We rarely bought a record. We played them several times and then slipped them back into their sleeves and returned them to the spotty boy.
'Sorry, we can't quite make up our minds,' we'd chorus, and saunter out.
Up until January 1960 I didn't even have a record player so it would have been a pointless purchase anyway. We had my grandparents' gramophone, one of those old-fashioned wind-up machines with a horn, but it wouldn't play modern 45 records. We had a pile of fragile 78s, that shattered if you dropped them, and I had my childhood Mandy Miller records, 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic', 'Doing the Lambeth Walk', and some Victor Silvester dance music. They weren't really worth the effort of strenuous handle-winding. But on 9 January everything changed.
I did the shopping with Dad and you'll never guess what we bought! A RECORD PLAYER! It had previously been £28 but had been marked down to £16. It is an automatic kind and plays beautifully. We bought 'Travelling Light' by Cliff Richard and Dad chose a Mantovani long player. It sounds very square but actually it is quite good with some nice tunes like 'Tammy', 'Que Sera Sera', 'Around the World in 80 Days'. I've been playing them, and all our old 78 records, all the afternoon.
I know, I know – Cliff Richard! But this wasn't the elderly Christian Cliff, this was when he was young and wild, with sideburns and tousled hair, wearing white teddy-boy jackets and tight black drainpipe trousers, very much an English Elvis, though he was never really as raunchy as Presley. I remember Celia, a lovely gentle girl in my class who was very into pop music. Her mother was too, surprisingly.
'My mum says she'd like to put Cliff to bed and tuck him up tight and give him a goodnight kiss – and she'd like to put Elvis to bed and get in beside him!' said Celia, chuckling.
Celia knew the words to every single pop song and would sometimes obligingly write them out for me in her beautiful neat handwriting. I would solemnly learn every single bam-a-wham-bam and doobie-doobie-do and also try hard to copy Celia's stylish script. There are passages in my diary where I'm trying out different styles, and it's clear when I'm doing my best to copy Celia.
I saved up my pocket money to buy another record the very next week: Michael Holliday's 'Starry Eyed'. It was currently Carol's favourite song and so we could do a duet together, though neither of us could sing to save our lives.
I didn't buy another record until March, when I decided on the theme tune from A Summer Place, a very sugary recording, all swirly violins, but I declared it 'lovely'. I had no musical taste whatsoever at fourteen. I'm astonished to see I next bought a Max Bygraves record, 'Fings Ain't Wot They Used t'Be'. I can hardly bear to write those words on the page!
By August I was staying up late on Saturday nights listening to David Jacobs's Pick of the Pops, and hearing 'Tell Laura I Love Her' by Ricky Valance for the first time. I adored 'Tell Laura'. It was like a modern ballad poem, a tragic sentimental song about a boy called Tommy trying to win a stockcar race in order to buy his girl a diamond ring. Each verse had a chorus of 'Tell Laura I love her' – and of course Tommy's dying words from his wrecked car were 'Tell Laura I love her'. I didn't take the song seriously but loved singing it over and over again in a lugubrious voice until Biddy screamed at me to stop that stupid row now.
Thank goodness my taste developed a little over the next year – in the summer of 1961 I discovered traditional jazz. I fell in love with all the members of the Temperance Seven, a stylish crowd of ex-art students who dressed in Edwardian costume. 'Whispering' Paul McDowell sang through a horn to make an authentic tinny sound. It was the sort of music my grandparents must once have played on their wind-up gramophone, but it seemed mint-new and marvellous to me: 'I bought Pasadena, it's an absolutely fab record and I've now played it at least 50 times.'
I went to see the Temperance Seven at Surbiton Assembly Rooms, and when I was sixteen I used to go up to London to various jazz cafés in Soho with a boyfriend. That was way in the future though. I might manage to just about pass for sixteen when I wanted to get into an A film at the cinema – but I certainly didn't act it.
6
Films
I went to so many films – most of them pretty dire too! There were lots of cinemas in Kingston then, but each only had one screen. The Granada and the Regal and the Empire were all perfectly respectable, but Kingston Kinema was a total fleapit. It showed arty, less mainstream films, and we sometimes went there too, though we weren't supposed to.
The Kinema attracted Dirty Old Men – far dirtier than the ones who hung around Maxwells music shop. The pitch-black of the Kinema made them bold. They'd shuffle along the empty rows and sit right next to you. You'd strain as far away from them as possible, staring up at the screen, heart thumping. You'd keep telling yourself it was going to be fine, he wouldn't do anything, but then a clammy hand, repulsive as a jellyfish, would slither onto your knee. You'd jerk your knee away from it, trembling, but you knew that hand would come back. Sometimes it changed into a crab and tried to scuttle underneath your skirt. Then at long long last this would galvanize you into action and you'd grab your friend and sidle down the row away from him.
Why on earth did we put up with this? Why didn't we complain loudly and go and find an usherette? We were all as hopeless as each other – Carol, Chris, all my other friends: we sat paralysed with shame and fear while these hateful men dabbed at us disgustingly. It was as if we'd done something bad and embarrassing. We might joke about it afterwards, even getting fits of the giggles, but at the time it was terrifying.
So why did we go to the Kinema? Well, we wanted to see those arty movies, a lot of them X-rated. They would probably be considered very bland kids' stuff nowadays. We were so totally innocent, even a Cliff Richard film could shock us. We all wanted to see his new film, Expresso Bongo, because it was set in Soho where all the strip joints were.
Friday 22 January
In the evening I went to see 'Expresso Bongo' with Carol at the Regal. We saw tons of girls from school there, all dressed up pretending to be sixteen. Jill, Susan and Joyce were there in the 'ninepennies' and Jill told me afterwards that she had seen Peter there and he had smiled at her. She also said that Joyce had asked Susan and her to club together and buy some cigarettes. They reluctantly agreed, but Susan wouldn't smoke any. Jill had three and wasn't very impressed, but Joyce finished the lot off! I think she's only 13!
P.S. 'Expresso Bongo' was very good.
I was too shy to write in my diary about the astonishing scene set in a Soho club where you saw topless showgirls. There was an audible gasp from the cinema audience as this line of girls jiggled across the screen. They weren't even entirely topless: they had little stars in pertinent places, presumably stuck on. It must have been pretty painful removing them each night.
You didn't get topless models in newspapers in 1960, not the papers we had at home anyway. You didn't get girly magazines openly displayed on newsagents' shelves either. The only bare breasts I'd ever seen were on African women in the National Geographic magazine. Those Expresso Bongo girls made a big impression on all of us. We talked about them excitedly at school the next morning.
Mostly our film-going was a lot less adventurous. I seemed very easy to please. On Monday 4 January I went to see Tommy Steele in Tommy the Toreador and pronounced this film 'very good.' The next day I saw Norman Wisdom in Follow a Star, which I said was 'very funny'. You would have to tie me to my seat to get me to watch either film now.
Carol and I went to the pictures two or three times a week in the holidays. We went after school too, sometimes with Sue and Cherry. They lived in Kingston too. Sue literally lived next door to me, at number eleven Cumberland House, where we'd both lived since we were six.
This was 'a better class of council estate', according to my mother – and she did her level best to bring me up a better class of child. Sue's mother, Nancy, was equally ambitious for her daughter. No other children in Cumberland House had such white socks and blouses, such polished brown sandals, such expensive school satchels.
/>
Sue and Nancy had heated arguments nowadays. Nancy wouldn't let Sue use make-up and still liked her to wear smocked Viyella dresses with long blue socks and flat shoes, whereas we were all allowed lipstick and eyeshadow, nylons and little heels. Sue secretly used her birthday money on her own lipstick and nylons and spent two minutes in the ladies' toilets each time she went out, turning herself into a teenager.
Cherry lived in a flat too, but it was part of a very large house further down the road. When she was a little girl she'd had a pageboy haircut, but now she had a blonde ponytail that bounced as she walked. Cherry was part of a different teenage world altogether. She went riding, she joined a tennis club, she sang in amateur Gilbert and Sullivan productions. (Biddy perversely sneered at these harmless middle-class hobbies.)
I'd been friends with Sue and Cherry when we were children but they'd gone to different secondary schools. However, now we were in the third year (Year Nine), Coombe had expanded and Sue and Cherry started going there too.
Thursday 4 February
After school I went to the pictures with Sue and Cherry. Carol still has a chill. It was 'Please Turn Over', and all three of us enjoyed it very much. Julia Lockwood was in it who I quite like. In the film she wrote a book called 'Naked Revolt' about her suburban family, with some shocking results. It showed you excerpts from the book, and I would have given anything to have been able to read it. The other film was good too; it was called 'The Desperate Man'. Conrad Phillips (William Tell) was in it, and also a very attractive girl called Jill Ireland.
You got good value for money going to the pictures in 1960. There were always two films, the main feature film and then a shorter film, usually a thriller. In between you got Pathé News, introduced by a noisy cockerel, and a ten-minute documentary called Look at Life. If you had nothing else to do, you could sit there in your red plush seat watching the entire programme all over again. You'd only have to get up when they played the National Anthem. It sounds so strange now, but they truly did play 'God Save the Queen' after every cinema performance, and everyone stood to attention, looking solemn.
Thursday 11 February
After school I dashed home and changed, slapped some powder and lipstick on my face, called for Sue, and then we went to the flicks. We met Carol there and saw 'A Summer Place' with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. It was quite good, but a little too dramatic. Everyone seemed to have a love affair with someone else, and crept hand in hand to the boat house, beach or park respectively. It was rather like a women's magazine story, taking you to the bedroom door and no further.
I don't think I knew much about what happened behind the bedroom door at fourteen, but I wanted to sound sophisticated.
I nearly always went to the pictures with my friends. Harry had taken me when I was a little girl but we didn't go anywhere together now. I did occasionally go with Biddy:
Saturday 13 February
Mum said she wanted to see the film 'The Reluctant Debutante' so we went together. On the way we went into the Bentalls' record department. I saw P. Wilson and Y. McCarthy in turquoise duffel coats, extremely tight jeans and cha-cha shoes being cuddled by a group of horrible spotty teddy boys. 'The Reluctant Debutante' was very good, and Mum and I also enjoyed the other film 'Watusi' very much.
Oh dear, it would have been so much cooler to be wearing a duffel coat and tight jeans and cuddling a teddy boy rather than going to the cinema with my mum.
The following Saturday I 'went to see "Pillow Talk" with Carol and Sue'. Pillow Talk sounds sophisticated, but it was a frothy comedy. I vastly preferred the next film I saw, The Nun's Story, with Audrey Hepburn. Audrey made thousands of girls decide they wanted to be nuns, although sadly no real nun ever looked so ethereally exquisite in her veil and wimple. I fell in love with Audrey like everyone else, but the nun's vow of obedience appalled me.
Monday 22 February
In the evening I met Carol and we went to see 'The Nun's Story'. It was a really wonderful film, one of the best I've seen. It showed you what a nun's life is really like. I know one thing, and that is that I would never make a good nun, not even a makeshift one. Never, never could I have such sheer obedience; if I think I am right I cannot obey humbly but I must argue my point. But humility is the quality I lack most. If anyone says anything humiliating to me, something inside me is hurt and angry and tells me to hit back at that person with cutting remarks. Besides, I could not bear a life minus men and children.
I saw delicious melodramas like Conspiracy of Hearts with Carol – but occasionally I went to a comedy with Chris. We saw Please Don't Eat the Daisies – and sang 'Please, please, don't eat the daisies' up and down Coombe's corridors for weeks afterwards. We had a lovely cosy day when we went to see School for Scoundrels.
Thursday 19 May
I went home with Chris at dinner time. It was raining, and we had to wait for 4 buses. When we eventually got to the Keepings' we were absolutely drenched. For dinner we had liver, baked beans, cauliflower and new potatoes; then rhubarb and evaporated milk! Very nice! Then we did our maths together, and then caught the train to Kingston, and saw 'School for Scoundrels'. It was very funny, but Chris and I laughed far more at the other film which was meant to be VERY SERIOUS. The main character was called Julian Caesar, his best friend Marc Antony, another friend Brutus, his girlfriend Portia, and his enemy Cassius. How daft.
It could well have been a brilliant contemporary reworking of Shakespeare but clearly it didn't work for us! We must have infuriated everyone sitting near us, going giggle giggle giggle, but only half the audience seemed interested in watching the film:
Sitting in front of us were these girls and teds snogging (if you'll pardon the vulgar expression) and Chris and I are positive that one of them (the one on the end without a boy) was Jennifer D!
Oh dear, how awful to be the one on the end without a boy!
I wasn't a particularly religious girl, but I adored the film The Ten Commandments. In an age long before videos and DVDs it was a rare treat to find a film repeated after its original release. I saw The Ten Commandments was on again at the cinema and begged Carol to go with me.
It was extremely long, but we watched enraptured. It was filmed very solemnly, with the actors frequently standing still as if in a tableau, gesturing bizarrely, but we soon got used to that. It was very stirring when they were building the pyramids and Moses saved the old woman – she's actually his real mother but he didn't know this.
The colours of The Ten Commandments were so rich and beautiful and the miracles themselves seemed wondrous. In our age of computer-generated trickery the parting of the Red Sea would probably seem pretty pathetic – but I held my breath when Charlton Heston made his way through those waves. The whole cinema whispered, 'How did they do that?'
The film was about the very good and the very bad – and I'm afraid I was mostly on the bad guy's side. I thought irreverently that the film's Voice of God was a little like the voice of the Wizard of Oz. I quite liked Charlton Heston as Moses but I vastly preferred his enemy, Yul Brynner, playing bald, sexy Rameses, who was unhappily married to dark, scheming Nefertiri. She was one hundred per cent a baddie, a callous murderer, but Anne Baxter, who played her, was so beautiful that I thought her wonderful. I didn't want to be blonde Susan Wooldridge any more. I wanted to be dark and sultry with long shiny black hair and crimson lips.
I went to some classic adaptations with the wrong attitude entirely. Carol and I hadn't read D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (and Lady Chatterley's Lover hadn't even been published yet) but we thought it would be pretty sexy. We watched the film restlessly and grew impatient at the end.
'What a swizzle. It wasn't a bit sexy,' I said. 'I don't think much of D. H. Lawrence.'
But sometimes these adaptations worked wonders.
Saturday 23 July
In the afternoon I went to the flicks again, this time with Sue, and saw 'Wuthering Heights', on at the Kinema. It was very good, and at the end I could hear Sue sniffl
ing away as if her heart was broken. I think I will read the book, as it is one of the classics Miss Pierce told us to read.
I read it that summer, waking up early every morning and reading for hours until I reached that beautiful last paragraph.
7
Books
I read voraciously right through my teens. I didn't read teenage books: there were no such things in those days. Well, there was a small shelf in the library labelled TEENAGE BOOKS, but they were dull-as-ditchwater career books with ridiculous titles like Donald is a Dentist and Vera is a Vet. Donald and Vera were barely characterized and there was no plot whatsoever. Each book was a dreary account of how to pursue the relevant career. I didn't want to give people fillings or spay cats so I left them gathering dust on the shelf. (I might have been tempted by Jacky is a Journalist.)
I read children's books up to the age of eleven or so and then I switched to adult books. I didn't just read classics like Wuthering Heights, of course. I read all sorts of books – some trashy, some tremendous, some wildly unsuitable.
I spent most of my pocket money on paperbacks and borrowed three books from the library every week, sometimes twice a week. If I was particularly interested or irritated by a book I wrote about it in my diary, but sadly I didn't record every book I read. That would have been like writing 'Today I brushed my teeth with Colgate toothpaste', something I simply took for granted as part of my daily life.
I had various favourite books and I read these again and again. I kept my bright pink Pan paperback of The Diary of Anne Frank on my bedside table, with a carefully cut-out photograph of Anne pinned above my bed. The Holocaust had happened less than twenty years before. I could barely take it in. It seemed so unbelievably terrible that Anne and six million others had lost their lives because they were Jews.