Chapter
Six - The Dreary Side of Life
A lot of things happened that spring. For one thing, I got pregnant. I was very pleased, as so many others were producing offspring. Apart from Sue with her lovely baby, the Queen had just had Prince Andrew in the February and we had waited on a bitterly cold night outside the Palace for news. Nova had produced her Craig and I felt it was time to get into the act! I must have been very fertile because it happened so easily. A major item of world interest was the Sharpeville massacre. Suddenly South Africa became news. People who had not shown any interest in the country before, questioned us about life there. We explained about the apartheid system and told people that not everyone was a racist and that we knew how unfair things were to the black underclass.
Soon after that, we had to choose whether to be British or South African and I became Naturalised British and was able to get a British passport. Graham never really settled in England, I think he was hankering to get back to the sunshine, something which was a constant worry to me as I was so enraptured with London and England. I had forgotten all about going to America and dreaded the thought of ever going back to Durban. So did Pixie.
On Princess Margaret's wedding day all the flags were out on buildings all over the City and Maureen and I went and took photos of each other on the top of our building in Fleet Street. That was the day I knew I was pregnant. My period had never ever been late before. Within two days, the sickness started. I had heard the words 'morning sickness' but did not take in the significance. I was not just a bit sick, I was terribly sick every day and everywhere. Maureen used to dread meeting me on the train to work as it was embarrassing as I walked along from Temple Station vomiting into passing rubbish bins and into the gutter and over walls all the way.
I was becoming more friendly with many of Graham's colleagues, particularly Jenny and her husband who lived in Hampstead. She had given birth to Victoria at about the time we arrived in England and was very helpful to me regarding my pregnancy. She lent me her copy of Dr Spock's childcare book. He was the baby-doctor at that time. She told me about the Natural Childbirth people and Erna Wright, who later wrote the book the 'New Childbirth'. I would have to start childbirth classes in about the following October. Until I started to read books about birth, I had never realised that there was such a thing as labour. I suppose I thought you just sat and pushed the baby out in one swoop when it was ready. A young 19 year old Scientologist was also pregnant. The father was her uncle, or rather her aunt's husband and I was very shocked, not only because of the situation but because although he was charming and well educated, he was so old and to me, almost repulsive in looks. I was learning quickly about the side of life I had not seen in the Doris Day musicals.
Graham seemed pleased about the pregnancy but was most ashamed of me regarding the sickness. He told me that Scientogists did not get sick and that other pregnant girls he knew about who were further up the 'tone scale' (a Scientology phrase) stayed fine. So I knew I was a failure in this respect.
We also had a nasty shock re accommodation. We found out that babies were simply not acceptable in bedsitter buildings and we must find somewhere else to go. A widowed lady Scientologist with a teenage son, who lived in South Harrow, told Graham we could come and live with her, as she had 2 rooms upstairs to let out. This was a great relief to us and so we moved again. This time, Pixie also moved but not with us. She shared a flat in Chiswick with some of her work and show friends. Clare was still about too, and my cousin by marriage, Ann Bailes had also arrived in London, where she shared a large beautiful flat in Gloucester Road with other mainly South African girls. She worked in theatre making props for West End shows and was having a wonderful time meeting stars like Julie Andrews and Laurence Harvey.
South Harrow seemed a bit boring and far out, but at least we were nearer to Maureen for the Tuesday night visits. After we had been there a few months, the landlady, Maura, said that she thought her cleaner ought to clean our two rooms when she came round the next week. I must admit I did wonder why, but agreed. Having always lived in hotels in a country with servants, I was very slow to comprehend that dirt could arrive by itself. On the day the cleaner had been, I arrived home to find Maura eager to intercept me on the way up the stairs. She had news to impart I could tell. 'The cleaner found six dustpans of dirt under your bed' she said. I was absolutely astonished. 'Where did it come from?' I asked. I didn't put it there'. I had no idea that so much dust and fluff could appear as if by magic in a few months. Ah well, it was a good housekeeping lesson learned.
Athough it was nice to be nearer to Maureen, the journey to work was much more horrendous. Once when the train was full and suddenly stopped halfway into town because of a power failure, it was too awful for me in my pregnant state. I was standing pressed between the other commuters and when the nausea started, all I could find as a receptacle was an airmail envelope. When I had filled it to gruesome capacity, I had to lean over the seated people who had until that moment considered themselves lucky, and throw it out of the teeny high slanting windows of the train, with the sitters next to the window recoiling in dread.
On days when I got a seat, I could refrain from being sick until I got into town where I would be sick every single day at the same spot on the northbound Northern Line platform at Leicester Square station. The reason for this convoluted journey to Temple station was because if one got off the Piccadilly Line at Hammersmith, there was not the faintest chance of getting a seat, so I used to stay on the train until Leicester Square and catch the Northern Line to Embankment (then called Charing Cross), and then the one stop on the District Line to Temple. Both these were very short journeys. I chose to be sick on the northbound platform so that the others travelling southbound with me, would not know. I used to feel sorry for the stationwoman who must have had to clean it every day but did not know what else to do. Years later, with two of my children, I went to Leicester Square station and showed them the bleached stain at the side of the bench which still remained faintly visible!
Of course soon after that, I had to leave Odhams and was given a lovely pram quilt set and the tea lady sold me her large coach built Silver Cross pram for £5. We had to go and fetch it and take it home on the Metropolitan line where the trains were larger, and then walk home from Harrow on the Hill station. I did not realise then that we could easily have bought a similar pram locally without all that hassle.
Our friend Jenny had to go to hospital for a week and asked if I would like to look after Victoria for her as this would be good practice for me. Most people learn about children starting with teeny sleeping babies before they progress to terrible toddlers. Looking after Victoria was like jumping straight in at the deep end.
Victoria was a bright, lovely child and did all the things one year olds usually do. She took the toothbrushes out the bathroom and swept the carpets with them, she poured oil from the chip-fryer all over the kitchen floor, she started eating the soap I had put at the back of her pram with the other shopping and when I took her to the park, she took rubbish out the bins and tried to eat it. Any strong smells were terrible to me and made me even sicker, so I had to use a sort of mask with cotton wool and an upturned woolly hat with ties knotted around my face before I could change her nappy. I think the first time this happened, she was quite scared and didn't know who it was bending over her!
A while later, a friend of my landlady in Harrow, had to go into hospital to have her second child and wanted me to look after her one year old, David, especially as she felt I had already had some experience. I thought David was hideous, with his red hair and gaping mouth. When we went shopping to Fine Fare in the main road, I would try to go via back streets in case anyone thought he was mine! Later on, when his mother had returned from hospital and I was visiting, she looked across at David and me and said 'You know, people would think you were his mother, you are so alike!' Well, what could I say? It was presumably meant as a terrific compliment.
Another winter was upon us and I was getting very fat and slightly less sick. Graham was rather distant in fact as well as in manner. I think he was trying to keep his mind above all the dreariness of our real life, cold, shortage of money and a fat wife! There was a scheme at the Scientology place that wives and husbands of staff could have free 'auditing'. So I duly went and I do believe it helped me quite a lot, like a lot of forms of counselling might do. I certainly believe I was in quite good shape to take what happened very soon after, and not go to pieces!
Jenny wanted to go on a daytime Course and asked if we would like to go and live in Hampstead with all food provided so I could again look after Victoria, though Jenny would be home by about 5 o'clock each day. She would not pay me but we would have free warmth and meals so it would be a saving. Whilst staying there, Graham hardly ever had time to speak to me, and would sit up in the lounge after I went to bed and go to work before I got up in the morning. I spoke about this to Jenny one evening and said how worried I was about his behaviour, and she said I must make an appointment to speak to him and be very firm and say we must talk about whatever the problem was.
Well, about a month before my baby was due and about 10 days before Christmas, we had the planned discussion late at night and in bed. He said he had not wanted to hurt me but he just did not want to be married or to have a child. He said he envied free young men who were still going round on motor bikes with their friends and also that he had not had enough sexual experience before meeting me. He told me he had been having an affair at work with a girl whose flat we had visited in Chelsea and who had been very kind to me. He had also been to a prostitute in Bayswater but did not find that very satisfactory. I was astonished as well as miserable. I felt I was a lot to blame as I had not suspected all these feelings of his. He said he would not leave me until after the baby was born and that it wasn't my fault and he was very sorry.
Well, you can imagine what it was like. I may have known deep down that I was not madly in love with him, but I did love him and thought we got on well and often laughed about the same things and seldom quarrelled. I cried all night naturally and wondered how I would cope on my own with a baby and what he would do next and how humiliating it was all going to be. The next morning, he went off to work as usual and Herbie, Jenny's husband who was Graham's boss, was not going in until later. I was red-eyed and blotchy and told Herbie I could not go to my Natural Childbirth class (run by Erna Wright, an ex-Scientologist) and told him why. He was very kind to me and said I must wash my face and go as usual and he would drive me there. He said I should think about the baby and make my own plans and keep well for the baby's sake.
At the class, it was awful watching and listening to all the pampered, well-off mothers who were all of the type who went to those early and somewhat trendy classes near Marble Arch. I thought how amazed they would be to know that I knew my husband was going to leave me shortly. They all discussed the design and matching draperies of their new nurseries and what their husbands were buying them for Christmas.
Life went on as usual despite all this trauma and soon afterwards we returned to South Harrow. Pixie and Clare both came to Christmas dinner which I cooked with a little help from Pixie. I had now learned how to roast a chicken and quite a few other things besides. Jenny had taught me how to make fish kedgeree and spaghetti bolognese.
Every night, though, I lay wondering what the future held. At first I cried myself to sleep every night, though managed to be composed in the daytime. Gradually though, I started imagining perhaps sharing a flat with other girls and being the only one with a baby. I imagined having parties, with my baby asleep in one of the rooms and soon it started to seem less of a terrible prospect. I did not get as far as imagining how I would go to work or earn any money though whilst caring for a baby.
I wrote and told my mother what had happened and she was terribly upset. I also asked her not to tell my father who had always thought Graham young and irresponsible and I knew would blame him and be annoyed. In fact, I did not blame Graham. After all, I asked him to tell me the truth and he did. He could not help how he felt and had obviously been dissatisfied with his life for some time. Graham was the sort of person who needed fun and money and freedom to be happy and these were in rather short supply in our present situation.
At New Year we were invited to a party near Great Portland Street. Graham
was keen to get there because someone going there owed him £3 and we needed it
desperately of course. Also the food promised to be lavish. The problem was
that we only had 2/3d in
old money. The fare from South Harrow to Baker Street was 2/3d single. However,
from Harrow on the Hill, it was only 1/9d single. We were not worried about
getting back as we knew Graham would have the £3. It took me all day to work
out how we both could get there.
At South Harrow station, there was never anyone checking the tickets on the
way in, but at Harrow on the Hill there was. I worked out that if one person
went on to the station at South Harrow and caught a train to Rayners Lane, they
could change to the Metropolitan Line and go back to Harrow on the Hill. The
other person would have to walk to Harrow on the Hill and get a 1/9d ticket to
Baker Street, then meeting the other one down on the platform, they could both
go to Baker Street together. In those days there were no automated machines so
the important thing was to have a ticket to show to the man at the destination
barrier. At Baker Street one person could take the ticket
through the barrier, then buy two threepenny tickets at a machine and re-enter.
The two threepenny tickets would take both people from Baker Street to Great
Portland Street!
The idea was fine but guess which heavily lumbered person had to walk in the freezing January dark uphill to Harrow on the Hill station? Graham said he did not know the way. Still, we got there and we got the £3. I was usually a very honest person but travelling on the underground was obviously the Achilles heel of my honesty! Not that I ever cheated when it was not necessary, it was only in times of desperation that I thought out cheaper ways of getting around!
The baby was due on the 13th January and on that day I had a wonderful surprise. My mother phoned saying she was in a hotel at Harrow on the Hill and had flown over although she was terrified of flying and never wanted to do it again. She had only told my father that she felt she ought to be with me and he had paid her fare. She got a taxi to us and it was wonderful to have her there. She found a bedsitter nearby straight away. She had said in a letter that after looking at my astrological chart, she thought the baby would be a girl and be born on the 15th and she turned out to be right!
My labour started early on Sunday morning. I sailed through all the early contractions doing what we had been told at the classes and looking at my breathing chart. The midwife was called as I was planning to have the baby at home, as Jenny had done so successfully with Victoria. (Erna Wright had been present and the birth had been recorded. We had the carrycot ready with baby hot water bottle in it and all the strange things they ask you to provide for a home confinement ie bricks, brown paper etc.! The midwife seemed to think I had a long way to go and said she would come back at about 2pm. However she did not and when she at last returned at about 5 pm, she said she regretted that the baby was in breech position which she had not spotted earlier, so she rang my doctor and the ambulance and told me that I would have to go into hospital.
In those days we did not have scans during pregnancy or the breech would have been discovered sooner. I had to rush out to the ambulance between contractions and the journey was horrific. Graham came with me and the sirens were going and I felt as if a wild animal were jumping about inside me. As the head had not engaged it was not a question of 'pushing', there was nothing to push. I was taken straight into the delivery room at Edgware General and a Mr Picton, the Head Gynaecologist, came in with a crowd of students, who had been waiting for a breech! I didn't really mind, my feet were put in stirrups and I could hear him explaining to the students about not damaging the limbs. I gasped at the gas and air and a nice West Indian nurse held my hand. With a breech, the head comes out last and Jennifer's head came out like a cannon ball from a cannon. There was an worried exclamation from the great man, as everything had torn with the force and I needed fourteen stitches. Jennifer Sue, named after Jenny and Sue naturally, was removed somewhere to the side of me as the cord had to be quickly unwound from her neck and then she was given to me to hold. She was not particularly red, she seemed to me to have a wide face and one eye was larger than the other. When Graham told my mother about her eyes, she was terribly worried as she had bought a Virgin Mary statuette which looked peaceful and she wanted it to represent me somehow so that everything would turn out well. She had not noticed that the baby in the Virgin's arms had one eye larger than the other and quickly rectified this with a pen just in case it was significant!!
The nurses said a breech baby had to have cot nursing for 48 hours so I would not be able to feed her at first. They took her away before I had the chance to be really alone with her and welcome her into the world in the way the Scientologists had said should be done. Early the next morning, a nurse came and pushed her hurriedly into my arms. I was amazed and said so, although I was very glad. The nurse had made a mistake but said 'Oh well, keep her now you've got her'.
I was very pleased. I said to her 'Welcome to the world. You are safe and we all love you and want you and will look after you' and other comforting words of that nature which although the baby will not understand them at the time apparently means something perhaps to the unconscious mind. Later that day huge bouquets of flowers arrived for me at the hospital from South Africa where they had been sent by Interflora, which seemed wonderful. There were telegrams and cards and when Graham visited the next night, he said 'I could never leave her' which upset me a lot. Although I was pleased that he loved her, I would never have wanted a man to stay with me solely for the sake of a child.
Jennifer weighed 8lbs 8ozs and was a really bonny baby. Although she was by far my easiest baby, she did cry a bit at night in the first week or two. The trouble began when the Maura, the landlady said she couldn't stand it and her sleep was disturbed. She worked at Scientology from home in her front room. She had wanted us to come and knew I was pregnant, surely she knew babies cried sometimes. We had been good tenants although I had once borrowed an egg from her fridge when she was out, leaving a note of explanation, and returning a similar egg later in the week. There had also been a week when we couldn't pay the rent and I had sold my precious record player in order to pay her back as soon as possible. On another occasion, she had almost forced me to borrow £12 from her as we both thought my maternity grant was on its way and she wanted me to buy the most important baby items. After I had spent the money, I had a letter from the Social Services saying I had not paid sufficient contributions to get any money.
I was horrified and wrote to my father, the only time I ever asked him for money, though he sent me some every Christmas and birthday. I also wrote back to the DHSS and said how upset I was as I had borrowed the money already. On the same day about 10 days later, I received two letters, one from my father enclosing a sort of bank draft and another from the DHSS saying they had reconsidered my case and were enclosing a payment I could cash at a post office!! I did of course pay back the landlady immediately so she had no grievance against us that I could imagine but she wanted us out!
Anyway, my mother looked after Jennifer so that Graham and I could go into central London to an Accommodation Bureau to find somewhere more suitable to live. They had only one place on their books that would accept a child and it was in Willesden Green. They made an appointment for us to meet the landlord at the premises in about an hour and we went there straight away. It was a large house which could have been as nice as its neighbours had it been privately owned and occupied. However, it was divided into eight rooms with one bathroom and one toilet for the eight families who shared the building. We were shown to the top of the house to Room 7 which had a bare lino floor, hideous yellow wallpaper with red roses diagonally down it and no curtains or linen on the two narrow single beds. There was a tiny cupboard on the landing with sloping roof which was a sort of kitchenette which the landlord said made it one of the most desirable rooms in the house. There was a gas ring and sink in this cupboard.
Another couple were viewing at the same time and they had got there first. The landlord put out his hand towards the other couple for the first week's rent and when they hesitated, he put his hand out to Graham and Graham deposited the four guineas in his palm! And so it was done, and we moved into that bleak place. It was the sort of place that from Day One of moving in made you have no other purpose in life but to leave it as soon as possible. My mother bought us two blankets and I had a striped table cloth that I cut in two and tied up at the window to make feeble curtains. I went shopping in Cricklewood Broadway and found a very cheap shop where I bought two pairs of sheets. After washing they went like soft tissue paper but it was something I suppose. My father had gone on holiday and my mother only had the money he had sent her to live on that month. She moved into a bedsitter nearby which had a Polish landlady and she was quite happy there.
I suppose I did learn something in that awful place. I learned how to clean a lino floor. There had previously been carpeting in our other bedsitters. Despite my lack of cleaning experience, I realised that the floor really must be cleaned so I got out a bowl and a cloth and filled the bowl with soapy water. I started at the door and went backwards into the room, ending on one of the beds in the far corner. It was at this unfortunate moment that the Co-Op insurance man turned up; he used to walk around collecting premiums from any of the tenants who were that organised. The door was wide open so I called out to him that I could not reach him with the money as the floor was wet. So he explained to me that one should start cleaning away from the door and then work back towards it. I was very impressed. 'I never thought of that. Thank you' I said.
Jenny and Herbie visited us there and Jenny asked 'Aren't you cold?' when she saw the single blankets on our beds with coats strewn on top. I said 'Yes'. There seemed nothing more to say. We had hardly any food, all the money had gone on sheets and other necessities for the room. My mother remembered for a long time how she dithered over whether to leave the pilot light of the Ascot alight, thereby wasting gas, or to turn it out and then need another match to re-light it! Jennifer got very sick when she was about six weeks old. It seemed almost to be a form of whooping cough. The nice Jewish Dr Goldwater who dealt with all the poor Irish families in this building, Kelly, Murphy, Conway, etc. seemed quite concerned and prescribed antibiotics. He even called back the next day without being asked. I was already back at work as a temp typist, before having had my postnatal examination. I had earache and pink eye and was still losing quite a lot of blood and the worry about Jennifer's illness was just the last straw. I can remember walking home along Walm Lane, almost blinded by tears, thinking that there was no way I could ever be happy again in my whole life. I suppose the Scientology salary unit must have been very bad at that time. Herbie had suspended Graham from earning anything at all at Scientology for a week while he had free "auditing". This was because he had behaved unethically by telling someone he was supposed to be helping that he would soon leave his wife and be free to see more of her.
Graham suddenly took up oil painting again. My mother thought it was unbelievable that in that awful room with a sick baby and cold and poor, he was painting away oblivious to his surroundings. He really annoyed me once when he said he was tired of getting such inferior food! I said I just couldn't manage and we often had rice with a smear of some tinned food over it to give it flavour. He said we could easily eat on £1 a week. He illustrated this belief by saying he would get five tins of Irish Stew and some bread. I could hardly begin to put him right. I said 'What about tea, milk, sugar, toilet paper, soap and butter, and what about the weekends? These months were very dreary and depressing in almost every way. I felt like a zombie, going through the motions of existing but that was about all.
A lady moved into room 8 next to us on the top landing. We found out her name was Eileen and she had an illegitimate son of nearly two, who was at the moment in a Home and had been awaiting adoption. Her mother had refused even to see her grandson and so now Eileen was hoping to make a home for the little boy as it seems she had been told by the Children's Home that he was unlikely to be adopted at his age. Most people only wanted tiny babies. Eileen worked at Selfridges on the meat counter in the food store and I think she very soon realised the situation we were in as far as food was concerned.
She brought us bits of chicken she said were spare and sometimes mince or chops. She might have been stealing, I really don't know, she did not have much money herself anyway and she had a boyfriend who was a manager in the food store so I suppose he could have put little bits aside for her. It certainly was the only bright spot in our bleak lives at that time. Eileen had a good lunch at the subsidised staff canteen every day so she was quite well fed. The day she brought her son, Graham, home was quite an event for us. He was a dear little boy with big blue worried eyes and curly hair. He came up the stairs and walked into our room the door of which was ajar and buried his head in the larger Graham's lap. From then on there was a Big Graham and a Little Graham. Eileen had to work on Saturday mornings and insisted on paying us ten shillings a week to look after him which my mother and I would have liked to do for nothing in gratitude for all the meat, but Eileen was terribly proud and independent and said the meat did not cost her anything anyway. Eileen was 28 and I was 23. Our backgrounds were different in every conceivable way but we became great friends until her untimely death at the age of 41. She knew nothing at first about our marital problems as I was always hoping things just might come right and did not want to be disloyal.
But on May 1st Graham left me, saying it was no use, he still did not want to be married and was going to go and live on a friend's floor until he could get something better. I knew all this a day or two before, but we went through all the motions of normal behaviour. I cooked his dinner on the Sunday and then he said he needed a taxi but didn't know where the taxi rank was. Of course there was no telephone in the building at all. I walked round to the taxi rank near the station and left Graham holding the baby.
She was now nearly four months old and we were trying to teach her to wave. I got out of the taxi and took her from him and stood at the door saying 'wave to daddy' as he drove off. Then I went upstairs and into Eileen's room and burst into tears. When I said 'he's left me' she couldn't seem to grasp what I meant. When I explained, the most amazing thing to her was that I had cooked his dinner! She kept repeating 'but you cooked his dinner!'
On the Friday night following, my mother said she would babysit the two children and Eileen and I went to the pictures at the Kilburn State. I should have mentioned that by this time, I had stopped work and my mother had managed to get a job at J Arthur Rank in Wardour Street so that I could have a chance to be with Jennifer. Eileen and I were quite cheerful when we came home and we found Graham sitting in the room with my mother. He had returned, very contrite, said he had made a mistake and he really loved me and would try to get a better job.
I wasn't really happy about this. I tried to be but I just felt dull and listless and knew I just did not love him or believe anything he said any more. The months passed and we moved to the ground floor flat which had its own toilet and the use of the back garden to dry washing. Graham got a job in a factory at North Acton and we started to eat better. I think he earned about £14 a week. Jennifer was absolutely beautiful and happy and was the only real joy in my life. Pixie was thrilled with her too and often visited. Faith came over from Durban, newly married to her prosperous husband, whose family now accepted her, and I was rather ashamed when she saw the pathetic way we lived. Sue's cousin Nicky also came over to England and later won a scholarship to Oxford. He also visited the Willesden Green place and must have been appalled. Now when I look back on that period, I think of it as grey.
Graham rented a TV, the first we had watched apart from the Tuesdays at Maureen's house. He watched all the cowboy films and cartoons. He had never been an intellectual I suppose but it hadn't bothered me before. Maureen by the way, since the birth of Jennifer, visited us every Tuesday although occasionally we all went to Wembley to see them on a Sunday for dinner. When she came to see us, she usually brought her own food, knowing we could not afford to feed an extra person.
Late in August, Graham again started saying how he was not satisfied with his life and still felt he wanted to be free and go around in a crowd. I was just bored with it, I just said 'Look, please go if you want to, I'm not hanging on to you, I can't stand the chopping and changing, so please just go'. Well, he did decide to go, and I didn't want to be there at the time of his departure. My mother and I took Jennifer out in the big pram and walked and walked all over Hampstead and Primrose Hill and St John's Wood for hours taking food and nappies and bottles with us. We came home quite late and he had gone. Its unbelievable but he came back in the middle of the night, ringing my bell at about 2am. I was terrified until he whispered who he was through the front door. He apologised and said he would definitely go in the morning again but there had been bugs in his bed. I really went to pieces and shook and said I couldn't stand any more, and so for one last night we shared a bed. And he did go the next day without returning.
We realised that I would have to work as I would earn much more as a secretary than my mother was earning at her clerical job and it would be better if she looked after Jennifer during the day. She also had to leave her pleasant room a few minutes away and move in with me to help with the rent. So she gave notice and I went to an agency in Oxford Street and was sent to several interviews straight away, which is the way it was in those days.
The job I chose was the one that wanted me the most desperately; in fact they asked if I could start that afternoon, but I said I couldn't start till the next day. The place was called Flintkote, a subsidiary of Shell and was in Fitzroy Square almost diagonally opposite where the Scientology people were. I was very happy there, it was a lovely building and we were allowed to go into the square with a special key, to have lunch. They were a nice lot of people, Angela, who in a later decade would have been called a Sloane Ranger, mousey little Ann who we called Ann3, who had elderly parents, and Shirley who prior to becoming a secretary had been part of a stage act bouncing on a ball at the London Palladium and had met such people as Frank Sinatra and Max Bygraves. Today she would be known as vertically challenged. She was a cripple who had never grown properly and she was very lively and amusing.
My mother used to walk into town from Willesden Green sometimes to meet us for lunch so I could see Jennifer which was very nice. Angela invited Jennifer and me to her family mansion near Peterborough for the weekend, and later at Easter 1963, when my father visited us, we were all invited to Shirley's flat at Edgware for dinner. Before his visit however, we had twice moved homes. At last we got out of Willesden Green in November and moved to Stoke Newington to a big room with a bathroom nearby. This was difficult for Eileen but she did find someone else to have Little Graham on a Saturday. I never really got to know the other people at Stoke Newington, but my mother made friends with two girls called Bernie and Cynthia who also had babies. It was not very wonderful, but was a definite improvement on Willesden Green and it had been lovely to escape from the mad Irish resident there who had pinched the lightbulbs in the dark entrance hall and had poured gallons of disinfectant on the matting there so that everything smelled dank and mouldy. It was very strange that all the doorbells at Willesden Green had been marked with Irish names (even ours was Irish), until Eileen had moved in.
While we were at Stoke Newington, someone told us about a bedsitter to let that they had heard about in Bayswater in Inverness Terrace. This was more like our idea of living nicely in London and we were very thrilled when the lady said she would take us and did not mind a baby. We had a huge room on the ground floor with all the usual cooking facilities and a screen to hide the cooker and washbasin. There was room for Jennifer's cot but not the large pram. I bought a new folding pushchair, on HP, from a baby shop near Finsbury Park station.
When we moved from Stoke Newington to Bayswater, the 'debbie' Angela from Flintkote persuaded her current boyfriend, Malcolm Perring, heir to a furniture fortune, to help us move in his smart sports car. What a person will do for love! He had probably never been in such a dreary road as our back street, nor met such pathetic people!
A few days before Jennifer's first birthday, Graham phoned me at work and asked to see her. He wanted me to take her to the flat he was sharing in Holland Park. So we went and I met the friend he shared with. Graham bought Jennifer a lovely pink velvet dress and a push-along dog for her birthday, which she loved. She was also very keen on his friend and kept looking and smiling at him, but was not particularly interested in Graham! A few months later Graham rang me at work to say that he was going back to South Africa and just wanted to say 'goodbye'. I said 'goodbye' and he seemed disconcerted. Perhaps I was heartless but I just didn't care what he did, though I wished him well.
One wonderful thing happened to me at about this time. I wrote an article about accommodation problems in London for families called 'Not Suitable for Children'. I sent it off to various magazines, one at a time, and the third time it was accepted. I was very thrilled and really thought our troubles were over and now I would become a successful writer. I treasured the letter offering me twenty one guineas for world rights from the magazine 'Today' and everyone at Flintkote was very impressed. The trouble was that everything I wrote subsequently in that first flush of success was rejected. But it was lovely having the money and buying presents for us all. I bought an Alexon suit at Whiteleys in Bayswater, so that I would have one decent thing to wear to work. It was made of pure new wool with a pink and grey flecked pattern.