Joining the Dots

by Juliet Gardiner

  Looking back, I feel desperately sorry for my mother and her fruitless trip. But there was no way that I was going to accompany her back to 33 Adeyfield Road and the confined and narrow life that represented. So she had to return empty-handed and concoct a story both for the school and for friends and neighbours that I had been offered such a good job in Bristol that I could not turn it down, and therefore I would not be returning to school for the sixth form.

  Meanwhile, the police had somehow got involved, but once satisfied that I was of sound mind, implacably determined and in no moral danger, they explained to my mother that there was nothing they could do. However, the husband of the Beaufort Road bedsitter landlady had no idea his wife owned a small portfolio of property, so she could not risk any scandal or official intervention that might alert him to that fact. I agreed as an interim measure to move into the YWCA hostel round the corner. Predictably, I found that as restrictive as school, and the enforced companionship stifling, and as soon as possible found another place in Clifton.

  George bought me an Aladdin paraffin stove and I carried that and a suitcase from bedsitter to bedsitter, away from mice-infested kitchens, draconian restrictions on visitors worse than any Oxbridge college, creepy, predatory landlords, and excessive rents, until I ended up in a bedsit above a genteel restaurant in Pembroke Road near Bristol Zoo. I liked it there. The other residents were much older but agreeable and one, a man with a wispy gingery beard and a face like the first television chef Philip Harben, and who claimed he was a descendant of the great French chef, Antonin Carême, used to cook omelettes and rice puddings for me and make sure I had a pint of milk every day, while refusing to accept either thanks or reward. In addition, there was the opportunity to eat a plain-fare meal in the restaurant downstairs each evening before the diners proper made their entrance, in exchange for washing up all evening.

  Nineteen-sixty was an odd year for me. I got a job in Bright’s, an upmarket department store in Clifton, where I was assigned to the lingerie and hosiery department working under the fierce buyer, Miss Gledhill. It was the era of the sticking-out, short gingham skirts in the style of the ‘sex kitten’ Brigitte Bardot. In order to stick out in the required parasol manner such skirts called for hooped petticoats, so I spent a lot of my time threading whalebones through the nylon petticoats until canny young girls (designated teenagers by then) realised they could achieve the same effect by dipping their petticoats in a solution of sugar and water and letting them stiffen as they dried – though if it rained, or the petticoats became sodden with perspiration, they must have had a sticky and uncomfortable end to the evening.

  I can’t imagine I was much good at that job. The only garments on display were on plaster torsos, so if a customer wanted a pair of knickers or a ‘brassiere’ (as Miss Gledhill referred to these doughty garments) or a deliciously slithery satin slip, she would have to ask an assistant, who would pull out a glass-fronted mahogany drawer and, wearing white cotton gloves, unfold the merchandise for the customer’s perusal. However, whatever my inadequacies, the other staff were very kind to me, and gathered round and clapped when the wages clerk brought round the weekly wages in small brown envelopes on a Friday and they realised it was my first proper pay packet.

  I don’t know why I left Bright’s. I don’t think I was sacked. Maybe I agreed to leave as part of some bargain with my parents to get a ‘proper job’ in local government, like my father. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to work on Saturdays because I preferred to take the bus to Stroud to spend my weekends with George. In any event, I found a job working in the offices of Kingswood Urban District Council on the northern fringes of Bristol. I learned how to operate a very simple telephone switchboard (with apertures shielded by what looked like blinking eyelids to plug the connecting wires into), open the post, file, and work the Gestetner machine. Again, everyone was very kind to me, too kind in the case of the chief clerk, a dusty, Dickensian, cadaverous, avuncular man who was horrified at the idea of a sixteen-year-old girl living on her own in bohemian Clifton and did everything in his power to find me digs in a family home near the office. I resisted.

  I had shown some initiative in leaving home, but I showed little after I arrived in Bristol. I had hardly any money once I paid my rent and was often hungry. The tea in a stained plastic mug served with a sugary Nice biscuit every afternoon at the council offices was the high point of my day, and each Friday (pay day) I would buy a tin of condensed milk and eat one spoonful of the thick sweet confection every evening for the following week.

  All I looked forward to was the weekend, when I would get on the bus to go to stay with George in the flat – or rather a bedroom, kitchenette and office with an ever-rattling teleprinter – above the classified ads department of the Bristol Evening Post (Stroud and District edition) in the high street. It was then that I would eat: we would grill gammon steaks, or chops, or go out for dinner on Saturday night in a local hotel or pub.

  It was a magical time: the Cotswold villages of Uley, Dursley, Painswick with their soft sand-coloured stone seemed sunlit for that entire summer. Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee’s lyrical memoir of his childhood in the village of Slad, the most beautiful of all the nearby villages, had recently been published to enthusiastic acclaim and he was in great demand locally (and in literary London too, no doubt) to open fetes, judge produce and craft shows, and more appropriately, give readings in village halls.

  Since Lee lived on George’s journalistic patch, we followed him around with the paper’s photographer, Terry Garrett, and George managed to establish a fruitful relationship with the Sunday Express by acting as their one-summer Slad correspondent. Many evenings we would drink (cider, appropriately) in the Star Inn in Slad with Laurie Lee and his statuesque and improbably beautiful wife Cathy, whom he liked to say he had fallen in love with when she was a fourteen-year-old girl dancing barefoot on the quay in Marseilles and he was on his way back from the Spanish Civil War. We spent one evening in the Star admiring Cathy trying on hats she had got on approval from a shop in Cheltenham, I think, to wear when she and Laurie went to a royal garden party to which they had been invited. Being asked to choose the best one was for her an impossible task. She looked stunning in each, so the entire pub had a show of hands to decide as she obligingly paraded round the bar – though we never knew if she took our advice.

  At some point I decided that I really couldn’t stand working for Kingswood Urban District Council anymore. George had by this time come back to the Bristol office and was learning to be a sub(editor) on the Western Daily Press – where Tom Stoppard also worked as a journalist for a few years – which entailed night work, and we wanted to spend the days together. I embarked on the usual fill-in occupation: waitressing. First on the breakfast shift at the Hawthorns Hotel, from where I got the sack because I was too slow at dishing out the bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, then at Horts restaurant in Bristol which catered largely for businessmen at lunchtime and middle-aged couples at dinner. The maître d’ was a Mr Peel (‘the name may be Peel, but I’m no lemon’) and a fellow waitress was Glenda Jackson, whose then husband, Roy Hodges, was directing a summer season in Weston-super-Mare. This was still several years before Jackson made the big time in Peter Brook’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ project. But her fluid, straight-backed grace marked her out as special, and I watched fascinated as she effortlessly wove her way round the tables with a lithe elegance that gave the impression that she was skating on an ice rink.

  It was about this time that George and I decided we wanted to get married. I can’t remember being proposed to; we lived together now anyway, though I hid in the wardrobe if the off-site landlady knocked on our door. Since I was not pregnant, not much would change, I thought. It just seemed the next step in life.

  Predictably and reasonably my parents objected: I was only just seventeen (‘My goodness, if I had married the boyfriend I was going out with when I was seventeen …’ was a usual response to the news), and unless you el
oped to Scotland (Gretna Green was the favourite) you could not get married without parental consent until eighteen. There was talk of making me a ward of court on my parents’ part and of applications to magistrates on ours. But in the end my parents capitulated, my mother warning me that sex was certainly not all it was cracked up to be, though I bought a black nylon ‘baby doll’ nightdress as a mark of change of status.

  We posted the banns for early February 1961 and were married a couple of weeks later. George went to the bank to try to raise a loan for a honeymoon in France, but was told that he needed collateral and that a spasmodically employed teenage wife-to-be hardly fitted that bill. So he bought a rakish astrakhan hat with the money left in his account and we resigned ourselves to the Jurassic coast rather than Paris. Then, having assembled a collection of wedding presents, including several Pyrex glass dishes on metal stands and Denbyware casseroles with green ears of wheat painted on the sides, we returned to the same bedsitter in Clifton that we had denied living in together before the wedding, a married rather than an unmarried couple.

  Chapter Six

  Spanland

  In August 1961, George was posted to London so we set about finding somewhere to live. It always intrigues me how incomers to a city with no connection to a particular area decide where to settle. Obviously it is partly a matter of cost, but many London postcodes have equivalent values, and if I ever go somewhere like Tulse Hill, Battersea, Queen’s Park, Camberwell, or Sheen, for example, I wonder why chance did not lead us to move there. In our case we had of course heard of Hampstead and fancied living among its leafy streets reputedly encompassing a left-wing literary and artistic culture, not realising how the Finchley Road cuts a swathe through the borough, leaving the heath rising on one side and a slow descent into Kilburn on the other. A further spur was the advice of the woman in the letting agency to which we had gone to find a flat, who pointed out that Finchley Road was on the number 13 bus route to Fleet Street where the Evening Post had its London office.

  As soon as we arrived in London, I started a job that I had seen advertised while still in Bristol, in the art department of the TV Times. The advert had specified ‘art school training’, but I applied anyway. I got the job, which turned out to involve sizing up photographs with a red chinagraph pencil for the Grampian (Scottish) edition of the independently published rival to the BBC’s Radio Times, in the days when commercial television was both deemed vulgar and envied as a ‘licence to print money’. Coronation Street, Emergency – Ward 10, Bonanza, Robin Hood, 77 Sunset Strip, The Avengers, World in Action and Double Your Money were among the hit shows for which I chose photographs for each issue of the weekly magazine, but I never saw any of the programmes myself, as even now married and grown up, we had no television.

  Our first London home was an un-self-contained flat (small kitchen and living/bedroom) in West Hampstead. We shared a bathroom where there was a geyser for hot water, meeting fellow tenants on the landing most mornings and evenings clutching towels and sponge bags. The house was owned by Mr Bard, a quietly spoken German émigré who was courtesy itself when driven to complain mildly about the late hours we kept, the doors we banged, the number of times we clattered down the stairs to answer the payphone in the hallway. Our living/bedroom came with a double bed, covered by an eiderdown, a dining-room table and chairs and a couple of upholstered ‘easy chairs’. I threw a length of yellow cotton over two tin trunks which provided storage and an approximation of a coffee table, or as the sociologist Stuart Hall remarked in a different context, ‘an occasional table which has seen few occasions’. Each Saturday I would carry a bag full of dirty washing to the launderette round the corner in West End Lane, and sit reading while the clothes swirled around, before transferring them for an extra shilling in the slot to a tumble dryer, since there was no space to hang up laundry in our small flat.

  The image I associate most vividly with that weekly chore is of Saturday 27 October 1962, as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. I remember being sat huddled in my navy duffel coat, watching my underwear going round and round in the dryer, and peering at aerial photographs in my newspaper of hard-to-decipher Soviet ships steaming towards the US military blockade around Cuba, where an agreement between Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev had led to the siting of Soviet ballistic missiles on the island. This followed the seizure of power by Castro, who had severed relations with the US, appropriated American economic assets, and was forming strong links with the Soviet Union. The missiles were intended to discourage another ‘Bay of Pigs’ – the previous year’s CIA-backed botched invasion to overthrow Castro and regain the assets of those Batista-supporting Cubans who had fled to Florida.

  The missile crisis was the most perilous confrontation of the Cold War, until, after nearly two weeks of nail-biting brinkmanship, Presidents Kennedy and Khrushchev came to a last-minute agreement on 28 October. Like everyone else I was transfixed by the unfolding drama, though without a television I relied on the newspapers and our small transistor radio to follow the action. That Saturday afternoon as the Soviet ships approached the US military blockade surrounding Cuba, I sat rigid with fear, wondering what on earth was the point of having clean knickers, pillowcases and tea towels, since the world seemed about to end in a nuclear holocaust.

  But thankfully it didn’t, of course, and apart from the Cuban missile crisis, I really did not feel that I was living under the ‘shadow of the bomb’ that was supposed to hang over our postwar lives, obliterating most other considerations – and the future. Although I took a keen interest in disarmament conferences, and was a badge-wearing member of CND, I regret to say that I never joined the many thousands who marched every Easter in the early 1960s the fifty-odd miles from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire to hold a protest rally in Trafalgar Square. Nor, two decades later, did I join the women’s peace camp set up in protest at the siting of US cruise missiles at the RAF base at Greenham Common, also in Berkshire, where the protesters were manhandled by the police and forcibly evicted – but then broke in again. Women came and went – some leaving children to do so, since they considered the threat of nuclear war posed a greater danger to their families than their absence; others brought their children with them, and at least one baby was born at the all-female camp. A few women went on hunger strike. Nearly all linked arms to surround the wire perimeter fence that encircled the base, and many wielded wire cutters to make gaps in the fence so they could get into the base. They were not sure if they could be charged with criminal damage, as police and soldiers fought to keep them out. Some endured the mud, rain, cold and primitive living conditions for almost twenty years.

  Why was I such a slouch when it came to political activism, I wonder with regret? ‘Where are you now?’ the Greenham women sang. ‘At home,’ I would have had to answer, as would my friends and neighbours. Strong beliefs in those turbulent times of protest, but feeble in action, I fear.

  I New Name, New House, New Baby

  By 1963, George and I had decided that we were tired of living hugger-mugger in our cramped quarters in West Hampstead. An incident in our galley kitchen when he rubbed some of the scrambled eggs he was cooking into my hair after I had said something particularly annoying – a reaction that startled us both – hardened our resolve that we needed somewhere with more space.

  He had by then picked up a Saturday job as a subeditor for political copy on the Sunday Times, in addition to his Evening Post work. So, with a somewhat improved income, we set about house-hunting. We couldn’t afford to buy where we were, and wanted a house rather than a flat so we could have a garden for George to grow sweet peas, twisted round a row of bamboo canes, a hobby he had cultivated while still at school living with his mother and corgi dog on Romney Marsh. My mother (with whom I was in hands-off reconciliation since she had come to think her errant daughter had done well to marry the man she had) kept pushing Hendon as a suitable location, which was why I didn’t want to consid
er the houses for sale there, which were pretty much the semi-detached spit of the detached house I had left so definitively only a few years earlier.

  This was the time that I decided also to change my name from Gillian, which I considered almost as regrettably suburban as ‘Patricia’. A new first name to match my recently acquired new surname seemed to me to complete the process of severance. There was no need to do so by deed poll: I knew that you could call yourself what you liked as long as the name is not assumed for fraudulent purposes. I toyed with Cressida, or Octavia (which I realised was inappropriate) and Leonie (thank goodness I didn’t), but finally settled on Juliet – since it wasn’t a million miles away from Gillian. It also had a pleasing Shakespearean resonance, though I know it would have been more appropriate to call myself Titania (but think of the abbreviation!) since I was born on Midsummer’s Day.

  My existing friends adopted Juliet quickly, and new friends and acquaintances of course had no reason to query it. Nevertheless, it was yet a further cruel and unnecessary rejection of my adoptive mother and I know it hurt her deeply: she had chosen Gillian because the name ‘sang’ to her ear, but if it did, it was the wrong tune to mine. And in any case she had changed my birth name of Olivia when she and my father adopted me. I suppose it was another example of believing that my identity was fluid: I had no anchor and was free to self-identify and construct my own persona – name and all.

  One day in the summer of 1962, I met my old school friend Janet (now generally known as Jan) for lunch. She was then working as an assistant on the Architects’ Journal and had been sent to the press launch of a new Span development in Blackheath, near Greenwich, and was very impressed. Span was the brainchild of architect Eric Lyons and developer Geoffrey Townsend, who had met as architectural students at the Regent Street Polytechnic. The name Span signalled the men’s intention to span, or bridge, the gap between architect-designed modern houses, which were out of reach for most people, and the conventional mass-produced houses being built by developers such as Wates, Wimpey and Barratt in serried lines to pretty much a 1930s suburban design. As the architectural critic Ian Nairn observed in 1961, most housing estates built in the 1940s and 50s had learnt little from the design of houses built between the wars: ‘Leaded lights and bow windows … The narrowest possible gap between houses and call the result “detached”.’