Lizzy May – Chapter 8

Escape

‘Set ’em Up’ by Steve Fendt

Summer 1976

I was twenty-one years old when I finally managed to escape from Mother. It was nineteen twenty-two.

You see, in those days parents had legal responsibility for their children until that age. Did you know, that only changed six years ago?

Ah, well, there you are.

So, it was very difficult to do anything without your parents’ permission. To get a job, rent a room, get married. Young people still found ways, of course, but your parents could make life difficult for you, if they chose to.

It was particularly bad for girls, because women had fewer rights than men in the first place. You wanted to watch out, or you could find yourself locked up in an asylum, just for having a will of your own.

I have no idea why Mother kept me at home, other than sheer spite. Things had deteriorated again, to the point where we could hardly bear to look at each other. We went for days without speaking. Father used to relay messages, or we’d leave notes.

When she did say anything, it was ‘Ernie and Elsie this’ and ‘Elsie and Ernie that’. Mother always doted on my big brother, so after he came back from the War in one piece, and then married a pretty little wife and had a pretty little baby girl … Well, you can imagine.

I think she secretly hoped that my brother and his young family would move into Martindale Road with us. Thankfully, they had more sense.

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On my twenty-first birthday, I got up early, washed and dressed. It was a chilly spring morning, the April sun just starting to rise over the rooftops. The window panes were misted up.

Then I started to pack. It didn’t take long: a suitcase of clothes and a bag of books. A hat box and a jewellery case. A wash bag and a little picture I loved, a framed print of an Impressionist landscape, from my wall.

Father was waiting. He’d offered to help me with the move. He was always the one to keep in touch, build bridges.

I called ‘Goodbye, Mother!’ up the stairs, left my keys on the hall table, and shut the front door behind me. If she replied, I didn’t hear her.

Those were the last words I ever spoke to her, though she lived another fifteen years, until 1937. I never set foot in that house again.

I’d already got my accommodation arranged, of course. I was going to lodge with Louisa, an ex-colleague I was friendly with, and her husband Jimmy.

You see, most landlords wouldn’t lease a flat or house to young single women. They were worried about their own reputation, that the women would invite boyfriends to stay, causing a scandal with the neighbours, who would gossip and might even call the police!

If they were accused of keeping a ‘disreputable house’, they could be fined, and shut down.

There were options: boarding houses and hostels, but the owners could impose arbitrary rules, like curfews. If you weren’t home by nine o’clock, say, they’d lock you out for the night! Then the next morning, you’d find your bags sitting on the front step and you could find somewhere else to live, thank you very much.

The boarding houses had very basic, shared facilities, not much privacy, and you had to watch out for landlords, and male boarders, taking advantage.

Landladies preferred male boarders, too, because they were often helpless, when it came to preparing their own meals or doing their own laundry. That led to extra services, which could be charged for, you see?

The hostels? They were even worse, really a last resort.

All that kept me at home much longer than I would have liked.

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In general, though, the 1920s were a wonderful time to be a young single woman in London. Have you heard of the Roaring Twenties?

After the austerity of the war years, everyone went a bit mad, I think. Particularly young people, and most particularly young women. We drank, we smoked and we came home late.

Even wallflowers like me got invited to parties.

There were bars, clubs and dance halls, serving beer and wine, cocktails and hard spirits. There were other stimulants freely available as well, if you knew who to ask, but we’ll say no more about that. Your parents’ generation didn’t invent bad behaviour, though I’m sure they think so.

It’s what young people have always thought.

There were new kinds of music imported from the USA, the like of which I’d never heard before. Jazz and blues. Wild new dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom, and new fashions! Cloche hats and flapper dresses that showed your figure, with hemlines above the knee!

Scandalous!

Female fashions became generally less bulky and more practical for the modern, working woman. Hairstyles became shorter too. I got my first bob cut. I didn’t have to spend an hour every morning brushing the knots out of my hair and getting dressed.

Don’t imagine your Nan was ever a ‘good time girl’, mind you. For one, I had very little money to spare, and for another, I was too busy drinking in all the serious culture that London offered.

There was so much, and most of it free. The British Museum with its treasures from around the world, the National Gallery and the V&A. Classical music concerts by world-class orchestras and soloists. The British Library, its shelves lined with every book ever published in Britain, the echoing hush of its great circular reading room.

Full-price tickets for the theatre, the opera and the ballet were expensive, beyond our means. If you stood ‘up in the gods’, though, behind the back seats in the top balcony, it was cheap. Or the ushers would let you in after the first or second interval, to take any vacant seats.

You could go to public lectures by the greatest thinkers of the age: scientists, explorers, novelists and philosophers.

London in the interwar years was just wonderful! They were the happiest years of my life.

Which was about to get even more interesting.

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Coming up:

This Friday in Tales from the Wood: Pauly gets in trouble again at school, and finds solace in solitude and rustic pleasures. (Paid subscriptions.)

Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: Lizzy May lands a job on Fleet Street. A Very Annoying Man spoils her enjoyment of a lunchtime concert.