general status quo: that a young girl best sit tight and hang on for Mr Right. Yet I wasn’t in any way political in my thinking. My ideas about freedom and free love weren’t feminist as such. I didn’t go on marches or protest on the streets. I didn’t consciously believe women’s lot was unfair. Certainly, I questioned what I’d been told since childhood, mainly because a lot of it didn’t make sense to me. Fortunately, I was single-minded in my determination to reject all this by getting out there, sharing flats, though without real economic independence, the very thing I craved, this didn’t always prove to be a successful venture. How could it be? I wasn’t an educated thinker. I operated on instinct alone, an ordinary 20-something from a challenging background at a time when women were just starting to be unshackled from the many things that had always held them back: fear of unwanted pregnancy, outdated laws around divorce, economic restraint. For me, it was all about having my freedom.
Around the time my story starts, a single mum was in a bad place as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Some men still believed they had to tell a woman they loved her in order to convince her it was OK to have sex. Yet by 1976, ‘I love you’ was frequently being replaced by ‘What was your name again?’ the morning after. Or ‘I divorce you’. By then, anyone landing from a distant planet could have easily wondered if many of the inhabitants of these islands had anything else on their mind other than sex. Or hedonism.
Working lives changed a lot too in that decade. In 1966, most men preferred to have stay-at-home wives. Ten years on, a woman’s work or part-time job to supplement the household income, help pay the bills to raise their family, was more or less taken for granted. My belief too is that in this transitional decade, younger people, at least, became much more worldly in outlook. The cheap travel had a lot to do with that. The ’70s kick started the real changes in what we ate back home too, reflected by the many Chinese, Italian, Indian and Greek restaurants that started to pop up on our streets. Whether we liked it or not (and many did not) the switch to a decimal currency followed by Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973 shifted our general perspective a notch, forced us to look outwards.
This is, of course, a personal story. It’s about my own experiences and what was going on around me. London is a huge, sprawling city: very much a series of villages and my personal village had distinct borders. It encompassed my parents’ home in Dalston, central London, the West End, Fleet Street and the leafier parts of north-west London. It certainly wasn’t suburbia. But what is interesting about it in historical terms, if you like, is that many of those streets and places where the story took place remain just as they were.
Fleet Street, of course, has vanished in that it’s no longer a thoroughfare hosting most of the country’s national newspapers, but an extension of the financial and legal district, though a few of the ancient pubs still remain as testament to journalism’s long lamented pub culture. The huge Mirror building where I worked, the proud, bustling enterprise which dominated the area around Holborn and Chancery Lane for so many years, is gone, the site transformed into Sainsbury’s head office. Which probably speaks volumes about the changes to our way of life. And there are the areas around Hackney and Dalston: left virtually untouched for several decades, they’re now dramatically changed by a wave of gentrification, infrastructure and fashionable development, something that was unimaginable in the shabby, scruffy ’70s.
The music was there all the time, too. Originally an Elvis girl, I remained loyal. For life. Yet what followed Elvis musically became such a phenomenon – I defy anyone around in 1967 not to remember where they were or what they were doing the first time they heard the Sgt Pepper’s… album. The music resonates still. The wonderful thing about it is we can now access it instantly, with a touch of a button or a single swipe. If anything, the music takes on an even greater significance the more time passes. It was that good: listen to it now and marvel at the extraordinary talent that produced it. Yet at the time, for me, it was just… taken for granted. Like all the other exciting things that were happening around us.
There are places in my memory where the detail is somewhat cloudy (this book does start in the ’60s, after all). So I trust I’ll be forgiven for that. Some names have been changed too. My single regret in this is that I didn’t write it all down at the time. But here, at least, are some of the highs and lows of those times remembered. We laughed a lot, drank and smoked too much, slept too little and lived, mostly, for the next party. Or holiday in the sun. It might have been almost half a century ago. Yet the carefree, often reckless insouciance of youth never changes. Mine was definitely prolonged by my refusal to take responsibility for anything. Yet for that, I am now truly grateful. There was time enough ahead to sober up and start living sensibly.
I like to regard that 1960s–70s decade as the era when many of us happily followed the hedonistic ‘Have a good time – all of the time’ mantra (as put so eloquently in the rock’n’roll movie This is Spinal Tap).
Though of course you can, if you wish, use those words as a motto for life…
Jacky Hyams
London, February 2013
THE STORY SO FAR
In my previous book Bombsites and Lollipops, I told the story of my childhood, growing up in post-WW2 Hackney in one of London’s most deprived, bomb scarred areas in the East End. With my parents, Molly and Ginger, I inhabited a bizarre world. We lived in squalid, depressing surroundings: a tiny, damp flat in a narrow alleyway dotted with bombsites and ruined buildings. Poverty was all around us in the 1950s, yet we lived like kings. While most of the country skimped and saved, struggling to live on meagre rations, enduring freezing winters, fuel shortages and power cuts, we ate the very best food available, wore beautiful clothes, had an army of servants and helpers – including a cleaner and a chauffeur – and my parents stepped out frequently, living the high life in London’s West End or partying with London’s most notorious duo: the Kray Twins.
Our lavish lifestyle was courtesy of my grandfather Jack’s booming Petticoat Lane business as a bookmaker. Returning from WW2, my dad Ginger joined his father in what was then a thriving illegal trade, taking bets in the East End’s pubs and streets from the hordes of punters and street traders whose daily gambling on the ‘gee-gees’ and dogs was part of a way of life. Ginger’s pockets were constantly stuffed with wads of cash, mostly blown on a wild, post-War spending spree that never seemed to end.
As for me, I grew up a spoilt, only child, indulged by my hedonistic parents in a bewildering world where money was no object, yet at the same time surrounded by a grim, grey backdrop. The city was gradually struggling to its feet. Initially a studious child, once at grammar school I morphed into a rebellious, stroppy teen in the Elvis era.
By the dawn of the ’60s, I’d abandoned my studies and was working in offices in London’s West End, hanging out in Soho after hours and moving from job to job as I started to travel, learn about life and seek love and adventure in the wider world beyond Hackney. The inevitable teenage clashes with my dad, whose heavy drinking, possessive ways and free spending habits led him down a perilous path, saw me desperate to get away from home and break free of my claustrophobic environment.
Yet it wasn’t until 1966 that I finally got away and found freedom of sorts in a shared flat in north-west London. My dad’s bookie world collapsed around him and London itself was beginning to be transformed into the world’s most ‘swinging’ city.
A light aircraft, a Piper Aztec, is taking off from a small airfield just outside
