1967

Things

The era of acquisition had dawned. ‘In the capitalist world there had never been a period of expansion and prosperity to compare with the 1950s and 1960s … If ever capitalism looked as though it worked, it was in these decades,’ reflected the historian Eric Hobsbawm.fn1 By 1967 rationing and making-do were well and truly consigned to the past. One ninety-one-year-old lady recently told me, ‘Oh yes – that was the first time since the war that you could really buy whatever you wanted.’

In Style Wars (1980) the journalist Peter York writes:

The reality of the sixties was new money, new technology, things – and the choices they implied.

At that time Peter York was working in advertising. Things were his handle on reality, from Wrighton kitchens to Hoover Keymatics, prawn cocktails to real cream – ‘a veritable cornucopia of consumer goodies’.

My family were not immune to this embarras de richesses. We too wanted the things we saw in the new, glossy Sunday supplements. Though my parents (like many of their high-minded ilk) were resistant to watching commercial television, its consumerist agenda filtered through, subtly reshaping their lives. The adverts for After Eight Mints and Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate, for Vesta Chow Mein and Heinz Sandwich Spread all worked their magic on us, and we wanted our share. True, shopping was still recognisably 1950s in style, and most women shopped daily. Having moved from suburban Leeds to rural Sussex in 1967, this was not an easy proposition for my mother. But the local market town had five butchers (one of which delivered to villages like ours), two fishmongers and half a dozen greengrocers, and my mother phoned through her weekly grocery order to the village shop.fn2 Our liking for foreign food was a challenge to them, but they did their best, providing vermouth, tinned beansprouts and Kraft ready-grated parmesan which had the consistency of sawdust and smelled weirdly rancid. But they also delivered essentials: bacon, Summer County margarine, Ajax powder and twenty filter-tipped Players Navy Cut.

Supermarkets, however, were slowly advancing. A little further afield there was a small branch of Sainsbury’s. In those days the shop was nothing more streamlined than a self-service but still old-fashioned grocery with an impressive cheese counter where you could buy Camembert. There were other signs of the times. My parents’ wine consumption increased – by 1970 people like them would be consuming twice the amount of wine they had drunk in 1960 – and in the local town a health-food shop and a delicatessen opened. Now adventurous cooks could buy brown rice, Gruyère, tinned olives and pâté de campagne by the ounce.

For inspiration and aspiration, one cookery writer was ahead of all the others. Lynn Barber didn’t like cooking. But David Cardiff, whom she later married, did. Soon after they moved to run-down Stockwell he brought home a strange purple vegetable he’d found in the local greengrocer’s and told Lynn it was called an aubergine.

He explained it meant there must be other middle-class people in the area, people who read Elizabeth David, people who knew what to do with an aubergine.¹ It meant the area was ‘coming up’.

My mother too worshipped at Mrs David’s shrine. Author Margaret Forster was the same. ‘I had cookery books, mostly Elizabeth David’s, and I’d pore over them and experiment.’² Hunter happily opened a bottle of something at table most evenings and Margaret flung wine and herbs into her dishes with abandon. Joan Bakewell too had fallen under David’s spell. She cooked lasagne and minestrone for her dinner parties, and made pilgrimages to the eponymous Greek Street emporium to buy petits pots and mouli-légumes.

Though this kind of eating and drinking had been the preserve of those with wider horizons, by the mid-1960s the continental influence was percolating downwards. Avocados were starting to appear, served with vinaigrette or prawns, on sophisticated menus even in the provinces, and no restaurant was complete without scampi. In oral histories of the period one encounters piquant memories:

– I was astonished when I saw [my sister] feeding long, stiff strands of pasta into a pan of boiling water, because I’d only ever seen or tasted tinned spaghetti before that …³

– People were just starting to go out to eat.⁴ I remember the Berni Inn in Worcester, where we’d go on Friday nights to have chicken in a basket and a glass of red wine, followed by an Irish coffee. Great fun.

In 1967 my parents bought a second car – since the end of the war car ownership had rocketed from 1.5 million to nearly 11 million – and an automatic washing machine. In the new house we had no fewer than three telephone extensions installed, one upstairs and two downstairs, and for her custom-built kitchen my mother joyfully selected a marble-effect Formica worktop. She also found that the Brighton branch of Habitat had caught up with her taste in stripped pine, bentwood rocking chairs and William Morris curtain fabric.

Just a bus ride away, my sister and I were also able to indulge our retail dreams. For sub-teens, half in love with Mick Jagger, rock’n’roll credibility was of pressing importance, and it didn’t take long to locate an address in the quaint grid of Brighton city-centre alleyways known as The Lanes where we could buy into the latest trends. This shop was called Gamut. It smelled intensely of sandalwood joss sticks and patchouli oil, which it displayed in ranks of little blue bottles alongside more pop items: Union Jack coffee mugs, Snoopy Dog merchandise and self-adhesive multi-coloured psychedelic butterfly stickers made by a firm called Hunky Dory, which I applied to my wardrobe doors. I also bought spherical turquoise blue Japanese lampshades and a chunky stand-up alarm clock with twin bells, enamelled in clashing pink and orange. My younger sister was the lucky one though: she had a wonderful, all-enveloping yellow ‘sag bag’ in the corner of her room. Then there were occasional trips to London, now within reach. In Fulham Road I discovered a revelatory shop called Laura Ashley, where it was possible to buy Victorian milkmaid-style floral frocks with flouncy frills. For some reason, everyone wanted to look like this.

By now my parents had caved in and joined the 90 per cent of British households who had a television. They also owned a Morphy Richards steam iron, a second-hand Kenwood chef with a blender attachment, a portable Hacker radio and a stereo record player, beside which were scattered my brother’s LPs, mostly Beatles and Stones.

*

This gallop through the products and possessions of the mid-1960s is a personal one, and every reader who remembers that time will surely have their own list of the food, fashions and furnishing that cluttered their homes, or headed their wish lists. Dreams were for sale at this time. Illusions too – for the façade of wealth was a thin one, plastered over a rickety pound, growing unemployment and a tanking economy. When I interviewed Kimberley Saunders about her time with the Rocker fraternity, one of the stories that seemed to me most suggestive of the consumerist 1960s was her account of how she met Dave, whom she later married. They got together through Sindy dolls.

Sindy, ‘the doll you love to dress’, had been launched in 1963.

Sindy is the free, swinging girl that every little girl longs to be …

the promotional text declared.

Sindy has sports clothes, glamour clothes, everyday clothes – a dog, skates, a gramophone – everything … Every genuine Sindy outfit is a child’s dream come true.

Sindy also had a boyfriend called Paul, and her range of plastic accessories gave her the marketing edge over her competitors. This healthy-living, clean-limbed dolly could go skiing, swimming, or to the bowling alley. Like her mass-produced rivals, Barbie and Tressy, she had a ready-made name and off-the-peg characteristics; her owner was not expected to individualise her, but would join a club of other Sindy-owners. However, unlike Barbie or Tressy, who had alluring make-up, waspy waists and prominent busts, she was not overtly sexualised. Sindy, though slender, looked more like a wide-eyed baby in a bra. All this made her lovable, unthreatening, enviably within reach and utterly desirable, to me and all my school friends. There can’t have been a girl in the land who didn’t want to own her, and she quickly became a bestseller. I was ten when some generous family friends made me a gift of my first Sindy in her ‘Happy Traveller’ outfit, featuring tailored coat, pleated skirt, red turtle-neck, plus holdall and camera: a joyful moment indeed.

Sindy: plastic perfection, packaged for a generation of pre-teens.

Teenager Kimberley Saunders had moved way beyond the doll stage. Virginal and wide-eyed she was not, following a wild sex life conducted on the London-to-Hastings line and the shingle of the Essex coast. On top of that, an unplanned pregnancy had made her a mother at fifteen. Her daughter was placed in foster care, and Kimberley went back to school in Bracknell ‘– as though nothing had happened’.fn3

After that I didn’t want nothing to do with men.⁵ And when I had my sixteenth birthday I didn’t invite any boyfriends. Just women friends.

It was a chastening experience. But Kimberley’s deflated mood was short lived, and before long she was out looking for fun again. Money, however, was in short supply. Girls like Kimberley traded their attractions for a night out in the dance hall or the bowling alley, which had to be paid for by whichever passing big spender you could entice into getting out his wallet. Saturday evening came, and she and her friend Janice dolled themselves up nicely.

And we went down to the town to see if we could pick up a couple of geezers. And lo and behold, I tell you, that was the luckiest night of my life.

There was these two blokes, pulled up at the side of the road …

The big Ford Zephyr, with its elaborate grille and chrome trim, spoke of cash flow. It looked as if these guys were up on their luck. As it turned out, they were indeed looking to do a deal, but had got lost. They’d come from Kilburn in north-west London with a bootful of goods due to be delivered to some shady contact in Bracknell who would pay ready money for them. One of them, Dave, the good-looking one, rolled down the window and asked the girls for directions.

He said, ‘We’re looking for so and so, we’ve got an order for him …’ It was a racket – a bit like Minder, you know? He’d get a load of stuff one day, and a load of stuff another day, probably knocked off the back of a lorry or something. So he says, ‘Well, we’ve got some stuff we need to offload, we’re dropping it off with this geezer down ’ere. Then we’ll go out for a meal.’

So I said, ‘Well, get rid of it first.’

And they opened the boot, and I said, ‘What have you got in there?’

And he said ‘Oh, we’ve got a load of Sindy dolls …’

Piled up in their cardboard and cellophane packaging in the back of the Zephyr, Dave and his mate had a ready supply of the toys, a dream cargo of nylon hair and plastic smiles.

So we all went out for a drink or something, and I took Dave’s phone number …

Happily, Dave was up for it. As for Kimberley, she was seriously interested. So when Saturday rolled around again he showed up in the Zephyr to take her out. But Kimberley’s mum was adamant that she wasn’t going to have her wayward daughter ‘in trouble’ a second time. Yes, he could stay the night, but on the settee, not in her bedroom. That evening she was off to the pub herself, but left the pair with Kimberley’s little half-sister, five-year-old Heather. With the child around to look after, it was unlikely they could get up to too much mischief. But she’d reckoned without Dave’s charm and resourcefulness.

He bribed my little sister with a Sindy doll. He sent her out so we could be on our own. He said, ‘All right, Heather, I’ll give you two Sindy dolls if you’ll stay out of the room for a few hours, and three Sindy dolls if you’ll just go upstairs and stay there …’

But I mean, it’s not as if we needed a bed. He had a great big Zephyr, didn’t he, we could just go in the back of his car, or the woods, or something, you know?

Actually, it was the love affair of the century. He was very romantic, wrote letters … very poetic. He loved me so much, and I loved him. And when I was sixteen we was engaged.

There is something eloquent about Sindy as intermediary in this short tale of boy-meets-girl. Dollies in the 1960s were not just what many girls wanted to have, it was how they themselves were seen: as plastic playthings. From dressing up to go out on the pick-up in Bracknell on a Saturday night, to the trade-off of a mute, placid, unconfrontational dummy in exchange for sex in the back of the Zephyr, the whole episode is freighted with uncomfortable symbolism.

And even from the early days the clues were there: ‘For example, I told Dave, “Look, I’m going to art college,” but – typical man – he didn’t want me to have a career.’ In reality Kimberley was no Sindy, and she was strong-minded. Behind the backcombed hair and high-heeled boots, there was a feminist waiting to get out.

In the Rocker world you had a passive role. But I wasn’t passive. I’ve always been a feminist, but I didn’t know what the word meant. Sexism was seen as normal, but even in those days I wouldn’t take it. I remember being in a bar with Dave when we was engaged. He said, ‘Innit about time you bought us a round of drinks?’ I said, ‘Do what?’ I said, ‘When women get equal pay, then I’ll be buying the drinks!’

I told Dave I was learning to drive. He said, ‘You can’t drive, you’re a woman!’ I said, ‘Do you mind, you’d better rephrase that,’ I says: ‘You can drive, why can’t I drive?’ And he tried to stop me. I said, ‘You can’t stop me. If I want to do something, I’ll do it.’

Plus, I wasn’t the typical woman his mother was looking for. His mum wanted a woman who would boost her son’s career. A domesticated woman, with huge whatsits, which I didn’t have either. So I didn’t quite fit in that role.

And when we did eventually split up, he said, ‘The trouble with you, Kim, is you’re too much of a feminist.’

So I said, ‘Oh, tough, get over it.’

Fun, Fun, FUN!

In a society where the idea of women as plastic playthings was a factor in the sex deal, feminism would have a steep hill to climb. Sanitised and cosmeticised, messy real life took cover behind uniform, unthreatening, smiling mannequins with improbable body types. For now the perfect wife of the 1950s had given way to the fluffed-up, deferential dolly bird. And nowhere was this type more in evidence than at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club.

The Hefner empire had been expanding. With a new club opening at 45 Park Lane in 1966, a recruitment drive had been launched, and the Great London Bunny Hunt was on. Playboy magazine invited England’s ‘most beautiful and charming young ladies’ to send their photographs to the Bunny Mother. From these, six British beauties were pre-selected to be flown to Chicago to train as bunny girls, qualifying them to train another ninety-four applicants who, with their instructors, would make up the 100 bunnies required to wait at tables, direct the clientele and act as casino croupiers, wearing ears, a cotton-wool tail and a tight pink corset.

The lucky six returned to Heathrow airport fresh from their bunny immersion course, stepping off the plane complete in high heels and pompoms, to be greeted like stars by a seething crowd of photographers with flashguns.fn4 Advertisements were then placed in the press and on radio, and the publicity ensured a deluge of 30,000 candidates competing for the coveted post of rabbit-waitress.

The excitement mounts: Hugh Hefner was spending over £1.5 million bringing his Playboy Club to London, and staffing it with bunnies.

Today, blonde, blue-eyed Patsy Reading – who now runs a quaint bed-and-breakfast in the south of England – still possesses the warm, effusive charm and generous figure that appear to have got her the job back in 1967 when she was twenty.

I must have heard about it on the grapevine.⁶ So I went along there, green as green. And it was this huge place, and I went in and I thought, Oh gosh! And I was introduced to the man who was going to interview me, and I thought, Oh dear, is he going to ask me to undress? But he was very nice to me – and I did have, you know … [she smilingly mimes her curves] – and I suppose he thought, well, maybe she might do –

Student actress Pat Quinn from Belfast had made Swinging London her adopted city at this time, and was living with her friend Melissa in a with-it flat in World’s End, Chelsea. Like all theatre people, Pat bought The Stage religiously every Thursday, and it was through its pages that she applied for and got a bunny interview:

I hadn’t even read Playboy.⁷ It was just a club that was opening and they needed some very pretty girls to work in it. And it said you had to bring a swimsuit and high heels.

So off I went and the panel said, ‘Could you just walk up and down.’ And they muttered a bit. ‘Croupier?’ they said. And then they said, ‘Yes, you’re in. Thank you. Next!’

Having made it through the selection process, each bunny was sent to be individually fitted for her costume. Pat Quinn was petite; Patsy Reading more ample of figure. But everyone was expected to be slender and shapely, and the rigidly whaleboned, tight-laced satin corsets they were given to wear ensured the uniformity of the bunny body brand. ‘It was like a scaffolding really,’ recalled the seamstress who worked backstage at the Playboy Club. ‘If the costumes weren’t fitted properly, the girls used to get a pain in their hip – the bones used to lay on a nerve – and they used to be in agony.’⁸ ‘I nearly fainted on several occasions during my first month on duty and would have to leave my post to get unlaced for a while,’ recalled another bunny, Carol Cleveland.fn5 All this at a time when the fashion world was abandoning wiring and heavy elastic in favour of minimal underwear, and replacing shapely voluptuousness with unisex jeans and androgyny.

Once strapped in you added accessories: a servile, slightly fetishistic bow tie plus starched white collar and cuffs, a bandeau with floppy satin ears attached, and the famous tail. Pat Quinn:

We had a wire brush for our tails – and you brushed it till it got bigger and bigger. And eventually you’d get marks for your tail, and then you’d get a prize if yours was the best tail at the end of however long …

Why rabbits? Whatever Hugh Hefner had in mind, it wasn’t the rodents’ famed reputation for reproducing quickly. Bunnies, however, are cute, fluffy, appealingly wide-eyed and soft, with floppy ears, adorable little cottontails, defenceless – and hard to tell apart. In other words pets in a petting zoo, not people.

Almost as soon as she joined the Playboy Club Patsy Reading discovered that all was not as it seemed.

When I arrived, I was taken to the bunny girls’ dressing room. And there were these bunny girls coming off a session … Imagine them all, with the most beautiful hair, and beautiful long eyelashes, and beautiful make-up – and boobs up to here! And I thought: these women, they’re just amazing, they’re fantastic.

So I stood there watching them getting out of their costumes. And this very beautiful girl sat down, and OFF came the hair. And it was a wig! Off it came! And then off came the eyelashes. And then the face – the mask was wiped clean. And then, from out of these wonderful costumes – pushing their breasts up – I watched as they delved into the bra cups, and pulled out all these tissues and socks – and things they’d stuffed in to pump them up! And do you know, underneath all that, none of it was real, it was all an illusion. The high heels, everything. Everything was false.

And I just remember seeing this wonderful image disappearing before my eyes. And underneath it all there was this very nice girl, who couldn’t have been more ordinary.

So then I had my fitting – and I didn’t need any socks or tissues at all!

As a croupier, Pat Quinn now had to put in a further six weeks’ training to acquire the specialised skills needed at the tables. It was exacting work, with shifts of twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, till the small hours. Waitressing, Patsy Reading had a different challenge on her hands. Serving a tray of drinks dressed in the tightest of corsets and five-inch heels was hard enough. The bunnies were instructed in the art of the ‘bunny dip’, a complex curtsey-like manoeuvre that involved a graceful bend of the knees without intruding your behind, coupled with the fluid backwards arm gesture that delivered Martini to customer without spilling a drop. ‘[It] was a way of serving the drinks so that the bourbon hit the table before the boobie did!’ recalled Carol Cleveland. Practice made perfect. But Patsy struggled to master the drinks themselves. The club was famed for its superbly stocked bar, comprising a thirty-foot wall of bottles, of every shape, size and colour. ‘Whatever exotic cocktail somebody wanted, from a screwdriver to a mai tai, you had to know exactly what it was, and I just could not master it. So what a hopeless bunny girl was I!’

With its bars, restaurants and casino, the Park Lane club was regarded as the ultimate exclusive venue for rich sophisticates. The sex divide was surely never more explicitly highlighted than in this dark, mirrored, chrome-and-marble interior: a space where male and female appeared almost as different species. Here in its plush, shadowy recesses men in black tuxedos talked business, made deals and made money, ate, drank and played, while shimmering, semi-naked, improbably curvaceous women in shades of pastel satin tottered past, waiting upon them. The Playboy Club worked because it created an environment in which a man could live out his own James Bond fantasy of the Martini-drinking playboy and bon viveur, complete with suave suit, cigar, roulette and an attitude to women that cramped, crippled, stifled and depersonalised them, and varnished over their imperfections. In the war of the sexes, it decisively handed men the power. An ex-bunny interviewed for Walker’s documentary explains:

A playboy is potent – in every way, I think.⁹ He’s potent in the workplace, his sexual aura is potent …

A playboy knows how to live.

Marilyn Cole

But as one of her colleagues comments, it also worked because it was the embodiment of one man’s consumerist vision:

Well, it is all down to Hugh Hefner, and his notion, his vision of the perfect world, the perfect woman, and the perfect lifestyle.¹⁰

It was a perfect life for a man. So whatever our own internal conceptions of ourselves were, as women, the original idea was yet another, perfect Thing – or Adjunct – for the perfect man.

Liz Flower

Meanwhile, the mix of provocative lingerie, alcohol and money created an intoxicating cocktail. The steamy atmosphere of sex had the potential to ignite, and Playboy’s managers found it expedient to damp things down. Patsy Reading explained:

The clientele were all these smooth James Bond types, you can imagine – very nice! And you were supposed to be this lovely object, who would come at their command when you were sent for. However, they were not supposed to touch you. And you learnt to duck and dive, to stop them touching.

Also you were made very aware that a lot of them would be wanting to see you outside work. So if one of the men who came in liked you and said, ‘Oh, may I have your phone number?’ we couldn’t give it. And we were taught on pain of death that we would be instantly dismissed if we did.

In other words, they could look, but NO touching.

Pat Quinn was even more blunt:

No, there was no fraternising – even though we were quite with-it girls! Well, nobody ever bloody approached me. I mean, working there was like being in church, sorry …

Maybe it’s just ‘frosty Pat’ or something. Anyway, they would have been thrown out on their ear if they’d had their hand up my bunny tail!

So, while the outside world was a ferment of free love, the portals of 45 Park Lane concealed a sanctum of Victorian values. Imagine a nineteenth-century society drawing room, strip its occupants of their mutton-chop whiskers and rip off their crinolines, add in some false eyelashes, and you have the Playboy Club. From tight-laced corsets to prohibitive codes of conduct, from D-cup bras to deferential curtseys, the bunny girls lived out a glamorised fantasy in which men-about-town could buy an updated version of the sexually unavailable, heavily supervised Victorian handmaiden. The discreet blush, the feminine flirtation, the billowing bosoms – combined with a strict ‘look but don’t touch’ diktat: a hundred years earlier, this was the way their grandmothers had flattered men into marriage. And not so very much had changed. As Patsy Reading recalls:

I suppose I’m a bit of a flirt – and I suppose I thought, Oh I might meet Mr Right here. Might. And I had watched all the Disney films, and – Yes! Of course my prince was coming on his white charger, it was just a matter of time.

But then, in a way, you knew you were safe – because it was just looking and no touching …

(though according to Carol Cleveland, the ‘wealthy Arabs’ paid scant attention to this rule. ‘I was always getting my tail tweaked …’). Of course, outside working hours was a different matter, and Victor Lownes, the club’s chief executive and Hugh Hefner’s right-hand man, became renowned for his party-giving and philandering ways. ‘It was pretty amazing – it was hot and cold running girls,’ remembered Angela Pitt, Lownes’s housekeeper at the time. He could take his pick. ‘It’s like a harem, isn’t it? And the guy was extraordinarily attractive and charismatic – and he was your boss!’

Pat Quinn and Patsy Reading felt no qualms about how they earned their living. ‘I loved being a rabbit,’ says Pat:

Those ears were great. We were the crème de la crème of rabbits. Oh yes. Very proud of being a rabbit.

And Patsy:

The costume? It was such fun. Who would not like wearing a bunny costume? Just imagine the fun of it! – And doing the dip, being charming. Who would not enjoy all that?

And I know the feminists would be appalled – but we didn’t feel that way. We didn’t see it that we were prostituting ourselves, or that it was sleazy.

It was a job, it was good pay – and all I can tell you is that it was FUN. It really was. Fun, fun, fun.

*

Smashing time, smashing time,

We’re gonna have a –

Smashing time, smashing time

We’re gonna have a

SMASHING TIME!

Silly lyrics bubbled from the opening titles of an equally silly film (entitled, unsurprisingly, Smashing Time) starring Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave. This undemanding slapstick romp from the ‘Ingénues-take-on-London’ genre was billed as a satire on Swinging London. But George Melly’s script is sadly heavy-handed and, by the time it was released in 1967, it was already passé; the world of hip photographers and dolly birds it purported to satirise had already been subjected to Antonioni’s more searching lens. The film’s value is its sequences that recapture times and places from the past. The urban locations of Smashing Time include the blackened exterior of pre-renovation St Pancras, traffic-free thoroughfares, Battersea Power Station belching vapour, that symbol of modernity the Post Office Tower, and riverscapes of the Thames without skyscrapers. This London still had subterranean public conveniences, barrow-boys were common sights selling their wares along the Camden pavements, conductors patrolled double-deckers collecting fourpenny fares in leather satchels, and black faces on the streets had shock value. Then there’s Brenda (Rita Tushingham) being put in charge of a pretentious boutique done up with Victoriana and funky cushions – surely modelled on the Chelsea Mecca, Granny Takes a Trip? – and Yvonne (Lynn Redgrave), dressed in a red-and-white geometric mini prancing down a colourful Carnaby Street with its wacky shop fascias and window dressings. Another sequence shows Brenda kitted out in a fluffy pussy-catsuit with pointy ears and a long curly tail, playing hostess in a glamorous nightclub. Cinema audiences would certainly have caught the reference.

But the tempo of smashing, zany, dolled-up Swinging London was slowing, giving way to a new, more placid and inward mood. 1967 was a year of extremes. Is it possible to reconcile the backward-looking glamour world of the bunny girl with the emergence of the hippie? How does Hugh Hefner’s vision co-exist with that of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; or those false, contorted bodies with free-floating flower children? Before they descended on our grey island, both hippies and bunnies had arisen out of the USA. Until 1967, for a few short years, Liverpool and London had driven the cultural agenda. Now the reset button had been pressed on style, pop, drugs and philosophy, reinstating America at the cutting edge of change. Students and bohemians who appropriated the fashionable ‘hipster’ idioms of African Americans had evolved into ‘hippies’, and reports reached these shores of the Summer of Love, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, and the invasion of Haight-Ashbury by thousands of footloose teens in pursuit of transcendence and cheap hash, irresistibly drawn by Scott McKenzie’s summertime music and lyrics: ‘If you’re going to San Francisco / Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair …’ The hippie orthodoxy lined up young against old, cool against square, and its gurus endorsed the use of psychedelic drugs, exhorting their followers to ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’. Their peace-and-love, flower-power message was anti-capitalist and nature-worshipping; like bright blades, the fragile daffodils they brandished told of yin and yang, female and male, aggression and submission.

What could be more captivating? Fashion editor Felicity Green charted the change on the British side of the pond:

Striped plastic trouser suits in Op or Pop are Old Hat.¹¹ Out. Finished.

The kookie kids of ’66 have been replaced by the flower girls of ’67 … Short sharp hairdos are now freaked out in a riot of fuzz or curls …

Beautiful flower children, in beautiful surroundings. In August 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the Duke of Bedford opened his grounds to an invasion of weekend hippies.

Twiggy changed her look from gamine waif to Dame aux Camélias. At the height of flower power, Janey Ironside, professor of Fashion at the Royal College of Art, was called upon to contribute a section about our relationship with clothes to a high-profile television documentary. Ironside immediately proposed featuring a couple of ‘flower people’. Unfortunately, it proved difficult to find anyone willing to participate. Ironside scoured her hippie contacts for flower children, but kept getting turned down, despite the generous payment on offer. ‘No, I don’t know any, and in any case they are against all that sort of thing …’ was the typical reaction.¹²

I had forgotten that their clothes did not indicate a passing fashion among hippies but denoted an anti-capitalist but peaceful philosophy.

Eventually she tracked down a young man and woman who not only possessed the exotic gear but were also bona fide flower people. At the BBC, the normally blasé receptionists were duly thrilled at the spectacle:

The very pretty girl wore her hair straight – short and straggly – and her feet bare. Her clothes were many coloured, long, on the whole unidentifiable, with a mass of Eastern jewellery. The thin attractive young man wore purple satin women’s trousers covered in frills, with a sleeveless Afghan embroidered sheepskin jacket and a pendant round his neck, while his hair was freaked out into a huge frizzy halo round his head.

In her memoir Ironside did not comment on the breakdown of gender boundaries that this look exemplified. Nor did she expound on the anti-fashion ethos now emerging: low-maintenance, do-it-yourself, individualistic style. For many under twenty-five, the alternative way to be and to dress was hard to resist.

A Calm Sea

We’ll return to the hippies, the flower children and the permissive society. For now, it should be acknowledged – as an important corrective to a widely held view that hippie-freakydom, sex and drug culture dominated the decade – that even in 1967 there were innumerable other ways to live. Against the background of a deficit and a devalued pound, the mood was becoming decidedly anti-frivolous. Certainly, paisley bedspreads, flowers and free love were not for everybody.

In 1967 we were still a nation of Mrs Grundys and domestic goddesses, with fidelity, patriotism, uniformity, thrift and tedium alive and well in suburbs and villages across the land. As for turning your back on capitalism, that was a luxury few could afford; while for busy wage-earners dangly jewellery and freaked-out locks just got in the way. Paying the rent was hard enough, but marriage and motherhood cramped one’s style even more. And where Miss Dropout opted for narcotics, Miss Normal preferred booze (as Melissa North said, ‘alcohol was for old people …’).

For me, uniformity meant exactly that: being uniform. That was the year I first became a pupil at a deeply traditional girls’ grammar school situated at the foot of a hill in our quiet town. Here, daily, 400 pink-faced, velour-hatted, adolescent girls clad in identical navy-blue gabardines, blazers and box-pleated serge skirts trooped beneath the arched gateway to the school, whose motto, spelled out in wrought iron, read ‘By Love Serve One Another’. Each morning we prayed and sang, with the mistresses joining in. Those schoolmistresses were spinsters, the ‘unclaimed treasures’ of the First World War,fn6 each one buttoned up, across her capacious bosom, in impregnable tweed: Miss Brinkworth with her club foot who knew all about Roman roads; Miss Nicklin who taught us to sew flat fell seams and bind buttonholes; and the dubiously named gym mistress, Miss Pinchin, who chivvied us naked into a post-hockey shower and then stood sentinel. Here, house ties were worn, lots of hockey was played and the corridors were hung with solemn lettered Boards honouring the Old Girls who had passed on to ‘Cantab’, ‘Lond’ and ‘Oxon’.

The last chapter described what happened when those pink-faced maidens got there. Beyond the portals of education, the adult world that awaited them was one of stultifying tedium. A ‘little job’ – often a secretarial one – would tide them through until marriage. In An Education Lynn Barber describes being an office junior: the segregation of ‘girls’ from men, the mind-numbing tedium of taking dictation, of typing it out with multiple sheets of inky carbon paper, the utilitarian workspaces furnished with metal filing cabinets, spider plants and ashtrays. Being able to smoke – as everyone did – was the one redeeming feature.

But apparently it was patriotism, not ennui, that motivated five public-spirited typists, employed in the Surbiton offices of a heating and ventilation company, to demonstrate the spirit of the Blitz by using their tea-breaks to work an extra half hour every day, for nothing. Overcome by anxieties about national decline, the women got together in the winter of 1967 and spontaneously offered their additional services gratis to the firm’s marketing director. In the space of a week they had a national campaign on their hands: ‘I’m backing Britain’, complete with Union Jack imagery and badges. But, quashed by trades unions, it died as quickly as it had started. It was back to the desk job and the dark winter evenings, back to the rush-hour commute, back to your flat, strap-hanging on the suburban trains.

Nevertheless, for wage-earning women, this life might offer a glimpse of freedom. Mary Ingham described her move into an unfurnished flat with two girlfriends as ‘the first true stirrings of emancipation’. ‘Flat-sharing …’ The New London Spy tells us, ‘is a special feature of the London domestic scene …’ And a perfect example of flatshare life jumps from between the covers of an October 1967 issue of Woman’s Own. Five student nurses – Liz, Janet, Jane, Jenny and Looby – wrote in to the magazine’s ‘The Way We Live’ page, describing their everyday lives ‘on the wrong side of Hampstead Heath’. ‘Straight’ or ‘square’ is how Melissa North and her friends would have described them. In their group shot, Liz, Janet and co. project a far-from-trendy image, dressed for off-duty in daintily patterned shirtwaisters. But, though the haircuts are ‘square’, the dresses are mini, and topping the stack of vinyl LPs artlessly scattered on the coffee table before them is the unmistakably iconic cover of Sergeant Pepper. Their little flat is the realisation of a dream of independence – ‘We get a great kick from fending for ourselves and find it great fun doing housework to the liveliest records.’ Nevertheless, the big excitement is Liz’s imminent marriage in December. Looby is going to be her bridesmaid, and the others will be making the dresses.

Carmen Callil set little store by wedding dresses, though she loved nice clothes and continental holidays. By 1967 Carmen was twenty-nine, with a foot firmly on her chosen career ladder; in any case, her well-off boyfriend was already married. A lucky chance got her the job as publicity manager for Panther Books; publicists tended to be pretty young women. On the receiving end were a lot of older male journalists, many of whom were serial gropers. Carmen’s office was round the corner from a clutch of Soho pubs, and she learnt to keep up drink-for-drink, at lunchtime and post-work, with the publishing and media men who propped up their bars. No hippie, her day was fuelled by alcohol and a passionate love of her work, but never by drugs. ‘Somebody once forced some pot onto me, and I hated it.¹³ It made things come out of my fingers. It’s always been my way to have one glass too many. I’d wake up in the morning feeling terrible. But that was when my proper life really began.’ Carmen formed tight friendships with the other females in her line of work. ‘We laughed, we read. It was an education …’

Up in Manchester, rookie journalist Ann Leslie’s flatshare friend was the actress Janet Suzman; behind lace curtains the pair created a refuge together from the pressures of carving out a career, negotiating the everyday with the help of comfort food and booze. Their speciality was ‘spag bol’ made with tinned mince and brandy; their Sunday treat, toast and marmalade topped with whipped cream, was also heavily brandy-laced. ‘Our drunken cookery was divine, wasn’t it?¹⁴ Everyone adored it!’ Janet recalled. From 1963 the guru for single working women like these was the redoubtable journalist Katharine Whitehorn, whose chatty and eminently practical manual, Cooking in a Bedsitter, was targeted at city survivors in need of a square meal.

In the 1960s fast food meant fish-and-chip shops, period. Ready meals were decades away. Most bedsits were minimally equipped with little more than a single gas ring, and the water supply was often at the end of the corridor in a shared bathroom. Whitehorn’s sympathetic understanding of her readers’ problems – lack of money and refrigerators, lack of space and lack of little porcelain ramekins – made Cooking in a Bedsitter an instant bestseller, as she showed readers how to do creative, thrifty things with tinned soup, bacon and half a cauliflower. They were urged to befriend the casserole and to try using teabags. Whitehorn also understood the complex imperatives of being a young woman, so there were helpful sections on ‘Cooking to Impress’, ‘Cooking for a Man’ and ‘Asking Him Up’ (‘The problem here is to make sure that everything is looking nice without anything looking planned … Dig in your food box as if you had no idea what was there and you just often do have a tin of foie gras handy’). Independent women who wanted to manoeuvre their man into making a move were learning a new set of rules in the how-to-catch-your-man game. But it was still a game.

Once you’d caught him, the social norms made it ever harder to break loose or live like a butterfly while, for those who hankered for hippie freedoms, getting married and breeding were particularly restricting. After Cynthia Lennon gave birth to their son, John took off on tour, leaving her in Liverpool with an infant who howled incessantly. She was a nervous wreck, seeing double with exhaustion. John dropped in intermittently, but was unwilling to do his share – ‘He would leave the room whenever I changed a nappy.’¹⁵ Even if you weren’t an aspirant hippie, the ‘sour milk, urinous nappies [and] bits of lint …’ (as Sylvia Plath described them) could drive one deranged.¹⁶ Audrey Battersby, later a vocal feminist, was going ‘quietly crazy’ with three small children in north London when she started to meet other mothers, mainly to talk about child-rearing.¹⁷ Out of their conversations emerged a growing anger.

Three years later, provision of free twenty-four-hour nurseries would be one of the fundamental demands made by the nascent Women’s Liberation movement. The voices of Hannah Gavron’s interviewees (in The Captive Wife) remind us how the mothering-versus-work dilemma, with which so many women are familiar today, was already becoming acute in the mid-1960s:

I wanted to work but [my husband] would not hear of it …

When they are young children need their mother, and it’s doing them a wrong if she isn’t there …

You’ve no idea what it’s like to spend all day in one room trying to keep the children quiet because the landlady can’t bear noise. I feel like I’m in a cage …

No wonder hallucinogens and floaty frocks were the preserve of the few.

But Harriet Lear never complained, because her exemplary married life was the one she had chosen. At the age of twenty-six Harriet put her youthful adventurousness behind her, and married a country solicitor. In 1967 motherhood was yet to come (she would eventually have five children). She and Nick were on a tight income, paying off £1 a week for their car. ‘As for the various youth cultures of the time – my mother would sometimes say, “Things are going to the dogs” – but it absolutely bypassed me … You see, I didn’t read the newspapers.’¹⁸ Harriet joined the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service to help with meals-on-wheels; friendships evolved through the church. Mainly, she was blissful, tending to a neglected home, an abandoned garden and – until the longed-for babies arrived – orphan lambs. The Lears were frugal in the extreme, growing their own vegetables.

We had no television. Really, I was absolutely happy, just waiting for my husband to come home at night …

Emma Codrington was another who felt slight regret, but mainly detachment, as a generation of young women shifted their focus from respect for their elders, to indifference or hostility. The ‘Youthquake’ seemed faint and distant in the safe Tory world of her Wiltshire community:

This is a very nice, conventional little market town.¹⁹ I’ve always felt very lucky to live in Wilton. We didn’t have any bells and beads here!

When the news brought stories of rejection and rebellion, Emma shut her ears.

I thought they were complete idiots, making an unnecessary commotion. I didn’t think they were really achieving anything – just disrupting a calm sea.

In her late thirties, Emma had worked all her life to instil certain values – teamwork, duty, responsibility, good deeds, plus the quality she describes as ‘stickability’ – in her groups of Girl Guides. Sitting round a campfire singing and eating sausages; holding the end of a rope ladder; working with Meg, her lifelong companion, to build up their old folk’s home: these were the activities that made sense of her life.

Meanwhile, Scottish nursery maid Veronica MacNab had turned her back on Chelsea and all it stood for. Veronica had aims, and she needed qualifications. From 1965 she resumed her life north of the border, where she found employment as a trainee in a Barnardo’s home just outside Edinburgh. Ravelrig housed kids who were deaf, coeliac and hydrocephalic, and she had one small boy affected by thalidomide, who had been dumped because his mother couldn’t cope. ‘Most of them were from the most sordid, god-awful, atrocious family backgrounds that you could ever, ever imagine.²⁰ They arrived with scabies, eczema, nits, the lot. They had been living on crusts, lying on urine-soaked mattresses. One child whose mother had committed suicide had lain beside the corpse for three days. She screamed and screamed and screamed.’ Veronica’s new working environment reinforced the values she had grown up with: family, hierarchy and hard work. Prayers were said every morning before breakfast with Matron, and six days a week the trainees worked a twelve-hour day. The home reeked of polish and disinfectant.

But slowly, very slowly, the sounds of the sixties penetrated Veronica’s consciousness. On precious evenings off, she went with friends to hear folk music in the Edinburgh pubs, and she started to spend her meagre salary on music. ‘My much-prized first record was “Blowin’ in the Wind”.’ At work, Dylan’s deadpan lyrics and skirling harmonica drifted down the scrubbed linoleum corridors – ‘I played it on the record player in the nurses’ staff room.’ Ambiguous, bittersweet and uplifting, Dylan’s poem of protest spoke to all of hope, humanity and the empowerment of the meek; a transcendent anthem of freedom.

Lucy in the Sky

Which brings us back to the free spirits.

Drugs and hippies are inseparable, which might explain the rarity of the full-time hippie, who could afford his or her highs without holding down a day job. For the majority, the tie-dyes and marijuana were an add-on, brought out for the weekend and on special occasions. On one level, the anti-materialism of hippie culture was itself delivered via things: your sandals, beads, albums and wind-chimes were signifiers of your identity. The historian Dominic Sandbrook also points out that only a small number of the rich and young had the wherewithal to follow the path of ‘true’ peace-and-love hippiedom, while their fellow-travellers were fair-weather hippies, for whom ‘[flower power] became a form of consumerism’.²¹ True – and this is borne out in Michael Schofield’s important survey of British teenagers, which shows how few hard drug addicts there were in Britain in 1967 – just 395 – while the proportion of teens turning to cannabis remained overall extremely small.

But it is important to appreciate that there was more to hippiedom than bells, patchouli oil and druggy oblivion. The hippies’ anti-Establishment, anti-war and anti-materialist messages were then, and remain to this day, components of a tenacious ideology that – for millions of people – does not lie down. Also, at its best, this was a peace-and-love Utopia that outlawed the constructs of masculinity: greed and violence. Even more importantly, the money men and playboys, with their fat cigars and fast cars, were regarded as tainted. The evils of capitalism, the things, the property, the robotic work and the poisoning of the planet were laid at the door of the heartless patriarchy – ‘The Man’, as he was sometimes known. Virtuous, unworldly hippies had a psychic distaste for Mammon and all his accompanying machismo, preferring to exist like the flowers of the field, independent of jobs-for-life, mortgages and the trappings of affluence. You did your own thing. You trod lightly on the earth, meditated, read The Hobbit and the I Ching, sought out ley lines, made art. You cultivated domestic, ‘womanly’ pursuits: cooking wholefoods, singing, sewing, planting beans according to the phases of the moon, weaving bags. The alternative sixties society was stumbling uncertainly towards a green, anti-macho, anti-materialist creed:

There was an urge to be less consumer-orientated, to lead a more communal life, to care …²²

Andrea Adam

You put all your effort into not being employed, not becoming an accountant.²³

Sue Miles

How little you could do with, rather than how much you could get, became in itself a kind of status.²⁴

Julie Christie

But it was Pattie Boyd, cushioned as she was by her marriage to a Beatle, and despite a love of Charles Jourdan shoes, who expressed it best:

In the sixties nobody did anything for money.²⁵ The main goal was spirituality – and creativity. And not caring about money channelled our creativity … If I needed some money then George or somebody in the office would give it to me.

Why was this? I think it was because there were more jobs available. If you needed money, it was, ‘Oh, I’ll just work in this shop because I know the owners and they sell really cool clothes …’

Whoever had money would pay for it all … If I was out with girlfriends, I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll pay, don’t worry …’ I don’t know why money wasn’t a big issue. But it wasn’t.

And everybody of my generation feels the same way …

The aggression associated with money-making was also dampened in this time of gentle, scrawny, long-haired, dreamy-eyed dope heads, more concerned with the latest batch of Afghan herb than pumping dollars through the system. Androgyny was trending in the pop world; men and women danced in the same way, but apart. Male stars embraced female vanity, wearing Biba, applying eyeliner and sequins. Jimi Hendrix fussed over his immaculately ironed shirt frills, Mick Jagger adopted Shakespearean blouses while Donovan and Marc Bolan projected a clean-shaven, feminised, soft-focussed romanticism to their legions of besotted teen fans. ‘See Emily Play’, sung by Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, and ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album (both released in 1967) were distillations of a gentle, druggy whimsicality. The hippie sound had a gypsy, vagabond bohemianism which made Elvis’s stomping phallic rock of just a few years earlier seem gross and showy. Ruffled blouses and long curly hair blurred the sex lines, and male serenity and inertia appeared to hand the power balance across to the female. As colours, forms and music fused under the influence of mind-altering substances, it sometimes seemed as if gender, too, could be merged, freed from the past.

That notion of freedom was mesmerising. Freedom to move at will, freedom of the mind, but above all freedom of the body. Women like Sheila Rowbotham could see that in certain ways the hippie counterculture benefited women. The sprouting of unorthodox new spaces extended women’s options. In the old world, it was unacceptable for a woman to go to a club or a pub on her own. She would be made to feel awkward and vulnerable. But drifting gently through a haze of joss sticks at the Arts Lab, or leafing through The Lord of the Rings in Better Books, those conventions no longer applied.

As everything in the counterculture was meant to be weird and mystical, you could take cover under the imperative on everyone to be a free spirit.²⁶ You could hang around alone, bump into people you knew, pirouette in the light shows to music, hide in a corner or meet someone new.

So were the male hippies relinquishing masculine power along with mortgages and market forces? Would marriage and motherhood become the old world order? Or was it all a mirage, as illusory as the flying saucers, Middle-Earthers and magicians so beloved of the ‘heads’ and freaks? Predictably, where freedom was concerned, not everyone got an equal share of it; these men’s attitude to women was as stuck in the past as the fairy tales they treasured.

*

In 1967 the rarefied aristo-hippies were the ones in the vanguard. (In this context, it’s worth remembering that women from the social élites have always had possibilities denied to their rank-and-file sisters: like money, domestic help, childcare, leisure – and freedom to dream.) Novelist and scion of a barony, Emma Tennant recalls watching the ‘“real” Sixties’ unfold before her, hanging out with galleristas and artists. Cecil Beaton recorded in his diary a visit to the upper-class ‘“dopists” of a certain young set in London’, where one of the guests was the socialite and beauty Jane Ormsby-Gore, daughter of Lady Harlech – recently killed in a car crash – who was tranquillising herself with reefers. (‘We were seeking the Holy Grail at that moment, and always very high-minded and spiritual …’ remembered Ms Ormsby-Gore).²⁷ Later Mick and Marianne arrived. Most preposterous of the blue-blooded tearaways was Viscount Weymouth, who took his droit de seigneur to extremes, collecting over seventy ‘wifelets’ together to form one big happy family on his Longleat estate.

Another diarist, the Bloomsbury intellectual Frances Partridge,fn7 paints a vivid picture of advantaged youth gathered on a summer’s day at her brother-in-law’s country home in an East Anglian village:

May 30th 1967

The younger generation seem like opium-smokers, lying about soaking up sensations, pouring cigarettes, drink, cinema, television and marijuana in at the portals of their senses until near-satiation is reached.²⁸

Later that summer, with friends, she returned to the same subject:

July 30th 1967

We talked of the burning, everlasting topic of the drug-taking, flower-loving, Zen-Buddhist young … [Ed] mentioned someone who ‘was very much “turned on”’. F: ‘What does that mean, exactly?’ ‘Taking drugs and wearing flowers and bells and loving each other and calling each other beautiful.’ According to Ed, bells are the badge of drugs …

That evening, as if to demonstrate how ‘turned on’ she was, Frances’s young daughter-in-law announced her arrival with the sound of tinkling:

Susan said, ‘Oh, here come the bells.’ It was Henrietta with two friends, wearing a bell on a string round her neck like a farm animal. She looked lovely and came up and kissed me warmly.

Caroline Harper’s story is also an illustration of how privilege begets rebellion. ‘Looking back,’ she says, ‘I was a hideous little snob.²⁹ I was very right wing, and really rather ghastly …’ But much in her entitled background would conspire to propel her in the opposite direction.

At the beginning of this book, we briefly saw Caroline as she is today, an elegant, confident woman who exudes warmth and wit, as if to the manner born. Caroline’s father was club chairman of an illustrious polo ground in the south of England; her mother gladly took on the role of polo hostess, entertaining a glittering array of spectators and players from the upper echelons of international society. From the age of four the backdrop to Caroline’s life was the playboy world of polo.

Of course, she herself didn’t compete. ‘Some girls played polo, but my father was very against it – he said they ruined the game for the men.’ In the early sixties Caroline was sent away to boarding school. But every summer weekend she returned, accompanied by a gaggle of breathless girlfriends:

I was hugely popular. Everyone wanted to stay with me because of the polo players. The glamour of them! The Argentines particularly. They were all amazingly good-looking. And me and my girlfriends would mill about swooning. And there were definitely some kisses. And sometimes coming close, and sometimes a bit too close …

Sex, glamour and horses. I loved it all. I loved the life – and I didn’t question it in any shape or form.

Ten years earlier, and – living in this milieu – Caroline would probably have fallen into line with her parents’ expectations for her, which were to leave school, do the season, and make a suitable match with the wealthy polo-playing heir to a grouse moor. But by then it was 1966. Almost imperceptibly, the rebel in Caroline Harper was beginning to awaken.

I was reading The Carpetbaggersfn8 to my riveted dormitory – and getting it confiscated. So the whole sort of sexual freedom thing was definitely hitting …

Ignoring her headmistress’s advice to try for Oxford (‘I was only interested in having fun’), Caroline left school at sixteen and submitted to another of society’s rituals ordained for the perfection of womankind: the Tante Marie School of Cooking in Woking. There she learnt to make a very good white sauce. But for a girl of Caroline’s class, there was really only one place to be: London, which by 1967 was the centre of the social universe. After some nagging, her parents caved in; it was agreed she would go through the motions of attending secretarial college, while in reality marking time until marriage. Her mother had a handsome, asset-rich aristocrat lined up for her and had taught her that a woman’s value lies in externals:

The women I knew were of a type. They were often very good-looking, glamorous and good hostesses – funny – often sexy. In some ways, they were quite free-spirited, as were my parents, but all within a certain parameter. Mum got a lot of air time because she was funny. My value was to be pretty and sexy.

But the serious opinions were all offered by the men. What they said went. I never thought my opinion had any value at all.

The men had all the power. And I fed it to them.

Caroline describes herself as ‘a well-trained people-pleaser’.

And so, what was supposed to be the transitional, débutante phase of life for an extremely pretty, privileged and popular young woman got underway. So far, so familiar: shopping, soirées, dances, flirting and drinks parties consumed Caroline’s free time. But something had changed. As Cecil Beaton had noted, upper-crust gatherings had acquired a new, narcissistic character. The ‘dopists’ had begun to infiltrate high society. Dandified and highly styled young men were appearing, stoned, wearing flamboyant floral finery. The day of the peacock had dawned.

And Caroline was fascinated:

From fairly early on, I was aware that I seemed to be far more attracted to the colourful guys in the corner of the room. They represented something ‘other’ than the stuffy, tight, restrained, inhibited, perfectly behaved world I belonged to.

You sort of just know, don’t you? They wear different clothes for a start.

For Caroline was now discovering that the aristo-hippies differed in a number of ways from the testosterone-charged Argentines and macho, opinionated Etonians who had been her model of manhood up to now: ‘only interested in sex’. The long-haired roués she had started to meet were also interesting and deep, and they were searching – like her – for meaning.

And so I moved towards these ‘unsuitable’ men. They were the reprobates of the deb world, the dangerous ones on the edge who were experimenting with dope.

One of them quickly became a best friend, a wonderful colourful character – a peacock – who was trying out drugs. And once I had a best friend to laugh with I could start to explore.

Dope suppressed their sexual aggression, and they looked like Jesus: ‘These were the kind of men I went for: feminine, introverted, gentle and androgynous.’ Among them, she found her opinions listened to, her views shared. As idealists, they wanted to change the world. ‘I basically bought into everything that the young of my time believed.’ She and her friends cared about the planet, hated the Vietnam War, were anti-materialistic and anti-Establishment.

There was huge anger with the older generation. We called them the Straights, as in ‘Oh, he’s terribly straight …’ or ‘She’s so straight …’

Now, looking back, I know my parents just wanted the best for me – it’s just that our ideas of what was best differed so greatly. And I had so little understanding then of what they’d fought for – and given their lives to – to produce, actually, a stable launch pad for us to take off from, like a lot of colourful butterflies.

Along with her friends, Caroline experimented with free love, and she tells me that, looking back at her several dozen lovers, she recalls some memorable moments. But sex was not a driver. The game-changer was drugs:

And so I started smoking. And it was soon after that I started to take drugs more seriously …

*

Like Caroline Harper, Melissa North was a boarding-school girl who had hung around the posh party circuit. She and her counterculture friends had been rolling joints since 1965, and that same year she tried LSD for the first time. She was also holding down a decent if rackety job at a music agency, booking gigs for top bands. By 1967 acid (LSD) was regularly on the menu.

Yes, I took it all the time.³⁰ Well, not every day, but certainly if you went to UFO to see the Floyd, you would take acid because you were going to see a psychedelic band …

And bands were Melissa’s world.

Taking an acid trip was an intense, ceremonial rite of passage that dissolved the confines of convention. For the post-war housewife, a fitted kitchen with picture windows had offered dream-come-true normality. Melissa and her group were stepping beyond the plate glass, discovering a layered, coloured, ecstatic reality that made home improvements and Hoover Keymatics seem trivial and superfluous. And now it appeared that the locks imprisoning women within four walls were actually flimsy, brittle and impermanent. As Jenny Diski wrote in The Sixties (2009):

The middle sixties was that moment when Dorothy stepped through her front door, out of Kansas, on to the undreamed-of yellowness of the brick road on her way to the Emerald City, and the heart burst with pleasure at the sudden busting out of a full-blown Technicolor world.

Melissa North was ecstatic. One could spend hours mesmerised by the beautiful purple tendrils of a fuchsia, enraptured by the slurred, slow-motion resonances of a guitar solo, mindblown by the multi-hued grandeur of a sunset, in love with the turning, wheeling motion of the planet itself. And as bourgeois dreams were replaced by hippie hallucinations, things that seemed important to the mediocre masses – like safety, morality, legality, Tupperware and what to do about dinner – were jettisoned. After Jimi Hendrix arrived in the UK Melissa got close to Howard Parker (aka ‘H’), his roadie, and accompanied him on gigs round the country. They took the gear in a van, and Melissa would help set up the amps and speakers on stage.

And once the gear was up we’d take acid, and then we’d stand behind the amps and Jimi would play. And afterwards we’d load up all the things – on the acid! – and then drive back to London to meet Jimi at the Speakeasy for dinner.

We always drove on acid. The whole of the M1 was nothing but vans driving up and down on acid. And we’d stop off at the Blue Boar transport café for, you know, egg and chips, and there’d be all kinds of encounters, like, ‘Oh, hi Dick, I haven’t seen you!’ And it’d be, like, ‘Oh, man, I’m so tripping. I mean, I’m so tripping, I mean, even these baked beans are speaking to me man …’

Returning at three in the morning from Manchester, H missed a turning and hit the kerb; a wheel flew off the van. As they scrambled to look for it in the dark, life seemed astonishing, peculiar and wonderfully freaky. H and Melissa lay in the road laughing uncontrollably.

Everything was so much FUN! I mean one was in such high spirits. I always think of acid as being hysterical with laughter … I mean, we were very young, and it was just, like, oh – joyous.

This way of life was mind-altering and exhilarating if your day job permitted, if you had wealthy parents or were a pop star. Rainbows, mystical perceptions and cosmic visions were luxury add-ons that came with the affluent rock’n’roll lifestyle. Though the term ‘recreational’ was not then in currency, drugs, like Sindy dolls, were magical toys that acquired a projected life outside your head. Unlike prescription tranquillisers – (‘Mother’s Little Helper’) – they weren’t there to prop you up through the day’s drudgery, they were there to validate your rejection of the mundane, the trivial and the domestic. As Melissa North says:

We took drugs not just to fall around laughing but because we thought they made us think better – and bigger.

The washload could wait. Interiority took on a new meaning. Who needed the joyless drudgery, the petty battles with dirt, disorder and dust endured by a myriad of crushed housewives? There was a different way to look at inhabited spaces. Hallucinating on 6,000 micrograms of LSD, Henrietta Moraes was awestruck by the ‘silken, silvery cobwebs, glittering with diamond drops …’ strewn across her room.³¹ Marianne Faithfull stared with distended eyes as the rose-and-trellis Sanderson wallpaper of her bedroom started to dance a mystic ballet that revealed the secrets of the universe through its intricate choreography.

But, just as a spotless home transmitted messages of virtue and righteousness to the world, the slovenly and neglectful drug-user was inevitably associated with immorality and degeneracy. Marianne saw her pretty nest in Chelsea descend into squalor, the draining board ‘strewn with bloody needles’, junkies stupefied on the floor.³² Peak decadence was reached when, famously, the police busted Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at Redlands, Keith Richards’s home. Marianne Faithfull was there, adding to the debauched frisson of the occasion by exhibiting the fact that she was naked under a fur rug. The press gorged on it, and Jagger and Richards were given custodial sentences.

Cynthia Powell fought a losing battle to keep house, in the face of John Lennon’s pot habit, tidying, cooking and trying to minimise interruptions so that John could sleep till two in the afternoon; when he woke she would bring him breakfast in bed. Following the release of Sergeant Pepper the drug-taking was escalating; John would pick up glassy-eyed drifters at night clubs and bring them home for all-night sessions listening to loud music, drinking, drugging and raiding the larder. Brick by brick, narcotics were building an ever-growing wall between them.

George Harrison would ultimately retreat behind a different barrier. But in 1967 he and Pattie Boyd were still newlyweds, drugs were built into their lives, and they were having fun. Pattie described acid as ‘part of the creative process’ for the Beatles; though both she and George were disillusioned when they visited the hippie district of San Francisco in the summer of 1967:³³

We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible – full of ghastly dropouts, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains.

For the same reason Melissa North is reluctant to describe herself as a hippie, seeing the label as belonging to the Haight-Ashbury movement. ‘Our culture was more about people sharing. People came to your house, and if you hadn’t any dope, they brought some and you shared it.’

Melissa stresses that art, originality and vision were what differentiated her set from the spotty dropouts. ‘It was about people doing things. We made things, we were creative.’ The youth rebellion found expression through music, but also through little illustrated magazines, album-cover design, batik patchwork skirts, silver puzzle rings, face-paint, funky typography, surreal ‘happenings’, and décor that took art out of the frame and onto the walls of shabby flats in Hackney, Chelsea, Fulham and Brighton.

In 1967 Celia Birtwell and Zandra Rhodes were rethinking textile design with a new emphasis on whimsicality and psychedelia, Yoko Ono was being censored for her films showing close-ups of buttocks walking away from camera, while the artist Joan Hills was directing light shows for Soft Machine and Jimi Hendrix. But women were still up against the rigid attitudes of the art Establishment. When pop artist Jann Haworth applied to the Slade she asked whether she should submit her work. ‘Well, no,’ came the reply, ‘we don’t really need to see portfolios of the women students. We just need to see their photographs because they’re here to keep the boys happy.’

I promise you – not a word of a lie.³⁴ At the Slade, for sure, there was this kind of separation, that somehow the male students knew about paint. [The tutors] would say, ‘Men just know about paint, and women don’t.’

From that point, it was head-on competition with the male students …

Spurred by indignation, Haworth pioneered outrageous soft sculptures crafted from latex and fabrics – ‘a female language to which the male students didn’t have access …’ – and went on to find fame collaborating with Peter Blake on the album cover for Sergeant Pepper.

Vultures

In many a dingy basement the bohemian garret dream took shape. But it wasn’t always romantic.

This was the heyday of the short-lived Covent Garden Arts Lab, conceived (‘[it] was my baby’) by underground celebrity Jim Haynes.³⁵ It was envisioned as an ‘energy centre’, always ready to embrace the weird and the wacky, the hip and the happening. According to one of its chroniclers, the drifters who used the Arts Lab as a crash pad existed in a permanent fug of marijuana. Quintessentially, the venue offered rich pickings for sexual buccaneers, notably Jim Haynes himself and his comrade-in-arms the talented but quarrelsome theatre director Charles Marowitz. Both were American. Marowitz, another indispensable underground character, had arrived in London in the 1950s. His description of the Arts Lab as an old warehouse cheaply done out with rotting foam rubber mattresses, thick with the reek of pot smoke and unwashed socks, has all the sex appeal of a pigsty; nevertheless, according to him, its high-minded countercultural aims and ‘New Bohemianism’ were a veneer masking its real purpose:

It became a kind of sexual seraglio for itinerant potheads and students … who perceived it mainly as a convenient place to ‘pull birds’.³⁶

In this field, Marowitz and Haynes were close collaborators, though they often purloined each other’s spoils.

Our deepest bond was the mutual adoration of pussy and, in pursuit of this object, we frequently roamed the town together reconnoitring some of the loveliest, sexiest, most voluptuous and often most impregnable women in London.

They lured their prey with tempting morsels of rock’n’roll culture, pirated Beatles recordings and the like. But behind the bait of soft-porn Super-8s and poetry readings was that unwavering purpose: ‘the quest for pussy …’

– the insatiable (though regularly sated) desire to gobble up as much as one could decently consume and then some.

The carnal greed of these two vultures is of its time, and it is of a piece with the affluence and consumerism rampaging through the shopping streets of the later sixties. And if men were the consumers, women were, like a cargo of knock-off Sindys, the things they acquired.

Marowitz describes how he and Haynes were in a constant state of hungry arousal – ‘wanting to touch, to taste, to savour, to consume …’ from the inexhaustible supermarket of bra-less dolly birds that rolled past them on a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt, packaged in dainty Laura Ashley prints, tactile legs exposed by the briefest of minis (or ‘pussy pelmets’) which in turn barely concealed the scantiest of knickers. A feast of fresh meat, delectable and juicy, lay temptingly before them, young flesh that had to be eaten before it perished. This was a moment when a certain kind of man ceased to question whether or not he was entitled to whatever erotic satisfactions he happened to crave. A man has to eat, doesn’t he? Wanting and taking was enough.

In this context, it’s hard not to recall the qualms of Mary Whitehouse and others regarding the permissive society, and their fears that once women were pulled off their pedestals, they would be in danger of maltreatment and abuse. But Marowitz, who wrote his memoir of the 1960s twenty years after they ended, took care to add a disclaimer ‘for those feminists who immediately construe this as the insensitive objectification of women’.fn9 In it, he explained that he and Jim Haynes maintained an almost religious veneration for the women who inspired their passion. ‘Our erotic activities were invariably recalled with awe.’

Unluckily for them, it seems the huntsmen’s trophies themselves didn’t always see their capture and submission in quite the same light. One Arts Lab habituée recalls the milieu created by Jim Haynes: ‘You lay … watching these third-rate, amateurish porn films, while people were actually doing it in front of you, which I thought was really rude.’³⁷ ‘Haynes was the horrible old man who prowled the Arts Lab in search of chicks,’ wrote Linda Grant in Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution (1993). Wryly, she notes that Haynes had a knack of interpreting the sexual revolution of the 1960s in a way that served his libido. ‘Sexual repression and frustration and ignorance’ were, for him, the root of society’s problems. Banish repression and the rest, let rip with lust, and uncomplicated fun would ensue.

Jim Haynes tried to sleep with me …³⁸

recalled art student Cheryll Park:

I wasn’t alone, there were about six other women in the bed. I said, ‘No.’ He humiliated me. He seemed to think it was all so easy to be permissive and free with your body. I was only nineteen and I’d come down from the north of England and it was … all too much. I thought that there was something wrong with me, because I wasn’t going to go along with it. I told him he was a pervert and to get out of my bed.

I’d love to meet Haynes again, now that he’s a shrivelled-up old man, and humiliate him in the way he humiliated me.

*

The trouble was, nobody wanted to look uncool, straight, or behind the times. ‘Part of the newness of the world we were creating was the abolition of jealousy, and the idea of possessing other people,’ wrote Jenny Diski.³⁹ Born in 1947, Diski bought into the revolutionary ideals of her generation. Her 1960s were spent in London, ‘buying clothes, going to movies, dropping out, reading, taking drugs, spending time in mental hospitals, demonstrating, having sex, teaching …’ She and her friends aspired to the hippie ideal of unfettered freedom for mind and body.

But over the years Diski’s perspective shifted. Her memoir angrily unpicks the permissive experiment, holding up an unforgiving mirror to her own generation. Around 1967 she moved into a squat in Long Acre that she had found through a methedrine dealer who hung out at the Arts Lab. Here she felt curiously at home, in a smoky room full of ‘stoned strangers’. But regardless of their favourite mantra, there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of peace and love happening among its occupants. ‘Our youthful cruelty was boundless,’ she wrote, referring to the contemptuous dismissal of middle-aged bourgeois values by the young, whose ideals were formed by anger and indignation at how their parents seemed to have mishandled everything. ‘It is not the job of the young to be grateful, it is their job to tear up the world and start again.’

The received idea among peace-and-love merchants was that society’s problems could be solved by abolishing sexual repression. The pioneering poet and author Jeff Nuttall agreed. In Bomb Culture (1968), he explained how his generation, in thrall to Wilhelm Reich (whose The Function of the Orgasm was reissued in 1968), saw the sexual climax as both a window onto the eternal and a quick fix for Mr and Mrs Average – ‘who are largely so suicidal because they never get a good fuck’. Nuttall appealed to his underground comrades to save the world through an eight-point plan, which included:

(g) To institute a sense of festivity into public life whereby people could fuck freely and guiltlessly, dance wildly and wear fancy dress all the time.

(h) To eradicate utterly and forever the Pauline lie implicit in Christian conventions, that people neither shit, piss nor fuck … To reinstate a sense of health and beauty pertaining to the genitals and the arsehole.

Nuttall’s promised land would be constructed around an erect penis:

Can we apply a quivering phallic strength to our civic organisation and our economy?

Fifty years down the line, the damage wrought by a supremacist, patriarchal, phallocentric culture has still to be contained.

Another, less macho way to understand the world was the adoption of pagan and Eastern religions. The past, in the form of ancient texts such as the I Ching, the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, provided the young with visions, and the human hunger for answers was sated with arcane lore: horoscopes and the like. This was the time when the Beatles were seeking enlightenment through transcendental meditation, under the guidance of the Maharishi. In the relentless quest for inner development, joints merged with prayer wheels, and ancient wisdom with LSD, against a continuo of twanging sitar music.

But Jenny Diski tells us that ultimately it was all about the self, about doing your own thing. Thus the daily stresses of life – piled-up plates in the sink, grime round the bath – got left to those who cared for trivial matters like order and hygiene. ‘That’s your problem, man …’ was the banal dismissal routinely dished out – to the women.

And sexism went deep. In the minds of many men, sex was tangled up with social anger and youthful entitlement, and norms like making demands, possession, infidelity and betrayal were supposed to have been jettisoned along with the old world order. In reality, insofar as it meant self-interest, dissipation and misogyny, that old world order seems to have been alive and kicking. Despite moving in a group that professed to have thrown out the formalities, Jenny Diski – like debutante Kristina Reed – still felt hampered by the old-fashioned courtesies. And, though her icy description of sexual power play among the caftan-and-velvet brigade questions all of their claims, it also sounds a doleful echo of Kristina’s predicament:

Sex was a way of being polite to those who suggested it or who got into your bed. It was very difficult not to fuck someone who wanted to fuck you without feeling you were being very rude. My guess, no, my certainty, is that large numbers of people slept with friends, acquaintances and strangers they had no desire for …

There was a large principle at stake. If sex was no longer going to be a taboo then it was hard to think of a good reason not to have it with anyone who came along. It was uncool to say no …

The idea that rape was having sex with someone who didn’t want to do it didn’t apply very much in the late sixties. On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn’t take no for an answer …

*

As liberalisation gathered pace, the male mindset had a lot of catching up to do. Diski’s take on the hippie dreamers raises questions about the influence of their radicalism. ‘We had about as much effect on the world as someone jumping from a plane does,’ was her view. So, was their opposition to their elders, and to mainstream society, a waste of time? Arguably, yes. Roy Jenkins, the Labour government’s Home Secretary between 1965 and 1967, probably delivered more tangible permissive reforms than a field full of hippies. But that permissiveness had consequences – for women. Glaring injustice came in its wake. The hideous, sexist, misogynistic violations Jenny Diski (like so many others) describes would provide fuel for one of the most important social changes of the twentieth century. But first, women had to learn how to give a name to their oppression, and their oppressors. After centuries of subservience, it couldn’t happen overnight.

Come Together

In 1967 a reporter from the Daily Mail came to interview the principal of Felixstowe College about her views on permissiveness among her students. Miss Elizabeth Manners was an advocate of strict Christian discipline. She was worried, she told the journalist, to see parents allowing their daughters to experiment. ‘The more you give way, the more they try on,’ she said, and she urged parents to ‘fight rebellion – even if this does cause rows at home’.⁴⁰

But the misgivings of the older generation rang hollow as new freedoms accelerated. And the demand for sex without consequences was beginning to force the authorities to grapple with change. Following a heated debate, October 1967 saw the passing of the Abortion Law Reform Act; it would come into effect from April 1968, permitting termination of pregnancy up to twenty-four weeks’ gestation. The number of abortions rose almost immediately, but there was a corresponding drop in the incidence of sepsis and death related to illegal terminations. The more tolerant climate also extended to homosexuals, and a bill to decriminalise homosexual acts in private between men over the age of twenty-one (in England and Wales) was passed into law in July 1967.

Generational tension was the hot topic. In that year’s Reith Lectures the anthropologist and public intellectual Edmund Leach addressed the alienation of the young, and the hostility of parents towards rebellious children. He blamed the family: ‘Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.’⁴¹ Leach’s inner hippie turned for answers to the tribal societies he had studied. Should we run our lives differently, like the Israelis with their kibbutzim, the Chinese with their communes?

Among dreamers and idealists that very question was already being posed with growing urgency. Unstitching the family itself was a way to challenge capitalism and all its ills, and collective living – the commune – seemed to be the answer. One of the earliest was the Selene Community. It was started in a tumbledown Welsh farmhouse thirty miles from Carmarthen in 1967. One is tempted to wonder what Edmund Leach would have made of the members of this pioneering collective, who apparently wandered nude in the fields and embraced the idea of group marriage. Selene’s architect, Tony Kelly, had two ‘wives’. Nineteen fellow pagans shared a back-to-the-land existence, which also involved a pantheistic belief system based on the moon goddess Selene and Mother Nature. In their Welsh wilderness, Tony Kelly and his tribe sought oneness with ‘the other-world of faery’, communed with Pan, Lord of the Forest, and worshipped the Earth Mother: ‘the great womb in which all her children still have their roots’.⁴² We don’t know whether Kelly’s real-life female cohabitants shared in the oneness, but Edmund Leach would surely have seen eye-to-eye with the fundamentals of Selene’s creed:

The monogamous family in its traditional isolation is the greatest barrier to all social reform as well as, ultimately, the instrument of the most devastating form of grief known to man and we urge its abolition …

Eccentric though it sounds, Selene was a trailblazer, seeking to close the gap between reality and the ideal. Within five years around a hundred similar collective households, rural and urban, would self-generate across the British Isles. For women, they were to prove a mixed blessing, the lure of collaborative childcare and domesticity being offset by conflict, sexual jealousy and fear of rejection. Male dominance continued to prove a hard plant to uproot. But in 1967 communes were still few and far between.

As Christine Hugh-Jones comments:

The thing with utopian movements – they’re all like this – was that you wanted a different society, but you didn’t know how it was going to be run …⁴³

Today, Christine (a noted social anthropologist) is retired and lives in Wales – with her husband. In 1967, as Christine Williams, she was studying for her degree at the London School of Economics. The LSE in the second half of the 1960s was becoming a beacon for radical activism. But as she recalls, it radiated more heat than light.

There was a feeling that the world was being run for you, and you didn’t have any say in its running. The Establishment was what you didn’t like, and what you had to get rid of. It was a kicking against authority. More then, than at any time before …

Strong-minded, resourceful and outgoing, Christine was finding her political feet. Her roots were in Derbyshire. The daughter of a self-made industrialist and a thrifty housewife who kept a close eye on the price of apples, she was conflicted in her class allegiances. Wealth and white gloves pulled one way, hippie-ish bohemia another. Ambitious and driven, Christine shelved her parental model at the earliest opportunity. A private education (with a scholarship) secured her entrance first to art school, and thence to the LSE, where she enrolled in 1965.

Living in London, Christine revelled in her own independence, beachcombing on the shores of the Thames for driftwood to make shelves, living off vegetables discarded on the pavements of Berwick Street market, and sprats at fourpence a pound. Her frugality fed into a sense of left-wing virtue. ‘I saw myself as a good egalitarian socialist; I read the New Statesman …’ The LSE was formative. The school in those days was a seething, crowded melting pot of students and staff. In what she describes as her ‘worthy middle-middle-class background’ foreigners and dark faces were so rare as to be regarded with fear and consternation, but Christine took the buzz and cosmopolitan atmosphere at the LSE in her stride, remembering the excitement of being squashed in the canteen conversing with people of various colours and backgrounds. The course itself was broad in scope, encompassing sociology, moral philosophy, statistics, economics – ‘You did a bit of everything. The teachers were brilliant.’ But among this community of excited, young, multi-cultural intellectuals, it was impossible to ignore the prevailing anti-authoritarian current that was gathering force, stronger by the day.

It was happening in all the universities. It was about having student representation on the board and the councils and that sort of thing – which was a long hard thing to achieve.

And then there was the revolution, which seemed to be about some huge dissatisfaction …

Actually I don’t know if anybody really knew what the revolution was about. But certainly we all felt unbelievably strongly about it.

To be young, clever and away from home was electrifying. In a world where loud music, free sex, denim and drugs were emblems of prestige, college students nationwide felt that they were the drivers of change. Christine Williams never contemplated the idea that, as a woman, she might be second-class:

In the life I led at the LSE sexism wasn’t an issue. And even though my mother had been a housewife and had done nothing beyond her family sphere all her life, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t as good as a man, that I couldn’t do the same things as them and so on …

She was not alone. The sixties generation clash saw young lined up against old, but within those ranks were daughters lined up against their mothers and grandmothers. In their early twenties, many of those daughters were determined not to be confined by the domesticity that had held their mothers captive. And that meant embracing equality.

One woman whose hippie beliefs underlay her activism was Caroline Coon. Both in the 1960s and beyond, she would make important differences to the society she lived in. In 1967 Caroline was a twenty-two-year-old art-student-turned-underground-activist. Later, she would become a vocal feminist. As she saw it, the two were linked. Caroline now understands that her 1960s fervour for change was a reaction against parental expectation, and against ‘the prison that I saw my mother and my grandmother in’.⁴⁴ Her wealthy, posh, Home Counties, landowning parents regarded daughters as ‘marriage-meat’. At the age of sixteen, in protest at their expectation that she would accept a millionaire neighbour as her future husband, Caroline stormed out, moved to London, got involved with the underground and started a relationship with a Jamaican musician. It was when her boyfriend was arrested for possession of marijuana and sentenced to two and a half years in prison that she realised how powerless minorities in this country could be. Release, an organisation formed to help young people in trouble with the law (particularly over drugs), was her brainchild.

The breakthrough moment for Release came in July 1967, at the first Legalise Pot rally. ‘It was one of those brilliant Peace and Love sunny summer days …’ remembered Caroline. That summer people were tripping to the sounds of Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, and – as ever, capturing the mood of the moment – the Beatles were chanting ‘All You Need is Love’. On that day 5,000 optimistic hippies in robes and caftans converged on Hyde Park with flowers, macrobiotic picnics and poetry books. ‘Change the Drugs Laws’, ‘Flower Power’ and ‘Love, Love, Love’ were painted in bright colours on their posters.

Among them, handing out Release ‘Bust Cards’ and leaflets, was Caroline, with a team of helpers. There could be no more palpable demonstration of young versus old, minority versus authority, the rebel versus the Establishment, the freaky versus the fuddy-duddy. At the end of that day Caroline went back to her basement flat in Notting Hill, and the phone didn’t stop ringing.

Caroline saw Release as essentially about civil liberties and human rights. People needed to know what to do, and who to talk to if they were arrested. The organisation helped everyone from homeless runaways to heroin addicts. They provided information, and lawyers on tap. ‘We were the welfare branch of the alternative society.’

Inevitably, any woman spearheading an organisation of this nature was liable to run up against male resentment. Joe Boyd, a close colleague, was one who admired her unreservedly: ‘[She] did a magnificent job for Release … All she was interested in was answering the phone and getting people a lawyer.’fn10, ⁴⁵ But her gender and posh accent also won her enemies. A splinter group, apparently led by Mick Farren, attempted a takeover of Release.fn11 Caroline reacted by very calmly handing over the office keys, the account books, the banking details, filing systems, addresses, volunteer rotas and phone listings. ‘If you have any questions, give me a call,’ she said, and left. Within a day it dawned on the mutineers that they couldn’t function without her; they begged her to come back.

Speaking to an interviewer in 2016, Caroline Coon describes her youthful passion for liberty and rights as being inextricable from what, then, were still barely articulated feelings about Women’s Liberation.fn12 She and her countercultural friends were stumbling towards a way of life in which, as she saw it, people of all colours, orientations, genders and beliefs could live together more equally, more peacefully and more humanely.

This was absolutely key to what I thought the hippie generation of peace and love was actually about.

And yet …

Looking back on it, that era was an era of male liberation. Men wanted to be liberated from their marriages and to have as much sex as possible. But they weren’t going to liberate women as well …

The shock to women in the sixties was that our male colleagues were just as misogynistic as any patriarchy of the past … But in the sixties we didn’t have the language, we didn’t have the critical mass with which to combat misogyny and sexism.

It’s the same story that we heard from Kristina Reed in the 1965 chapter, from the victims of sexual harassment in 1966, from Jenny Diski and the Arts Lab trophies. It’s about free love. But free for whom?

Release, however, found its voice in 1967 and has been giving legal advice, on-call assistance and specialist counselling, and speaking out for drug offenders, for over fifty years.

*

Harrowing news was unfolding on the world stage. In July 1967, as Caroline Coon and her comrades were assembling their Legalise Pot propaganda and painting posters, the US Marines had suffered their single worst day in Operation Buffalo, conducted north of their base at Con Thien in the Vietnam Demilitarised Zone. On that summer’s day, as the hippies in Hyde Park chanted ‘Change the Drug Laws’, families across America were mourning 159 Marines killed and 345 wounded. But the losses to Vietnamese troops were far worse, with US authorities claiming 1,290 dead. The casualties among civilians at that time were appalling. In 1967 US officials in Saigon estimated that 50,000 civilians, including 10,000 children, would be treated for war injuries; but the civilian death count has never been accurately calculated. The war’s dreadful toll was a spur to action, to those who espoused peace and love, and many more besides.

As a virtuous left-winger Sheila Rowbotham joined the East London Vietnam Solidarity Committee; she was invited to attend its first meeting, convened in December 1967. The festive season was approaching, but that evening the streets of Hackney were raw and dank, and Sheila muffled herself up when she set out, reluctantly, to brave the chill of Mare Street. Unsurprisingly, the meeting was male-dominated, and predictably the first item on the agenda was the organisation’s dire lack of funds. Equally predictably, in an episode that may sound very familiar, even fifty years later, to women who attend committees or try to contribute to public life, she quickly found herself running up against the men in the driving seat. These ones were Trotskyists too, and they had views that overrode those of their female comrades.

I brightly suggested a jumble sale; no one responded, so I piped up again.⁴⁶ They kept cutting me out of the discussion as if I had never spoken.

Jumble sales, it appeared, involved women, particularly old women, and were therefore insufficiently revolutionary. But nobody else had any other fundraising ideas. Feeling herself becoming shrill, Sheila took a righteous stand; voices were raised. At last, grudgingly, the men agreed that she could go ahead with the jumble sale, and the agenda proceeded. The platform then invited a sub-committee representative to take the floor and give his report. To Sheila’s surprise a gentle-looking, long-haired hippie guy in a caftan and beads muttered a hesitant response from the back of the room. He had a soft American accent, punctuated by the word ‘like’; the gist being that he didn’t, like, need to talk from the front, like, and might as well speak from where he was sitting. This man certainly wasn’t given to macho assertiveness.

His name was Henry Wortis. At the end of the meeting Henry offered Sheila a ride home. ‘It was cold and a lift was welcome.’

I liked this American man with his quiet air of authority despite the libertarian front. He proceeded to tell me they were shutting me up at the meeting. I grinned. People were always telling me I talked too much … But, Henry went on, it was because I was a woman. I couldn’t believe my ears. This was an extraordinary thing for a left man to be saying. According to Henry, there was this thing called ‘male chauvinism’ and that’s what had been going on in that VSC meeting …

He explained that he knew this because his wife, Shelley, had been in a Women’s Liberation group in Boston. Several groups in the United States had been started by women from the new left.

For Sheila, it was like switching on all the Christmas lights at once.

The mounting feeling that, as a political woman, she was out on a limb, that her reluctance to adopt strident asexual postures was causing men to ignore her views, that the behaviour of men who disagreed with each other was different when they disagreed with women – all this suddenly now had a name.

Till now, Sheila had had no posture on feminism. As she saw it, the word belonged to history – ‘I knew it only as the suffrage movement of long ago or as a lobby of professional women for advancement at work.’ Emancipation had similar connotations. Both terms failed to address the chasm that she and so many women like her experienced in personal relationships between the sexes.

For months now, Sheila had been quietly arguing with herself, cluttering her mind with complexities. She had been reading male literature that typecast women as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and found herself wondering how much these clichés were projections. The empty misrepresentations and pejorative labels had percolated aggressively into the everyday: ‘– a man at a party talking about a woman’s buttocks as if she was meat, another calling girls “bits”’. Women, it seemed to her, were cast in their narrow, off-the-peg roles by men. They didn’t know how to be, or who to be. They were things, dolls, possessions, who seemed to have no identity they could call their own. Sheila cast about with increasing urgency, searching for ways to deal with the overlap between class and gender; rereading Simone de Beauvoir, plunging into Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and the essays on ‘feminine psychology’ by German psychoanalyst Karen Horney with a growing sense of community and recognition.

But sex was yet another minefield. Sheila’s self-questioning led her to recognise that a woman like her could be as detached in her physical desires as a man – ‘but this was more or less impossible to assert publicly in 1967’. The power game between the sexes was, she observed, complex: men had vulnerabilities and fears, while women often colluded in their subservience. Anyway, what was to be gained by women becoming the ascendant sex, if what she craved was sexual and emotional closeness? How did one reconcile the overwhelming longing to lose oneself in passion, with the equally passionate attempt to find oneself?

As 1967 slipped into history, Sheila Rowbotham continued to brood over a host of such unanswered questions. But something had shifted. In the bedroom of her dilapidated communal house in Dalston, the floor was obscured by the ever growing mountain of bags and boxes containing outgrown plimsolls, unwanted woollies and discarded pyjama bottoms, all awaiting the Vietnam Solidarity Committee Jumble Sale. In her mind, though, the mountains were rolling away: ‘as if some hidden plate deep under the surface of appearances had moved irrevocably, sending out tiny, barely perceptible seismic shocks which were shortly to contribute to an earthquake …’

After this politics was never to be quite the same.