White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  The flat was on the corner of Circus Road, above a baker’s shop. It, too, was a short walk away from Abbey Road Studios and the famous zebra crossing, and minutes away the West End, work, shops, clubs, everything we needed. There was even a deli opposite, Panzers, so there’d be no problem with having to cook or food shopping. There were pubs at either end of Circus Road. Regent’s Park was just a walk away. It really was the ideal launch pad for two 20-somethings, right in the heart of it all. There was one slight drawback: it was even shabbier – and much smaller — than the Finchley Road flat. Up the stairs, ancient loo and bathroom on the landing, then at the top, the square, sparse kitchen directly facing what had been just one room, now divided by a landlord’s paper-thin partition wall, into a very small living area (just one battered old sofa and two chairs) and an even smaller bedroom. The bedroom, overlooking the street, was just big enough for two single beds and an ancient wardrobe.

  Space really was at a premium. Both rooms were decorated with a poster of Chairman Mao, left there by the previous tenant. There was a phone on the living room floor, a luxury after the coin box of the last place. And, because it was above a bakery, mice scooting across the kitchen floor eventually became as regular a feature of our lives as the eager young men who’d drop in on us virtually all the time, en route to and from the centre of town. Talk about location, location, location. This place wasn’t just convenient, it was a bloke magnet.

  There was no TV – hardly a source for concern since we were rarely at home long enough to sit down and watch it. But I had acquired a valuable asset via my old job at the electronics company – an early-model answering machine. I’d been surreptitiously given it as a parting gift on my last day there. It took me months to find someone to set it up for us, but eventually we had the answer to the age-old problem of Waiting For Him to Phone: a machine (essentially a tape recorder connected to the phone line) that played a message recorded in my breathiest tones glibly informing all callers that Jacky and Rosie were out – but they’d love to hear from you, so please leave your name and number…

  So new were these machines that many people couldn’t cope with them. There were more sounds of people hanging up than messages left. Or there were sarcastic jokers who’d say, ‘The one thing I don’t wanna do is speak to Jacky or Rosie.’ Some comedians would sing – but not reveal their identity. It was definitely progress in knowing if the men you wanted to ring were calling. But not much. People couldn’t go out and buy these things cheaply the way they do now. BT would only permit them to be rented. Signing up to rent one – on a five-year contract – was a hefty financial commitment. It was a big day in the office at the electronics company when John Cleese, already a BBC name with The Frost Report and on the cusp of his success with Monty Python, rang up to order two, one for home, one for office. Yet they remained a novelty, really. After all, 60 per cent of households in the country didn’t even have a phone.

  Jeff didn’t take to Rosemary. This was odd, as she looked every inch the desirable hot babe. ‘I don’t like her,’ he said thoughtfully, after the first meeting. ‘There’s something funny, like she’s got something to hide.’ Jeff’s instincts were finely tuned. There was a secret back story to Rosemary. But neither of their hidden worlds would be revealed to me just yet. When I did start to learn a bit more about my new flatmate, it was nothing more than a partial glimpse of her world, that summer of ’68, when things started to change a little bit for me.

  Until moving in with Rosemary, who created her own social scene around us, I’d still gone to clubs, sometimes with friends. I’d already abandoned the West End places like Tiffany’s in Piccadilly (easy to pull there but the men were too dodgy) or the Whisky-A-Go-Go (ditto) for the more fashionable clubs further West, like the De Vere in Kensington and, on the odd occasion, the musicians’ hang out, places like the Cromwellian in Cromwell Road.

  The De Vere was my favourite. One reason I liked it was that just getting the guy on the door to let you in was a challenge of sorts. It was free for girls, but only the nod from the fat, bald man behind the small table at the top of the stairs would get you in. It seemed you had to be the right kind of babe. The De Vere had two floors. On the first was a small, intimate kind of bar with banquettes and a few tables and chairs while the top floor had the dancing area. No live music: just the latest big hits such as ‘Ride Your Pony’ (Lee Dorsey), ‘Keep on Running’ (the Spencer Davies hit), ‘Respect’ (the Otis Redding song that Aretha Franklin made her own), ‘The Letter’ (The Box Tops) and The Foundations’ ‘Baby, Now That I’ve Found You’. The music, whether Motown or Stevie Winwood, would become legend, but unlike my go-go flatmate, I was never a very enthusiastic dancer. The cool way to do it was to make the appropriate hip-shaking gestures, copying the better dancers’ moves, managing to keep in time – and looking as if you couldn’t really be bothered.

  I wasn’t a great beauty, but I had smooth-skinned youth on my side. And I was quite slim, dressed to look even thinner, usually in a tight sheath dress, heels as high as I could manage, though I was never able to walk confidently in them. Perched on those four-inch heels, about as non-athletic as you could get, I was a wobbler, a totterer. Yet high heels are part of your essential armoury when you’re permanently on the pull (that’s why you see so many 50-something women and beyond hanging onto them). They elevate. They push out your best bits, to go with the teased hair, the lavish all-over spray of Diorama, my favourite of all the Dior fragrances, no longer around now.

  I had my triumphs at the De Vere. At one point, I’d run into a fascinating blond out-of-work actor, Derek, with whom I spent a steamy 48 hours in his flat off Shepherds Market in Mayfair – and never saw again. Another time at the De Vere I acquired what is now called a fuck buddy, Nick, a dark-haired hunk of Greek origin, who lived with a model in a mansion block in Elgin Avenue, Maida Vale. Nick would often call on weekends to pick me up to join him in their flat – while she was away on modelling trips. Nice guy, eh? Nick was memorable for his tiny red TR4 sports car – and was incredibly well hung. He had a kind of saturnine, sardonic allure. I had a distinct penchant for moody, surly men – a hangover, maybe from the early days of my Elvis lust. The Nick thing went on for about a year or so, though I never had a clue what he did for a crust. But if they didn’t tell you, who cared? I was in it for the excitement, the kicks, the moment itself. There was no goal, just a theme – girl meets different men, dives in, enjoys what she likes the look of, discards or ignores the rest. The men, of course, were just being opportunistic, simply because more women were now up for it. Everything you heard or read about new sexual freedoms seemed to conspire to give people more latitude.

  But not everyone at the De Vere has a good time. One Thursday night, I am on the tiny dance floor, shrugging, moving carefully, ignoring my partner and contemplating an early night, when I spot a familiar figure on the edge of the dance floor. A tubby man, going to seed. Glaring at me. He’s got a bloody cheek, I think to myself. He was the one that ran off. Bryan. It is, by now, well over 18 months since my Central line trip and Bryan has totally ignored my existence in that time. Of course I’ve been hurt by this, Bryan had, after all, been a pivotal person in my life, the first big affair. Yet the deception with the two men had been a messy situation I’d mostly succeeded in shaking off. Now I’m occasionally seeing Jeff, sleeping with anyone I like the look of, working out of my shoe company cubby hole, pretending to be a man with a double-barrelled name.

  ‘Tart!’ Bryan hisses at me as I leave the dance floor to go down to the ladies loo. ‘You’re a bloody tart!’

  What’s going on in his mind? I have no idea. Am I a tart because of what I’d done, used my wits to get out of what, for me, was an impossible, intolerable situation and now he’s guessed that I lied? Or am I a tart because I’m out and about on the pull?

  Now, as I make my way back up the stairs, he’s standing there, blocking the entrance to the bar, glass of double scotch in hand, looking distinctly disheve
lled. He’s even more overweight, really slobby now. His clothes are creased. There are food stains on his expensive silk tie. This, I tell myself, is a frustrated man who can’t get anyone into bed. That’s why he’s so angry. He had a regular bed partner. Once. She’s out there now, on the pull and loving it. He can’t find a replacement. Why? Because he’s morphed into a saddo barfly. I don’t bother to hide my opinions. ‘You’re only pissed off with me because no one wants to sleep with you,’ I hiss. No sooner do the words fall from my lips than I see by his expression that I’ve hit home. Hard. That’s my trouble. It’s one thing to see the truth but not everyone wants to hear it. Yet again, I say the unsayable without a thought for what happens next. My brand new, sleeveless skimmer dress from Fenwicks, costing nearly £10, is quickly dripping double scotch and ice. A dry-cleaning bill of three shillings and sixpence awaits me. A furious Bryan, frustrated male incarnate, has chucked the contents of the glass at me.

  ‘Bitch!’ he yells. ‘Fucking bitch!’ He lurches down the stairs, still clutching the empty glass, down past the doorman, out into Ken High Street. And out of my life. For good.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BANDAGE MAN

  Rosemary isn’t just older, more experienced and worldly than my previous flatmates. She is a man magnet. Flashily dressed, a woman that men tend to gawp at on the street, she creates a considerable flurry of attention around her. I stop using clubs to meet men: at that point, they seem to be swarming around us. All the time. Parties. Friends of friends, determinedly collecting phone numbers, ringing up out of the blue, even if I don’t remember them. Men I’d run into at drinks after work.

  Some just become friends. One long-lasting friendship comes about in a rather odd way, though the incident underlines my far-too-casual attitude towards going off into the night with total strangers. In a jam-packed hallway at a very noisy, crowded party in Swiss Cottage, I get chatting to Laurie, a journalist turned public relations man from West Hampstead. Laurie is a few years older than me and we have something in common: a shared appreciation of French and Italian movies. It turns out we’ve both worked for the same foreign film distribution company, Gala Films, in Soho at different times in the early ’60s. Soon, he’s proffering a friendly toke from a joint of weed, which I refuse. ‘I’ve just moved into this great place with my friend John,’ he informs me, taking a huge drag of the joint and nearly choking with the effort. ‘It’s a big mansion flat. We’ve both got our own space, so it works really well.’

  I don’t fancy him one bit. So it is probably quite daft to accept his offer to drive me to West Hampstead to inspect his new premises about half an hour later. But I am an endlessly curious girl in many ways. I really do want to check the flat out, have a look round, see how others are living. And Laurie is Jewish, which to me is a sort of dating shorthand for safe, sober, highly unlikely to be a lunatic rapist. I’ll have a good look round. Then I’ll get him to run me home afterwards. But once inside his space, which is essentially a decent-sized bedroom masquerading as a studio, with armchairs and a sofa, things take a rapid turn for the worse. All conversation ceases. Laurie lies on his big double bed expectantly. I sit on an armchair. Now I’ve seen the flat – which is actually quite spacious, with stained glass panels in the front door and an impressively thick carpet on the stairs – I’m ready to depart. Er… could he run me home?

  Silence. The PR man’s eyes are now closed.

  ‘Look, I wanna go home. If you don’t wanna drive, you can call me a cab,’ I offer.

  More silence. Then a gentle snore. He’s asleep. Or rather, I know immediately he’s just pretending to be asleep. He’d got my phone number earlier at the party. He probably had hopes of some action, but I’ve dashed them by making it clear I want out. Sorry, Laurie, but you don’t get off that lightly. Be a gent. Play the game. So I try again. Nicely. ‘Can you call me a cab, please?’ Nothing. Another fake snore (he’s a crap actor).

  Now I’m really angry. The fact that he is pretending to be asleep in order to get out of all this is so pathetic. OK, so I don’t want to play ball. Does he have to be so bloody infantile about it all? Sod him! And without any thought whatsoever, I pick up the nearest object, a heavy Murano glass ashtray, and fling it with all my might across the room so it hits the opposite wall with a resounding thud. Whack! Hey, he’s wide awake!

  ‘What have you done?’ he snarls, rushing over to inspect the damage – a big dent in his bedroom wall. ‘I’ll have to pay the bloody landlord for this!’ Then he dives out, goes next door to his flatmate’s quarters and returns, red faced, a few minutes later. ‘There’s a cab coming,’ he tells me, ushering me out into the narrow hallway. ‘Get out!’

  I clomp down the stairs and sure enough, a black cab pulls up in a few minutes. I promptly go home and forget all about it…

  But Laurie, a Scorpio with a mean streak, does not forget. A respectably reared boy from Golders Green, he is not used to such displays of girlie tantrum. He and John, his flatmate, hatch a cunning revenge plot, commando style. They know where I live because I’ve told him I’m above the baker on the corner of Circus Road, so the pair decide to teach the lairy girl a lesson. That Sunday, they climb into John’s little MGB and drive to my flat. In the car, they have a big bucket of cold water, ready and waiting.

  The idea is this. They’ll ring the bell, I’ll appear at the door and, whoosh, I’ll get the bucket of cold water treatment, pure payback for denting his wall. Waterboarding, north-west London style. Neat trick, eh? I know none of this until a couple of months later, when Laurie rings the flat. ‘I’m the guy whose wall you ruined with an ashtray,’ he says. He tells me about the revenge plan which misfired, probably because the doorbell, typically, was faulty and often didn’t work. They’d rung, the waiting bucket at their side. They’d stood there expectantly, waiting for the joyful moment of Laurie’s revenge. But no one came down. Such is the way friendships are born: Laurie and I remained friends over the years.

  Much later, when I asked him why he’d pretended to be asleep, he explained it all to me. It was mostly down to the clothes I wore. ‘Your tits were almost hanging out and you had a really short skirt on. To blokes like me, always on the hunt for nookie, that was a signal that you were definitely up for it. And once you said you’d come to my flat, I thought I was well in.’

  Mixed messages, eh? There is, of course, a well-worn argument that if women dress provocatively, they shouldn’t be surprised if men react accordingly – because men are men, after all. My argument is: I defined myself back then as a girl of my time, certainly, partly by the way I dressed. But I was also at a point where I was very conscious that I’d choose who I’d sleep with, not the other way round. Things had changed. Women no longer had to sit waiting patiently for men to summon them. If men got the wrong signals sometimes, it was just too bad…

  At that point, the accelerating pace of life in Circus Road involved a bit of double-dating. Jeff suggested fixing Rosemary up with one of his friends, Eddie, another, even taller blond Michael Caine look-alike. Off we went in Eddie’s new Ford Escort to the little Bistro d’Agran, tucked away behind Harrods in Knightsbridge, red-and-white check tablecloths, candles lighting up the tiny space, tough minute steaks that were difficult to chew, the ubiquitous Black Forest gateau afterwards. Rosemary took a distinct fancy to Eddie, an obvious charmer with a good line in salesman’s patter, but alas, Eddie was very married and vanished back to the outer ’burbs after our night out, never to be seen again, despite Rosemary’s repeated enquiries after his existence.

  On another occasion, Jeff insisted on introducing Rosemary to his pilot pal, Des, the eager, bright-eyed ex-RAF type who’d taken us up for the somersault flight. I told Jeff it definitely wouldn’t work. Des’s short hair and unfashionable attire – hand-knitted pullovers, C&A trousers – would be an instant a no-no for style-conscious Rosemary. I was right. She was polite but aloof. Which meant our night out in the Star pub in St John’s Wood Terrace ended on a somewhat sour note w
hen we all walked back to the flat and Jeff and I, half-cut and overwhelmed as usual with lust, decided to noisily commandeer the tiny bedroom, leaving the other two staring at each other in the front room, waiting for us to hurry it all up and finish.

  At one point, I introduced my new flatmate to a group of salesmen, mostly those I’d worked with at the electronics place. We’d regularly meet up for drinks in a pub off Charlotte Street. This revealed a somewhat surprising side to Rosemary. For despite her insistence on her relative purity, the one man she fell for was the last guy I’d expect her to be interested in: a petty criminal with gangland connections.

  Each of the salesmen had a unique character, linked only by ducking and diving to make a fast buck. They included posh, well-spoken older men from Chelsea, suburban twits: former photocopier salesmen in cheap Burton or John Collier suits (‘the window to watch,’ the ad said, though few women would waste more than a passing glance at these guys), a couple of very good-looking out-of-work actors, shabby desperadoes in their sixties who had clearly hit hard times, Kent and South Coast chancers with various fiddles and sidelines. I met up with them because they were lively, humorous and good company, irrespective of their shady dealings.

  Tony Connor made no secret of the fact that he’d done time, though it was never clear what for. Skinny, dark-haired and sardonic, he had a distinct aura of danger. You couldn’t miss it – it shimmered off him. Disliked by the others because of his self-avowed prison past and because he didn’t work much or bring in many sales, this man – the runt of the group in a way – was the one who held a curious fascination for my go-go dancing flatmate, despite all the other guys rushing to buy her drinks and get her attention for the briefest time. Odd, I thought. Why would she go for him?