That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters Read Free Book Online Page B

which two tablets would be dropped into our waiting palms and tossed with practised ease through the air on to our similarly waiting tongues. Then to finish off and complete the ‘style queens of the number 9 bus route’ image, out would come the Peter Stuyvesant’s or Consulate menthol cigarettes. We were good at the silences and expert at communicating solely by gesture or look. This was mainly down to the fact that Chris had a not insubstantial stutter. Conversations would go like this:
    ‘J-J-J-Julie . . . have you s-s-s-s-s-seen m-m-my b-b-b-b—’
‘Biro?’
‘N-n-n-no, m-my b-b-b—’
‘Brush?’
‘N-n-n- no ! M-m-m-my b-b-b—’
‘Bum?’
‘N-n-no. Errr, . . . s-s-s-stop i-t! M-m-my b-b—’
‘Bag?’
‘Yes.’
    ‘No.’
    And so it went on, with me finishing off by guesswork whatever sentence she had started. On the day of her wedding, not many years later, she went through the whole ceremony without a single stutter.
    We both purported to be Mods, which meant that we wore leather jackets over twinsets and pearls, below-the-knee pencil skirts and clumpy shoes, usually brown suede Hush Puppies, which would nowadays be worn by sensible old ladies with bad feet. On our nights out in town, however, we donned more slinky evening attire and Chris would often do our hair. One of the hair fashions of the day was a soft set of bubbly, bouncing curls and on a Saturday night Chris made a valiant effort at achieving this look for the two of us with the help of a set of rollers and a couple of litres of cheap hair lacquer. This sticky, sickly-smelling liquid set the curls into rigid little pompoms all over the head, so that not only was the soft and bouncing quality of the style never quite brought off but the whole thing was also rendered highly inflammable. There were terrible tales of girls bending their heads to light a cigarette and their whole hair catching alight instead of the cigarette, burning it down to the scalp and reducing it to a frizzled, stubbly mass.
    There was an occasion once, after I’d started work, when I went out to one of Chris’s dos on a Sunday night. As a result there wasn’t time on the Monday morning before I went to work to comb out the stiff curls with their solid lacquered finish. After I had slept on it for several hours, my hair had taken on a very odd shape, completely flat on one side, whilst wildly frizzing out in all directions on the other. At the end of about twenty minutes in the toilets I felt, after much tweaking and despite its having a certain Brillo Pad quality, that my hair was in an acceptable state, so I slipped into the office at the insurance company where I worked - my first proper job on leaving school - and sat at my desk. Within minutes the boss was at my elbow, hissing in my ear: ‘You’re late! And take that silly wig off your head!’
    On these nights out we frequented several different clubs: the Rum Runner, La Dolce Vita, Club Cedar, the Metro, but we would most often end up at the Locarno, a large club in the centre of Birmingham. In my memory at any rate, it was enormous and was divided, I think, into several bars and a couple of dance floors, each playing a different kind of music and so each appealing to a different age group, one of them for what we thought of as middle-aged people but who were most likely folk in their early twenties. Here the music was live and the band, usually something like a five piece, tended to play rock and roll, Elvis Presley, Frank Ifield, Tom Jones, the Beatles. No matter what, it always seemed to finish off at the end of the night with couples, some the worse for wear, draped over each other, in various stages of pre-coital foreplay, moving slowly round the room to ‘I Remember you’ by Frank Ifield and, later, ‘Hey Jude’. These were played solo by a bespectacled chap, sitting on a low stool, with a huge red-and-white electric guitar. At some point midway through the evening we would usually look in on our way