White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  ‘Say “Hello” to London, Jacky,’ she told me sadly. ‘Maybe they’ll let me come and see you one day.’ Carlos had to work, so he couldn’t drive me to Lisbon and wave me off. ‘I will miss the Mad English,’ he joked as we promised to keep in touch.

  This time the long, long train ride didn’t seem quite so tortuous. I’d paid a small supplement to go first class for the Portuguese section, which meant a bit more comfort and I didn’t get the two miserable guards, grim-faced, outside. Christmas Day came and went as the almost empty train made its way slowly to the Spanish border and by Boxing Day I was nearly in France. My festive season lunch, stuffed into my case, consisted of spicy Portuguese sausage and bread, plus a couple of stale Portuguese cakes. Why is it that the return journey is always faster somehow, no matter how long the trip? By the time I’d reached Paris, almost two days later, and opted to walk, lugging my bag, from the Gare d’Austerlitz to the Gare du Nord for the train ride to Calais, I noted with total disgust that I could no longer do up the zip on my beloved tight, green velvet trousers from Fifth Avenue. I was just too fat.

  A chubby, dishevelled size 14, my trousers held up only by a safety pin, I boarded the cross-Channel ferry at Calais on a wintry evening at the end of 1970. It was a huge relief to chat to my fellow travellers without having to worry about making myself understood in another language. Yet my prospects, whether regarding men, money or job, were zilch. My country seemed to mirror this somewhat bleak state of affairs. The newspaper headlines warned that Britain was poised for more upheaval, disputes, union walkouts and worse, though I’d just missed the dreadful power workers’ work to rule that was almost as bad as an out-and-out strike. It had meant awful power cuts throughout the day and night and candles at a premium, soaring in price to 15 shillings.

  It didn’t sound good. Yet with my vague but omnipresent optimism, I figured I’d overcome any problems. Somehow. But the extra weight would have to come off if I were to regain my old pulling power.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MR VERY, VERY DANGEROUS

  They conned people. They took out carefully worded advertisements in upmarket newspapers. Then they encouraged their leads (those silly enough to respond) to visit them, climb the narrow stairs to their office with the swish address – and hand over what was often their lifetime’s savings. In return for their cash the hapless punters got promises – and, if they were lucky, big boxes of useless equipment. The conmen’s promises of future wealth, early retirement, a life free from money woes were just words. Yet in the time-honoured tradition, the lure of the dream, the clever confidence trick, proved so much stronger than the need to stop, think and exercise caution. Caveat emptor, indeed.

  These conmen were my bosses that short, hot summer after my return from Lisbon. It was a time of grey, suede wedge slingbacks, leather-look tiny waistcoats, suede hot pants with matching jerkins and long Indian cotton skirts. In a few months, I shed the cake weight acquired in Lisbon, though it was more a diet of white wine and not much else (glass after glass of cheap white L’Hirondelle) and snatched snacks at odd hours that brought the weight down. I’d like to recount that by then I’d become less restless, less prone to go for the instant high, the party, drink and tumble into bed with whoever I fancied. But what happened was that the party option kept winning.

  There were plenty of people around me with similar ideas. Many 20-something former ‘straights’ were now living the hedonistic, hippie-inspired life, doing whatever they fancied – and making good ‘bread’ out of it. These were north London hippie types like my friend Alan, who’d ditched a safe surveyor’s career because his boss wouldn’t let him take his dog to the office. He swapped surveying for life as a traveller-cum-entrepreneur, driving down to Spain and Morocco with an eclectic harem of blonde sylph-like ‘dames’ for company, haggling for the dirt cheap cotton, silk and cheesecloth gear in Marrakesh markets and selling it to the boho locals in his tiny shop, Aurium, on Rosslyn Hill in Hampstead, next door to Lloyds Bank.

  Just around the corner from the shop, Alan lived in hippie splendour in Gayton Road with an assortment of cosmopolitan dropouts, Vietnam draft dodgers, groovy Californian surfer types and young women from Scandinavia and northern Europe. If I fancied dipping into this more alternative world on the weekend, I’d make my way there, lie on the sofa smoking with some of Alan’s crazy houseguests, listening to new music like Santana’s ‘Oye Como Va’ (from the Abraxas album) or ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ (Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon). This was light years away from the everyday world I mostly inhabited, working in an office in central London to support myself before roistering in the pub with all the other office wage slaves.

  My nights were my own and pub life for me equalled adventure, release from the dull reality of living. I was once again living with my parents in Dalston after Portugal. I never thought I’d do this, but it was my best option. Staying there while I tried to save a bit of cash, get back on my feet, was just about manageable – but only just. I’d sacrificed a chunk of my freedom in my mad, impulsive dash to Lisbon. Once back in London, I hadn’t asked anyone I knew if they could put me up for a while. Not that anyone had any room, anyway. Most people I knew lived in cramped, rented quarters. A couple of single girlfriends were boldly trying out independence in rented bedsits. They were free but it was still quite grim. These were the truly shabby years of rented accommodation on a modest salary. Others, like my friend Jeanette, remained with their parents. Or lived with new husbands in tiny rented flats. Life was actually getting leaner. Creeping inflation meant that prices had shot up along with unemployment, which was heading for the dreaded million mark by the end of 1971.

  To add to the general woes, the country switched over to the new, European-style decimal currency in the February after my return. Out went the shilling, the sixpence and the half-crowns of my childhood. Goodbye, ten bob note, replaced with the 50p piece. We’d all had plenty of warning, of course, especially in the shops. But older people, like Ginger, were angry, convinced we’d been cheated out of our heritage. ‘I didn’t go to war for this country for us to turn into some poncy Frog place,’ I’d hear him rant to Molly, overlooking the fact that his ‘going to war’ didn’t mean true danger or hardship. He’d spent most of his leisure time in the Royal Army Pay Corps – the financial overseers of the forces – in India, putting down bets at the racetrack and had frequently been downing double scotches in the local during the earlier war years when he’d been stationed in Kent.

  Yet while the early ’70s were dominated by financial crises, the shocking conflict in strife-torn Northern Ireland and the ongoing power struggles with unions demanding ever increasing pay rises, my parents were like many other ordinary working people now reaching their fifties. Their lives, though previously blighted first by war and later by my dad losing his business, were comfortable enough, with secure jobs and paid holidays (a bit of a novelty for my dad, so used to self-employment for much of his life). They never ever ventured abroad, though, because Ginger flatly refused to fly. ‘I’ve done all my travelling,’ he’d say, pointing to his years of service in India. ‘You can’t beat a pint at the Tartar Frigate and a week at the Royal Albion,’ he’d say, proudly referring to what had become their annual holiday in Broadstairs. ‘Good enough for Charles Dickens, good enough for me.’

  Much to my chagrin, their cramped flat, now even noisier than ever with the timber yard opposite going at full tilt, also remained ‘good enough’ for my parents with its cheap rent, which by now had gone up to just £3 a week. It was far too late, really, for them to take the plunge and move elsewhere, though they did venture to have a look at a widely advertised and very new development called Thamesmead, a hugely ambitious ’60s social housing project in the Greenwich/Bexley area. No, they decided, it wasn’t for them when they came back from viewing it. ‘Too council,’ said Molly, who still saw them as being a notch above the masses in the ‘private’ rented grot hole in Dalston. I was angry with them at the time. It was,
I thought, a chance to go somewhere nicer. But I was quite ignorant and very wrong. With poor transport links, no shopping facilities and plagued by all manner of construction and social problems, Thamesmead was a dream that never fulfilled its early promise. It was just far too grandiose a plan to succeed.

  These were transitional times, really. Everyone moaned constantly about the cost of everything but when you look back, things still cost very little out of most pockets, the average wage being around £40 a week. A Mars bar at lunchtime? 2p please. A loaf of bread? Dig out the new 10p piece. Even Ginger’s ticket to watch his Spurs win the League Cup against Aston Villa at Wembley in February 1971 cost him just £2. Lots of things about the early ’70s were quite grim, but people’s lives weren’t anything like as tough as they’d been while I grew up in the ’50s. By the end of the ’70s, nearly all my friends would be mortgaged, happily ensconced in their own homes. Even hippie Alan eventually stopped ranting against consumerism and claiming ‘all property is theft’ and became a bearded, kaftan-wearing homeowner with a living room disguised as a souk. But not in 1971.

  For me, the key attraction of my full-time job with the conmen in offices near Oxford Street was this: they paid way above the going rate. I got £30 a week, no deductions, each Friday. No questions asked on either side. And much of our time was spent in their favourite pub, the Spread Eagle, near Bond Street. The booze flowed, frequently followed by a meal somewhere in town. Others might be a bit short of the readies but for the conmen the cash was only there to splash.

  Some nights I’d return to Dalston, others I’d be ‘staying with a friend’. Molly was bewildered, glad that I was there when I was but often dismayed at how rootless and unfocused I’d become. But she was busy: she’d switched back to her pre-war working environment in the West End now, with a part-time job selling wedding dresses at Berketex on Oxford Street. Ginger, now leading his nine-to-five life with the BMA, would be asleep when I did come home or up and out before me early every morning.

  I slept in my childhood room, its damp walls still papered with my teenage magazine cut-outs, the early ’50s black-and-white Elvis torso shots facing the leggy, high fashion ’60s models with straight glossy hair and sharp, short outfits. Icons of their respective eras with torn, crumpled edges.

  There weren’t big rows and screaming matches with my dad as there had been in my younger years. Just a solid block of resentment in my heart for the misery, the dank perspective of those claustrophobic surroundings. And from Molly and Ginger a sort of sad, unspoken disappointment that their offspring so bright, so promising in childhood, had effectively morphed into a runaway typist without much of a future. Not even a hubby in sight. Yet I remained disinterested in husbands, my future. That night’s entertainment in a glass would suffice, which is ironic when you consider how my early years were blighted by my dad’s commitment to the pub.

  At work there wasn’t much to do for the conmen. Secretaries were hired to decorate the place, joke with, buy drinks for. Our employers were a small band of salesmen who’d grouped together around their big scam. It was what is known as a pyramid-selling venture, the general idea being convincing punters that they could make their fortune by handing over their savings to buy the goods. The idea was those who handed over their cash could then recruit others into the scheme to market the goods, who in turn would hand over their cash to the first lot and the next lot, in turn, were supposed to recruit more people, handing their money over to the second lot and so on. In this particular case, people just handed over their money and some received boxes of unmarketable and worthless fire-fighting equipment. That was it.

  Pyramid schemes come and go over the years. They are usually hotly debated, some insisting even now that they can and do work. Mostly, they are rubbish. Many customers at the firm I worked for didn’t even get the boxes of useless equipment to store for ever in their garage. They just lost their savings. Later in the ’70s, the law would seek out such fraudsters and bring them to book. But it would be far too late for these unlucky punters.

  There was only one other woman in the office and the conmen tended to treat her with considerable respect. They seemed in total awe of her. Big George (her real name was Georgina) ran the accounting side of things. (Did she too have much to answer for? I never knew.) She was a mountainous divorcee from south London with an extremely pretty face, a mane of thick, dark, curly hair, expensive clothes from Jaeger and Peter Robinson (a now vanished department store in Oxford Street) and a formidable power over men.

  Rumour had it that in his early Dartford years, Mick Jagger had bedded Georgina. Once. I believed it. She had presence and charisma. In her head, she was still the pert ’60s babe who’d been chased by every bloke who met her. In reality, she was now nearly always pissed out of her brains. OK, I was well oiled a lot of the time but I was an amateur drinker compared to Big G who was often so smashed she’d be virtually speechless, reduced to the simplest of verbal expositions. ‘No way! No way!’ was the usual rant if she didn’t like something. This would always be accompanied by much waving of arms. (Had she been studying Mick Jagger moves in her younger years?) ‘Waiter! More fucking champagne now!’ was another highlight of her repertoire, also accompanied by much movement of the upper part of her considerable body.

  The call for regular infusions of expensive champagne in a bucket was also the permanent refrain of two other men closely involved in the enterprise, the brains behind the whole scheme, though they were rarely around in the office. Timothy was a short, chubby, affable, mild-mannered guy who’d gone to public school, while Adrian was a London chancer with reddish hair and pale, pasty skin, who made me laugh with his dry, sarcastic humour which matched mine. I didn’t actually do any work for the bosses. My role was to type for the salesmen. But since everyone in the office was on permanent party alert we’d all wind up drinking together – nearly every night.

  Adrian and Timothy also rented a houseboat on the Thames. So on weekends they’d party there and sometimes I’d join in. They were never particularly lecherous, so if any female wanted to hang out on the boat all weekend, sleep there, there was no pressure to romp with them in bed. They just wanted to party – with as many guests as possible. And they always footed the bill. This meant there was a permanent assortment of hangers on, of both sexes, as well as the hard-drinking habituees of the West End pubs, most of whom were deeply unfanciable. With the odd exception.

  Nigel drank with the conmen crew regularly, lugging his briefcase up the stairs to the top bar in the Spread at day’s end in his made-to-measure Hector Powe suit, eager to erase all memory of his reality – a big house in leafy suburbia and a wife and kids he hardly ever saw. Nigel claimed his business was flogging insurance – there was starting to be a lot of high pressure insurance sales at this time – but I had no idea of the truth of his circumstances. He always made a beeline for me, had a wicked sense of humour and one boozy night, before catching the 38 bus home I said yes, I’d go off with him for a dirty weekend in deepest Wiltshire. That Friday, we drove down to Wiltshire and the gorgeous l5th-century inn called the Angel in the outstandingly pretty village of Lacock.

  As an assignation, it wasn’t really dirty. Or even very sexy. We were drinking pals rather than two people with the crazy hots for each other. We did make the briefest of drunken love in a low-ceilinged room in the oak-panelled inn but both of us passed out immediately after. The next day, after a huge fry-up, we spent most of the afternoon driving round, sampling the other pubs before motoring back to London. Drink-drive laws then were regularly flouted. Though the breathalyser had been introduced in 1969 and alcohol-related traffic accidents were significantly reduced after that, a lot of men like Nigel were still blasé about drinking and driving: old habits die hard.

  For me, the idea that I was being driven around by a somewhat sozzled person was barely a consideration. I wouldn’t dream of saying: ‘I’m not getting into that car with you, you’re too pissed to drive.’ It just wouldn’t have
occurred to me. Or anyone I knew, come to that. Smoky, grubby pubs and way over the limit drivers were common then. No one ever questioned this. Apart from Molly, who would pick up my discarded clothes to wash, sniff them and say, ‘They stink of booze and fags, Jac.’

  I would shrug it off. ‘The dry cleaners never say that, Mum,’ I’d snap back.

  There were many other diversions. I had many single girlfriends in north London and frequently saw Jeanette, my Spanish trip friend. She had her own drinking circle, the Kentish Town crew, wise-cracking Cockneys, down-to-earth market stall and taxi driver types, blokes who treated you with a rare East End courtliness – quite refreshing compared to the more ribald drinking scene at Conmen Central. Jeanette’s friends would throw lots of parties in Malden Road council flats, young marrieds she’d had known all her life. The parties were noisy, crowded, packed with people just letting their hair down, dancing and singing along to songs like Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ or Dawn’s ‘Knock Three Times’, just enjoying the release from the grind of work. Sharp-witted young Cockneys you’d find all over London back then. Now they’ve long moved out to Essex and beyond: the post-war working class generation that wound up living the dream their parents could never have dreamed. These days, they’re home owners with holiday places in Spain, still living the good life today, born at just the right time.

  The men in Jeanette’s gang were hard-working lads. Only one or two were hippie, dope-smoking types with long hair, serious aficionados of the more ‘intellectual’ prog rock groups like Yes or King Crimson. There was definitely something appealing for me about the contrast between these glimpses of their lively, knees up, outwardly uncomplicated lives – and the dishonest, seedy personas of the champagne-quaffing, flash car driving, Bond Street conmen. Really, it was all so typical of London then, as it still remains to an extent – a jumble of very different worlds, mostly ignoring each other’s existence, yet briefly rubbing shoulders – all jammed into one exciting, hectic city. A pick’n’mix social life, if you wanted it.