1965

Lewisham Road, London. 1965

During the 'swinging sixties' I was an art student in London. At weekends you might find me in my red leather boots, mini skirt and butcher's boy cap sauntering down Carnaby Street or along the King's Road. I lived in a bedsit on the Lewisham Road. The Indian landlord and his wife lived in the basement and the wonderful smell of cooking spices drifted up to my room on the ground floor. The rooms above me were crammed with other students. All of us shared the same bathroom which had French windows leading out into the long back garden, a space left to riot as it wished, entirely covered in rose bay willow herb. You know what they say about the sixties, that if you remember them you weren't really there. But I remember every aspect of 1965 very clearly.

Before coming to London I had spent four years as a fine art student at a northern art school. In the spring of '65 the young life model became pregnant. She asked me to lend her money as she was desperate to have an abortion. I lived carefully on my grant and small sum of scholarship money and was relieved that I had no moral decision to make and could honestly say that I didn't have any money to spare. No one else was prepared to lend her money for this illegal and life-risking deed and she went on to carry the child. Then a girl in my year discovered that she was pregnant. She and her boyfriend were delighted! I have photo of us all in the studio, mum-to-be with an ENORMOUS belly, her face smiling broadly above.

I went to London in the autumn where college didn't start until ten o'clock. I was used to an earlier start and sometimes caught the bus to Greenwich Park with friends so that we could walk in the quiet with grass under our feet. We would have breakfast at a transport caf at the bottom of the park and then catch a bus back to college. If there was to be a morning lecture students in the house would knock on each others' doors to be sure that they would be in the lecture theatre in good time. One morning we failed to rouse the girl in the room above me. She had taken an overdose in an attempt to take her own life. We pulled her out of bed and dragged her around the room. I sprinted down the road for a telephone, my heart hammering. It transpired that during the summer she had had an abortion and now was filled with despair and regret. When she was released from hospital she was sent to a recuperation centre where I visited her. It was a grim place, a large wooden hut that had been used after the war as somewhere for displaced persons. She was a forlorn sight. She returned home and did not complete her studies.

Sometime later I read Germaine Greer describing the delights of her youth, the joy of women in being sexually free. If you became pregnant, she wrote, it was easily solved by having an abortion. Silly bitch, I thought. How simplistic.
The 1962 film, The L-shaped Room stars Lesley Caron as a young unmarried pregnant woman. It is a black and white - and grey -  film, and is, for me a very accurate depiction of 'swinging' London in the sixties.