Free White Boots & Miniskirts by Jacky Hyams

were, to be fair, probably used to a more diligent work ethic. What these agencies blithely ignored was how slack many London employers were in the ’60s. By then, I’d job-hopped quite a bit. Secretaries were too often underemployed, little more than a status symbol.
    The London agency, once they’d interviewed us and checked us out, took over all the paperwork. The Americans also insisted on a medical and various other administrative checks. The entire process, we were warned, would take several months. But what troubled me about it all was the somewhat draconian (to me) deal with the New York employment agency: they’d provide you with each placement as a temp. Once you’d done your two or three weeks at one place, they’d send you to another, and so on. But the contract you signed with them was binding. If you didn’t like the work or jumpedship, you were out. Back to Blighty you must go. The agency would point you in the right direction to find suitable accommodation initially but you were more or less on your own when it came to finding a permanent place to live. The money, though, was good, much better than our London secretary’s wages of £ 12–13 a week. Not quite double but close. Having Ange there would make the difference. It all pointed to a much better life, brighter prospects of finding more exciting men. Or so she convinced me at the time.
    ‘You’re not getting anywhere here, are you? Jeff’ll ditch you one day and then where will you be?’ she’d say in her somewhat blunt northern way. ‘You don’t wanna wind up with someone like that big fat fool, do you?’ Meaning Bryan, which was cruel. But apt. She was spot on. None of my other girlfriends dared to push my nose into the reality of my dodgy affair with an obvious lothario. And eventually I’d confided in her about the illegal abortion and the Jeff/Bryan deception, so she knew exactly where I was coming from. What she said seemed to make sense, so I agreed.
    Yet I had a niggling feeling that the agency dictating where I worked might not be such a good idea for someone like me, who resented any form of authority. I’d been exploiting my situation at the shoe company, had won a bit of autonomy and was lucky to have a boss who was hardly ever there. That worked for me. Job-wise, I could only hang around if I got a bit offreedom. I couldn’t cope with a typing pool, for instance. A room full of girls at typewriters with a supervisor keeping an eagle eye on everything was far too authoritarian and disciplined. Less opportunity to – well, play it your own way.
    Another big unconsidered weakness in The Plan was my relative lack of travel experience. Two teenage trips to Italy and one £ 30 all-in package holiday to Benidorm just before moving from Hackney do not a seasoned traveller make. And as with millions of ordinary people who now found sunshine packages affordable – thanks to tour companies like Clarksons or Horizon Holidays – my Benidorm trip had shown me there were certain drawbacks to these cheap sunshine deals. By the mid-1960s, the 400-page glossy Clarksons’ holiday brochure was being pored over at night by families all over the country through the dark winter months, the shiny, enticing pictures of sun-baked sandy beaches and brand new, high-rise hotels in Spain proving irresistibly alluring to sun-starved, pale-skinned Brits.
    In 1966, the year of my first-ever Spanish package, the average earnings were about £ 1,200 a year for men and around £ 600 a year for women. Which meant that the £ 30- £ 40 price tag had become affordable, something to save up for. Yet what the British holidaymaker didn’t know – and how could they? – was that tour companies had spotted the huge potential of the cheap charter flight even in the 1950s. By the ’60s they’d really got stuck in,doing deal after deal with eager Spanish hoteliers or developers, all desperate to cash in on the demand to accommodate the sun-starved millions from