the hassle of switching around to strange faces and bosses every few weeks. Many dislike this idea, even with the lure of more money.
I earn around £12 a week. I manage to supplement that for the year or so when I work at the electronics company by handing out good leads that have come direct to me, the sales manager’s secretary, to a few select salesmen, getting £30 per sale in return. So I have plenty of cash to splash out on clothes, makeup and shoes. In fact, I blow the lot on clothes nearly every Friday when I receive my £9 (after deductions) pay packet, in exchange for my favourite styles: five guinea crepe dresses by Radley with wide trumpet sleeves or slinky, short, body-skimming shift dresses to go with tight, elasticated, white high boots from Dolcis, (£3 9 shillings and 11 pence) or killer pointy stilettos also costing a few pounds. What more does a girl need to get out there and attract?
Once the accounts girl has handed you the little brown envelope with the printed slip inside – no cash machines then or automatic salary transfers into a bank account, though 1966 saw the launch of the plastic revolution with the Barclaycard, the first credit card – away we all went at lunchtime, click-clicking down Oxford or Regent Street to a tiny Wallis (long relocated from its original home next to Oxford Circus tube, and still a popular chain to this day) or the bigger, pricier Fifth Avenue (long gone) on Regent Street or into one of the new boutiques for women popping up all around the hub of men’s trendy gear shopping: Carnaby Street.
There are ’60s labels I lust after like Tuffin and Foale (as spotted on Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go) and Cacharel from Paris. But they remain out of my price range, alas. Lured by the newspaper and Honey magazine hype, I venture to the famous Biba in its early days in Abingdon Road, off Kensington High Street one weekend. But the clothes in the packed little shop are far too tiny, cut too narrowly, too tight-sleeved and aimed at very lean King’s Road girls. The smocks and the dyed skinny vests are for the flat-chested, not for me.
Yet once I do find what suits me elsewhere, a swift wriggle into the new ultra-short op-art dress, zip it up, add a pair of pale tights, low-cut patent shoes and lo! Instant transformation into the siren I hoped to be, complete with super-thick false eyelashes or carefully painted-on lower lashes, (thanks, Twiggy) pink Max Factor lipstick, and a blonde, shoulder-length flick-up hairdo. And, of course, a small, quilted Chanel-style bag on a gold chain slung over the shoulder. The ’60s look.
Of course, we can’t all look like the high priestesses of classic mini-skirted ’60s blonde. Women such as Patti Boyd, Julie Christie, Catherine Deneuve or Bardot (my secret role models – talk about aiming high. In this at least I have real ambition). I’m not lean enough to be a classic dolly bird, though the slinky, short, patterned dresses in man-made slippery fabrics suit my curvy shape. With an unruly, curly brown mop I am very far from the requisite natural blonde with straight, shiny hair. Somehow, I’ve managed to transform myself into a yellowish peroxide blonde, often with nasty dark roots. But the fashions of the time help: bad hair days can be disguised because all kinds of head gear and caps have become ultra-fashionable, especially the plastic pillbox hat, worn on the back of the head revealing only a dead straight fringe. Consider Mandy Rice Davies wearing such a hat outside the court in 1963 at the height of the Profumo affair. The hat covers a multitude of sins, if you’ll forgive the pun.
Look carefully at those ’60s photos of the commuters streaming down Waterloo Bridge to work or thronging Oxford Street or Piccadilly. You can’t see too many overweight people, can you? My colleagues and girlfriends are different shapes and sizes – yet hardly any are what could be described as glaringly obese. The post-war generation, reared on free milk and NHS sticky orange juice as toddlers, remain quite lean by today’s standards. Yet by today’s standards, we eat badly – our office girl lunches, purchased with luncheon vouchers, now obligatory for any employer wishing to attract office staff, consist of cheese or ham crispy white rolls, Smith’s crisps, Kit Kats, Lyon’s Maid choc-ices or the somewhat dubious three-course café lunches for 2 shillings and 6 pence (watery tinned soup, something vaguely resembling meat and chips, treacle pudding and sticky yellow custard). All this, of course, is way too starchy and fat-laden. We are mostly ignorant about what really constitutes a sensible, healthy diet.
I’ve been diving into adventurous foreign eating territory in Soho, with cheap Chinese dishes like sweet’n’sour pork around Chinatown and Shaftesbury Avenue, since my late teens. Or sampling poppadums and curried chicken in north London Indian restaurants on my nights out with Bryan. But young women probably stay slim-ish because there aren’t many fast food outlets around yet. Small workers’ cafés, run by cheerful, hard-working Italian immigrant families, are the norm at lunchtime in the West End or the City, alongside the fast-growing rash of Wimpy Bars and Golden Egg chains spreading everywhere. These would eventually destroy places such as Lyons Corner Houses, so beloved of our parents’ generation yet losing popularity all the time until their demise in the early 1970s. Pub food? This barely existed beyond the odd sandwich, scotch egg or ham roll. White bread only. (‘Don’t say brown, say Hovis’ ran the 1950s ads for wheatgerm bread, but most pub managers continued to ignore anything but soggy sliced white bread well into the 1970s – and beyond).
In flesh-revealing terms, slimmer ’60s women were pretty modest by today’s standards. The mini is rampant, certainly, a revolutionary expression of new freedoms. There is a lot of leg and thigh on display. But you’re unlikely to see a seven-month pregnant woman at a bus stop in a clingy outfit emphasising the bump. Modesty, even with the mini around, would not vanish overnight.
Parents are mostly horrified and somewhat puzzled at the exuberant rise of the show-all mini. ‘You can’t go out like that’ becomes the mantra of a generation of women accustomed to ‘making do’ and rationing, using a black crayon to draw a fake ‘seam’ down the backs of their legs in wartime, nylon stockings having been virtually unavailable for many years. Now, those prized, precious, seamed nylons and suspender belts are on the way out too, replaced by the shiny white tights. Or, later, striped high socks with square-toed patent flats. It’s truly daft to attempt to combine a mini with stockings and suspenders, though there’s always the odd aberration, much to the delight of all the men in the office.
In a way, central London is my playground. I’ve grown up in a tough, streetwise area around Ridley Road market, but since my teens I’ve been spending most of my time working and going out in the West End, with occasional brief forays to fashionable Chelsea and Kensington. So the fashion influences are all around me, in my face, the shops a daily temptation. As a secretary I can job hop with remarkable impunity, mainly because there are so many office jobs on offer – and I am very easily bored. Offices big and small are taking on huge numbers of young school leavers and 20-somethings. With a bit of secretarial experience behind you, you can pick and choose, swapping around as often as you like.
For someone like me, with a restless, impatient nature, I am truly fortunate in that I hit the working world at just the right time: jobs a-go-go. Though with the carelessness of youth, I simply take this kind of freedom for granted. Gratitude for being given a job? Excuse me? Isn’t it the other way round?
What I really hanker for, but never acknowledge, is some sort of challenge or stimulus in my daily trek to the typewriter. The day-to-day routine, waiting for men to dictate to you so you can type, spells stultifying boredom to me, only enlivened by banter and cheeky retorts to colleagues around the office and the contemplation of the after-work drink or that night’s diversion. Yet such is the laissez faire of the employers, the ease with which office jobs are dished out, often with a minimum of formality (a CV was unknown, though a typed ‘reference’ from a previous job might be required by a diligent employer), I do manage to find the occasional minor challenge, simply because I opt to move around the job market frequently.
Far from being a model employee, the somewhat defiant, ‘couldn’t give a stuff’ attitude I’d deployed at school has now morphed into a kind of sneery arrogance about it all. I’ll do the work, rattle through it, no problem.
