Elvis married Priscilla in May. Evel Knievel has jumped over sixteen cars on his motorbike. The Beatles have a new album out – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The single ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’ by Scott McKenzie has just popped into the charts. And Keith Richards has been sentenced to a year in jail for possessing illegal drugs.
Drip, drip drip. Drip, drip drip.
It’s July. I’m in bed, half asleep. It may be the summer of love in San Francisco but here in London it’s wet. My head’s wet, anyway. No – it’s not rain. The ceiling’s leaking.
Monday morning; my first morning in my very first bedsit. But this isn’t the start I’d planned. I’d wanted the rhythm of music to wake me up – The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’, say, or ‘Pictures of Lily’, the new single from The Who – not the damp annoying beat of dripping water. Never mind, saves washing hair.
(Did I say bedsit? Not much of a bedsit – a tiny single bedroom in someone else’s apartment with use of their K and B (kitchen and bathroom). The leaseholder, a Spanish guy with a wife who, he says, lives mostly in Spain, won’t give me a key to my door but I’ll worry about that later.)
At least the leak gets me out of bed.
Having caught the coach from Oxford to London and stayed with my sister a few days in outer suburban dreariness, I’d found this room in West Kensington in the Evening Standard small ads – £1 10s a week and a short walk from my favourite underground line – the District and Circle, where all the most glamorous addresses were, I had decided. Okay, my nearest station was the distinctly unfashionable Baron’s Court next to the unglamorous Hammersmith flyover, but for 30s I could hardly expect Sloane Square.
There’s enough money in my post office savings book to last for a month by which time I must have a job or else I go back to my mum, the cat, the budgie and our home – a 16ft caravan on a small estate in Botley, an Oxford backwater.
I have to make this work. Mum can’t afford to support me any more and who wants to live in a bloody caravan anyway? Not me.
At 11 a.m. I have my first interview. Well, to be honest, the only interview I’ve got lined up. For the only job I want to do. Ever. But I don’t stand a chance. But I’ve got to try. Otherwise, I’ll never know.
So I dry my hair and curse the kinks that appear, and put on the warpaint: Rimmel Truly Fair make-up for combination skin; Boots Cream Blusher, Truly Fair powder compact (anti-shine); bright pink lipstick (pinched from Mother’s small and ancient make up collection), Boots Powder Eyeshadow in Shimmer Blue. All fine. Shaking hands, stab eye at last hurdle – Rimmel Stay Put Mascara in Brownish-Black. Bugger. Not that stay put then – as my eye streams the mascara ruins everything. Have to start again. Bugger! I’m going to be late.
10.15 a.m. Run down Gliddon Road, across the Talgarth Road and join the crowds jostling into the tube on their way to work. Feel the rush! I’m actually part of the London rush hour. How fantastic is that? When you’ve come from living in a caravan and then you leave your mansion block and walk down the streets of West London to catch the tube to get to work, and you can actually mingle with Londoners at last, and pretend to be one – well, that’s amazing. Even more amazing to get out at Blackfriars and walk down towards Ludgate Circus and FLEET STREET. Fleet Street!
I’m 11 and it’s my first visit to London, and I’m standing on Fleet Street with my mother and her friend Mrs Hill. As I don’t talk a lot, ever, they aren’t to know that I’m almost passing out with excitement to be here at last. With the help of one of my life’s many decent coincidences, it turns out that Mrs Hill’s oldest son works in an office right on the street itself. So here we are, waiting for him to take us to lunch.
There was a year, around the age of 8, when I wanted to be a stable girl, but two years ago I decided I want to be a journalist and that’s been my career decided ever since. Nothing more, nothing less will do. So just to stand here, near the Daily Express and the Daily Mail and Reuters …
‘Do you think he’s a reporter? Is he Cassandra? Do you think she’s a journalist? Where’s the Cheshire Cheese? Where’s the Wig and Pen?’ all this said to myself, not out loud, I don’t like to be a nuisance.
This is the only place to be, I have to be here. I can’t wait to grow up.
Strange, now, to think that a walk down grubby old Fleet Street was enough to begin the process of turning me from a shy no-hoper child into, several years later, a walking advertisement for Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
Thank God for aspiration and ambition, the fantastic surge of anticipation that comes in around adolescence. The blind faith that says ‘I am special!’ and the ignorance that allows you to say ‘I can do anything I want!’
Without that, a large helping of luck, and the undoubted advantage that my ambition was to work on a teen pop magazine rather than be the next Simon Jenkins of The Times or Katherine Whitehorn of The Observer, I would probably still be in Botley today.
By the time I cross Ludgate Circus and begin the journey down Farringdon Street, I’m not so much walking as wobbling along, as my knees have given way with nerves. I would ask the way now but I can’t because my voice has disappeared along with my bravado. I’m holding my A-to-Z but I’m too embarrassed to look at it as I don’t want people to think I’m new around here. My stabbed eye aches a bit. Also, I am itching.
It’s the suit. A quite ghastly two-piece skirt suit, knee-length, turquoise (yes, turquoise) in the style of Chanel but actually from Oxford Market, price £1 5s. Nearly a whole week’s cleaning wages for my mother. Made of some tweed-like material, thick, unyielding, ITCHY.
Also of course, I’m sweating. Boiling hot London day, bulky jacket, tights, blouse complete with pussycat neck bow tied too tightly, long sleeves, cheap nylon. So I’m sweating with the suit and sweating with nerves and wondering if I’ve got BO and dark patches showing through my jacket yet, and in this state I arrive at New Fleetway House – a less than prepossessing concrete office block nearly underneath the Holborn Viaduct. Shall I just leave now? I don’t want this job anyway. Who’d want to work in a place like this? Well, I do. Actually I do, very much.
Having negotiated the utilitarian entrance, the manual lift and a short stretch of windowless corridor, it really is like a Wizard of Oz or Through the Looking Glass moment, when all suddenly becomes light and beauty and bustle and glamour, the dream turns good, if rather quirky.
I stand like Dorothy/Alice surrounded by the Beautiful People who make Fabulous Magazine come true every week. I know them all because Fabulous Magazine is so cool it actually prints photos of the people who work there on its pages; it makes them its own mini-celebs. And, as I said, I am a reader. A fully paid up, order it from my newsagent, reader, from the very first issue which had The Beatles on the cover.
And I can see John Fearn, the art editor with the bowtie; Maureen ‘Mo’ who does the letters page. Heather Kirby the fashion editor. My God, there’s June Southworth who writes the Fab features and gets to mix with the stars each week. And here’s this ethereal gorgeous person, Anne Wilson, who is the ‘Ed’s Sec’ (for this is how ‘editor’s secretary’ is written each week in the mag). Anne Wilson is famous to us readers because she is so slim and lovely she is often used as a model on the pages of Fabulous. And now Anne Wilson is drifting over to me, smiling at me. It’s her job I have come to try to win.
What a joke. What a nerve.
‘Can I help you?’
Grab the side of a desk to stop myself running away.
‘JudithWillscomeforjobinterview.’ All in a rush.
Just smile, Mother had said. I smile but my lips have stuck to my gums and I can’t undo them. My suit’s the worst thing. They’re all wearing flower power, floaty things – even the men. God, what can possibly be worse than wearing the Wrong Clothes?
Then after a while Anne leads me through the inner sanctum door and there she is. The most envied woman in the teenage world. Unity. Unity Hall. The editor. Or ‘Ed’ as she is known to us readers. Her Ed’s Letter each week tells tales of who she’s met, which pop hero has come to the office, what great press parties she’s been to. Her life is so glamorous it’s even off the scale of my vivid imagination and here she sits before me in her Fabulous office at her Fabulous desk looking Fabulous – if with a slightly dodgy Cleopatra haircut and eyebrows, I later bitchily decide.
God knows what she thinks of my suit, my sweat, my accent, my red eye, my sheer all-embracing inability to talk or persuade her as to why she should employ me; my lack of personality or a trace of common sense.
‘Previous experience as a secretary, dear?’
None.
‘Qualifications?’
Poor A levels in English Literature, which may or may not be useful here, and Economic History, which definitely won’t, and shorthand and typing.
It was the shorthand and typing which was almost to be my downfall. For after a fifteen-minute interview, Unity decided that I had to have a practical test.
‘Just get your notepad out, dear, and I’ll dictate you a little letter and you can use Anne’s typewriter to type it out.’
My brain froze and hands shook as she dictated a letter to Cyril Maitland, Fabulous’s photographer in Los Angeles. I was so excited to have a letter to Cyril Maitland dictated to me by the editor of Fab that actually taking the dictation was not possible. When I came to type it up, all there was on the pad were a few meaningless squiggles in no known shorthand language. So I sat at Anne’s Olympia and decided to improvise the missing bits. In other words, I made it all up.
After I’d finished my fiction, an hour passed, during which time I sat, virtually in an hypnotic trance brought on by my nerves, a dreadful thirst and utter disbelief that I’d managed to get into this space, the holy grail of my young teen years. At some point someone offered me a cup of tea but I had to refuse – what if I spilled it down my front?
Then I’m summoned back into Unity’s office for the verdict.
She’s talking to me about how bad my shorthand test was. And I’m agreeing, and nodding and trying to look okay about it, and babbling, ‘Well, never mind, it was great to meet you; thanks for seeing me anyway …’.
She finally gets a word in, shouting.
‘NO DEAR – I DO want you to work for me! I’M OFFERING YOU THE POST.’
‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’
‘I want you to have the job!’
‘But why? – you just said you haven’t seen a worse effort at transcribing in years!’
‘YES, DEAR – well I expect you’ll improve, and I like you,’ Unity boomed. ‘In fact I think your letter to Cyril was better than mine!’
I reckoned she just felt sorry for me and hadn’t the heart to turn me away. It wasn’t until years later that I cottoned on to the fact that all the best magazine stories are made up, so she no doubt thought my letter showed true promise.
And thus I was to start as Ed’s Sec in one week’s time.
I’d landed the job of my dreams.
WOW, COOL, GROOVY, WOW, COOL, FAB!
• I’m the new Ed’s Sec of Fabulous.
• I work just off Fleet Street.
• I don’t have to get in until 10 a.m.
• I am earning £4 10s a week on a three-month trial basis.
• Soon I may be able to afford a new dress, a floaty dress.
• I can talk to John, Anne (who is still at Fab, promoted, appropriately, to beauty editor) and Mo, just by shouting from my desk. Not that I would. As John says a few days into my new job, ‘What did Unity employ you for? – You wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’
• I can even see Doug Perry when he comes in once a week. He works for Radio Luxembourg (London), which is an even more glam job than working for Fab, and writes the Fab Luxy column. He’s rather nice.
• And I might get to see some of the stars who come in to see us hoping for a paragraph or two, or even a whole feature written about them.
• I now know the true meaning of the phrase ‘deliriously happy’. For I truly am.
• Well, 75 per cent deliriously happy; 25 per cent shit scared. How the hell am I going to pull it off?