Strictly speaking it was my father and all his companions in the Eighth Army who were the first in my immediate family to experience foreign travel. And as I grew older I learned that he went to a great many places, some of which I had never heard of and had to pretend that I had. He seemed to enjoy Italy and North Africa above everywhere else, especially North Africa. Nevertheless after a lot of thought I decided to draw a line under destinations to do with war and concentrate on those I was hopefully about to experience in the post-war future.
It was annoying to discover that it was my older cousin who
was going to be first in the family to leave our place of birth and strike out
for foreign places. To be fair it was
simply a long weekend in Paris which later I decided didn’t really count if I
didn’t want it to. Not emerging as the
first was a blow to be honest. If she
had still been married to Jack the trip would never have happened in the first
place because for one thing he was much more interested in cars than travel and
secondly in the drama of the marriage break up Margaret had given up the good,
solid job in Dolcis and moved on to what her mother claimed was a much better
one, as secretary to a man who was in the Importing/Exporting business. I was somewhat confused as to how she could be
an actual secretary since as far as I knew she was unable to type and she
certainly couldn’t do shorthand but when I mentioned this Aunt Mag simply advised
me to Button my Lip and added that there was nothing much to typing. That observation didn’t please me at all
because I had recently spent three years at Wombwell Hall acquiring that
particular skill, but I buttoned my lip as directed because back then as a
teenager, largely you did.
My mother agreed that it was odd to be able to get a job as a
secretary if you couldn’t type but on the other hand you could go to night
school and learn easily enough and in fact perhaps that’s what she’d done
because there were no flies on Margaret and she was a quick learner. Anyway the job did not simply involve typing
letters, she had to organise meetings and do travel bookings as well and act as
receptionist in the Dartford office so she now had a weekly appointment booked
at Gloriette’s in Crayford for a shampoo and set. Aunt Mag said it was a Responsible Position
and not one that every girl would be able to do. She gave me a long, hard look as she said
this which was annoying. Margaret was living at her mother’s place at
the time because Jack had refused to leave the flat in Slade Green but it was
not something any of us talked openly about because back then you didn’t. Instead we were directed to admire her new
high heeled shoes and the pleated skirt that swished and swung pleasingly when
she walked ensuring she looked every inch the high powered 1950s PA. These were things it would have been
impossible for her to buy all the while Jack had an interest in the spending. On the other hand marriage break-ups were
nothing to be proud of and that was a fact
The Paris trip was something that was definitely discussed in
some detail and it took place at Easter that year, and was all to do with an
urgent job the new boss had to carry out.
It entailed four nights in a hotel with a swimming pool and a restaurant
where each female diner was given a rose.
I wondered how Margaret coped with the rose because she suffered badly
from hay fever at the time and said she was adversely affected by flowers. What’s more she certainly had never learned
to swim as far as I knew so would be unable to take advantage of the swimming
pool. My mother said to Aunts Martha
and Maud that if you believed the story about the urgent job that could not be
done either before or after the Easter break then you’d believe anything. She said nothing to Aunt Mag of course because
although she had of late been very talkative about travel she was certainly not
inviting questions on the topic.
When she returned I was more than keen for Margaret to tell
me all about Paris but she seemed quite reticent to do so and her answers to my
eager questions were uncharacteristically taciturn. It was all most unsatisfactory. It was around this time that some of her
sudden reputation for international travel had to be shared with another Cousin
– Aunt Martha’s June who had just married a young man whose name escapes me but
who had several years’ experience in the plumbing trade. It was at their engagement party that June
announced their intention to leave Crayford for a life in South Africa which
was a lot further away than Paris as most of us realised. She made several announcements at the party,
one of which was that at her upcoming wedding she did not want any of the women
in the family wearing dangly plastic ear rings because in her opinion they had
a common, vulgar look about them.
Being fond of plastic ear rings at the time, especially dangly ones, I
recall feeling almost as offended as I felt when she did in fact leave the back
bedroom in her mother’s house in Mayplace Avenue for a new life in Cape
Town. Unlike Margaret, Cousin June was
more than keen to tell us all about her new life, especially about the fact
that she now had a woman come in each week to do the ironing and she wrote
excited letters back, mostly to Crayford but once or twice to us in Northfleet also.
Meanwhile, yet another cousin, Connie from Waterdales, my
father’s side of the family, was making preparations to join her fiancé Mick
the Builder in Auckland, New Zealand and the long boat trip was going to take
her to a number of places that so far both of us had only read about in
books. I had to accept the fact that I
was definitely not going to be the first and that was palpable because as a
group the lower classes were beginning to move out of the confines of the
demographic they had always occupied.
They were studying brochures, beginning to realise that it wasn’t
necessary to always spend holidays at Tankerton caravan and chalet camps or
even Butlins at Skegness, and gathering the necessary courage to make
applications for passports. And getting
a passport, Aunt Mag said, was not as easy as you might imagine because there were
forms as long as your arm to be filled in.
As someone who definitely considered that I ought to be at
the forefront of all that was seen as in step with the times even if it was
glaringly obvious that I was not, it was sobering to be so clearly lagging
behind. I wondered why it was and after
consideration decided that it had something to do with not being part of a
couple. As a couple it seemed to be in
many ways easier to make decisions and act upon them and most importantly to be
able to finance them. There wasn’t a
great deal that could be done with a mere five pounds weekly wage as a
shorthand typist when I was regularly paying both the Provident Society and the
Typewriter Shop near the station on a regular basis. This
was also a time when males, even those under twenty, were still paid
significantly above women.
In fact I was not to become launched into exotic places for
another two years and as I had suspected it came about when I became part of a
couple though a not particularly wholesome or stable couple and a short term one
of necessity. I didn’t actually mind any
of that terribly especially in retrospect because Luuk Nijhof, Radio Veronica’s
Technical Director, fitted the bill well enough. He was
a rather charismatic Dutch sound engineer who later turned out to be a heating
engineer and knew little about the intricacies of sound. But this understanding and awareness came
only after the money that should have been spent on a radio transmitter had
been spent on living the high life in London and Amsterdam. It’s a long and perhaps familiar story and
culminated in him serving a prison sentence.
However, the short period that preceded that was filled with excitement
as we hopped from one five star hotel to the next, shopped in Bond Street and
most importantly filled in those forms as long as your arm that resulted in a
passport. At last I was pleasingly
embarked upon foreign travel! What more
could a girl from Gravesend want?
What I did not anticipate was the change in the way all of us
began to view travel ensured that even my mother became a passport holder
before too long and made regular trips to Southern Spain to the rather splendid
holiday home now owned by Margaret and the New Boss who had in the interim
become her New Husband. This change in
his status meant that it was no longer acceptable to discuss him in derogatory
terms or make reference to her previous husband who still occupied the flat in
Slade Green.
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