White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  To an only child, already struggling with a sharing situation and craving a degree of solitude, the arrival of a new group of people is a disruption too far. Shoshana’s pals pile into the flat en masse, stroll into the kitchen, open cupboards and drawers, hunt for food and cutlery. Whatever they do find, usually thoughtfully provided by Shoshana, they cheerfully eat, plonking themselves down in the living room, plates on laps, laughing and joking in Hebrew. I query all this, of course. How come they just walk in and do what they like?

  ‘This is how we live in Israel,’ they explain. ‘We share everything. If you come to our home, we don’t mind you sharing our food.’

  I have a Jewish background, but this is my first glimpse of people from the homeland. The six-day Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 was a landmark victory for the state of Israel, just 20 years old. But the ideas, the pioneering socialist principles behind the building of the new country, which meant many people working on the land together, sharing all their resources, go right over my head, sadly. I don’t enjoy or understand how rewarding it can be to be part of a group. I like Shoshana. She’s a lively person. But I shrink back from the group’s noisy company: I just want my own space. Essentially, I want to share a flat with one person, someone more like me.

  I’d never quite related to Sandra and Denise. They were too drab, for a start. Angela was focused and ambitious, alien to me, yet there were shared obsessions: men, fashionable clothes and eye makeup – her false lashes had to be seen to be believed, perfectly working the big, doe-eyed ’60s Biba look (used to powerful effect by model-turned-photographer Sarah Moon). She had also been consistently honest in her opinions – believing, with some justification, that my torrid affair with Jeff was leading to Nowheresville – but the other two, while they never said anything to my face, clearly turned their noses up at my plebian lover. Respectable girls from safe backgrounds, they didn’t care to respond to his Jack the lad joshing and innuendo.

  Sandy of the locked boudoir was as rampant in her habits as any swinger of the time (when she could rope them in), yet in conversation you’d have thought she was Mother Teresa. I’d get sneers and funny looks from her if she ‘tidied’ the lounge and picked up my discarded copies of Nova, the ultimate hip, glossy style magazine with a revolutionary visual flair and a no-holds-barred approach to hitherto hidden topics like abortion, drugs, homosexuality, VD and wife-swapping. ALL MEN ARE BASTARDS was one cynical headline in bold letters above an article about men and their naughty ways. I laughed, promptly cut it out and stuck it over my bed. Sandy didn’t see the funny side. ‘Is this yours?’ she would say with disdain, holding an offending copy of the magazine between two fingers as if Nova’s mere presence in the flat was enough to transform us all into sex-crazed nymphos, charging starkers down the Finchley Road in pursuit of any male.

  Nova, launched in 1965 (and killed off, ultimately, by the arrival of Cosmo in the early 1970s), really was the magazine for its time. But not every woman was quite ready to openly display her enthusiasm for the onset of the sexual revolution. My flatmate’s expectations for living in the big smoke were, essentially, a mirror image of the aspirations of the girls I’d gone to school with: the ring, the big white floaty meringue, the semi in the quiet neat streets of identical semis in Wembley, Gants Hill or Surbiton. And maternity smocks. As soon as possible, please.

  By now, my parents, Molly and Ginger, had adjusted to the idea of me, their already worryingly wayward 20-something daughter, sharing a flat, though my relationship with my dad remained very much at arm’s length. I’d visit them every couple of weeks, less if I could get away with it. I still detested the poky flat off Shacklewell Lane where I’d grown up. Even visiting it briefly disturbed me: the dirty stone stairs, the noisy timber yard opposite, the flies buzzing round the rubbish chute in summer. Sometimes I could time my visit to avoid Ginger. Saturday afternoon in the football season was ideal because mostly he was off enjoying a home game of his beloved Spurs. Then, Molly would make me a favourite lunch – tinned sardines on toast to start, roast chicken with all the trimmings to follow and I’d sit there stuffing my face, after filling her in on some of my news. I gossiped about friends of mine that she knew, though I never mentioned my love life – and she didn’t ask. Or we’d arrange to meet up in Oxford Street and do a tour of the shops and have a bite to eat in a Corner House–a girly pastime that continued for years.

  Molly was working now, two days a week, selling underwear in Jax on the corner of Dalston Lane with Saturdays off. Working wives existed back then, of course. But those that did work tended to do it out of real necessity or need. Men still furiously resisted any idea of their wives’ independence – and Ginger was light years away from being what we now call a ‘new man’. Yet both my parents had, somehow, adjusted to their recently changed circumstances, with Molly working to keep them afloat now that my dad had lost his bookie business.

  ‘Your dad’s got a job,’ she told me cheerfully on one of my visits home several months after I’d left. ‘He’s working as a clerk in the accounts department at the British Medical Association in Tavistock Square. The money’s not good but they’ve said it will go up.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll be a thousand-a-year man, after all, Mum,’ I quipped sarcastically. The phrase, ‘a thousand-a-year man’ was bandied about at the time frequently as a marker of mid-1960s prosperity. To me, such a statement in relation to my dad, Ginger, was a huge joke. A thousand a year – £20 a week – was merely a few big rounds of drinks for his punters when he was flinging his cash around the pub in his long lost days in the early years of the decade as the last of the big-spending bookies.

  ‘Well, at least it’s going to be easier for us now, Jac,’ Molly said, her loyalty to her man undiminished by time or circumstance. Instead of being bitter and twisted about the fact that she had been forced to go out to work in her late forties and was still stuck in a post-war Dalston grot hole, Molly held fast to the positives. OK, so they’d had the good times, lived it up while others had it lean. Now times were improving for others and they’d hit a rough patch, yet she was determined not to look back with rancour. Or give my dad a hard time about his weaknesses or mistakes. Other women might have been angry or mean-spirited about their situation, but not my mum. Anyway, working as an underwear sales lady meant a decent staff discount, a third off the asking price of anything in the shop. So her new Triumph Feel Free bra, priced at 29/11 (30 bob), had cost her just £1, she informed me. I too could benefit from this generous discount if I wished.

  ‘I’ll get one for you, Jac, for next time you come,’ chirped Molly, happy to be doing something – anything – for me beyond the occasional meal. I knew, deep down, how much she missed having me around, looked forward to our brief outings or my visits. Her smiley face whenever I turned up told me the real story. Yet there was never a word of protest or recrimination that I’d fled the nest.

  Nonetheless, this news about Dad’s work was quite startling: other than his bookie life, my dad had never actually held down a proper job. Even before they’d married he’d led a peripatetic existence, travelling around, ‘on the knocker’ – selling household goods door to door. Now here he was, a 50-something with a regular 9-5 wage. And a pension. Respectability at last. Paid holidays too. They’d already booked a week’s holiday on the coast, in the Albion Hotel at Broadstairs, something they’d never done when racing timetables dominated my dad’s life and he was unable to get a whole week off to take the missus on holiday.

  ‘D’ you think he’ll stick it, Mum?’ I pondered, pushing back the empty plate, feeling uncomfortably full after the first decent meal I’d had for ages beyond the shop-bought cheese rolls, occasional tubs of Eden Vale cottage cheese and the Knorr packet soups I consumed most of the time.

  ‘Oh yes. They love him in the office. They think he’s really funny.’

  That was Ginger. A non-stop bar-room clown. A stream of jokes for every occasion.

  I was somewhat taken aback that this posh-
sounding doctor’s professional body would take to his Cockney banter and repartee but opposites attract, eh? What I was way too immature to understand was that Ginger’s confidence, seriously dented by the collapse of his business, must have received a huge boost by the offer of a steady job – let alone having his new colleagues laughing themselves silly at his wisecracks.

  I mulled over all this as I scanned the Standard, my eyes peeled for any ad that showed potential, musing over my dad’s somewhat lucky break which had been engineered by Molly – she spotted the BMA job ad in the same newspaper. It’s good news, of course it is. But I still can’t shake off my disgust at how he’d blown all their cash, nose-dived the business into failure, left them almost penniless – and how he’d blighted my early years with his drinking and possessive behaviour. Out of the hated environment I was and out I’d stay. All I needed now was a new person to share a flat with… And there it was, a line in black type, nestling in between all the other ads. ‘Girl wanted to share flat in central London,’ followed by a phone number.

  Enter Rosemary. She didn’t actually have a flat to share, she’d been living abroad, in Turkey, she told me over the phone. She’d worked in a club in Istanbul as a go-go dancer. Now she wanted to find someone suitable to share with first and then we could look together for a good place. Should we meet up? I was intrigued, impressed. This definitely wasn’t another prim, hypocritical provincial girl. Here was someone sophisticated who’d already got out there and tasted life and experience. This girl was way ahead of me in the travel stakes. I’d only sampled that one package holiday to Benidorm. Nothing like as exotic or exciting as dancing in a cage in a Turkish nightclub…

  If I was a very competitive sort of girl, I might have been put off by Rosemary’s appearance. She looked exactly how every fashion-hungry young girl in London wanted to look – the archetypal dolly bird of the era, a real head-turner. Shoulder-length, straight fair hair, a tall, skinny frame with small boobs, long lean limbs, the shortest of skirts and an appropriate air of disdain. A true babe, just three years older than me.

  I heard her story in another Italian café over a watery minestrone and a stale roll. Her family came from Guildford, Surrey. She’d been in Turkey for two years because she was engaged to a Turkish boy who’d only recently gone into the army to do the Turkish equivalent of National Service. While living in Istanbul, he with his family, she in a tiny apartment, she’d worked at night as a go-go dancer. Istanbul in the mid-1960s was at the very edge of what was known then as the hippie trail to India. So it attracted large numbers of young travellers from Europe, the US and elsewhere, mostly dropouts or Vietnam draft-dodgers en route to India and Kathmandu, Nepal, in search of the wisdom of the east and enlightenment (and dope).

  Skimpily clad, dancing on the podium in a smoky, crowded club night after night before a throng of mainly northern European expats, waving those long, lean limbs – complete with long, skinny boots – was one way of earning enough money to live there and be with the Turkish boy. But he’d be stuck in the army for at least another two years so it made sense to come back home, work hard and save up for their future. She couldn’t live with her family in Surrey because she wanted to live near the West End, close to work. She’d already settled into a good job, as a manager for an employment agency. These were truly boom years for agencies like Brook Street Bureau, Conduit, Alfred Marks and Drake Personnel: commissions for those helping to recruit the unending stream of office workers needed in central London were good. A manager could earn a basic £800 a year – a bit less than a secretary in the area – but they could double their earnings in commissions for placing staff. So she could save like crazy.

  ‘Mehmet writes all the time and he goes insane if I even mention another guy so I’m not interested in anyone else,’ she told me (it proved to be the pure bullshit line she spun to all). ‘And sometimes he sends his friends over to keep an eye on me, so they might turn up any time,’ she warned. ‘Turkish men are incredibly jealous.’

  I shrugged. The odd Turk at the gate didn’t sound like a problem (little did I know). Then I briefly told her about the now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t Jeff experience, explaining that I did my own thing when he wasn’t around. ‘I’m on the pill,’ I informed her. ‘I want to do whatever I like.’ At this news, my potential flatmate’s expression changed. Initially quite smiley and relaxed, she now looked distinctly nervous, unsettled by this clear admission that someone was happily at it whenever they fancied someone.

  ‘Ooh, I couldn’t do anything like that,’ she said, not quite looking me in the eye. ‘I’m engaged, anyway.’

  Rosie’s long-distance romance wasn’t that unusual. Foreign boyfriends or fiancés were becoming quite common by then. Our mums and aunts might have tripped the light fantastic on the dance floor – or done a bit more afterwards – with gum-chewing GIs in wartime. Or they smooched uniformed men from other countries at a local hop. But cheap foreign travel for my generation in the ’60s had wrought changes: young, single British girls, much more free with their favours than their equivalents in Latin countries, were frequently hot bait for love-starved, passionate, ball-scratching Euro locals.

  Holiday romances, oh, how they lit up the mundane, everyday lives of so many girls. Today you read about grandmothers on the rampage, hot-footing it to the Gambia for love or marriage with lean lads young enough to be their sons. Back then, it was much more straightforward: young, late teen or 20-something office girl gets two-week sun tan by day and a surfeit of passionate promises of eternal love in very broken Engleesh by night. Accompanied by the delicate dropping of bikini bottoms on the sand. (Knickers on tiled hotel room floors were still uncommon, since beady-eyed hoteliers were not yet up for guests dragging their newest squeeze back to the package-deal hotel). Hot, sticky love in another climate. No contest against life back home when you consider the reality then of the other 50 weeks of the year: a shabby office or factory with strip lighting and a monotonous routine, permanently grey skies, a packed, smoke-filled local pub – and a steady, stolid boyfriend more preoccupied with football scores or closing time than wooing his woman.

  One work friend, Annie, had a package holiday in Gibraltar and a fleeting, passionate affair with a local, married, tour guide. Only to discover, in a south London doctor’s surgery several months later, that she’d remember that holiday for ever. (Annie was a large, if healthy lady, and her symptom-free pregnancy went totally undetected for seven months. It sounds bizarre but that’s exactly what happened.) Another girlfriend, Jeanette, flew out to a Spanish resort at every opportunity to be with Miguel, a holiday rep for Clarksons Tours. It fizzled out. Pat, a tall blonde from Kent I’d worked with previously in Soho, had a hopeless and somewhat frustrating relationship with another Miguel, a waiter in Loret de Mar. She spent her free time at home learning Spanish. He used his free time for other tall blondes, some also called Pat. My school friend Lolly was married to Michael, an Italian waiter at the Savoy, and had a family of two. Another girl from Dalston, Georgina, had met Paolo, a dark-eyed southern Italian, in a Soho disco and they wound up married. And so on.

  Boyfriend or not, Rosemary would be a good person to share with, I figured. She talked conventionally but she didn’t really look it. Always wildly impressed by the glossy, fashionable look (my mum’s lifelong obsession with dressing up and looking good probably had much to do with this), I did have a bad case of hair envy. Rosemary’s hair was naturally straight and silky. Mine wasn’t. I’d resorted to positioning a hefty, straight blonde hairpiece over my frizzy, dyed-blonde mop (with dark roots) to get the right dolly-bird look. Bad hair or not, a decision was made. We’d find a flat and split the rent.

  Rosemary came up with something first. It sounded great but alas, I didn’t have the cash. It was a flat in a posh red brick block in Abbey Road, St Johns Wood, just across the street from the studios and the zebra crossing the Beatles would march across into rock history with Abbey Road in 1969. In those days, long before flat re
ntals were regulated, London landlords would advertise flats quoting not just a rent but a chunk of money, sometimes called key money, which was effectively a deposit. Key money is no longer legal. But then, there was nothing to stop landlords asking for it. Or people coughing up. Sometimes the landlord’s ad would quote an annual rent to be paid in one go, say £250, including furniture and fittings (usually pretty disgusting old stuff they couldn’t be bothered to chuck out).

  The swanky flat in the red brick block was £15 a week but the landlord wanted a down payment of £600 cash for a three-year lease. But my £300 share would be far too much for me, a woman with a wardrobe stocked with crepe dresses from Radley but who couldn’t afford the real deal, Ossie Clarke, the superman of ’60s and ’70s designers. (Rosemary had the cash – and a much better wardrobe with buttery soft leather jackets and even a fur coat.) But about a week later I struck gold in the Standard: the ideal location, just off the southern end of the Finchley Road in St John’s Wood. No key money, only a month’s rent in advance. £10 a week. One small bedroom.

  Finding a habitable flat to share on a secretary’s pay was extremely difficult. London’s evening newspapers, the Evening News and the Standard, had several editions on the street through the day. All the flat-letting ads were in the Standard – but if you bought it late in the day, sorry, too late. The few affordable flats advertised were always gone. Or the phone number was permanently engaged (off the hook, usually, when a pissed-off landlord would tire of the endless stream of calls). If a landlord had stipulated a time to view, you’d turn up at the flat at 9 am to find a long queue of people outside the front door. Yet if you bought the paper the minute it came out in the morning and there was no set viewing time, you had a chance.