SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 10)

Making changes.

Surviving on government benefits was a skill I soon acquired.
In general it involved starving myself to feed Dan and Dylan.
I became very adept at making very little go a very long way.

My landlord was overjoyed when he came to collect the rent each week.
He was a kind old boy really. He recognised the effort I was making to improve his property and rewarded me by asking for receipts for the materials I had used in place of rent money.
I had redecorated the flat from top to bottom and I had lifted the carpets, thrown them out of the window to float down two floors into the back yard. There, I had soaked them through with buckets of detergent and disinfectant. I followed this with intense scrubbing until the dirty brown carpets revealed that they were, in fact, a pale grey with a slight black swirly pattern. The universe joined in this enterprise by raining heavily for a couple of days, thus providing the final rinses. After about a week of sun drying I hauled them up the two flights of stairs with Dan and Dylan helping as best they could.

Dylan always tried to be the most helpful of dogs when he was around.
Within a few days of being at that new home he had taken to mysteriously disappearing for many hours at a time. I was not overly worried because he was very traffic aware, used pedestrian crossings with consummate skill and always befriended other dogs and people wherever he went. In those days, dogs were often seen out on their own, it was not such a rule infested world in the seventies as it is now.

One day, as we headed to the beach, I met a woman, a little older than myself, who was also on her way to the beach with a handsome pure white German Shepherd bitch.
Woofie greeted Dylan with joy and the woman turned out to be the proprietor of a restaurant close to where I lived.
"Is he yours?" she asked, gesturing to Dylan.
"Oh yes!" I said "Have you met him before?"
"Goodness me, yes!" she laughed. "He calls for Woofie early every morning and they go to the beach for a swim, judging by the state of her when they get back! I give him breakfast because I assumed he was a stray. No collar you see!"
I gave Dylan a look which conveyed to him "Ooh, you crafty little shyster!" and he wagged his tail to confirm his bevy of skills that were beyond my wildest imagination.
This was not the only occasion when Dylan brought me friendship either.
I was passing a bakers shop at the other end of town one day when a shop assistant called to me from the doorway.
"Is that your dog?" she asked as Dylan wagged his tail in greeting. Of course, I replied to confirm.
"Well!" she crooned, caressing him around his ears. "He comes here for the day's leftovers every closing time!" I couldn't believe it. He was getting the best steak with Woofie in the mornings, leftovers with all my neighbours at lunchtimes and then sticky buns for tea at the bakers! No wonder he was always so gleaming with health and energy!

Everyone adored Dylan.
He had time for them, you see.
Bedsitter land is stuffed full of really lonely people and Dylan would befriend them all.
I often heard him being called by a neighbour and would watch him disappear into various doorways. He would come home with bones and squeaky toys or smelling of perfume, having been hugged by his latest squeeze. If Dan was playing outside in the yard, Dylan would always be with him and so, as time passed, Dan too was welcome in everyone's bedsitter homes and I, as the obligatory parent appendage, was gaining popularity too.

I got to know everyone who lived in bedsitter land very quickly. I bathed with Dan every evening at 7pm and had cleaned the bathroom, provided some discreet net curtaining and bath mats for the cold linoleum floor. Everyone really appreciated me cleaning all the stairs too and when the landlord heard what I was doing voluntarily, he rewarded me with a nice reduction in rent to compensate me. Result!

One dark and dismal weekend day I woke early in the morning to a loud commotion going on downstairs. I put on my dressing gown quickly and dangled over the banister trying to see what was happening. It transpired that one of the girls who lived directly underneath me had attempted suicide in the bathroom. The door lock had been smashed by her boyfriend and there was blood everywhere. Thankfully, she had been caught in time and was on her way to hospital.
I had to borrow a step ladder to clean the blood off the ceiling and walls before Dan woke up and toddled in there to use the bathroom. Such events were not common, but in bedsitter land despair was always lurking behind the smiles.

Dan was fast approaching his third birthday and frequently asked for his Dad so reluctantly and with much trepidation I sent a note to Tony asking him to visit Dan for his birthday, the 25th of May 1975.
I was hearing bad rumours of drunken brawling and chaotic parties going on in my former home. Adele had been accepted for a council house. She had been glad to move out of the chaos at my former home. She stopped me in town one day to tell me that the house was a disaster, full of drunken freeloaders and Lorraine was frequently there, but not actually in residence.
I tried to tell myself that I did not care, but I did.
My beautiful dream former home was being wrecked with neglect and I passed by there on one occasion noting that evidence, bottles and cans spilling over the front garden, revealed the truth of Adele's words. Nevertheless I received, by word of mouth, an affirmation that Tony would be coming to see Dan at 4pm on his birthday and I prepared accordingly a small birthday tea party and I made a cute cake.

4pm came and went with Dan sitting on the stairs playing with his toy cars, patiently waiting for his Dad. The sandwiches were starting to curl when I decided to ask one of the girls in bedsitter land to watch over Dan while I went to find his errant father.
I called at all the flats in my block but nobody was around. I popped into the open front door of the house next door and thankfully heard laughter coming from the first room on the ground floor. A big round faced girl, who I did not know, opened the door to my knock.
I was let into the large darkened room and, as my eyes adjusted to the limited light, I immediately saw Tony making love to a blonde girl on the dishevelled bed, surrounded by maybe half a dozen other people, drinking and smoking.
Suddenly I was knocked to the floor by a sharp blow from behind. I was being pummelled and punched by so many people from so many angles that I could not defend myself at all. A fist slammed into my eye socket and I flipped out, flailing and battling to get out of the door. I returned to my flat bloodied and swelling until my eye shut completely.
I was in shock and told Dan that his Dad was not coming so we should cut the birthday cake and start our party alone. Tony was proving to be absolutely unlike the man I thought I had married - he had done nothing to stop the assault on me. Shaking more with fury than fear I solemnly viewed the damage to my face in the mirror. It was pretty bad and no amount of makeup was going to hide it. I told Dan that I had fallen on the stairs when he noticed the bruising, but I distracted him by giving him his birthday presents to open and he was soon playing happily with his new toy fire truck and trying on his new clothes.

One boiling hot day during the following month I was passing by the rear of the restaurant where Woofie, Dylan's German Shepherd girlfriend, lived. Dan was in his pushchair and Dylan was trotting alongside us as usual. A beautiful, tall blonde girl came out of the back gate and I vaguely recognised her but could not place where I had seen her before.
She greeted me by name and I was really embarrassed that I did not know her name. I said so and she laughed. "I am Elaine" she announced and, seeing that I was none the wiser, she went on to explain that she was the barmaid in the Palace nightclub on the seafront, where I had my only night out during Dan's first year of life. She reminded me that I had leaked breast milk all down the front of my new dress and she had called me a taxi. She was strikingly beautiful and seemed genuinely interested in what was going on in my life now. I warmed to her immediately and, as we were both going in the same direction, we walked and talked for quite a while.
Elaine had been working in the Castle restaurant and lived in the building. She knew Dylan well from his daily visits and he acknowledged her with a friendly wag.
"He knows everyone!" I laughed, shaking my head with amusement at Dylan's astonishing ability to get around the entire town. Elaine was telling me that she had an opportunity to share a huge apartment over the local music store but had no transport for her copious wardrobe and general possessions.
I said "It isn't much, but this pushchair can take a lot of stuff if we arrange it well" and so it was decided that I would help her to move.

The friendship that grew from this chance encounter became very important to me.
Elaine's new accommodation was indeed vast. There were five bedrooms and although it was dingy and very old fashioned with ugly dull colours and wallpapers, she had great plans for it.
The young man who was the official tenant was a strange, elusive character who would dress in black biker's leathers and always wore his helmet before he left his room locked, to roar away for days on end with his huge motorbike. I don't think I would recognise him if I ever saw him again. He was a deeply private gruff sort of guy.
This meant that Elaine had the rest of the place to herself and she took the fullest advantage of that, until we realised that the mysterious biker was not returning.

Week after week went by and Elaine was putting her rent money in an envelope which she was slipping under the locked door to his room. We had no way of contacting the biker guy and simply waited for him to return but he never did. Ultimately, one day when Elaine was completely out of cash, she got a friend to break into that room and we entered. It was dark and heavily curtained. We discovered all over the floor, huge piles of pornographic magazines, films and slides! There was very little else in the room. Elaine retrieved her envelopes, bagged up the porn as rubbish, but our male friends grabbed it before we could dispose of it. From then on she was a non-paying squatter in that wonderful two storey apartment.
Meanwhile we were having a fine time making clothes together, sharing everything we had and seeing each other every day for sunbathing excursions to the beach.
1975 was becoming a great summer and we were both loving our freedom.

A sad and lonely young woman, who worked in the nearby Tesco store, moved into the other flat on the same floor as me in bedsitter land. Her name was Gaye but she was far from it.
She was very pale skinned with long black hair. She only left the flat to go to work and she had a television that was always on, even if she was not in the building or asleep. She said it made her feel less lonely.

Elaine and I wanted to go to a new live music venue that had opened over a cafeteria on the seafront and I needed a babysitter. I caught Gaye on the way home from work and asked her if she would babysit for me. Her face absolutely lit up, which took me totally by surprise.
She explained that she was divorcing and her husband had taken custody of their son, a boy of similar age to Dan. She said she missed him. I was gutted for her but delighted that she offered to take care of Dan whenever I needed her to. She refused any kind of payment and from then on she would leave her door open whenever she was at home so that Dan and Dylan could wander in to see her at any time they liked. Which they did, of course!

This open door policy of hers saved the entire building from being burned down one dinner time. Gaye had been heating her chip pan in preparation for a meal and had been distracted by something on the television in the other room. I smelled burning and quickly discovered the pan was a foot wide column of flame reaching Gaye’s kitchen ceiling. I turned off the electricity as the lightbulb blew out above me and raced to my own kitchen to grab a pan lid, warning Gaye to stay back and absolutely not to use water.
As luck would have it my lid fitted the burning pan perfectly and the room went instantly dark with flaming polystyrene ceiling tiles melting and floating down all around me. Dan was hanging onto the back of my long skirt screaming because, as far as he could see, I had put my hand directly into the fire. He was desperately trying to drag me out of the room. When I finally turned to comfort him he offered me his toy fire truck between sobs.

Gaye proved to be totally grateful and an excellent neighbour after that.
I helped her redecorate her blackened kitchen and from that day forward I was completely free to partake of the local nightlife. I had the babysitting covered.

This was a marvellously exciting opportunity and Elaine was quick to show me around the seedier side of Clacton life. My father-in-law's comment "Clacton is a den of iniquity" was rapidly becoming a mind mantra. That man had discovered in three weeks something that I had never seen in as many years but was beginning to see now under Elaine’s guidance.

I had been prescribed some strange pyramid shaped purple pills by the doctor when I had first returned from London. These were supposed to reduce the neurosis I had suffered and, to a large extent, they did the job. However, Elaine noticed that after I took them in the evenings, once Dan was settled into bed, I would become distant and dumb, as she described it.
One evening the extreme dumbness got on her nerves for the final time and she grabbed the little bottle of pills from my hand and launched it out of the open window of my kitchen.
"I have something that is much better than those!" she declared and invited me to her flat to find out what she was referring to. I bathed with Dan as usual and I put him to bed with his hot chocolate drink and peanut butter on toast. He and Dylan settled down to sleep together and I went to Gaye's open door to pop my head around and whispered that I was going to Elaine's for a couple of hours. Gaye was watching television and had no plans to go out, so this was quite acceptable.

Elaine was looking unusually mischievous when I arrived. She was playing a new album of music that she had just bought from the shop beneath her flat.
It was Cat Stevens "Tea for the Tillerman".

She made a couple of cups of coffee and then produced a tiny metal pill box with an intricate design in enamel on the surface which she opened, winking at me.
"Ever heard of dope, Fran?" she twinkled conspiratorially.
I felt like the dumbest halfwit on earth that night because, no, I had not heard of it and was embarrassed to say that I had no idea what it was. I soon found out and so began my enlightenment to the wild, experimental world of street drugs.

Life was starting to seem like something that had been passing me by unseen, during the time I had lived as Tony's wife.
I was determined to correct that immediately.
Elaine happily showed me the way.