Prelude

Look around. And imagine. Imagine the old as they once were, fifty years ago, in the 1960s.

Was the pensioner in the supermarket queue a Mod back then, posturing on the pillion of a Lambretta? Was the lady serving her at the checkout her sworn adversary, a Rocker, hanging out in black at the Ace Café? Did the elderly woman walking her little dog in the park once stride with a banner, yelling slogans till she was hoarse, at the front of an anti-war demonstration? Does the tired-looking grandmother on the bus still treasure her collection of Biba frocks in smudgy plums and earth colours – though the label never made anything above a size 10? What about the stout assistant working in the charity shop – might she once have seen a flying saucer, back when she was a skinny chick in batik, spaced out on marijuana? And is that matronly figure dozing opposite you on the train dreaming of her long-gone student days, being seduced over late-night Nescafé to the sound of Jethro Tull?

Secrets, intimacies, insights, disillusionments, memories. For our mothers, our grandmothers, for ourselves – and for countless women born after the end of the Second World War – the intoxicating colours, potent soundtracks, intense ideals, extreme clothes and unfamiliar freedoms of the 1960s contributed to the moulding of their early lives. This book tells their story.

Of course, by no means all the young women of this generation were radicals, fashion leaders or utopians. Some took their own stand in rejecting the permissive consensus. Others had personal struggles to contend with, deeply held beliefs that were at odds with the prevailing current, or were leading lives remote from the public collisions between young and old, hip and square, fringe and Establishment that we have come to associate with the 1960s. Yet for all of this generation, the simple fact of having been young in that decade has given their lives a different dimension from those the sixties left behind, or those who, like me, were a bit too young to keep up.

This book is in part a personal one. I was born in 1955. As I enter my seventh decade, the need to make sense of a time that I both lived through and was barred from has prompted me to find out more about the women whose experience might have been my own – if I’d been ten years older, and a bit braver. Have I missed out, have I been their beneficiary, or have I in truth had a narrow escape?

But I also intend it as a homage to those women, giving them voice, value and visibility, and celebrating them, while the memories are still alive.

*

Many important books have been written about the 1960s. They are mostly by men. They range from Bernard Levin’s lofty overview The Pendulum Years through Arthur Marwick’s magisterial The Sixties to Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat, while the great historian David Kynaston has left his many fans in 1962, still waiting for him to complete his encyclopaedic account of post-war Britain. To all of these and more I owe a debt, but this history – like others I have written – stands apart from theirs because it is about women, and is narrated from a woman’s perspective.

One might imagine that stepping across the threshold from the monochrome fifties to the psychedelic sixties would be to enter a new, egalitarian era. But for the young women growing up in it, the post-war world promised much while delivering little. Sex was taboo outside marriage. Unwed mothers were shunned, contraception was reserved for wives and pre-marital intercourse was only for sluts. The younger generation were hungry for sexual freedom, but for women that freedom would come with a price tag. Mid-decade, we start to recognise the tentative beginnings of the Women’s Liberation movement.

Any history must have dates, data and documents as its foundation – but how best to breathe life into that impersonal repository of facts? Here, as always, I turn to memory, and the human voice.

Memory is subjective, and I have not attempted to be definitive. My aim has been to uncover how it actually felt to be a young woman at that time. I also take the view that the apparently trivial can often tell us more about the past than great men and their milestones. My own 1960s time capsule would contain nylon macs, false eyelashes, menthol cigarettes, Babycham, tubular frame furniture, transistor radios, innovations like tights and avocado pears, patchouli oil – and Top of the Pops. For me, they reveal the texture of everyday life in a way nothing else can.

How did I select my interviewees, and what is my version of events? The cliché of the 1960s is that it was a decade whose radiant light show sprinkled everything it touched with stardust: a time of space travel and utopian dreams, but above all of sexual abandonment. That story needed to be told, but it is far from the whole story. Early in the research period for this book I realised that not everyone felt the prevailing culture of permissiveness was for them. Their voices had to be heard too, otherwise my account of the 1960s would be warped and one-sided. A student who attended Hull University in 1967 remembered: ‘It was incredibly dull.¹ Everything reached Hull about five years after it reached everywhere else … girls were wearing miniskirts, but in Hull I’m sure they’d never heard of them.’ Clothes will play a conspicuous part in this book. For many women – and men too – in the 1960s, clothes defined who you were, and who you weren’t, just as shops, pop songs, magazines and films held up a mirror to a newly prosperous society. But this was also a time when capitalism was having image problems; many were questioning its macho associations with war, hate and greed, and asking: could we not replace centuries of male domination with the gentler, more ‘womanly’ virtues of anti-materialism, peace, love and spirituality? I wanted, too, to unpick some myths, so I talked to women who didn’t fit our received idea of the savvy, liberated Mary Quant-wearing ‘chick’: like a nanny, a journalist, a Girl Guide leader, a council worker, a rural housewife and a bunny girl. Nearly forty women invited me into their homes, responded to letters and phone calls, trusted me and talked to me about their lives during that decade (some of them have asked for their identities to be disguised).

The conversations I had were many and various. I travelled to Liverpool, to the flatlands of north Lincolnshire, to a Yorkshire suburb, to a sleepy Wiltshire market town and the deep valleys of the West Country. I found some contributors not far from my front door; others in city flats or sheltered accommodation. Their answers to my questions were surprising, funny and in many cases intensely moving. Often in those conversations there were moments when I knew I was sharing a memory of extraordinary significance to my interviewee, as barriers were lowered and the years seemed to melt away. These were experiences that, for some, had barely been mentioned for the greater part of their adulthood. Others, through the prism of their private lives, shed light on historical landmarks such as the thalidomide scandal, the Cuban missile crisis or the LSE riots. I encountered regional accents, privilege, glamour and disadvantage, side by side with comedy, honesty and tears. In these pages we will follow such women’s stories. Here are just a few of them as they are today.

*

‘I’m a sixties woman – for the rest of my life,’ says Kimberley, who was born in 1951.² ‘There’s not many sixty-five-year-olds like me. I go to see reggae bands, rock bands – all sorts. I don’t really fit in with my age group!

‘I’m a party animal. And I’m still partying on.’

Kimberley speaks with the vestiges of a suburban London accent. She now lives in a flat in Hastings, from the windows of which you can catch a glimpse of the chalk cliffs that rise above the town. Her surroundings and appearance leave you in no doubt about her claim. She’s dressed in a floor-length red and orange caftan printed with pineapples. An ethnic pendant dangles from a leather thong around her neck. But her broad, lined, unmade-up features speak of struggle, survival, experience and character.

‘Well, I have had a really interesting life. I’ve certainly got a book in me!’ she says cheerfully. The flat’s interior – like her colourfully eccentric clothes – hints at a complex story. African figurines jostle for space in the alcoves with books: Clare Ungerson’s Women and Social Policy, suffragette Hannah Mitchell’s autobiography The Hard Way Up and Women against Violence against Women, by Dusty Rhodes and Sandra McNeill. Red fairy-lights festoon the mirror, and geometric fabrics alleviate the surfaces. Kimberley opens the window so that she can chain-smoke and talk without disturbing her sleeping guest in the next room, a homeless Jamaican lesbian whom she’s invited to stay temporarily until she can find a place.

Then the story begins: ‘I was a wild child …’

*

Theresa: you only have to enter her room to pick up on her sense of style. The walls are white, but pattern is everywhere: framed, semi-abstract prints, ethnic wool-embroidered cushions. Above all, the planes of her own dynamically colourful ceramics burst forth with moulded birds, palm fronds, fish and fruit. These jugs and platters seem – like their creator, who dazzles in scarlet tights, pink lipstick and a multi-coloured bandeau – to originate in a sunnier climate than that of north London.

In 2016 Theresa was seventy. All her life she’s been balancing two inheritances, bequeathed by her Jamaican father and her Scottish mother. In the 1950s, growing up as the only little brown girl in Cornwall for miles wasn’t always easy. From the earliest age she’s been coping both with the contempt levelled at the ‘half-caste’, and irrepressibly curly hair. Like ambient music, her racial origins are hard to ignore, an insistent refrain underlying her loves, her career, her talent. But the teenage Theresa around 1960 sang to another key. ‘Oh my God, yes, the music was important to me!³ The rock’n’roll thing was beginning. My friend Jean and I were mad about Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Elvis Presley. I even went to see Cliff Richard – he was my idol. And I screamed till my nose bled. I saw the Everly Brothers too.⁴ I adored them, absolutely adored them. Jean and I learnt to sing “Dream”, in harmony. We used to sing it on the school bus, over and over and over and over, absolutely pitch perfect …’ Melodious, hypnotic, repetitive: the swoony lyrics bound Theresa, and countless teenagers across the country, in a rhapsodic spell of wishful thinking.

*

Mary is nearly eighty. Once, her looks used to be compared to those of the top tabloid honeypot of her day, Christine Keeler. In 1968, when she was thirty, the Hull Daily Mail pictured Mary, not in a sexually provocative pose, but vehement, arresting – in mid-sentence, arm outstretched to make her point, wearing a boxy leather jacket and rock’n’roll eyeliner.

Today, the feline eyes and striking bone structure remain, but Mary is lame, and the glossy backcombed hairdo has lost its bounce. She struggles with mobility, and needs a Zimmer frame to potter from kitchen to sitting room. In old age, after a spell away from her north-eastern roots, she has returned to the flat watery Humber estuary, with its great windswept skies that carry a briny tang of the North Sea. Mary’s life is basic now. The terrace cottage she lives in is appointed for one occupant, with a huge comfortable armchair, TV and coffee table, but little else. The kitchen betrays a lack of concern with formal meals. Mary sometimes forgets the things she needs.

But she hasn’t forgotten her youth; and her spirit, her outspokenness and her dirty laugh transport one from the slightly underventilated sitting room to a more blustery and tempestuous time. When it comes to remembering the past, she’s sharp as a pin. In 2017 her home town, Hull, was European City of Culture; in the sixties it was a backwater, a world away from the neon-lit and pleasure-seeking capital. In Hessle Road, heart of Hull’s fishing community, the smell of salt, tar and herrings was perpetually in Mary’s nostrils. She grew up in abject poverty, daughter of a fisherman, the only girl in a family of eight brothers.

Girls were seen as insignificant.⁵ Mother always favoured the boys. The men had to be served first. They had a naturally bigger appetite, so they were given more. I was left waiting.

And the way my mother spoke to me … If we had an argument, she would say – pointing her finger – ‘You ought to remember where you’re from, who you are, and don’t expect too much of life, ’cos you won’t get it!’ She was terrified of my father. He was a drunkard, a cruel drunkard. He’d beat her black and blue – and in front of us children too. We’d cower under the furniture when he’d be kicking her.

You would think with all that I would grow up to be the most downtrodden, insignificant female. But I think it put iron in my soul.

And maybe that’s why I turned out the way I did …

*

Margaret is a reluctant rebel. If it hadn’t been forced on her by circumstances, she and her husband Billy would most likely have led unexceptional lives, wary of authority, adrift in the world of their social ‘betters’. Margaret never knew her father. He was killed in the war when she was a baby. Her mother remarried. Exactly eight years later her ‘second dad’ was killed in a work accident. The eldest of three, she learnt about maternal responsibility when their mother was forced to take factory and auxiliary nursing jobs to support her daughters. Margaret, at the age of ten, became aware that they were no longer ‘a whole family’. With her mum absent at work, she now had to learn to take on a mother’s role, weighing up the household budget against the family’s needs, making decisions. It was a lesson that would prove invaluable.

Today, Margaret, Billy and their grown-up son David live in an impeccable bungalow on a hill overlooking the South Yorkshire town of Barnsley. Framed family photographs scatter the shelf tops; visible reading matter is mostly escapist thrillers. Where the walls aren’t textured with Artex they are papered with a simple, sinuous design of modern red flowers to complement its counterpart in the seat cushions. Dressed in trousers and a stripy top, Margaret is bustling, upright and beady-eyed. When two men arrive to mend the washing machine, she deals with them briskly. She is matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, practical, with a firm grip on the set of values she inherited from her mother: self-respect, sobriety, respectability and respect for your elders. Margaret talks in her cadenced Scots about how she met Billy Hogg at the age of just fifteen. They went to the pictures together and got married two years later, in July 1959. By January 1960 she was happily, and healthily, pregnant. That was the year everything changed.

*

Anthea took the trouble to come and meet me at the station. But as we hadn’t met before she had sent me a brief description of herself: ‘I’m medium tall, slim, fair haired, seventy-one and hair “up”!’ Even if she hadn’t, I would have had no difficulty recognising her from the correspondence we had had. Standing on the platform was a slight, beautiful, unmade-up woman wearing neutral clothes and a boldly arty necklace. She exuded energy and sincerity, and welcomed me with a melodious, educated voice.

I had been seeking somebody who felt they were in opposition to the mainstream. Anthea told me by email that she had been an active clergy wife, and that as an English Literature student at Reading University in the 1960s she had met Mary Whitehouse, founder of the Clean-Up TV Campaign. ‘I do seem to fit your brief pretty exactly,’ she wrote.⁶ ‘You will probably cause me to recall matters that I haven’t considered for a long time …’

Anthea drove briskly out of the city and in twenty minutes its suburbs gave way to deep lanes spilling over with summer foliage. Soon we were seated with coffee in her light-filled conservatory. Anthea pulled out historic press cuttings from her student days, when she had written articles challenging the ‘anything goes’ permissiveness of the era. ‘Now, I don’t know where you want to begin …’ she said.

*

Beryl’s speaking voice is a gentle, but distinctively nasal Scouse, with a tuneful lilt to it. At nearly seventy, singing is still her reason for getting up each morning. She has no plans to give up and, for those who remember her glory days in the sixties, she’s still out there, giving them a piece of the action.

All her life, Beryl has depended less on glamour and glitz than on talent and personality – a choice whose wisdom is proved as the girlish freshness of her early years has given way to a rounded, friendly attractiveness. Beryl’s neutral sitting room, in a north London flat, demonstrates how little appearances matter to her. The only nod to décor is a modest arrangement that one might describe as a shrine, set against one wall, with flowers and a tea-light, the intimation of some profound inner life. Her lack of make-up and her tomboyish clothes – ripped skinny jeans, trainers and a grey marl hoodie – tell the same unpretentious story, though a curly top-knot, unleashing dark auburn tresses which bounce around her face, gives a hint of frivolity. Yet Beryl, barely over five feet tall, has a contained energy. She might jump up at any minute and start bopping.

Beryl lived her early years in Liverpool to the sound of popular song. Her first memory is hearing American female vocalist Jo Stafford on the radio, singing the souped-up hit folk song ‘Shrimp Boats’. Home back then was an urban slum in a run-down Georgian terrace. Her mother had a total of ten children, by (she thinks) four different men. Even when they moved to a bigger house, the kids were three to a bed. ‘So radio was, well, my sort of escapey bit from those tough surroundings …⁷ The thing is, I think that probably from the age of nine or ten, I went, “I’m going to sing.” And I had this thing inside of me, no matter what. And me mum thought I was mad. She’d say, “What are you talking about? Sing? It’s impossible …” And they only had boy bands then. So she’d say, “It’s not a proper job! You’re a girl, for a start …”’

*

June 1963: Caroline, aged thirteen, had managed to get tickets to see the Beatles, at their one and only live appearance at the old Odeon cinema in Guildford. Some say that ‘Beatlemania’ began that night. Alongside her, over fifteen hundred excited teenagers crammed the auditorium. Till then, audiences had generally listened respectfully to the performers. It was not the done thing to interrupt. The Guildford audience broke the rules. ‘The screaming was so loud, you really couldn’t hear them.⁸ Not a word. They sang “Love, love me do”. I can remember the excitement – and feeling frustrated too, because I wanted to hear them – and I was sitting quite far back. And no, I didn’t scream. I was far too well brought-up to do that! At that point I was still very much my father’s daughter …’

In those early days of the sixties, as a shy and inhibited teenager, Caroline didn’t question her privileged background. She has travelled a long road since then. Today she’s preparing a healthy salad in her prettily rustic kitchen and, though she professes to loathe it, one could equally well imagine her, with her fabulous looks and easy manner, slotting comfortably into the dinner-party scene in West Sussex. The fact is that the outer appearance of this animated, stylish and assured woman betrays little of the inner forces that drive her.

But towards the end of the sixties, something happened. And that thing derailed her known world. ‘It’s led me down paths I never would have gone on otherwise. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to make sense of everything I experienced then, and following a totally different direction than had been planned for me. So, I’ve been integrating that experience ever since, all my life.’

*

These seven women are now rising seventy, or older. The lives of many more will figure in this book. They may be our grandmothers, or our mothers. They may be us. Their formative years intersected one of the most intense decades ever: the 1960s.

During it, these women measured their identity against such defining moments as the Lady Chatterley case, the Profumo Affair, the introduction of the birth-control pill (if you were married, that is) and the miniskirt, the Moors murders and the Abortion Act. At its end, in February 1970, five hundred women arrived in Oxford to attend the first ever National Women’s Liberation Conference, held at Ruskin College, and later that year Germaine Greer’s landmark book The Female Eunuch was published. At that time, Britain was still years away from having its first woman prime minister, working women were earning an average 25 per cent less than men and marriage had never been more popular.

If, as women, we want to understand our world today, we should surely lift the cloak of invisibility from the shoulders of the women who shaped it.