by Jacky Hyams
Jeff hasn’t yet quite convinced me of his charms on this day of the aerobatic somersault. He’s an outrageous flirt around the electronics company where we both work and there’s an element of mystery around his existence that makes me initially wary (it will take several years before I learn to trust those first, crucial instincts).
He claims to live with a brother, somewhere in deepest Hertfordshire. The truth is he lives in sin in Pinner with a much older woman he’s been with for years. There’s also an illegitimate son and the boy’s mother, tucked away in Scotland, seen about once a year – a brief affair from Jeff’s national service days. Yet I don’t know about any of this when, a few months later, I willingly succumb to his persistent advances in the back of his Rover.
This relationship with Jeff, which continues until I learn the whole truth a couple of years later, brings my tally of boyfriends up to three. There’s Bryan, the on–off boyfriend, a racy, chubby advertising man I knew before leaving home in Dalston. I go to pubs, Indian or Chinese restaurants with Bryan and sleep with him, usually in his flat, albeit intermittently. And recently, I’ve regularly started to see Martin, a less dashing figure than the other two – a wiry, ambitious shop manager from Islington, a sharp dresser, almost a Mod, whom I mostly see on weekends for drives and trips to the cinema.
It sounds odd now, but our favourite drive is to get into Martin’s much-prized Mini and drive to Heathrow airport (people actually drove to airports then just to look at the planes, a popular family day out). Today’s traffic-clogged, hellish and unloved route from central London to Heathrow, the A4, was very different then, virtually empty and car-free. Sometimes we whizz down from central London to the airport in 20 minutes or so. No unending stream of planes taking off every 60 seconds at Heathrow then. Park outside, go into the quiet terminal, blissfully free of innumerable shopping opportunities and sit there, watching the BEA Comets and the Spantax Coronados. Without the crowds and bustle we know today, it is all quite… romantic. ‘I’m gonna be on one of those BOAC planes one day, when I go to live in the States,’ Martin says confidently. And he does just that a few years later.
I never do get too involved with Martin for some reason, though I admire his sparky determination to move his life along and not just accept what he’s been dished out. Our dates never go beyond the odd snogging session in the Mini. Who knows? Maybe he had another girl, maybe he hid his shyness or lack of sexual experience under his sharp-suited exterior.
Yet had anyone asked me back then, I’d have told them it was perfectly acceptable for a young single woman to go out with – and sleep with – as many men as she pleased, get drunk if she felt like it and treat life like an adventure, a quest for experience, rather than a single-minded march towards marriage and motherhood. After all, it was 1966, wasn’t it? Sex was now freely available. Thanks to the arrival of the contraceptive pill, women of all ages, single or married, no longer had to worry about the threat of unwanted pregnancy or men who couldn’t abide johnnies. (‘Like picking your nose with a boxing glove,’ as one wag described it.)
The ’60s, of course, are historically defined by the sexual revolution because once the pill was introduced (1961) and the laws on abortion changed (1967), sex became quite a different proposition, as women had real choice in such matters for the first time ever. All this sex revolution stuff was sweet music to my ears. Yet it was still a matter of time before those changes actually took effect in everyday lives: the reality across the land was not quite the way I was choosing to see it. Women’s take up of the pill in the ’60s was tiny: only one in ten were actually taking it by the end of the decade. If my conversations with girlfriends were anything to go by at that point, I was a little bit different to those I knew in being quite so generous with my favours. Some of us were bravely, blindly, diving into the freedom of choice or ‘love is free if you want it’ idea. But not half as many were going for it as one might imagine from the burble and hype around the sexual revolution and swinging London in the mid-1960s.
Today no one bats an eyelid at single women juggling lovers of either sex, having one night stands at whim or even opting for what are known, somewhat bleakly, as ‘fuck buddies’. This kind of thing was not really happening for the majority in the mid-1960s. Essentially, the sexual freedom hype, as purveyed by the newspapers of the time (let’s face it, it’s an eye-catching story, particularly when there are pictures of beautiful young women in tiny skirts to go with it), created a somewhat confusing picture of a wild, free-love society which, to a greater extent, was still the very opposite: it remained solidly class-bound and reticent in all matters sexual. Youth was going mad, but for now the older generation was having none of it.
Nonetheless, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. The influence of the maverick young leading the way, the Pied Pipers of the ’60s, is enormous: the Beatles, Stones, snappers David Bailey and Terence Donovan, models Jean Shrimpton, Celia Hammond and Twiggy, actors such as Michael Caine and Terry Stamp, and girls like Cathy McGowan, the Ready Steady Go presenter with her glossy long hair and dead straight fringe. Mostly (but not quite all) they are working class, yet they are positioned right at the heart of all the hype by dint of what they represent – youth, glamour, talent and beautiful role models for millions of youngsters.
Beyond the buzzy, happening centre of London – just a few square miles of tiny clubs, shops, an area running from posh, louche Chelsea, the King’s Road, the fabled, tiny Abingdon Road shop called Biba (which moves to Kensington High Street in 1965) and across to the West End and Soho – the swinging city runs out of steam. Out in the groovy live music venues in south-west London’s suburbs – the Bull’s Head at Barnes (jazz) or the Crawdaddy in the Station Hotel, Richmond (the bluesy launch pad for the Rolling Stones) – there had been a buzz going since the early ’60s. Yet way beyond, in the outer suburbs, the provincial cities or small towns, free love, long hair for men and dolly birds in micro minis are on their way – but have not yet arrived. Only by the time of the summer of love, 1967, the pivotal moment when the Beatles launched the groundbreaking Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and young people started piling in to cool, small, trendy venues in cities and towns like Canterbury, Bristol, Norwich, York and, of course, Liverpool, was the effect of it all to move right across the country, fuelled by the massive influence of the music and those making it – and of the powerful American hippie culture.
Yet at this point, real economic freedom, as we know it now, is still a long way away for ordinary, working class girls like me. Career options for professional women remain limited, even for the university-educated middle classes. Beyond shop, factory or office and secretarial work there is – what? Nursing, teaching and the civil service, of course. And for the educated women, academia. A few middle-class women venture into creative fields like advertising or journalism, yet the limitations don’t lift in the ’60s. Girls’ jobs remain more or less what you do before finding a man to marry, rather than the sometimes overblown career expectations of millions of young girls now, spurred on by fantastic dreams of instant stardom and lifelong riches.
I may be more rebellious in my thinking than the other girls I know of my age, some of whom are already married. In my case, however, I am a child of my times in that I am heavily influenced by the imagery and the printed word. Like so many others, I soak it all up. Because I have avoided further education and dived into the working world at 16, most of my ideas about life and sex come through devouring magazines like three-month-old US Cosmopolitans, eagerly purchased from Soho newsagents each month. (Britain’s Cosmo does not arrive until 1972.)
US Cosmo, with its bold editor, Helen Gurley Brown (best quote: ‘Bad girls go everywhere’), pushes forward the daring new belief that women can enjoy sex, pick and choose their partners – they don’t have to focus solely on marriage and motherhood to lead a fulfilled life. They can make themselves gorgeous – and follow their own career path. This, to me, makes perfect sense. All of it. I
already understand, by pure instinct, that the traditional path up the aisle isn’t going to suit me. Too restrictive, too mundane. Men? Yes, please. Sex? Ooh, yes. Marriage? Er… no thanks. Babies? Pass. Though it will be many years before the notion of career ambition starts to emerge for me.
Yet for all my defiance and media-led ideas about sexual freedom, I am still stuck with one thing: the men around me continue to retain all the power. Even at this mid-1960s point when the social change really begins to accelerate, the men are still setting the agenda of the chase. You can reject an offer, an advance, a date. But if you like someone, fancy them, you still have to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, summoning you. It’s a convention I profoundly resent, partly because I am terminally impatient but also because I see all this waiting as grossly unfair. My argument is: if you can phone me when you want, why can’t I phone you? Yet because such equality doesn’t yet exist and communication itself is so limited by today’s standards – phone, letter or a knock on the door – I’m still stuck with that wait, staring at the black Bakelite instrument, willing it to send out its shrill, exciting sound.
This limited communication also gives men the edge in terms of keeping you in the dark about what they are actually up to. It’s so much easier for them to be vague or non-committal. Or simply untruthful, which some ’60s men are if they’re juggling two ‘birds’ at a time. Unless they live or work near you, know your friends and family, how can you, living in the heart of the big city, know anything about what they’re really doing? No Facebook, Google or website to check someone out. No blog, no exchange of text messages or tweets, mobile phone lists. No email to whizz off a swift one-line retort or naughty come-on. Telegrams, delivered to your front door, usually by bike, are the only other means of fast communication. You can hardly send a telegram to a man: ‘HURRY UP AND RING ME, YOU BASTARD’. Or even: ‘WHAT’S GOING ON, IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS SINCE YOU CALLED’.
Voicing these things out loud when the call does come never seems to get you anywhere. Just more waffle, excuses and vague references to ‘work’. If a man you’re entangled with says they’re going ‘up north on business’ (a popular favourite in London, the frozen north being a remote place to be approached with considerable caution) for an unspecified period, you accept it. People simply could not go round checking up on each other’s behaviour the way they do now. So ’60s men, for all the historical hype about the era, got away with a lot that would be very difficult for them to get away with now. Unless you’re going steady or engaged, the unspoken rule is: they call, you can’t ring them.
Financially, too, they call the shots. Going Dutch or sharing the bill does not exist in traditional dating. The man pays for the drinks, the cinema seat, the meal, you drive there in his car – whatever needs to be paid for in cold cash is down to him. He’s doing the courting (unless he’s seriously mean, when it’s just a drive and maybe one or two drinks, if you’re lucky, in a local pub). The tradition of the man paying is reinforced by the fact that women earn much less than men and will continue to do so for a long time. Even in the rarer instances where there is some kind of equality of pay at work, you’re unlikely to find anything other than misogyny from the men in charge. ‘Equal pay, equal work, carry your own fucking typewriter’ was the mantra of one friend’s boss, an editor of a local newspaper when she joined the team as a youthful reporter.
You can, of course, invite a man round for a meal if you’re not living at home – the idea of the ‘dinner party’ is already starting to take hold now that growing affluence and full employment are virtually taken for granted – but for me this is hardly a thank-you or even an invitation to seduction. It’s more a way of expanding social horizons.
By now, I’m sharing a big flat in north-west London with three other girls where the rules of engagement with men are perpetuated. Our landlord had sensibly installed a coin-operated payphone inside the flat. After work it’s permanently engaged (without even any ‘call waiting’ to get someone off the line). All a smitten girl has for comfort is the unimpeachable, unbreakable parting male shot: ‘I’ll call you.’ Essentially, you are always waiting: at the dance (by now a club or disco) you wait for them to approach you. Then once they’ve escorted you home or you’ve been out with them – and decide you like them – you wait for the call. I’ve grown up with this, of course, but in my early twenties I still can’t quite accept it. Yet all this stratified behavioural code, had I only known it, was about to be turned upside down in less than a decade. More honest, open exchanges between the sexes were on their way.
The one thing the 20-something ’60s office girls have as their defence is their spending power on the latest fashionable gear. Traditional West End department stores like Swan and Edgar, Dickins & Jones and the new, fashionable chains like Neatawear go all out to tempt the young working spender with the very latest styles and fashions at prices aimed craftily at weekly pay packets. Temp secretaries, in particular, earn big sums working for an employment agency, moving around from office to office, if they’re prepared to put up with the hassle of switching around to strange faces and bosses every few weeks. Many dislike this idea, even with the lure of more money.
I earn around £12 a week. I manage to supplement that for the year or so when I work at the electronics company by handing out good leads that have come direct to me, the sales manager’s secretary, to a few select salesmen, getting £30 per sale in return. So I have plenty of cash to splash out on clothes, makeup and shoes. In fact, I blow the lot on clothes nearly every Friday when I receive my £9 (after deductions) pay packet, in exchange for my favourite styles: five guinea crepe dresses by Radley with wide trumpet sleeves or slinky, short, body-skimming shift dresses to go with tight, elasticated, white high boots from Dolcis, (£3 9 shillings and 11 pence) or killer pointy stilettos also costing a few pounds. What more does a girl need to get out there and attract?
Once the accounts girl has handed you the little brown envelope with the printed slip inside – no cash machines then or automatic salary transfers into a bank account, though 1966 saw the launch of the plastic revolution with the Barclaycard, the first credit card – away we all went at lunchtime, click-clicking down Oxford or Regent Street to a tiny Wallis (long relocated from its original home next to Oxford Circus tube, and still a popular chain to this day) or the bigger, pricier Fifth Avenue (long gone) on Regent Street or into one of the new boutiques for women popping up all around the hub of men’s trendy gear shopping: Carnaby Street.
There are ’60s labels I lust after like Tuffin and Foale (as spotted on Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go) and Cacharel from Paris. But they remain out of my price range, alas. Lured by the newspaper and Honey magazine hype, I venture to the famous Biba in its early days in Abingdon Road, off Kensington High Street one weekend. But the clothes in the packed little shop are far too tiny, cut too narrowly, too tight-sleeved and aimed at very lean King’s Road girls. The smocks and the dyed skinny vests are for the flat-chested, not for me.
Yet once I do find what suits me elsewhere, a swift wriggle into the new ultra-short op-art dress, zip it up, add a pair of pale tights, low-cut patent shoes and lo! Instant transformation into the siren I hoped to be, complete with super-thick false eyelashes or carefully painted-on lower lashes, (thanks, Twiggy) pink Max Factor lipstick, and a blonde, shoulder-length flick-up hairdo. And, of course, a small, quilted Chanel-style bag on a gold chain slung over the shoulder. The ’60s look.
Of course, we can’t all look like the high priestesses of classic mini-skirted ’60s blonde. Women such as Patti Boyd, Julie Christie, Catherine Deneuve or Bardot (my secret role models – talk about aiming high. In this at least I have real ambition). I’m not lean enough to be a classic dolly bird, though the slinky, short, patterned dresses in man-made slippery fabrics suit my curvy shape. With an unruly, curly brown mop I am very far from the requisite natural blonde with straight, shiny hair. Somehow, I’ve managed to transform myself into a yellowish peroxide blonde
, often with nasty dark roots. But the fashions of the time help: bad hair days can be disguised because all kinds of head gear and caps have become ultra-fashionable, especially the plastic pillbox hat, worn on the back of the head revealing only a dead straight fringe. Consider Mandy Rice Davies wearing such a hat outside the court in 1963 at the height of the Profumo affair. The hat covers a multitude of sins, if you’ll forgive the pun.
Look carefully at those ’60s photos of the commuters streaming down Waterloo Bridge to work or thronging Oxford Street or Piccadilly. You can’t see too many overweight people, can you? My colleagues and girlfriends are different shapes and sizes – yet hardly any are what could be described as glaringly obese. The post-war generation, reared on free milk and NHS sticky orange juice as toddlers, remain quite lean by today’s standards. Yet by today’s standards, we eat badly – our office girl lunches, purchased with luncheon vouchers, now obligatory for any employer wishing to attract office staff, consist of cheese or ham crispy white rolls, Smith’s crisps, Kit Kats, Lyon’s Maid choc-ices or the somewhat dubious three-course café lunches for 2 shillings and 6 pence (watery tinned soup, something vaguely resembling meat and chips, treacle pudding and sticky yellow custard). All this, of course, is way too starchy and fat-laden. We are mostly ignorant about what really constitutes a sensible, healthy diet.
I’ve been diving into adventurous foreign eating territory in Soho, with cheap Chinese dishes like sweet’n’sour pork around Chinatown and Shaftesbury Avenue, since my late teens. Or sampling poppadums and curried chicken in north London Indian restaurants on my nights out with Bryan. But young women probably stay slim-ish because there aren’t many fast food outlets around yet. Small workers’ cafés, run by cheerful, hard-working Italian immigrant families, are the norm at lunchtime in the West End or the City, alongside the fast-growing rash of Wimpy Bars and Golden Egg chains spreading everywhere. These would eventually destroy places such as Lyons Corner Houses, so beloved of our parents’ generation yet losing popularity all the time until their demise in the early 1970s. Pub food? This barely existed beyond the odd sandwich, scotch egg or ham roll. White bread only. (‘Don’t say brown, say Hovis’ ran the 1950s ads for wheatgerm bread, but most pub managers continued to ignore anything but soggy sliced white bread well into the 1970s – and beyond).
