Aftermath

Why be equal?¹ … They’ve got a very warped view of life in my opinion …

It’s 1970, and Les, a hippie, is talking to a social scientist making a study of youth cultures, about his attitude to women and women’s rights:

I mean if somebody had sort of gone to this chick when he first screwed her and screwed her with absolute tenderness, and showed the quality of fucking love as much as he could, they wouldn’t have been freaking out all over the place, wanting equal fucking rights, you know. They just want to be into being women, because it’s a beautiful fucking thing …

Take away the slang, take away the obscenities, and we are back in the pre-suffrage era, when women were dolls in dolls’ houses, when their bodies were regarded as the natural property of their menfolk, and when the idea of gender equality was seen by men as outlandish and abnormal.

The time had finally come to change all that.

*

Sheila Rowbotham and the others thought about a hundred women might show up. It was 27 February 1970, and the organisers of the first National Women’s Liberation Conference quickly realised that the space they had booked at Ruskin College Oxford was far too small for the 560-odd women, plus the handful of men that had travelled there that day. The conference decamped to the Oxford Union, a building hitherto reserved for male orators. Nearby, men students from Ruskin were (unprecedentedly) running the children’s crèche. The women had come together to make demands: for equal pay, for equality of education and opportunity, for free contraception and abortion on demand, and for free twenty-four-hour nurseries.

Picture a Gothic quadrangle and leafless trees; then picture a sombre galleried chamber with Victorian stained glass and sculpted busts of past presidents.fn1 Someone has irreverently cloaked the head of one of these male panjandrums with a stripy towel. The benches are crowded with attentive female faces. They’re casually dressed, many with long, loose hair. They lean forward, not missing a word as speaker after speaker takes the microphone in that cavernous panelled space, relieved only with the boldly graphic banners of the movement: WOMEN’S EQUAL RIGHTS CAMPAIGN – an angry face, a raised fist. On the wall they’ve Sellotaped a scrawled timetable: Saturday 2 p.m., Women and the Economy – Sunday 3 p.m., Women and Revolution. Tables are loaded with flyers, leaflets and copies of Shrew. Among the crowd milling around after the sessions there’s a palpable vehemence and fervour:

Suddenly we were all together having this enormous buzz of excitement – and then the world started taking notice, often to belittle us – like calling us Women’s Lib – but actually from then on they couldn’t ignore us.²

Participants like this one remember the atmosphere as euphoric, electrifying. Ideas spilled out about what slogans to adopt, how to connect with existing political groups, how to organise and exert influence. A march was planned and a committee formed. ‘After Ruskin I felt I had rights …’ said Audrey Battersby, who had come up to Oxford that weekend from the original Tufnell Park group; ‘I didn’t feel like a sex object any more …’ ‘Ruskin changed my whole life,’ recalled one of the Conference organisers, Sally Alexander.^{3, 4} ‘I learnt who I was through the Women’s Liberation movement.’ But Juliet Mitchell remembered above all the sense of solidarity:

You did feel you could have one feminism.⁵ One ‘women’s liberation’.

In 1970, at Ruskin, we felt we had one goal, we were unified. Yes, we had that.

*

Germaine Greer had arrived in Britain a couple of years before her compatriot Richard Neville, and almost immediately started to overstep boundaries. But 1970 was the breakthrough year.

That May Neville surpassed himself in putting two fingers up to the Establishment, by giving the world ‘Schoolkids Oz’, a special X-rated edition of the magazine put together by school-age teenagers. His comeuppance in 1971 was the resulting highly publicised obscenity trial at which Neville and his colleagues would be found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act. His book Playpower also came out in 1970. Feminism doesn’t feature in Playpower, though Neville makes passing mention of a ‘Female Fuckability Test’.

But hard on the heels of ‘Schoolkids Oz’, in October 1970, he gave page space to Germaine Greer to guest edit a special Women’s Liberation issue. Headed ‘Cunt Power’, its very title was a declaration of war against male phallic domination. Greer – clever, iconoclastic, witty, beautiful and provocative – was a new voice for a new decade, and here, beneath the customary trippy graphics, in an article entitled ‘The Politics of Female Sexuality’,fn2 she called on women to ‘dig CUNT’ and abandon their knickers for ever. The article coincided with the publication of Greer’s first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), which used confrontational language to bust the myths of female passivity, to debunk the permissive society that so depressingly favoured men, and to develop her premises about women’s libido into a vision of the pleasure principle. Women, she argued, were effectively castrated, raised from birth to be in denial of their sexuality. Smoothed, softened, brushed, tamed, hatted and white-gloved, womankind had been bridled and neutered. Greer urged women to think outside their social conditioning, and to struggle joyfully against their oppressors. Joy, she asserted, was something women were entitled to:

To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness … To be freed from guilt and shame …

A book whose cover was calculated to affront and challenge.

The Female Eunuch was a bestseller.

At this time feminist militancy was never far from the headlines. In November 1970 members of the Women’s Liberation movement infiltrated the audience for the live television broadcast of the Miss World contest held at the Royal Albert Hall, with light relief provided by comedian Bob Hope. Outside, demonstrators held placards proclaiming ‘We’re not Beautiful – We’re not Ugly – We’re Angry’. Hope mocked the protesters, quipping: ‘I’m very, very happy to be here at this “cattle market” tonight – “Moo-ooo!”.⁶ No, it’s quite a cattle market – I’ve been back there checking calves …’ As Hope’s commentary descended into innuendo – ‘I don’t want you to think I’m a dirty old man, because I never give women a second thought – my first thought covers everything’ – he was interrupted by the clatter of football rattles. From the auditorium, feminist Jo Robinson watched him beat a hasty retreat. ‘I looked up and saw in the floodlights all this flour, smoke bombs and leaflets all coming down … and there were all these women screaming, and the show stopped – and it was OURS – this was our moment to tell the whole world about feminism!’⁷

But the contest’s winner, Miss Grenada, told a journalist, ‘I do not think women should ever achieve complete equal rights.⁸ I do not want to. I still like a gentleman to hold back my chair for me.’

Nevertheless, progress was inching through Parliament in 1970, with the introduction of the Labour Party’s last piece of ground-breaking legislation before their election defeat later that year: the Equal Pay Act, triggered by the Dagenham workers’ strike in 1968 and propelled through the Commons by the trailblazing Barbara Castle.fn3 Though the Act laid down a principle of equal pay for equal work of equal value, almost ten years later women in this country would still be relatively worse off than their sisters in Italy, France and Germany. Nor did the 1970 general election do much to amplify the female voice in Parliament: just twenty-six women gained seats in the chamber – barely 4 per cent – to alleviate the 630-strong multitude of grey-suited men who had been voted in to legislate on the fate of the nation. One of them, however, was the independent socialist Bernadette Devlin, at twenty-two the youngest sitting MP, elected to represent Mid Ulster in a 1969 by-election. Devlin, ‘the girl from the Bog’, became a press sensation – ‘I was a mass of flesh which had become public property’ – but her record as youngest woman MP would stand for over forty-five years.⁹ And at last, after all the gibes about women’s ‘inability to concentrate’, there were signs that local authorities were giving in to pressure, when a Darlington bus company announced (in January 1970) a scheme to train a hundred women bus drivers.

Minorities were getting louder, and more visible. A few months after the 1970 election the first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front was held in a basement room at the London School of Economics. GLF drew inspiration from the revolutionary activism of 1968, aiming to change social attitudes, and giving heartening encouragement to lesbians, as well as homosexual men, to step outside their closets.

But, as the sixties melted into the past, a generation had much to mourn. Rock’n’roll fans were in shock, because this was the year when rumour became certainty that the Beatles as a group were over and done with. And it was the year when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. It also saw Rolling Stone Mick Jagger branching out, with a new film role in the sinister Donald Cammell/Nicholas Roeg art movie Performance, which showcased the decadent dark side of late-sixties jeunesse dorée. Musically, from 1970, everyone was in thrall to the poetry and melodies of Simon and Garfunkel. But Marcia Griffiths, with her vocal partner Bob Andy, was a young Jamaican singer who better caught the zeitgeist of 1970, with her upbeat hit ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, while another talented black American singer, Freda Payne, belted out the grief and disillusionment of marriage:

Now that you’re gone¹⁰

All that’s left is a band of gold …

We’ve travelled a long road from the diehard devotion and cutesy wifedom of ‘Bobby’s Girl’.

What will the new decade hold in store for women? A lucky dip into the headlines of 1970 brings up a handful of omens. Altheia Jones-LeCointe was arrested while assisting a woman injured during a Black Power demonstration that had gathered to denounce police raids directed at the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill Gate. Jones-LeCointe would later stand accused of riot in a landmark race trial. In the three years since 1967 prosecutions for cannabis offences had risen threefold, to 7,520; and hot pants broke new ground in sexual exposure when they first appeared in fashion collections. Also that year Mary Whitehouse’s campaign for standards of taste and decency in the media was getting into its stride. Whitehouse was greatly heartened by the rise, and growth, of the Nationwide Festival of Light, a massed evangelical Christian movement, which took off with two huge rallies the following year. The puritanically minded could see the floodwaters rising. In July 1970 permissiveness had gone mainstream with the opening of the stage revue Oh! Calcutta!, Kenneth Tynan’s 1970 version of a smutty seaside postcard. Popular with those who enjoyed unisex full-frontal exposure, it would run for ten years. Cecil Beaton looked on in dismay:

Nudity is everywhere.¹¹ Nothing is left unsaid. It is amazing and wherever does it go from here? …

It went even more mainstream. In November 1970 The Sun’s editor Larry Lamb out-manoeuvred Oz and broke new ground for a daily paper by printing a picture of model Stefanie Kahn on Page 3, backlit in a meadow, with a clearly visible nipple. Sales rocketed, and by mid-decade – depending on where you stood – the Page 3 Girl had become synonymous with either a culture of tabloid sexism which demeaned and objectified women, or a celebration of female beauty and ‘an innocuous British institution’.fn4

This was the year when the Family Planning Association finally changed its rules to allow contraceptive advice to be given to unmarried women. They also, in 1970, commissioned the poster that brought fame to everyone concerned, portraying a man in a jersey whose repentant expression and swollen tummy hardly needed its inspired caption: ‘Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?’

Ten years after oral contraceptives were introduced in Britain, the children of the Pill age were starting to change their minds, sometimes dramatically. At the beginning of the decade, nearly 60 per cent of girls who had been asked their opinions of pre-marital sex in a psychological survey considered that it was ‘Always wrong’. By 1970 that figure had dropped to under 15 per cent. Young women were not just looking anew at sex; they were starting to analyse the costs and benefits of the permissive society, and to ask the questions about subjugation that hadn’t been asked before. In 1971 Rosie Boycott was a receptive onlooker at a meeting of women working, like her, for the underground press, as they threw a searchlight on the condition of women in the new decade:

‘I expected to be encouraged to write and to edit.¹² Instead all I do is type.’

‘I hate being called a chick …’

‘I’m too embarrassed to say what I like in bed … But how to ask?’

‘I hate to admit it, but I’ve never had an orgasm.’

Rosie came away tingling with excitement. Within a year she and Marsha Rowe, an Australian who had worked as a secretary on Oz, had raised the money to start another new magazine, Spare Rib. This time the content would be feminism and all it stood for.

But the 1970s are another story.

*

For most of the women whose voices have been heard in this book, the 1960s were a formative time, when they were growing up. Who they became later was determined by those years. So for the curious, the orderly and those who like resolutions, the following paragraphs may help to deliver a kind of dénouement.

*

There are multiple heroines to this story, but the name of Sheila Rowbotham comes high up my list; her insights, expressed in lucid, honest writing, changed the world for women. During the research stage of this book Sheila and I corresponded briefly, and she was right to suggest I drew on her memoir Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2000), rather than interview her. It proved a rich resource. At its close, Sheila describes the disintegration of her relationship with the male editorial board of Black Dwarf and how, after returning from a trip to the dentist, she sat in a café writing them a resignation letter. ‘[I suggested] that they sit round imagining they had cunts for two minutes in silence so they could understand why it was hard for me to discuss what I had written on women.’¹³ The Women’s Liberation movement would be her life for the next ten years, until Margaret Thatcher came to power. But Sheila has been a lynchpin for British feminists for nearly half a century. In her long career she has been a campaigner, historian, biographer, journalist and teacher. Much loved at the University of Manchester, where she held the professorship of Gender and Labour History, her compulsory retirement in 2008 at the age of sixty-five provoked a wave of indignant support from students and academics worldwide, who started a ‘Save Sheila’ campaign on Facebook. The battle was won, and Manchester has now reinstated her as a research professor, confirming her reputation as one of Britain’s leading feminist thinkers.

*

Margaret Hogg is a very different kind of heroine. Margaret’s son David was born severely disabled because she was prescribed medicine containing thalidomide while pregnant. When David was three, the Hoggs had a second son, and a daughter completed their family in 1972. The doctors predicted that David would not live past his fifth birthday. He is now in his fifties, and still living at home with his parents, who are approaching their diamond wedding and have seven grandchildren. Against the odds, their firstborn son learnt to play football and became a keen swimmer. His mother says, ‘What David wants to do, David goes ahead and does it whether he succeeds at it or not. He tries.’ In adulthood he has worked on a telephone switchboard for a charity, has travelled, has had ‘umpteen girlfriends’ (according to his mum) and an excellent social life based at the local pub. As for Margaret, after a lifetime struggling with doctors, lawyers and the daily demands of bringing up a disabled child, she remains as loving, brave, strong and straightforward as ever. Today the campaigning is slowing down, but Margaret is always willing to add her voice to calls for better allowances and disabled facilities. Above all, her outspoken tribute is to the ‘thalidomiders’ themselves:

When people speak of thalidomide victims, can I just please plead not to call them victims?¹⁴ They are survivors … and all I can say, as a parent – and I speak for all the rest of the parents – is, we are very, very proud of them.

And if she could turn the clock back, would she change anything? The simple answer is, ‘No.’

After what she has lived through, one might also expect Pattie Boyd to willingly hit the rewind button, but she too has no regrets. ‘Given my life over again, I wouldn’t change anything.’¹⁵

It was after she and George got back from India in late 1968 that things started to go wrong. Chapter 7 of Pattie’s memoir is headed ‘The Tears Begin’. George, sucked into a hermetic world of meditation and chanting, was neglectful and unfaithful; Pattie felt helpless against his denials. There were lonely days with just the cat for company since, at George’s insistence, she had given up modelling. As an antidote to isolation she took up photography. In 1970 Eric Clapton, the guitarist and songwriter of Cream, fell in love with her, pouring his unrequited passion into the heart-rending song ‘Layla’. But when Pattie protested that she was married, he threatened to take heroin, and was as good as his word. In 1974 a desperate Pattie left George and joined Eric on tour in the USA. They married in 1979, and the pattern repeated. Eric’s drug shifted to brandy – ‘life was one big party fuelled by alcohol’ – and the rock-star infidelities soon kicked in. For years, as their relationship foundered, it tore at Pattie to listen to the songs she had inspired, like ‘Wonderful Tonight’. In 1989 their divorce was finalised. Pattie found herself in meltdown at the age of forty-five, haunted by her empty life, tortured with loss, regret and grief. But she has survived. There have been new relationships, a house in the country, adventures in the Himalayas, Peru, Bali. When she heard of George Harrison’s death from cancer in 2001, Pattie burst into tears – ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of a world without George.’ Muse to the greatest performers, inspiration for immortal songs, Pattie Boyd has lived at the heart of a historic moment in music. Today, the ex-model stands on the other side of the photographer’s lens, and – though she still has a weakness for glamorous shoes – she has learnt the hard way how beautiful women can be trapped by projection and illusion.

Pattie Boyd, like many of her generation, first married in her early twenties. But Melissa North believes young marriages are a bad idea. ‘Nearly all my circle who did that got divorced later,’ she says.¹⁶ She and Tchaik had been an item since 1962, but unlike most they waited to marry until she was thirty-two.

I had this horror of marriage and children. You didn’t want the mortgage, the house. We didn’t want anything that looked like our parents.

Melissa brings that same sense of defiant stylishness to her work as an interior designer. And when we met at her apartment in a hip west London neighbourhood, its poetry of colour quickened my pulse. Melissa and Tchaik’s relationship has lasted, and they have lived in this flat – previously owned by their old friend David Hockney – for fifty years. Recently Melissa had the sitting-room walls painted an intense viridian green as a loving birthday present for Tchaik. ‘It took ten coats, and each one had to dry out, so it wasn’t ready for his party!’ Bold works of art, photographic and abstract, interrupt its expanse, huge mirrors bounce light from floor-to-ceiling windows and pink lilies collide with crimson, lemon-yellow and cobalt-blue armchairs. It’s a joyful technicolour mishmash. The bathroom is brilliant with turquoise mosaic, and the kitchen nurtures an indoor jungle of triffid-like house plants which spill into the dining room (‘If this table could speak …!’). Melissa brings a tripped-out taste to chairs and tables that recalls her exuberant youth. If you could match this interior to a soundtrack, it would be ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’. Everything about Melissa’s home sings loud and clear: ‘It’s party time.’

Theresa Tyrell’s marriage also stayed the course. In 1969 she found she was pregnant by Jeff, the boyfriend she had met at art school in 1965. Jeff’s mother reacted with alarm when they decided to make it official. ‘She didn’t know me, and she was scared of her son marrying someone with a different skin colour …’ Theresa pulls out the group shot from her wedding day to show me – and the clothes say it all.¹⁷ Centre-shot, the happy couple epitomise 1960s Sunday best, with Jeff in a fashionable button-up suit from the men’s boutique Take 6, and Theresa in a home-made floral ultra mini-dress, modestly cut under the bust to disguise her pregnancy, with a matching hat, gloveless, and clutching a posy of sweet peas. Flanking them are Jeff’s mum in a feathered hat and structured outfit, beadily smiling at her son while keeping a tight grip on her handbag, and Theresa’s mum beatific in flyaway spectacles and a turban. Both mothers are wearing the white gloves that defined their generation; her Jamaican dad, standing to one side, has the only noticeably black face in the picture. Theresa and Jeff’s son was born in 1970, and they have now been together for over fifty years. Both of them are working artists. Through the seventies, Theresa continued to be employed as an animator. Later, her exuberant sense of design took her back to an early love of ceramics, and today she re-explores her Caribbean heritage through gorgeous textured pottery. On bowls and plates, her fish, parrots, cacti, palm fronds and flowers evoke jungles and sunny shores. In many of her loveliest pieces, the bright pigments sing out against a black background.

Pretty Mavis Wilson nurtured the fantasy of a gift-wrapped wedding and a happy-ever-after ending. ‘I wanted to be like Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore.¹⁸ You’d be happy together, you’d have a nice house, and you’d have children, and you’d have fun.’ Her live-in boyfriend was the kind of card-carrying radical who spurned marriage. But when Mavis’s boss at Editions Alecto offered her a job in the company’s New York art gallery he changed his tune and proposed. ‘I think he thought it was a bit of an imposition for his girlfriend to go off somewhere as exotic as New York. I was a fool really. I was just a bloody idiot.’ It was an uneven relationship from the outset. As her marriage floundered, Mavis, soon to be a divorcée at twenty-three, found compensations. There were affairs and, later, a daughter; but also her mental life expanded and she became a voracious reader. Today, alone, but with a complex family and past that she mines for material, Mavis Cheek is a successful author who volunteers her novel Yesterday’s Houses (2006) as a source of supplementary 1960s socio-biographical information, from serving pimento-stuffed olives with a glass of sherry to having sex wrapped round the banisters. ‘But looking back, what I took away from my time working in the sixties art world was the value of exploring, creating, risk-taking and daring to experiment. Society encouraged it. It really was a fabulous ten years.’

After 1971 Mavis, like many of my interviewees, was in a position to take advantage of the easier divorce laws. Like Mavis, Kristina Reed married in 1970. At twenty-two, Kristina was starting to feel the pressure of her friends tying the knot. ‘There were a lot of engagement pictures of people one knew in the press …’ The marriage lasted twenty-three years.¹⁹ Second-wave feminism barely touched her, though she admits that in the 1970s she found it embarrassing, when asked what she did, to have to reply, ‘Well, I’m married, and I’ve got a child.’ She solved this by learning a new skill, which led to a modest career in interior decoration – ‘So I could say, “Well, I make lampshades.”’ In 1983 Kristina recognised that the bad in her marriage outweighed the good and decided divorce was the only solution. ‘By that time the stigma for a divorced woman had all but disappeared. The relief of being independent was extreme.’

Today Kristina, who dresses with the sober and thoughtful taste of a woman who knows what keeps a seventy-year-old young-looking, has settled in a quiet London town house as neat and petite as she is. She is now remarried to the retired founder of a successful theatrical insurance-broking firm, who still has interests in theatre production. Her second husband appreciates her raw honesty and spicy turn of phrase. They have pretty things, and a small black cat, and they are happy.

Another woman who repented her early marriage was Rosalyn Palmer. Being a clueless newlywed with a baby in a Liverpool slum in 1965 wasn’t what she had signed up for when she got her university place there three years earlier. But it had compensations. Her next-door neighbour Millie Sutcliffe, mother of the Beatles’ first ill-fated bass guitarist,fn5 was often visited by the Fab Four, and Rosalyn got a thrill from watching the guys, then at the height of their fame, popping in to visit her at the Clarence Street flat, and getting insider gossip from Millie afterwards: ‘“That John Lennon,” she would say – “he fucks the boys and the girls – and not even the cat is safe!”’²⁰ In 1967 Rosalyn found work as a teacher. Getting the best out of her deprived inner-city pupils proved inspirational, and gave her the grounding in social justice that has been her guiding principle ever since. Later, both she and her husband, Paul, worked abroad, teaching and travelling. There were sorrows and setbacks. In the 1970s her marriage crashed and burned. In 2000 she remarried and made a home in the south of England, where she served as a popular and effective Liberal Democrat county councillor. I asked for her thoughts on the women’s movement. ‘What’s Women’s Liberation? It’s about being able to run away. Girls in China have their feet broken. Here in Britain they wear high heels and tight skirts – what’s all that about? It’s about repressing the female so she can’t run away. The minute you start wearing jeans and flat shoes you can run! And that’s freedom.’

Carmen Callil is surely one of the greatest feminist heroines of the last fifty years. In the early 1970s Carmen – like several of her Australian compatriots, Richard Neville, Germaine Greer and Marsha Rowe – was a champion of change. In 1973 she founded Virago Press to ‘publish books which celebrated women and women’s lives, and which would, by so doing, spread the message of Women’s Liberation to the whole population’. Its mission was in character with its founder – an imprint which would shock, provoke, entertain and liberate. In 2017, when she was honoured by the Queen, Carmen’s reaction was typical: ‘I like the Dame idea – but not so keen on the British Empire … I am busy writing furious letters about Grenfell Tower to Kensington Council, and signing them Dame …’²¹

A comparable humour and campaigning spirit was in evidence when I met Mary Denness in 2016, though her circumstances were far humbler. Today, the city of Hull celebrates Lillian Bilocca and her female comrades – including Mary. A centrepiece of the city’s artistic line-up when it was European City of Culture in 2017 was the impressionistic staging of ‘The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca’, by actress and writer Maxine Peake, which played to sell-out audiences. The campaigner’s likeness, captured in the form of a pair of massive murals, gazes, complete with headscarf, from the walls of two locations in the centre of Hull, and the city council has honoured her with a commemorative blue plaque – ‘In recognition of the contribution to the fishing industry by the women of Hessle Road, led by Lillian Bilocca, who successfully campaigned for better safety measures following the loss of three Hull trawlers in 1968.’ Today, the smell of herrings has left the dock area. The 1970s Icelandic cod wars killed off the industry, and a retail park has grown up by the quay where the trawlers lay at anchor. Nevertheless Mary Denness remained immensely proud of the part she played in Lil’s campaign. Talking to Mary, it was clear that she had always regarded herself as more educated and experienced than her friend – ‘And I put on my lah-di-dah accent because I saw how they treated Lil.’²² After she and Barry Denness divorced in 1977, that savvy, and the lah-di-dah accent, stood Mary in good stead. They gained her a job as a matron at a posh public school, and in her sixties she was employed by Eton College, helping to care for Princes William and Harry, ensuring that her unruly royal charges submitted to flu jabs and the like, even if it meant forcibly getting Prince Harry to roll up his sleeve. ‘And, whatever you’re writing about me,’ she insisted, with a rich cackle, ‘I’d like it to end with that piece of levity!’ Her sense of gratification at having disproved her mother’s prediction that she would never amount to anything was even greater than her pride at her triumph over the trawler owners. The remarkable Mary Denness had only a year to live when we spent that memorable afternoon together; in 2017 she died, aged seventy-nine.

Neither Mandy Rice-Davies nor Christine Keeler are here to tell their tales. Mandy died in 2014 and Christine three years later. Their obituaries remained saturated with myth, ungenerously laced with the vocabulary of prostitution, prurient in their use of photographs and irresponsibly prolonging the unproven version of events by which Christine was having simultaneous affairs with Profumo and Ivanov. A surprising number of people still assume that both women were call girls. After the scandal their paths diverged and there was little love lost between them. Christine, her beauty eroded by her tribulations, remained haunted by her past, continually retelling her story in ever more conspiratorial forms in a quest for redress. In later years she worked in telesales and as a school dinner lady. Mandy took a more down-to-earth view of events, but never shunned an opportunity to step back into the limelight, happily collaborating with Andrew Lloyd Webber when he announced a West End musical based on Stephen Ward’s story. At the end of her 1980 memoir Mandy, she wrote, ‘[I have been] caught up in a web of fate, not knowing who I really am. It is the oddest thing to experience in life, reading so much about yourself that the line between fact and fiction is blurred.’ The conclusion to Christine’s book was more fatalistic: ‘There are some preconceptions about that will never change; not now and not after I’m gone.’²³

*

What about the bunny girls?

Patsy Reading married twice, divorced twice, and has two much-loved daughters. At over seventy, blonde Patsy brings an irresistible glamour to her seasonal job taking the public on guided tours round a historic house; while her bunny training contributes grace and allure to her other occupation, hosting a bed-and-breakfast in her pretty cottage near to the South Downs.

Glittery Pat Quinn still dazzles. ‘The point is, I always take trouble with my attire, no matter what the occasion.’²⁴ Her ‘interviewee’ outfit is a silver lurex mini-dress, belt studded with sparkling diamanté, and gleaming silver leggings, scalloped like fish-scales in black, while her hair, an untamed shock, is the colour Chanel calls ‘rouge noir’. Pat’s first marriage, to actor Don Hawkins, gave her two children; her second, to Sir Robert Stephens, gave her a title and access to a more aristocratic kind of sparkle. Pat stresses that her job as a bunny croupier occupied a very brief period of her life while she was ‘resting’. In 1973 she hit the big time when she was cast as Magenta in The Rocky Horror Show, reprising the role when the show was made into a movie in 1975. Her bravura acting and dancing, and her dark-rouged lips, gained her a cult following. Now that she is widowed, Rocky Horror conventions around the world keep Pat, now well into her seventies, insanely busy. ‘It’s gone stratospheric, it’s gone off the planet. I mean, darling, signing my autograph is my occupation now!’

Baroness Benjamin’s jet-propelled life also leaves one feeling mildly exhausted. In 2010 Floella Benjamin’s Establishment credentials were formalised when she was made a peer: the first Trinidadian woman to join the House of Lords. Her energy – so fizzingly abundant at the age of twenty when she joined the cast of Hair – showed no signs of abating in her new career as presenter of the BBC’s Play School – (‘Guess the window!’) – which made her a household name. Undoubtedly, she would have made her Marmie proud, for a glance at her website shows her presenting the Commonwealth Cup at Royal Ascot; in her role as chancellor of Exeter University giving honorary degrees to the great and the good; speaking at the Hay Festival; visiting schools nationwide for Black History Month; attending the BAFTA Awards and the Women of the Year Lunch; campaigning for the Liberal Democrats in Hull; donning a hard hat to inspect the Crossrail excavations; and gallivanting to the Monaco Grand Prix to meet Lewis Hamilton. In 2006 Floella ran the London Marathon in four hours forty-six minutes. She sings in a band, runs a production company, writes books, supports charities. She is happily married with two grown-up children, looks fabulous in her late sixties, and has an all-singing, all-dancing philosophy:

Remember to live your life to the full, giving with the joy and passion you would like to receive.²⁵ Never become or see yourself as a victim, even when others go out of their way to make you feel like one. Keep on thinking, ‘I am worthy; it’s not my fault.’

‘I’ve been so blessed.’²⁶ At the start of Anthea Martinsmith’s marriage to her ‘lovely curate’ Anthony Millican, the couple lived in Soho, but soon after moved to Bristol. At twenty-one, with a baby and another on the way, Anthea was thrown straight into the role of clergy wife, which she performed with such élan that she was made Diocesan Young Wives’ representative and entrusted with the writing of a newsletter, a medium for her communication skills and strong-minded views. ‘The Bishop called it Mrs Millican’s Encyclical.’ Anthea has given her devoted all to church and family. But in 1991 tragedy struck. Anthony, who appeared to be a fit man, collapsed. ‘I was talking to him one minute, the next minute he was gone. He died in one second.’ A year passed, and in her forties she married a second clergyman, widower of a woman who had been in Anthea’s tutorial group at Reading University. But my interview with Anthea, conducted in the light-filled conservatory of her Somerset home, was overlaid by the context of a troubled daily life; at this time Anthea was devotedly spending hours each day visiting her husband, who was very ill in a nursing home, witnessing his deterioration with anguish and courage. And this happy marriage also ended with his death in 2017. Twice widowed, Anthea’s faith sustains her:

That, and my philosophy, and my beliefs, are not relativistic. There are many grey areas in life. But there are some absolutes, the most important of which is the incarnate Son of God, risen, ascended and glorified.

Without the resurrection we are wasting our time.

Some things were right and some things were simply wrong. Veronica MacNab knew from the start that her old-fashioned father would never, never accept her relationship with a married man. In 1965 Veronica’s adventure, nannying for wealthy families in the south of England, ended when she returned to Scotland, to train as a Barnardo’s nurse. She was still a complete ingénue when she fell giddily in love with the ‘wonderful’ Steve who – when he wasn’t on his speedway motorbike – drove a bright red Triumph Spitfire. The small problem was that he was married – ‘and, well, you just didn’t’. Richard, who asked her to dance at a Student Union hop, seemed a better bet. Torn with misgivings, Veronica let wonderful Steve go. ‘I chose Richard, and I chose safety.²⁷ I was twenty-three and not very brave. The ring was on my finger within three months.’ Pregnant, Veronica closed the door on her nursing career in order to bring up a much-loved son; sadly, the marriage did not live up to her hopes. But twenty years in, a new door opened. Out of ‘sheer bloody-mindedness’ (and to her husband’s disgust) Veronica accepted a place on a degree course in Geography at Dundee University, where she got a First. Never did she guess that it would lead her, through brains, determination and serendipity, to a remarkable career: initially as first woman director of National Trust Scotland, then as the first woman bursar of a Cambridge college. Today, Veronica is divorced, and happily remarried. And she smiles to think that most of the dons who later conferred her with an honorary degree had little idea that she had left school at fifteen; and that her taste for great houses, peaches and fine porcelain had been formed on the wrong side of the green baize door, all those years ago, nannying at Knepp.

Nor would it have been easy to predict Kimberley Saunders’s self reinvention, from school-shy wild child to student and self-styled radical feminist. In 1969, when she was eighteen, Kimberley married Dave, the Sindy doll seller – it was ‘the love affair of the century’ – and moved to West London, where she found work in the buying department of a carpet store. But the marriage didn’t last. ‘I thought Dave was playing away, so I wanted to get my own back on him.²⁸ And I got bloody pregnant by his best friend … I didn’t even like him.’ As Kimberley says, ‘You could write a whole book about my life …’ With two husbands, one of them Ghanaian – (‘I love black people!’) – neither of whom fathered her two children, her complicated and colourful life is indeed impossible to compress into a paragraph. Meanwhile, her dancing days are far from over – ‘I can do the Banga, and the Sega, and the Charleston, and the Can-can, and I’ve tried a bit of belly dancing.’ But the shelves in Kimberley’s Hastings flat, crammed as they are with feminist texts, tell a different story. In the 1980s Haringey Council employed her as a social worker. It gave her direction; a lifetime of struggle fuelled a new determination, and she started up a women’s centre. ‘I went from doing nothing at school to taking an honours degree in Sociology. Back then I didn’t know words like patriarchy. I just knew that there were some bloody awful men around who treated us like bastards. And after my marriage to Dave finished I gave my wedding ring as a donation to the National Abortion campaign. Men? I like them as individuals, but not as a species, no. I like my women-only space, I always have done, and I will defend that space until I die.’

Following her second journey to India in 1971, hippie Caroline Harper made a firm decision: ‘no more drugs’. LSD had ignited an inextinguishable inner fire – but it could never be compatible with true freedom, true love and true caring: qualities which she has amply demonstrated in her subsequent life. Back in England, Caroline worked as a Montessori teacher, and later as a nurse. Marriage, and the intense joy of motherhood, followed. Later she divorced. For nearly thirty years now, she has been in a relationship with Nick (‘who is even more other-worldly than me!’). She also teaches meditation, runs a chanting group and works as a counsellor; her parents, whose polo-playing world she turned her back on, were both devotedly cared for by their daughter till the end. Today, Caroline reflects on the journey that her generation took:

I am now on the threshold of a new phase of my life.²⁹

What became of the sixties dream? I think that many seeds were scattered at that time – through music, art and literature and, like all seeds, some have fallen on stony ground and some have taken root and flourished – probably many more than we know. The more recent discoveries in quantum physics verify many of the more ‘way out’ experiences of LSD, while neuroscience is confirming that we humans can ‘change our spots’ – with enough vision and dedication.

The sixties ideal, in essence, was to believe in ‘the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible’.fn6 It still seems to me a worthy ideal and one worth having changed the course of my life for …

Imagine …

Scouse pop singer Beryl Marsden found healing and enlightenment too. But she got there by a very different route. In 1968 Beryl put the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll of the capital behind her, and went home to Liverpool. ‘I got offers to join this band or that band – you know?³⁰ – as soon as I got back, and I chose not to go with anyone who was going on tour. I just wanted to be home, and have a bit of a normal life.’ Unfortunately a dark period ensued when she ill-advisedly married a man who not only resented her work as a performer, but also had unpredictable moods. ‘Don’t ask me about the 1970s. They were horrendous. I went through hell.’ Two children were born, but the marriage ended, leaving Beryl stranded, broken, and with her confidence in rags. Fear drove her back to London with her small family. In the Speakeasy one evening she ran into a musician friend who suggested she come to a meeting with him.

And out of that terrible, terrible darkness I found Buddhism. It’s become key to my life. Stuff that happens in your life can destroy you. Holding on to pain can stop you from enjoying your life. You can’t let it win. There are things we can learn from, things we can use. All that darkness, all that hurt, all that pain – it hasn’t been wasted.

In Beryl’s north London flat the little ‘shrine’ arrangement with its flowers and shimmering tea-lights all come into focus. The Buddhist tradition requires its adherents to perform ritualistic chants. At the first gathering she attended, something in the chorus of vibrating human voices spoke to Beryl:

It stirred something inside of me.³¹ I felt, ‘I know this …’ – if that makes any sense?

And literally the next day, I started to chant – every day. And as soon as I started to chant I felt a wonderful, warm feeling, which I hadn’t felt for a long, long time. And slowly, little by little, all those terrible feelings of anger and hurt just melted away.

In the same 2011 interview Beryl describes her gradual abandonment to the force of the chant; its capacity to transcend adversity, to heal and to bring peace.³²

For Beryl Marsden, singing – in every form – has always given her life its meaning.

I’ve always known that’s what I’m here for … it’s never left me.

If I ever felt nobody was listening to me, or that vocally I couldn’t cut it, I would stop. But that’s not yet.

And at the age of seventy, casual as ever in jeans and a glitzy T-shirt, Beryl bounced back onto the stage at Liverpool’s legendary rock’n’roll venue the Casbah Coffee Club, and belted out the song which launched her career all those years ago when she was fourteen, back in 1961.

It was ‘Boys’:

Well, I’m talkin’ ’bout BOYS – yeah-yeah, BOYS –

Hey, what a bundle of joy – yeah-yeah, BOYS!

The beat is made for dancing. This tiny, energetic woman fills the one-time coal cellar and early home of the Beatles with her raw, raunchy contralto and infectious gusto. Beryl Marsden’s voice is a sexy, whisky voice, full of throat, and full of heart.

’Cos when you’re singing, and your heart’s pounding, and you’re just full of that feelgood feeling, it’s quite amazing. And now – to have continued singing through everything – through the ups, through the downs, through the darkness and the light – that’s really something.

And, well, it’s just an incredible joy …