by Jacky Hyams
Funnily enough, Jeff always got slightly ratty at the merest mention of Bryan. I worked out that this had nothing to do with any real jealousy around me, you understand. More a bit of a class thing. Bryan had been privately educated, easing him into a really good job in ad-land. Jeff’s status, though he kidded himself otherwise, was more of Cockney chancer. Car ownership constantly troubled Jeff too, a typically male perspective. Bryan whizzed around swingin’ London either in the Mini, a present from his doting dad, or a newly acquired adman’s sports car, a gleaming red TR4. Compare that to Jeff’s much-prized company car, the Rover, which he banged on about ad nauseum yet could never afford himself. Yet which one could really lay claim to having the biggest and best appendage?
‘It’s not the size of your knob, it’s what you do with it,’ was one of Bryan’s favourite quips. Perhaps this was a reassuring statement for a man who knew damn well he wasn’t generously endowed. But as I was starting to realise as I found out much more about the ‘what you do with it’ bit, the art of self-deception knows no bounds whatsoever when it comes to the fragile male ego.
CHAPTER THREE
RANDY SANDY AND THE CHICKENS
Alone envelope lies on the mat. Still half-awake, I stumble bleary-eyed down the stairs from my bedroom the minute I hear the rat-tat of the letterbox. It’s Saturday and I’ve been anticipating this all week: the missive that will redirect the course of my life. For ever. Yes, it’s addressed to me. As I pick it up, even before I open it, I can see by the bold markings on the thick white envelope that this is it: the Big Plan is about to bear fruit. Until this moment, it has remained just an idea – someone else’s idea, at that.
Somewhat recklessly, I’ve agreed to go along with it. Why not? I’m free, white and 21 (an American saying never heard now, for obvious reasons, but one often used then). On the surface, at least, the plan is immensely appealing, adventurous, more exciting than anything I’ve ever come up with. Yet in my usual slapdash fashion, I have not really thought it all through, gone into it in depth or given it sensible, serious consideration. Leaving me totally unprepared for what it all really means now that I’ve reached the final hurdle…
‘It’s a bloody daft idea, Jacky,’ Jeff had sneered that early spring evening a few months before when I’d outlined The Plan to him as we sat drinking outside the Bull and Bush, a handy local mainly because you could sit outside (al fresco eating and drinking in London was very much a novelty then, at a time when people could smoke themselves silly indoors in pubs and restaurants with no complaints at all about the accompanying unhealthy haze). ‘You don’t wanna go and do that, gorgeous – what about me?’ he smiles, lighting up his usual Churchmans cigarella (five shillings and tuppence for a pack of 20) to accompany his occasional bottle of Double Diamond (‘works wonders,’ said the advert, though what kind of wonders remained vague; for most men it was surely the hope of a swift leg-over after closing time). ‘Are you saying you can really live without me?’
‘Yeah, I can live without you. Don’t kid yourself,’ I tell him tartly. I’m not that surprised he’s shown no enthusiasm for The Plan. But his attitude isn’t exactly helpful. Nor does it help when he drops me off at my flat that night with a lingering kiss that leaves me weak-kneed, wet-knickered and hungry for the following weekend’s promise: conjugal bliss in his friend’s tiny cottage in Kent. He’s blinding me with sex, I sigh to myself as I totter on my perilous Dolcis stilettos down the dark alleyway to my front door: he thinks I’m not really going to go through with it.
It’s funny, isn’t it? Here is Jeff, a regular if somewhat erratic fixture in my world, questioning my idea to really get out there and do something different with my life – even while there remain a number of big unanswered questions hanging over our relationship, the main one being is he really faithful, never mind, where does he really live?
We’re no longer working in the same sales office where we’d met. As a consequence, we see less of each other. Yes, he takes me on weekend jaunts: onto a friend’s yacht (I loathe every minute of it, cold, wet and at one point quite scary when we have to abandon ship and climb up a perilously narrow ladder on a harbour wall to safety). Or to motor race meetings in various parts of the country. Sometimes, on his sales trips, we drive north on the brand new M1, the UK’s first motorway, linking south to north via the Midlands. This means we couple up as Mr and Mrs Jeff in seedy provincial hotels. There’s a frisson of the forbidden, the sleazy, about such trips and while my taste for luxury and comfort has yet to be fine-tuned, I find this all exciting, a turn-on, if I’m completely honest.
He’s an ongoing stimulus, is Jeff. I have the serious hots for him, no question. Yet somehow, whenever I express a doubt about him or ask a pertinent question, he always manages to head me off with a sexy or romantic gesture. And it’s always exactly the right one to throw me off balance, shut me up. He’s pitch-perfect at seduction, flatters outrageously, woos me beautifully (which means I find myself believing what he’s saying – at the time). Jeff is constantly telling me how gorgeous I am, how he loves my legs, adores my figure, and so on. He comes from a tough background. As a girl and an only child I was over-protected by my indulgent parents, shielded from the worst of the mean streets of Hackney. Jeff was one of three kids in a tiny cottage with a tough father who worked erratically and a mother who worked in a laundry. Yet Jeff knows and understands the value of the spoken word, the seductively pitched voice when it comes to the lists of love. Even from a distance, he uses the phone seductively.
Nowadays women can make a good living from just sitting at home, getting paid to talk men into orgasmic heaven on the mobile while cleaning out the kitchen cupboard at the same time. Everybody wins. Yet in the ’60s, before sex evolved into a packaged commodity for all comers, it was the guys who understood the subtleties of the chase – like deploying a smoothly sensual voice down the phone line – that frequently had the edge when it came to success with many women. Remember that hot, steamy phone call from Michael Caine to Britt Ekland in the early 1970s movie Get Carter? It was one of the first times Brit-style phone sex was openly celebrated on screen. (‘Just doing my exercises, darling.’) That was definitely a Jeff scenario.
Let’s be clear. I am not lacking in romantic impulse at this point. I am thrilled to be wooed like this – it’s so exciting. But at the same time, I don’t believe myself to be so in love with Jeff that I envisage a rose-tinted future, us bonded together, welded fast in some sort of sticky permanence. It’s never like that. It’s very much an affair of the here and now. I love the excitement of it all. Yet I also know what kind of man he is around women because I’ve worked with him. I’d see it with my own eyes. Loverboy Jeff aims to flirt with or chat up many women because he sees something attractive or desirable in practically every woman that crosses his path – and he sees no reason to hide it. For him, it’s all a joyful game.
This behaviour, of course, is not exactly reassuring. It’s quite unnerving – it shakes my confidence. I give a good impression of a confident, streetwise girl, hiding my insecurities behind my short-skirted armour, a sarcastic tongue and a cynical demeanour. Yet I am no different to most of my gender emotionally. It rattles me to know he’s appreciative of so many women in this way. But he’s cleverly manipulative too, always tapping into to my main character weakness, my undisciplined laissez faire, easily persuading me to overcome my reservations about his outrageously flirtatious behaviour – and keep going along with him on the ride marked Destination: Pleasure.
And what pleasure it is. It’s the beginning of what evolves into an intense attraction to sex as a hedonistic, recreational pursuit for me. It’s all wonderfully unpredictable too. Sometimes it’s urgent, passionate, speedy. But there are times when it’s tantalisingly slow and sensual, depending on the location (sleazy hotel room versus the back of the Rover – my shared bedroom is a no-go most of the time). He flicks the switch, I react instantly. Away from him, I’m often swamped with sheer physical lust, wanti
ng touch, smooth flesh on flesh so much it almost hurts. This is all totally new for me, an unknown country. As is the not inconsiderable discovery that Jeff can bring me to orgasm quite easily – something Bryan never achieved, probably because he was pretty much a one-speed lover. If you like, Bryan was my first course, a mere appetiser. Jeff was the complete menu. As many delicious, lip-smacking courses as a woman could stand.
Yet his life was a blank canvas. I don’t have a home phone number for him and if I do ring his office, he’s never there, according to the secretary who answers the phone. He claims it’s his own business now, him and another guy ‘selling insurance’. That’s all I know. It’s not a covert situation: he proudly shows me off to some of his friends sometimes – they’re all a lot older than him, mostly established businessmen in their forties – and it’s obvious too that in their eyes I’m a bit of a catch, a ’60s babe with knockers. But there’s no point in grilling any of them for guidance: they too are in on the act. Jeff’s a very naughty boy, that’s the underlying theme of their joshing and semi-lascivious, yet outwardly respectful glances at me around the pub bar. So how could I catch him out?
As for my life outside Jeff, sharing a flat with other girls has proved to be a big culture shock for me. Liberation from my dad and the grotty Dalston milieu had been easily achieved. I’d responded to a few newspaper ads and found a suitable locale, over a parade of shops fronting the Finchley Road. But now I was faced with day-to-day living with three other young women. And their underwear cluttering the place, their big, red hair rollers, their daily grooming rituals – hair in the sink and pubes in the bath, talcum powder all over the bathroom floor – and, on occasion, their trickle of eager suitors, mainly local guys in their twenties, eager for the promise of girl action. Now I am supposed to muck in, give room for others. It’s called sharing – unknown terrain for a spoilt, solitary kid whose mum ran round her like a virtual slave. I have to fend for myself food-wise, wash my own clothes, maintain a semblance of tidiness in my quarters and so on. This, of course, is not so different from the way many youngsters are today when they first swap the comforts of the parental home for university and rented places. Except that today the landlord (or doting parents) might provide a labour-saving microwave, washing machine, even a dishwasher.
Such devices were then largely unknown in messy, shabby, rented flats. We didn’t have a vacuum cleaner, just a little carpet sweeper that didn’t really do the job. If you were lucky – and we were – we had a launderette close by. But even that meant the better part of an evening sitting there, waiting for the slow machines to do their job. Even the service wash hadn’t reached the Finchley Road by then.
This flat was quaintly termed a ‘maisonette’ with rooms on two levels. You reached it by climbing crumbly stairs at the back of the shopping parade and then negotiating a quite dim, narrow passageway – and a jumble of rubbish – to reach the front doors leading directly to the flats above the shops. Inside, more stairs took you to a sparsely furnished, big living room and a greasy kitchen with a greyish lino-covered floor that was perpetually slippery but never clean, a bedroom and bathroom on the same level, then more narrow stairs (at the foot of which you encountered the landlord’s thoughtful and all-important coin box phone) up to another lounge and a second bedroom right at the top. It was quite a spacious place, as flats above shops often are. But such was the demand for rented ‘furnished’ accommodation then, landlords didn’t need to offer anything beyond the very basics.
Ancient green, moth-eaten velvet curtains, probably pre-war, in the living rooms, permanently drawn to cover up the grimy, soot-stained windows that were never ever cleaned. Threadbare flooring (calling it carpet would be going too far), wobbly G-plan table and chairs (G-plan was the 1950s simple wood furniture which proliferated across the country for decades) and a heavily stained, dark green sofa made up this ‘fully furnished’ place. There was a 1950s TV, though it was rarely switched on and, somewhat surprisingly, a red Dansette record player, on which I would occasionally play Sinatra, Hammond organ star Jimmy Smith or Jack Jones LPs donated by friends. After my Elvis teenage days, I rarely forked out for things like records; my money went primarily on tarting myself up. Or, as time went on, trips abroad. As for the rest of the flat, you wouldn’t care to examine your mattress too closely for very obvious signs of previous amorous engagements. Nor would the poky bathroom and loo withstand too much careful scrutiny. All this for £4 a week each.
Any effort to clean the place only happened if a dinner party was in view (menu: Birds Eye crispy cod fries, Birds Eye frozen chips (or watery tinned potatoes) and Birds Eye frozen peas. Frozen food, the 1950s forerunner of convenience food, became pre-eminent in the ’60s, when supermarket shopping started to spring up – especially Birds Eye foods, the only brand to advertise their wares. This version of cookery was, to us, real effort. Our usual evening meal consisted of boiling up a packet of Knorr chicken soup – the precursor to Cup-a-Soup which arrived in 1972. Or munching on packets of Golden Wonder cheese & onion crisps, a novelty snack launched in 1962 that soon became a national obsession. If men were being entertained with our Birds Eye repertoire, someone (never me) might dig out the landlord’s useless carpet sweeper and pointlessly introduce it to the floor. Or, if they were desperately keen to make a good impression, they might buy a box of the ultimate in post-prandial sophistication: After Eight thin mints, advertised then as something that snooty, fur-clad women kept in their Ferrari.
An only child, no matter where he or she lives, is a custodian of their own universe, their own solitary state. Being under the same roof as three other young women was a real struggle for me emotionally. I didn’t row or have big arguments with them. I just felt… permanently uncomfortable with so many people around. I’d got the freedom I’d craved. But to an extent, I’d lost my privacy. Sharing a bedroom offered scant opportunity for love-ins.
All the others were from provincial homes: Denise and Sandra, sharing the downstairs bedroom, were from Leicester and Hampshire respectively. Denise was quiet, studying hard to be a teacher, pleasant but nondescript. She went home most weekends, which suited Sandra just fine because this allowed her to fully indulge in her two main proclivities. Let’s be nice and call them her hobbies. The first was eating. Her family had some sort of farming connection on the south coast and she’d often drive to Waterloo station on Friday evening (she had her own little Mini, though none of us were ever invited into it) to meet the train and collect a big food hamper with goodies, including whole roast chickens, which her family had provided. Then she’d take the hamper back to her room, lock the bedroom door and chomp her way through it, only emerging over the weekend to go to the loo.
The other hobby also involved taking something into her room, locking the door and not emerging for 24 hours. Or more. But here Sandra wasn’t quite as fortunate as she was with her weekly food parcels from home. Ideally, she’d substitute the hamper for a horny, living, breathing bloke. Nirvana for Sandra was to be holed up in the bedroom with both, but to the best of my knowledge, she never managed to pull this off. While clever and comfortably off with a good job as a legal secretary, Sandra definitely did not have it in the looks department. Plumpish, she was untidy, with unkempt hair and seriously badly dressed. Yet with rat-like cunning and guile, she could still manage to lure the odd unsuspecting male into her Misery-type boudoir and promptly lock the door. I don’t know if she tied them to the bed or drugged them, the dreadful things that Kathy Bates did to poor old James Caan. But I did once see one victim emerge, shagged to his outer limits, after a weekend in randy Sandy’s clutches. He looked like a man who’d just emerged from the rubble after an earthquake or a bomb – blinking, hardly believing his luck at still being alive. Free love, as much as a man could stand, had definitely arrived in the Finchley Road. But for some men it came at a higher price than they’d ever imagined. Sandy was relentless. I suppose she figured she’d better make the most of it since there was a chance it mi
ght never happen again.
Then there was my room-mate, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Sandy – and me too. At 19, Angela had arrived in London from a posh suburb of Manchester with big goals and big dreams. She wanted much, this girl. Her dad was a successful northern businessman and she’d grown up with riding lessons in Cheshire and private schooling, a far cry from my rackety East End childhood and abruptly terminated education. While Sandra wanted stuffed chickens and sex, preferably together, Angela wanted much more: a wealthy, good-looking husband who would drape her in Dior and Chanel, fully indulge her whims and catapult her into the upper echelons of society. Today, she’d probably be hanging out for a hedge fund manager. Then, there was no precise professional standard: he just had to be rich. Inherited money would do. But with her canny northern background she preferred a fortune made in business.
Angela was catty, derisive of much around us, which appealed to my own somewhat cynical take on life, and very manipulative. Yet she was also great fun. Her sarcastic tongue often surpassed my own somewhat acid dialogue, so we laughed a lot. She was pretty, with a snub nose, freckles, huge hazel eyes and curly hair. Though she was quite tall, her biggest worry was her lower half. Chubby thighs. Big legs. Half of her was a slim ’60s dolly bird. The other half was less than average, when you consider how short skirts were and how important a neat derriere and a slim pair of legs could be in the overall scheme of things. Yet what she lacked in physical attributes she made up for with a sharp brain. She was foxy, long before the phrase became commonly used.