant West Indian families dreaming of the balmy Caribbean world and the happy life they’ve left behind – having reached the revered mother country only to be ripped off outrageously by greedy, uncaring landlords. And treated like pariahs by most of the population round here.

  My parents’ flat is just up the road. But there’s no way I’m going there. I’ve taken the day off work to do this, see the doctor. They’d ask questions if I turned up midweek. Instead, I walk in the opposite direction towards Ridley Road market, thinking hard, pushing myself to come up with something, anything that will help get me out of this situation. I’ve told no one at all about what I fear is happening to me, not my flatmates, who are provincial, middle-class girls in London to work and find husbands, nor the man who got me here, my new squeeze from the office, the gregarious Jeff. Jeff is a bit of a secret lover, anyway. No one knows I’m sleeping with him. The girls in the flat and my friends know about my on-off (mostly off) boyfriend, Bryan, the adman. He’s still an Official Boyfriend. But that’s it. What a mess.

  Then, at the junction of Ridley and Sandringham Roads, where you encounter the market itself, the rickety stalls, the slimy, mucky muddle of urban street trading, I remember a conversation I had ages ago, with an old friend from Hackney schooldays, Doreen, a girl I rarely see now since I’ve moved to a different world in north-west London. The connection with my old life, growing up here, these familiar streets, opens up a flash of hope. Yes. Doreen. She knows someone. She told me all about it over the phone. This happened to her. But her boyfriend’s uncle knew someone and her boyfriend, a wealthy foreign student, paid for it all. It was fine. Oh, how lucky I am that troubled day. Salvation is merely round the corner. Doreen, a tiny, skinny girl with a curly short crop, lives in an old block of flats in Dalston Lane with her dad and her younger brother. She’s had a rotten deal. Her mum died when Doreen was small, so she’s more or less had to bring up her younger brother and look after her dad, who is now quite old. Education never featured large in Doreen’s life and she doesn’t work, apart from occasional part-time hours in a high street dress shop.

  She’s home, cheerfully offering me a cup of lemon tea and a rich tea biscuit in the cluttered front room of their cramped flat. Her dad remains, as ever, inert in the bedroom. I give her a brief version of events. Does she still know that man? Does she still have the number? Yes, she’s got it. ‘But it costs about £80,’ she warns me. ‘How you gonna pay for it?’

  ‘I’ll find a way,’ I tell her, carefully writing the number down. It means deception of the worst order. But I’ve already come up with an idea about getting the money for an abortion – way beyond my own resources since I never save a penny out of what I earn.

  The next night, when the flat I share with the three other girls is temporarily deserted, I dial the number from the coin box in our hallway. Push button A. A man with a foreign accent answers. I don’t beat around the bush. ‘I’m pregnant and I don’t want it. My friend says you can help me,’ I say boldly. I’m not in the least bit embarrassed about all this. I want what I want: to get out of this fast – and I’m told this man can do it. But I don’t know a thing about him. I don’t even know if he is a doctor. As usual, I’m not interested in detail. Can he help? Silence. This is still illegal, dodgy, no question. We both know that. He chooses his words carefully, an obvious Eastern European accent. But his English is quite good.

  ‘Yes, we can help. Bring the money with you when you come for the appointment. How many weeks?’ He doesn’t use the word ‘pregnant’ at all. I explain, briefly, what I know, tell him I’ve seen a GP. ‘That is good. We are in Ealing. Can you come next Wednesday? Ring again tomorrow, we give you a time.’

  And that’s it. A week away. The next bit, getting the money, is going to be really fraught. There’s not much trepidation involved in ringing up a total stranger, asking them to carry out a highly dangerous and illegal operation in their home. But I am very nervous, edgy, about what my next move involves. Because I must lie through my teeth. It’s about two months or more since I have slept with Bryan. But my decision has been made: I know the timing. I keep a diary of my period dates and it’s definitely Jeff who is the dad, not Bryan. Jeff will be told about all this. But only once it’s over, sorted. Passion overwhelmed me that night in the car, our first time, risky business indeed. Yet Bryan is another matter: a man who has been having his cake and eating it (if you’ll forgive the expression) for a long time. OK, it was my decision to stick around, still see him on the odd occasion whenever he felt like it. But now, I reason, with his Official Boyfriend status, Bryan can fork out. So I dial his number.

  ‘Jesus-fucking-Christ, I thought you were on the bloody pill,’ is his response.

  I had managed to get a prescription via a Family Planning Association clinic back when Bryan and I were a proper item, seeing each other regularly. But I’d hated taking it – it made me feel sick. So after a few months I stopped. And then we’d lapsed into our on-off state, with big gaps of several weeks between our dates. The last time we slept together in his posh flat, with Donovan serenading us with ‘Sunshine Superman’ on the Dansette, Bryan was quite drunk and ignored my admittedly half-hearted suggestion of ‘using something’. So I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really remember much about the night at all, let alone when it was. He’s not going to be counting weeks or consulting the calendar. He doesn’t really know for sure, I tell myself. And I’m right. Bryan doesn’t bother to calculate. All he wants is instant resolution. ‘OK, so what do you wanna do? Oh, you’ve got someone. Good. How much?’ he says warily. He knows me well enough to know that I’m not going to even suggest I have this baby, keep it.

  I tell all him about Ealing, the price, the appointment.

  ‘Right. I’ll drop round Friday night and give you the money.’ Click.

  The odd thing is, even though I’m lying to him, I’m really upset at his lack of concern. Daft, eh? By now, with the changes taking place already in my body, my hormones are all over the place, so I’m bound to feel wildly irrational. Yet my anguish at his indifference gets worse when he turns up that Friday. I’ve been hanging out the window for ages, waiting for him, so I run down to the front door when I hear his souped-up Mini. No, he can’t come up, he’s in a hurry. He just hands me the money, all £10 notes for some reason. ‘I’ll ring you,’ he says coldly, his usual parting shot. Then he screeches off. Typical.

  ‘He’s a bastard,’ I tell myself for the umpteenth time as I climb the stairs to my bedroom, clutching the notes. ‘He deserves this,’ I say over and over again. Yet it still feels lousy, a betrayal of sorts. But logic dictates that I can’t afford the emotional luxury of spending time on reflection, right or wrong, in this situation. I’ve acted out of sheer expedience. Bryan has cash, I don’t. And I do not want to stay pregn
ant. Simple. Even so, I spend the next few days in a pretty miserable state. If ever I needed confirmation that Bryan was a callous shit, this is it.

  The following Wednesday, I call in sick at work and make my way on the Central line to Ealing Broadway. Then I walk, following the man’s carefully dictated instructions, for about ten minutes to a big Edwardian house, where I ring the big white bell for the ground floor flat. I’m not nervous, shaking, tearful or anything like that. I’m glad no one is with me. The distraction wouldn’t have helped me. My mind is holding fast to what I want to achieve. I cannot – will not – let fear or any other emotion creep in. It’s bad enough when I think about Bryan the Bastard.

  It’s a big, spacious, spotless, high-ceilinged hallway that I’m asked to sit in, briefly, by a youngish woman who answers the door before an older, smiling blonde woman in a blue overall comes out to greet me. She’s a big round lady, about 35, well-groomed, lacquered, bouffant hair, manicured nails. Smart but at the same time motherly. She also has a foreign accent. Yet she exudes a low-key confidence, a professionalism that is somehow reassuring. She ushers me into a very large area, part-office, part-surgery where the man is sitting waiting. He is much younger than Dr King, maybe late thirties, spotless white coat, good looking, sandy hair, also very pleasant. Perhaps they’re a husband-wife team. He jumps up, greets me by name, shakes my hand, asks me for the money which I willingly dig out of my little Chanel-style padded shoulder bag, briefly noticing the big table in the centre of the room with its scary metal stirrups, something I’ve never seen before. Gulp. This is it.

  Yet I don’t baulk or falter as the woman shows me into a corner cubicle behind a flimsy screen, tells me to undress and put on a short thin robe. I am about to have an illegal abortion without a general anaesthetic. It is highly dangerous for so many reasons: prosecution and prison face people like these if they are apprehended. Girls like me face even greater dangers if something goes wrong, if non-sterile instruments or incorrect procedures are used – or if a body goes into shock at undergoing such a process while wide awake. You might bleed to death afterwards and die. Today, if placed in such a situation, I’d be absolutely terrified, shaking, practically hysterical. It would probably be nigh impossible to treat me. I’m well aware of the complexities of the human body, the possibilities of what might happen at the hands of an inefficient practitioner. Today, I don’t trust most doctors unless I have real confidence in their manner, their skills. I am acutely nervous of all forms of physical intervention. Even a visit to the dentist is something to be avoided.

  Oh, the invincibility of youth! No true sense of your own mortality, your human frailty. The young do ridiculously stupid, reckless things because they have no anticipation of pain. So that day, in that big room in Ealing, I blindly place myself at the mercy of these two individuals, an eastern European couple whom I later understand must have fled their own country and Communism after the political upheavals of the 1950s. He’s probably a qualified doctor there, but how he has arrived at this situation, dodging the law and risking much, is open to question. Probably this is a better bet than the alternative: a life without freedom behind the grim iron curtain.

  I obediently do what I’m told – get up on the table, submit to the awful stirrups. There is no bad, wrenching pain, just acute discomfort which is endurable when I look away, stare at anything, rather than acknowledge the reality of the cold surgical instruments, the procedure itself. There’s a brief, jolting, sharp injection, a local anaesthetic before it all starts. The woman is amazingly professional, quietly chatting to me, asking me questions about my life, distracting my thoughts from what the doctor is doing to my body. I know it’s all going just fine because she keeps reminding me, briefly, in that soothing way of practised, caring medics. Until, after about 20 or so minutes, though it could well have been longer, the man is telling me, ‘It’s OK. Nearly over.’ Then, a few minutes later: ‘You’re not pregnant any more.’ How well he understood it all.

  This couple, whatever their story, are knowledgeable and confident. After I’ve stepped down somewhat shakily from the table, dressed and been handed a cup of something warm, the man hands me some painkillers – which I never take – and explains what to do when I get home and what to expect (which proves to be nothing dramatic). He also tells me to ensure I have a cervical smear test done every year, something I’ve never heard of before. ‘You must do this test each year, just in case there are any problems,’ he explains. He doesn’t use the word ‘cancer’. Such information is not widely understood by women at this time: newspapers and magazines give out some information on health and medicine, but it’s nothing like the plethora of detail and useful, valuable advice on every topic under the sun that we can access today. Or the abundance of shock-horror, ‘This could be happening to you,’ scary detail we are also exposed to now.

  I nod, grateful, relieved beyond belief that it is done. I’m out of trouble. I’ve got through this. My life can go on as before. Then he offers to drive me back to north London. He ushers me into the back seat of his dark-blue Jaguar, which would have cost around £1,800 then. The average worker in the mid-1960s lived on around £1,200 a year. This was surely a lucrative business.

  At the end of that same year, 1967, the abortion bill passes through Parliament, making it legal in the UK for up to 28 weeks gestation. The Act comes into effect in April 1968. Abortion, by a registered practitioner, then becomes free in England via the NHS. Perhaps people such as the clued-up couple knew this was coming and so took ever-greater risks while they could. There would have been plenty of demand for their unadvertised services, though the £80 might have been a stumbling block for many, given the average wage packet.

  How do I feel afterwards? Pretty shaky. Though there are no dramatic physical after-effects. No one in the flat knows my secret – my trip down the Central line – and I haven’t told my mother, Molly. Yet emotionally, of course, I am not in a good place: weepy for weeks, strangely quiet, no interest at all in forays to the clubs of the West End, dancing, being chatted up. I have some sort of post-termination blues. Consciously, I do not want a baby. Ever. But my hormones, over which I have no control, have been gearing up for a different story.

  Perhaps because of this, I’m still emotionally fixated on Bryan, even though I know this drama and my duplicity presages the end of whatever relationship we have. Pretty tragic, really. He does ring briefly after a day or so, just to check I’m OK. But he doesn’t ask to see me, though I’m vulnerable enough to utter those pathetic words: ‘But when will I see you…?’ Nah. Too busy. Going abroad for work. Will call. That call does not come.

  I do tell Jeff exactly what has happened. The look on his face – sheer relief he hasn’t even been required to get remotely involved – says it all. He’s had a blindingly lucky escape. Had I been a different sort of girl, one who wants a baby, married or not, he’d have been in a right pickle. (The more I know Jeff, the more the details of his complicated private life puzzle yet elude me: I do not yet know he already has one illegitimate child. That he never sees. So he must have been exceptionally thankful that it hadn’t happened again.) He’s been irresponsible, but so have I, juggling two boyfriends in this way. My view is: I can’t really blame him for all this. He represents fun, laughter – and hot sex. But the thing is, I’ve known Bryan the Bastard over quite a long period of time. My attachment to him is born of familiarity. He wasn’t the first lover, technically speaking. But he was the first man I’d had sex with on a regular basis. Emotionally, there was bound to be some sort of attachment.

  After a few months, I’m more or less back to my normal self. And I start to understand how different Jeff is from my previous lover, simply because he’s so much more skilled in bed. I’m an all too willing pupil, though he’s very consistent when it comes to using condoms. Bryan wasn’t even in the same league as Jeff, who knows by a combination of strong instinct and experience what turns a woman on. Foreplay, beyond the initial lunge for my bra stra
p and a swift nibble, was a waste of time to Bryan (not that he’s alone in this, as I will discover in time). And he always needed booze or marijuana before sex.

  His ad agency world of top-level contacts did give him access to the exclusive, inner circle of swinging London. He hung out in trendy places where the Beatles went, such as the Ad Lib Club in Leicester Square (though he never took me). Or frequented tiny exclusive clubs like the Scotch of St James or The Bag (The Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street, where, legend has it, Linda first hooked Beatle Paul). Once, in the very early days of our affair, Bryan escorted me to a party in an enormous, totally intimidating house in its own grounds in grandest Surrey, where Charlie Watts of the Stones was a revered if somewhat silent guest. At the time, I was both wildly impressed and totally overawed at Bryan’s connections. But that one-off party made it very clear to me: Bryan kept his worlds in totally separate compartments.

  Jeff – much better-looking, 6ft 2ins tall, blond hair, hard muscled body, oozing sexual charisma – is a far less sophisticated man, quite working class. Think Michael Caine as the chauffeur lothario in Alfie – the movie of 1966 that daringly highlighted the emerging sexual freedoms of the era and the whole abortion dilemma in a scary way never seen on screen before – and you’d be fairly close to Jeff’s style. He’s more a quick half in the pub, 1/6d pie and chips man, suits from Austin Reed (purchased on an HP account), £5 a week, not much of a drinker, more of an action man, in his mind at least. He sees himself clearly in bold letters ‘A Man Born to Shag as Many Women as Possible’.

  At this point I haven’t quite worked it all out, though soon I will see everything more clearly. Eventually, the whole post-abortion emotional mess in my head starts to recede. With hindsight, I was incredibly resilient. Of course, I didn’t manage to brush it all off completely. I wasn’t that insensitive nor was I in any doubt that I’d deployed deceit of a questionable order. So any guilt I felt was around that, not around ending the pregnancy. But you do tend to bounce back quite quickly at that stage of life, especially if your personal default setting is not to take on responsibility – of any kind.