White Boots & Miniskirts - A True Story of Life in the Swinging Sixties. Jacky Hyams

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СКАЧАТЬ a body goes into shock at undergoing such a process while wide awake. You might bleed to death afterwards and die. Today, if placed in such a situation, I’d be absolutely terrified, shaking, practically hysterical. It would probably be nigh impossible to treat me. I’m well aware of the complexities of the human body, the possibilities of what might happen at the hands of an inefficient practitioner. Today, I don’t trust most doctors unless I have real confidence in their manner, their skills. I am acutely nervous of all forms of physical intervention. Even a visit to the dentist is something to be avoided.

      Oh, the invincibility of youth! No true sense of your own mortality, your human frailty. The young do ridiculously stupid, reckless things because they have no anticipation of pain. So that day, in that big room in Ealing, I blindly place myself at the mercy of these two individuals, an eastern European couple whom I later understand must have fled their own country and Communism after the political upheavals of the 1950s. He’s probably a qualified doctor there, but how he has arrived at this situation, dodging the law and risking much, is open to question. Probably this is a better bet than the alternative: a life without freedom behind the grim iron curtain.

      I obediently do what I’m told – get up on the table, submit to the awful stirrups. There is no bad, wrenching pain, just acute discomfort which is endurable when I look away, stare at anything, rather than acknowledge the reality of the cold surgical instruments, the procedure itself. There’s a brief, jolting, sharp injection, a local anaesthetic before it all starts. The woman is amazingly professional, quietly chatting to me, asking me questions about my life, distracting my thoughts from what the doctor is doing to my body. I know it’s all going just fine because she keeps reminding me, briefly, in that soothing way of practised, caring medics. Until, after about 20 or so minutes, though it could well have been longer, the man is telling me, ‘It’s OK. Nearly over.’ Then, a few minutes later: ‘You’re not pregnant any more.’ How well he understood it all.

      This couple, whatever their story, are knowledgeable and confident. After I’ve stepped down somewhat shakily from the table, dressed and been handed a cup of something warm, the man hands me some painkillers – which I never take – and explains what to do when I get home and what to expect (which proves to be nothing dramatic). He also tells me to ensure I have a cervical smear test done every year, something I’ve never heard of before. ‘You must do this test each year, just in case there are any problems,’ he explains. He doesn’t use the word ‘cancer’. Such information is not widely understood by women at this time: newspapers and magazines give out some information on health and medicine, but it’s nothing like the plethora of detail and useful, valuable advice on every topic under the sun that we can access today. Or the abundance of shock-horror, ‘This could be happening to you,’ scary detail we are also exposed to now.

      I nod, grateful, relieved beyond belief that it is done. I’m out of trouble. I’ve got through this. My life can go on as before. Then he offers to drive me back to north London. He ushers me into the back seat of his dark-blue Jaguar, which would have cost around £1,800 then. The average worker in the mid-1960s lived on around £1,200 a year. This was surely a lucrative business.

      At the end of that same year, 1967, the abortion bill passes through Parliament, making it legal in the UK for up to 28 weeks gestation. The Act comes into effect in April 1968. Abortion, by a registered practitioner, then becomes free in England via the NHS. Perhaps people such as the clued-up couple knew this was coming and so took ever-greater risks while they could. There would have been plenty of demand for their unadvertised services, though the £80 might have been a stumbling block for many, given the average wage packet.

      How do I feel afterwards? Pretty shaky. Though there are no dramatic physical after-effects. No one in the flat knows my secret – my trip down the Central line – and I haven’t told my mother, Molly. Yet emotionally, of course, I am not in a good place: weepy for weeks, strangely quiet, no interest at all in forays to the clubs of the West End, dancing, being chatted up. I have some sort of post-termination blues. Consciously, I do not want a baby. Ever. But my hormones, over which I have no control, have been gearing up for a different story.

      Perhaps because of this, I’m still emotionally fixated on Bryan, even though I know this drama and my duplicity presages the end of whatever relationship we have. Pretty tragic, really. He does ring briefly after a day or so, just to check I’m OK. But he doesn’t ask to see me, though I’m vulnerable enough to utter those pathetic words: ‘But when will I see you…?’ Nah. Too busy. Going abroad for work. Will call. That call does not come.

      I do tell Jeff exactly what has happened. The look on his face – sheer relief he hasn’t even been required to get remotely involved – says it all. He’s had a blindingly lucky escape. Had I been a different sort of girl, one who wants a baby, married or not, he’d have been in a right pickle. (The more I know Jeff, the more the details of his complicated private life puzzle yet elude me: I do not yet know he already has one illegitimate child. That he never sees. So he must have been exceptionally thankful that it hadn’t happened again.) He’s been irresponsible, but so have I, juggling two boyfriends in this way. My view is: I can’t really blame him for all this. He represents fun, laughter – and hot sex. But the thing is, I’ve known Bryan the Bastard over quite a long period of time. My attachment to him is born of familiarity. He wasn’t the first lover, technically speaking. But he was the first man I’d had sex with on a regular basis. Emotionally, there was bound to be some sort of attachment.

      After a few months, I’m more or less back to my normal self. And I start to understand how different Jeff is from my previous lover, simply because he’s so much more skilled in bed. I’m an all too willing pupil, though he’s very consistent when it comes to using condoms. Bryan wasn’t even in the same league as Jeff, who knows by a combination of strong instinct and experience what turns a woman on. Foreplay, beyond the initial lunge for my bra strap and a swift nibble, was a waste of time to Bryan (not that he’s alone in this, as I will discover in time). And he always needed booze or marijuana before sex.

      His ad agency world of top-level contacts did give him access to the exclusive, inner circle of swinging London. He hung out in trendy places where the Beatles went, such as the Ad Lib Club in Leicester Square (though he never took me). Or frequented tiny exclusive clubs like the Scotch of St James or The Bag (The Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street, where, legend has it, Linda first hooked Beatle Paul). Once, in the very early days of our affair, Bryan escorted me to a party in an enormous, totally intimidating house in its own grounds in grandest Surrey, where Charlie Watts of the Stones was a revered if somewhat silent guest. At the time, I was both wildly impressed and totally overawed at Bryan’s connections. But that one-off party made it very clear to me: Bryan kept his worlds in totally separate compartments.

      Jeff – much better-looking, 6ft 2ins tall, blond hair, hard muscled body, oozing sexual charisma – is a far less sophisticated man, quite working class. Think Michael Caine as the chauffeur lothario in Alfie – the movie of 1966 that daringly highlighted the emerging sexual freedoms of the era and the whole abortion dilemma in a scary way never seen on screen before – and you’d be fairly close to Jeff’s style. He’s more a quick half in the pub, 1/6d pie and chips man, suits from Austin Reed (purchased on an HP account), £5 a week, not much of a drinker, more of an action man, in his mind at least. He sees himself clearly in bold letters ‘A Man Born to Shag as Many Women as Possible’.

      At this point I haven’t quite worked it all out, though soon I will see everything more clearly. Eventually, the whole post-abortion emotional mess in my head starts to recede. With hindsight, I was incredibly resilient. Of course, I didn’t manage to brush it all off completely. I wasn’t that insensitive nor was I in any doubt that I’d deployed deceit of a questionable order. So any guilt I felt was around that, not around ending the pregnancy. But you do tend to bounce back quite quickly at that stage of life, especially if your personal default setting is not to take on responsibility – of any kind.

      Funnily СКАЧАТЬ