My Secret Diary Read online

  We rarely bought a record. We played them several times and then slipped them back into their sleeves and returned them to the spotty boy.

  'Sorry, we can't quite make up our minds,' we'd chorus, and saunter out.

  Up until January 1960 I didn't even have a record player so it would have been a pointless purchase anyway. We had my grandparents' gramophone, one of those old-fashioned wind-up machines with a horn, but it wouldn't play modern 45 records. We had a pile of fragile 78s, that shattered if you dropped them, and I had my childhood Mandy Miller records, 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic', 'Doing the Lambeth Walk', and some Victor Silvester dance music. They weren't really worth the effort of strenuous handle-winding. But on 9 January everything changed.

  I did the shopping with Dad and you'll never guess what we bought! A RECORD PLAYER! It had previously been £28 but had been marked down to £16. It is an automatic kind and plays beautifully. We bought 'Travelling Light' by Cliff Richard and Dad chose a Mantovani long player. It sounds very square but actually it is quite good with some nice tunes like 'Tammy', 'Que Sera Sera', 'Around the World in 80 Days'. I've been playing them, and all our old 78 records, all the afternoon.

  I know, I know – Cliff Richard! But this wasn't the elderly Christian Cliff, this was when he was young and wild, with sideburns and tousled hair, wearing white teddy-boy jackets and tight black drainpipe trousers, very much an English Elvis, though he was never really as raunchy as Presley. I remember Celia, a lovely gentle girl in my class who was very into pop music. Her mother was too, surprisingly.

  'My mum says she'd like to put Cliff to bed and tuck him up tight and give him a goodnight kiss – and she'd like to put Elvis to bed and get in beside him!' said Celia, chuckling.

  Celia knew the words to every single pop song and would sometimes obligingly write them out for me in her beautiful neat handwriting. I would solemnly learn every single bam-a-wham-bam and doobie-doobie-do and also try hard to copy Celia's stylish script. There are passages in my diary where I'm trying out different styles, and it's clear when I'm doing my best to copy Celia.

  I saved up my pocket money to buy another record the very next week: Michael Holliday's 'Starry Eyed'. It was currently Carol's favourite song and so we could do a duet together, though neither of us could sing to save our lives.

  I didn't buy another record until March, when I decided on the theme tune from A Summer Place, a very sugary recording, all swirly violins, but I declared it 'lovely'. I had no musical taste whatsoever at fourteen. I'm astonished to see I next bought a Max Bygraves record, 'Fings Ain't Wot They Used t'Be'. I can hardly bear to write those words on the page!

  By August I was staying up late on Saturday nights listening to David Jacobs's Pick of the Pops, and hearing 'Tell Laura I Love Her' by Ricky Valance for the first time. I adored 'Tell Laura'. It was like a modern ballad poem, a tragic sentimental song about a boy called Tommy trying to win a stockcar race in order to buy his girl a diamond ring. Each verse had a chorus of 'Tell Laura I love her' – and of course Tommy's dying words from his wrecked car were 'Tell Laura I love her'. I didn't take the song seriously but loved singing it over and over again in a lugubrious voice until Biddy screamed at me to stop that stupid row now.

  Thank goodness my taste developed a little over the next year – in the summer of 1961 I discovered traditional jazz. I fell in love with all the members of the Temperance Seven, a stylish crowd of ex-art students who dressed in Edwardian costume. 'Whispering' Paul McDowell sang through a horn to make an authentic tinny sound. It was the sort of music my grandparents must once have played on their wind-up gramophone, but it seemed mint-new and marvellous to me: 'I bought Pasadena, it's an absolutely fab record and I've now played it at least 50 times.'

  I went to see the Temperance Seven at Surbiton Assembly Rooms, and when I was sixteen I used to go up to London to various jazz cafés in Soho with a boyfriend. That was way in the future though. I might manage to just about pass for sixteen when I wanted to get into an A film at the cinema – but I certainly didn't act it.

  6

  Films

  I went to so many films – most of them pretty dire too! There were lots of cinemas in Kingston then, but each only had one screen. The Granada and the Regal and the Empire were all perfectly respectable, but Kingston Kinema was a total fleapit. It showed arty, less mainstream films, and we sometimes went there too, though we weren't supposed to.

  The Kinema attracted Dirty Old Men – far dirtier than the ones who hung around Maxwells music shop. The pitch-black of the Kinema made them bold. They'd shuffle along the empty rows and sit right next to you. You'd strain as far away from them as possible, staring up at the screen, heart thumping. You'd keep telling yourself it was going to be fine, he wouldn't do anything, but then a clammy hand, repulsive as a jellyfish, would slither onto your knee. You'd jerk your knee away from it, trembling, but you knew that hand would come back. Sometimes it changed into a crab and tried to scuttle underneath your skirt. Then at long long last this would galvanize you into action and you'd grab your friend and sidle down the row away from him.

  Why on earth did we put up with this? Why didn't we complain loudly and go and find an usherette? We were all as hopeless as each other – Carol, Chris, all my other friends: we sat paralysed with shame and fear while these hateful men dabbed at us disgustingly. It was as if we'd done something bad and embarrassing. We might joke about it afterwards, even getting fits of the giggles, but at the time it was terrifying.

  So why did we go to the Kinema? Well, we wanted to see those arty movies, a lot of them X-rated. They would probably be considered very bland kids' stuff nowadays. We were so totally innocent, even a Cliff Richard film could shock us. We all wanted to see his new film, Expresso Bongo, because it was set in Soho where all the strip joints were.

  Friday 22 January

  In the evening I went to see 'Expresso Bongo' with Carol at the Regal. We saw tons of girls from school there, all dressed up pretending to be sixteen. Jill, Susan and Joyce were there in the 'ninepennies' and Jill told me afterwards that she had seen Peter there and he had smiled at her. She also said that Joyce had asked Susan and her to club together and buy some cigarettes. They reluctantly agreed, but Susan wouldn't smoke any. Jill had three and wasn't very impressed, but Joyce finished the lot off! I think she's only 13!

  P.S. 'Expresso Bongo' was very good.

  I was too shy to write in my diary about the astonishing scene set in a Soho club where you saw topless showgirls. There was an audible gasp from the cinema audience as this line of girls jiggled across the screen. They weren't even entirely topless: they had little stars in pertinent places, presumably stuck on. It must have been pretty painful removing them each night.

  You didn't get topless models in newspapers in 1960, not the papers we had at home anyway. You didn't get girly magazines openly displayed on newsagents' shelves either. The only bare breasts I'd ever seen were on African women in the National Geographic magazine. Those Expresso Bongo girls made a big impression on all of us. We talked about them excitedly at school the next morning.

  Mostly our film-going was a lot less adventurous. I seemed very easy to please. On Monday 4 January I went to see Tommy Steele in Tommy the Toreador and pronounced this film 'very good.' The next day I saw Norman Wisdom in Follow a Star, which I said was 'very funny'. You would have to tie me to my seat to get me to watch either film now.

  Carol and I went to the pictures two or three times a week in the holidays. We went after school too, sometimes with Sue and Cherry. They lived in Kingston too. Sue literally lived next door to me, at number eleven Cumberland House, where we'd both lived since we were six.

  This was 'a better class of council estate', according to my mother – and she did her level best to bring me up a better class of child. Sue's mother, Nancy, was equally ambitious for her daughter. No other children in Cumberland House had such white socks and blouses, such polished brown sandals, such expensive school satchels.