turning in a different way. From the dodgem cars and waltzers in the fairground at Victoria Park a new music was sounding. It, too, had a different beat—created not by lush orchestral strings but picked out on guitars and rough harmonicas —a Mersey beat. In the wider world that year was notable for a series of salacious scandals, including the sensational divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. Every evening during the television news I would hear my parents complaining in hushed tones about upperclass depravity or ministerial falls from grace. Something called ‘the Profumo affair’ was on everyone’s lips. John Profumo, a respected Tory cabinet minister with a film-star wife, had been forced to resign after being caught in a web of intrigue involving call-girls and a Russian spy. The details went over my head but there seemed to be a general feeling in the air that the establishment was rocking on its heels and an old, hidebound way of life was being overturned.
At school a new wave of forward-thinking and politically motivated teachers had been spearheaded by the arrival of a young, innovative headmaster, Mr Kent, who, at the end of that year, led a special assembly to mourn the death of American President Kennedy, giving a memorable speech celebrating democracy and equality.
Soon another member of staff appeared, wearing long hair and a black PVC raincoat. Mr Rogers had been trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and had come to teach us ‘acting’. With him came a lot of big wooden boxes, open on one side, which could be fitted together in various combinations of shape and size to form a stage. Instead of whacking us with a slipper, he prompted us to explore it. We leaped on to it, pretending to be all manner of things—trees, birds, angry, sorry, sad.
One afternoon Mr Rogers took four of us to one side and introduced us to Shakespeare. Christine Bolton, Pat Pask, Sharon Warren and I were then ten years old, but after a few weeks’ coaching we were also word-perfect for the Witches’ scenes in Macbeth. A month later we were confidently applying panstick make-up, cloaks, wigs and talons and stepping out on to the stage at Aldgate’s Toynbee Theatre, waiting for the curtains to open and the lights to go up.
John Profumo, the disgraced government minister, was atoning for his sins by cleaning toilets in the same building. Perhaps he even watched the Shakespeare Festival in which we played our parts.
Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble…
As Hecate I had a thirty-five line speech but after Mr Rogers’s expert coaching, I didn’t forget a word. The rest of our class, together with proud teachers and parents, boomed applause from the stalls.
On the Central Line train home to Mile End, my father looked on as my classmates carried my broomstick for me. He smiled across at me, full of pride, having had no idea we had even been rehearsing, let alone would be performing in a proper theatre. A few weeks later, coming home with my dad from the Bridge House one evening, my mother flung her patent leather handbag on the sofa.
‘Do you have to keep going on?’ she snapped. ‘People go out for a quiet drink—they don’t want to keep hearing about “my kid this and my kid that”.’
My father had been bragging again, boring pub regulars not just with his account of the theatre production but with news that I had now passed the Eleven-Plus, one of only two girls in my class to do so.
This was the exam that would separate me from the friends I had grown up with, scattering us in different directions. After the summer holidays I would be moving on to the Central Foundation School for Girls in Spital Square, on the edge of the City. My friends would be attending secondary moderns where, in 1964, academic subjects were superseded by lessons designed to prepare them for the kind of life it was assumed working-class girls would go on to lead. If they showed the aptitude for it, they learned shorthand and typing. If not, they had classes in something called ‘layette’. I hadn’t the faintest idea what this was—it sounded to me like the name of some French perfume—until it was explained to me that it was guidance for what to buy and make for your baby. Girls as young as fifteen years old filled exercise books with notes on essential babycare items and were instructed how to knit and sew everything from baby blankets to burp cloths.
The boys, too, were set on diverging paths. Those who passed the Eleven-Plus would go on to a new local grammar school while those who failed might learn woodwork at a secondary modern or technical college.
After term ended, my friends and I took a trip on the number 8 bus to the West End. With pocket money given to me by my dad, I paid for us to see Zulu, with Michael Caine, on a huge cinema screen in Piccadilly. Afterwards, we headed to Trafalgar Square where we fed the pigeons, took farewell photos of one other and tried to make sense of the message Mr Rogers had written in each of our autograph books: ‘Keep to the Coven’.
Although we promised to stay in touch, deep down we all knew, even then, that it wasn’t going to happen. We went home on the bus together and after we’d said our goodbyes I lingered a moment at the bus stop, knowing I’d be returning to it soon. I would be taking the number 8 out of the East End every day to my new school, while my friends remained behind. But riding with me would be my father’s expectations. Could I possibly ever live up to them?
On the heels of my Eleven-Plus result had come news of another exam I’d sat. I had passed that one, too, and if my father was pleased as Punch that I had gained a place at a grammar school, this was the icing on the cake. I had been awarded a bursary that would fund my school uniform until the day I left. The Alleyn Award hadn’t been won for years, but I’d done it.
When the bursary came through my mum and I travelled up to the City to buy my uniform, which could only be purchased from Gamage’s department store at 116—128 Holborn. Once known as the people’s popular emporium, Gamage’s no longer exists—it closed its doors in the 1970s—but at one time it had been among London’s best-known stores. It had sold everything from picnic baskets to magic tricks to motoring accessories, as well as boasting an international shipping service that had, in its glory days, dispatched goods ‘throughout the empire’. Much loved by small boys for its seemingly endless array of model trains, aeroplanes, bicycles and ‘scholar’s microscopes’, it had become the official supplier of uniforms to the Boy Scout movement. In 1964, it also stocked every item on the exhaustive list we had received from the Central Foundation School for Girls, or CFS, as it was known.
In the girlswear department, a smart, well-spoken lady hurried across to attend to us. I sensed my mother’s unease. Perhaps she would have been happier if the tables had been turned and she had been serving this woman a cup of coffee in her Kardomah overall. She reacted by adopting a new voice for the afternoon, one more fitting to her new station as respected customer.
We handed our list to the assistant, who led us to various rails and stacked shelves, selecting bottle-green gymslips and skirts, green-and-red-striped ties, gingham summer dresses, starched white shirts and sports gear suitable for hockey and something called lacrosse. I stepped out of changing cubicles looking, and feeling, uncomfortable in stiff-collared blouses. My mother checked the price of each item. It was all shockingly expensive. Stunned by the mounting subtotal, she started to panic, insisting on large sizes I could grow into, until the sales assistant reminded her as tactfully as she could that since the bursary paid for a full six years there was no need to economise. I heaved a sigh of relief. I had no intention of starting a new school swamped in voluminous skirts when the mini was all the rage.
We stepped out into sunshine, laden with bags. The Kardomah coffee house was only a few bus stops along the road and my mum couldn’t resist dropping in so the Saturday waitresses could see where we had been. ‘Julie’s grammar school uniform,’ she said proudly, raising a Gamage’s bag.
There was more to be done when we got the uniform home. Every item had to have its own name tag. My mother considered the instruction ruefully, then went out to the market and bought iron-on labels. Life was too short for a working woman to sew.
Seven years before, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had told us all we ‘had never had it so good’, but in the East End, at least, we were only just beginning to agree with him. By 1964, ‘Live now, pay later’ was the slogan of the day. No one seemed to fear hirepurchase agreements any more and labour-saving goods were at the top