Lorna Eedes (now Lorna Selby) has sent in some more of her recollections. This time is of the time after school. She is now living in London in the late 50's with new husband David.
What Next?
It was the late 50’s and it was London, the irresistible magnet. Everybody you ever knew was either there or passing through. David and I were married and we moved half in and half out of student life, mixing with young people from all over the world. Vivid characters like the young Reuter journalist from Australia, causing a stir on London streets that hot summer wearing shorts to the office; Siegfried Sassoon’s (newly ex-) daughter-in-law, our flamboyant flat-mate; another, whose place we temporarily filled, never reappeared - she had gone off to join a circus; the frustrated journalist whose ‘media job’ consisted of sitting all day in front of a TV, noting down every unintended named product appearing on screen; the many young people we met making final preparations to emigrate to far-flung places, and those parties, parties, parties …..
Then there was Paul. This was before he married Germaine Greer (a marriage that lasted two weeks). In the early 70’s you could have seen quite a lot of him yourself if you had opened Cosmopolitan’s first male centre-fold. But when we got to know him, Paul was a post-grad London student who at the same time had got into the property market. He hired inexperienced but grateful fellow-students to do the labouring work and, with a cavalier approach to any health and safety rules (‘What rules?), renovated ex-council flats in central London for private letting. When that first house was completed it became our first home. Tempted by the offer of free accommodation, we took over as caretakers.
We
lived in the gloomy back basement room whose only window faced an entire
blank wall. It was of course furnished with cast-offs. Luxurious new
Wilton carpeting had been picked up at auction for a song, its price
dictated partly by the colour (black) and partly by the diagonal line of
footprints across it in gloss paint (white). At the back of our funereal
room a door-curtain covered an unlit ‘storage space’ which we learned
not to venture into. When anyone tried, the jangling of discordant
musical strings, crashing of boxes and blows from falling objects of
every shape drove them out again fast.
An article from the Daily Express, 31st August 1969
I could write pages about the different tenants taking rooms in this elegant house close to Hyde Park; eg the Hennessy brothers, door-to door vacuum-cleaner salesmen – or, as described here, ‘sculptors’ - desperately saving to get back to Australia. Having previously emigrated there, they had returned to the UK the year before, regretted doing so, and needed cash to get back. Spotting the opportunity to make a sale, they insisted on demonstrating the tremendous vacuum created by their product (‘Look, it can hang by suction from the walls/ceiling.…..’) I could not imagine ever needing to do this so I resisted their sales patter. They must have blown all they had earned with their final boozy party, which was great fun, on board a ferry down the Thames from Teddington. You will note they intended to hitch-hike back to OZ.
Then there were the two good-time girls from the Midlands, sharing a room, who had frequent gentlemen callers equipped with cameras (we had to answer the front doorbell.) I specially remember them since they sneaked into our room one day and stole some money. On one of the upper floors there was a fastidiously immaculate businessman from Ceylon, out on business every day. Other residents complained - ‘We can’t use the same bathroom as him’ - because of his colour.
We left London at the end of the year. As for Paul, our odd, very talented friend and landlord, in the next ten years he made (and then lost) a fortune. He shrugged it off - it had always been a game for him.
They say ‘If you can remember London in the 60’s, you weren’t there’. We weren’t there.! We had moved to the south of England, started a family, and David was working in a residential college. Living in an upstairs flat amongst student rooms was no hardship when surrounded by beautiful countryside, meeting the great and the good at regular intervals as part of college work. Talented artists early in their career would appear as if by magic to perform, to lecture, or to run a course (there were even cold-war international meetings). Our flat was partly above the college theatre, so concerts were enjoyed without moving an inch. If there was an individual speaker or performer, I could slip downstairs at the interval to mingle with the crowd. One of my more embarrassing moments was one evening when I asked the first young man to arrive at the bar what he thought of the talk John Mortimer had just given (on ‘Dock Brief’). He said he thought it had been quite good. I then discovered he was John Mortimer! The 17-year-old Jacqueline Dupre giggled helplessly while she and cello balanced precariously on a makeshift stage; a sombre Ted Hughes just as the scandal of Sylvia Plath’s death was becoming known; John Boorman’s cine/production courses; helping to mend Prunella Scales stage costume before a performance . . ...
One Sunday in 1964 I created my own newspaper headlines when unexpected twins arrived on a Somerset roadside. I wasn’t smiling then!
This surprise arrival of two more babies meant our flat in the
college was too small (and besides, nights of infant howling were
definitely not what punters had paid for). It was time to move on.
Our next destination was the Midlands, and that was where I began a
career of sorts, which led me much further afield.
Lorna Eedes (now Selby)
(THS 1947-54)