their backs were turned. We justified this bad behaviour by claiming to be anarchists—and in a sense we were. There was a seam of chaos running through each of our lives. I went to bed every night on our living-room sofa and felt the lack of privacy far more keenly as a teenager than I had when I was small. Without a room of my own, I found it virtually impossible to bring friends home. I was ashamed, too, of the slum conditions in which we lived and frustrated that there was no sign of any change in our circumstances. June’s mum had left her in the care of a father with whom she constantly fought and with a young brother she was often expected to look after.
In some ways, my father’s questioning, probing nature probably instilled in me the idea that rebellion was essentially a good thing. So it was somewhat ironic that I was rebelling in the one place where he wanted me to toe the line. The trouble was, I wasn’t always sure exactly what I was challenging. Like Brando’s character in The Wild One, if someone had asked me what I was rebelling against, I would probably have replied, ‘What have you got?’
Perhaps the global atmosphere of unrest in 1968—the year of revolution—was another influence. In March an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, in the heart of Mayfair, degenerated into a fierce confrontation between demonstrators and police, resulting in 200 arrests. Then, in May, a student protest in Paris escalated into riots on a much bigger scale and led to a general strike involving half the French workforce that crippled the country. Soon students and workers everywhere, from Prague to Chicago to Mexico City, were taking to the streets. June and I felt frustrated that we weren’t old enough to join them.
But we were on our own collision course with authority. One afternoon, as we made our way back to school after our lunch break, a couple of barrowboys from the market started throwing fruit at us. We fought back and a pitched battle ensued. The headmistress, hearing the commotion in the street, pulled us into her office and accused us of disgracing the school. Having delivered her dressing-down she allowed June to go but kept me back for another tirade. In an angry speech that seemed to sum up my whole school career, she berated me for wasting every opportunity I’d been offered. If I’d been bright enough to pass the Eleven-Plus, she said, I was bright enough to gain five O-Levels. After that, two A-Levels would see me into university. Moreover, the fact that I had won the Alleyn Award was a clear indication that if I worked hard I might get into Oxbridge. Didn’t I want my name on the board outside her office along with those of the cream of our old girls?
Watching her as she continued in this vein, I became suddenly and acutely aware that there was more to this diatribe than a teacher lecturing a pupil. It was someone on the other side of the class divide reminding me of my place and of how lucky I was to be at her precious school. She expected respect but understood nothing about my home life and my situation.
Insolent to the last, I said nothing.
My silence was the final insult. ‘Go on. Get out of here and waste your life,’ she said. I turned for the door and as I grasped the handle, she added viciously: ‘You’ll probably be pregnant by the time you’re sixteen.’
I turned and looked at her, outraged. Perhaps she thought I’d been flirting with the market boys but I decided against putting her right. If university meant more of this, more blind kowtowing to outdated traditions and heavy-handed authority, I wanted nothing to do with it.
Soon a new interest began to eclipse my studies: pop music. I’d been a Beatles fan since the age of eleven, having screamed through their first two films—A Hard Day’s Night and, the following year, Help!—in the stalls of the Mile End Odeon. Now, as a teenager, I was going to real concerts with live acts. I was besotted by the Walker Bothers and Donovan. I was there when Jimi Hendrix accidentally set fire to his Afro while plucking his guitar strings with his teeth on stage at the Finsbury Park Astoria. I was suffering very badly from crushes on pop stars, probably because I had no access to real boys. Having spent five years at an all-girls’ school, I didn’t yet know a single boy of my own age. That omission, however, was about to be rectified.
In the summer of 1968 I was asked to be bridesmaid at a neighbour’s wedding. For weeks I was caught up in the preparations for the big day, going off to fittings for a white satin dress with pink bolero top. I learned how to stand with a bouquet in my hand and bought a demi-hairpiece—half a head of long, straight hair stuck on a black velvet band. No one suspected it wasn’t my own, or so I believed. All of a sudden I found myself mixing with young adults and involved in social activities that felt much more grown-up than mucking about with my schoolmates. The bride and groom were in their late teens and after their marriage would be renting the flat above the groom’s mother’s. Having friends a few years older than myself with their own flat seemed incredibly sophisticated.
At the wedding rehearsal I met the best man, a young friend of the groom. Martin was just eighteen, tall and lean with long legs like Clint Eastwood’s. He seemed just as shy around me as I was in his company, and we didn’t say much to each other then, but we continued to meet regularly at the newlyweds’ flat. We flirted, exchanging furtive glances across the room.
I was nearly sixteen and for some time Aunt Carrie had been asking me, ‘When are you going to find yourself a nice boyfriend?’ It was a question my parents had never once put to me. As far as they were concerned, boys were still off limits. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for all that when you’ve finished studying,’ my father would say. So I had no intention of admitting to them that I had my eye on somebody.
I hadn’t even gone on a date with Martin when he walked me home one night from our friends’ place and kissed me at the doorstep. Straight away I knew it was love.
After that first kiss Martin and I started ‘going out’ together. Actually, we didn’t go out so much as stay in. Mostly we’d sit in his living room or bedroom playing records. The music of the time said it all. ‘It’s your thing—do what you wanna do. I can’t tell you who to sock it to,’ as the Isley Brothers put it.
In the background Northern Ireland’s social and political issues, a constant source of debate in our Protestant-Catholic home, were simmering like a pressure cooker waiting to explode. In the spring of 1969 I was pleased to see twenty-one-year-old Bernadette Devlin—dubbed ‘Fidel Castro in a mini-skirt’ by some Protestants—become Britain’s youngest-ever woman MP when she was elected by Mid-Ulster on a ‘Unity’ ticket. But that summer the Battle of the Bogside would mark the start of the ‘Troubles’ and bring the British army to the streets of Northern Ireland. For my mother the matter was clear cut: she sided instinctively with the Catholic cause. My father, however, had a foot in both camps. The IRA were the rebels, and therefore deserving of his support, but in this instance it was his government they were rebelling against, which left him in a bit of a quandary. When it came to the personal versus the political, I was learning, things were not always as straightforward as they seemed.
His primary concern in those years, however, was still the fate of the Royal Mint. Matters had been brought to a head by the government’s decision to introduce decimal currency in 1971. The changeover would require millions of new coins to be struck, and in 1967 their proposal to build a new facility at Llantrisant in South Wales was made public. The idea was to gradually phase out production at Tower Hill and transfer the entire Royal Mint to Wales—a plan that my father strongly opposed on behalf of the colleagues he represented.
As the 1960s drew to a close my friends and I moved on from mini-skirts and tight boots to kaftans and sandals. I bought Indian bells to wear about my neck from a shop called Indiacraft in Tottenham Court Road and finally gave up on the straightening tongs: curls and frizz were fashionable now, and it was a relief to be able to leave my hair to do its own thing. I would wander around the Biba store in Kensington High Street, at that time an art-nouveau doll’s house filled with clothes, make-up and perfume. I badly wanted to be different and original but so did everyone else, which meant we all wandered around Biba and ended up looking very much the same.
When Martin managed to get tickets for us to see Arthur Brown, whose single ‘Fire’ had become an alternative hit, I wore black, accessorised by my demi-hairpiece and plenty of startling dark eye shadow—the appropriate style of dress, I felt, for witnessing Arthur erupting on to the