WHITE BOOTS
& MINISKIRTS
A TRUE STORY OF LIFE IN THE SWINGING SIXTIES FROM THE AUTHOR OF BESTSELLING BOMBSITES & LOLLIPOPS
JACKY HYAMS
To Ron, Clive and Ian.
Gone too soon. But not forgotten.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 THE COMPLAINTS MANAGER
CHAPTER 2 A SECRET TRIP ON THE CENTRAL LINE
CHAPTER 3 RANDY SANDY AND THE CHICKENS
CHAPTER 4 THE GO-GO GIRL FROM GUILDFORD
CHAPTER 5 BANDAGE MAN
CHAPTER 6 AN UNRAVELLING
CHAPTER 7 THE ’60S ARE OVER
CHAPTER 8 BOLO DI CREMA
CHAPTER 9 MR VERY, VERY DANGEROUS
CHAPTER 10 THE CLOSED SHOP
CHAPTER 11 THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
CHAPTER 12 MANY RIVERS TO CROSS
Copyright
My sincere thanks to the usual suspects, fellow writers Tammy Cohen, for her unfailing support and insight, and John Parrish in Sydney, whose enthusiasm for my ideas never fails to encourage me.
All thanks also go to Alice Jordan (for showing me that the life of a 20-something woman hasn’t changed that much!) and to Mary Bowen, my Melbourne consigliere, always up for consultation – and excellent advice.
Gratitude too to Jenny Wright and Jeff Samuels, former news desk inmates whose memories of those times proved invaluable.
Finally, a big thank you to the British Library team at Colindale, unfailingly courteous and polite, no matter how minor the request.
The country was going to the dogs. Optimism was in short supply. The economy was in a perilous place. Money was tight. Upheaval on the streets. House price crash. Terrorism. And unemployment on the rise…
Welcome to Britain. Go on, fill in the year. Some time in the early 21st century, perhaps? Yes and no. Because our history is dotted with similar patches of extreme uncertainty when the only way through seems to be to either just get on with it – somehow – or get out, jump on a plane, find a better way of life… Back in 1976, when I decided to do just that, the country was pretty much locked into a negative spiral: the general belief was that Britain had a dismal future.
Yet just ten years before, the sun shone down on Blighty and the streets were full of partying people: the summer’s World Cup soccer victory over Germany at Wembley in 1966 seemed to set the seal on what looked like a golden age of optimism. Mini-skirted London was widely acknowledged as the swinging city. An unprecedented explosion of Brit creativity had made a huge impact all over the world. Our musicians, designers, pop and movie stars were fast becoming international icons. Youth culture was big news, on the march, especially across the Atlantic.
The older, wartime generation might have blinked, rubbed their eyes at all these long hair and free love ideas that were being spouted, let alone the idea of their kids hitting the hippie trail to the East or smoking pot, but these were stable times: jobs for nearly everyone, less than a quarter of a million people unemployed in that year of World Cup jubilation. Foreign holidays in the sun had started to become a national pastime. And colour telly was on its way.
When I sat down in 2011 to write my 1950s East End memoir of my childhood, Bombsites and Lollipops, I wrote not just about myself, my parents, my teenage adventures, but about the world I’d inhabited, one of a society – and a city – shaking off the lingering effect and deprivations of wartime and very slowly reinventing itself into something approaching what we know today. I had hoped, of course, that readers could identify with some of it or that if the world described was unfamiliar, even alien, they’d find something entertaining in the reminiscence of the ‘lost world’.
Much to my delight, they did. The response was immensely gratifying. A writer always hopes to strike the right chord, but you never really know if you’ve hit the right note until you get the feedback from your readers. Among all the welcome positive feedback, I kept getting the same comments, time and time again: ‘So what happened next?’, ‘How did you get from there to here?’, ‘I didn’t want it to end’. And so on. Hence my decision to write a sequel, covering another lost world, the decade after that book ended, when I’d first left home and started to make my way in life.
The changes in my own life were gradual. But in some ways, they were reflections of the big social changes around me. And the mood of the country itself shifted quite quickly: from chirpy to bleak within a few years. In the summer of 1966, anything seemed possible, the future looked good. Yet even by 1970, the storm clouds were already gathering. Everyday lives were changing for the good, more people travelled abroad, wages were good and though it was early days, the arrival of the supermarket and the home ownership culture were already making an impact. Yet from then on, industrial disputes, strikes, shortages and inflationary woes were to continuously plunge the country into crisis mode through the decade.
The ’60s – the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll years – are always viewed as the pivotal moment, the starting gun, if you like, of massive change in British society. Technically, this was true. Yet a lot of it was mostly hype: the much-touted sexual revolution, at least, didn’t actually happen for most people until the ’70s arrived. And the politics of the time, from Harold Wilson’s rocky Labour era of 1964-70 to the false dawn of the Conservative ‘Better times ahead’ Ted Heath years that followed, eventually took the country down a bitterly acrimonious path of union confrontation and IRA terrorist carnage. If the ’60s seemed like the best of times, the decade that followed surely would seem the worst of times.
That extraordinary decade followed the years of my youth. The immediate post- WWII generation were late starters by today’s standards. We lost our virginity in our late teens, maybe later. We emerged from the late ’50s as the first wave of youthful consumers, even though, as teenagers, we hardly knew what consumerism signified. For those like me, abandoning education at 16, it could be said that our university years were the march straight into the adult working world. Through work, you meet people. Move around all the time from job to job, as I did, and you meet many more, learning as you go, not just about offices but about life. Constant exposure to lots of different people from many different backgrounds hadn’t always been the common experience for working class girls – until the class barriers started to wobble in the ’60s.
I
