by Sylvia Smith
Carol’s finished hairdo was a complete mess and she said to me, ‘If it wasn’t so funny I could cry.’
She found it necessary to pay the hairdresser a visit and she was asked, ‘Whoever cut your hair for you?’
1961
HAZEL
Hazel was thirty years old and married. She worked as an audio secretary in the busy Typing Department of an engineering company. I was sixteen and the office junior in the same department
I would collect the typed letters from the secretaries’ trays and deliver them to the relevant executives for signature. As I reached Hazel’s desk I would sometimes stop to chat. She would tell me of her single days and of her various boyfriends. One story I particularly remember involved her father’s sense of humour. She told me that at the end of one of her dates she took longer than usual saying ‘goodnight’ to a boyfriend in the porch of her parents’ house. After some twenty minutes had passed she heard the street door opening behind her. She turned round and instinctively grasped the hot water bottle her father thrust at her. He closed the door, leaving Hazel and her beau to take the hint.
1961
MICK
Mick was eighteen. I was sixteen. We met whilst working for the same engineering company in north London. I was a junior in the Typing Department, he was a clerk in the Buying Department, the next office to mine. We dated for two and a half years.
Our office hours were 9 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. At nine twenty-five each day I would collect correspondence for typing from the various departments. I would frequently see Mick hurrying along the corridor, having overslept again. He had numerous warnings about his lateness but this did not affect his conduct. His boss eventually tired of him and Mick was sacked. He found himself a job in a hardware store. This time he had learnt his lesson and arrived on time each morning.
Mick bought a series of old cars that he and his brother Ron would repair and make roadworthy. None of them were very reliable but they were all Mick could afford. When they became too expensive to run he would sell them for scrap and buy another one.
I can remember a trip to Clacton on Sea in an old Ford. I held a piece of silver paper in the battery on the floor to keep it charging. If I had not done so we would have slowed to a halt. I did not see much of the countryside as we travelled to and from the coast.
I nearly had an accident in one of Mick’s cars. He took a sharp left which forced me to lean on the passenger door and it flew open. He grabbed me just in time to prevent me falling onto the road.
Mick bought a large blue Bedford van and placed a seat beside his for me to sit on, but he didn’t nail it to the ground. All was well until he made an emergency stop at the traffic lights. My seat fell backwards and I sped along the floor until I hit the doors. Once again Mick reached out to me. He seized my right ankle and pulled me to my original position.
After one evening out we were returning home in another old car when it ground to a stop in Forest Road, Walthamstow. We were lucky to find several men to push us down the steep hill by the Fire Station, whilst Mick worked the accelerator and clutch. We coasted down the hill but the car refused to start. We pushed it into the kerb and Mick walked me the short journey home. The following day his father set out to repair the vehicle and discovered we had run out of petrol.
Mick was the lead guitarist in the Dave Clarke Five shortly before they became famous. He was not happy with the band. He told me, ‘I’m altering the music sheets to fit all the instruments but I don’t get any more money than the others. I’ve seen Dave about it but he won’t pay me. So I’ve said I’ll be leaving as soon as he finds a replacement.’
A few months later The Dave Clarke Five made the hit record, ‘Glad all Over’. Mick was very envious.
1961
LINDA W
Linda and I worked as office juniors for the same engineering company. We were both sixteen and began a friendship that still exists today. I knew her before she met Dave, her husband. They had three children and emigrated to Australia in 1979. After twenty-six years of marriage and three grandchildren they divorced. They now have new partners.
Every evening Linda and I would travel home together. We usually caught the same bus and sat upstairs. Linda would pay the minimum fare but this did not cover her full journey. The conductress finally realised. When Linda remained seated at the last stop covered by her ticket the conductress climbed the stairs and said to her, ‘You’ve only paid for half the distance you want to travel, haven’t you?’ Linda blushed furiously but remained silent. The conductress rang the bell and said, ‘You can get off at the next stop.’
* * *
Linda and I went on a shopping trip down Walthamstow High Street in search of underwear. We entered a draper’s and an assistant came forward to serve us. Linda said in a very loud voice, ‘I want a pair of drawers.’
I paid Linda and her young family a visit in the tiny tumbledown house they were living in. Dave was finishing his dinner at the dining table in the small lounge whilst the three children played on the carpet. Linda decided she needed to be on the other side of the room, but her two-year-old daughter was blocking her path. She lifted her leg over the child. As she was wearing Dr Scholl’s sandals the body of the shoe hung down giving Pamela a hearty whack on the head. Pamela cried. Linda and I laughed. Dave said, ‘Try to be a mother, Linda!’
Linda decided she would like to learn to knit. She was very ambitious, choosing a sweater for Dave as her first garment. She completed the front and back and put the two pieces together to measure them. She found one was three inches longer than the other. Linda thought this was easily rectified. She picked up the scissors and began to chop off the surplus length. She was quick to realise she should not have done that.
1961
CAROL C
Carol and I worked together in the same engineering company. We were both sixteen and employed as office juniors. We are still friends today.
Early in December Carol asked me, ‘What day is Christmas Day?’ I replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The following morning she told me, ‘Christmas Day is on the 25th of December.’ I replied, ‘I know that, but I thought you meant what day of the week.’ She didn’t believe me.
Carol and I shared our office with a girl called Jean. The three of us would go dancing on a Saturday night. Jean and I paid Carol’s expenses because she told us, ‘I can’t afford to go out.’ It was some weeks before she told Jean, ‘I’m saving up really hard because I’d like a car, my own flat and some nice clothes.’ Neither Jean nor I had any money in the bank so we stopped providing Carol with free entertainment.
* * *
Carol very kindly lived with me at my parents’ house whilst they were on holiday. After an evening out we returned to my home and found we had no milk. She said, ‘I’ll go to the machine in the main road and get a pint.’ Half an hour passed and I began to wonder if she’d had an accident. Eventually there was a knock on the street door. I opened it to see Carol holding the milk and a blond young man standing beside her. She told me his name was Mick and that they’d just met. They went out together for several weeks.
Carol told me one of her father’s funny stories. She said, ‘During the war my father was in the army and his unit was based in England. They had a fierce battle with the Germans flying overhead dropping bombs on them. One of our fellers took fright and jumped into a truck and drove away. My father said it was funny because the feller had jumped into the ammunition truck and hadn’t realised it.’
Carol decided to learn to drive a car. On the day of her test she left the office early. The following morning I asked her, ‘How did you get on yesterday?’ She replied, ‘I had the most terrible examiner and he failed me. As far as I’m concerned I should have passed. I answered all his questions correctly and I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just unlucky to have a test with a creep like him.’
A few weeks later Carol invited me to the home she shared with her parents, brother and sister. I discussed her driving te
st with her brother and I commented, ‘It was just hard luck she got a lousy examiner.’ He laughed and said, ‘The real reason why she failed was because she had a crash half way up Tottenham High Road. She was told to take the next left but she was in the overtaking lane and the car beside her wanted to go straight ahead. She should have let him go first but she didn’t. She crashed straight into him and made a dirty great hole in the door beside the examiner. Her instructor was livid when he saw the state of the car.’
Carol married at the age of nineteen and her son, Larry, was born in the first year of the marriage. He was three months old when Carol told me, ‘I thought I’d give Larry a bath in the baby bath. I put it on the kitchen table and I dipped him in it, then I covered him with soap. My hands were soapy too. I picked him up to give him a rinse and he slipped straight through my fingers and went crash on the floor!’
Each Christmas I would buy Carol some type of toiletry set. She told me her mother would say, ‘Well, you know what you’re going to get off Sylvie this year – another bar of soap.’
1962
THE WRESTLER
I was seventeen and on a date with my boyfriend, Mick. He was nineteen. We went to the Finsbury Park Empire one Saturday night to watch the wrestling. It was in the days when the matches were genuine and not ‘fixed’ as they appear to be now. At that age I thoroughly enjoyed the agony suffered by the wrestlers.
Mick and I were sitting approximately ten rows from the ringside. The wrestling was first class.
The third bout of the evening was between two heavyweights who were fairly evenly matched. It was a close fight until one wrestler hurled the other into the air. All fourteen stone of him flew across the ring, with legs wide open, until he crashed down on to the top rope, landing on his scrotum. At that very moment his eyes met mine. I was standing up with the rest of the crowd, clapping my hands, cheering and smiling, completely delighted at his misfortune. He made no sound as he fell off the rope onto the canvas clutching his testicles. His pain must have been tremendous but still he was silent. Eventually two Seconds carried him to the floor. They walked down the aisle to the dressing rooms backstage, each man standing either side of the wrestler, holding an arm, while he walked like a Cossack dancer, unable to stand, without making the slightest murmur.
1963
URSULA
I was eighteen. Ursula was twenty-six. We both worked for the same chemical company in London’s West End as their printing department. I ran the Gestetner Department. Ursula was in charge of the Photocopy Department. We shared an office called The Print Room.
Ursula was dark-haired and very attractive. She had come to London from Liverpool with her fiancé Eric as his job as an engineer required him to work there for six months. They were living together in a furnished flat in Streatham. Ursula told me this was against her parents’ wishes.
We were both newcomers to the company. Ursula arrived two weeks after I had been employed. We hit it off from the start and as our jobs did not require much concentration we spent most of the day in conversation.
Every evening we would leave the office together, walking to Baker Street tube station, and would say ‘goodnight’ in the entrance, Ursula would take the right tunnel down to the trains and I would take the left. Our nightly ritual continued for some three months until one Thursday evening. I had boarded my train and was standing by the doors as they were closing, idly watching the crowds filling the platform. To my amazement I saw Ursula walking through the passageway. She saw me too. We burst into laughter as we realised we both wanted the same train. The doors closed and I jokingly waved to her as we left the station. It was several minutes before I stopped laughing, much to the puzzlement of the other passengers.
1963
THE BEAUTIFUL WAITRESS IN THE ITALIAN RESTAURANT
I was eighteen and working in the City as a shorthand secretary to a firm of chartered accountants. Most lunchtimes I would eat in an Italian restaurant three minutes’ walk away.
The beautiful waitress who served me was Italian and aged about twenty-two. She had long dark hair, huge brown eyes, a smooth olive skin and a very slim and attractive figure. She was engaged to marry another Italian and the marriage took place some months later. She soon became pregnant with her first child.
Every lunchtime I spent in the Italian restaurant I would see the beautiful waitress tucking into plates of pasta or eating large dishes of peaches and cream. As well as her expanding pregnancy she began to get very fat and once her child was born she didn’t diet to lose her excess weight. Her beauty was destroyed by layers of fat around her cheeks and jaw, under her chin and all over her body. Gone was the beautiful face and slim attractive figure.
I continued eating in the Italian restaurant and the beautiful waitress became a fat Italian mamma.
1963
GLORIA
Gloria and I both worked as secretaries in a chartered accountants in the City of London. I was eighteen. She was twenty.
Gloria and I shared an office and we would chat to each other as we worked. She told me, ‘At my last job the accommodation wasn’t up to very much and we had single toilets in the passageways. One day one of the male clerks went to the loo. The door was unlocked so he opened it and saw one of the Directors sitting on the toilet with his underpants and trousers around his ankles. He said he was sorry and closed the door but he told half the office and the story spread like wildfire. It must have been very embarrassing for the Director but we all had a good laugh.’
WOMEN TRAVELLING ON THEIR OWN IN THE SIXTIES
I was in my twenties.
The tube trains in the rush hours were packed solid with passengers travelling to and from their workplaces. I would rarely find a seat and no man would offer me his so I would usually spend my journey ‘strap hanging’. During these years men stealthily assaulting women in the crowded aisles was commonplace. If I was unfortunate enough to board a full train and had to stand in the area by the doors I could expect some man to misbehave himself, unnoticed by the people around me, as we swayed to the rythmn of the train.
I can remember two incidents that happened to me. On the first occasion it was winter. I was squashed against the doors with the man to my right staring at me. I avoided his gaze and concentrated on looking through the windows. As the train drew into my stop I looked down to step over the gap between the doors and the platform and saw my admirer gently playing his fingers over my crotch. I realised he must have been doing this for some time because he smiled at me and followed as I left the train, giving me the impression that he thought I’d enjoyed his attentions and wanted more. I ignored him totally and lost myself amongst the crowds. I had felt nothing through my thick coat.
Another time I was ‘strap hanging’ in the aisles and a man of Eastern appearance was thrusting himself against me, again without anyone else noticing. I lost my temper and elbowed him in the stomach as hard as I could. I looked round at him in time to see his face contort and he made a whooshing noise as my action forced him to breathe out. He did not trouble me further.
Travelling at night had its hazards.
At weekends my last overhead train left the main line station in the City at 12.50 a.m. I did not experience any problems from the other passengers as I travelled the twenty-minute journey to my home town but as I walked through the side streets there was always a man behind tracking me, presumably having fun, because no one ever caught up with me or spoke to me. If I walked faster so did he. If I slowed down he did too. This game of ‘cat and mouse’ would continue until I reached the main road near to my parents’ house. Then I would run the short distance to them.
Travelling on the last bus from Ilford was again problem-free but walking the fifteen-minute journey from the depot was unpleasant. I can remember a scruffy man aged about forty-five following me. Once again, if I walked faster so did he, if I slowed down he did and if I looked in a shop window in the hope that he would pass me, he would stop and do the same until I moved on
. This behaviour continued along the main road but as I walked through the dark back streets to my parents’ home he began to catch up with me. I became very angry and silently thought, ‘Oh, so you think you’ve got me, do you! Well let’s see what you are going to do!’ I spun round to face my assailant and marched straight up to him. He dashed past me, turning right into one of the streets ahead of me. As he had worried me I thought it wise to walk the long way round where there was better lighting and continue along another main road. This road had a hill, a valley and another hill. I reached the top of the first hill and I could see my would-be attacker walking up the far hill. I realised he must have run half the way there. Yet again I reached home safely.
1965
A FAMILY HEALTH PROBLEM
