White Boots & Miniskirts (7 page)

Such devices were then largely unknown in messy, shabby, rented flats. We didn’t have a vacuum cleaner, just a little carpet sweeper that didn’t really do the job. If you were lucky – and we were – we had a launderette close by. But even that meant the better part of an evening sitting there, waiting for the slow machines to do their job. Even the service wash hadn’t reached the Finchley Road by then.

This flat was quaintly termed a ‘maisonette’ with rooms on two levels. You reached it by climbing crumbly stairs at the back of the shopping parade and then negotiating a quite dim, narrow passageway – and a jumble of rubbish – to reach the front doors leading directly to the flats above the shops. Inside, more stairs took you to a sparsely furnished, big living room and a greasy kitchen with a greyish lino-covered floor that was perpetually slippery but never clean, a bedroom and bathroom on the same level, then more narrow stairs (at the foot of which you encountered the landlord’s thoughtful and all-important coin box phone) up to another lounge and a second bedroom right at the top. It was quite a spacious place, as flats above shops often are. But such was the demand for rented ‘furnished’ accommodation then, landlords didn’t need to offer anything beyond the very basics.

Ancient green, moth-eaten velvet curtains, probably
pre-war, in the living rooms, permanently drawn to cover up the grimy, soot-stained windows that were never ever cleaned. Threadbare flooring (calling it carpet would be going too far), wobbly G-plan table and chairs (G-plan was the 1950s simple wood furniture which proliferated across the country for decades) and a heavily stained, dark green sofa made up this ‘fully furnished’ place. There was a 1950s TV, though it was rarely switched on and, somewhat surprisingly, a red Dansette record player, on which I would occasionally play Sinatra, Hammond organ star Jimmy Smith or Jack Jones LPs donated by friends. After my Elvis teenage days, I rarely forked out for things like records; my money went primarily on tarting myself up. Or, as time went on, trips abroad. As for the rest of the flat, you wouldn’t care to examine your mattress too closely for very obvious signs of previous amorous engagements. Nor would the poky bathroom and loo withstand too much careful scrutiny. All this for
£
4 a week each.

Any effort to clean the place only happened if a dinner party was in view (menu: Birds Eye crispy cod fries, Birds Eye frozen chips (or watery tinned potatoes) and Birds Eye frozen peas. Frozen food, the 1950s forerunner of convenience food, became pre-eminent in the ’60s, when supermarket shopping started to spring up – especially Birds Eye foods, the only brand to advertise their wares. This version of cookery was, to us, real effort. Our usual evening meal consisted of boiling up a packet
of Knorr chicken soup – the precursor to Cup-a-Soup which arrived in 1972. Or munching on packets of Golden Wonder cheese & onion crisps, a novelty snack launched in 1962 that soon became a national obsession. If men were being entertained with our Birds Eye repertoire, someone (never me) might dig out the landlord’s useless carpet sweeper and pointlessly introduce it to the floor. Or, if they were desperately keen to make a good impression, they might buy a box of the ultimate in post-prandial sophistication: After Eight thin mints, advertised then as something that snooty, fur-clad women kept in their Ferrari.

An only child, no matter where he or she lives, is a custodian of their own universe, their own solitary state. Being under the same roof as three other young women was a real struggle for me emotionally. I didn’t row or have big arguments with them. I just felt… permanently uncomfortable with so many people around. I’d got the freedom I’d craved. But to an extent, I’d lost my privacy. Sharing a bedroom offered scant opportunity for love-ins.

All the others were from provincial homes: Denise and Sandra, sharing the downstairs bedroom, were from Leicester and Hampshire respectively. Denise was quiet, studying hard to be a teacher, pleasant but nondescript. She went home most weekends, which suited Sandra just fine because this allowed her to fully indulge in her two main proclivities. Let’s be nice and call them her
hobbies. The first was eating. Her family had some sort of farming connection on the south coast and she’d often drive to Waterloo station on Friday evening (she had her own little Mini, though none of us were ever invited into it) to meet the train and collect a big food hamper with goodies, including whole roast chickens, which her family had provided. Then she’d take the hamper back to her room, lock the bedroom door and chomp her way through it, only emerging over the weekend to go to the loo.

The other hobby also involved taking something into her room, locking the door and not emerging for 24 hours. Or more. But here Sandra wasn’t quite as fortunate as she was with her weekly food parcels from home. Ideally, she’d substitute the hamper for a horny, living, breathing bloke. Nirvana for Sandra was to be holed up in the bedroom with both, but to the best of my knowledge, she never managed to pull this off. While clever and comfortably off with a good job as a legal secretary, Sandra definitely did not have it in the looks department. Plumpish, she was untidy, with unkempt hair and seriously badly dressed. Yet with rat-like cunning and guile, she could still manage to lure the odd unsuspecting male into her
Misery
-type boudoir and promptly lock the door. I don’t know if she tied them to the bed or drugged them, the dreadful things that Kathy Bates did to poor old James Caan. But I did once see one victim emerge, shagged to his outer limits, after a
weekend in randy Sandy’s clutches. He looked like a man who’d just emerged from the rubble after an earthquake or a bomb – blinking, hardly believing his luck at still being alive. Free love, as much as a man could stand, had definitely arrived in the Finchley Road. But for some men it came at a higher price than they’d ever imagined. Sandy was relentless. I suppose she figured she’d better make the most of it since there was a chance it might never happen again.

Then there was my room-mate, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Sandy – and me too. At 19, Angela had arrived in London from a posh suburb of Manchester with big goals and big dreams. She wanted much, this girl. Her dad was a successful northern businessman and she’d grown up with riding lessons in Cheshire and private schooling, a far cry from my rackety East End childhood and abruptly terminated education. While Sandra wanted stuffed chickens and sex, preferably together, Angela wanted much more: a wealthy, good-looking husband who would drape her in Dior and Chanel, fully indulge her whims and catapult her into the upper echelons of society. Today, she’d probably be hanging out for a hedge fund manager. Then, there was no precise professional standard: he just had to be rich. Inherited money would do. But with her canny northern background she preferred a fortune made in business.

Angela was catty, derisive of much around us, which appealed to my own somewhat cynical take on life, and
very manipulative. Yet she was also great fun. Her sarcastic tongue often surpassed my own somewhat acid dialogue, so we laughed a lot. She was pretty, with a snub nose, freckles, huge hazel eyes and curly hair. Though she was quite tall, her biggest worry was her lower half. Chubby thighs. Big legs. Half of her was a slim ’60s dolly bird. The other half was less than average, when you consider how short skirts were and how important a neat derriere and a slim pair of legs could be in the overall scheme of things. Yet what she lacked in physical attributes she made up for with a sharp brain. She was foxy, long before the phrase became commonly used.

Unlike me, who merely reacted to events as they unfolded and used my brain only when I had to, Angela had it all planned out. She knew exactly where she was heading. Think of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp from
Vanity Fair
and you won’t be far off. After less than a year in London working as a secretary and not terribly impressed with what she’d landed thus far in the love stakes – a reasonably well-off, attractive and very attentive boy from the ’burbs, training to be a solicitor and poised to be the proud possessor of a big five or six-bedroom house in Weybridge – Angela came up with a bright idea. Why didn’t the two of us hunt for bigger, better prey in a much better setting? New York, she calculated, would offer the single girl supremely better chances of bagging a multi-millionaire.

Neither of us had been there, of course. In the
popular imagination, it was the New York of myth and ’60s movies like
The Apartment
or
Barefoot in the Park
, all honking yellow taxis, towering buildings, cocktail hours and fast-living, megabucks spenders. London had now emerged as a happening place, ever since the famous
Time
cover in 1966, proclaiming L
ONDON
: T
HE
S
WINGING
C
ITY
. Yet the city was still dotted with wartime debris and shabby buildings – a long way from the fast-paced, slick consumer world, with all its 24/7 temptations, that Manhattanites were already accustomed to.

Today, we revisit the New York of that time through the carefully recreated prism of
Mad Men
, the advertising drama on TV. Ad agency secretaries in skyscraper buildings being shoehorned into a life of sizzle and consumer luxury by the likes of leading man Don Draper. Martinis at dawn. Even in the ’60s, the idea of New York as a glamorous backdrop to a successful life was a global media-led phenomenon. It wasn’t just the movies that sold New York as the epicentre of – well, everything glam. The books did too. An avid paperback reader, I’d already devoured
The Best of Everything
, the phenomenally successful 1950s Rona Jaffe book about Manhattan girls in acting or glamorous publishing jobs and single mums rescued by love or chased by married men on the make, four decades before
Sex and the City
made its mark.
Best
… impressed me: a high-octane story of young women choosing career and illicit affairs over
the security of marriage. But I was even more impressed by what I was now reading in the pages of
Cosmopolitan
: the idea that you could pick and choose your men – and the way you ran your life.

The New York of my room-mate’s dreams was very much a heady panorama of skyscraper luxury with rich Don Draper types seeking love in the arms of an English secretary. Perhaps not one with thunder thighs, but she’d find a way round that. As I’ve said, Angela wasn’t going to let anything get in her way. And so somehow, in one of our many midnight conversations as we lay in our little single beds, talking boys, laughing at our flatmates’ peccadilloes and sharing confidences, she convinced her restless, though distinctly unambitious room-mate with a love life that didn’t bear too much close examination, to join her in a big enterprise. We’d be secretaries still. But in New York.

I must have said yes to the idea in one of my more reflective periods when I could see quite clearly that the Jeff thing, while exciting beyond belief, was even more emotionally hazardous than the previous road I’d embarked on with Bryan, who had been more or less fixed in his life, his ad-man world, his posh pad and his need for weed and booze. With Jeff, however, I didn’t have a clue what he was up to. For all I knew, he could have been living part-time in another city. With another woman.

As for the New York idea, this was how it panned out.
At the time, English secretaries were very hot with New York bosses. The Brit accent, mostly, over the phone was a sure fire way to impress their peers or clients. Angela had spotted an ad for a London-based employment agency that specialised in helping secretaries with good experience relocate to New York. The agency would arrange it all, including the visa to work in the land of the free. Essentially, the deal was that you had to sign a contract to work exclusively for a New York secretarial agency as a temp. As Brits, our technical skills were deemed to be vastly superior to those of the locals from Queens, Brooklyn or Yonkers, who were, to be fair, probably used to a more diligent work ethic. What these agencies blithely ignored was how slack many London employers were in the ’60s. By then, I’d job-hopped quite a bit. Secretaries were too often underemployed, little more than a status symbol.

The London agency, once they’d interviewed us and checked us out, took over all the paperwork. The Americans also insisted on a medical and various other administrative checks. The entire process, we were warned, would take several months. But what troubled me about it all was the somewhat draconian (to me) deal with the New York employment agency: they’d provide you with each placement as a temp. Once you’d done your two or three weeks at one place, they’d send you to another, and so on. But the contract you signed with them was binding. If you didn’t like the work or jumped
ship, you were out. Back to Blighty you must go. The agency would point you in the right direction to find suitable accommodation initially but you were more or less on your own when it came to finding a permanent place to live. The money, though, was good, much better than our London secretary’s wages of
£
12–13 a week. Not quite double but close. Having Ange there would make the difference. It all pointed to a much better life, brighter prospects of finding more exciting men. Or so she convinced me at the time.

‘You’re not getting anywhere here, are you? Jeff’ll ditch you one day and then where will you be?’ she’d say in her somewhat blunt northern way. ‘You don’t wanna wind up with someone like that big fat fool, do you?’ Meaning Bryan, which was cruel. But apt. She was spot on. None of my other girlfriends dared to push my nose into the reality of my dodgy affair with an obvious lothario. And eventually I’d confided in her about the illegal abortion and the Jeff/Bryan deception, so she knew exactly where I was coming from. What she said seemed to make sense, so I agreed.

Yet I had a niggling feeling that the agency dictating where I worked might not be such a good idea for someone like me, who resented any form of authority. I’d been exploiting my situation at the shoe company, had won a bit of autonomy and was lucky to have a boss who was hardly ever there. That worked for me. Job-wise, I could only hang around if I got a bit of
freedom. I couldn’t cope with a typing pool, for instance. A room full of girls at typewriters with a supervisor keeping an eagle eye on everything was far too authoritarian and disciplined. Less opportunity to – well, play it your own way.