by Jacky Hyams
‘It’s a fine place to make a film about the end of the world,’ Ava Gardner had quipped to waiting reporters in Melbourne in 1959 when she arrived there to make a film called On the Beach – a movie about the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Judging by what I kept hearing in London, many still felt that way. Yet my enthusiasm remained undiminished. Ron’s generous act of friendship gave me a chance to break free, do something different. In the sunshine, to boot. That was good enough for me. In many ways, it was a roll of the dice. Yet as usual, I ignored the what-ifs. Too much of that could hold you back.
I threw a series of farewell bashes: a remarkably sober one at the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street and a big boozy one at the flat for my north London friends, such as hippie Alan and his caravan of good-looking men and women from all points in the globe and Laurie, he of the ashtray smashing, now sleekly successful in PR with a mad, live-in girlfriend he desperately wanted to ditch. Anne turned up with Oleg in tow and even my quiet flatmate Richard produced his equally shy girlfriend and admitted he was moving out. They were getting married.
Everyone was either very stoned or smashed: the reverbations of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and the joyful sound of the British Afro-pop band Osibisa echoed all the way down Boundary Road. Neighbours hammered on the door, demanding peace and quiet. It finally came at around 3 am. Raelene – egged on by Jeff and Roger, two reporters from the office who’d been pushing me for an introduction to her for ages – ran upstairs to the Pit. She emerged, minutes later, clad in her piece de resistance: an all-in-one pink and blue ‘bunny’ suit, with a cute little white bushy tail, covering a flap at the back – which revealed her naked bum.
‘You guys wanna come upstairs?’ she enticed in her broadest Oz tones. Two nigh-on legless young hacks didn’t need any further encouragement: one waited outside the Pit while the other stepped inside briefly for Raelene’s Linda Lovelace offering, her gifts for the younger generation of Fleet Street’s finest.
‘Did you have to take two of them on?’ I asked Raelene the next night, after the lads had gleefully told the whole office about the event.
‘Ah, what am I gonna do if he sticks it in ma mouth?’ was her reply.
There was no answer to that.
A few days later, Jenny and I danced a farewell jig on the news desk, waving the reams of white copy paper and the news desk phones at the camera. I still have those photos. They show a very happy, high-cheeked ‘Yoko’ in a denim dress, long socks and two-toned pumps, delighted to be moving into the next important stage of her life. And alongside her, her co-worker, brown hair in a neat fringed bob, black roll-neck jumper, brown leather jacket and blue wide flares, looks straight at the camera and gives a half-smile, lips pursed.
The camera doesn’t lie. You can see my apprehension, the uncertainty underneath it all. There would, indeed, be tricky, uncertain episodes after that day in March 1976 when the big bird went down the runway at Heathrow and took to the skies to transport me to the other side of the world. Yet my timing was impeccable. For me, it was exactly the right moment to put everything I knew behind me and make my way in the world in a totally different place. There will always be people in this world who need to leave their environment in order to reinvent themselves, flourish and become the person they never quite imagined they could be. My new horizons in Australia offered me so much more than a suntan, a new job and endless cask wine on tap.
As a relatively ‘new’ country, Australia had always been open, generous in opening its doors wide to people like me. The initial welcome was a bit shaky but after a while, I would be a true beneficiary of that open-handed, laidback Aussie generosity: a lucky Pom in a truly lucky country. In truth, it was all going to happen for me. A long, long way from home.
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ePub ISBN 978 1 78219 368 5
Mobi ISBN 978 1 78219 387 6
PDF ISBN 978 1 78219 406 4
First published in paperback in 2013
ISBN: 9781782190141
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