White Boots & Miniskirts - A True Story of Life in the Swinging Sixties. Jacky Hyams

packed little shop are far too tiny, cut too narrowly, too tight-sleeved and aimed at very lean King’s Road girls. The smocks and the dyed skinny vests are for the flat-chested, not for me.

      Yet once I do find what suits me elsewhere, a swift wriggle into the new ultra-short op-art dress, zip it up, add a pair of pale tights, low-cut patent shoes and lo! Instant transformation into the siren I hoped to be, complete with super-thick false eyelashes or carefully painted-on lower lashes, (thanks, Twiggy) pink Max Factor lipstick, and a blonde, shoulder-length flick-up hairdo. And, of course, a small, quilted Chanel-style bag on a gold chain slung over the shoulder. The ’60s look.

      Of course, we can’t all look like the high priestesses of classic mini-skirted ’60s blonde. Women such as Patti Boyd, Julie Christie, Catherine Deneuve or Bardot (my secret role models – talk about aiming high. In this at least I have real ambition). I’m not lean enough to be a classic dolly bird, though the slinky, short, patterned dresses in man-made slippery fabrics suit my curvy shape. With an unruly, curly brown mop I am very far from the requisite natural blonde with straight, shiny hair. Somehow, I’ve managed to transform myself into a yellowish peroxide blonde, often with nasty dark roots. But the fashions of the time help: bad hair days can be disguised because all kinds of head gear and caps have become ultra-fashionable, especially the plastic pillbox hat, worn on the back of the head revealing only a dead straight fringe. Consider Mandy Rice Davies wearing such a hat outside the court in 1963 at the height of the Profumo affair. The hat covers a multitude of sins, if you’ll forgive the pun.

      Look carefully at those ’60s photos of the commuters streaming down Waterloo Bridge to work or thronging Oxford Street or Piccadilly. You can’t see too many overweight people, can you? My colleagues and girlfriends are different shapes and sizes – yet hardly any are what could be described as glaringly obese. The post-war generation, reared on free milk and NHS sticky orange juice as toddlers, remain quite lean by today’s standards. Yet by today’s standards, we eat badly – our office girl lunches, purchased with luncheon vouchers, now obligatory for any employer wishing to attract office staff, consist of cheese or ham crispy white rolls, Smith’s crisps, Kit Kats, Lyon’s Maid choc-ices or the somewhat dubious three-course café lunches for 2 shillings and 6 pence (watery tinned soup, something vaguely resembling meat and chips, treacle pudding and sticky yellow custard). All this, of course, is way too starchy and fat-laden. We are mostly ignorant about what really constitutes a sensible, healthy diet.

      I’ve been diving into adventurous foreign eating territory in Soho, with cheap Chinese dishes like sweet’n’sour pork around Chinatown and Shaftesbury Avenue, since my late teens. Or sampling poppadums and curried chicken in north London Indian restaurants on my nights out with Bryan. But young women probably stay slim-ish because there aren’t many fast food outlets around yet. Small workers’ cafés, run by cheerful, hard-working Italian immigrant families, are the norm at lunchtime in the West End or the City, alongside the fast-growing rash of Wimpy Bars and Golden Egg chains spreading everywhere. These would eventually destroy places such as Lyons Corner Houses, so beloved of our parents’ generation yet losing popularity all the time until their demise in the early 1970s. Pub food? This barely existed beyond the odd sandwich, scotch egg or ham roll. White bread only. (‘Don’t say brown, say Hovis’ ran the 1950s ads for wheatgerm bread, but most pub managers continued to ignore anything but soggy sliced white bread well into the 1970s – and beyond).

      In flesh-revealing terms, slimmer ’60s women were pretty modest by today’s standards. The mini is rampant, certainly, a revolutionary expression of new freedoms. There is a lot of leg and thigh on display. But you’re unlikely to see a seven-month pregnant woman at a bus stop in a clingy outfit emphasising the bump. Modesty, even with the mini around, would not vanish overnight.

      Parents are mostly horrified and somewhat puzzled at the exuberant rise of the show-all mini. ‘You can’t go out like that’ becomes the mantra of a generation of women accustomed to ‘making do’ and rationing, using a black crayon to draw a fake ‘seam’ down the backs of their legs in wartime, nylon stockings having been virtually unavailable for many years. Now, those prized, precious, seamed nylons and suspender belts are on the way out too, replaced by the shiny white tights. Or, later, striped high socks with square-toed patent flats. It’s truly daft to attempt to combine a mini with stockings and suspenders, though there’s always the odd aberration, much to the delight of all the men in the office.

      In a way, central London is my playground. I’ve grown up in a tough, streetwise area around Ridley Road market, but since my teens I’ve been spending most of my time working and going out in the West End, with occasional brief forays to fashionable Chelsea and Kensington. So the fashion influences are all around me, in my face, the shops a daily temptation. As a secretary I can job hop with remarkable impunity, mainly because there are so many office jobs on offer – and I am very easily bored. Offices big and small are taking on huge numbers of young school leavers and 20-somethings. With a bit of secretarial experience behind you, you can pick and choose, swapping around as often as you like.

      For someone like me, with a restless, impatient nature, I am truly fortunate in that I hit the working world at just the right time: jobs a-go-go. Though with the carelessness of youth, I simply take this kind of freedom for granted. Gratitude for being given a job? Excuse me? Isn’t it the other way round?

      What I really hanker for, but never acknowledge, is some sort of challenge or stimulus in my daily trek to the typewriter. The day-to-day routine, waiting for men to dictate to you so you can type, spells stultifying boredom to me, only enlivened by banter and cheeky retorts to colleagues around the office and the contemplation of the after-work drink or that night’s diversion. Yet such is the laissez faire of the employers, the ease with which office jobs are dished out, often with a minimum of formality (a CV was unknown, though a typed ‘reference’ from a previous job might be required by a diligent employer), I do manage to find the occasional minor challenge, simply because I opt to move around the job market frequently.

      Far from being a model employee, the somewhat defiant, ‘couldn’t give a stuff’ attitude I’d deployed at school has now morphed into a kind of sneery arrogance about it all. I’ll do the work, rattle through it, no problem. I prefer to be doing, rather than just sitting around – something many bosses, who are quite happy to let you sit there twiddling your thumbs for much of the time, don’t quite comprehend. But the whole package, the office location, the general environment, the ambience of the place has to suit me. Otherwise I’m off.

      My attitude is best illustrated by a job I held for a while after I’d quit the electronics company following a swift and unexpected management change – and the booting out of my boss. For about 18 months afterwards I worked in a job that was on the fringes of London’s ’60s fashion explosion. Though you’d never have guessed it if you turned up at the rundown building tucked away in the mews behind Oxford Street where the company had its headquarters. Scruffy is a polite word to describe the exterior. Dead rodents, rubbish, torn boxes and birdshit greet the visitor. Without any health and safety laws or human resources policies to keep things in check, small companies frequently operated in less than healthy environments. Yet this job, with all its drawbacks, remains one of the more diverting – and memorable – ways I found to make a living in the late 1960s.

      Essentially, the job involved a bizarre corporate cover-up. I was hired as a sort of personal assistant to a director of a chain of shoe stores. No one ever bothered to explain to me beforehand that the job mostly involved pretending to be a man. A man who did not exist. OK, it didn’t go as far as me donning men’s clothes or doing impersonations. But essentially, for the time I worked in those dingy offices, I and I alone acted as a man of power and influence within the company, signing letters and documents bearing his name and often pretending to be a direct conduit to this non-existent individual. I have his ear. I am his official right hand, as far as the customers are concerned. His name: Mr Kirk-Watson.

      To this day, I have no idea if this man ever existed. All attempts to grill my boss and other colleagues about The Real Kirk-Watson lead nowhere. No one ever actually knew him or anything about him. But in the minds of the shoe chain’s many customers, he is a significant presence indeed. And for the endlessly harassed store managers –