‘All right Miss Hyams?’ grins Jeff, turning back to give my exposed bare knee a quick caress. Jeff’s a Hackney lad, common ground with me that he’s exploiting to the hilt in his quest, so far thwarted, to get me into bed.
‘Yeah,’ I smile, remembering to show my girly gratitude to my host. ‘Er… nice one, Des.’
‘Next time we’ll show her some more tricks, eh Jeff?’ winks Des as he expertly handles the controls and guides the plane down towards the landing strip. Jeff looks chuffed: ‘tricks’ are his thing all right. I’m well used to the double entendre: it goes on all day, every day in the office. But I’m not the giggly, wriggly, ‘Oo, you are awful’ type. It’s usually a sarcastic retort, a sharp put down. Yet today, for some reason, I don’t bite back.
Still, for 1966, this is a pretty resourceful ploy for seduction. Getting young women up in small planes isn’t exactly commonplace. Nor is flying itself, still mostly for the comfortably off, though I’ve already had my first flight to Italy and, by the end of the decade, five million Brits will be off holidaying abroad, mainly on package-deal charter flights.
Mostly, men deploy their cars as girl bait, especially those who can afford to show off in flash Rovers, souped-up Minis, Triumph TR4s or MG MGBs. Young office girls are still some way off from buying their own cars after they pass the test, propelling themselves around town independently. And because it is still quite common for sons and daughters to live in the family home until marriage, car ownership means a guy has, at least, a love trap on wheels. Otherwise it’s outdoor sex (never a brilliant idea in Blighty’s climate, but nonetheless popular because it’s comparatively easy to find a secluded spot to carefully place the blanket) or the deserted office or shop floor – more popular then than you’d ever imagine. Or, as a final resort, there’s always the family home when unoccupied: not always achievable with other siblings hanging around.
Jeff hasn’t yet quite convinced me of his charms on this day of the aerobatic somersault. He’s an outrageous flirt around the electronics company where we both work and there’s an element of mystery around his existence that makes me initially wary (it will take several years before I learn to trust those first, crucial instincts).
He claims to live with a brother, somewhere in deepest Hertfordshire. The truth is he lives in sin in Pinner with a much older woman he’s been with for years. There’s also an illegitimate son and the boy’s mother, tucked away in Scotland, seen about once a year – a brief affair from Jeff’s national service days. Yet I don’t know about any of this when, a few months later, I willingly succumb to his persistent advances in the back of his Rover.
This relationship with Jeff, which continues until I learn the whole truth a couple of years later, brings my tally of boyfriends up to three. There’s Bryan, the on–off boyfriend, a racy, chubby advertising man I knew before leaving home in Dalston. I go to pubs, Indian or Chinese restaurants with Bryan and sleep with him, usually in his flat, albeit intermittently. And recently, I’ve regularly started to see Martin, a less dashing figure than the other two – a wiry, ambitious shop manager from Islington, a sharp dresser, almost a Mod, whom I mostly see on weekends for drives and trips to the cinema.
It sounds odd now, but our favourite drive is to get into Martin’s much-prized Mini and drive to Heathrow airport (people actually drove to airports then just to look at the planes, a popular family day out). Today’s traffic-clogged, hellish and unloved route from central London to Heathrow, the A4, was very different then, virtually empty and car-free. Sometimes we whizz down from central London to the airport in 20 minutes or so. No unending stream of planes taking off every 60 seconds at Heathrow then. Park outside, go into the quiet terminal, blissfully free of innumerable shopping opportunities and sit there, watching the BEA Comets and the Spantax Coronados. Without the crowds and bustle we know today, it is all quite… romantic. ‘I’m gonna be on one of those BOAC planes one day, when I go to live in the States,’ Martin says confidently. And he does just that a few years later.
I never do get too involved with Martin for some reason, though I admire his sparky determination to move his life along and not just accept what he’s been dished out. Our dates never go beyond the odd snogging session in the Mini. Who knows? Maybe he had another girl, maybe he hid his shyness or lack of sexual experience under his sharp-suited exterior.
Yet had anyone asked me back then, I’d have told them it was perfectly acceptable for a young single woman to go out with – and sleep with – as many men as she pleased, get drunk if she felt like it and treat life like an adventure, a quest for experience, rather than a single-minded march towards marriage and motherhood. After all, it was 1966, wasn’t it? Sex was now freely available. Thanks to the arrival of the contraceptive pill, women of all ages, single or married, no longer had to worry about the threat of unwanted pregnancy or men who couldn’t abide johnnies. (‘Like picking your nose with a boxing glove,’ as one wag described it.)
The ’60s, of course, are historically defined by the sexual revolution because once the pill was introduced (1961) and the laws on abortion changed (1967), sex became quite a different proposition, as women had real choice in such matters for the first time ever. All this sex revolution stuff was sweet music to my ears. Yet it was still a matter of time before those changes actually took effect in everyday lives: the reality across the land was not quite the way I was choosing to see it. Women’s take up of the pill in the ’60s was tiny: only one in ten were actually taking it by the end of the decade. If my conversations with girlfriends were anything to go by at that point, I was a little bit different to those I knew in being quite so generous with my favours. Some of us were bravely, blindly, diving into the freedom of choice or ‘love is free if you want it’ idea. But not half as many were going for it as one might imagine from the burble and hype around the sexual revolution and swinging London in the mid-1960s.
Today no one bats an eyelid at single women juggling lovers of either sex, having one night stands at whim or even opting for what are known, somewhat bleakly, as ‘fuck buddies’. This kind of thing was not really happening for the majority in the mid-1960s. Essentially, the sexual freedom hype, as purveyed by the newspapers of the time (let’s face it, it’s an eye-catching story, particularly when there are pictures of beautiful young women in tiny skirts to go with it), created a somewhat confusing picture of a wild, free-love society which, to a greater extent, was still the very opposite: it remained solidly class-bound and reticent in all matters sexual. Youth was going mad, but for now the older generation was having none of it.
Nonetheless, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. The influence of the maverick young leading the way, the Pied Pipers of the ’60s, is enormous: the Beatles, Stones, snappers David Bailey and Terence Donovan, models Jean Shrimpton, Celia Hammond and Twiggy, actors such as Michael Caine and Terry Stamp, and girls like Cathy McGowan, the Ready Steady Go presenter with her glossy long hair and dead straight fringe. Mostly (but not quite all) they are working class, yet they are positioned right at the heart of all the hype by dint of what they represent – youth, glamour, talent and beautiful role models for millions of youngsters.
Beyond the buzzy, happening centre of London – just a few square miles of tiny clubs, shops, an area running from posh, louche Chelsea, the King’s Road, the fabled, tiny Abingdon Road shop called Biba (which moves to Kensington High Street in 1965) and across to the West End and Soho – the swinging city runs out of steam. Out in the groovy live music venues in south-west London’s suburbs – the Bull’s Head at Barnes (jazz) or the Crawdaddy in the Station Hotel, Richmond (the bluesy launch pad for the Rolling Stones) – there had been a buzz going since the early ’60s. Yet way beyond, in the outer suburbs, the provincial cities or small towns, free love, long hair for men and dolly birds in micro minis are on their way – but have not yet arrived. Only by the time of the summer of love, 1967, the pivotal moment when the Beatles launched the groundbreaking Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and young people started piling in to cool, small, trendy venues in cities and towns like Canterbury, Bristol, Norwich, York