Once it was confirmed that I didn’t have a glittering academic future, my mother decided to get me onto the books of a modelling agency. We went to their headquarters so they could take a look at me and we were waiting to be seen when we overheard the receptionist answering the phone. As she was taking down all the details out loud, we realized that the caller was trying to book one of the agency’s models.
‘Quick,’ hissed my mother and dragged me out into the street, where she hailed a cab and hustled me into it. The next moment, she was telling the cabbie to take us to the address we’d just heard trip off the lips of the receptionist.
When we got there, my mother announced to the client that I was the model sent by the agency. Looking a bit dubious (I was only 15), the client gave me a coat to try on. I did my best, but he received the coat back from me impassively and invited my mother to try it on. As soon as he saw her in it, he offered her the job! I think that was when my mother realized that I wasn’t going to be a star myself, so I’d better aim for the next best thing, which was to marry one.
By that time my mother had been married to Eddie, the ship’s chef, for three years. I was 11 when she first introduced him to me and at the time I liked him. I was still quite innocent and impressionable and it never crossed my mind that he was playing up to me in the hope that I’d accept him, unlike all my mother’s other suitors, which would earn him Brownie points with my mother. I think the fact that I tolerated him where I’d rejected the others probably clinched it for Eddie where my mother was concerned.
When she told me she was getting married, I was so pleased that I immediately started imagining what I’d wear and how I would look with my hair permed in a style called ‘Italian Boy’. But the evening before her wedding, I went to show her my dress, which was white with a floral print and made of paper nylon, and found her crying on the phone to her friend, Sally Lombard.
Although I’ll never know for certain, I’m convinced that she realized she was making a mistake, that she’d only agreed to marry Eddie because she was weary of Joe’s broken promises and because life as a single parent was tough and she longed for a bit of security and support. But Joe was the man she really loved and in any case, Eddie wasn’t as nice as we thought. It was only when he was wooing my mother that he tried to win me over by being as sweet as pie to me. After the wedding, we started to see the other side of him - from sweet as pie to sour as lemons. In the end he took himself off back to sea and that was the last we heard of the Dreaded Eddie.
So when my mother met Bobby, I think she thought, ‘Here’s a decent man.’ She met his parents, Doris and Bob, who had been married for ever. She saw the stable background he’d come from and she wanted that for me. She didn’t want me to re-live her life.
My mother and I used to walk past Ilford Palais on the way to the Regal cinema and I’d look yearningly at it and think I’d never be old enough or glamorous enough to go there.
On the ceiling was a glittering, twinkling ball of mirrored mosaic, spinning and throwing off lights. The girls would put their handbags on the floor and dance round them. The cha-cha was the fashionable dance and there would be a long trail of boys and girls doing it in sync, like line-dancing. I used to think it was so adult and I longed to be part of it.
There was a Babycham bar. Babycham was the drink du jour; it was sparkly and bubbly like champagne, although actually it was made from pears. It came in tiny bottles with a Bambi on the label blowing bubbles from its mouth. You drank it from a proper champagne glass, feeling like sophistication come to life.
The Palais was packed with young people. It featured live bands like Ambrose and his Orchestra. A man called Gerry Dorsey sang with the band, but failed to achieve any great fame until he recorded a song called ‘Please Release Me’ and simultaneously had the inspired idea of changing his name to Engelbert Humperdinck.
Another of Ambrose’s singers was Kathy Kirby. She looked like Marilyn Monroe, with fabulous platinum blonde hair and glossy red lipstick and a soaring soprano voice. In the early Sixties she went on to have a huge hit called ‘Secret Love’, but in those Ilford days she and her sister, Pat, lived virtually opposite us. I’d see her in the window of her front room, wearing a satin cat suit and walking around holding the phone on a very long wire, which to me was the height of chic. Pat was quite something, too. She married Terry Clemence, who owned the Seven Kings Motor Company, and they had three daughters who all went on to make brilliant marriages, one to a viscount, the other two to lords. Not bad going for three car dealer’s girls from Essex.
I wasn’t to know then, but Pat and Terry would one day become near neighbours of Bobby and me in Chigwell. We lived it up at many a party. But that was all years into the future . . .
The big day came when I finally made it to the Palais. I’d been off school with flu since the start of the week and my mother had been trying to build up my strength with nourishing invalid breakfasts of bread in warm milk with sugar before she headed off for work. Towards the end of the week I started feeling better and concocted a plan with a school friend, Vivien Day, to go to the Palais for the lunchtime session. This started at twelve and as my mother didn’t get back from work until early evening, I knew I could get back home and into my sickbed without her being any the wiser.
That morning she treated me to the bread-and-milk as usual. Yuk. Who wants that when you’re heading for the Babycham bar? She was really worried because I only picked at it, and to tempt back my appetite left me Irish stew, my favourite, for my lunch.
The stew went untouched. Instead, Vivien and I were tremblingly shelling out 6d. each at the door of the Palais. Sixpence was the lunchtime cheap rate. In new money, it translates into the staggering sum of 2½p.
My heart was beating like a hammer as I advanced into the place that I’d dreamed of for so long. I just looked and looked. It was crowded with people of my own age, most of whom had nipped out during school lunch hour. I was particularly awestruck by the ladies’ cloakroom. The walls were panelled in rich, plum-coloured velvet. The fittings were gilt. It was lit by chandeliers. I was amazed.
When I got home, still starry-eyed, my mother was waiting for me. I’d forgotten that Thursday was her half-day. The lamb stew was thrown straight into the dustbin. As far as she was concerned, it was the most heinous thing I’d done since getting myself flashed at in Valentine’s Park. It was boarding school for me again, for all of twenty-four hours.
The Ilford Palais episode wasn’t my only covert expedition. I used to sneak up to the Two I’s with my girlfriends to see Tommy Steele, but things would hardly have started before we had to steal away at 10 pm like Cinderella. Another place we went to was Heaven and Hell, which was in a basement accessed only by some very narrow stairs. If a fire had broken out, it would have been virtually impossible to escape. But you never think of that kind of thing when you’re 15. You’re immortal.
My first boyfriend was Harry and I went out with him for six months. He was 17 and had lovely amber-coloured eyes with long eyelashes. Harry was a Mod and wore a bum-freezer jacket; he took me to haunts like the Skiffle Parlour in Ilford Lane on the back of his scooter. But that Easter I was offered a school trip to Perpignan, and my mother said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if you went on that.’ She had no time for Harry, amber eyes or not.
No sooner had she removed me from the clutches of Harry than I fell for Gilbert, the Perpignan Adonis. He played rugby for France schoolboys and was my first real crush. Cupid’s dart must have been more of a pinprick, though, because Gilbert was soon abandoned in favour of my next conquest, an actor. He can’t have been a very successful one because I’ve forgotten his name. But he had some great lines. ‘When you grow up,’ he murmured, ‘you’re