My Secret Diary Read online

'Oh no, really!'

  'I insist!'

  I dithered, nibbling my lip. I couldn't think clearly. Alarm bells were ringing in my head. Biddy had drummed it into me enough times: Never get into a car with a strange man! But he seemed such a nice kind strange man, and I was worried about hurting his feelings.

  I tried to wriggle out of his suggestion tactfully.

  'My mum isn't at home,' I said. 'So you won't be able to explain to her. I'll tell her when she gets home from work. I promise I'll explain it was all my fault.'

  I went to pick up my satchel. I used the aching arm and nearly dropped it. I tried to hurry away, but the aching leg made me limp.

  'You are hurt, I'm sure you are,' he said. 'Where does your mother work? I'm driving you there straight away, and then I'll drive you both to the hospital.'

  I didn't have the strength for any more arguing. I let him help me into his car. Biddy's workplace, Prince Machines, was only five minutes' drive away. If he drove fast in the wrong direction, intent on abducting me, then I'd simply have to fling open the car door and hurl myself out. I'd survived one car accident, so hopefully I'd survive a second.

  Yes, I know. I was mad. Don't anyone ever get in a car with a stranger under any circumstances whatsoever.

  However, my stranger proved to be a perfect gentleman, parking the car in the driveway of Prince Machines, supporting me under the arm, carrying my satchel on his own back. Biddy looked out of the office window and saw us approaching.

  She shot out of the office and came charging up to us. 'Jac? What's happened? Who's this? Are you all right?'

  'This is my mum,' I said unnecessarily.

  The stranger explained, anxiously asserting again that it really wasn't his fault.

  Biddy didn't doubt him. 'You're so hopeless, Jac! Haven't I told you to look where you're going? You were daydreaming, weren't you? When will you learn?'

  I hung my head while Biddy ranted.

  'Still, thank goodness you're all right,' she said finally, giving me a quick hug.

  'Well, I'm not quite sure she is all right,' said my rescuer. 'I think she was unconscious for a minute or two. She seems pretty shaken up. I'm very happy to drive you to hospital.'

  'Oh, for goodness' sake, she's fine. There's no need whatsoever,' said Biddy. 'Who wants to hang around the hospital for hours?'

  Biddy had once worked there delivering newspapers to patients and had a healthy contempt for the place. She always swore she'd never set foot in the hospital even if she was dying.

  She had more authority than me and sent the stranger on his way. He was kind enough to pop back the following day with the biggest box of chocolates I'd ever seen in my life. I'd never been given so much as a half-pound of Cadbury's Milk Tray before. I lolled on my bed in my baby-doll pyjamas all weekend with my giant box beside me. I'd seen pictures of big-busted film starlets lounging on satin sheets eating chocolates. I pretended I was a film star too. I can't have looked very beguiling: I had one arm in a sling and one leg was black with bruises from my thigh down to my toes.

  Biddy had had to drag me up to the dreaded hospital after all. My aching arm became so painful I couldn't pick anything up and my bad leg darkened dramatically. We spent endless hours waiting for someone to tell us that I'd sprained my arm badly and bruised my leg.

  'As if that wasn't blooming obvious,' Biddy muttered.

  At least it got me out of PE at school for the next couple of weeks, so I didn't have to change into the ghastly aertex shirt and green divided shorts.

  I cared passionately about clothes, but most of the time I was stuck wearing my school uniform. The winter uniform wasn't too terrible: white shirts, green and yellow ties, plain grey skirts and grey V-necked sweaters. We had to wear hideous grey gabardine raincoats, and berets or bowler-type hats with green and yellow ribbon round the brim. Earnest girls wore the hats, cool girls wore berets.

  We had to wear white or grey socks or pale stockings kept up with a suspender belt or a 'roll-on'. Oh dear, underwear was so not sexy in 1960! Those roll-ons were hilarious. They weren't as armour-plated as the pink corsets our grannies wore, but they were still pretty fearsome garments. You stepped into them and then yanked them up over your hips as best you could, wiggling and tugging and cursing. It was even more of a performance getting out of them at the end of the day. I'm sure that's why so many girls never went further than chastely kissing their boyfriends. You'd die rather than struggle out of your roll-on in front of anyone. They had two suspenders on either side to keep up your stockings. Nylons took a sizeable chunk of pocket money so we mostly wore old laddered ones to school. We stopped the ladders running with dabs of pink nail varnish, so everyone looked as if they had measles on their legs.

  We had to wear clunky brown Clarks shoes – an outdoor and an indoor pair – though some of the older girls wore heels on the way home if they were meeting up with their boyfriends. They customized their uniforms too, hitching up their skirts and pulling them in at the waist with those ubiquitous elasticated belts. They unbuttoned the tops of their blouses and loosened their ties and folded their berets in half and attached them with kirby grips to the back of their bouffant hair. We were younger and meeker and nerdier in my year and mostly wore our uniform as the head teacher intended.

  Everyone cordially hated the summer uniform: canary-yellow dresses in an unpleasant synthetic material. There is not a girl in existence who looks good in canary yellow. It makes pale girls look sallow and ill, and rosy-cheeked girls alarmingly scarlet. The dresses had ugly cap sleeves, like silly wings, unflattering to any kind of arm and embarrassing when you put up your hand in class.

  Very few people had washing machines in those days. You did your main wash once a week, so by Friday our canaries were stained and dingy. We had to wear straw boaters going to and from school even if there was a heatwave. These were hard, uncomfortable hats that made your head itch. They could only be kept in place with elastic. Nasty boys would run past and tip our boaters so that the elastic snapped under our chins. Particularly nasty boys would snatch at our backs to twang our bra elastic too. I often wonder why I wanted a boyfriend!

  I looked younger than my age in my school uniform, but I did my best to dress older outside school – sometimes for particular reasons!

  Thursday 4 February

  After school I went to the pictures with Sue and Cherry. I wore my red beret, black and white coat and black patent shoes and managed to get in for 16 as the picture was an 'A'.

  I sound too twee for words. A beret? But at least it was a change from eau de nil. Green still figured prominently in my wardrobe though.

  Saturday 12 March

  In the afternoon I went shopping with Mummy and we bought me a pale green checked woolly shirtwaister for the Spring to go with my green shoes and handbag.

  Just call this the lettuce look. However, I seemed to like it then. In May I wrote:

  After dinner I got dressed in my new green shirtwaister, that I think suits me very well. Then, loaded down with records, I called for Sue and we went to Cherry's party. Everyone had brought lots of records, and did my feet ache after all that jiving! Carol wore her new black and white dress which looked nice.

  My writing was certainly as limp as a lettuce in those days. Nice!

  So I liked my green dress, but my favourite outfit was 'a cotton skirt patterned with violets and nice and full'. It's about the only one of those long-ago garments I wouldn't mind wearing now on a summer day.

  Biddy was generous to me, buying me clothes out of her small wage packet.

  Saturday 4 June

  In the afternoon Mummy and I went to Richmond and after a long hunt we bought me a pair of cream flatties, very soft and comfortable. Then, back in Kingston, we went into C & A's and found a dress in the children's department that we both liked very much. The only trouble with it was that it had a button missing at the waist. Mummy made a fuss about it, but they didn't have another dress in stock or another button, so we bought it