by Jacky Hyams
The extent of Ginger’s borrowing remained undetected. Because he regularly operated an agreed overdraft facility with the bank, it was relatively easy to go back to his friend, the manager, and up the ante, borrow more. And because he and he alone operated the till of the shop – he had never quite trusted his counter clerk, Charley Riley, and his business partner didn’t even come to the shop very often – no one could have a clue as to what was going on. Months passed and the debt was mounting. Yet everything went on as usual, my dad flashing wads of cash in the pub, downing double scotches and shouting doubles for all every night, still assuring my mum that we were living on ‘the finest and the best’. No one knew a thing.
CHAPTER 26
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
Office jobs in the West End were so easy to find and with my first year’s experience under my belt, I could job hop with incredible ease. After a less-than-stimulating stint temping (the attraction of temping ended when the agency sent me for a soul-destroying fortnight at a big typing pool in Portman Square, akin to being on the production line of a factory, or worse, being back at college under the vengeful eye of Sister Brigid), I found it ridiculously simple to get a new job, sample it, leave after a few months of dictation and boredom and walk straight into another, usually via an employment agency. The agencies had so many shorthand/typing and clerical jobs to fill that it was a breeze for them to find work for virtually anyone with a bit of experience who came walking through the door. If you had decent speeds plus one good reference, that was plenty.
Sometimes you’d go for two or three interviews and wind up being offered every job. As a result, I was extremely casual about the whole idea of working. I’d grown up in a world of ‘live for now’ at home and was spending every penny I earned. Unlike many other East-End teenagers out at work, I was under no obligation to hand over a pound or two to pay my way at home. So seeking some sort of permanence or continuity at work just didn’t come into the equation.
It was all far too easy. A job interview usually went along these lines:
‘So … I see, Miss … er … Hyams, you can do Pitman shorthand and type at forty words a minute?’
‘Yes I can.’
‘Well, we certainly need someone like you to do our letters. We get a lot of correspondence and Mister so-and-So needs all the help he can get.
‘When are you available?’
‘I could start next Monday.’
‘OK, next Monday it is. 9am sharp.’
This kind of ‘speed hiring’ sounds incredible now when three, even four interviews are not unknown for certain types of jobs. But there’s a lot to be said for a world of full employment: the knowledge that another job is yours for the asking makes for a more confident worker, albeit a somewhat fickle one. And overall, office standards weren’t that exacting: I was literate, could spell and did the work quickly. Often, the bosses giving you the dictation or handwritten letters had poor verbal or literary skills; you’d wind up discreetly correcting them on paper. And often, a secretary or typist was only there to boost their executive status. Frequently, you’d sit all day with absolutely nothing to do. The bosses didn’t exactly run around tearing their hair out: it was, in office terms at least, definitely a more leisured era. Or maybe I just chose places that were a soft option.
I worked for an engineering association (as uninspiring as it sounds), a theatrical agent (too quiet: like the agent’s clients, I sat there, waiting for something to happen but being paid; the ever-diminishing list of clients must have starved), a film distributor (interesting, at last, but long four-hour industry lunches made for tricky afternoons when my boss came back totally wrecked or the MD got amorous), and a fat, camel-coated, cigar-chomping Soho entrepreneur whose main income came from flogging cost-price table lighters and whose enterprise was run by a tiny, domineering woman called ‘Hillie’ – my first female boss and definitely not a feminist.
My key criteria for choosing a job was simple: the office had to be in the ‘right’ part of the West End, close to the 38 bus route and ideally in the streets around Soho and Piccadilly, which included a bit of Mayfair.
Soho, for Lolly, me, and a few like-minded Hackney girls we teamed up with, was the epicentre of our social world. Soho had all the places where we wanted to hang out: coffee bars like Les Enfants Terribles on the corner of Dean Street and Diadem Court and La Bastille on Wardour Street. These places had tiny basement dives, part of a growing number of small, smoky basement clubs like St Annes (near the church in Wardour Street) where you could have soft drinks and dance to records from the jukebox.
The overwhelming attraction of these places, of course, was the clientele: glamorous, dark-eyed, handsome young French or Italian boys, here ostensibly to learn the lingo, or work in the burgeoning catering trade – but primarily hoping to lighten the gloom of a greyer, colder clime by copping off with compliant young ‘Eeenglish’ girls.
The French were mainly bourgeois students with parents subsidising their studies. The Italians were mostly in London to work, complete with a work permit (back in those pre-EU days you couldn’t get into the country without the right papers) that gave them a lower-ranking job in the posh hotels like The Savoy, enabling them to send most of the money back to their impoverished families.
Les Enfants was an early favourite. It was open in the day, and we could go there straight from work and on weekend afternoons when the best-looking Italian waiters were having their afternoon break before starting their evening’s tasks.
These stunning-looking charmers with fractured English were infinitely more attractive to us than the local Stamford Hill boys in their baggy jumpers which had been knitted by their mums – think fried egg ‘n’ chips versus a tasty bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Amongst our peers we were seen as a bit daring in rejecting our own ‘manor’; as I’ve said, it was pretty much expected we’d pair off with one of our own kind. But in wanting to be ‘up West’ all the time, we were only following a pattern: living just a few miles from the centre, our families too had frequently stepped out there on special occasions as we were growing up, or taken us there on kiddie outings. (Molly already had a serious West End shopping habit going back to her wartime years selling underwear in Oxford Street.)
But there was a cultural shift going on too, something that started to emerge in those afternoons jiving at Les Enfants: a growing awareness of a certain kind of Eurocool. For kids like us, anything French or Italian – movies, fashion, as well as young men – was desirable, exotic, the youth more slickly costumed than the duller post-war Brit version. They may have been skint Italian waiters but the Latin passion for ‘la bella figura’ meant that many looked more like movie stars.
The swinging sixties, the miniskirted, long-haired, thigh-booted fashion and music explosion, when London became the global focus of cool, was still a few years away. Before that, the only really snazzy dressers in London, apart from the sharp-suited Mod boys, tended to be from across the Channel – and the only shoes worth buying were Italian. In Paris, straight-haired, full-fringed girls had been wearing skinny cotton pants, ballerina shoes and black T-shirts or polo necks à la Bardot since the late fifties. By now, we were aping the latest European looks, sporting bouffant hairdos, sleeping in rollers, backcombing and lacquering like crazy. But we didn’t, couldn’t, look quite as cool as they did.
We were East-End kids from a tough post-war environment. Yet being able to work around Soho meant there were no barriers to this, our further education: we could easily absorb and soak up some of the culture around us. Alongside our obsession with French Elle magazine, small groups of us went to see Ella Fitzgerald sing live, had our first-ever Chinese meal for five shillings in Shaftesbury Avenue, enjoyed Italian subtitled movies like La Dolce Vita, Rocco and his Brothers or Pasolini’s unfathomable Accattone at the Academy, Oxford Street, jived to Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’ and ‘Hit the Road Jack’ at La Poubelle in Great Marlborough Street, or smooched up close with fanciable you
ng Italian waiters to the strains of ‘Georgia on my Mind’.
Soho has always been a melting pot of cultures, and a hub for the sex trade. Yet it didn’t feel threatening in any way; there was no sense of danger or menace wandering around those streets after work when we’d finished primping and preening in the plush ladies’ loos of one of the big West End department stores, clicking down the stairs to the basement dives in our stilettos, atizz with anticipation, or heading to the Marquee Club on Oxford Street on jazz nights. The fact that many of our dancing partners spoke very little English only added to the excitement. In our small way, we were living dangerously, differently: it was all new – and therefore thrilling.
When the music stopped, we’d totter down Wardour Street to the number 38 bus stop, sometimes accompanied by one or two eager suitors. Occasionally they’d steal the odd brief kiss at the bus stop. But that was it: these boys lived in shared digs, two, even three to a room, so there was no likelihood of them trying to lure us back to their place. Even someone living solo in a bedsit was unlikely to risk incurring their landlady’s wrath by bringing girls home. But if we did want to make a hasty escape, we’d occasionally splash out on a black cab back to Hackney, priced at eight shillings and ninepence.
That’s if we didn’t spot Lolly’s dad, with his light on, going down Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘Aargh, geddin you two and I’ll bleedin’ well get you ‘ome in a flash,’ Monty would say. And he did.
The summer of ‘62 sent Lolly and I on our first-ever package holiday: two weeks in the Italian Riviera at Diano Marina. We took our first-time flight to Nice, uneventful enough and an improvement on the lengthy cross-Channel ferry journey, and after a wait of several hours, a coach took us, via the dazzling and scarily winding corniche, across the border at Ventimiglia into Italy.
The resort was OK but a bit scrubby and disappointing. We’d expected it all to be a lot more exotic and mysterious, palm-fringed white sands and blisteringly hot days and nights. What we got was quite different: a series of concrete buildings, some quite new, a fairly narrow, crowded beach and our somewhat dreary hotel, catering mainly to package-tour Brits and a long long walk from the centre of Diano with its more interesting looking outdoor cafés and, hopefully, boy action. Who knew that Italian beaches were so regulated, and that you had to pay to use them? The weather, even in August, wasn’t particularly hot or sunny. But we donned our striped swimsuits, as seen in French Elle (as usual, we bought exactly the same item in different colours) to splash around in the water, and plonked ourselves on our paid-for deckchairs: children, really, playing a grown-up game.
After a couple of days I am sporting huge mozzie bites on my arms and legs, which itch furiously. Yet nothing can dim our enthusiasm for actually being here, in Italy, the ultimate location in our quest for Good Boy Hunting. We even venture into a hairdressers and point and gesture to indicate what we want. When we emerge, the result, we agree, is far better than the somewhat floppy bouffant achieved in our local salon at home: this version is bouncier, higher, sleeker. Italian.
We quickly develop a routine: up late, trundle down to the beach by day, back to the hotel for the evening meal, usually a sparse plate of spaghetti with watery sauce or vegetables with a tiny bit of fish or chicken, followed by a big tarting-up and heavy backcombing session in the room before hitting the streets of Diano, heading for the coffee bars in town, wishing and hoping …
Our parents would have been horrified at our modus operandi; my dad would have had a heart attack had he known. Because what we are doing, quite deliberately, is nothing more than casually picking up, night after night, a series of different Italian boys who are hanging around, eager to make contact with pretty young foreign girls, chancing it, though our aspirations are going in different directions to theirs. We are still pristine, virginal, yearning for passion, romance of a sort with a glamorous local; they are hoping for a lot more action, even the Full Monty, than they’d expect to achieve with their own girls.
And yet … nothing bad happens. Incredibly, we are only too happy to jump into cars with total strangers, be driven around – even then, Italians adored their cars and showing off their country – and, in exchange for our company and the odd snogging session we conduct our own version of meet the locals, see the sights. It never gets out of control. No one tries to rape us, drive us off into heaven knows where to have their way with us. There’s no booze, no drugs, no coercion.
Almost every night we meet another pair of boys, have a different kind of adventure, driving around the Ligurian coast, revelling in the delight and novelty of being young and carefree on warm summer nights in the Med; it’s a new kind of hedonism for us, light years away from what we know in Hackney. A few of these boys speak some English but mostly we have to deploy our shaky French and the odd Italian word we’ve picked up along the way to communicate. We laugh a lot, muck around, tease and are teased; yet it’s a bad night if we don’t find ourselves, still laughing, being driven back to our hotel at an ungodly hour, waking up the stroppy porter, saying farewell to our latest conquests, whom we never see again. And we have a long-standing pact that we stick together, don’t split up. This pact is what probably keeps it all safe.
Yet there are dangers involved in this game, beyond the sexual. We really don’t know who these guys are that we are so happily picking up. How could we? We have no real knowledge or experience of Italy, other than a few blokes encountered in a Soho coffee bar, chosen for their sleek looks. We know Italians are still regarded warily back home.
‘Eyetie quislings,’ Ginger would sneer. ‘Too scared to fight and didn’t know which way to run when it got bad.’
‘Bloody Fascists,’ was cabbie Monty’s view of the Italian race. ‘Sucked up to ‘itler and paid the price.’
We’d been hearing this stuff since we were kids. Yet Italy’s wartime record didn’t deter us one whit; it was ancient history, anyway. But one significant event made it clear that in our innocence, we were, in fact, playing with fire. Literally.
Tonight’s two pick-ups are a bit older, early twenties. Normally, one tends to be more fanciable than the other. (The unfanciable one usually has better English, for some mysterious reason.) But tonight’s duo, encountered in a crowded outdoor café, are both equally alluring, one quite blond, one dark haired: bandbox fresh white shirts, perfectly laundered by their loving mamma’s hand, neatly pressed narrow cotton trousers, beautifully tanned, white teethed: we adore the way they look. And their English isn’t bad.
‘Why Engleesh girls so beautiful?’ jokes Mr Blond.
‘Cos English boys so ugly,’ we quip back, happily accepting their offer of a drive around.
It goes on like this, in their car, for a couple of hours, Mr Blond driving, occasionally throwing one liners or longing glances at me, seated in the front (we’re both in love with him, really) while the dark one, who obviously lives in the area and knows it intimately, directs him to a local beauty spot, some miles along the coast.
We are parked. It’s about 1am and if it’s romance you hanker for, you cannot fault this setting: a million stars twinkling in the sky above (a revelation to inner-city kids; we’ve never seen a sky like this), the glittering reflection of moon on the calm blue waters of the Med, the tranquillity of the soft, balmy air. There’s a brief but heady silence. The dark-haired one puts his arm around Lolly. Mr Blond switches off the engine, smiles meltingly. Then, without knowing why, because I have never done this and am rarely inside a car, I reach out before me and open the glove compartment. And I cannot quite believe what I see inside the box.
It’s a gun. A small, black handgun.
I stare at it in utter disbelief. At first, my words won’t even come out. Lolly, peering behind me, sees the gun too. She too is terrified, scared to speak.
‘What’s a GUN doing there?’ I finally manage, stupidly. What I should have done, for once in my life, was close the glove compartment and shut up.
But it’s Mr Blond who
leans across me and gently closes the glove compartment. He says nothing. The dark one pulls Lolly close and strokes her hair, murmuring something in Italian.
Unbelievably, Mr Blond is smiling at me, a sort of rueful, but forgiving look.
‘Why a gun?’ I try again (I always was one for pushing my luck).
He shrugs.
‘Cosa vuoi?’ Non è niente.’
Lolly and I know, roughly, this means ‘Whaddya want, it’s nothing.’
A gun? Nothing? What constitutes ‘something’ in Italy – a Cruise missile?
But the entire spell of the romantic moonlit setting, of course, is well and truly broken. Whatever intentions they might have had to woo us, they’ve been dashed by my reckless curiosity. Mr Blond makes an executive decision. He revs up the car and whoosh, we’re off on a long, nervily silent drive back to our hotel for forty minutes, which seems like hours.
At one point, I pretend to fall asleep, nodding off, figuring this is a safe course of action. The dark haired one keeps his arm around Lolly, but makes no more attempts to kiss or nuzzle her. Later, Lolly tells me that she is so scared, all she can think of is what Monty would say, language unprintable, if he knew we’d stepped out with two guys with a gun in their glovebox.
‘Ciao Jakka,’ Mr Blond says as we stumble out of the car, relieved and thankful to reach the hotel door. Then, with a screech of brakes, they’re gone, off into the soft, balmy Ligurian night.
In our room, we giggle about it as we throw off our shoes, undress and climb into our respective beds.
‘Trust you, Hyams, to be nosey,’ Lolly admonishes me.
‘Yeah but who thinks they’re gonna find a GUN in there?’
Within minutes, we are sound asleep. Our brush with the unknown, a lethal weapon, does not distress us. The next day, we don’t even go through a ‘What if’ conversation about it over breakfast. It’s just something else to laugh or joke about later on.
