White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  Underneath all this there is an ongoing confusion in my mind. I hunger for a next step, yet I can see no way of changing things. I definitely don’t want to quit Fleet Street and find a new job in London. That, to me, seems pointless. In an attempt to clear the decks, as it were, I finally come clean with James that autumn. I haven’t seen him for weeks or slept with him for months. In the Printer’s Pie, we have what he clearly hopes is some sort of reunion. ‘Look, I’m seeing someone else,’ I blurt out, after he’s ordered his usual steak and kidney pie. I needed three glasses of Hirondelle under my belt.

  ‘I bet he’s a journalist. And he’s married,’ James says quietly. How well he knows the environment I work in. Then, to my horror, I realise there are tears in his eyes. ‘I loved you,’ he says stupidly. Then, in a very James-type gesture, he takes out a clean white hanky, sniffs into it and then wipes the moisture off his face, regaining some composure.

  Oh, no. What a horrible selfish cow. I shouldn’t have put this off. He obviously still had hopes. Yet I can’t bring myself to placate him, be nice. I don’t want to. What’s the point? There’s an awful silence. Then our food arrives. Still not speaking, we start eating. More silence, broken only by the noise of James chomping his food (an irritating habit that drives me mad) and the clatter of cutlery on plates. It’s agonising. Then I put my knife and fork down. I have to say something, anything. ‘We can still be friends, if you want,’ I mumble.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, clicking his fingers at the waiter for the bill (another infuriating habit), desperate to get away, even though his meal is half finished. Then he digs into his wallet, throws a £10 note onto the tablecloth and pushes back his chair. ‘You sort it out. I’m going home.’

  I justify it all to myself, of course. I’ve loved and lost in my time, haven’t I? Now it’s my turn to say, ‘Sorry, no thanks.’ Perhaps I did use him as a sort of available handbag, while I put myself about. Don’t all women do that sometimes? I had treated him badly, I knew that. It would have been worse if we’d wound up married or living together, I tell myself.

  We have one mutual friend, Big Pete, another ad sales guy. A few months after the Printer’s Pie dinner, I run into BP in Fetter Lane. ‘James has had quite a bit of bad luck,’ he tells me. It seems James has been running around town with all sorts of different women. Then he’s been stopped and breathalysed for drink-driving near Berkeley Square. Result: loss of licence, a bit of a blow for James. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, Jacky, but he also told me he’d got a dose of the clap from one of these girls. He’s a stupid bastard sometimes.’

  Since many people were now bed-hopping like mad, the clap or a sexually transmitted disease like gonorrhea was frequently mentioned in conversation at that time in the ’70s. Condoms became passé: many women were now on the pill or, like me, had an inter-uterine device fitted. ‘A dose’ was seen as a mere occupational hazard for shaggers. Bad luck, nothing more. Usually easily treated with antibiotics. Only when the AIDS virus surfaced in the early ’80s did most people really start to take sexually transmitted diseases more seriously and understand the merit of the packet of three.

  Through that summer of 1975 there have been other, more serious things going on in my life. After years of ignoring doctor’s warnings about his blood pressure, my dad, Ginger, got sick. Smoking, drinking and being overweight have taken their toll. He had a stroke and wound up in the Metropolitan hospital in Kingsland Road, Dalston. He’s lost some use of one arm and it affects his walking, though he can still get out and about enough to wander up the road and back. But he has had to stop working at the BMA. At 63, he’s been pensioned off.

  ‘Ging loved that job,’ my mum tells me sadly one afternoon when I meet her in town after she’s finished work at Berketex. With my dad now at home, she’ll have to find part-time work in a local shop. She’ll miss the bustle of Oxford Street and the lively shop talk, the company of all the other women working there.

  ‘He’s lucky to be here, Mum,’ I tell her. And I don’t say it, but I think he is very lucky to get the BMA pension so late in life. It means they aren’t facing an impoverished old age.

  Visiting them at the flat now is even sadder for me. Ginger has become like an old man, waiting for his demise. He isn’t supposed to drink at all now and his sole pleasure is the almost daily trek to the betting shop in Shacklewell Lane, where he regularly runs into Michael, my friend Larraine’s Italian husband. ‘That Michael,’ he’ll say. ‘What a lovely bloke he is.’ This is rich. When we were in our teens, he’d hated my friendship with Lolly and her family. And when she’d married Michael, he’d been very derisive about Italians: ‘Cowards, the lot of them.’

  Now, with his enforced retirement and their shared love of the gee-gees, Michael’s stock has soared in my dad’s eyes. But I guess he just misses male company. At the BMA, he’d been a real favourite with the doctors, travelling up to Scotland with them for conferences, a kind of Cockney mascot for the august institution. Now all he has are four claustrophobic walls and my mum. And, of course, his old insecure possessiveness.

  I am no longer a target because I am not there. But Molly will arrive home from her part-time job in the High Road to find him either hanging out of the window or downstairs, in the street, worrying himself stupid if she’s just a few minutes late from work. Stoically, as ever, she puts up with it, saying nothing.

  I take all this on board. I’d been shocked to see him in a hospital bed, frail and helpless. In fact, the one time I’d visited him there, I’d burst into tears when the doctors drew the curtains around his cubicle. It surprised me: after all, I’d loathed his very existence for the better part of my life. But there is truth in the saying blood is thicker than water. At that point I’d realised that whatever I felt about his behaviour, our home, he was still my dad – the skinny man who’d dumped his bags in the hall, arriving back from India after WWII and, for a short while, someone I’d looked up to as a tiny tot. There was no getting away from that.

  The changes come thick and fast that autumn. Not long after the Spaghetti House Siege and the day of the wrecked barbie, Susan rings me at the office. ‘We’re going to Australia, Jacky. I’ll get a visa as Ron’s partner and Ron says it’ll be really easy for us to get work there. Ron’s fallen out with the News of the World, anyway. He says he’s had enough of Fleet Street.’

  Boyfriends and lovers have come and gone over the last few years, but the imminent departure of two people I’ve come to regard as surrogate family is as much a shock to me as witnessing my dad’s frailty. Within a few weeks they are gone, following a series of farewell lunches and dinners in Hampstead, our favourite Greek restaurant in Camden Town and a final, enormous goodbye lunch thrown by our friends running the Camden Head pub in Islington.

  ‘Ya’d better think about coming out to Australia,’ Ron tells me as we hug goodbye. ‘You’re going nowhere here.’ Typical Ron, straight and to the point. I was going nowhere and the days were now shortening. Gloom was everywhere. The UK in the ’70s had become synonymous with IRA car bombs. Suspect packages. Bomb scares where buildings were hastily evacuated. In central London, two people were killed by an IRA bomb at the Hilton Hotel that September. The following month a man was killed by an explosion at a bus stop in Green Park. A TV presenter and political activist, Ross McWhirter, was assassinated by the IRA outside his home in November. The bad news just went on and on. My mood, already quite flat, now plummets even further with the next piece of news: the end of an era on the newsdesk.

  Jenny is expecting, a truly happy event for her and Roy. Their lives are changing. No longer will they be going off to concerts at weekends, buying expensive leather belts with ‘The Eagles Tour’ notched in silver at the back. It is time to be responsible parents. They’ve already bought a home and now Jen is giving up work. They’re even going to tie the knot. ‘I’m leaving in March,’ she tells me delightedly. I join in the jokey congratulations and smiles. It should be good news. I’ll move up a grade. As the senio
r, I’ll do all the double time overtime on Friday nights, effectively a 20 per cent pay rise of about £10 a week. Instead, it plunges me into more confusion. I’ll miss Jenny. We’ve laughed so much together – is there any better way to bond with colleagues? And we’ve always looked out for each other, though we’re totally different people. I just can’t envisage being there with a new person, a stranger.

  Only Clive, always cheerful and optimistic, lifts my spirits. Sometimes he’ll be sent away on a job for a few days and I manage to join him. That autumn, we go to Jersey, where he’s been sent on a follow-up to a terrible story about the ‘beast of Jersey’, a man who had terrorised women and children on the Channel island for years, raping and assaulting them while wearing a ghastly rubber mask and studded wristbands. Edward Paisnel had been finally caught in 1971 and imprisoned for 30 years. Yet, in true Fleet Street style, the story didn’t end there, mostly because he’d affected the lives of so many on the small island.

  We have an uproarious few days in St Helier. Clive’s trail of interviewees runs cold quite quickly so we make the most of the time, enjoying the hotel and room service. Although Clive is sympathetic to my dilemma, he doesn’t have any solutions or ideas for me. ‘If you leave the Street, luv, we’ll never see each other,’ he warns me.

  But I am far from being the only restless soul. Around me, quite a few 20- or early 30-somethings feel like me, that the UK is a basket case and if you can get out for a better life, now is the time to do it, if you aren’t tied down by mortgages and family. We’ve all had a taste, by now, of what life can be like beyond the grey skies and scruffy pubs. The decade we’d lived through as 20-somethings had given us much freedom – and the cheaper travel explosion had turned many heads. Already, in the office, one or two older journos have retired to the sun in Spain. Some young freelancers are heading off to LA to try their hand at writing about the rich and famous for the tabloids. ‘We can file our copy from the beach,’ they tell everyone.

  A few of the reporters on the desk are being lured to the USA by tabloids like the National Enquirer, who tempt them with an expenses-paid month’s trial at the paper’s Florida HQ. Journalists, by trade, were more itinerant then than now: there were more jobs, for a start, and foreign coverage on papers was more extensive in the pre-electronic era, so people could take chances as stringers if they fancied unfamiliar surroundings. But it wasn’t just Fleet Street that was affected by this get up and get out feeling. All over the country, people wanted out.

  It was one afternoon in early December when I finally found my get out of jail card. It was around 4 pm, the skies outside already darkening and the prospect of another winter of discontent looming large when a reverse-charge call came through to the news desk from the switchboard. We always accepted such calls, no matter where they came from, in case they meant good stories. ‘I have a Mr Sinclair in Sydney for you. Will you accept the charge?’ said the voice on the switch. Oh joy. Ron and Susan, in their new home by the beach. Well past 3 am there and they were full of the joys of it.

  ‘Oh, Jac, you’d love it here’ trilled Susan. ‘They’ve got these amazing cardboard boxes with wine in them. You just put them in the fridge, push the button and it comes out lovely and cold. And wine’s so cheap, it’s incredible.’ On and on they went, taking it in turns to tell me what a good time they were having. They’d found good jobs virtually on landing, Ron in radio for the ABC, the Aussie equivalent of the BBC, Susan doing typing shifts in the Radio Australia newsroom. They were renting a big roomy apartment for next to nothing. ‘The money’s so good, we’ve already started saving,’ Susan told me. ‘Last weekend we went to this amazing beach an hour’s drive from the city: there was no one else there. We had the entire beach to ourselves.’

  Oh, God. Empty beaches, cheap wine on tap, generous employers – how lucky could you be? Then it was Ron’s turn to take the phone: he’d been drinking but he was still quite articulate. ‘If you can get your ass here, you’ll be laughing. They love Poms who’ve worked in Fleet Street. You’ll walk straight into a job. And if you need money, we’ll stump you for all the cash you need to get yourself a place until you get on your feet. I mean it. Think about it, eh?’

  I’ve already mentioned my innate opportunism. It was there at the start of my working life and it never failed to propel me forward over time. I knew, for a start, that this was no idle comment. Ron, for all his wild, irreverent ways, had already sensed my ennui with my lot in life. Like many Australians, he genuinely believed in his lucky country and thought the Poms were a hapless lot, stuck in a grimy place where positivity, sunshine, good food and a decent living were in somewhat short supply. Put simply, he wanted to help. It was a generous gesture, made in spontaneity, certainly. But the offer was on the table.

  I spent the entire weekend after the call in my flat, thinking about it all. Or rather, doing sums, plotting how I could scrape together enough money for the airfare. I could leave in March, with Jenny. I had to give three months’ notice, anyway. We’d both say farewell together. That would give me plenty of time to save a bit. There was a pension fund I’d paid into. I could access that, which, combined with my outstanding holiday pay, would give me most of what I needed. It was definitely doable.

  Once I’d found a job and a flat to share in Sydney, it’d take a bit of time to repay Ron. But I’d be in the sunshine, with two of my best friends. It was a fabulous offer. I immediately sent them a postcard to their new address: ‘Want to come. Please ring the news desk again. I think I can get there after March. See you soon!’ Yet I kept quiet about my plans. I wanted to be sure before I started making it all come true…

  That Christmas Eve, I hailed a taxi from Fleet Street to Dalston. I’d overnight with Molly and Ginger in my old bedroom and break my news to them over Christmas lunch. I was quite worried about their reaction. Would Ginger start browbeating me, doing his possessive number: ‘You can’t do this to us,’ ‘We’re your parents,’ that sort of thing?

  Amazingly, they took it well. ‘I did my travel when I went to India,’ said Ginger proudly. ‘Now it’s your turn. And you’ll be back, anyway. You won’t stick it there for long.’ Gee thanks, Dad.

  Molly was fine. She had long-lost relatives there. ‘You can look them up, Jac.’ I promised to do just that. One hurdle overcome.

  I gave my notice in after New Year after several calls from Sydney during which we’d finalised all my plans. I’d go as a Brit tourist on a three-month visa and stay. ‘No problem,’ Ron assured me. ‘They never check anything.’

  He was half-right. My somewhat casual approach to paperwork, even in the pre- computer era, did go on to cause me problems down the line. But I wasn’t about to let the details of immigration rules hold me up. I just wanted to get there.

  ‘Well, Miss Hyams, you can show the Australians what England is made of,’ said Graham with a smile when I handed in my memo giving notice.

  Brian, as ever, was completely sanguine. ‘You’ll be back, chummy,’ he told me.

  My other colleagues, mainly those who were quite happy to live out their lives to a Fleet Street sunset, were also less than encouraging. Australia was regarded very differently in 1976: a place seemingly full of ‘colonials’ with funny accents, lacking culture or couth. Yet few people had actually been there. Nearly everyone had a relative who’d gone off there to be a Ten Pound Pom (the nickname given to British migrants who’d opted to emigrate in the ’60s, paying just £10 for their fare in return for two years in the former penal colony: if you left Australia before the two years were up, you paid your own fare back). A few had returned, deeply disillusioned.

  ‘My aunt says it’s a great place for doin’ your washing,’ said one pub wit.

  ‘So and so says there are too many flies and not much else,’ I was told.

  One girl who’d worked there for a year and returned told me, ‘Don’t do it. It’s a very strange place and people don’t like you if you’re English.’

  ‘New Zealand?’ s
aid another pub pundit. ‘It’s a bit of a small place for someone like you, isn’t it?’

  Even Raelene wasn’t exactly encouraging about her mother country. ‘You’ll like it for a bit, I s’pose, but you’ll get bored if you stay much longer,’ was her helpful comment.

  Only Clive was enthusiastic about my forthcoming leap into the dark. Because he too was getting out, packing his bags. Amazingly, over Christmas he and his wife had made a similar decision to emigrate down under. Clive had recently fallen out of favour with his bosses for some unknown reason. They couldn’t sack him but office politics meant that he’d get the crap jobs, rather than the travelling, the interesting stories. Because he worked for a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, he’d already met one or two Australian executives, one of whom had already offered him a job on a Murdoch Sydney newspaper. It would all take time to organise, but he too would be in Australia by the middle of the coming year.

  Strangely enough, this news left me with mixed feelings. I enjoyed being with Clive: it was impossible to be anything but cheerful and happy in his company. But it was always very much an affair, a Fleet Street one at that. I hadn’t given too much thought to the Clive situation when I made my decision to decamp to the other side of the world. But still, I told myself, it would be reassuring to have yet another familiar face around.

  I had absolutely no idea what to really expect when I landed in Australia. In the pre-electronic era, you only had photographs or movies to give you some idea of what it all looked like: mostly the images were of sprawling yellow beaches or dusty, alien outback places. There was the occasional news story from Oz, mostly involving sport. And, of course, the famed Ronnie Biggs, train robber extraordinaire, had run off there in 1966 to live with his family until his escape to Brazil in 1970.