by Sylvia Smith
I was twenty. My father was sixty. We both had the same ailment.
To my disappointment I found I had an embarrassing complaint that needed medical attention so I made an appointment to see my doctor.
I sat down in his chair and said, ‘I appear to have some growths immediately outside my backside and they itch.’ He asked ‘Could you be more specific and describe them?’ I replied, ‘They’re very large bubbles of skin that look like pink grapes.’ He replied, ‘You quite obviously have piles. Ill write out a prescription for some cream and I want you to squeeze it into the opening of your back passage.’
A few weeks went by uneventfully until my father found he had the same problem. On his return from the surgery I asked him, ‘What did the doctor say?’ He replied, ‘He said I had piles but he didn’t ask me to describe them as he did with you. He said, “Drop your trousers, bend over and part your cheeks.” So I did.’ He laughed and asked, ‘Supposing he’d said that to you? What would you have done?’ I replied, ‘I’d have kept my lumps to myself and come back home immediately.’
1965
JEAN PIERRE
Jean Pierre was a Swiss student who chose to live in London to improve his English. We met at a dance and dated for three months. He was twenty-three. I was twenty.
I found Jean Pierre to be very courteous and considerate. I would see him three evenings a week and each night he would take me somewhere expensive in London’s West End.
On one of our dates he told me he had taken a girl in Switzerland to the cinema and she had fallen asleep half way through the film. He was so annoyed he didn’t disturb her at the end of the picture but quietly vacated his seat, leaving her to wake up alone in an empty theatre.
1966
MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
I was living at home with my parents in a small two-bedroomed house in Walthamstow, London. As my twenty-first birthday approached, I asked my father if I could have a party in the house. He told me to hire a hall as he thought his furniture might be damaged. I was very disappointed and considered what other celebration I could have, as I had always found parties in halls to be cold and impersonal, and I did not have the money to hire a suite in a good hotel.
Fortunately I had a man-friend called Frank, who was aged thirty-one. I would see him occasionally and he would call me ‘Princess’. When he heard I would not be celebrating my birthday, he asked if he could take me to dinner. I was delighted.
On my special day, I opened all my birthday cards and presents. Frank had sent me an imitation silver key and had bought me a bottle of designer perfume. He knocked on the street door at 8.30 p.m. and drove me in his green Mini to an expensive hotel in Epping, just outside London. I wore a black, low-cut cocktail dress with my freshly set hair piled in curls on top of my head. Frank looked very smart in a grey suit and blue shirt with a navy-blue tie.
A waiter showed us to the table Frank had reserved and gave Frank the wine list. He ordered a glass of champagne each. We both chose a three-course meal from the menu. The waiter asked Frank what wine we would have. He clearly did not know and accepted the waiter’s suggestion.
Frank was excellent company and I had a lovely evening. The food was first-class and I enjoyed the soft, piped music in the restaurant. If it had not been for Frank I would have been at a loss as to how to spend my birthday. His kindness made it a very special day.
Frank married someone else a few years later.
1967
PIERRE
I met Pierre at a dance in the Café de Paris near Leicester Square. I was twenty-two and he was a very attractive Frenchman aged twenty-six.
Pierre came to the table I was sharing with a girlfriend and asked me to dance.
He led me onto the floor and pulled me tightly to him, placing his hands on my rear. I didn’t like this at all and said so. He altered his hold immediately and we danced in a normal manner. The band eventually stopped playing and he asked me if I would like a drink. I accepted and we rejoined my friend at our table.
Pierre and I spent the remainder of the evening talking and dancing. Finally he asked me for my telephone number and said, ‘I will call you Monday at eight thirty.’ As he was on holiday and didn’t have a car I went home by tube with my girlfriend. She’d had several dance partners but had not found herself a boyfriend.
I really liked Pierre and looked forward to seeing him again.
On the Monday evening I sat by my telephone and at eight thirty precisely it rang. I was thrilled and picked up the receiver but to my dismay the ringing continued. Despite frantically pressing all the various buttons and speaking down the mouthpiece I was unable to answer my phone. It rang a further thirty times and then stopped. My caller had obviously thought no one was in. I decided that was Pierre. If it was he never contacted me again.
1967
PATRICK
Patrick was twenty-seven. I was twenty-two. He worked as a sales rep. We dated for three months.
Patrick lived in Dagenham. As I lived in Walthamstow and owned a car, I would drive to Ilford Station to meet him half way on each one of our dates. He would travel by bus. He would then direct me to a different pub somewhere in Essex. At the end of the evening I would drive him home.
After leaving a country pub one night Patrick said, ‘Take the next left.’ I did so immediately. We drove through two large iron gates, down a short drive, around a circular flowerbed belonging to a large house, up the drive again and out through the iron gates and back onto the road. We both laughed. Patrick said, ‘I meant on the main road. The people in that house must have thought they had visitors coming.’
1967
KATHY
Kathy and I shared an office whilst working as secretaries to four partners in a firm of chartered accountants in the City of London, before word processors had been invented. We were both in our early twenties.
Kathy and I had busy jobs and our only opportunities for having a chat were during our tea breaks or when sewing sets of accounts together. The accounts were sewn into folders with a satin ribbon threaded through the left-hand side of the front cover and were a lengthy task not requiring much concentration.
During one of our conversations Kathy told me of a secretary she had worked with in her previous job. She said, ‘She was knee-deep in work and was typing hell for leather on a manual typewriter. Halfway through the day she came unstuck. When she pulled the carnage return lever at the end of a sentence, the roller shot out the typewriter and went straight through the window into the street, and we were on the second floor! She had to take the lift down to the main entrance and pick the roller up from the pavement.’
One lunchtime Kathy and I had sandwiches at our desks. I had also bought myself a yoghurt as my dessert. I was very tidy minded and decided to suck my spoon clean. I put it right side up into my mouth, gave it a hearty suck and attempted to pull it out again. To my horror it wedged itself between my upper teeth. I groaned and Kathy looked up to see my open mouth with the spoon hanging from it. I sat at my desk wondering how I was going to free it whilst Kathy giggled. As it wouldn’t move forward I tried to push it further back into my mouth and to my great relief it released itself.
1967
THE LADY IN THE RAIN
I was aged twenty-two.
It was absolutely pelting down with rain as I walked home from work down Forest Road, Walthamstow. I noticed a middle-aged woman on the opposite side of the street wearing a mackintosh and rain hat, making her way along the uneven narrow pavement. There was a deep puddle in the kerb beside her. A car drove through it at speed creating a high wall of water that drenched her from head to foot. I expected to see some reaction from her but there was none. She continued along the highway completely soaked but as though nothing untoward had happened to her.
1967
ANNE
Anne and I worked for the same bank in the City. She was a copy typist in the banking hall and I was secretary to the Managing Director. She was aged twenty. I wa
s twenty-two.
We had a big collection for Anne when she announced she was leaving the bank and emigrating to Australia. As she had a club foot she was not eligible for the Australian ten-pound assisted fare scheme for immigrants, so she chose to fly there, meeting the airline bill out of her own pocket. We all wished her well and told her to write and let us know how she was faring.
Three months later a mutual colleague saw her in the street and asked her, ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Australia!’ Anne replied, ‘I did emigrate to Australia. I went to Sydney and found myself a small flat but I flew home again the following week because a woman got murdered in one of the flats below mine and I was too frightened to stay on all by myself. Now that I’m home I’ve had time to think and I’m going back again when I’ve saved up enough money, but not to Sydney next time. I think perhaps somewhere not quite so big will be safer.’
1968
JACKIE
I was twenty-three and secretary to the Managing Director of a bank in the City. Jackie was a twenty-year-old clerk working in the banking hall of the same bank.
Jackie was very popular and had made close I friends with most of her colleagues. She was engaged to be married and had planned a honeymoon in Spain. On the Friday before her wedding day various members of staff sewed ‘L’ plates onto the back of her coat and ribbons onto the front. She was presented with an expensive glass clock as a wedding present from everyone in the bank.
Jackie didn’t return to the office two weeks later as expected. Her new husband phoned her supervisor to say she was ill. Twelve days passed and he phoned again with the terrible news that Jackie had died.
We were told that Jackie had been taken ill on honeymoon. A doctor had been called but he could find nothing wrong with her. On their return to the UK Jackie’s condition did not improve. She was examined twice in hospital but still no one could find any explanation why she was unwell. A few days after her last hospital visit she died. The coroner’s verdict was that death had been caused by the contraceptive pill she had recently started taking.
Her friends in the office were in tears and those on the pill were saying, ‘That could have happened to us.’
1968
ALAN
Alan was a blond twenty-five-year-old Australian journalist working in London. I was aged twenty-three and we met at a dance. He was the illegitimate son of an English woman and was adopted soon after his birth. His step-parents emigrated to Australia when he was three years old. I had four dates with him.
Alan lived in Kensington, which was known as ‘Kangaroo Valley’ because of the great number of Australians living there. On each of our four dates he insisted on collecting me from my home in Walthamstow and escorting me to the West End of London for dinner. At the end of the evening he saw me to my street door and returned to his digs at a very late hour. I calculated that he spent three hours travelling every time he saw me.
During the course of one of our evenings out Alan discussed sex and life in general. His final comment on the subject was, ‘When I was five years old my teachers used to smack me because I masturbated during playtime at school.’ He paused and looked at me and said, ‘You don’t understand what I’m talking about do you?’ I replied, ‘Yes I do.’ He grimaced and blushed furiously. When he had recovered himself he changed the conversation completely.
1968
DAVID
David was a twenty-year-old police constable living in a police section house in London. He was an only child and was born in Cheltenham. Gloucestershire, where his parents still lived. I was twenty-three years old when I met him and we went out together for several months.
One wintry Saturday evening David was on duty in Knightsbridge with several other policemen. One of the officers came up to him with a civilian by his side and said to David, ‘This feller has been caught stealing, guard him until I come back to you.’ David took the man’s arm and led him into a shop doorway. Whilst standing with his prisoner David noticed a drunk staggering up the road. He turned to the thief and said, ‘Wait here while I pick up this drunk.’ David walked up to the drunk, arrested him, and returned to the shop doorway, to find his prisoner was no longer there. He looked around him and saw the man running at top speed down Knightsbridge. David immediately blew his whistle and, after the intervention of his colleagues, the thief was once more in police custody.
One weekend in early summer I drove to Cheltenham with David in my black Hillman Imp car, having been invited to stay for the weekend with his family. I found his parents to be very warm and friendly and his mother had quite obviously spring-cleaned the house for our arrival. Unfortunately this spotless image was shattered over dinner as I watched her stub out her finished cigarette in her used dessert plate.
During my stay I met one of David’s friends, who was a local policeman. He asked David, ‘What are your chances for promotion up in London?’
1968
ERIC
He was thirty-three. I was twenty-three. We met at a dance in the winter. He lived in Ruislip. Regardless of the snow and ice he would drive across London to take me out three times a week. We dated for two months.
Eric told me he had recently been engaged to a girl and they had bought a house together in Ruislip, living as man and wife. As his fiancée got on so well with his mother, it was decided she should move in with them permanently, giving up the tenancy on her small council flat.
Unfortunately for Eric his fiancée’s feelings changed towards him and she ended their relationship, returning to London to start her life afresh.
Eric said to me, ‘Now I’m buying a house and I’m stuck with my mother living in it.’
1969
PAT
Pat was twenty-six. She lived at the bottom of my street with her eighteen-year-old brother and fifteen-year-old sister. Their parents were dead and Pat was legally her younger sister’s guardian. I was twenty-four.
Pat and I walked to the railway station together every day on our journey to work. One wintry morning I made my way through the ice and snow to her street door. I asked her, ‘Can I hang on to you? If I don’t I reckon I’m going to fall over.’ Pat replied, ‘I think I’d better hang on to you as well.’ We linked our arms together and picked our way down her pathway. Pat closed the gate behind her. She took one step forward and completely lost her footing, landing on her backside whilst still hanging onto my arm.
Pat was continually late for work and her boss had given her several warnings. He noticed her slink to her desk fifteen minutes after the correct time once more and called her into his office. He asked her, ‘Why are you late again today?’ Pat replied, ‘It wasn’t my fault. The train didn’t stop at Liverpool Street.’ She returned to her desk and suddenly realised that Liverpool Street was a main line station and the final stop for all trains travelling there.
Pat decided to change her job and registered with an employment agency. She was given a timed typing test. The interviewer said ‘Go’ and pressed the stop watch. Pat typed as fast as she could and wondered why nothing had been printed on her sheet of paper. She looked down to see she had jammed all the keys of the manual typewriter.
I went dancing with Pat and her friend Angie. Pat said to me, ‘Angie gets all the fellers and I don’t get any.’ I examined her appearance and said, ‘I think it’s your hair. Why don’t you have it cut?’ She took my advice and made an appointment with a hairdresser one lunchtime. Pat chose a very short style to replace her long black page-boy. On her return to the office a male colleague stopped her and asked, ‘What have you done to all that beautiful hair? It really suited you.’
Pat told me she walked past a family welfare clinic just as a young mother took her baby out of the pram. The woman turned around with the baby in her arms and banged the child’s head against a telegraph pole. She looked at Pat and said, ‘If I do that one again there won’t be much point going in will there?’
1969
BOB
Bob was thirty. I was twenty-four. We met at a dance at the Empire ballroom in Leicester Square. We had one date.
Bob invited me to dinner at his flat one Thursday evening and we made arrangements that he would meet me by car at his local underground station.
He cooked an excellent medium rare steak and french fries, served with a dressed salad and a glass of claret.
After our meal we settled in his lounge with the remainder of the wine. I found him to be far too amorous. I turned down his advances and would do no more than kiss him.
At the end of the evening he drove me back to the tube and suggested I meet him there the following Thursday, but this time with a pound of sausages as he would have no time for shopping.
The next Thursday I arrived at the underground station at the appointed hour but there was no Bob. After waiting forty minutes and not knowing exactly where he lived and still there was no Bob, I went home, taking my sausages with me.
