A la recherche du temps perdu

A dangerous route to go down. I met my philandering husband in 1965. I was 19. Today that would be considered young. Then, we seemed more mature - or maybe a weird mixture of young, and old before our time.

London was a small place back then - everyone you met had been to boarding school, secretarial college, finishing school, the Cordon Bleu Cookery School, or Grenoble, which is where my husband went after leaving school,not bright enough for an English University! Oh, those were the days. What a simple life. None of us had any expectations, no ambition. A lot of my friends married almost straight from school. I was a bridesmaid three times - terrible outfits, hyacinth blue crackly nylon, mustard velvet, turquoise velvet. Oh dear, oh dear. No argument, no choice, and you paid! But - life was fun - I had fun with the husband to be. I really fell for him - but the stage was set. He was never to be trusted, and he broke my heart.

Yes we had such fun, and we seemed to be best friends. I look back fondly to the mid-sixties - life was changing and our parents could only look on quizzically and wonder what had happened! They never had the freedom, the choice and how lucky we were to be in at the beginning of it all. Mary Quant in the Kings Road, Vidal Sassoon, yes, I had the geometric haircut, Biba in Abingdon Road. Hardly anyone had a car - unless they borrowed the parents' mini, and the train from Paddington to Leamington Spa on a Friday night was full of chums going back to Warwickshire for the weekend. Oh nostalgia.