remarkably good flying conditions. As the plane climbs to 2,000 feet, anyone looking up from below might envy the passengers the delight of their winged freedom on this, a perfect day. If they continued to look up, they might have been somewhat impressed by the daring but perfectly executed aerobatic roll executed by the pilot a few minutes later.
Brilliant stuff. If you’re on the ground. But I’m up in the tiny plane, strapped in behind the pilot, Des, and his friend, Jeff. A gregarious, charismatic, speedy chatter-upper in his early thirties, Jeff is hell bent on making a real impression on me, a 21-year-old secretary working in his office. Well, it’s one way to pull the birds, eh? Persuade your best mate, a former RAF fighter pilot, to take you and your latest object of desire up in the clouds for a few aerobatic show-off manoeuvres.
‘Show Jacky some tricks, Jeffrey,’ laughs Des, as he manoeuvres the controls to send us into that head spinning, stomach-churning, 360-degree spin. Luckily, I’m not expecting this. No time to anticipate the sheer terror of being flipped upside down in a flimsy airborne tin can: it’s all over in a matter of seconds. I manage to remain impassive, stay outwardly remote, in my gingham mini-dress with the white organdie collar, cutaway shoulders and short white Courrèges boots, though it’s the fake cool of ignorant youth, rather than any kind of real courage or bravado, that gets me through this terrifying moment. This is the sort of thing that’s exciting once you’ve done it, I tell myself. He could’ve asked me first…
‘All right Miss Hyams?’ grins Jeff, turning back to give my exposed bare knee a quick caress. Jeff’s a Hackney lad, common ground with me that he’s exploiting to the hilt in his quest, so far thwarted, to get me into bed.
‘Yeah,’ I smile, remembering to show my girly gratitude to my host. ‘Er… nice one, Des.’
‘Next time we’ll show her some more tricks, eh Jeff?’ winks Des as he expertly handles the controls and guides the plane down towards the landing strip. Jeff looks chuffed: ‘tricks’ are his thing all right. I’m well used to the double entendre: it goes on all day, every day in the office. But I’m not the giggly, wriggly, ‘Oo, you are awful’ type. It’s usually a sarcastic retort, a sharp put down. Yet today, for some reason, I don’t bite back.
Still, for 1966, this is a pretty resourceful ploy for seduction. Getting young women up in small planes isn’t exactly commonplace. Nor is flying itself, still mostly for the comfortably off, though I’ve already had my first flight to Italy and, by the end of the decade, five million Brits will be off holidaying abroad, mainly on package-deal charter flights.
Mostly, men deploy their cars as girl bait, especially those who can afford to show off in flash Rovers, souped-up Minis, Triumph TR4s or MG MGBs. Young office girls are still some way off from buying their own cars after they pass the test, propelling themselves around town independently. And because it is still quite common for sons and daughters to live in the family home until marriage, car ownership means a guy has, at least, a love trap on wheels. Otherwise it’s outdoor sex (never a brilliant idea in Blighty’s climate, but nonetheless popular because it’s comparatively easy to find a secluded spot to carefully place the blanket) or the deserted office or shop floor – more popular then than you’d ever imagine. Or, as a final resort, there’s always the family home when unoccupied: not always achievable with other siblings hanging around.
Jeff hasn’t yet quite convinced me of his charms on this day of the aerobatic somersault. He’s an outrageous flirt around the electronics company where we both work and there’s an element of mystery around his existence that makes me initially wary (it will take several years before I learn to trust those first, crucial instincts).
He claims to live with a brother, somewhere in deepest Hertfordshire. The truth is he lives in sin in Pinner with a much older woman he’s been with for years. There’s also an illegitimate son and the boy’s mother, tucked away in Scotland, seen about once a year – a brief affair from Jeff’s national service days. Yet I don’t know about any of this when, a few months later, I willingly succumb to his persistent advances in the back of his Rover.
This relationship with Jeff, which continues until I learn the whole truth a couple of years later, brings my tally of boyfriends up to three. There’s Bryan, the on–off boyfriend, a racy, chubby advertising man I knew before leaving home in Dalston. I go to pubs, Indian or Chinese restaurants with Bryan and sleep with him, usually in his flat, albeit intermittently. And recently, I’ve regularly started to see Martin, a less dashing figure than the other two – a wiry, ambitious shop manager from Islington, a sharp dresser, almost a Mod, whom I mostly see on weekends for drives and trips to the cinema.
It sounds odd now, but our favourite drive is to get into Martin’s much-prized Mini and drive to Heathrow airport (people actually drove to airports then just to look at the planes, a popular family day out). Today’s traffic-clogged, hellish and unloved route from central London to Heathrow, the A4, was very different then, virtually empty and car-free. Sometimes we whizz down from central London to the airport in 20 minutes or so. No unending stream of planes taking off every 60 seconds at Heathrow then. Park outside, go into the quiet terminal, blissfully free of innumerable shopping opportunities and sit there, watching the BEA Comets and the Spantax Coronados. Without the crowds and bustle we know today, it is all quite… romantic. ‘I’m gonna be on one of those BOAC planes one day, when I go to live in the States,’ Martin says confidently. And he does just that a few years later.
I never do get too involved with Martin for some reason, though I admire his sparky determination to move his life along and not just accept what he’s been dished out. Our dates never go beyond the odd snogging session in the Mini. Who knows? Maybe he had another girl, maybe he hid his shyness or lack of sexual experience under his sharp-suited exterior.
Yet had anyone asked me back then, I’d have told them it was perfectly acceptable for a young single woman to go out with – and sleep with – as many men as she pleased, get drunk if she felt like it and treat life like an adventure, a quest for experience, rather than a single-minded march towards marriage and motherhood. After all, it was 1966, wasn’t it? Sex was now freely available. Thanks to the arrival of the contraceptive pill, women of all ages, single or married, no longer had to worry about the threat of unwanted pregnancy or men who couldn’t abide johnnies. (‘Like picking your nose with a boxing glove,’ as one wag described it.)
The ’60s, of course, are historically defined by the sexual revolution because once the pill was introduced (1961) and the laws on abortion changed (1967), sex became quite a different proposition, as women had real choice in such matters for the first time ever. All this sex revolution stuff was sweet music to my ears. Yet it was still a matter of time before those changes actually took effect in everyday lives: the reality across the land was not quite the way I was choosing to see it. Women’s take up of the pill in the ’60s was tiny: only one in ten were actually taking it by the end of the decade. If my conversations with girlfriends were anything to go by at that point, I was a little bit different to those I knew in being quite so generous with my favours. Some of us were bravely, blindly, diving into the freedom of choice or ‘love is free if you want it’ idea. But not half as many were going for it as one might imagine from the burble and hype around the sexual revolution and swinging London in the mid-1960s.
Today no one bats an eyelid at single women juggling lovers of either sex, having one night stands at whim or even opting for what are known, somewhat bleakly, as ‘fuck buddies’. This kind of thing was not really happening for the majority in the mid-1960s. Essentially, the sexual freedom hype, as purveyed by the newspapers of the time (let’s face it, it’s an eye-catching story, particularly when there are pictures of beautiful young women in tiny skirts to go with it), created a somewhat confusing picture of a wild, free-love society which, to a greater extent, was still the very opposite: it remained solidly class-bound and reticent in all matters sexual. Youth was going mad, but for now the older generation was
