White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  Wrong choice of words as usual.

  ‘I’ve never slept with him!’ Rosemary screams at the top of her voice. ‘I want to be with Mehmet, he really loves me!’

  ‘Oh yeah, and what about your kid!’ I screech in ghastly retort. ‘You’ve got a bloody kid – and no one knows she exists!’

  She stares at me, wild-eyed. For a nanosecond, I think she’s going thump me. But she doesn’t. Nonetheless, it’s an ugly verbal equivalent of a hideous, hair-tugging, rolling on the floor, girly catfight. ‘My parents have adopted her!’ she screams at the top of her voice. ‘And what about you? You’re on the pill! You sleep with anyone! I bet your mother would be pleased to hear that!’

  Sounds daft now, doesn’t it? But that’s how it was: illegitimacy, birth control for single women, multiple lovers – still a mark of shame according to a lot of people. Even in London in the spring of 1969.

  The little flat with its flimsy walls is now far too small for two young women who have reached such a nadir in their relationship that even one more night in the same room is too much. All that remains is sterile, chilly silence. Rosemary packs her bags immediately, rings a faithful slave in yet another flash car who drives her off to the station and a return to Surrey. I have a week left at the flat to contact the landlord, hand in our notice and find another place to live.

  In the space of just 24 hours, everything has unravelled. Amazingly, I’d held back for months from spilling the beans to Rosemary. But it’s not in my nature to keep my thoughts to myself permanently. As for Jeff, I should have followed my early instincts, at least made some attempt to protect myself emotionally. But while I was having such a good time with him, it was easier and far more exciting to focus on the more basic ones…

  Did this fiasco with Jeff harden my heart, help me wise up, make me more wary in my choices in the future? The truth is, it didn’t change anything at all. It sent me spiralling downward briefly. But not for long. Remember the yo-yo craze? The yo-yo was big in the early ’60s and even made a comeback in popularity in the 1980s. That best describes me as a 20-something: a human yo-yo. Down I’d go on the string, hitting the lows emotionally, usually over a romance, only to bounce back up again for the highs (the next romance), repeating exactly the same exercise again and again.

  My mum, Molly, once summed it up perfectly: ‘You’re a bouncing ball, Jack.’ Yes, there is some merit in refusing to stay down for too long. But, oh, what an emotionally seesawing time it is when you opt for a prolonged, protracted youth with only freedom as your beacon. Because at this point, my heady pursuit of sexual experience, momentary excitement and whatever else the changing times had to offer, was very far from running out of steam. Ahead of me were more detours and disasters, yet nothing would bring me to a halt. Even though I was constantly hurtling towards a destination I couldn’t name, searching for an identity I couldn’t define.

  I knew what I didn’t want: stability, respectability, leading a planned, ordinary but safe life with a steady, sensible man. These things were fine for other people. But I was in a changing world, living in the city right in the middle of it all, the happening place. Tears today – but an unknown tomorrow. The challenge of the unknown would always release me from any hurt, self-inflicted or otherwise.

  So I threw away my hairpiece, packed my bags and set off for uncharted territory, a female Dick Whittington without a compass. The enormous bouquet of red roses was left, unwrapped and ignored, by the dirty crockery on the side of the kitchen sink. I didn’t even trouble myself to chuck them in the bin.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE ’60S ARE OVER

  A large house on Islington’s Liverpool Road where a New Year’s Eve party is in full swing. People drift from room to room, voices increasingly louder, the sound of The Archies singing ‘Sugar Sugar’ almost drowned out by the burble of chatter, the intermittent outbreaks of loud, raucous laughter, the anticipation of Big Ben’s chime half an hour away. No one dances. Not yet.

  A faint odour of hashish mingles with the more powerful scent of patchouli oil, the exotic, musky late ’60s hippie smell. The hosts, a married couple – he an ad agency boss, she something in fashion – are an effusive, outgoing, late 20-something pair. Rumour has it he’s having it off with his secretary. And that she too has flirtatious, messy liaisons. Welcome to the dawn of the 1970s…

  I’m perched on a low, extremely uncomfortable orange chair from a shop called Habitat, wondering where Michael has suddenly vanished to. These are his friends, his advertising crowd from work. Big pine table in the kitchen, shag pile rugs, chrome and glass furniture in the living area. Even a sofa made out of dark leather. I have never seen furniture like this before, other than in photos in the posh Sunday supplements. I feel a bit out of my depth, mainly because I know no one here. Where is he?

  Michael is the love of my life. We’ve been together for several months, the first few living a deux in Highgate, wrapped up in each other to the exclusion of most of the world. He’s gentle, soulful and sensitive, a talented art director with an unhappy, long-term relationship behind him. Curly, unruly brown hair, piercing blue eyes. Michael often insists he’d be happier as a dreamy, itinerant hippie on Ibiza if he didn’t have to earn a living, pay his way in the world. He’s a guitarist, sings beautifully and serenades me with songs like ‘Lay Lady Lay’, the sexy Bob Dylan hit. He’s gently humorous – he teases me endearingly about my fixations, my onion-style upswept hairdos and see-through lacy outfits. He’s knowledgeable about art and classical music, in an unpretentious way.

  Michael is a new world for me. This is no frenetic, sexually charged headlong dive into pleasure with an experienced seducer. Love with this man means just that, a softly melting fusion, two people fitting together perfectly, lovingly, completely in synch. So familiar is he to my senses, it’s almost as if we’ve known each other before – in another life. Michael, for me, is a place of total harmony, blissful contentment. The rest of the world can go hang. Snuggling up to his long, lean shape each night, waking with his arms wrapped tightly round me, finding myself adrift in endless warmth and affection for the first time ever, I’m blissfully in love and it’s a two-way street. He tells me how he cares and shows me he adores me in a thousand ways. Not by lavishing me with expensive gifts or taking me to flash places. But by small, unexpected gestures – like leaving tiny, folded up love notes for me in my handbag. I still remember them: ‘Jacqui of a thousand delights. I’ll be at work when you wake up. But I’ll be thinking all day long about your soft, delicious skin…’

  He’d been born in Scotland but moved south with his parents as a toddler. We’d been introduced in a pub by a mutual friend, a copywriter who’d worked with him. At that point, I was temping in an extremely dull solicitor’s office off Rosebery Avenue. I’d quit the shoe firm just after leaving Circus Road and taken a series of dreary two-week temp bookings to keep going through the last summer of the ’60s.

  Moving from Circus Road that spring had been relatively painless. With the help of a friend of a friend who knew someone – I didn’t trust ads any more – I’d swiftly found a new place in the same area: up on the 20th floor of a brand new, high-rise council block in Abbey Road, a ten-minute walk from the zebra crossing where, that very summer, the Fab Four strode across the street, John leading the way in his beautiful white suit, as they crossed into musical history with their last album together.

  The Abbey Road block had more than a hundred flats of different sizes but I was in a one-bedder. Not a great idea. The tenant, Sheila, believed she could let out the bedroom to me (for a fiver a week) and sleep on the living-room couch. This was fine until her giant of a boyfriend, singing in the chorus of a West End show, came to stay each weekend and I couldn’t get into the bathroom in the mornings. It really wasn’t an ideal situation, though at least the view across London was spectacular. The novelty of newly built, high-rise living was quite a thrill for me – there was even a state of the art waste-disposal unit in the kitchen s
ink, a far cry from the smelly rubbish chute I’d lived with in my Dalston days – though at the time many people shunned and distrusted these new, high-rise council buildings. They didn’t exactly have a great reputation after the near-collapse, in 1968, of Ronan Point, a new 22-storey tower block in east London. Two people had died in a gas explosion there. One of my friends, Laurie – he of the ashtray-chucking – wouldn’t venture into the lift of my new place, let alone come up 22 floors. Yet within a couple of years he would buy his first flat on the top floor of… a high rise.

  I must have been there for about three months when I met Michael, by which time I had at last stopped thinking about Jeff’s betrayal and understood it for what it was: a hot affair with a Bad Boy. I never saw Jeff or Rosemary ever again. That chapter was closed for good. But at the same time I had decided to stay away from men and such entanglements for a while and to remain truly free in every way. Until that night in a crowded pub in Seven Dials in Covent Garden, surrounded by long-haired, young advertising art directors and copywriters in flowered shirts and fat kipper ties. We were drawn to each other immediately. Yet it wasn’t Michael’s sexual allure or charisma that created the instant magnetism, more a recognition that here was a kind, gentle, loving man, an artistic person, someone to be totally at ease with, learn from. Hours later, arms wrapped round each other, we left the heaving, packed pub and went off to his Highgate flat that first night – and that was it.

  I stopped temping. I just stayed in the flat, waiting for Michael to come home from work at night. There was, of course, no attempt at domesticity, playing the little woman. The flat was big and in a pretty, tree-lined road – but it was barely furnished and rundown. More mice in the kitchen, damp patches on the ceiling, a greedy gas meter you had to constantly feed with coins if you wanted to stay warm. Mostly, we’d go to the nearest pub for drinks (glasses of Mateus Rosé for me, Skol lager or brown ale for Michael) and sustenance (more cheese rolls). If I went into town to meet him from the office we would eat pasta in Soho dives like the Amalfi on Old Compton Street. It didn’t trouble me that I didn’t work, though it did seem to bother others. ‘But what will happen if you run out of money?’ one puzzled girlfriend asked me. I’d shrug. Michael earned good money and he wasn’t stingy. That bridge would be crossed if and when we came to it. Right now my sole responsibility was to be with him, 24/7.

  Molly and Ginger were frantic with worry when I rang from a phone box and told them I was living in Michael’s flat. About a week later, they even turned up at the front door – foolishly I’d given them the address to placate them, as there was no phone. They stood there in the draughty hallway – Ginger, portly in his immaculate, three-piece suit from Hector Powe, Molly equally smart in her Julius wool coat, virtually pleading with me to come back to Dalston. I was appalled that they’d do this, turning up to give way to their feelings. What did they think? I was a woman of 25, living with a man. So what? But for their generation, ‘living in sin’ was a no-no, one of many ridiculous conventions like expecting me to stay put at home, waiting for Mr Right to deliver me into a life of suburban conformity. I shouldn’t have been so open about it and told them what I was doing, of course. But I’d figured they’d just have to accept it. I knew my dad’s possessive attitude made life hellish for my mum sometimes. He’d been the one to drag her here. Quite a few girls I knew were in situations that earlier generations found socially unacceptable – and I had sometimes discussed these with Molly who hadn’t seemed particularly unnerved by my friends’ stories.

  Two of my single 20-something friends had gone off, on their own, to live abroad, one to the USA, another to work as a courier for a travel firm. Another girlfriend had a long-term, married boyfriend who was about to divorce his wife now that huge changes to the divorce laws were coming through. The 1969 Divorce Law Reform Act came into effect in 1971 and made it much easier for couples to divorce. It would change millions of lives and wipe out, once and for all, the lingering stigma around divorce that had persisted beyond the 1950s.

  ‘We’re your parents,’ said Ginger. ‘You’ve gotta respect us.’

  Then Molly started to weep. ‘What did we do to make you do this, Jac? Why?’

  Michael stood in the hallway, his arm protectively round me. But he said little. ‘Jacky’s fine here with me,’ he told them quietly. I was glad he didn’t try to intervene or take my dad on. Fortunately, there was a taxi waiting for my parents outside the house, its meter still running. Ginger no longer lived his bookie life of Riley, but had retained his loyalty to the black cab. I didn’t have to say ‘Piss off’, but there was nothing more they could say or do. They left, Molly still dabbing her eyes with her hanky. And no, I didn’t feel bad. Just angry that they’d done this. It had been a futile exercise.

  ‘You’re well out of that, Jacky,’ was Michael’s only comment as the cab drove off.

  I’d already told him everything about me, so he understood it all. Yet as romantic as it all was, just the two of us, eventually the real world crept in. Michael was offered a new job with heaps more money than he was earning. The drawback was that it was in Holland. The Dutch were dead keen to recruit art directors from trendy London agencies but only a few people were prepared to leave the swinging city, so the Dutch had to up the ante. But my initial dismay at this news didn’t last for long: there was a middle way. ‘I’ll fly back every Friday and we can have weekends together,’ Michael assured me. ‘The only problem is, we have to get out of the flat. The landlady wants it back for her son.’

  So that was how I went back to temping for Office Overload (at 12 shillings an hour) and moved yet again, this time into a small ground-floor bedsit in Woodland Gardens, off the long Muswell Hill Road, priced at £6 a week, with a bathroom to myself on the landing. It seemed like a good solution: we’d split the rent, I’d get my privacy again and we’d have all our weekends together. Yet the very first weekend he came back, Michael told me he didn’t like the new job. The people he was working with were cold, unfriendly. He missed me, he missed London and they wanted him to work late sometimes on Fridays – meaning he wouldn’t always be able to get the last flight into London. So our perfect weekends together – staying mostly in bed, listening to Astrud Gilberto’s 1965 album Look for the Rainbow on Michael’s portable player, eating tinned Campbell’s soup heated on the tiny gas ring, going for the occasional walk in Highgate Woods – were sometimes cancelled at the eleventh hour. Thankfully, he’d got a week’s holiday off after Christmas. At least we’d be seeing in 1970 together, I thought. Yet in the same way that all the optimism and bright energy of the ’60s somehow faded with the onset of the darker, grimmer ’70s, so my love affair changed direction that very New Year’s Eve.

  As midnight approaches the Islington party is more crowded, more raucous. But where is Michael? I wander into every room, look upstairs, but all I find are laughing, joking, well-oiled or stoned revellers and a kitchen strewn with empty bottles of Pale Ale and Babycham, the usual mad crush you find at any packed New Year’s bash. The front door to the house is wide open. I step outside and there he is. My love is sitting there on the cold, cold grass, crying, his tie askew, his new corduroy jacket crumpled, pink shirt unbuttoned and half hanging out of his trousers. He is sobbing his heart out, his head in his hands. What’s going on? I run over, throw my arms round him, desperate to comfort him. I’ve never seen him like this before.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mike? What’s happened? Tell me what’s wrong!’ I plead.

  Michael merely pushes me away. Then he looks at me, the tears still trickling down his face and I realise I’m looking at a totally different person. He now looks quite wild-eyed and deranged. In fact, he’s looking at me as if I’m a hateful stranger. ‘You! You knew! You knew they were laughing at me! They hate me! Every one of them hates me!’

  What is all this about? I have no idea what is happening. He was fine when we got here about an hour or so back. What’s changed? In all the time we’ve spent together, I’ve ne
ver once seen Michael get angry, lose his temper or shout. In fact it’s one of the things I love about him. I know he’s quite shy around other people – he’s told me that many times. This is the first time we’ve even gone to a party together. But who is this person ranting and raving before me? And why would anyone hate him? Yet before I can say another word, he’s gone. He’s running away, a dishevelled figure flying down the Essex Road, out into the night. I stand there, rooted to the spot. I really don’t know what to do. I’m totally bewildered. Stunned. Part of me wants to go after him, the other thinks it’s best to stay put, try and make sense of it all. But there is no sense to any of this. Something is very, very wrong with Michael and I have no idea what it is or how to reach out to him, help him. I go inside, don my long black maxi coat, pick up my shoulder bag and hastily say farewell to my hosts, who are now oblivious to everything but the heady, sweaty momentum of their party.

  At the stroke of midnight, the dawn of 1970, I’m on the street, trying to hail a cab. Impossible. I wait, I walk and eventually, after about half an hour, a cab drops a noisy group off and I head for Muswell Hill, hoping he’ll be there to greet me. He’s not there. I lie wide awake for hours but he doesn’t come back. I finally doze off at about 6 am. His things are here, I tell myself repeatedly. He has to come back. Later, I open his small suitcase. Inside are clothes, neatly folded, nothing more. His cash, tickets and passport must have been in his jacket pocket.

  1 January, New Year’s Day. The first day of the New Year wouldn’t be an official bank holiday until 1974, so back then if it fell in the working week you were supposed to turn up for work. I’ve already told the agency I’ll be off that day, so I wait all day in the bedsit – but nothing. There is no one I can ring, nothing I can do. About 4 pm, a tap on the door. It’s the landlady, Marjorie, the 50-something witch who lives in the basement flat and rents out the rooms. There’s a call box in the house, but it’s directly outside her flat downstairs, so you never hear the phone if it rings. ‘A man called Michael rang for you. He said to tell you he’s gone back to Holland and he’ll pick up his things next time he comes over.’