Faith (18 page)

She knew backstreet abortions involved knitting needles, enema tubes and such things, and she was sure this would make him come running after her. But it didn’t.

She lay on her bed the whole weekend crying, unable to believe it really was over. Each time the payphone rang down in the hall, she started, convinced it would be him. But no call came. Jackie didn’t phone either, and that made her feel even more desperate. All through the following week and the next weekend she could think of nothing else. She couldn’t eat or sleep, her mind churning over everything she and Steven had done together.

To gain sympathy at her work she told people that she’d caught him in bed with another girl, and Sonia, another wages clerk, invited her to spend the next weekend with her so they could go out dancing.

That gave Laura another idea, and on the Friday afternoon she rang Steven’s office.

A woman answered the phone and said he was in a meeting. Laura didn’t believe that for one moment, sure he’d given everyone instructions to fob her off if she phoned. But if he wasn’t going to speak to her, she was determined to make trouble for him, so she told the woman that she was about to go off to Brighton to have his baby aborted. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll care,’ she sobbed down the phone. ‘He just used me, then tossed me aside when he got bored. I’m really scared I might die from it, but I can’t bring a baby up on my own.’

She was delighted the woman sounded very shocked, and hung up quickly when she asked for a number Steven could ring Laura back on.

She had a great weekend with Sonia in Croyden. They went to the Orchid Ballroom at Purley on Saturday night, which took her mind off Steven and even made her think that maybe it wasn’t so bad being free again. But the weekend was all the sweeter for imagining Steven being frantic with worry. She hoped he’d gone down to Brighton to try to find her.

About five on Sunday afternoon she returned home. As she half expected Steven to be waiting outside her house in his car, she’d taken the precaution of putting on a black blouse that made her look pale, and left her hair all bedraggled. As luck would have it she’d got her period that morning, so she told herself that if Steven insisted on taking her to the hospital the doctor would think the blood was confirmation of what she’d done. She even staggered as she got off the bus at the end of the road, and kept stopping and holding her stomach as if she was in pain.

But Steven wasn’t there waiting. Jackie was.

It was a warm day, and she was sitting on the wall outside the house wearing a green and white summer dress, her auburn hair tied back with a ribbon at the nape of her neck. Clearly Steven had told her about the message she’d left, and suddenly Laura felt genuinely tearful because her friend was concerned enough to come round.

‘Thank goodness you’ve come, I feel terrible,’ Laura said, clutching at her stomach as she ran to her friend. ‘I wish I hadn’t done it now, I feel like I’m going to die. But I had to, Steven didn’t want it.’

But Jackie didn’t embrace her and there were no words of sympathy or understanding. ‘Stop right there,’ she snapped at her, her face stern and cold. ‘I know full well you weren’t pregnant, so you can’t have had an abortion. You disgust me!’

‘But I have,’ Laura insisted. ‘I’m bleeding really heavily.’

Jackie caught hold of her arm, and manhandled her in through the front door and up the stairs. It was very quiet; all the other tenants must have gone out.

Once in Laura’s room, Jackie pushed Laura down on to the bed. Her face was pale with anger and her green eyes flashed dangerously. ‘You’re lying, Laura, you’ve no more had an abortion than I have. How could you make up something like that? It’s the lowest of the low!’

Laura burst into tears then and carried on insisting she wasn’t lying. But Jackie just closed the door and sat down on the chair, looking at her in disgust.

‘Attention-seeking, that’s all this is,’ she raged. ‘A desperate attempt to get Steven back any way you can. But it won’t work. Don’t you know you lost him weeks ago by being so jealous and clingy? He’s had enough of you.’

Laura tried to justify herself but Jackie just told her to grow up. ‘Of course he’d been with other girls before he met you. He’s twenty-four, not an innocent little boy. You’ve snogged and petted other boys too. But never mind that. It’s this fantasy pregnancy I’m angry about. Have you forgotten that you asked me for a Tampax only last month? I even had to point out that you had some blood on your skirt. How do you explain that?’

Laura had forgotten about that and she knew she was caught out.

‘You don’t care about me now you’ve got Roger,’ she blurted out desperately, unwilling to admit she had lied, even when she was cornered.

‘I certainly don’t care about you when you behave like this,’ Jackie snarled at her. ‘How could you ring Steven’s work and tell such thundering, malicious lies? Have you got any idea of how embarrassing that was for him? It went round the whole firm and his boss called him in to question him about it. When Steven called me at my work I was ashamed that I even knew you. I never want to see you again!’

That last statement of Jackie’s before she stormed out of the door stayed with Laura for a very long time. She never saw or spoke to Steven again and it was months before she saw Jackie either. All through the remains of that summer she cried herself to sleep at night, not so much over Steven – she’d more or less reconciled herself with that being over – but because of Jackie. She missed her, she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her best friend, and she was very ashamed that Jackie had had to find out what a liar she was.

Sonia became her new friend, and all through the summer and autumn Laura told herself she was far more fun than Jackie, but that wasn’t true. Sonia was cold-hearted and she only wanted to go out with Laura to pick up men. Every time she found a new one, she dropped Laura. But during the time they were together Laura learned even more ways of manipulating men, better shops to steal from, and to drink brandy.

Yet however hard she tried to convince herself that she didn’t miss Jackie, it never really worked. It was like a dull pain inside her, which never went away. She wanted to go up to Jackie’s house in Muswell Hill and apologize, but she was too afraid of being rejected to do it.

That Christmas was miserable. Sonia had found a new boyfriend just a few weeks before and once again dropped Laura, and she had no choice but to spend the holiday alone in her room. On New Year’s Eve she passed the time going though her clothes, wondering why when she had so many lovely ones, she had so little opportunity to wear them.

Then on the morning of her eighteenth birthday in January, there was a card from Jackie. She sobbed with delight as she read the message that Jackie missed her and she’d decided at New Year that their friendship had been too good to forget.

Laura phoned her soon after and Jackie said that although she would never condone what she’d done, she thought she understood Laura’s reasons and would like to draw a veil over the incident.

To Laura’s keen disappointment Jackie was still going out with Roger, so she couldn’t expect everything to be the same as it once had been. But even seeing her friend just once a week was better than nothing, and at least the New Year of ’63 looked very much brighter.

That winter was a very bad one with endless snow, making the journey to work twice as long. Having a bath was an ordeal because the bathroom was so cold, with snow underfoot it was too much trouble to go out anywhere, and quite often Laura got into bed the minute she got home because she felt so lonely and miserable.

During the spring Jackie broke up with Roger. He had been promoted at work, and his new job involved much longer hours and a lot of travelling. Jackie thought he was using work as an excuse to get some time away from her, and after a blazing row they parted.

Laura pretended to be very sympathetic, but in reality she was delighted. She came up with the idea that they both needed to get out of London for a while, and she found unlikely allies in Jackie’s parents. They had liked Roger, but had always felt Jackie was too young to settle down, and it was they who suggested the girls should apply to a holiday camp for the summer season. They said that a complete change would be the making of both of them, and that Jackie would benefit from learning to take care of herself.

They couldn’t get in at Butlin’s because they applied too late. But they got accepted by a far smaller holiday company called Drake’s, which had several sites in Devon and Dorset, as entertainers.

Both of them were very excited, even though the grand job description only meant they had to entertain children on the site during the day, and organize games with the adults during the evening. The pay was very poor, just £2 a week, plus accommodation, and meals in the site café, but the manager said they would get tips from the holidaymakers if they worked hard, and they would get a bonus of a further £2 for every week if they stayed till the end of the season.

They arrived at Drake’s near Brixham in Devon in mid-May in heavy rain to find the site a desolate sea of mud. They were tempted to turn tail and run, for the place looked run down, deserted and grim. There were no chalets, only caravans, and the amenities consisted of a shop, café, children’s playground, shower block and a club room, all of which badly needed a coat of fresh paint.

In their naivety they had imagined a swimming pool, pretty flower beds, fairground rides and continental-style cafés. They’d seen themselves in the glamorous role of Butlin’s Redcoats, but it was immediately clear they would not be that.

The caretaker, who introduced himself as Alf, was well over fifty, with rotting teeth. As he showed them to the old and tiny caravan which was to be their home, he warned them the damp could make their clothes and shoes go mouldy.

He left them to settle in, saying he would make them a cup of tea later and show them where the games equipment was stored. He seemed to be somewhat amused that they had been taken on as entertainers, but didn’t explain why.

‘It’s going to be awful, isn’t it?’ Jackie said in a shaky voice. She prodded the seat cushions which doubled as a bed, and winced because they felt damp. ‘Can you imagine what sort of people would come here for a holiday?’

Laura could. People like she’d grown up with in Shepherds Bush! There wouldn’t be any nice boys, just men with braces over their vests and their trousers rolled up. The children would be evil little guttersnipes, and they’d have mothers who screamed at them all day, then got very drunk at night.

She might have known there would be a catch to the job. At the interview, the general manager hadn’t even asked them what sort of relevant experience they had of organizing games with large numbers of children. All he’d really said was that they would be there to make sure everyone had a good time, and to deal with any problems which might crop up.

He’d made more of an issue about the tips they’d get if they made sure the holidaymakers enjoyed themselves. The girls were so convinced they could make the holidaymakers ecstatically happy that they imagined they’d come home rich at the end of the season. They’d almost bitten his hand off for the job.

They were unpacking their clothes and trying to fit them into an inadequately small wardrobe when the sun suddenly came out.

The caravan was instantly warmer, and when they looked through the grimy windows they saw the mist had lifted and the sea was visible at the end of the campsite.

‘It doesn’t look so bad now,’ Laura remarked. ‘Let’s have some music, that might cheer us up.’

She turned on the transistor radio Lena had given them, and the song playing was ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers. They looked at each other in astonishment, and started to laugh.

It was the laughter that summer which Laura remembered better than anything else. The caravan might have been damp and cramped, the food in the cafe awful, and when it rained they got daubed with mud. But the girls were back together and they both felt light-hearted after all the intensity of the previous year.

The holidaymakers were in the main quite poor and rough, but they were out to enjoy themselves and they appreciated anything Laura and Jackie did for them. The girls never did think up the brilliant games to play with the children that they’d intended, it was just rounders, team games or reading them stories. But mostly the weather was good, and people went off to the beaches even when it wasn’t. By the time they came over to the club room in the evening, they were more than happy to play a few games of bingo, musical chairs, or pass balloons from one pair of knees to another, as long as they had plenty to drink.

There was a band who played twice a week, and a DJ on the other nights, and the girls would encourage everyone to sing along. They also ran a talent competition each week and these were invariably hilarious, with children singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ or some old drunk trying to be Jim Reeves. During the whole summer they never found anyone who had any real talent. But the holidaymakers loved it, just as they did the Pirate Nights, when they put a patch over their eye and painted a moustache on their upper lip, or the Twist competition which everyone from three to eighty took part in.

But the best fun for the girls took place late at night. There were many like-minded young people working in the area for the summer, from chambermaids to waiters and bar staff, and they soon found them, plus the more affluent men who sailed in and out of Brixham on yachts.

Mostly they gathered at a small drinking club in the town, and as neither Jackie nor Laura was keen to have a regular boyfriend again for a while, they played the field, enjoyed the attention they got and didn’t take anything too seriously.

It was the best of times. The worst they did was to give a few men false hopes, and suck up to the holidaymakers so they’d tip them when they left.

But the real value of that summer job to Laura was that it gave her the confidence she so badly lacked and opened up her mind to other possibilities. She had only been to the seaside a few times in her life, and then only to Southend and Brighton. She hadn’t known that Devon was so beautiful, and the rolling hills, thatched cottages, rivers, moors and woodland enchanted her. But she had also shone a lot brighter than Jackie with the holidaymakers, for she knew how ordinary working-class people thought, and what they wanted and needed.