(posted 8021 days ago)The Sunday Times
May 05, 2002
Time & Place: Bare boards and high hopes
She couldn’t afford carpets, but Penny Vincenzi has a soft spot for the flat where her writing dreams took off
Our home in Abercorn Place, St John’s Wood, was a seminal place for us to have lived in the Sixties. I moved into the top-floor flat with my husband, Paul, in 1963, and it was our first grown-up home. I was 23 and had our first baby, Polly, there, so it was all very exciting.
I was working as a secretary for Marje Proops on the Daily Mirror, and Paul was working part-time as a photographer. The rent was £9 a week, which we couldn’t really afford. We each earned about £14 a week and knew things would be tight.
We had one big sitting room, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and two bedrooms at the front — one for us and one for the baby. It seemed like a palace and felt really splendid and grand. The flat was unfurnished and it stayed that way for quite a while before we got luxuries such as curtains and carpets. Paul’s mother was incredibly kind and gave us four beautiful Georgian chairs as a wedding present, so we had this empty flat and these four unbelievably expensive chairs.
I remember one night we had Marje and her husband, Proopsy, to dinner and they sat on the Georgian chairs and ate off their knees.
Working for Marje was the best thing I ever did. I was her secretary to start with and she got me promoted to editorial assistant. I was pregnant when I started working for her and she was very kind. She lived two streets away in Hamilton Terrace and she’d often drive me back or send me home early and say I was doing research. I had always wanted to be a journalist, but to be a journalist you had to be in the National Union of Journalists. Marje was Mother of the Chapel. One day she rang me at about midnight and said: “Darling, you are in.”
While we lived there I became fashion editor of Nova magazine. Paul was doing very well as a photographer. He used the big room as a studio for some of his shoots. On the landing was a storage room, which we turned into a fantastic darkroom. We found this magical pair of plumbers who fitted the plumbing for us one night. It was quite illicit and we’d have been thrown out if anybody found out.
The contrast in my working life and home life was really funny. When I was at Nova I had a secretary and didn’t have to make my own coffee, and then I’d come home and wash the floors. I’d cook every night — 1960s wives looked after their men.
We had lived in a horrible place in Kennington before, so it was great to be able to ask people around for a civilised thing like drinks. At dinner parties I used to be told by other mothers that they loved their children and wouldn’t want to go out to work and leave them with au pairs as I did. I felt guilty all the time and I do have terrible remorse, but we didn’t have a choice because we needed both our monies.
We stayed in a lot because money was tight so I always say I missed out on the swinging London scene. But we lived just 100 yards away from the Abbey Road studios. The Beatles were at the peak of their fame and there were often crowds of screaming girls. I was supposed to be a respectable, grown-up mother and I just stood there praying I’d see them. It was very exciting when they arrived; they all waved and ran in as you’d expect.
We started to get rather squashed when I had Sophie, 2½ years after Polly was born. We decided we absolutely had to move, but we kept putting it off because we loved it so much. In 1967, we moved right out to East Molesey, where we bought our first house, for £5,000. It was very hard to leave the flat and I cried all the way down the road.
About five years ago, I returned to the street and all of a sudden I felt 23 again. I went back to the little parade of shops and was most put out that they weren’t the same. It was very odd because I thought any minute I’d see Polly and Sophie run down the street in their red macs. I felt very nostalgic because they were such lovely days.
Something Dangerous by Penny Vincenzi is published by Orion at £6.99. Interview by Louise Johncox