White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  For a week or so, I’m sustained by the thought that I’ll see him, that he’ll explain things, that somehow gentle, sweet, loving Michael will come back again and New Year’s Eve will be forgotten. We will go back to our wonderful, loving relationship, won’t we? I manage to get myself onto the Northern line from Highgate underground station each grey morning, get into town, type at my desk. I am waiting, in a holding pattern. And I continue to wait. But nothing happens. I don’t know the name of the Dutch agency where he works and, even if I did, what could I say to him over the phone other than ‘Come back’ or ‘Tell me what’s wrong’. I can’t do a thing.

  In February, I go to Benidorm with my friend Jeanette from the shoe firm, a cheap winter sun package we’d booked ages earlier. Benidorm in winter is a revelation: sun, blue cloudless skies, not quite summer weather but still a welcome relief from the grey streets of north London or the hated morning burrow, with all the other wage slaves, into the tunnel-like entrance at Highgate. I confide in Jeanette about my lost love. She jokes it off. ‘Oh, Jac, he probably realised what he was doing, getting involved with you. He’s come to his senses: buy that man a drink!’ And drink – and laugh – is what we do. Barbecues and cheap sangria: not quite a panacea for a broken heart, but they do help. A bit.

  There’s a letter waiting for me when I get back. The writing on the envelope is unfamiliar. It’s from Michael’s older sister, Marie, up in Scotland. He’d mentioned her to me, told me how close they were, how he loves her two little girls. It’s a short letter. ‘My dear Jacky. Michael gave me your address because he wants you to know that he won’t be coming back to England. He’s had a nervous breakdown. He had one before and we think he’s getting better this time but he can’t work. The doctors think he will improve, as long as he takes the medication, but it’s best he stays here with me and the children for now. Michael didn’t ask me to tell you this but he’s told me many times how much he loves you, what a lovely girl you are and I thought you’d want to know that.’

  I am floored. I’ve heard the phrase ‘nervous breakdown’ but beyond that, I don’t know much about what it means. I think it involves some sort of mental illness, which is unknown territory to me and therefore quite scary. But what I don’t understand is how it could suddenly strike like that, out of the blue, from nowhere. But perhaps there were many things I didn’t know. We had lived in a kind of bubble of intense togetherness those few first months, hardly seeing anyone, adrift in our own little world of bed, love and brief trips to the pub. He’d been very adamant that the new job was a great idea because he said the people at work in London didn’t like him. At the time, I’d thought they were just snobbish, because I knew lots of posh people worked in advertising. So I didn’t read anything into it.

  There was an address in neat capitals on the back of the envelope. Should I write? What could I say? I decided to try to find out more about breakdowns and mental illness. I went to the local library and found a couple of books. But they didn’t enlighten me. These were books written by doctors in a very technical style which was really hard to understand, though the general idea seemed to be that treatment for mental illness involved either drugs or something called electroshock – later known as electroconvulsive therapy – which was definitely frightening. I didn’t even want to think that Michael might have been treated this way. It was too harrowing to imagine. Even today, sadly, mental illness still carries a stigma because people don’t quite comprehend it, though at least knowledge of the different conditions is much more developed. Back then, it was just a hugely mysterious and frightening topic and something you never heard people talking about very much.

  For several weeks I put off writing a letter until finally, at winter’s end, when the first tiny green buds of renewal appeared on the big ash tree outside my bedsit window, I sat down and poured my heart out to him. ‘I hate to think of you being ill and unhappy but I am hoping so much it’s over, you’re getting better. You know I’m here if you want to get in touch, nothing has changed, I still love you,’ I wrote. At least I’d done something. Yet the next day, as I trekked down Muswell Hill Road, I reached the post box – but I just couldn’t bring myself to post it. More weeks passed. The letter lay there at the bottom of my shoulder bag. Then I just tore it up. Michael still loved me – and he had my address, didn’t he?

  This time, I didn’t go down my tried and tested route to oblivion of going out all the time, trying new men and looking for more thrills, action and excitement. Instead, I’d come straight home from work, back to my room, make myself something to eat and go to bed early. Or I’d visit a girlfriend. Occasionally we’d go to see new, daring movies like Five Easy Pieces (Jack Nicholson at his horniest) or the fabulous spoof on the military in Vietnam, MASH (the first Hollywood movie to use the four-letter F-word) On weekends I’d still manage to see my mum, avoiding the Dalston flat if possible. It made me even more miserable to go there, even if Ginger wasn’t around.

  On one of our Saturday outings to Oxford Street, I blurt out the whole Michael story to Molly and I’m surprised at her reaction. ‘He wasn’t for you, Jac,’ she tells me quite bluntly. ‘That’s why it happened the way it did. It was meant to be.’

  I’d hoped for some sympathy, even reassurance that he might get better, come back. I knew she’d supported my dad in his daft trip to the Highgate flat but I didn’t think she was anti-Michael in any big way. ‘How do you know he wasn’t for me? You only met him once and that was to check him out in case he was a murderer,’ I snapped.

  ‘Look, Jac, if he had that problem what good was he going to be for you? You wouldn’t want to be stuck with a man who was ill. And supposing it got worse?’ was her response.

  I shut up. Thanks for nothing, Mum. Only down the line did I realise she was simply being my mother, as protective as any parent will be. She knew what it was like to be stuck with a troubled individual. Ginger had a different kind of problem – a love of the bottle and an extreme kind of possessiveness – but what caring mother wants anything less than the best for their child? She’d accepted her fate. But why should something similar be mine?

  That summer proved to be a hot one in London. Yet I went back to the beach at Benidorm twice: first in June on a package deal and again in August, which proved far too hot. I’d convinced an elderly West End travel agent into getting me a cheap flight at a massive discount and my friend Jeanette’s Spanish boyfriend Miguel, a rep for Clarksons Tours, found me a very cheap room for the second trip. Jeanette stayed in relative luxury in the hotel he worked from. My room cost something like 100 pesetas a night (at that time around 75p). Yes, it was cheap. But that was all you could say about it. It was a health hazard. Airless. In fact, it didn’t actually have a window. You had to leave the door open to get some air in. We dubbed it The Dungeon.

  I couldn’t really sleep properly there. In the end, wheezing and chesty from The Dungeon’s damp and humidity, I was glad to go home. Even though my sad little bedsit – a room about 14 feet by 12 feet, with a tiny fridge and miserable, two-ring cooker – had little going for it. Yes, I had craved privacy. But back then Muswell Hill was dull suburbia: no one dropped in, like they had done in Circus Road. I’d isolated myself. Without a phone or a regular place of work, people couldn’t easily contact me. Even if they rang the coin box downstairs, I wouldn’t hear it ringing and Marjorie the Witch was too busy to bother with writing down messages, given her all too frequent and noisy love-ins with her incredibly young toyboys. (Coming out of the bathroom one morning, I spotted one very young-looking lad on his way out of her flat: on seeing me in my dressing gown, he went bright red and dived out the front door.)

  So 1970 had started off badly and it continued that way. It was flat, uneventful, only lit up by the holiday sorties to Benidorm. By early autumn, the uninspiring temp job routine had really got to me. Boredom brings out the worst in us: I’d morphed from a wisecracking, laughing girl into a sullen, couldn’t-give-a-damn person with hair bleached almost
white – and still those dirty brown roots. In desperation, I found a permanent job in an Oxford Street office as a secretary in a public relations company who mainly handled the accounts of showbiz people. It sounded promising, but it wasn’t much more interesting than the dull temp jobs. Bands like Status Quo, who had their first hit with ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, were clients. Mick Jagger was on the phone a couple of times. It would have been an ideal job for a music groupie – which I wasn’t. I was drawn to the bright lights of showbiz glamour, but the agency was run by a couple of older men in old fashioned suits who spent much of the day away from the office and there really was nothing to do most of the time. The interesting, important and confidential work was done by an older woman who had been working with the company for years.

  I started going out for longer lunches, trawling the rails of the Oxford Street stores – and coming back late. At first, no one said anything, though the somewhat frosty atmosphere in the office should have told me to stop my long lunch hours right then. After a couple more weeks, they sacked me: I’d been there just over a month. This was a huge shock. I’d never been sacked before. Years later, I heard on the grapevine that my dismissal was down to my sneery, clever-dick demeanour. It might have been tolerated elsewhere, but ’50s-style employers – and despite the pop music youth explosion, showbiz back then really was run mainly by older, conservative men from the post-war era – saw no reason to put up with defiant secretaries with attitude who took the piss. Especially if the company boasted money-making big names as clients. I went back to temping the following week.

  At this point, with winter looming, getting away to sunnier, distant climes became something of a recurring idea. In fact, 1970 marked one extraordinary development, barely noticed by me at the time, but it would soon transform the way everyone travelled. That year saw the takeoff of the first commercial flight from New York to London of the Boeing 747, the jumbo jet, poised to transport people across the world on long-haul flights at affordable prices by the middle of the decade. Yet all I was doing was temping again, trudging back to my sad bedsit in my big maxi coat, my thoughts full of ideas of fleeing Muswell Hill, the uninspiring jobs and the aftermath of Michael’s loss. Oh, how I wanted an escape hatch. The Dungeon experience had briefly diminished the appeal of Spanish beaches. There had to be somewhere else I could run to.

  I have always had a strong opportunistic streak. Mostly, it serves you well to believe that once you spot a promising opening, you should grab it with both hands. Yet when it comes to travel, venturing out into the unknown, you sometimes need a little bit more than just the opportunity. Cash helps. So does a bit of knowledge about where you are heading, what you might expect. Research, in other words – easily achieved now at the touch of a button but slightly more difficult in the days where printed information, mostly books, was your main source of information apart from meeting other travellers. But then again, if you are headstrong, desperate to pack a bag and move on, just for the sheer hell of it, very little will stop you anyway. And so, in the autumn of 1970, I found my place to run to, a beautiful place, certainly, but one where I learned that many women didn’t yet have the freedoms I now took for granted. My running away exercise didn’t turn out to be a total disaster. But neither would it prove to be a raging success.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BOLO DI CREMA

  I didn’t realise it, but my escape plan was kick-started by a chance meeting, in the spring of 1970, at a bus stop in Tottenham Court Road. A dark-haired girl around my age, sporting a fashionable maxi skirt, wandered up to me and asked for directions. We got chatting. On the bus, conversation flowed easily: Ines was Portuguese, vivacious, interesting, living in Fulham. ‘Here is my phone number if you would like to come and visit me,’ she smiled as I got off at my stop.

  I did visit. A new friendship was formed. Though from vastly different worlds, we discovered we had similar ideas about independence and life, and a bond was quickly established between us – the educated girl from a very comfortable middle-class home near Lisbon and the East Ender, already with a past but with very definite views about freedom and sex. Effectively, Ines was on the run. She couldn’t be independent. Her family in Portugal funded her stay in London, paid the rent on her tiny flat and doled out a small monthly allowance. Yet she could not go home. She had a three-month old son, Luis, the love child of a wealthy young man from a very prominent Lisbon family. ‘My family don’t really want us back,’ she explained that first time I visited, smoothing her black, glossy curls off her face. ‘If I go back with the baby, everyone will know about us.’

  At that point, I started to understand that English girls were more fortunate than their European counterparts. Not only were more relaxed attitudes towards sex and permissive behaviour slowly starting to become acceptable but the pendulum had already swung in our favour towards legal abortion and contraceptive advice for single women. Yet in other European countries, nothing much had outwardly changed for women: being open about unmarried sex remained as socially unacceptable as illegitimacy. Social attitudes in strongly Catholic countries like Ireland, Spain, France, Italy and Portugal remained as stratified and rigid as they’d ever been. Unmarried women who fell pregnant carried all the blame: they’d ‘fallen’ but the men weren’t burdened with shame. Ines’ situation was even worse than my former flatmate’s. It wasn’t just social attitudes or scorn: her heart had been broken too. She’d fallen madly in love with her child’s father, which was why she’d thrown caution to the winds and embarked on a passionate romance with him. Now, here she was in a shabby Fulham flat with her baby son. The lover she still idolised had rejected her. Facing the wrath of his own rich, powerful family, he had recently stopped all contact. He refused to acknowledge his child. The two families were at war. An illegitimate male heir to the wealthy family’s lineage was the last thing they wanted.

  To me, there was something romantic and very brave about Ines’ plight. After all, she’d only fallen in love and what was wrong with that? I couldn’t help in any practical way, but I kept in touch, went to Fulham occasionally on Sunday afternoons, phoned for chats. Ines was a natural mother and had adapted easily to the practical demands of motherhood, balancing little Luis easily on one shoulder while warming his bottle with one other hand. Her calm courage impressed me: she seemed to be coping. Yet after a while, life got more difficult for her. Alone, she could survive in London, working part-time in a restaurant, but with a baby and unable to work at all, it was nigh impossible. ‘My parents have told me they want me to come back,’ she told me over the phone a few weeks later. She was close to tears. ‘They want to see their grandchild. And we have servants at home, so there will be plenty of help with him. But I don’t want to go.’

  Yet she had to go. Luis would be better off in the comfort of her family home, no matter how bad her circumstances, how angry her family were that she’d brought shame upon them with an illegitimate child. ‘If ever you want to come to Portugal, Jacky, you must let me know,’ she told me on the phone before she left. ‘It’s really beautiful. We have a beach house in Costa de Caparica. Maybe you could come next year?’

  I could. But Impatient Woman didn’t want to wait till next year, too far away. Ines had often told me about Lisbon, how beautiful it was, built on seven hills, like Rome. She’d said how easy it was to jump on a train from the heart of the city to its nearby beaches, sunny resorts like Estoril, with its big casino and grand Belle Époque buildings where the rich and titled had once partied in considerable splendour. It all sounded fascinating.

  So when a few weeks later, I received a long letter from her in her big, rounded scrawl, telling me how her family adored Luis but that she missed her freedom in London, I made a snap decision and immediately wrote back. Here was the answer to my restless desire to run off abroad, somewhere warm and sunny. ‘I can come there now,’ I wrote. ‘All I have to do is give my notice on the bedsit, tell the agency I’m going away and leave all my stuff with my parent
s. London is driving me nuts.’

  By the time Ines wrote back enthusiastically, with advice on where to stay in Lisbon, how she looked forward to seeing me, I’d bought a train ticket to Lisbon and told everyone I was off. Typically, I just dived in. There was no period of thinking it through, asking myself all the relevant questions. My friends were mostly shocked. ‘But what will you do once you’re there?’ (from the men), or ‘I’ve heard Portugal is a very dangerous place’ (from the women). In fact, no one I knew had actually been there. Of course, there was the small factor of the language barrier. To augment my smattering of French and Italian, I did take the trouble to buy a Portuguese phrase book, assuming it was similar to Italian or Spanish, so if I learned some phrases phonetically, I’d be fine. Talk about naïve.

  Predictably, Molly and Ginger were appalled when I lugged all my belongings up the stone stairs to their flat and deposited them in my tiny childhood bedroom, still damp, still noisy from the timber yard opposite. I wouldn’t stay there, even the night before I took off. The plan was to quit the bedsit in the morning and go straight to Victoria station with my suitcase that same day. Thanks to work, I had managed to scrape together what I believed was a sufficient amount of money. It’d all be fine. A real adventure at last.

  Very little of my Lisbon adventure would pan out as it had formed in my over-enthusiastic imagination. I had no idea about the length of the journey, for a start. The interminable train trip took more than three days. First there was a cross-Channel ferry, then a train to Paris Gare du Nord, a metro ride to the Gare d’Austerliz and then through France for over 14 hours to the French border town of Hendaye, into Spain via Irun, across Spain for a 13-hour train ride (Burgos, Valladolid, Salamanca to the Spanish/Portuguese border at Vilar Formoso). Finally there was a switch to a Portuguese train, which was a real shock. This was ancient, dirty and a tad scary for a young English woman who had never travelled abroad alone. On the first leg, across the Channel, I had chatted to other travellers, gleaned basic info. But after we’d gone past France, my limited language skills left me without company. I didn’t even attempt communication with any of my fellow passengers, mostly country people lugging huge bundles and boxes or weary, black-clad women, some carrying small children.