The Woman of Substance by Piers Dudgeon

Author:Piers Dudgeon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

The Jeannie Years

‘There’s nothing you can’t have if you try hard enough, work hard enough and strive towards a goal. And never, never limit yourself.’

Audra in Act of Will

The Fifties were an unforgettable era. The decade saw the exploding of the H-bomb, the coming of TV to the masses, the first exploration of outer space, the beginnings of the affluent society and the start of a period of teenage-powered rebellion against existing attitudes to sex, class, authority and good taste. It was the time of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Burgess and Maclean, and the papers were full, too, of Khrushchev, Castro and Suez. Feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir used the term ‘women’s liberation’ for the first time in 1953, and, two years earlier, Irish writer Leslie Paul wrote Angry Young Man, providing the soubriquet for a radical school of writers that included John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Colin Wilson, John Braine and others.

In fact, as we shall see, there were large parts of this Fifties agenda that Barbara never experienced, partly because the ‘good taste’ and elegance elements that were up for replacement were endemic to her style, which it never occurred to her to change. Nevertheless, the era was an unforgettable experience for her, if quite unlike most people’s. It began in austerity and finished up with a Hollywood liaison.

In 1950, twenty Dunhill cigarettes cost three shillings and sevenpence (about 17.5p in modern coinage); a large loaf of bread, two shillings and a penny (10p); a pound of cheese, a shilling (5p); and a bottle of gin, thirty-three shillings and ninepence (about £1.70). On the face of it, that sounds like a cheap shop, but of course salaries were far less then too. A political columnist on the Sunday Pictorial, a national newspaper, was earning £1500 in 1950. Would he be earning forty times as much today? If so, his shopping bill today, at 1950s prices, would be £7 for the packet of Dunhills, £4 for a large loaf of bread, £2 a pound for cheese, and £68 for a bottle of gin. Quite clearly the whole product-cost balance is different today, and there are many more things to spend our money on, but clearly, too, things were not cheap more than half a century ago.

When Freda delivered Barbara to her small flat at 44 Belsize Park Gardens, NW3, between the Finchley Road and Haverstock Hill, she was going to find it hard to make ends meet on a salary that will have been considerably less than £1500 per annum. Typically, the burden was eased by Freda. Like Christina in Act of Will, the rent was paid by her mother: ‘My parents supported me when I was in London,’ Barbara has said.

This might be assumed to have had an effect on the frame of mind in which Barbara began her decade in London. Indeed, she makes plain in Act of Will that there is a price for Christina to pay for Audra’s self-sacrifice on her behalf.

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