Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  So what to do? Occasionally there would be an ‘adventure’, an old man in a shelter I could ‘tease’ in my hitched-up skirt and thick eyeliner, a wannabe Lolita. Most of these men could be taken to the point where they would do or say something inappropriate; in one case the man unzipped his flies. But it stopped there, with a thrill on both sides, and then I ran away.

  Then the holidays arrived, and it was the long, hot summer of 1971, which seemed to be teeming with gorgeous, erotic images of love in the long grass. We cooled off in the darkness of the cinema watching The Go-Between with Julie Christie and came out panting over Alan Bates. We drooled over Cat Stevens on Top of the Pops, and covered our rooms with pictures of him. We read D. H. Lawrence avidly, and dreamt of Cat Stevens doing to us whatever the gamekeeper Mellors had done to Lady Chatterley.

  We, for I had found a best friend at last, with whom I now spent every day. Cath’s mother had died and her father, a vicar, and a man with a vague bewildered air that may have been grief, gave her as much freedom as my own distracted mother gave me. When anyone asked what I was doing I would mention cinema trips, books, or staying at Cath’s house. I had a door key and the magic purse, and no one ever bothered to determine the boundaries.

  Cath and I now spent most of our time looking for trouble. It was in some ways a further frustration that the adults weren’t interested in us. We could be outrageous, take trains to distant places, stay out late, and all we were faced with was the inescapable and depressing fact that still nothing exciting happened. I was stuck, with no sense of how to escape and a growing panic that my future might have been ruined by my mother and my lack of schooling. My best chance of getting away from her was clearly to have a boyfriend who would carry me off.

  Our favourite activity, often fruitless, was looking for hippies. They had suddenly invaded Southport the summer of 1969, and since then had hung out and played guitars on the steps of the Monument in town. This previously dull landmark had instantly taken on an aura of counter-culture mystique, enhanced by the fact that the local schools had placed a ban on pupils being in its vicinity while in uniform.

  So, one day of that endless hot summer, we went through my jumble-sale hoard and dug out long silky dreses, flowing scarves and beads in which we might pass as hippy girls and we wandered into town. Sadly the steps were deserted, so we trudged past possible coffee bars, looking into them hopefully in our unconvincing costumes. It was now early evening but the muggy heat had brought on desperation. Cath had to go home so I trudged on alone. At last I walked past the Wimpy bar and there was someone who was not only a hippy but almost as gorgeous as Cat Stevens or Chris.

  Chris had been my first hippy. He lived in a dirty squat near the promenade and was painfully thin. I took him fillet steaks, stolen from the household deep freeze, which thawed out, leaking sweet-smelling watery blood into the bottom of my school satchel. I then cooked them ineptly on his filthy cooker, and in return he made me a patchwork velvet bag that was my favourite possession for years. But as I barely had breasts and as he was probably quite old and probably a junkie, things never took off romantically.

  I now went into the Wimpy and sat down. The man looked even more thrilling in close-up. He was older than Chris but had thick black hair hanging down his back, a beard, and pink loon pants. Wrapped around his neck was a bedraggled feather boa. I rummaged in the patchwork bag and pulled out a slightly crumpled cigarette, walked over and asked him for a light.

  ‘Love the boa,’ I said. ‘Where’s it from?’

  He waggled it. ‘Yeah, from Kensington Market.’

  ‘How fabulous. I miss London terribly. I just live to go to London,’ I said dramatically.

  ‘Come, if you like. I’m going back there in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a lift, but it’ll have to be early, I’ve got a job on.’

  We chatted a bit and then I told him I’d meet him outside the café the next day. I went to a phone box and called Cath to tell her the plan. ‘So if anyone asks where I am tomorrow night, say I’m staying at yours, OK?’

  She balked a little at this. ‘What if they want to speak to you?’

  ‘You know they never check, and if they do just say that I’m on my way over. Then, if I don’t turn up, you can pretend you thought I’d changed my mind.’

  She was fine with that, so I went home to pack a small bag and plan my trip. The next morning I sneaked out leaving a note ‘gone for early morning bike ride, staying at Cath’s’ and went back to wait. At last his car pulled up and I jumped in, then he roared off, the radio on and a stash of ready-rolled joints on the dashboard. I was in heaven.

  24

  Breaking Away

  LONDON HAD NEVER SEEMED more like the Promised Land, as I stepped from the sunshine of the King’s Road into Stop the Shop’s inky-black interior, with its floor revolving to the sound of the Supremes and mannequins appearing to slow-dance to ‘Love Child’. The guy with the boa didn’t spike my drink or have sex with me. He just listened happily to my prattle as we drove down the motorway and then left me where I asked to be left, on the King’s Road, and gave me a key to a flat in Earls Court and his girlfriend Eliza’s phone number. He said I could stay on their sofa.

  That night, happy and exhausted, with my magic purse almost empty, I finally trudged back to the address scrawled on the scrap of paper with a smudgy map. It had been a perfect day of King’s Road, Carnaby Street and shopping. I rang the doorbell, clutching my bags of booty, suddenly nervous of what I might find. Eliza was there, enviable Eliza with her tangled locks and her hippy boyfriend. She fed me vegetable bake and asked me the truth about how old I was, and then very firmly told me to ring my mother straight away.

  They were already in bed, and my mother was in the hall in her nightie keeping her voice down, hoping Peter wouldn’t catch on. She thought I was sleeping at Cath’s; where on earth was I? She sounded seriously rattled as I explained. Eliza spoke to her, and apologized, saying it had been a misunderstanding. Eliza seemed worried enough about her boyfriend’s complete idiocy in taking an underage girl with him that she was willing to lie for me, but she landed me in it by saying that I had told her I was older. When she offered to put me on a train home the next morning my mother calmed down.

  But back home I overheard Audrey and Peter talking about what to say to me. It was the first time that I’d heard him angry with her.

  ‘She’s barely thirteen. She could have been abducted – anything could have happened. How can she believe that this was acceptable behaviour?’

  Her voice was low and I couldn’t make out her words, just a sad mumble.

  ‘You are the mother,’ he said. ‘You have to show her who is boss.’

  It seemed to be dawning on him that she lacked the confidence to really discipline me. Having made me her partner in crime for so many years, she felt she had no authority to begin parenting me properly now.

  Peter now began an attempt at a clampdown. I would have to always let them know where I was – a simple rule, but one that left me feeling full of rage and frustration. I’d been leading my own life for years and no one had cared. Now, when it suited him, he had decided to treat me like a child. He began to notice things he had previously overlooked, commenting on my clothes and ‘the stuff on my eyes’ and what was and wasn’t ‘suitable’. The result was to make me more determined than ever to get away from this suffocating attempt at family life. London became my new goal, and although I was only thirteen I was determined to get there as soon as possible. In the meantime I wanted a boyfriend and to have sex.

  The Wimpy bar where I had met my hippy was down by the seafront and had big sticky plastic tomatoes on the tables and condensation running down the windows. Inside this cosy fug Cath and I would now daily meet the boys from the King George V Grammar School, known as KGV. Even if I hadn’t been to school that day, I would still turn up to meet the other girls fresh out of the classroom, and we would trail together down to the Wimpy. These boys weren’t a
s interesting as hippies – many had spots and lacked any social grace – but they were available.

  One day my mother appeared at the café window, peering through the steamy glass and waving. She walked in, entirely incongruous in her mink-lined raincoat with diamanté buttons, smiling warmly at everyone as if they were the most charming gathering she had ever seen. She put her arm around me and asked how I was. She had been worried about me as I had started my periods that morning. I was fine, and she now announced gaily to the group of pimply youths, ‘My little girl is a woman!’ and then swept out.

  We celebrated my womanhood by piling into the ‘pinnies’, the amusement arcade next door with its pinball machines that the boys would play frenziedly in those days before computer games. We, the girls, would compete for who could look on with the greatest admiration at their brilliance. American girls may have had to wave pom-poms and kick their legs; in Southport you just had to stand at the pinnies and not look too bored.

  As well as Cath, I had another new friend, Amy, who was part of this Wimpy-bar gang, and I realized she was fantastic boy bait. Now that I was a teenager I was confident I would one day develop wonderful pert breasts like hers, but they were yet to arrive. Amy also had big blue eyes, a blonde mane and a sweet nature. The boys would come to kneel at her shrine and I could pick them off with my more-compelling personality and vamping techniques.

  My mother had little sense of childhood, and simply saw it as an inconvenient life stage to be got through as quickly as possible. Her announcement to the local grammar-school boys that I was technically now a woman had been a sign of genuine relief. I was launched and now a fellow traveller rather than a small needy person and she was delighted to share any womanly wisdom with me. She seemed to me at this time to be an unfathomable combination of needing to control me, and wanting me to be her. I didn’t believe she knew herself what she really wanted.

  One thing that I was keen to learn was how to catch a man. I’d already absorbed a lot, partly from observation and from tips that I had heard her pass on to other women, secret spells for spinning a gossamer web of attraction that was supposed to settle over a man and hold him entranced. Now that I was older she was sharing the precious secrets of this female sorcery with me and, as she liked to point out, ‘Your Eve’s Guide for Girls book won’t tell you about this!’

  She seemed to be right, as the chapter in The Young Eve called ‘Being Beautiful’ assured that any girl who is ‘reasonably proportioned and healthy, who is glad to be alive and tiptoe with eagerness to know about everything’ would have men falling at her feet. My own observations of Southport youth suggested that this wasn’t always the case, so I now took careful note of the Audrey method.

  She demonstrated the delicate operation of ‘making them fall in love’ as a kind of dance: one moment you were up close to them, smiling right into their eyes thinking wonderful thoughts; the next you were wafting away from them, so that they were waiting for you to come back. She explained how to ask them about the things they most loved talking about, and to then cup your hand under your chin and listen to them with a fascinated expression.

  ‘People most enjoy talking about their best life moments,’ she would say, after listening with great enthusiasm to some man describing how, as a child, he would revamp old motorbikes together with his dad. ‘It makes them feel happy and they then associate that happy glow with you.

  ‘If you want them to actually fall in love with you, then just as you have been in rapt attention, you should suddenly look away, very mysteriously, into the distance and sigh with soulful eyes. They will ask you what you are thinking, and you just softly say, “I was wondering … oh nothing really.” They are left wondering. That is the pulling-away part of the dance.

  ‘Then you just sigh and pick up where they left off. “So, what were you saying about your rugby match – how exciting!” You need to get their head spinning, slightly disoriented, and then comfortable again. They need to feel you are partly their best chum and partly this magical and mysterious creature that they will never fully know or understand.’

  Then there were other ingredients one should sprinkle into the love potion: creating a picture that they can hold in their minds, that they can remember as the moment they ‘fell in love’. This could be on a dance floor – ‘though not in your case’, she was quick to add. It could just be a walk down a staircase, or a moment that you turn and toss your hair, and meet their eyes, but it needs to be thought about and worked on.

  Another essential component in Audrey’s arsenal was making a man feel like the centre of the world as you constantly say his name. ‘People love to hear their own name, but say it as if it is a lovely sound – Julian or Roger or Brian – as if it was music.’ This made me giggle, but Cath and I nonetheless practised saying the names of the boys we knew as if they were music: ‘Eric Crankshaw … Terry Woolley …’ we would intone in breathy voices.

  They need to feel that they are your hero, my mother told me. You should repeat things that they’ve told you as if they were terribly wise. Also make them feel important and useful by giving them something to fix, like a problem or a flat tyre; and of course, make them laugh or, even better, find their jokes terribly funny. My mother and I specialized in terrible jokes, so we now practised telling each other the worst jokes we could think of, and then trying to make our laughs like the peal of tiny bells.

  Dave was the prettiest boy I had seen, with blond hair to his shoulders and a handsome chiselled face, and the first time that we met him, he had made a beeline for Amy. They had now been going out for a week, but the following Friday night there was a party, followed by a cricket-club dance on Saturday and the youth club on Sunday: a whole weekend of close proximity. Amy would of course take me along, so this would give me ample time for theft, and I rehearsed all of the tricks with great thoroughness. At the party Amy stood by him as I asked questions about the cricket scores, and then, having milked that topic, I listened fascinated to his description of his mother’s new car. I looked in awe and admiration at the way he could twirl a coin between his fingers. I laughed and laughed at the names he invented for the host’s home-brew beer. I said the name ‘Dave’ with a special tone of excited warmth, and when Amy went to the loo I began smiling into his eyes, telling him all about my job as an extra on the film, and how thrilling it had been.

  ‘It’s like you were saying the other day, Dave, about how money is freedom. I thought about that afterwards, it’s so true.’

  Then, as I had reeled him in, the pulling away. I suddenly looked off into the distance and sighed soulfully.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sally, are you OK?’ said Dave.

  ‘Oh, it’s just something … oh, nothing … I was just thinking …’

  Then Amy came back from the loo. Dave was looking at me oddly.

  ‘I’ll just go into the garden for some air,’ I said. ‘I find looking at the stars so calming.’

  I wasn’t surprised when Dave appeared in the garden a few minutes later.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, Dave, I’ve been having a difficult time at home, but being around you makes me feel so much safer, as if everything is somehow going to be OK.’ I stared into his eyes as if he was my saviour and could fix my broken life, there being no broken bicycle handy.

  By the end of the weekend I had stolen him from her and the big tears rolled down Amy’s lovely cheeks as she agreed that nothing could be done if he ‘loved me more’.

  It was only then I realized that Audrey’s ruthlessness was there in me too. Her power was beginning to bloom in me, along with my woman’s body, and I wasn’t sure that it was a rose or a daisy so much as some monstrous flytrap. I had the terrifying thought that I might one day become her, but the heady excitement of my power over men was too strong to resist. I was no longer the small boring person in our double act; I had deployed her tricks, and been every bit as effective as she might have been, which left me feeling triumphant.


  Since the incident with Peter’s gatepost I was more aware than ever of how brilliantly effective her ingenuity and fierce determination could be.

  I watched her swing into operation with poor Keith, who had arrived back from his boarding school the week before, looking overweight and unhappy. He wouldn’t go out and have fun, as directed. Instead he thwarted her, by sitting in front of the television, fat, hot and cross. After a few days of this my mother signed him on at the tennis club as, despite her dislike of sports, she could think of no other solution to his lack of a social life. She bought him tennis clothes and a racket, despite his muttering, ‘No way am I playing tennis.’

  The next day there we were. I was sitting in the back of the car, Keith in the front next to my mother, as she roared up the road to the dreaded tennis club. He was staring out of the window glumly; no one spoke.

  We arrived outside the club, and she waited. He went on sitting there, in dangerous defiance.

  ‘Go on, get out.’

  He still sat there, and I knew what was coming.

  ‘Get out of this bloody car and play tennis,’ she said in a voice that froze the blood.

  I saw him flinch. He at last climbed out.

  ‘I’ll collect you at five o’clock.’

  He stomped off in misery.

  When he got home for dinner, sweaty and miserable, a plate was put in front of him with nothing but a Ryvita and a dollop of cottage cheese and lettuce leaf. We were all on a diet, apparently, in support of him, and there was no other food in the house. Peter had resorted to having a sandwich at the golf club before he came home.

  Keith took one look at his plate and furiously stormed out of the kitchen before slamming the door.

  She would not relent and became more determined than ever. Each day there was a new scene. By the end of that summer Keith was transformed; he was now slim, tanned, attractive and playing tennis happily every day before going out to have fun with his new girlfriend. The rows were forgotten. Peter and I both looked on in awe and admiration.