Tales From a Hen Weekend (9 page)

‘All right! No need to cry about it!’ I say. It’s a feeble attempt at a joke. Mum looks as if she
is
going to cry.

‘Cry? You’d cry all right, girl, if you were marrying someone like I did!’

This isn’t really what I want to hear. ‘Come off it, Mum. You and Dad were happy enough at the beginning, weren’t you. Fair enough, it didn’t last, but…’

‘Happy!’ She shakes her head, snorting with mirthless laughter. ‘If only you knew, dear! If only you knew!’

‘Margie,’ warns Joyce again. ‘Let’s not get started on all that, just now.’

‘No time like the present,’ she responds heartily, looking with disappointment at her empty wine glass. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell my daughter about my wedding, eh, Joyce? Kind of fitting, don’t you think – make her realise how lucky she is not to be marrying a
pig
like her father?’

Oh, God.

The only thing I’m grateful for is that no one else can hear. They’re all too busy singing along with
Whisky In the Jar
.

It’s the hen party, you see. It’s brought back all these memories.

I was only twenty when I got married. Even so, I wasn’t the first of my group of friends to
tie the knot
, as we used to call it in those days. It was fairly normal to marry young, because as I tried to explain to Katie, it still wasn’t quite the done thing to live together before you were married. Not in our part of suburbia, anyway, whatever might have been going on up in Swinging London.

Terry was twenty-five, and a fireman. He was drop-dead gorgeous. I couldn’t believe my luck when he asked me out – never mind when he asked me to marry him. One of my friends said afterwards that I couldn’t get him up the aisle fast enough; I suppose she had a point. I reckoned if I hung on too long he might get fed up and find someone else.

As it was, I was always worried about him going off with other girls.
Birds
, he called them. Men don’t use that term nowadays – it’s considered insulting, isn’t it.

‘Margie,’ he used to say; ‘Margie, why would I be thinking of running off with some other bird, eh, when I’ve got my little princess?’

But there was no getting away from the fact that he used to eye up all the other
birds
, even if he wasn’t thinking of running off with them. You couldn’t really blame him. He was so good-looking, the girls would turn their heads in the street to look at him, even when I was with him. They’d giggle and toss their hair and wiggle their bums, and he’d just smile and pretend he wasn’t interested, but what man wouldn’t be? I was anxious to get that wedding ring on his finger pretty smartly, I can tell you.

I wasn’t supposed to be seeing Terry on the night of my hen party. It was meant to be unlucky for the couple to see each other the day before the wedding. He was having his stag do at his local pub in Brentwood, and he phoned me before he went out.

‘You be careful tonight,’ he told me. ‘Don’t go drinking too much and getting yourself into trouble!’

I didn’t normally drink much more than a couple of Bacardi-and-Cokes. That was everybody’s favourite drink in those days.

‘Don’t be silly!’ I said. ‘Shirley’s looking after me. And anyway,
I
don’t drink too much. It’s
you
that has to be careful!’

‘Don’t you worry about me, darlin’. I can handle it! See you in church tomorrow, eh?’

Less than twenty-four hours till I’d be Mrs Terry Halliday. I thought I was the happiest girl in the world.

My friends were the other student nurses I worked with at the hospital: Angela, Linda and Shirley. Shirley was my best mate; she was two years older than me, already married and very sensible, so I wasn’t worried. She’d make sure I got home all right even if I did have a few drinks. It was Shirley’s idea to go to Southend.

‘It’ll be much more fun than sitting in the local pub,’ she said. ‘We can have a drink, get a Chinese, maybe go bowling on the pier.’

See what I mean? We didn’t expect so much, in those days. Just a nice evening out with our friends. None of this dressing up they go in for nowadays, and certainly none of these naughty games with dares and forfeits and things. Girls used to be a lot more
civilised
, if you know what I mean. We used to leave the excessive behaviour to the blokes. That was considered normal; we didn’t expect any better of them.

Well, anyway, we went to Southend on the train and had a couple of drinks in a pub on the seafront. I’m not saying we didn’t get a bit silly and giggly, but that was just excitement. I remember Angela – a nice, quiet girl, younger than me, who’d only left home a few months before – admitting she was still a virgin and the rest of us all teasing her and suggesting how she should go about finding somebody to change that for her. We might have got a bit rude, I suppose, but we weren’t
loud
with it. We didn’t get complaints from other people in the pub. We were just enjoying ourselves.

We went on to the Chinese restaurant. It was a bit of a treat in those days, not like now, with people having a takeaway any time they don’t feel like cooking. We used to have proper old-fashioned dinners every night of the week – steak and kidney pudding, shepherd’s pie, toad in the hole. Our mums taught us to cook – there weren’t any of these ready-made microwave meals in the shops then, you know. So none of us were very good at choosing what to have from the menu in the Chinese, and we ended up ordering a bit of almost everything, and sharing it around. For some reason we found s
weet and sour pork balls
absolutely hilarious and kept passing them from plate to plate, getting more and more hysterical the more glasses of white wine we had. But I still maintain it was all perfectly innocent fun, nothing rowdy, nothing spilt on the tablecloth – you understand?

By the time we came out of the restaurant we couldn’t be bothered to go tenpin bowling. We were probably a little bit too tipsy for it, to be honest, or at least, I certainly was. Not that I was incapable of walking straight, or anything like that. It was June – a lovely summer evening – and we strolled along the seafront arm in arm, just chatting and laughing, and ended up at the Kursaal.

You wouldn’t know about The Kursaal as it was then: it was an amusement park – probably the biggest and best in the country, in its day. Our parents used to take us there when we were kids, as a big treat on a day out at the seaside. You youngsters don’t know you’re born, what with your foreign holidays and day trips to France at the drop of a hat, just to go shopping for wine and cheese. We thought we were in heaven when we had a day out at Southend. We used to go swimming in the sea, too – never mind that it was mud right up to our knees, never mind all the warnings nowadays about dirty beaches, turning everyone into namby-pambies if you ask me. A candyfloss and a few pennies to spend on the rides in The Kursaal kept us kids more than happy back in the 1950s, even if we
were
wearing hand-me-down clothes and our school plimsolls.

Anyway, as I was saying – the Kursaal, by this time, 1972 - was past its best and in fact it closed down, I think, a year or so later. But we had a ball, there, that night. We only left, in the end, because we’d run out of money. We went on all the rides, had a go at all the hooplas, shooting galleries, coconut shies, you name it; and we laughed until we cried – not about anything in particular, just out of the sheer fun and excitement of being out together, the four of us, the night before my wedding.

We saved the Big Dipper till last. You must have heard of the Big Dipper. It was the biggest thrill in the park: the original roller coaster ride. Oh, I suppose it would be tame by today’s standards – nowadays something’s only a thrill if it’s so dangerous you have to have a medical before you go on it – but it made us scream ourselves hoarse, I can tell you. Going up that first long steep climb to the top of the ride, my heart was in my mouth, and as we lurched over the top and sped full-pelt down the other side, dipped at the bottom and shot back up again, I could feel my chop suey and sweet and sour pork balls shooting back up too.

I seemed to be the only one who felt sick afterwards. It was getting late so we walked back to the station anyway. The others were teasing me.

‘You’ve gone white!’

‘No, green! You’ve gone green! Your face matches your cardigan!’

I couldn’t talk. I was too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other and not throwing up on the pavement.

‘Will you be all right on the train?’ Shirley asked me anxiously as we waited on the platform.

I nodded yes, but moving my head made everything spin. I held onto her arm and allowed myself to be helped up into the carriage of the last train back to Romford.

I managed to hold on till we were almost at Brentwood – only a few stops from home – and then I suddenly knew I was going to be sick.

‘Get the window open!’ yelled Linda. ‘Get her some fresh air!’

‘No!’ I mumbled, my hand over my mouth, trying to stop myself from vomiting. ‘No! Got to get off! Going to be s….’

Fortunately for me, and for everyone else in the carriage, the train pulled into the station just at that moment. I wrenched the door open, stumbled out, ran to the fence at the back of the platform and threw up over the bushes. Hanging onto the fence, panting and trying to wipe my mouth with my hankie, I heard Shirley behind me saying:

‘Well, I expect you’ll feel better now. But I think we’ll have to get a taxi home.’

I looked round just in time to see the train disappearing down the track. The last train. Apparently, at Shirley’s insistence, Linda and Angela had stayed on the train but she’d jumped off to look after me.

‘No point all four of us being stranded,’ she said briskly.

‘Thank you,’ I said, feebly. ‘Sorry. You should have gone on, too.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I wouldn’t dream of leaving you on your own. Come on, let’s get outside and see what a taxi will cost.’

‘But I haven’t got any money left!’

We didn’t have credit or debit cards in those days. No cash machines on every corner. You either had cash, and spent it, or you didn’t, and you had to go without.

‘Nor have I. I’ll have to wake Graham up when we get back, and get him to pay the taxi. If he’s got enough money at home.’

‘Or I could phone my dad to come and pick us up,’ I said doubtfully, knowing how annoyed he’d be to be woken up so late, the night before the wedding that he and Mum had worked so hard to organise.

‘No, that wouldn’t be fair. He’d be cross.’

We joined the queue for taxis outside the station.

‘It’s going to be a long wait,’ I said gloomily. ‘And it’s going to be very expensive, and it’s all my fault.’ I stopped, suddenly laughing out loud. ‘Hang on a minute! How bloody stupid of me! We don’t need to get a taxi, or a lift back to Romford tonight! We can wait till the morning!’

‘What the bloody hell are you talking about, Marge? Are you still drunk? What, you want to sleep on the pavement here till the morning? You want to miss your wedding or something?’

‘No! For God’s sake! It’s obvious, isn’t it! We can stay at Terry’s place!’

Terry rented a room in a house with two other blokes, only a five-minute walk from Brentwood station. It was his last night there, of course – we were moving into our own place straight after the wedding. It was easier, then, you see – getting a mortgage – and we’d just managed to get in before the huge leap in house prices that happened about that time.

‘Don’t be silly, we can’t go there!’ said Shirley, grabbing my arm to pull me back into the queue. ‘You mustn’t see him tonight! It’s bad luck!’

‘Oh, that’s rubbish! I’m not superstitious! Come on, he won’t mind. We can get the first train in the morning and I’ll still have time to get ready for the wedding.’

‘I’ll have to phone Graham,’ said Shirley, doubtfully, looking around for a phone-box. ‘I’m not really sure we should…’

‘Yes, we should.’ I pulled her along the street by the arm. ‘Come on, you can phone Graham from Terry’s place.’

She gave in, then – I suppose because it did seem the best option – but she was still looking worried as we walked up to the door of the old terraced house the boys shared, and I rang the doorbell.

‘They’re probably all in bed,’ she said anxiously.

The house was certainly in darkness. For the first time, it occurred to me that the boys might not even be in. They’d been out on Terry’s stag night, after all, and even though the pubs were shut by now, they could well have gone on somewhere else.

‘I suppose we could sit on the doorstep and wait,’ I said, looking up and down the street in the vague hope of seeing them coming home.

I started to lift my face to his for a kiss, but thought better of it when I remembered that my breath would be vomit-laced. But he showed no sign of wanting to kiss me anyway. Instead he looked behind him, nervously.