by Jacky Hyams
It’s truth time. In the Clifton pub in St John’s Wood, he delivers his final bullet. Straight. ‘It’s Annette. She’s had enough of the way we’re living. And I have too. So we’re getting married. After Christmas. We want to make a go of it. I feel like I’ve known her all my life,’ he says, looking briefly at my face, then gulping his beer down in one swift movement.
I lose the plot, of course. He has never, ever lied. It’s me who couldn’t ever face the truth because I was always far too obsessed with getting to see him, be in his bed, to actually be able to stand back, view it all with a cool eye. I’m a ’70s version of a stupid stalker, living in a daft world of my own making, living only for the next time. Yet even then, I refuse to acknowledge what is real. ‘What do you mean? What, you won’t see me any more? Why? Why? I don’t believe you’re getting married! You’re just saying that to put me off!’ I yell at him. Then I burst into tears and make a headlong dive for the ladies. This can’t be happening. It can’t! I sit on the loo, sobbing my heart out.
When I emerge five minutes later, he’s gone. The car’s gone too. I totter back down Clifton Hill to the bedsit and cry most of the night. The next morning, I call in sick at work. I try ringing him the next day. The guys at work have been primed: ‘No, Frank’s out on a job.’ ‘No, he’s not coming in this week.’ ‘Frank? Are you sure you’ve got the right number, love?’ Then, unexpectedly, after I’ve called for the sixth or seventh time in a week, he picks up the phone.
‘Oh, sunshine. Meet me in the Kings and Keys,’ he sighs wearily. ‘I’ll get out around eight.’
I dress up to the nines, tight black velvet jeans, new Jeff Banks flowered blouse, my hopes high. Hopes of what? you might ask. A reprieve from my prison of obsession? A night with him – and then back to more obsessing, more phone calls until I get him? I wait. At 8.30 he strides into the pub. His face is like thunder. He’s sober too. His easygoing mood, a few hours back, has gone. ‘Come on,’ he says, yanking my arm. ‘We can’t talk here.’
Silently, we walk to his little MG, parked in a side street. I have no idea what is going to happen. It’s like a death walk. ‘Get in,’ he orders and settles at the wheel as I clamber in. But we’re going nowhere. He wants to read me the riot act away from the ears of his nosy colleagues. ‘If you don’t stop hounding me, you’re in real trouble, sunshine,’ he says, slowly and very deliberately. Frank’s good at menace. I know he means every word. But pathetically, I still try.
‘Why?’ I bleat. Why can’t we see each other? I know you’re not going to marry her!’
‘I’ve told you the truth to your face and you still don’t get it, do you? I’m a mug. I should’ve done it over the phone and saved myself the hassle. It’s over – can’t you get that into your stupid head, for fuck’s sake!’
I’m silent. Maybe if I shut up he’ll change his mind?
He looks at me, winces visibly – and leans across me to open the car door. Wide. His voice is low. But the menace remains. ‘Now get out. Go home. Don’t even think about ringing me any more. I swear, if you make any more phone calls, I’ll call your parents, tell them how you’re hounding me, calling me at the office all the time. We’re both sick of it, me and Annette.’
That’s a swift and very painful bullet. But it does the trick: the mention of her name, the shock of discovering he’s discussed my existence with her, let alone his threat to call up my parents, brings me to heel. I’m tearful now, out of his car, standing there in the narrow street, watching him drive off, back to his life with his fiancée, the life I’ve pretended to myself doesn’t really exist.
Today I could continue to stalk him, through social networks, text messages, internet trolling – all the means of communication we deploy now that allow the deluded or angry obsessive to hoard scraps of information about the pursued and to continue stalking their object of desire. Or hatred. But then, it wasn’t that easy: all I had was the phone – or the Annette flat in west London. Fortunately, I had no idea where that was. I could, of course, try his little flat at night – but that could prove either useless or even worse, if his car was outside and he was entertaining.
An obsession such as this cannot end quickly. Especially one so heavily weighted towards sex. For more than a fortnight, I stay in the bedsit, calling in sick at work, sleeping much of the time, just about managing to wander out to the shops for food, my hair unkempt, all interest in my appearance gone. Yet I do stop calling him, now that the pointlessness of it all has finally sunk in. My obsession with Frank fades away, in my mind, by increments. But it’s a very slow process. In time, it will be nudged out by circumstance, other events, new vistas. Yet it continues to haunt me for a long time, though I don’t try to contact him again.
The following year he marries. Some years after, they divorce and many years later, his own life in freefall, mine on an incline, we meet up, without a trace of any rancour on either side. Too much water under the bridge. But at that point in the bedsit, as I struggle with my feelings, wondering what drove me down such a crazy, intense path, I am unable to understand that knowing Frank has unwittingly nudged me towards a specific destination. An idea about working in a different kind of place that will, in time, change everything for me. For good.
CHAPTER TEN
THE CLOSED SHOP
The customs man at Gatwick is rifling through my suitcase. He looks bored. Maybe he’s thinking about his lunch break. We both know what he’s looking for. But I am one hundred per cent untroubled, completely guilt-free. On the other hand, my new friend Robert, with whom I’ve just spent an incredibly stoned few days in Santa Eulalia, has left me to my own devices as soon as we disembark from the plane carrying us from Ibiza. And I know why, though he’s not told me anything. Robert, a scrawny, dark-haired ‘straight freak’ (his Danish hippie friend’s description), a north London lad, recently married into an aristocratic family, is carrying something the customs man would love to find. Dressed for success, suit, tie, briefcase, Robert has already ambled straight through towards the exit. No one steps forward to stop him.
I grin broadly at the customs man, who knows I’m having a laugh at his expense. After all, he gets it all day, every day from returning Brit holidaymakers, tanned and impossibly pleased with themselves after their bargain jaunt to the Med.
‘See? Nothing but a load of dirty knickers,’ I quip, unable to resist the joke. Customs man ignores this, closes my case and stares back at me, taking in my mop of wild, brown curly hair, ankle-length turquoise wrapover cheesecloth dress, navy espadrilles and straw Ibiza basket looped over one shoulder.
‘Do you know where you’re goin’, love?’ he croaks.
‘Of course. I live here!’ I say brightly, picking up the case and heading out, secretly delighted that he’s mistaken me for some sort of wild, untamed hippie.
It’s 1974. I may have just had my third holiday that year on the hippie island and while there indulged in the traditional hippie ritual, getting stoned out of my mind on hash cookies. But I’m no dropout. Oh, no. My home is a shared flat in St John’s Wood (again) and I have a decent, well paid job. I’ve been there for two years now and have every intention of staying there. Stability, of a sort, has entered my life as a news desk secretary on a Fleet Street Sunday newspaper. Six weeks holiday a year and £40 a week, plus occasional overtime, gives me ample freedom to indulge my fantasy life as a wild hippie woman on a Mediterranean island, reading Camus (A Happy Death) on the deserted beach on the tiny island of Formentera and downing carajillo (coffee with brandy or rum) for breakfast, price 50 pesetas. In my own way, I am enjoying the Great British mid-’70s dream of so many ordinary people: the two-week sunshine jaunt to Spain has now become a status symbol, a must-have for the working person. Doing this twice, three times a year if I choose, is no longer a luxury. It’s a right.
Fleet Street newspapers, at that point in time, were enmeshed in worker’s rights. Decades later, after I’d left, I hailed a taxi that turned out to be driven by a chatty former newspaper pr
inter. It turned out he’d been working in Fleet Street around the same time as me. Permit me to sum up 1970s Fleet Street life in his words. ‘Let’s face it, luv – the editors were all pissed, the printers were all pissed, the reporters were pissed – everyone was pissed. I dunno how they ever got the papers out, to tell ya the truth.’
He was right. Nearly everyone around me in the newspaper world at this time was very thirsty indeed. A bottle of mineral water with lunch? Unheard of. Indeed, the ‘lunch hour’ was a flexible concept for many working in industries like newspapers and advertising, where entertaining and expense accounts ruled. Lunch was frequently a serious business, taking three or four hours out of the day, with an equivalent number of bottles of wine – or more – on the bill. There were no smartphones or gizmos to summon people back to the office or demand an instant response – only the pub landlord’s black Bakelite phone to yank the reluctant drinker back to the desk.
The hallmark of life on the news desk was the office camaraderie common to all news environments. Journalists feed off communication, challenge, gossip, repartee – and wit. It’s their stock in trade. Humour above all else, in all situations. Backed up, of course, by the endless yarns in the pub about who did what last night: the right job for a girl who loved partying, men, laughter and gossip.
As for getting the papers out, thanks to workers’ rights there were many times when the Fleet Street national newspapers didn’t even reach the British breakfast table at all. One paper didn’t appear for a whole year because of a union dispute. The union stoppages and strikes were not directly related to the drinking culture: they mirrored what was going on in many other industries across the country. Because the entire newspaper printing enterprise was then run not just by its often frustrated management but on the whim of militant and powerful trade unions in a manner that seems quite astonishing now.
Though walkouts and stoppages in all sorts of industries, often because of pay disputes, became part of Britain’s history in the early 1970s, it’s often overlooked that trade union militancy had featured in British life since the 1950s. But these later disputes affected so much. No post. No trains. No fuel. Dock strikes. Council workers strikes. Millions upon millions of pounds down the drain because of lost working days and productivity. And the newspaper business was caught up in all this: for many years it was accepted that the print unions ran certain Spanish practices (a very old phrase used to describe restrictive working practices, negotiated between the union and employers, yet very much in favour of the union employee).
One well-known ‘Spanish practice’ enabled Fleet Street printers to merely sign on for a night’s shift work (Mickey Mouse was a popular name used) then either go back home or down the pub. Money for nothing. Two paypackets. Week in, week out. A gravy train and far too cushy a way of life for any of the passengers to actually want to jump off. This all ended, of course, in the 1980s with Rupert Murdoch and the big Wapping dispute when thousands of print workers lost their jobs overnight. But until that time, newspapers remained very much a union-dominated enterprise. Their managements had no choice. Being hired in the first place was complex because everyone, whatever their role, needed membership of the relevant trade union before they could be employed. The closed shop policy was eventually outlawed in 1989, but until then it was equally difficult for union members to be sacked or dismissed by management once they were in. It was all down to the union might.
I’d been drawn into the idea of working on a Fleet Street paper because of my crazy obsession with a bad boy hack and his hard-drinking, access-all-areas lifestyle. I’d figured it was a fast-moving, stimulating sort of place where you’d have plenty of laughs (I was right about the laughs) and the idea of working at the beating heart of a national newspaper seemed vaguely glamorous. I was mistaken about the glamour.
To our eyes in the 21st century, the Fleet Street editorial office of the 1970s, where all the stories fit to print were generated, would look merely… drab. Shabby, scruffy, smoke-filled, strip-lit, vast, open-plan spaces with special areas for enormous newspaper files with wooden spines and handles. Huge metal desks with big spikes (a contraption for spearing unwanted copy). Battered old typewriters and ancient office equipment from the 1920s such the Banda (a primitive document duplicator) and the Lamson Paragon overhead pneumatic tube system, which carried paperwork and documents across the office. Elsewhere in the business world, office technology like photocopying machines already existed. But not here.
Even the reporters out on the road, phoning in urgent stories to their respective editorial teams, had to use an antiquarian, somewhat wasteful system. All their copy had to be dictated, word for word, comma for comma, down the line to telephone copy takers, seated in their own sectioned-off cubicles on the fringes of the newsroom. The copy takers would then type up the text and have it forwarded to the editorial sections around the building. I never got a chance to watch the all-important printing process itself, which took place in the bowels of the building. This was strictly off limits to the unauthorised, whatever their rank (more union rules). The demarcation lines of each and every job could not be crossed. Ever.
This was a mostly male domain, run by a fairly conservative group of editors and editorial managers, men in their forties and fifties. Their archaic world within a world carried its own unique characteristics (mostly thanks to the union rules) and, in the case of the paper I’d joined, there was an all-pervasive, powerful emphasis on maintaining the status quo. Once ensconced in a full-time staff job on a national newspaper, the editors, sub editors, reporters, feature writers and photographers had won their own comfortable berth on the gravy train. This included very generous expenses, reported to be the best in Fleet Street.
Journalists on staff could easily bank their salaries (which were also good) and live off the expenses (which tended to be part fiction, part truth) by writing ‘Ent. special contact: £20.’ And so on. On the Sunday Mirror, where I worked, the journalists’ union had negotiated a four-day week: hardly a rigorous working schedule for a paper that only really got going on a Thursday.
Yet this strange world, which initially seemed so odd to me after years of chopping and changing office environments, went on to hold an ongoing, profound attraction. Not because the office routine of taking dictation, typing letters or making coffee was any different – other than that you were typing lists of freelance payments, memos or story schedules for editorial conferences – but because the newspaper atmosphere oozed a very distinctive kind of professionalism and dedication to craft. Despite the unions, the boozing in the pubs and the scruffiness, there was also much pride in the paper’s success, a job extremely well done. Gravy train or otherwise, most of the editors, journalists, sub editors and photographers there had worked diligently to get onto a national newspaper. In journalism terms, once on the big Fleet Street national, they’d made it. Hence their very obvious pride in their craft.
The paper sold many millions. The company coffers were chokka with vast sums from their advertising revenues. Its readers, should they opt to turn up in reception, ring or write in, were always, without exception, treated with the utmost courtesy, even if they were nutters. (The nutters tended to write, usually on lined paper, in capital letters underlined in bright red ink with certain rude words cut out and pasted onto the letter from their newspaper of choice – and these were the more pleasant loonies.)
A news desk secretary was parked in front of a dark green metal console with half a dozen buttons linking up to the main switchboard, which would direct calls through to the desk as they came in. The job was primarily to use the phone, juggling or directing calls to the news editor or the reporters, passing on information from reporters out and about on stories – a central hub, if you like, of a vast inky enterprise. Secretaries on the paper, although their roles were mostly quite menial by today’s standards (editor’s secretaries got the confidential stuff, but they tended to keep themselves to themselves), were very much part of the general l
ively, jokey camaraderie – yet as females, we were also treated with an old-world courtesy, which came as something of a surprise.
What we’d now call sexual harassment – personal comments on your appearance, mostly – was part and parcel of working life in all offices in my twenties. You just dealt with it, no big deal. Sometimes it was fine: show me a woman who doesn’t welcome the attention of a compliment? As I’ve said, if you didn’t like it, you could deploy a sharp, cutting comment to stop it all in its tracks. If you moved offices as much as I did, you got used to the variations in attitude: secretaries in the 1970s were still either more or less ignored or treated primarily as objects of desire.
Even the advertisements that companies used to attract young women were worded in a way we’d find laughable, if unacceptable, now. Here’s a typical one: ‘A dolly required to brighten our lives. Must be gorgeous (or attractive will do), discreet, forgiving, with excellent shorthand typing skills. Salary? Well, ask us as much as you feel you’re worth.’ Today’s HR bosses would have a fit, wouldn’t they?
By the time I started at the newspaper in the summer of 1972, however, the moral climate had already started to shift and the feminist voice, questioning women’s identity and men’s behaviour, was already making itself heard, following the publication of Germaine Greer’s sensational book The Female Eunuch in 1971. Yet it wasn’t a strident war cry: the politically correct world – and the truly multi-cultural or diverse society – were still decades away.
People frequently hark back to the blatant sexism of the old, traditional newspaper world and of course it was what we’d regard now as a sexist environment – with a lot of effing and blinding thrown in. There were just two female journalists in the section I worked in – Viv, a much older woman (rumour had it she’d won the job as a result of a long-term affair with a long deceased executive) and June – a very bright, sassy younger woman, definitely going places. Yet somehow, in this place, the ‘I’m well aware you’re a woman’ attitude was a bit more sophisticated than I’d been used to: sexism dressed up with humour. And a veneer of respect.
