More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  By the fifth form, June and I had come to view CFS less as a seat of learning and more as a stage for St Trinian’s-style pranks. Stink bombs were manufactured with sulphuric acid pinched from the chemistry room, chairs placed on ballcocks to create floods. We stole wet clay from the pottery class and pelted student teachers with it when their backs were turned. We justified this bad behaviour by claiming to be anarchists—and in a sense we were. There was a seam of chaos running through each of our lives. I went to bed every night on our living-room sofa and felt the lack of privacy far more keenly as a teenager than I had when I was small. Without a room of my own, I found it virtually impossible to bring friends home. I was ashamed, too, of the slum conditions in which we lived and frustrated that there was no sign of any change in our circumstances. June’s mum had left her in the care of a father with whom she constantly fought and with a young brother she was often expected to look after.

  In some ways, my father’s questioning, probing nature probably instilled in me the idea that rebellion was essentially a good thing. So it was somewhat ironic that I was rebelling in the one place where he wanted me to toe the line. The trouble was, I wasn’t always sure exactly what I was challenging. Like Brando’s character in The Wild One, if someone had asked me what I was rebelling against, I would probably have replied, ‘What have you got?’

  Perhaps the global atmosphere of unrest in 1968—the year of revolution—was another influence. In March an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, in the heart of Mayfair, degenerated into a fierce confrontation between demonstrators and police, resulting in 200 arrests. Then, in May, a student protest in Paris escalated into riots on a much bigger scale and led to a general strike involving half the French workforce that crippled the country. Soon students and workers everywhere, from Prague to Chicago to Mexico City, were taking to the streets. June and I felt frustrated that we weren’t old enough to join them.

  But we were on our own collision course with authority. One afternoon, as we made our way back to school after our lunch break, a couple of barrowboys from the market started throwing fruit at us. We fought back and a pitched battle ensued. The headmistress, hearing the commotion in the street, pulled us into her office and accused us of disgracing the school. Having delivered her dressing-down she allowed June to go but kept me back for another tirade. In an angry speech that seemed to sum up my whole school career, she berated me for wasting every opportunity I’d been offered. If I’d been bright enough to pass the Eleven-Plus, she said, I was bright enough to gain five O-Levels. After that, two A-Levels would see me into university. Moreover, the fact that I had won the Alleyn Award was a clear indication that if I worked hard I might get into Oxbridge. Didn’t I want my name on the board outside her office along with those of the cream of our old girls?

  Watching her as she continued in this vein, I became suddenly and acutely aware that there was more to this diatribe than a teacher lecturing a pupil. It was someone on the other side of the class divide reminding me of my place and of how lucky I was to be at her precious school. She expected respect but understood nothing about my home life and my situation.

  Insolent to the last, I said nothing.

  My silence was the final insult. ‘Go on. Get out of here and waste your life,’ she said. I turned for the door and as I grasped the handle, she added viciously: ‘You’ll probably be pregnant by the time you’re sixteen.’

  I turned and looked at her, outraged. Perhaps she thought I’d been flirting with the market boys but I decided against putting her right. If university meant more of this, more blind kowtowing to outdated traditions and heavy-handed authority, I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Soon a new interest began to eclipse my studies: pop music. I’d been a Beatles fan since the age of eleven, having screamed through their first two films—A Hard Day’s Night and, the following year, Help!—in the stalls of the Mile End Odeon. Now, as a teenager, I was going to real concerts with live acts. I was besotted by the Walker Bothers and Donovan. I was there when Jimi Hendrix accidentally set fire to his Afro while plucking his guitar strings with his teeth on stage at the Finsbury Park Astoria. I was suffering very badly from crushes on pop stars, probably because I had no access to real boys. Having spent five years at an all-girls’ school, I didn’t yet know a single boy of my own age. That omission, however, was about to be rectified.

  In the summer of 1968 I was asked to be bridesmaid at a neighbour’s wedding. For weeks I was caught up in the preparations for the big day, going off to fittings for a white satin dress with pink bolero top. I learned how to stand with a bouquet in my hand and bought a demi-hairpiece—half a head of long, straight hair stuck on a black velvet band. No one suspected it wasn’t my own, or so I believed. All of a sudden I found myself mixing with young adults and involved in social activities that felt much more grown-up than mucking about with my schoolmates. The bride and groom were in their late teens and after their marriage would be renting the flat above the groom’s mother’s. Having friends a few years older than myself with their own flat seemed incredibly sophisticated.

  At the wedding rehearsal I met the best man, a young friend of the groom. Martin was just eighteen, tall and lean with long legs like Clint Eastwood’s. He seemed just as shy around me as I was in his company, and we didn’t say much to each other then, but we continued to meet regularly at the newlyweds’ flat. We flirted, exchanging furtive glances across the room.

  I was nearly sixteen and for some time Aunt Carrie had been asking me, ‘When are you going to find yourself a nice boyfriend?’ It was a question my parents had never once put to me. As far as they were concerned, boys were still off limits. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for all that when you’ve finished studying,’ my father would say. So I had no intention of admitting to them that I had my eye on somebody.

  I hadn’t even gone on a date with Martin when he walked me home one night from our friends’ place and kissed me at the doorstep. Straight away I knew it was love.

  After that first kiss Martin and I started ‘going out’ together. Actually, we didn’t go out so much as stay in. Mostly we’d sit in his living room or bedroom playing records. The music of the time said it all. ‘It’s your thing—do what you wanna do. I can’t tell you who to sock it to,’ as the Isley Brothers put it.

  In the background Northern Ireland’s social and political issues, a constant source of debate in our Protestant-Catholic home, were simmering like a pressure cooker waiting to explode. In the spring of 1969 I was pleased to see twenty-one-year-old Bernadette Devlin—dubbed ‘Fidel Castro in a mini-skirt’ by some Protestants—become Britain’s youngest-ever woman MP when she was elected by Mid-Ulster on a ‘Unity’ ticket. But that summer the Battle of the Bogside would mark the start of the ‘Troubles’ and bring the British army to the streets of Northern Ireland. For my mother the matter was clear cut: she sided instinctively with the Catholic cause. My father, however, had a foot in both camps. The IRA were the rebels, and therefore deserving of his support, but in this instance it was his government they were rebelling against, which left him in a bit of a quandary. When it came to the personal versus the political, I was learning, things were not always as straightforward as they seemed.

  His primary concern in those years, however, was still the fate of the Royal Mint. Matters had been brought to a head by the government’s decision to introduce decimal currency in 1971. The changeover would require millions of new coins to be struck, and in 1967 their proposal to build a new facility at Llantrisant in South Wales was made public. The idea was to gradually phase out production at Tower Hill and transfer the entire Royal Mint to Wales—a plan that my father strongly opposed on behalf of the colleagues he represented.

  As the 1960s drew to a close my friends and I moved on from mini-skirts and tight boots to kaftans and sandals. I bought Indian bells to wear about my neck from a shop called Indiacraft in Tottenham Court Road and finally gave up on the straight
ening tongs: curls and frizz were fashionable now, and it was a relief to be able to leave my hair to do its own thing. I would wander around the Biba store in Kensington High Street, at that time an art-nouveau doll’s house filled with clothes, make-up and perfume. I badly wanted to be different and original but so did everyone else, which meant we all wandered around Biba and ended up looking very much the same.

  When Martin managed to get tickets for us to see Arthur Brown, whose single ‘Fire’ had become an alternative hit, I wore black, accessorised by my demi-hairpiece and plenty of startling dark eye shadow—the appropriate style of dress, I felt, for witnessing Arthur erupting on to the stage in his signature flaming metal helmet. Everyone knew about the incident that had taken place the year before at the Windsor Jazz Festival when methanol fuel, accidentally poured over Arthur’s head, had caught fire. Luckily, two members of the audience had doused the flames with whatever was to hand, which happened to be beer. Now we all waited with bated breath to see if the experience would be repeated. We were disappointed.

  Martin lived about a half a mile away from Lefevre Road. His parents were divorced and his Irish mother, Bridie, worked night shifts as a hospital receptionist. His flat was larger than ours so once she had left for the evening we had the space—and the freedom—to do things I couldn’t do at home, but it was all relatively innocent. Martin’s room was something to behold. The walls were lined with posters of Jimi Hendrix, T-Rex and Led Zeppelin, all bathed in the glow of a red light bulb. A stolen British Rail safety lamp sat in pride of place in a corner and on the ceiling were cutting-edge polystyrene tiles. We spent a long time looking up at them, smoking either designer cigarettes like Sobranie or Du Maurier or very weak joints that quite possibly contained henna rather than cannabis. We wouldn’t have known the difference.

  With his lean build and delicate features, Martin was in every way the antithesis of my father. He wore his curly hair like Bob Dylan’s on the cover of the Blonde on Blonde album, and was generous with his meagre wages as an apprentice with the Gas Board, buying me jewellery and bottles of Aqua Manda perfume which made me smell like an orange. He had left school after taking his O-Levels and found gas-fitting incredibly boring. His parents’ divorce was hard for him to accept and when we visited his father one afternoon, I could tell, just by the way Martin looked at him, how much he missed having his dad in his life.

  I began to see Martin most evenings and in time his flat came to feel more like home than mine. My parents didn’t approve of me going out so often, especially when I began staying out increasingly late. They wanted me to concentrate on my schoolwork. To my dad, education was everything. ‘You could work in a bank!’ he said enthusiastically, in an effort to inspire me. It was his idea of a respectable, steady job with prospects and a good pension but exactly how he envisaged it bringing fulfilment to him or to me I can’t imagine. His expectations of me were fierce but unfocused. My parents simply wanted a better life for me than the one they had, but while I was struggling to discover what I wanted for myself I felt constantly under pressure.

  I never actually told them where I was going or who I was seeing but, not surprisingly, they guessed there was a boy involved. When a neighbour told my mother she had seen a handsome young man walking me home one night, she didn’t sit me down to discuss sex or contraception. Instead she simply insisted point-blank that the relationship should end. To me this seemed unreasonable, so I ignored her edict, but from then on when I went to Martin’s I pretended to be visiting June.

  My best friend now seemed to come and go as she pleased with little parental supervision. She and her father had reached an accommodation: they just avoided each other. June appeared to be reacting to her mother’s absence by developing an eating disorder. Looking back, she displayed all the symptoms of anorexia, though at the time it wasn’t a word we’d ever heard.

  After six months, my mother backed off. Perhaps she was in denial about my relationship with Martin; perhaps she had decided to trust me to be sensible. My father, however, remained outraged about the late nights I kept.

  One evening when I was round at Martin’s there was a knock on the front door. Bridie was in, too, as it was her night off, and she opened it to find my mother on her doorstep, upset and pleading for me to come home. It transpired that she had argued with my father, who was blaming her for having no ‘proper control’. Bridie calmed her down, reassuring her that there was no cause for concern. She convinced my mother there was nothing to fear from her son. Martin was a good boy, she said. He and I were dating, it was all perfectly normal at our age and he would always walk me back to our flat.

  As I watched my mother walking off into the night, I felt sorry for her but at the same time I was angry and embarrassed that she had turned up on my boyfriend’s doorstep. I was keeping two lives separate and I wanted them to stay that way. I couldn’t see that any good would come from introducing Martin to my parents. I did not wish to hear their opinion of him because I knew they wouldn’t approve of him on principle. I would be taking my O-Levels in a few months’ time and it was expected that I would stay on, study for my A-Levels and then apply to a university. Any boy, whether it was Martin or somebody else, would only be regarded as a threat to that.

  But I had already made my decision. I wasn’t going to finish with Martin and I wasn’t going to pander to my headmistress. My name would never appear on the board outside her office because I was going to walk out straight after my exams and take a job. Any job.

  My parents were disappointed when they failed to persuade me to change my mind, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. I passed six O-Levels and left school almost to spite the headmistress and the system. I didn’t even bother to go in on the last day of term to say goodbye to my teachers. I felt fully justified in leaving them and their rigid, outmoded education behind me. I already knew more than they did. Or so I thought.

  Chapter Five

  Keeping Secrets

  June left school at the same time as I did—we had always planned to ‘bust out’ together. But, having made our grand gesture, our resolve dissipated and we mooched around for a month or so, claiming we were looking for a job. In truth we weren’t doing much to find one.

  Towards the end of the summer June’s father went off on holiday, taking her younger brother with him. She asked me if I would stay with her some nights to keep her company. My mother couldn’t see anything untoward in this: June was one of only two friends I had ever invited into our home, so she was a known quantity. She lived only five minutes away and I came back regularly, sometimes bringing her with me. To my parents it all seemed innocent but they didn’t know that June and I were helping ourselves to her father’s best Navy rum and playing music as loud as we could, Terry Reid’s gravelly blues voice booming ‘Stay with Me, Baby’ morning, noon and night.

  Martin would come round to June’s when he finished work. One night he stayed over and we slept together for the first time. We had been an item for over six months, there were no parents around and it just felt right, as if we were a grown-up couple sharing a ‘pad’ of our own. We should have used protection but we didn’t. We weren’t ignorant about contraception. I’d learned about sex at primary school: when we were nine my friend ‘Sticky’ Sickelmore had explained how babies came from ‘ladies’ virginias’. Some years later, further sex education at CFS had filled in any biological blanks. I was aware that I was at a stage of my menstrual cycle that wasn’t conducive to conception. Surely it wasn’t called the safe period for nothing? Being young and in love made us feel somehow inviolate, too. What could go wrong?

  I waved Martin off to work the next morning and went back to Lefevre Road. Was it possible, I wondered, that my parents could tell what I had done? I studied myself in the mirror. My face looked unchanged and yet everything was different. I was no longer a virgin.

  That evening I sat watching television with them. Nothing seemed amiss and nothing was said. No one knew. I was very rel
ieved. But when my next period was due, there was no sign of it. I confided in June and she told me that hers had stopped completely. I would later realise that this was probably because of her eating disorder, but neither of us understood that at the time. Mine had always been irregular so I told myself there were all sorts of reasons why I might be late.

  Any anxiety I may have had was completely eclipsed by some other news: finally, nineteen years after my parents first put their names on the council list, we were going to be rehoused. None of us could quite believe this until we were given a selection of flats to choose from. My father said he didn’t mind where we went as long as my mother and I were happy. We viewed one show home after another before opting for 23 Gullane House, an upper maisonette on a nearby estate. It boasted a kitchen at the front and a spacious sitting room with windows all along one wall. Upstairs was a double bedroom, store cupboard, separate toilet, bathroom and, most importantly, a second bedroom, complete with a built-in wardrobe. We gratefully took charge of the keys.

  The night before we moved in, I secretly took Martin to see my new home. Having recently ditched his Gas Board apprenticeship owing to terminal boredom and started work on a building site, he now considered himself a bit of an expert on house design and he wasn’t overly impressed. He didn’t much care for the convection heating system with its ugly vent into the sitting room or the rough plaster finish on the walls. I made noises of agreement but really I couldn’t have cared less. All that mattered to me was that, for the first time in my life, I had a room I could call my own.