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William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017 Copyright © Juliet Gardiner 2017 Cover photograph by Dave Taylor Cover design by Jack Smyth Extract from ‘Having a Baby’ from Collected Poems by Allan Ahlberg (Puffin, 2008). Copyright © Allan Ahlberg, 2008. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House UK. ‘Diana’ Words and Music by Paul Anka © 1957, reproduced by permission from Pamco Music Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD. Juliet Gardiner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library While every effort has been made to trace owners of copyright material produced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007489190 Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780007489183 Version: 2018-05-17 For Rudi and Sammy Contents
A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and bottle-green stockings stood shivering in the vaulted booking hall of Bristol Temple Meads station looking uncertainly around her. It was 1 January 1960 and the woman was me. I was sixteen years old, and, using the money I had earned from delivering letters for the Post Office during the holidays (£8 5s.) and writing ‘amusing’ anecdotes to the letters page of Woman’s Realm, plus a Christmas present of a £2 postal order, I had run away from home. It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous in changing Britain’s history, politically, economically, socially and culturally. Although of course I could not have foreseen that, nevertheless it seemed a suitably significant date on which to start a new life; to leave behind the pebble-dashed house in the home counties, turn my back on the minor girls’ public school and be a grown-up at last: independent, poised to achieve the freedom for which I had yearned for so long. It was not, predictably, that simple. Progress over the next few years would be bumpy, interrupted, contradictory, frustrating. Dependencies transferred rather than jettisoned. But the world changed around me, as it did for most women in Britain – and that is the story I want to tell. It is not only or entirely my story; not a straightforward chronological account of women’s history, nor a history, disquisition, celebration or critique of feminism. Rather it is a series of reflections or meditations on some of the expectations and experiences that I, like many other women in Britain, had, or could have had, during the middle years of the twentieth century. I am a historian, and I was there, and that is what this book is about. It has no claims to be comprehensive: some important aspects of the period will be left out, or touched on only briefly; others might seem peripheral or wilfully quirky, but to me they are emblematic of various aspects of women’s lives and the perception of these lives both by the women themselves and by society more
