1965

Not Quite the Same as Before

In October 1964 the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the general election with a tiny majority of four seats; two years later Wilson was to gamble on a second election, bringing him a workable majority. Labour would stay in power for the remainder of the decade.

In the run-up to the 1964 election my parents campaigned for the Labour candidate in Leeds North-West, against the incumbent, Sir Donald Kaberry, a Tory backbencher who was chairman of the Association of Conservative Clubs. Generally, the world of art, literature and media was pro-Labour. That autumn, duplicated leaflets littered our kitchen dresser, and the talk was all of majorities and getting out the vote. All day on 15 October my father and mother took it in turns to collect Labour voters and drive them in our unreliable Austin A40 to the polling station in Moortown. (Conservatives were more likely to be car owners, so this service was essential if the Labour candidate was to stand a chance.) Sir Donald won the seat, but with a reduced majority, and my parents celebrated a Labour victory that to them, in their middle years, seemed like a rejuvenating breath of fresh air.

Doreen Hall from Darwen in Lancashire was of the same persuasion. At twenty-four, she was a first-time voter,fn1 and a year spent teaching in colonial Africa had heightened her awareness of social injustice:

I got a sense that people were reacting to toffs in government – and that Wilson was something else.¹ Wilson was forward-looking about technology, and he had a northern accent like me. So I thought, things are actually going to change. And I thought this is really, really exciting …

Wilson had grown up on the Wirral and represented the Merseyside constituency of Huyton. Pretty west-London teenager Mavis Wilson’s working-class background also instinctively drew her to the Labour Party. At sixteen, though she was too young to vote, she felt Harold Wilson’s Merseyside affiliations gave him credibility. ‘The Beatles thought Wilson was good.² That helped … And he smoked a pipe and he looked like your uncle. It did seem as if the world was opening up, and this was quite a changing moment.’

At Liverpool University, where she was studying Political Theory and Institutions, twenty-two-year-old Rosalyn Palmer could hardly believe her luck. Earlier in the autumn term she and her fellow Labour Party members in the Student Union had invited Wilson to speak at the University on 16 October. Although it was home territory, ‘we didn’t realise it was going to be the day after the election …’³

And we said, ‘Are you still coming?’ And he said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘The Queen can wait, but you can’t!’ Lovely man!

As part of the student committee, Rosalyn joined the new prime minister on the platform and had the opportunity to talk to him after he had given his speech – ‘which was amazing, and I just thought he was wonderful. I always thought he was the most brilliant prime minister we’ve ever had. And I still do actually.’ For Rosalyn, a Wilson-led Labour government was the clincher to her new Liverpool life of poetry, pop and politics.

It only remained to fall in love and lose her virginity, which she did, in her second year at the university. Paul was ‘the love of my life’, a year older than her, talented, clever and dangerous: an actor, a musician and a renegade. They became a couple, and hung out in a circle of artsy, political, pot-smoking partygoers, listening to music and philosophising. But where sex – and contraception – were concerned, Rosalyn’s ignorance remained profound. And in her final year, with her all-important degree exams looming, she became pregnant.

To put it mildly, holy shit. My mother went ballistic.

And to start with, the university said that I would have to leave, because they couldn’t have unmarried mothers. Well, I challenged them. I said, ‘Would you have unmarried fathers?’ At that time if girls got pregnant they would throw them out. So I said, ‘Well, what about the boys?’ And they kind of said, ‘Huh, it’s different for them. You know, the boys can’t help themselves.’ My professor was among them. He said, ‘Oh, so you’re pregnant – you’re going to have to leave.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be stupid – I’m not going to leave, who’s going to make me leave?’ I wasn’t going back to Surrey and my mother’s house!

So I got together with a whole load of girls and we fought it.

And eventually my professor recognised I had a point. And he said, ‘Yeah, why should you?’

But Paul said, ‘It means we can get married. It’ll be wonderful.’ I didn’t really know that I wanted to be tied down, but to cut a long story short we got married in February 1965 …

Rosalyn and Paul moved into a shabby flat in the run-down Georgian area of Liverpool. The baby was due in July. As her finals approached, Rosalyn took little time out from her books to think about the birth. A friend accompanied her to buy clothes, nappies and various unfathomable necessities. The impending physical ordeal had no reality for her. Her evasive and disapproving mother had merely told her that having a baby was mildly ‘discomforting’. When people inquired apprehensively whether she would hold out during the exams, Rosalyn’s ignorance made her unafraid. ‘“Oh it’s all right,” I said, “it’s not due for another three or four days, I’ll be fine.” I just thought, oh, I’ll face all that when my exams are over. So of course having the baby was a huge shock.’

My finals finished on July the second. Graduation was on the twentieth, and on the twenty-fifth I had Alex.

The hospital, bless them, kept me in for ten days, not because of any complications, but because they realised I didn’t know which way up was this baby!

Ambitions, goals, the result of her bachelor’s degree now receded before the unforeseen and bewildering demands of looking after a new baby in a one-room flat in a Liverpool slum. But one absolute dividend derived from Rosalyn’s shaky, clueless propulsion out of higher education and into motherhood: there was no going back to Surrey.

*

Labour won its slender majority in the 1964 election. But from Surrey to Southampton, Basingstoke to Basildon, England’s heartland would remain a sea of undeviating blue. At its centre, the quiet commuter town of Andover was home to teenage socialite Kristina Reed’s well-heeled parents. Conservatism defined who they were. Kristina herself had always felt as comfortable with the Tory status quo as she did with her pearls and her white gloves.

Three years earlier, in 1960, Kristina had been a reluctant pupil at Queen’s Gate School for Girls in South Kensington. She did not excel academically, and in 1964, having effectively been told by her school that she might as well give up on education, Kristina settled for two O levels, and left without regret. ‘I was fifteen, sixteen … and the old social life had taken off …’⁴ A photograph of Kristina, taken at her first ‘grown-up’ party in 1962 shows her posed, seated in somebody’s front hall, in a full-length white gown and pearls, looking closer to thirty-five than fifteen. Apprehensively, eyes downcast, she clutches a thimble-sized glass of sherry. ‘I was on my way to the Sandhurst Summer Ball, made to go by my parents with some boy I didn’t know, and I can feel it now, the terror of it!’

In 1965 she made her entrée to the London season. Though court presentations had been consigned to history by 1965, Kristina’s mother jumped through the expected hoops of lunching and taking tea with the mothers of her peers, making social arrangements with the mothers of suitably vetted young men, and acquiring a table for Queen Charlotte’s Ball.

But Kristina’s assumptions were about to be reset. ‘The post-war era, for me, had been founded on things going on being the same. I didn’t know anything about Wilson, but I just knew he wasn’t Conservative. I mean, the prime minister had always been Alec Douglas-Home or some similar Old-School bod …’ On the evening of 15 October 1964 Kristina scrubbed up and stepped out to a swanky party in a Kensington mansion, where a crowd of debs and their delights were watching the election results on television:

And Harold Wilson got in.

And I remember thinking, ‘This is the end of life as we know it. It’s going to be like Russia here now!’

And I just thought, ‘He’s a Socialist!! Gulp!’ And this was a whole new thing! I thought the working classes would rise up or something, and our houses would be bugged – well, that’s an exaggeration. But I kind of worked out, this is not going to be beneficial to people like us.

And it was just another shift under one’s feet, of things being, well, how can I put it? – not quite the same as before …

The Kennedy assassination and the Wilson election were bringing home to Kristina that she lived in a changing world. But as the only child of model high-bracket parents, those assumptions weren’t just political. Girls like her did certain things, and they didn’t do certain other things. Careers didn’t figure. Marriage was the goal. With this in mind, boyfriends were tolerated. At sixteen Kristina started going out with James, an ‘adorable’ Etonian two years her senior, whom she’d met at the Windsor Horse Show. ‘It was a real little love affair.’

However the boyfriend-tolerance didn’t extend to sex: ‘Nothing below the neck!’ Kristina had grown up in a don’t-talk-about-it culture where the physical realities of birth and death were suppressed and denied.

Anyway, I was much too frightened. There was no pill. I didn’t know what penetration was. I didn’t know what a willy did … And I couldn’t ask my mother – she was completely dippy about sex.

So I didn’t do anything …

Nevertheless, her appearance sent out erotic messages. For even London’s socialites were in love with Mod: Mod music and Mod fashion. Mod was what set you apart from the older generation. In 1961 Kristina had looked like a mini version of her mother, coiffed, gloved and hatted: an unlikely candidate for the role of teenage tearaway. But by the age of eighteen the persona had changed. It was 1965. Gone were the pearls. She acquired a short skirt and a silver leather jacket designed for her by an art-school friend. Small of stature, her petite features were framed with a backcombed do and a stylish fringe à la Cathy McGowan, her lids defined with black eyeliner and her lips with ashy white. The look was – albeit unintentionally – kittenish and provocative. Now, when she joined the parade of Saturday-morning followers of fashion flaunting up and down King’s Road, she no longer looked like a posh deb. She fitted in.

We felt we were at the centre of the world …

At that time the first Wimpy Bar had opened, and it was a place where you could meet people and just have a cup of coffee. And there was Mary Quant – so we’d go and have a rifle through the rails. And sometimes you went to a scruffy little cinema called The Classic, because it was a jolly good opportunity to sit in the dark …

The love affair with James the adorable Etonian ran its course. ‘I got to a point where I did get a bit bored with all my sort of people …’ As Kristina herself took on a new, classless camouflage, the A-list public schoolboys of her milieu began to seem starchy and Bertie Wooster-ish. It was time to find a new boyfriend: preferably one with Mod credentials from a somewhat lower social drawer. So without more ado she went to a party at the Ritz and promptly made a successful play for Alan Buck, drummer of a band called the Four Pennies, who had made the charts with their harmonious 1964 chart-topper ‘Juliet’. It was quite a coup. ‘That song was all over everywhere …’

He was from Manchester and he spoke with a Mancunian accent. Well, I went out with him for about six months. And I guess I thought I was being incredibly rebellious, because I must have thought, ‘This’ll piss my parents off!’ And actually, my mother was having an absolute heart attack about him …

But there was nothing for Mrs Reed to have a heart attack about. Though she pushed at the boundaries, and was regularly grounded for not observing a 10 p.m. curfew, the relationship with Mancunian Alan had little staying power.

Nevertheless, it was a matter of treading water until Mr Right came along, so Kristina did what so many girls like her did, and got a basic secretarial training. ‘The people at the college told me “You’ll never make a second-rate copy typist”, which was probably the worst insult I’ve ever been given!’ These were the glory years of the office temp. As The New London Spy pointed out, ‘If you are reasonably intelligent and able to type you need never be out of a job typing someone’s letters and answering his telephone …’ (my italics). In 1965 Margery Hurst, self-made founder of the Brook Street Bureau, floated her highly profitable employment agency on the London Stock Exchange, having tapped into the swing towards female independence. As Hurst herself put it:

The women who came to my bureau for jobs wanted to earn money, of course.⁵ But the job was also a passport to new friends, romance, and a means of filling in the day.

Kristina’s qualifications in the basics of paperwork and filing were enough to get her employment as a temp in a variety of offices, from the Sudanese embassy to a showbiz accountancy firm. It filled her day. But her nights were not filled.

At nineteen, Kristina Reed was still a virgin. Times had truly changed. Five or ten years earlier, that fact would have been not only unremarkable but unimpeachable. But for a very pretty débutante in 1965 it was beginning to verge on the freakish.

I hadn’t done it, and I guess most people of my type had by then. I think I was terrified of getting pregnant, or something awful happening. But I was beginning to think, I really don’t like this any more, people are beginning to say, ‘She’s frigid.’ I don’t think they quite said, ‘She’s gay,’ but it was slightly that way – kind of: ‘Oh, she doesn’t like boys …’ The problem was, I looked as though I did. You know, I had the bedroom eyes …

Anyway, I thought, this can’t go on …

The question was, how to go about things? As a first-timer, she didn’t want to launch into a one-night stand, or take risks with some sadistic seducer. Coincidence came to Kristina’s aid; the circles in which she moved guaranteed that, sooner or later, she would bump into James, her adorable Etonian ex. Though they’d parted, their reunion was delightfully pally and civilised, and he invited her to visit his parents. Following a cosy evening, it now struck Kristina that James was the perfect bet.

And now Kristina demonstrated, if only to herself, and if only in London SW3, how far women had come. Her decision was driven by curiosity, not love, and by a wish to fit in, and it was one that she took confidently, unashamedly and without guilt. She knew when she decided to have sex with James that it wasn’t going to reignite their relationship. Nor, when she took that decision, did she calculate any risks to her reputation, marriageability, class cachet, or eternal soul. Gone were the days when loss of chastity meant a girl was damaged goods. The world order that ordained that an impure woman must be shunned, disowned and sent abroad held no more sway. Lady Chatterley had shown the way: sex was supposed to be soft flames, feathers, and rippling bells. And Kristina Reed saw no reason to be left out of the fun.

’Cos it was a big thing! Well, it was to me … And I can’t imagine five years earlier making that kind of decision on my own. At that time Women’s lib, Feminism, whatever you want to call it – wasn’t a factor.

But by then women like me did feel we were part of a changing world – and that made one feel more independent and capable of making such decisions.

Anyway, I thought, ‘James is the guy to do it. This is the guy to whom I would like to lose my by now rather irritating virginity. And he won’t hurt me, and he’ll be kind.’

And so it proved when James helpfully obliged.

But what about the flames and feathers? And the bells?

Well, I thought it was quite nice. I didn’t think it was absolutely wonderful!

But it was such a relief to have got rid of it.

Nonetheless, having joined the human race, Kristina was absolutely determined to make up for lost time. Somewhere, despite her lack of information, and despite not reading D. H. Lawrence, she had picked up the idea that sex was supposed to be overwhelmingly fantastic. Girlfriends had told her, ‘If you don’t faint it hasn’t worked!’ Naturally, that wasn’t going to happen the first time, but perhaps if you kept trying it with different people, you’d get lucky. Kristina had no difficulty in finding willing accomplices: ‘I think there are certain physical aspects about women that men like very much, and I suppose I was blessed with them …’ In addition, her well-bred upbringing had programmed her to believe that, when a man took you out to dinner, it was rude not to say thank you nicely. And now that there were no social penalties attached to the practice of postprandial fornication, it was hard to think of a reason to say no. So – as often as not out of pure politeness – she said yes.

What’s New, Pussycat?

One case history doesn’t make a sexual revolution. But Kristina’s story paints in some nuances of a broad-brush perception, that the traditional understanding of sin and virtue was on the wane. The rising notion was that centuries of guilt, repression, shame, prohibition, stuffiness and double standards were being replaced by a new age of honesty, openness, spontaneity, empowerment and sexual freedom. In the era of op art, and the Wilson government’s ‘white heat’ of technology from which would emerge a newly forged Britain, the new freedoms appeared to be correspondingly black, white and streamlined.

In 1964 Bob Dylan told the world, ‘The times they are a-changin’.’ It was impossible to ignore his message: ‘Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command.’ And in 1965 the Who stuttered out a defiant, half-coherent, exhilarating challenge to the squares in ‘My Generation’. Meanwhile, the marriage motif that had so saturated pop ballads just a few years earlier was stealthily overtaken mid-decade by the lyrics of desire. In 1965 the charts sent the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to number 1. The narrative that sex was available and pleasurable was gaining ground.

In 1965 we are entering a ‘live now, pay later’ mindset: an era of abandonment. Libido was out of the box, with confused women – and men – unsure how to play by the new rules.

We are in a state of flux …

wrote the Daily Mail columnist Anne Scott-James in September 1965 –

The male is no longer dominant, women are restless and resentful and are fighting for a new role.

Hostilities were breaking out in the sex war, with the opening salvos of the conflict fired on stages and stadiums, on the street and on catwalks. The skirmishes were channelled through the pages of books and glossy magazines, and depicted on screens large and small. Amid the crossfire, the distinction between pornography and permissiveness was blurred. Never mind the fallout, never mind the losers: questioning laxity placed you in the intolerant camp.

For the most part, TV viewers were bombarded with an armoury of crudely glamorised, trivialised females.fn2 In television comedy for example, women provided glamour and the opportunity for innuendo, or else were conspicuous by their absence: Steptoe and Son, Hancock’s Half Hour and Dad’s Army featured almost no female characters. In action drama, Doctor Who’s young lady assistants were damsels in distress, while 1965 saw the suave dominatrix Diana Rigg playing The Avengers’ Emma Peel on ITV wearing a kinky zip-up bodysuit, in which she appeared both unassailably feminine and mouth-wateringly sexual. But Johnny Speight’s immortal Till Death Us Do Part was more nuanced. Though Alf Garnett’s long-suffering nag of a wife Else (played by Dandy Nichols) was characterised as unfathomably stupid, the helpless witness of his ranting sexism and racism, she was often given the last laugh, while their daughter Rita (Una Stubbs) was portrayed as an effervescent, feisty Mod. At the age of nine, my own favourite television programme was the American fantasy sitcom Bewitched (starring Elizabeth Montgomery), which also resisted the stereotype by having a suburban, ‘Feminine Mystique’ housewife turn out to be a clever witch, married to a gullible mortal man.fn3 I loved watching smart Samantha run rings round goofy Darren.

Cinema, however, offered little to comfort the woman fighting for a new role. Thunderball (1965) projected the passionate/aggressive/compliant Bond girl specimen: all mink gloves, bikinis and power play. The Knack, also 1965, starring Rita Tushingham, was the tawdry, slapstick tale of Nancy, an out-of-town ingénue who becomes an object of desire for three misogynistic flatmates. The film ends with a disturbing sequence in which Nancy is portrayed as an unhinged simpleton having rape delusions; the blokes, of course, are merely having ‘a bit of fun’. ‘Girls don’t get raped unless they want it,’ says one of them. The Knack’s director won the 1965 Palme d’Or at Cannes. The year’s classiest hit film, Darling, starred Julie Christie at her most photogenic: a toy for men, playing into the fantasies of beauty, wealth, fame, love and high society. At the opposite end of the scale, Woody Allen’s hugely successful male wish-fulfilment screenplay for What’s New, Pussycat? – a fantasy about a man besieged by lust-crazed females who all want to trap him into marriage – could have won an Oscar for its commodification of women. In one scene a beautiful parachutist (Ursula Andress) falls from the sky into Peter O’Toole’s lap and unzips her snakeskin catsuit. Looking back, it is hard to imagine how such films were considered palatable, but the foolproof, formulaic Carry On … series (fifteen films, from Carry on Constable to Carry On Up the Jungle, were made between 1960 and 1970) proves that the public lapped up this sexist, innuendo-heavy stuff.

More than ever, clothes were the combat zone, the sensation, the controversy. The Daily Express told its readers that Cilla Black spent £100 a week on clothes. Fashion was the meteoric medium. Up and up it went. Up with it went the erotic barometer. In 1964 there had been a short-lived craze for topless ‘shock frocks’. ‘Where’s it all leading, this mania for sexy clothes?’⁶ asked the doyenne of dress codes, Felicity Green.

It is intriguing to uncover at least three quite separate origin myths for the miniskirt. Did Mary Quant invent it? Whether she did or didn’t, she was gracious enough to give the credit to ‘the girls on the King’s Road’. But Barbara Hulanicki (‘Biba’) had her own theory. In 1965 a factory failure meant that a whole batch of temperamental jersey-fabric skirts arrived in the store shrunk to half the desired length. ‘That little fluted skirt walked out on customers as fast as we could get it onto the hatstands.’⁷ Jean Shrimpton, however, had a quite different account of its genesis. The synthetic fibre company Orlon had hired her to promote their product on a trip to Australia, but had been stingy with the fabric for her outfits. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the Shrimp told the designer.⁸ ‘Make them a bit shorter. No one’s going to notice … He did. And that was how the mini was born.’ But Shrimpton’s public appearance at the Melbourne Races, bare-legged in a mini-dress with no hat or gloves, provoked a press furore down under. Meanwhile, back in Britain, American visitors such as the journalist John Crosby were frothing uncontrollably over the sexuality of the London streets. The Sunday Telegraph printed Crosby’s drooling description of the miniskirt phenomenon:

… a frenzy of the prettiest legs in the whole world belonging to models, au pair girls or just ordinary English girls, a gleam of pure joy on their pretty faces … all vibrating with youth …⁹

They’re more than pretty; they’re young, appreciative, sharp-tongued, glowingly alive … Young English girls take to sex as if it’s candy and it’s delicious.

‘They’re getting shorter, shorter and shorter,’ headlined the News of the World’s fashion page in March 1965.¹⁰ ‘All eyes will be riveted on the legs and feet.’ Not just there. One young woman referred to her mini as a ‘helicopter skirt’. Why? she was asked – ‘Because you can see into the cockpit.’ Michael Caine’s mother, a charlady, didn’t believe in the mini until her son took her to King’s Road, where she reacted with repugnance: ‘If it’s not for sale you shouldn’t put it in the window!’¹¹ Many eyes now swivelled towards the upper thighs and crotch area revealed whenever a fashion-conscious young woman climbed upstairs on a double-decker bus. ‘There is only one solution,’ wrote Felicity Green.¹² ‘Tights. Not longer stockings. Not panty-girdles. Just tights.’

Inevitably, the mini was tough on the heavy-busted, the thick-ankled, or the plain fat. Advertisements for slimming aids multiplied. This was extreme fashion that disenfranchised those over twenty-four. Hips, bosoms and all they symbolised – motherhood, milk and honey, ample home-cooked meals – were inappropriate for a new age of contraception and long-legged youthfulness. The ‘dolly bird’, in all her nubile, compliant, Lolita-like immaturity, was in the spotlight.

Mary Quant spelled it out: ‘Every girl with a hope of getting away with it is aiming to look not only under voting age but under the age of consent.’¹³ In ‘Mrs Albion You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ (1965), the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri (who was in his thirties) indulged his babe-fantasies around ‘navy-blue schooldrawers’ and ‘old men looking up their skirts’, and allowed his thoughts to wander upstairs, as they …

comb their darkblonde hair in suburban bedrooms

powder their delicate little nipples

wondering if tonight will be the night

The message that attached to many of these ductile, doe-eyed, dewy little damsels with their angular figures, minimal crocheted cover-ups and pigeon toes was: bring on the lollipops, and welcome the stranger who offers you sweets.

Where the print media were concerned, an irreconcilable polarity was taking shape. Since 1964, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine had declared itself ‘the largest-selling men’s magazine of all time’, having hit on a winning combination of cultural heft and titillating arousal: über-reputable writers such as Harold Pinter and Jean-Paul Sartre were juxtaposed with alluring centrefolds of ‘playmates’ baring refulgent, gravity-defying breasts. But particularly indigestible were ‘Playboy’s Party Jokes’:

‘There’s nothing like a girl with a plunging neckline to keep a man on his toes …’

‘Then there was the girl who didn’t know she’d been raped until the check bounced …’

The discreet, lace-trimmed dolly-bird look referenced maidenly Victoriana, while putting the emphasis on wide-eyed immaturity and availability. Designs by Barbara Hulanicki for the Biba catalogue, 1965.

Playboy’s cartoons meanwhile paraded a regiment of pneumatic pink plasticised totty across its pages, and the adverts sold deodorants, slimline slacks and car coats with the aid of simpering females gazing in adoration at the proud possessors of the relevant merchandise.

However, 1965 also heralded a refreshingly brazen stance in the written and published word. The inexpensive paperback had democratised reading – although escapist titles such as Mills and Boon’s Inherit My Heart and Beloved Tyrant still dominated the market. By 1965 women were also spending approaching £80 million a year on weekly and monthly magazines. But the time had come for a new tone of voice. Since the 1920s, magazines like Woman, Woman’s Realm, Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Own had been addressed to housewives. Their pages opened onto a world of knitting patterns, batch-baking and fancy garnishes. Magazines like this were read by over 80 per cent of women. Woman’s Own told the housewife how to homemake. Honey (launched in 1960) told the teenager what to buy; its typical reader loved clothes, travel and boys, wanted to get married at twenty-five and earned £10 a week. For younger girls Jackie (from 1964) provided prim fantasy fodder. But there had been little on offer for women who looked beyond home, shopping and romance. Now, at last, editors and writers were stepping out of line, agitating to be heard by intelligent and grown-up readers.

‘It makes me hopping mad when I hear of any man who regards a woman, especially his wife, as less than an adult human being …’ wrote Mary Stott in The Guardian in 1965, commenting on the case of a reader whose husband had finally granted her a personal allowance of five shillings a week.¹⁴ Under Stott’s editorship her page, ‘Mainly for Women’, had grown to become a security zone for its readers, where they could share thoughts about relationships, morals and manners. Another ground-breaking publication was Nova: ‘a New Kind of Magazine for a New Kind of Woman’. Nova, launched in March 1965, was for adults: women who had ‘more to think about than what to do about dinner’. That year it ran features on New Wave cinema, venereal disease, racism, contraception, impotence, abortion, logical positivism, female sterilisation and childbirth. Its cover images of gingered-up, supercharged, unsmiling women became legendary, and its distinctive typography and layouts instantly made the fancy-garnish brigade look obsolete. Elizabeth David wrote the cookery column, and the fashion pages featured black models.

In Nova’s September ’65 issue their star reporter, American journalist Ruth Inglis, explored the female zeitgeist through fiction. She identified the cream of the crop of London’s literary women – Doris Lessing, Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch – and argued that there was a prevailing mood of sexual abandonment running through their writings. ‘Sex is great …’, proclaimed Inglis. Her article exactly caught the spirit of the times and the spirit of Nova’s readership – while Nova itself hacked a path through the chauvinist thorns and briars which for decades had kept thousands of Sleeping Beauties eloquently confined and intact in their sugarplum castles, frozen in time.

In 1965: The Year Modern Britain was Born (2014), the journalist Christopher Bray makes the claim that not only was ’65 a year of defining impact culturally, ethically, politically and technologically, but it was also ‘the year feminism went mainstream’. His claim is premature. Nova (which doesn’t get a mention in his appraisal of the year) barely uses the word ‘feminism’. Juliet Mitchell had yet to write Women: The Longest Revolution, her ground-breaking discussion of male oppression, which would pave the way for a genuine new-wave of feminism. But in 1965 there were dawning signs of a female fightback, with women talking, writing, being heard and being read in a way that was different.

Christopher Bray’s book rightly makes reference to a TV drama screened that year, Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction. The play was based on Dunn’s book of the same name, published two years earlier: a series of vignettes of working-class women’s lives south of the river, faithfully portraying all their foul-mouthed, poverty-stricken, carnal realities.

The book of Up the Junction had shocked, but the drama shocked more (unsurprisingly, it was one of Mrs Whitehouse’s targets). Set in the lee of Battersea Power Station’s steaming towers, Dunn’s documentary-style script caught the voices of a female community, with the volume turned up to loud:

‘I never once lay down with him.¹⁵ I used to meet him in a back alley off the Latchmere. I didn’t really know what he was at – I never got no pleasure out of it.’

‘Do you like ’em fair or dark?’

‘It’s not their ’air I’m interested in!’

‘When you love a boy, you want to give him the best thing in the world, and there is only one thing, isn’t there?’

‘They say it’s marvellous when yer naked …’

The director (Ken Loach) was equally unsparing in filming a harrowing scene in which one of the girls, seventeen-year-old Rube, miscarries and nearly dies after a botched backstreet abortion, cost: £4. Barely two miles from the peacock paradise of King’s Road, a London of debt, deprivation and slum demolition was a sooty, grimy contrast to the boutiques and bright lights of Swinging London.

The two worlds shared little in common, beyond the new norm of sexual laxity, for which women were still expected to pay a heavy price.

Paying For It

It was quite a lot of money – round about £100fn4 I think.¹⁶ Which was why people who couldn’t afford it drank bottles of gin and stuck knitting needles up their bottoms.

Getting a safe abortion was a rich person’s sport. There was a guy in Harley Street who had a very good trade in women like me …

As she put it, Kristina Reed had ‘fallen on her face’.

Having got rid of her virginity, Kristina discovered that it was easy to include a busy sex life in her round of social activities. She rarely stayed the night with any of her lovers, and her parents were left in the dark. But the sex wasn’t all that much fun.

Each time I thought, well maybe this will be the time when I’ll discover exactly what it’s all supposed to be about. Because I can’t see the point of someone just humping you, unless you want a baby …

And that was something she emphatically didn’t want. Where contraception was concerned, Kristina relied on her partners to take care of things. On this occasion, the man in question was older than her, and she expected him to know what he was doing, but something went wrong. She remembers feeling ‘terror, horror, shock …’ on realising her situation.

I couldn’t even think past today. And all I wanted was for this mess to be over. It’s a bit like having a migraine ’cos you’ve drunk too much the night before. And when you’ve got the migraine you feel guilty, because you know you inflicted it on yourself, and all you can think about is getting rid of it, whatever it takes. I just wanted to paste a nice clean sheet over this horrible messy page, and go back to what I’d been before.

In the event, she was relatively lucky, and not even out of pocket. Her lover, who was wealthy enough to pay for his pleasures, took the inglorious blunder in his stride. He made arrangements with a clean clinic, and signed the cheque. The staff were kind and non-judgemental. She stayed overnight, went home, and never told her parents a thing. But within a year, Kristina was caught a second time. This time her boyfriend was, ironically, Roman Catholic, but neither of them hesitated in taking what seemed the essential step of a second abortion.

I didn’t ever countenance the thought of having the baby. So it was straight to the clinic – and I was not alone. There really were a LOT of girls this happened to …

Across the social spectrum, both married and unmarried, there were a LOT of women breaking the law. A minority of women wanting abortions could seek help, legally, through the National Health Service, but only provided they could demonstrate conclusively that their mental health was at risk. Until 1967 (when the Act was passed that – under certain highly defined circumstances – legalised abortion by registered doctors who could be accessed through the National Health Service) approximately 10,000 abortions were carried out yearly in private clinics across the country, few of them legal, while estimates of illegal ‘backstreet’ abortions ranged from 15,000 to 100,000 a year. With unwanted pregnancy still a source of shame and family conflict, many a desperate young woman found her way from the provinces to London in hope of a secret termination.

The New London Spy explained that abortions were available in London to anyone who wanted one, at a cost ‘from £20 to £300 plus …’ (Rube’s £4 abortion in Up the Junction was outside The Spy’s experience).

There must be at least thirty practising abortionists in London, including one who offers a special students’ rate. Most of them do it simply for the money, but there are a few who risk their livelihood occasionally in the belief that no woman should be obliged to bear a child which she does not want and which she has conceived involuntarily.

Behind the figures are some harrowing stories. When I started making a wishlist of the kind of women I wanted to interview for this book, I didn’t include on it ‘Woman willing to talk about having abortion’ – and that was because I didn’t have to. A surprising number of women I contacted for other reasons, Kristina Reed being one, volunteered the fact that they had ‘fallen on their faces’ in the pre-Abortion Act era. Another was Carmen Callil, who told me with horror that ‘this was one of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life’.¹⁷ Carmen got pregnant despite being sensibly equipped with a Dutch cap. At this time she was an anxious, fragile and unstable young woman who had already made a suicide attempt. ‘I really wanted to die.’ Her wealthy married boyfriend would never permit her to go ahead with a baby. Instead, he set her up with a therapist, who was able to arrange a National Health abortion by claiming that Carmen suffered from ‘mental instability’. But the interrogation process put her through hell, and caused excruciating delays. The procedure was performed five months into her pregnancy, and she was exceedingly ill as a result. ‘And you know, what I think about “women’s right to choose”, and all that, is that an abortion is the most unspeakable experience you can have in your life, and you don’t need anybody else telling you what to do. It’s just shocking to have to do it –’cos you know it’s a living creature.’

A third woman who told me about her experiences was Sophie Jenkins, who, at the age of seventeen, had what she described as ‘a DIY abortion’. She and her boyfriend, Jeremy – who at that time was working as a part-time auxiliary in a mental hospital – had gone 75 per cent of the way; their petting sessions were non-penetrative. But rumours abounded about the risks, ‘and I didn’t know enough about sex to know what could make you pregnant and what couldn’t’.¹⁸ So when Sophie missed a period, she panicked. No way could she have a baby. ‘It was the most terrible thing. And I only considered going through an abortion because I had seen, through the example of a girl at my school, how much shame there was attached to being an unmarried mother. Another girl at my school gassed herself because she was pregnant.’ It never occurred to Sophie to tell her parents. Instead, she confided straight away in Jeremy, who spoke privately to a medical friend at the hospital. There was, it appeared, a combination of abortifacient drugs that could do the trick. So he stole them from the hospital dispensary. Sophie went to his tiny bedsit on a Saturday afternoon and took a dose of the tablets, followed by an injection administered by an inexperienced student friend of Jeremy’s, and then spent the next two hours vomiting, convulsing and having extreme diarrhoea. ‘It was frightening and disgusting, and a terrible risk. Those two hours count among the most horrible of my life.’ A couple of days later she had her period. ‘And I never even knew whether I was pregnant …’

Amanda Brooke-Dales was another woman who needed little encouragement to talk about the circumstances of having an abortion in the 1960s. Born into a military family in 1941, Amanda’s teens were a time of court shoes, cocktail suits and properly ‘done’ hair. By 1965 she was a sophisticated, trendy twenty-four-year-old graduate working in the social secretariat of the American embassy and enjoying all that Swinging London had to offer. Her mother, as she explained, was clear-sighted, but nevertheless baulked at confronting the implications of her daughter’s sex life. Instead, she enlisted a worldly family friend to talk to Amanda about sex and contraception, which she did, over a gin and tonic, before producing a Dutch cap in a box and packing her off to consult her own gynaecologist. Despite this, something went wrong. ‘I was having an on-off fling with somebody, and managed to get pregnant …’¹⁹ There was no question of marrying the father, ‘and I did feel very much that women should be allowed to choose whether or not they went through with a pregnancy’.

I just knew immediately that it was a mistake. He didn’t want it, and I didn’t want it, and it had to be dealt with.

So it was back to the gynaecologist – who had a network of colleagues prepared to perform the operation. Amanda was passed first to a ‘celebrity’ abortionist in Mayfair,fn5 whom she found slimy, patronising and loathsome. She then transferred to a clinic in Wimbledon, where the Belgian immigrant doctor treated her in a matter-of-fact, human way. ‘He made me feel that this was just something unfortunate that was now going to be sorted out.’ Though Amanda’s father was never told, her mother went with her to hold her hand. ‘It was manageable. But it was all deeply unpleasant. Everything about it was horrible. It was over quite quickly, and I was stuffed full of gauze and told to go home and lie down.’ What did it cost? ‘About £150, I think. The guy paid.’

Actually, it was more physically than emotionally unpleasant. I’ve not been tormented by it – though it did come back to haunt me, when it turned out, much later, that I couldn’t have children. And I did rather wonder whether I’d done something horrible to myself.

Meanwhile ‘Marion’, a London art student, told her story to Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, the authors of Generation X. After failing to induce her period using pills, Marion asked around and was recommended an abortionist, who met her and her boyfriend in a pub and charged £50. He told her he ‘did’ a lot of celebrities. On the appointed day he turned up, gave her a douche and went away. Hours later she started to abort.

There was a lot of blood. It was agony, as though my whole inside was being ripped out. I was screaming and screaming. It lasted six hours and I really thought I wouldn’t live through it …

I haven’t slept with a boy since …

We have already seen how, the previous year, Kimberley Saunders became one of the many women who attempted – and failed – to self-abort, hoping that her unwanted pregnancy could be curtailed by taking a hot mustard bath and administering quinine. Home abortions were common, and older women in the know passed on recipes to unwilling expectant mothers. Jumping down stairs was often recommended, or violent skipping. Another method was to mix up a solution of soap and boiling water, which was then pumped into the uterus. One woman who didn’t realise the mixture had to be cooled first died from internal burns.

It should not be forgotten that married women, often in impoverished circumstances and with large families, bore the brunt when it came to getting rid of an unwanted infant. Few such mothers could find the wherewithal for a safe termination in a clean clinic. Instead, they turned in desperation to home abortifacients, coat hangers and knitting needles, or an amateur with a kitchen table. All too often these operations ended at the mortuary.

Even of those women I spoke to who didn’t personally endure the distress of invasive and horrible interventions, a high proportion had friends or acquaintances who did. The experience of 1960s débutante Melissa North echoes those of Kristina Reed and Amanda Brooke-Dales, with the exception that most of the men who impregnated Melissa’s friends didn’t seem to accept any liability:

Lots of people got pregnant, the entire time.²⁰ The girls usually paid. Most people had allowances. It didn’t cost that much – though I suppose a bit more than a pair of shoes.

There was an anaesthetist in Harley Street who must have made a fortune, because posh girls were going there every week …

The inner circle knew who to turn to.

There was one girl who became a very, very posh soubrette, and she was always going off to see whatever-he-was-called. She had about three abortions! I didn’t have one. But I went with friends sometimes.

It was a bit like going to the dentist, and people would say, oh dear, I mustn’t let that happen again.

Maybe for some it was, indeed, as trivial a matter as having a tooth pulled. But Melissa North’s airy manner is untypical – and she herself hadn’t undergone the experience. Most of the evidence suggests that having an abortion was a terrifying last resort, whose criminality raised the stakes for women in the unhappy position of wishing to terminate a pregnancy.

As the twentieth century progressed, the gap between statute and social practice continued to widen. By 1965, doing the womanly thing and having a baby was no longer always an inevitability. For Kristina, Melissa, Marion, Kimberley, Amanda, Carmen, Sophie and many thousands more, sex had become detached from reproduction and all that went with it: prams, aprons and a husband to provide them. Instead, the advance of female emancipation brought with it a natural wish to participate in the privileges previously reserved for the non-childbearing half of the population, men. Women wanted access to fulfilling education, to political power, to economic independence, careers, self-realisation, creativity and self-expression – things that, as every mother knows, are far harder to accomplish alongside the demands of motherhood. They wanted equality. And as well as that, they wanted sex – without consequences, and without punishment.

The Abortion Law Reform Association, which had commenced its lobbying campaign in 1936, found new momentum in the revved-up post-war world. By 1965 demands for a change in the law were becoming increasingly vocal, and that year the Labour MP Renée Short introduced a bill outlining provisions for legal terminations. The relatively smooth passage of reform is probably attributable to the self-evidently lamentable status quo. For law-makers and politicians, it was a matter of defining parameters and eliminating abuse, and public opinion was approximately three-to-one in favour of reform.

But for some, it remained a matter of absolute morality. The temperature of any debate about the destruction of human life was always going to be heated. ‘How’, asked one lady correspondent to The Times, ‘could abortion ever be seen as liberal and humane?’²¹ She claimed that the argument that defective infants, babies conceived by a mother with mental health problems, or by a raped mother should be aborted did not hold good; the children should be adopted. ‘Do disabled people really wish they had never been born?’²² asked another, questioning the eugenics dimension of the debate. ‘Let us call a spade a spade,’ wrote a (male) Cambridge don, asserting that it was arrant hypocrisy to assert the human rights of the mother while killing the live organism in her womb – for any human being was surely created nine months prior to its birth.²³

Ann Widdecombe was another who argued then, and over the years to follow, that it was wrong to take life in any circumstances other than when it was necessary in order to save life. As a convinced Christian at Birmingham University in the mid-sixties, she cut her debating teeth on the issue, when it was proposed, as part of a provocative motion, that abortion was one of the signs of a civilised society. In such strongly left-wing student circles, her outspoken anti-abortion views couldn’t have been less popular. Nevertheless, they twice won her the debating cup.

Belinda Mitchell, a trainee nurse in the first half of the sixties, was shocked when she realised that her hospital had a semi-secret ward where women who were having abortions were looked after. Belinda and her fellow trainees were deliberately kept blinkered from certain facts of hospital life deemed unsavoury for young women; for example, they were prevented from watching deliveries in the maternity ward, and during Belinda’s brief nursing career she never saw any male genitals. But the young nurses were also steered away from that particular ‘shady little ward’ whose true function was never specified, separate from the main gynaecological wards and containing just six beds. Belinda heard whispered accounts that its occupants were there because they were having terminations under the NHS ‘mental health’ criteria.

But had having an abortion become just too easy? This young woman, interviewed by an oral historian, was comfortable with the step she had just taken:

As I left the abortion ward the doctor said, ‘Take the Pill and don’t come back.’²⁴ I got back into the swing of life. There was no grief, nothing.

Nurse Mitchell was sceptical about what she saw as a loophole. ‘Being pregnant was inconvenient.²⁵ You might just want to go on a skiing holiday – so you simply said, “My mental health’s at risk …”’ She brooded and worried:

I wanted to know the truth of things. Other people didn’t seem to be like that. But when a person acts, they need to know what exactly they are doing. So I made myself pretty unpopular by asking people, ‘Do you know what abortion actually is?’

She procured leaflets that included unsparing images of aborted foetuses, and from then on seized whatever opportunity came her way to inform acquaintances, strangers and anyone who would listen about the realities of abortion.

What the leaflets were about was, these are the facts. I said, if you’re pro-abortion, you need to know the facts. This is actually what is being done. I wanted people to know the facts about foetal development – that, you know, a foetus isn’t just a bundle of cells.

I wasn’t 100 per cent anti-abortion in all circumstances. I do think there are awful things that have to happen sometimes. But it was the idea that people would choose to undergo abortions for trivial reasons that bothered me.

And it’s all very well, you know, as T. S. Eliot said, ‘Mankind cannot bear too much reality.’ And yes, sometimes, terrible decisions have to be made. But, well – just don’t trivialise them.

*

The arguments of those who supported abortion law reform in the mid-1960s were strengthened by the growing scandal of thalidomide. At its height in 1962, a poll showed 73 per cent of the public to be in favour of legal abortion where a child might be born with physical impairments. Between 1963 and 1965 membership of the Abortion Law Reform Association doubled, while its officials also claimed support from over 200 MPs, attributing both factors to the all-too-visible tragedy of hundreds of deformed babies born to mothers who had unwittingly taken Distaval.

1965 was the year that Margaret and Billy Hogg finally got confirmation of the fact they had long suspected – despite the assurance given to Margaret by her GP that he had not given her Distaval – that their son David was indeed a thalidomide child. The Hoggs’ conviction sent them to see specialists at a hospital in Stirling in search of medical proof for the cause of David’s condition.

And the doctor examined him and that, and he turned to the other doctor and he says, ‘Well, this little lad is a typical thalidomide person.²⁶ You just have to look at his eyes to find out. He has the standard Columbine eye of a thalidomide.’

That’s the iris. It’s pear-shaped and it’s down in the bottom of the pupil. He says, ‘David is thalidomide.’ He says, ‘There is no doubt about it,’ he says. ‘Apart from that, he has the same arms, same hands and, unfortunately, the same nose.’

David’s arms and hands were little fingered appendages. The bridge of his nose was flat.

And so began a story, for Margaret Hogg, that to this day has still not ended: a daily test of patience and resilience, a growing anger at those responsible, a solidarity with other women also struggling to mother their impaired children, a fight for justice. A story of learning, day after day, what David could and couldn’t do. Of discovering that her GP, fearful of exposure, had destroyed her medical records. Of pride, morale and determination. There were days when there wasn’t enough money, when support systems failed, days when Margaret – who had left school at the age of fifteen – felt swamped by complicated red tape.

But Margaret has never felt personal guilt. And she maintains to this day that she wouldn’t have had things any different.

No. Somebody once said to me, ‘If this happened now, where you have scans and everything else, would you have went through wi’ that pregnancy?’ And I said, ‘Yes’. And they said, ‘Why?’

I says, ‘Well: one,’ I says, ‘David was a baby. And two,’ I says, ‘I cannot agree wi’ abortions.’ I says, ‘I would never have had an abortion.’ I says, ‘What other people do is up to them. For me, the taking of life is just – well, it’s wrong.’

I would never say I’d change things. I used to say to Billy over the years, ‘By God, I’ve got a broad back and He keeps giving me it …’ And as my mother always instilled in me, ‘You are never given more than you could bear.’

It happened for a reason, and that was that.

And what was that reason? Margaret Hogg’s eloquence, strength, courage and principles testify to a life well lived. Born in wartime into a low-income household, she grew up with limited horizons. Her twice-widowed mother slaved in factories to get food on the table. Margaret herself, like the majority of her generation, didn’t look for a future beyond humble work, marriage – and motherhood. But it was this last that catapulted her into unimagined territory. It helped her grow up, and grow as a woman. Since its foundation, Margaret Hogg has been an active trustee of the Thalidomide Society, in due course becoming vice-chair and chair. More recently she has been awarded the status of honorary trustee of the society. These posts have brought her a wealth of enriching experience and friendships. She has triumphantly conquered a fear of standing on a platform, speaking from the heart about her son and his fellow-thalidomiders in front of a packed audience at the Wellcome Trust in London. Afterwards, one of the listeners told her, ‘When you started, there was a hush – you could have heard a pin drop,’ and for months afterwards, there were requests for transcripts of her talk. Over the years Margaret has given numerous interviews to reporters for press and television, and recently, after years of self-denial provoked a debilitating crisis of confidence, she took the decision to enrol on a rewarding college course in Women and Health, proving to herself yet again that she had staying power and ability. ‘I had a fantastic tutor, and she says, “You’d lost yourself” – She said, “You’ve needed this time to pull yourself back, to remind yourself who you are.”’ Her life has been one of love, endurance and reward.

Today, Margaret Hogg might agree that thalidomide, though she didn’t choose it, chose her.

What to Do About Dinner

In 1965, family life was making unprecedented demands on Margaret Hogg. But from time to time she opened a newspaper. And what she saw there made her angry. The press had appropriated a term first used by American Vogue editor Diana Vreeland to describe the dizzying upheavals in fashion, pop culture and music that were putting youth in the forefront of change. This ‘Youthquake’ was beginning to change the scenery of the nation that Margaret had grown up in:

It would come out in the papers, all that ‘the youth of today’ had been up to. And I used to say, ‘They need a good damn smack on the backside!’ To me they didnae seem to have any values, they didnae seem to have any respect for their elders.

And I used to think to myself, looking at them with their dirty long hair, Good God, where’s your self respect? Go and wash your face and brush your hair!

Margaret was not in a minority. It helps to understand the new topography if the Youthquake’s highly coloured and vivid eruptions are projected against the respectable, class-ridden, boring, at times eccentric screen of our national daily life.

For Harold Wilson’s Britain remained a land of gentility, stoicism, sobriety, rigidity and tedium; of freezing houses, of Tudor coaching inns converted into steak houses, of silver that needed polishing, of navy-blue houndstooth, drip-dry shirts, coal tar soap, peppermint creams and potted calceolarias. A land of bingo halls, budgerigars and hairdressing salons. A land, too, of women whose primary concern was – as Nova had described it – ‘what to do about dinner’.

Through the decade, fanned by Betty Friedan’s portrayal of neurosis in the domestic doll’s house (and by the News of the World), the presumption gained currency that such women were martyrs to motherhood and homemaking. ‘I wonder if people realise how easy it is to become a drug addict these days,’ wrote one, under the headline ‘Anguish of a Pep-Pill Wife’.²⁷ ‘I went to the family doctor two years ago because I felt tired. How I wished to God I hadn’t …’ ‘Doctor please, some more of these …’ ran the Jagger/Richards lyric to ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, written in 1965. The politician Edith Summerskill had described the London suburban housewife as ‘one of the loneliest people in the country’;²⁸ her only regular point of contact being the doctor’s waiting room, where she patiently waited to pick up her prescription for phenobarbitone tablets, to ward off ‘nerves’; while a mid-century overview of the ‘permissive morality’ presented a portrait of ‘Mrs Jones’, a daydreaming, enervated, sensation-hungry housewife, who found stimulus in her daily life only through the ‘telly’, and ‘pep tablets’.fn6 ‘She exists in an almost incessant round of titillation, leading inevitably to emotional exhaustion.’fn7

Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that dinner, children and knitting patterns were meaningful pursuits for enormous numbers of women. Here are some glimpses.

Harriet Debenham’s adventurous spirit had been fed by a year spent crewing on a transatlantic yacht, bumming in a Californian ski resort, and then rejoining her crew to sail the Pacific. In 1964 she had come back to England and taken a stiflingly dull job as a receptionist in a London advertising agency. When I pressed her: ‘But surely London was the centre of the universe at that time?’ she replied:

Was it? Swinging London?²⁹ I don’t think I even noticed it. People talked about Mods and Rockers, but I never came across any.

Yes, I did wear short skirts, because they were practical for bicycling, but you know, I’m not interested in fashion and clothes. Or having my hair done, or shopping.

Bred in rural Sussex, Harriet’s country soul yearned for fresh air, home-made jam, ponies and furrows. Her first sight of Nick Lear was one winter’s day on a ploughed field, dressed in white knee breeches and a green coat, whipping in the beagle pack with her father and brothers. In 1965 Nick proposed, and they arranged a spring wedding. Nick would continue to earn his living as a solicitor, they would settle into a farmhouse, Harriet would cook and care for hearth and home, and then there would be babies: lots of them.

A glance through almost any generic women’s magazine mid-decade reveals the social aspirations of the mainstream middle-class wife. In this world dinner parties were a minefield of taste and taxonomy: what cutlery to use for your avocado vinaigrette, which glass to drink your whisky from, what to talk about; how to serve coq au vin, trifle or Camembert with crackers. Sixties Britain may have been a hybrid of posh and proletarian – but the social rigidities were as coagulated as the chocolate mousse. Belinda Mitchell regarded dinner parties as a non-negotiable aspect of her role as a newlywed. She married her husband in 1965, and they honeymooned in a bed-and-breakfast lodging in Scotland, where they were told, ‘“It’s single rooms you’ll be wanting …” – until we could prove that we were married.’ As a young wife (when she could spare time from her personal mission to inform anyone who would listen about abortion) there were social imperatives: playing house, tending your yoghurt plant (‘we all had them …’), going to dressmaking classes and entertaining; Belinda quickly learnt to whip up delicacies with her Kenwood Chef. Kitchen gadgets had status. Since it was first introduced into the UK in 1961, the Tupperware party had been a fixture on the young-wife circuit. Imported from America, these highly successful receptions were dreamed up as a sociable way to sell airtight plastic boxes under cover of a girly gathering with dips and drinks. The idea was to tap the commercial potential of the girls’ night in, and the jury is still out as to whether this celebrated business model reinforced domestic drudgery or opened a door to female entrepreneurship.

The only way you could buy Tupperware was through an agent, and the agent wouldn’t sell it to you unless you went to a Tupperware party …³⁰

Often inexperienced, the hostesses who were enlisted to embark on the curious ritual of selling storage containers from the home were supported by the ‘Tupperware ladies’ who guided them through the intricate maze of Tupperware etiquette. You were expected to serve cheese and pineapple on sticks. This was followed by funny party games, like: ‘Cut an image of your husband out of a sheet of newspaper – (we were all assumed to have one).’ Only when one had eaten the cheese on sticks and played the funny games, was one allowed to buy any Tupperware.

It sometimes seemed a heavy price to pay. But I loved Tupperware, and all my 1960s purchases are still in regular use over fifty years later.

Kitchens and their contents had the power to communicate women’s dreams. From Scandinavian ceramics to spice jars, tinned spaghetti hoops to psychedelic tea caddies, Pyrex to prawn cocktails, the sixties domestic heartland conveyed hints of exotica, modernity-worship, colour, convenience and clean lines.

However, a host of social and behavioural assumptions accompanied the Cinzano cocktails and eggs in aspic. The effusive romantic novelist Barbara Cartland codified these in a 1960s edition of her Etiquette Handbook. Here’s a flavour:

– Unless she is ill a woman should get up and cook her husband’s breakfast before he goes to work in the morning.³¹ It is bad manners to do this in curlers, without lipstick …

– It is dirty and slovenly for people to have dinner in the clothes they have worn all day … I am really shocked by many people who … rush into dinner unwashed and with dirty shoes – the men often without a tie.

– I always advise mothers to take their daughters to a Beauty Parlour and have them shown how to make-up properly … The great thing is to see that a standard of good taste in lipstick and eyeshade is reached as quickly as possible.

– Generally speaking, I believe that young people will not be involved in immorality or unsuitable love affairs if they have been brought up with high standards.

– When drinking a cocktail or any other drink it is completely wrong to say: ‘Cheers!’

Reading Cartland today, it is easy to see why, for a generation of rebels, any amount of indulgence, dissipation, colour, flamboyance and excess was preferable to this.

The Priesthood

The underground all sprang out of the fact that there was a community of people who wanted to see silent Japanese films, and lie on cushions, and smoke dope and take psychedelics.³²

Somehow, Melissa North sensed that there was more to life than going to dances, having a boyfriend with a Ferrari and holidaying in St Tropez. The marriage market was starting to seem irrelevant. At the age of eighteen she had completed her débutante year, lost her virginity to Nigel Dempster, learnt to type badly, worked for a Mayfair-based publishing company and spent a lot of weekends at posh country houses. In the early and mid-sixties she was sharing a flat near South Kensington tube station with three girlfriends named Jacquetta, Camilla and Theodora. But something was missing: a different kind of fun, a different set of ideas.

By chance, one day at a Chelsea party, she got to know a new crowd. These boys were graduates from the Architectural Association. They came from exotic eastern European and Jewish backgrounds; they spoke differently, they dressed differently from the tweedy boys she knew, and they had names that didn’t appear in Debrett’s. They had fallen under the spell of Le Corbusier’s ideas about class, housing and urbanism; while as émigrés they cared deeply about the disadvantaged, about economics and left-wing politics. They were concerned too about the rapid escalation of the ideological East–West conflict in Vietnam. ‘And they lived in this mysterious place called north London …’

The AA boys seemed to regard women differently too. As Melissa recalls:

They were all educated people, you know? With clever mothers who taught at LSE or whatever … They’d been brought up in intellectual, artistic families, in which the women often ruled the roost …

And I thought, they’re cool. This is where I want to be …

Tchaik Chassay was the handsome architecture graduate at the centre of the group; he and Melissa immediately fell for each other.fn8

So Nigel Dempster kind of withered away, and I went out with Tchaik and discovered this startling new world, which was incredible fun.

Melissa and Tchaik were at the very heart of what would soon become known as the underground. Their network of friends encompassed a near-indefinable mix of poets, artists, musicians, beats, students, publishers, actors and intellectuals. Today we might use the word ‘fringe’ or ‘bohemian’ to describe their world, which both paralleled and intersected that of the Swinging London trend-setters. But, as so often, there was dissociation between the two. ‘We thought “Swinging London” was the most ghastly expression,’ says Melissa, ‘I mean, yeuurgh!’ In the introduction to Too Much, his analysis of the 1960s, the cultural historian Robert Hewison deftly disentangles them:

From 1964 to 1967 … two ideologies were developing in parallel: the affluent and hedonistic Sixties of ‘Swinging London’, and the oppositional culture of the underground. They have important cross-relationships; they both depended on a particular set of economic circumstances, they were both heralded by particular developments in the arts, and they both aimed at a kind of personal liberation. Yet the logic of the underground was ultimately opposed to the materialism which had created the opportunity for it to flourish.

Swinging London comprised the fashion crowd and the pop crowd. Melissa’s circle overlapped, but it was arty, avant-garde and intellectual; a world of blues bands, little magazines, artistic happenings and – until they discovered pound blocks of hashish – ten-bob deals of Jamaican grass purchased from the dealers who hung out at the Rio in Notting Hill Gate.

Melissa North, however, had left publishing behind, and branched into rock’n’roll. A young, cocksure bunch of laddish fortune-hunters were moving into the world of agenting and music publishing; and Melissa found her dream job on the top floor of Bryan Morrison’s ramshackle new company overlooking Denmark Street – aka Tin Pan Alley. It included booking gigs for the Pretty Things and the newly formed Pink Floyd.

Melissa loved the informality and excitement of her job; the music was a turn-on and she was steeped in it (‘though nobody there asked my opinion on anything to do with it, not ever!’). But Bryan Morrison and his swaggery East End mates took a bit of getting used to, even for a rebel débutante. They were a shocking contrast to the poetry-lovers and intellectuals she hung around with, and a reminder that a minority of women might regard respect as their due. Working at the Morrison Duncan agency, Melissa’s posh accent made her the office laughing stock, while Bryan would summon her from behind his partition to talk through a contract, with a casual ‘Come here, cunt!’ His language was larded with ‘fucks’, and he and his partner made no attempt to suppress their foul-mouthed male banter; so-and-so was ‘a dog’; they’d ‘given her one’. Some of the musicians were sordid and predatory – ‘they’d sit on my desk and say, well, sexist things …’ – but, not being a dolly bird, Melissa evaded most of their approaches. ‘I wasn’t their type.’

Her own type was distinctly cultured and thoughtful by comparison.

Most of us had a rather earnest side – however naive it was …

she remembers. They were well read, too – ‘We … were interested in writers who showed how they were challenging “straight” perceptions’ – and deeply respected the thinking of writers like P. D. Ouspensky, Wilhelm Reich, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jean Genet and Carl Jung, who questioned conventional world views.

In the summer of 1965 London was full of poets. As Melissa recalled:

Before the music thing really got huge, poetry was like rock’n’roll. It had a huge following. One went to every poetry thing that was going.

And 11 June 1965 saw the ‘poetry thing’ to end all poetry things: a pivotal date in the annals of the underground. Somebody had decided an ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ could fill the Albert Hall. Every poet in sight was rounded up. There were portents of the coming of flower power. The night before the reading, the actress Kate Heliczer and some friends were inspired to salvage leftover blooms from the florists at Covent Gardenfn9 and bring them to distribute at the reading. They painted their faces in psychedelic colours and handed out the flowers. To everyone’s astonishment, over 7,000 people came; some even had to be turned away.

No women poets were included in the twenty-odd performers billed to read. But the Albert Hall’s vast circular auditorium was liberally decorated not just with flowers but with a sea of shapely legs, flowing locks and false eyelashes. As Allen Ginsberg clanked a set of Tibetan handbells and droned an incomprehensible chant, a young woman in the front row, dressed in matching spotty Quant-style dress and hat, waved her flower hypnotically and dragged on an unspecified roll-up. Then Adrian Mitchell did a crowd-pleasing chorus of ‘Tell Me Lies About Vietnam’. Later in the performance Ginsberg, looking like a bespectacled prophet, returned unsteadily to the platform, to declaim his free verse with blurred, fire-and-brimstone intensity:

I am that I am I am the³³

Man and the Adam of hair in

My loins …

while a solitary nymph in a frilled mini-dress, maybe tripping, swayed balletically, rocking, dancing, clasping and fluttering her arms from the front row. Over all hung a haze of reefer smoke.

Melissa’s American friend Sue Miles recalled that Ginsberg was drunk. For her, the occasion had little artistic merit –

– ghastly poetry, unbelievably bad …³⁴

Its significance was of a different nature. It was about ‘discovering that there were more of you around than you thought’. It was a moment of sharing: of astonished awareness that here was a previously unsuspected groundswell of nonconformity, containing the makings of a genuine counterculture, and the reassurance that as rebels and free spirits they were not deviants adrift, but could lay claim to a sense of belonging, a fellowship and a communal homeland.

Most of them were under thirty, and with their new-found sense of empowerment, they set out to live their lives differently.

The underground’s moment was brief, according to Melissa. Barely five years, between 1963 and 1968, during which a quite small group of individuals spread their ripples out from a creative heartland located in London. If you knew the people, you knew where to go. In 1963, by her own account, Marianne Faithfull was among those who looked on starry-eyed in a Chelsea coffee bar as the black-clad male priesthood determined the future course of civilisation: ‘[London’s] going to be the psychic bloody centre of the world, man!’ declared one of the beatniks. The outcome was Indica Books and Gallery in Southampton Row, which in 1965 supplanted the hot-spot bookshop and performance space Better Books as a magnet for the avant-garde. In 1966 ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and Joe Boyd founded the music venue UFO in Tottenham Court Road before moving it briefly (prior to its demise) to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. The Roundhouse was also the site of one of the counterculture’s most famous events, the launch of IT magazine in 1966 – ‘the International Times First All-night rave Pop Op Costume Masque Drag Ball Et Al’. After 1967 it would be the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, founded by Sue and Barry Miles (who was always known simply as Miles) and their fellow networker Jim Haynes. The Arts Lab was a cinema, bookshop, café, rehearsal space, pick-up joint, drug den and crash pad rolled into one: a venue saturated with the scent of hashish, patchouli and unwashed socks.

In this world, fame and wealth blended seamlessly with Bohemia. Seen through Melissa’s eyes, it was a community of creativity, idealism and personal liberation with no down side. Sexual freedom was taken for granted. Melissa’s beautiful flatmate Celia’s love life veered between the extremes of Cockney street cred and blue-blooded royalty, as she alternated liaisons with film star Terence Stamp and Prince William of Gloucester. ‘You’d hear them clomping up the stairs, but you never knew which one it was going to be.’³⁵

Here’s a day in Melissa’s life:

A typical evening was, come home from work – go to bed for a couple of hours, and have a snooze. About nine or ten in the evening people would start turning up, and we’d convene in the attic – which we’d converted into this big room with floor cushions. Dress up, change a bit. Then we’d go down to Blaise’s club in Queensgate. Might see Ike and Tina Turner, the Byrds … the first time I saw Jimi Hendrix was in Blaise’s. So then you’d swirl around with all your friends, probably till about two.

Then we would come back to our flat, and we’d go upstairs to the top room, make tea, roll a joint. And then we’d do mad things, I remember we read The Hobbit aloud for a month, with people taking turns. And we’d stay up till about five. And then I’d have to be in the office by ten next day to answer the telephone but nobody ever came in till one o’clock.

We thought drinking was boring, it was what old people did, so we didn’t do much alcohol. We were dope smokers …

Men’s Club

In 1965 Melissa first took LSD. Tchaik’s uncle returned from California with the drug. ‘And he gave it to us and we took it, and it was fantastic.’ Next day Melissa didn’t get into the office until about two in the afternoon. Bryan, her boss, said, ‘Where the fuck’ve you been?’ ‘I took LSD last night,’ she told him. ‘You did?’ Her status rocketed, as Bryan looked at her with a new respect.

Cool, colourful, transcendent, mind-altering, psychedelic drugs were the portal to the underground; their use was a badge of honour, and a signal to the uninitiated that you were a card-carrying member of the permissive priesthood. Melissa and Tchaik were early adopters. Within a year, as we will see, LSD would start to refashion the world view of her generation.

For me, the beat of sixties permissive culture was at its loudest when I was barely ten years old, living in safe suburbia, but its vibrations penetrated my childhood – in the form of art students. My father was their professor. Every June, disorderly, colourful and loud, his final-year students arrived at our house for a night of post-exam revelry washed down with intoxicating brandy-laced punch. They had long hair, wore velvet, colourful prints and scarves – and that was just the men. They ate, drank, smoked and danced, then they took off all their clothes and piled into the ornamental pond in our back garden. They seemed like another species, but they were incredibly beautiful and gorgeous and I loved them. Though I barely understood it, the word permissive – for me (and I suspect for innumerable others) – meant lovely, colourful, exciting and aspirational.

The idea of the permissive society has become synonymous with the 1960s counterculture – as if a few thousand earnest beatniks, stoned poets, groupies, art students and musicians could be credited with a Year Zero refashioning of the social agenda. As the historian Dominic Sandbrook explains in his book White Heat, these were not the people responsible for progressive policies such as the introduction of birth-control measures, the abolition of the death penalty (in 1965), the reform of the abortion laws and laws on homosexuality (in 1967), and of the divorce laws (in 1969). A melting-pot of politicians, campaigners, writers and public intellectuals, stretching back over the twentieth and even into the nineteenth century, should rightly be acknowledged for those achievements.

The permissive society grew out of an opposition. The ultra-conservatives of the post-war Establishment – people like Dr Leslie Weatherhead, Mary Whitehouse and the outspoken Christian journalist Malcolm Muggeridge – equated liberal reforms with moral delinquency. Ironically, it was their public antagonism that would energise the counterculture, helping it to punch above its initially very modest weight, and transforming it, by the end of the decade, from a flimsy sideshow into a barnstorming psychedelic circus. What had been fringe fiction was becoming mainstream reality. Small in number, a clutch of fun-loving, often frivolous and fanciful bohemians found their activities magnified under the full-beam glare of hostile media headlights. Pop stars and models, actors and artists were having a party. Come in fancy dress, said the invitation. Under thirties only. Drugs and rock’n’roll, from midnight, but above all, sex – for nothing could be more seductive than the promise implied in those two words ‘Free Love’. The old, the square, the bourgeois, the prudish, the passionless, the provincial, the ‘moral majority’ were not invited. And if the unregulated, untrammelled free-for-all from which they were excluded seemed all the more enviably enjoyable, then they only had themselves to blame for so vociferously denouncing the whole extravaganza.

The counterculture’s colour, music and potently idealistic agenda would capture the imagination of a generation. And yet the concerns of older people were often justifiable – like the fear that attached to the use and abuse of addictive and hallucinogenic drugs: ‘an infant playing with a lethal weapon …’ Books like journalist Alan Bestic’s Turn Me On Man: Face to Face with Young Addicts Today (1966) gave ammunition to those convinced that society was going to hell in a handcart. ‘Every heroin addict I met had taken first either marijuana or one of the amphetamine group like purple hearts … There were the two sixteen-year-old girls who were addicted to heroin two months after taking their first purple heart … There was the girl who sneered at pills, but loved to smoke pot, and who is now hopelessly hooked …’ Bestic painted a dire picture of seedy pads in dismal seaside towns, underage sex, addiction, withdrawal and death. Reckless, defiant, semi-criminal drifters, the addicts were on the run from their families, earning what they could working in shops, or stealing. The epidemic was spreading, said Bestic, with frightening rapidity. Alarmed legislators moved with all speed to tighten the law.

The press gave endless column inches to the view that civilisation was now sliding down a perilous slope. There was talk of changing the homosexuality laws; an affluent and permissive society was fostering a pernicious increase in teenage violence and crime; in places of entertainment, on the streets, in the cinema and on the stage decency and polite language had been abandoned; England was fast losing its self-respect, its empire and its way. A typical correspondent wrote:

We live in a permissive society.³⁶ We are encouraged to believe that pleasure lies in indulgence and all forms of discipline are the enemies of enjoyment. This propaganda reaches us in many ways – through many forms of advertisement and the content of much of our entertainment. To live above this needs an upbringing which today all too few receive. We seek technological advance while our morals rapidly decline.

H. W. Austin

London SW1

*

Halfway through the 1960s, a social ripple was becoming a small but unstoppable wave. Behaviour and beliefs which would enter the mainstream by the mid-1970s were formed at this time – from the scandalous use of the word ‘fuck’ on television to the questioning of marriage, from drug use to potent, entitled individualism.

This book has set out to ask the question of women, ‘How was it for you?’ For lots of women like Melissa North and Sue Miles the emergence of the counterculture was mind-altering, exciting and fantastic fun. But a broader reading of the sources tells us that, in a rapidly changing society, men were lagging behind in adjusting their inbuilt prejudices. For starters, the terminology used by men to describe women – ‘chicks’, ‘dollies’, ‘birds’ or even ‘Richards’ (the preferred Cockney rhyming term for ‘bird’, derived from ‘Richard the Third’) – was depressingly belittling. Jenny Diski:

Most women who lived through the early and late Sixties whether as political molls or psychedelic chicks can recall that they were mostly of ornamental, sexual, domestic or secretarial value to the men striking out for radical shores.³⁷ The Left was never known for its willingness to embrace gender equality, but no more were the ‘heads’ or the entrepreneurs of the counterculture.

To some extent, women were complicit in their oppression. Working wives like Joan Bakewell barely quibbled with the expectations laid on her: ‘Each of the different segments of my life, the job, the children, the marriage and more, made different demands.³⁸ I felt I was up to it … The entire domestic routine was my responsibility.’ White-gloved values were still exerting an undertow. The wives of professional men continued to accept that they left the room to powder their noses after dinner, leaving their husbands to stretch their legs, pass the port and talk politics. Nobody made a fuss about being excluded from masculine preserves like university unions, or men-only clubs. ‘Women are not clubbable,’ The New London Spy baldly informed its readers.

A tangible disrespect and fear of women lay behind this freemasonry; a brand of misogyny that prevailed even in countercultural circles, as Marianne Faithfull discovered: ‘It was a men’s club that I couldn’t join.’³⁹ Though Marianne loved to get high on hashish, her husband John Dunbar forbade her to roll joints – ‘an incredible piece of drug chauvinism’. Singer George Melly’s widow, Diana, agreed: ‘The British jazz world was as full of chauvinists as other more conventional worlds,’ she wrote.⁴⁰ ‘Men knew best and I never corrected them.’ As we saw earlier, the Beatles also fell into this category, with Cynthia Lennon recalling, ‘[They] were very happy to have their women subservient in the background,’⁴¹ while Beatles lyrics like those of ‘Girl’ and ‘Run for Your Life’fn10 were also unashamedly misogynistic. Meanwhile, the Mick Jagger/Chrissie Shrimpton relationship lurched into crisis when the serially unfaithful Jagger, discovering that Chrissie was having an affair, demanded that she break it off. ‘Mick has to be the one in control, giving the orders, calling the shots,’ Shrimpton was quoted as saying.⁴²

The culture of male control was not confined to rich, powerful celebrities. The divorce courts highlighted extreme cases like that of a Mr Kenneth Cox who objected strenuously when his wife Dorothy became involved with a local Girl Guide and Brownie group. Having already prohibited Dorothy from getting a job, the dictatorial Cox now refused to let her anywhere near the Girl Guides. He also tried to force her to have sex. But both parties’ pleas for a divorce on grounds of cruelty were rejected by the judge. Male jealousy and ownership of women were seen as legitimate – ‘In my opinion, a man who isn’t jealous of his wife isn’t in love,’ wrote a Glamorgan reader to a national newspaper.⁴³ Writing in the Daily Express, the columnist Peter Grosvenor pondered the difference between the sexes, and concluded that women couldn’t write symphonies, had made no contribution to science and were less emotionally stable than men. In the workplace, hypocrisy, subordination, harassment and sexism ran amok, with women still expected to make the tea and agree with the men.

But sex was the cauldron that was threatening to boil over. In the 1950s, whether they liked it or not, women had been insulated and armoured against sexual advances, with rigidly structured underwear designed to discourage all but the most persistent of would-be suitors. Now, in the world of miniskirts, lightweight bras and the Pill, men were reduced to perpetual spoiled adolescents, screaming, ‘I want it, and I want it now.’ Few were prepared for the onslaught; and with their self-esteem still predicated on pleasing men, women like Kristina Reed pacified the tantrums with sexual sweeties. ‘Free love’ was the mantra – but free for whom? We have seen how, as the prohibitive climate of the 1950s evaporated, Kristina sleepwalked into sexual laxity. The journalist Virginia Ironside was the same: ‘For women, it was absolutely grisly …⁴⁴ I remember the sixties as an endless round of miserable promiscuity. It often seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat.’ And worse was to come. But in 1965 there was no solidarity, no channel and no vocabulary with which to express discontent. The sexual power struggle was still in its infancy.