SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 27)

From Trivial Pursuit to Pinstripe Spy

Work had seemed so far away when I was in Corfu. It had been utterly forgotten and I was not due back at my desk until the coming Monday. I had the weekend to adjust back to reality.
Elaine had been working in the City as a recruitment consultant and she was suddenly changing career. Although she did not specify precisely what she was doing, I had a fair idea. She invited me to her London flat and we had an evening out in a club full of red velvet décor and expensive lighting. She introduced me to a slick black guy who eyed me like I was a piece of juicy steak that he was about to consume. He boldly looked me up and down and then told me, “You are sitting on your fortune!” and I worried what Elaine was getting into.

She did not need her office clothes any more and she gave me a large bin liner full of barely worn city girl designer suits, shirts and smart dresses.
"You can make good use of all this!" She announced and I was delighted to see many ideal outfits that were perfect for my new career.

I took my job very seriously and I set about being as super efficient as I knew how to be. I was given more responsibilities and when I asked for an assistant, I got one, no questions asked.
Alison was straight out of secretarial college and very unsure of herself. She was actually really clever but took a lot of encouragement and confidence building before she believed me. I had the use of a neat bronze coloured company car to pick up clients, suppliers and visitors from the airport or deliver print film to local printers.
I was loving it!

I developed a tremendous relationship with the staff on the factory assembly lines and fed information back to my boss about things that he was unable to keep an eye on.
The girls on the factory floor had a crush on the managing director so, one Friday, after he had fielded several irritating phone calls and had flopped back into his swing chair with a huge sigh, I made a suggestion.
"Why don't you take off your jacket and tie, roll up your sleeves and go down onto the shop floor to see exactly how the boxes are made up and filled? The staff would absolutely love it. It would be useful for you and they will be really impressed. Great for morale!"

He thought this was a terrific idea and went straight into action. All afternoon I worked like a thing possessed to cover for him and when he returned to his office at 5pm he was full of ideas.
"We have to get a painter and decorator in to fix up those appalling toilets!" He announced as I scribbled notes. "Oh, and that whole shrink wrap area needs to be redesigned!" He was grabbing his jacket as he went out of the door, "Get us another forklift driver, will you?"
"OK!" I said and waved him goodbye.

That evening, instead of going straight home, I popped to see a great friend and it just happened that a mate of his from Colchester was visiting. They were cracking up, giggling their heads off as I arrived. When I finally managed to get some sense out of them, it transpired that they had been to a solicitor and had both changed their names by deed poll.
They were now to be known as Bob Sherunkle and Sausage Hendrix. 🤣😂

Sausage was asking me about the factory where I was working and I explained the business to him. "I need a job!" he said hopefully. I was looking at a tattooed long haired hippy guy with no shoes and thinking, no way can I get this guy a job, but I casually mentioned the fork lift position. "Oh yeah, no bother!" retorted Sausage.
"Can you be outside the gates by 8am on Monday?" I asked.
"Sure, I will be there!" came the confirmation.
"With steel toe capped boots?" I ventured, and Sausage said that he had all the kit he needed. He swore he would not let me down and promised that he would be very smart.

On the following Monday morning I arrived at work at 8am to find Sausage waiting in the foyer outside my office. He looked amazing. His hair was neatly tied at the nape of his neck and he was wearing a nice shirt and clean work trousers. He had even polished the boots.

I went to the personnel department, collected an application form and we filled it in together. When my boss arrived at 9am we were having a coffee, waiting for him.

"This is Mr. Hendrix." I introduced Sausage. "He has come for the new fork lift job."
My boss looked at me, a little taken aback, and took the application form from me. He shook Sausage's hand and they went into the director’s office together.
When they came out I noticed that my boss had his tie off and was rolling up his sleeves.
"We will be in the warehouse!" he said, as they went through to the factory floor.

My boss came back alone and Sausage had started work.
Sausage and I met for lunch, at a bench around the back of the factory. We shared my sandwiches and he supplied a fat joint to celebrate.
Sausage was very grateful.
He was amazed that he had got the job so easily.
So was I.

Astonishingly, Sausage, known affectionately as Sos from then on, became a very popular member of staff, was always on time and almost workaholic. He was very experienced and careful. There came a day when he discovered that some large boxes from the Chinese supplier of game parts had a white powdery residue in them. Upon examination, Sos was alarmed and had come into the office to tell me that the boxes that the plastic parts had arrived in had previously held a chemical substance, which he could not pronounce, but had written down for me. He was very itchy and I noticed that where he had been touching the stuff he was coming up in a fierce rash.

One thing led to another and the upshot of this was Sos went to the local hospital to get some skin treatment and the whole factory was closed down while a professional clean was conducted at great expense. Everyone was very grateful to Sos for his observation and good sense in reporting the matter. That could have been disastrous for Trivial Pursuit in the infancy of it's development.

One afternoon, I was supposed to be collecting some German print representatives from Stansted airport, but their flight was significantly delayed because of fog. I used the time to find my old friend, Lynn, who had left Clacton in quite a rush. She had moved to a part of Colchester that I was not familiar with.
She had registered as homeless and had been rehoused in temporary accommodation by Colchester Borough Council. It was a shoddy little house and, when I arrived, Lynn was in her bedroom trying to arrange a lot of stuff into a very small space.

When she saw the neat bronze car parked outside her house she asked, "Can you have that car over the weekends?" I said that I could, if I wanted to.
"Great!" she said, "Let's go to the Pink Toothbrush in Rayleigh!" I had no idea what the place was, but Lynn was enthusing about a band she was hooked on called the Fields of the Nephilim, who would be playing at this alternative venue the coming Saturday night.

It was an intensely heavy experience with the first vestiges of gothic fashion beginning to develop. Lynn was dressed up all in black lace and was right at the front of the crowd totally entranced by the singer. Well, she called him a singer, but I heard groaning, husky unintelligible sounds that I guessed were supposed to be lyrics.

I enjoyed the seediness of the Pink Toothbrush venue and the crowd were certainly very alternative. There was a lot of cannabis resin in the air and the prices at the bar were not as stupidly high as you might expect in a place that was as popular as the Brush, as they called it.
Lynn met up with a few friends and we all went out to the car park to get some fresh air. It was there that I was privy to the first plans that were being made for an important upcoming action.

This germ of a plan introduced me to a movement called Stop the City which was deeply anarchist, even dangerous. They wanted to literally stop the City of London, the one square mile where all the banks and newspapers, insurance giants and movers and shakers conducted their mysterious control over the entire global economy.
It was a bold plan and the buzz had gone all around London like a wildfire in dry ferns.

In 1983 and 1984 they had taken the streets with surprise blockades and mounting of banners against the arms trade, the bank's supremacy and many other issues. Ringleaders had been rounded up by police at those early events and Lynn had escaped to the quiet life on the Essex coast until the whole idea had appeared to have been disbanded and forgotten.

Lynn explained to me that the movement had changed its modus operandi.
Now the work was all about infiltrating the grossest of the City businesses and doing what they could to disrupt and sabotage from within, or to leak information out if at all possible. I was very intrigued.
Lynn spent a lot of time reading high brow newspapers and was cluing me up on which companies were the hardest to get into. I was very curious to know how successful the activists had been, but she said that divulging more detail could risk people being exposed, so I let it drop.

Since 1981, I had been visiting Greenham Common with a small team of activists from Essex and we had sung ourselves hoarse at the gates on so many occasions that my memory is a melee of moments, mud and mayhem. Thankfully, some Greenham Women have sorted it out into a timeline published here and here. I helped to cut the fences, decorate them with rag-art and invade to dance on the silos.

I got caught inside the fence once by an American GI in a Jeep.

I was returning to the perimeter fence after pouring a corrosive ‘substance’ into the air vent of the massive missile silos, so I had a big black bucket with me. I was dressed in black and it was dark, around midnight, in June or July I think. Anyway, this Jeep came hurtling towards me with lights blazing and I froze, clutching my bucket.
“What you doing?” the GI asked me. Quick as a flash my mind whirred into action.
“Um…. collecting magic mushrooms!” I stated, grinning at this gorgeous hunk of all American military masculinity. Obviously, he had no idea that magic mushrooms only grow during late autumn, so my excuse was accepted without further question. He insisted that I got into the Jeep beside him and I really thought that I was being arrested.
As luck would have it, he was more interested in chatting me up!

He drove slowly to one of the gates, conversing in a very charming way and I was allowed to return to the correct side of the fence. Just as I was passing through the gate, much to the amusement of the women gathered there, this man loudly asked me for my phone number! My friend, Katie, who had been watching over me from our fence cut, came running up and told everyone that I could pull any bloke, even if I were dressed in a ‘bloody bin liner’! Which I was. She made me the butt of many of her jokes, for years over that little incident!

—0—

It was coming to the end of 1988 when out of the blue and, completely unexpectedly, Tony decided to break into my house via the back entrance, very late one Sunday night.

He was very drunk, he was unstoppable and he was filled with a rage that seemed to relate to his new wife Lorraine in some way, but he was so incoherent I never did fully understand what had happened between them.
He set about a very brutal rape which lasted until dawn, when I managed to persuade him to stop. I don't know how I finally got him to leave, but he went out by the back door and walked away, across a huge care home car park that was accessible from the alleyway at the back of my house.

I crawled back into bed exhausted, but was woken up again at about 8am by some frantic, loud knocking at the front door. It was Tony's brother, Pete who gestured to Tony's dark red Mitsubishi pick up which was parked facing the wrong way in the one way street. It was half on the pavement and right outside my house!
Tony, in his drunken stupor, had obviously forgotten that he had been in it the night before and had walked home without it.
"Lorraine is freaking out!" said Pete "She drove past a while ago, looking for Tony and has seen his pick up! Is he still here?" I shook my head and said that he had left hours previously, but had gone out the back way on foot.

I don't know how he excused himself for all this madness but he must have, because I never heard another word from any of them for months after that.

However, I was left emotionally shot to bits by the incident. There was no way that I could possibly go to work that Monday morning, I couldn’t stop crying.
At 9am I phoned the office to make my excuses and the person who answered the phone was the head of the purchasing department, a man I did not like.
"What is the matter with you?" he asked abruptly and I hardly knew what to say. I stumbled over trying to think of a feasible reason for not going to work but finished up saying, "Look, erm. Can I explain when I get there tomorrow, please? It is a bit personal."

The following day I covered up the developing bruises with make up and went to work like a mind dead zombie. My boss called me into his room as soon as I arrived and the hostile purchasing manager was also in there. I took my notepad as usual and my boss asked me to sit down. He was frosty and remote in his way of speaking to me.
"Can you explain why you were absent from work yesterday?" he asked.
I was not about to explain in front of anyone else and certainly not to two men who were glaring at me with their arms folded. I flashed with an indignant inner rage and stated flatly that I had deeply personal reasons for my absence that I was not prepared to discuss. The hint was not clear enough.
Rape didn't happen in their lives, not ever.
They were smart, university educated young men.
They had no idea what my life had been like and I was not going to be telling them either.

I was summarily dismissed and I simply walked out of my boss’s office, choked back the tears, picked up my handbag and went straight home without saying another word to anyone.

I phoned Top Job and spoke to the owner of the agency. I explained exactly what had happened. She was horrified that I had been sacked, but sympathised that I had been unable to tell them the truth about the rape. She understood completely.
She said, "When you are ready, call me. I will find you a great job. Don't worry!"

Later, almost at the end of business on that same day, I was sleeping on my lounge couch when she phoned me back and asked if I could manage to start a new job the following day!
"Wow!" I ejaculated, rousing myself as best I could. I was surprised that she had found something so quickly.
"What is it?" I asked.
She said I was to be working for a major insurance corporation in the City of London as a secretary/PA at board level.
"Highly prestigious, Fran! You would be doing me a really big favour if you could manage it?" The pleading in her voice was not a sound I had ever heard from her before. "If you do well, I will get their entire temporary work contract, Fran. It is a huge opportunity for Top Job!"

And so it was that, battered and bruised, I strode into the poshest suite of offices I had ever seen at 9am sharp, the following day.
I wore my black lace shirt under a black pin stripe suit and over black patent leather stilettos and black silky tights.
I carried, hidden from view, a stone cold, blackened and broken heart.