White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  The tiny room was crammed, top to bottom, with a chaotic jumble of packages – clothing, perfume bottles, plastic bags, parcels in shiny gift wrap, bottles of expensive body lotion, gift boxes of soaps, all clearly accumulated over the years. Virtually every surface of the cramped 10ft by 8ft bedroom was covered with the evidence of Raelene’s jackdaw instincts. It was obvious these were gifts from grateful admirers. A shrink would have had a field day with all this. Parcels, boxes, little packages are stuffed into every drawer or shelf in the landlord’s cheap wardrobe, all shoved in, willy-nilly, among her clothes, with yet further booty shoved underneath the bed. Still more stuff is strewn around on the floor, completely covering the thin carpeting, making it quite difficult to walk across without squashing a box or tripping over something.

  Only the little single bed remained visible to the eye as a sitting surface, yet this too had been commandeered as storage space, with several recently acquired gifts strewn over the threadbare, pink chenille bedspread. Everywhere I looked there was evidence of Raelene’s desirability: bottles of duty free spirits and liqueurs, packets of M&S tights (are some men that mean?), After Eights, Cadbury’s Milk Tray, bars of Toblerone, necklaces, costume jewellery clipped onto cardboard displays, long silk scarves of the hippie variety, hats, caps, slinky robes – a virtual Aladdin’s cave of Raelene’s trophies. It wouldn’t have surprised me if somewhere inside the clutter, you’d find books of Luncheon Vouchers. Didn’t south London madam Cynthia Payne take LVs from her elderly clients in the late ’70s? It was a pretty surreal sight. A Life of Grime hadn’t made it to our TV screens at that time. If it had, the producers would have been hot footing it to film Raelene’s Room, or Raelene’s Pit as one wag dubbed it later on.

  A week or so later after my reconnaissance of the Pit, I arrived home early one night to face yet more evidence of Raelene’s world. A strange man was sitting at the kitchen table, a half-finished cup of tea in front of him. He was bearded, wearing a black jacket and a white shirt. But he was in his somewhat capacious underpants: his black trousers were neatly folded over a kitchen chair. There was a little black skull cap on the back of his head. He nodded at me, a tad nervously, when I walked into the kitchen, but didn’t say a word. For a second, I was puzzled. Then I realised. He was a rabbi, a Jewish minister. I’m quite ignorant about many things about my own faith, but he was definitely a rabbi. I bounded up the stairs. Raelene was just exiting the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled. ‘What’s this rabbi bloke doing in the kitchen?’ (I wanted to say, ‘And why are his trousers hanging over the chair?’ but it was pretty obvious, really.)

  ‘Oh, he’s really nice,’ she cooed innocently. ‘I met him in Oxford Street. He’s so sweet. He gave me a box of lovely chocolates, so I invited him back for a cup of tea.’

  Logical really, isn’t it? Meet a rabbi on Oxford Street, he hands over choccies. Then you invite him home to remove his trousers? For choccies? Just as well I hadn’t got home earlier, to witness Raelene showing her gratitude by deploying what might have been a kitchen hand job, but was probably a blowjob. Over a cuppa. A Linda Lovelace moment. (Lovelace was the star of the famed oral sex movie, Deep Throat. Essentially a porn movie about a girl whose clitoris resides in her throat, the movie became a global phenomenon and arrived in the UK in 1973.)

  This was all very odd, but I was in no position to judge her. Like me, Raelene was a woman of the times we were living in, the sex-charged 1970s. She couldn’t get away with all this in her home town for sure, but given London’s relative anonymity, she could just do what she liked without censure. A censor of any kind in Blighty was out of a job by then. This was true of newspapers as well. Working on a tabloid, I didn’t pore over most of the copy I ran off for distribution in the newsroom (secretaries were not permitted to type up copy, as a result of the union’s power). In truth, I rarely even bothered to actually read the paper when it came out, which wasn’t unusual. ‘I just look at it to check my byline, gal,’ shrugged Jeff, a cheeky young reporter on the desk.

  Yet it was impossible not to be aware of the overtly sexual influences that millions were now regularly digesting with their morning cuppa. There was Chesty Morgan, the American stripper with the amazing 73-inch bust (incredibly, all her own, nothing to do with surgical enhancement). Then there was the huge press brouhaha and scandal around the big Marlo Brando movie, Last Tango in Paris, with its notorious scene in which Brando makes love to Maria Schneider and raids the fridge for butter as a lubricant for anal sex, causing morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse to demand the film be banned. (It wasn’t.) And people had flocked to see the infamous ‘was it real or were they acting?’ lovemaking scene with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in the movie Don’t Look Now. The former British reticence around matters sexual had gone for a Burton. The zeitgeist now was increasingly along the lines of Badfinger’s 1970 hit ‘Come and Get It’.

  It turned out Raelene also liked the shared experience. Not long after the rabbi incident, I pushed open the bathroom door after getting home and found Raelene and a skinny, long-haired American guy, splashing about in the bath, huge grins plastered all over their faces. ‘Oops, sorry,’ I said, already diving out of the door.

  ‘Hey, baby!’ he yelled behind me. ‘Come and join us. Get in. We can make a sandwich, honey!’

  Raelene giggled. Clearly, my flatmate really was up for anything any guy ordained. Orgy? Any time. Quick blowjob? Just give me a minute to finish my makeup.

  As time went on, there were more glimpses into Raelene’s habits. On Sundays, she’d dive out of the flat on two or three separate ‘dates’ with different men, returning home after an hour or two. A guy would ring our doorbell mid-afternoon and stand there, out on the pavement in Boundary Road, bristling with erotic expectation. Raelene, forever running late, would trip down the stairs, all smiles, skimpily dressed for the outing whatever the weather, greeting the lucky chap with a big ‘Hi’ and a hug. Yet it would be glaringly obvious that despite the warmth of her greeting, she’d never ever set eyes on this guy before. I might go in for one-nighters on a whim, but that’s really about it. No orgies for me, thanks.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

  Oh, he’s so smooth, this handsome older man: a shock of white hair, a dazzling smile, an old world, European, courtly manner. Wow. He’s impressive. Quite glamorous, really. His name is Georgi and he’s some sort of literary icon in his own country, a playwright, a man of letters. ‘You must come to meet me for a drink at Bush House,’ he tells me in his sexily accented English. Bush House was home of the BBC World Service. Yes, here’s my number. You bet.

  Meeting this man was no accident. It was a direct consequence of my Ibiza trips. In early 1974, in a tiny bar in trendy, hippie Santa Eulalia, with the haunting, atmospheric sound of Tubular Bells in the background and the evocative scent of wood smoke in the air, I met a Russian, a man originally from behind what was then known as the iron curtain. Anton was a defector from Communist Russia. A blond, dashing motorcycle champion, he’d been one of the privileged elite, a Russian who was actually permitted to travel outside the Soviet Union. Ordinary people were very much trapped by the tough Communist regime of those times – only trusted members of the elite, such as sportsmen and ballet dancers, were permitted to travel outside the USSR, as it was called then.

  Effectively, a 20-something Anton followed the example of Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet superstar who had defected in spectacular fashion from his native Russia while on a trip with the Kirov Ballet in 1961. In Paris, Anton declared his desire to swap Mother Russia and Communism for the West. The suspicious French thought his story was dodgy, that he was a Soviet spy. They threw him in prison for 18 months. Once released, he hot footed it to Munich and a job as a journalist on Radio Free Europe, a US-funded radio station which broadcast pro-West material to the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc countries.

  Yet Anton had wound up, a few years
later, as a part-time DJ in Ibiza. Why? He said he disliked the formal way of life in Germany. The climate in Munich didn’t suit him. Fluent in several languages, he was irresistibly drawn to the sun and the hedonistic hippie life as a DJ in Ibiza. Well, that was his story… I was intrigued by Anton, his tale and his yearning for his homeland, to which he could never return. It helped too that he was good-looking, with long blond hair and an athlete’s body. We had a short but sizzling affair, hence my three trips there in under a year, though by my last summer trip the sizzle had died down somewhat on both sides. At the time, I didn’t question his story. It was only later that I began to see that things might not have been quite the way he told them.

  Back home in London, and at Anton’s insistence after we’d first met, I phoned one of his friends from Radio Free Europe, a very glamorous American woman called Anne, who lived nearby in a Baker Street flat. Anne, a divorcee, had a managerial job in the radio station’s London office. Welcoming and friendly, delighted to have news of Anton (who I guessed might have been her lover too at some point), she immediately invited me round for drinks, introduced me to a couple of her other defector friends who also worked for Radio Free Europe.

  I met Oleg, a movie director, who had defected in London’s West End, walked into Savile Row police station and, unable to speak much English, let it be known by wild gestures that he sought refuge here. ‘My best memory of that time was how nice the policemen were,’ he told me. ‘They sat me down and gave me a cup of tea. That was when I knew I’d be OK.’

  Naturally, I was even more intrigued by all this. Yet the most fascinating of Anne’s defector chums was the courtly, white-haired man in his forties. He was from Communist Bulgaria. After meeting him at Anne’s place, I joined him at the BBC’s Bush House for lunch. A few weeks later, he invited me to his book-lined garden flat in south London where we wound up in bed, not that surprising given his devastatingly seductive European charm.

  A journalist working for the Bulgarian section of the World Service, Georgi had a story that was even more riveting than Anton’s. A leading writer in Bulgaria with impeccable credentials, he had initially defected in Bologna, Italy, where his brother lived. Then in 1969 he’d decided to come to Britain. Highly critical of the Communist regime in his native country, especially those at the top, he’d repeatedly made openly critical broadcasts to Bulgaria about all this via the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe. ‘I tell the truth about what happens there, so people can know who their leaders really are. But the leaders in Bulgaria are very angry about me. They want to kill me,’ he told me that day in south London.

  I thought it was all very dashing and exciting, this defector stuff – quite brave really, running in desperation into the arms of another country because your own was so awful. I’d grown up with stories about the Cold War. Stalin was a 1950s household word for repression and the miserable lives of people living in the countries behind the iron curtain. In 1956, the Hungarians had defied their Communist bosses and paid a terrible price, with thousands killed. And, of course, everyone knew about the British spies Burgess and McLean, privileged Brits who’d sold secrets – and their souls – to the Communists.

  Yet the idea that someone actually wanted to kill one of these fascinating men, none of whom seemed remotely spy-like to me, seemed so far-fetched, so beyond what I understood about such things other than from James Bond movies. Kill this man, now working at good old Auntie BBC? He was just trying to impress me, I thought afterwards. Who’d want to kill a journalist here in grimy old south London? It was bullshit, I decided. We spoke on the phone once or twice after that time, yet I never saw Georgi again.

  But Georgi wasn’t spinning me a yarn. Nor was he trying to impress me. It was all too true. A few years later, in 1978, the name Georgi Markov made headlines all over the world. Standing at a London bus stop en route to his job at Bush House, Georgi felt a sharp pain, like a sting, at the back of his thigh. He looked round to see a man bending down to pick up a dropped umbrella. Then the man jumped into a taxi and sped away.

  A few days later, Georgi died in a London hospital, leaving a widow and a small daughter. He had been poisoned. Traces of ricin, a deadly poison with no known antidote, had been lodged in a pin-sized metal pellet embedded in his calf. It is believed the tip of the umbrella being held by the man behind Georgi contained the deadly poison. It’s widely believed that the authorities in Bulgaria had wanted this journalist dead, silenced for ever, and that they’d found an assassin to do their deadly work. It turned out to be one of the most infamous episodes of the Cold War, and Georgi’s assassin has never been found.

  For all my tough East End talk and bravado, I knew very little of international politics. I was drawn to these defector people, innocently enough, because I was so curious about everyone, especially those who came from other countries. Yet it never occurred to me that their lives, once they’d run away from Communism and their own country, might have involved a certain amount of compromise, a trade-off of information in return for safety in the West. Espionage, in a way. Iron curtain defectors, then, often brought added value, as they call it now, because they had usually been privileged insiders in the Communist world. They weren’t really ordinary people. They’d had good connections in their homeland, so they were usually sought after by the US authorities. And it was the Americans who then funded Radio Free Europe, the station that had hired Ramon, Anne and Georgi.

  Moreover, as a friend pointed out to me some time later, I worked for a British national newspaper. I wasn’t a journalist, but I knew many journalists – and Anne, in particular, was exceptionally keen to meet my friends from the office, even inviting a few of them into her home. I took it all at face value, but later the big question was: had my innocent romance in Ibiza linked me to a chain of people who had traded East-West information? And was Anne’s friendship, seemingly so willingly given, actually a way of getting closer to people who might have been useful, like my hack pals? There are still no clear answers. And I never questioned people’s motives then.

  On reflection, though, Anton surely wasn’t quite what he said he was. Franco’s strict Fascist regime in Spain at that time meant the local police in Ibiza would have known exactly who he was and where he came from. On one occasion, wandering around Ibiza town together, we were stopped by a man in a suit who demanded to see my passport. Naturally, I wasn’t carrying it with me. Anton murmured to me that the man wanting my passport was a plainclothes policeman – and explained to the man, in Spanish, that the passport was at my hotel. The man said something curt and walked away.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked Anton.

  ‘He said this time it’s OK, but if it happens again, there’ll be trouble.’

  This baffled me at the time. Ibiza is a small island and the man obviously knew Anton: he didn’t ask for his papers. A while later, it occurred to me that Anton could easily have been working for the authorities there. He was perfectly placed for keeping an eye on the tourists and the many foreigners living and working there, many of whom were well to do and smoking lots of dope. Anton never touched or mentioned drugs. Yet I could never understand how he managed to run a car and a decent flat on a tiny, seasonal income as a DJ. He often said he was broke, but it still didn’t quite add up.

  By the end of that year of spies and Ibiza, my view of my life was changing. Even with breaks to the idyllic Mediterranean island, the novelty of my job, the working routine, was starting to lose its lustre, though there was no real reason for this other than my own habitual restlessness. On the news desk, Monty left to take his dream job as a racing correspondent. His replacement was Graham, a much quieter, more serious news editor, less prone to noisy, irreverent pronouncements. As his two hand maidens, the change in boss didn’t really affect Jenny and me. We were treated with the same courtesy, did the same things. Yet for some of the reporters it was a bit unsettling. Journos tend to view all changes of senior management with great suspicion and Monty had been very popu
lar: a hard act to follow. A few of the younger reporters on the desk were initially apprehensive about the change. The old hands took it all in their stride: they were safe in their jobs, thanks to the mighty union. But the younger ones were still finding their way, so they became unbelievably obsequious in their dealings with their new boss.

  Once he’d settled in, Graham moved some reporters to sit much closer to the news desk, which made the less favoured even more twitchy. Then he opted to have his own special little office constructed on the edge of the newsroom. This was followed by ordering a special humidifier to be placed by his desk. All this caused great consternation among the troops, though Graham did have a point: the lingering effect of cigarette smoke and a heating and ventilating system that didn’t work properly made for an unhealthy fug.

  Before long the office jokers had dubbed Graham’s new office the Bollock Box, because it was assumed that was where he’d take reporters to give them a dressing down, and the humidifier became the Humiliator.

  Technically, Jenny and I didn’t work for the reporters, so this wave of change and the very noticeable, almost feet-kissing reverence for the new boss made for much ribbing of our colleagues. ‘You’re a bunch of toadies,’ we chanted endlessly, exploiting any opportunity to send them up. The best moment came when Jenny devised her own implement of reporter torture – a wooden ruler with a big cut-out image of a speckled toad stuck on top.

  Jenny would wait until the reporter was summoned by Graham for a newsroom chat, position herself so that only the reporter could see her and then bob up and down briefly, flashing the toady board each time as the pair chatted. It worked like a charm. The reporters struggled every time to keep a straight face while talking story tactics with the boss. So good was the toady board that one reporter had to ask to be excused, dashing off to the loo to unleash his mirth.