No One Said It Would Be Easy. Des Molloy
need to be found. For a while I was a ‘guest’ of 603 High Rd, Leyton, a flat originally of six Kiwi and Aussie teachers. This had been an all-girl flat but at different times quite a few of us of the wrong-gender had bunked down in the lounge or temporarily taken over a bed while someone was away. During these years there were always openings in flats because often occupants were temporarily ‘going off to do Scandi’ or ‘driving across America’ or having a ‘Top-deck tour of Morocco’, ‘debauching at the wine festival in Fucina’, etc. Some would even go off to Aussie for a couple of months of outback work to top-up the coffers, thus enabling more travel. Our lives were ones of low-level hedonism, with work always taking a back-step. Careers were not advanced, there was too much living to do.
While at 603 the bikes had an unpowered, unlit, falling-down shed to live in. The sidecar frame was randomly deposited in the next-door backyard that was shared. Vandals subsequently set fire to the yard area and later a rag-and-bone man made a raid and removed everything. It is only decades later that I can mourn the loss as at the time it solved a problem. Preparation for the big trip was glacial in its pace.
For the summer of 1975 I’d had a construction company and had won a contract to replace a district heating scheme in a housing estate. This involved getting a great suntan, a lot of workers and heaps of fun, but towards the end, when I had my hand out for legitimate contract extras, the money flow slowed to a trickle and delaying tactics from the client were very obvious. I seemed powerless to get my due. The timing of this crisis was corresponding with the disestablishment of 603. I needed to move and for the first time in 4 years there wasn’t an obvious place to relocate to. After warning the client several times, I resorted to direct action and removed everything from site and went AWOL. I took an advertised room in West Hendon which I called The Box. It was tiny. I could almost touch the walls on either side with my finger-tips, and to put the light off I just swished away with my squash racket till I got the switch. For the first time I was not in an Antipodean enclave. It was just
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no one said it would be easy
about OK and despite my reservations regarding a 30s+ male flat-mate being an avid Come Dancing fan, and a reclusive ascetic woman of similar age being an author of Mills and Boon ‘Penny-dreadfuls’, I got by and Lawrie engaged me in a work scam he had inherited.
We worked … or rather attended a double-glazing company of some substance. We were contractors and worked under the direct control of the accountant, so the woman who looked after all the clerical workers in accounts knew nothing of what we did, other than that it was an important analysis project of some sort. All day we copied out figures and made summaries of sales. Just occasionally we would gather up our findings and take the ream of paper into the accountant and he would ceremonially put it through the shredder and tell us to start again. The work was deemed so important that we also needed to work over-time. Often we would surreptitiously follow the last of the bosses out the door and be only one gear-change behind him going up the road. This scam had been passed on from hand to hand for some years, Lawrie getting it from some South Africans a year or so earlier. Each week we’d submit our invoices and accordingly get paid. During the day Lawrie often slipped in toll calls to home in Australia or to the US where he was planning to relocate to prior to our ride. The sweet old dear who looked after the office never seemed to suspect a thing.
Around this time, I got news that my mum and dad were going to visit the UK and some of Europe. There was also the exciting possibility that my brother Roly was thinking of coming for a look around with a couple of mates. Roly is less than two years younger than me and had served his time as a motor mechanic. I was seen as the academic and he was the tradesman … a good mix. We’d shared a love of old motorbikes and cars from our schooldays. The kitchen floor at home often was a depository for large work-in-progress lumps of old Brit Iron. We’d always been close even though I was seen at times as a Svengali figure with undue influence, likely to sweep him along on a path that might not be ideal for either of us. The pending visits were great news and I told Roly to definitely come and to bring his tools. Presumptuously, I also hit him with the thought that he’d be able to work on the three bikes I was planning to go off adventuring on. Bessie had a clear lineage to the post-war BSA models he was very familiar with and I was sure he would be keen as mustard to get into the Panthers, being as they were exotic and totally unknown to him.
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Gestation
Life is not always linear, and on reflection, it is often the zig-zags that are the most interesting. I hadn’t really been living in The Box for all that long when I got a ring from one of the girls from another big well-known Anzac flat — 46 Alexandra Grove, North Finchley. A couple of my rugby team (and work crew) lived there, on and off. I’d partied there, so knew who Little Steph was when she introduced herself. She was the one that wasn’t Big Steph. Big Steph was a tall, rubenesque red-head who another of my rugby team Kiwis quietly lusted after. It seemed that Big Steph was going home and there was going to be a vacancy in the flat … was I interested?
My heart pounded, I didn’t want to appear too keen … but man oh man, this could be an escape from the solitary purgatory that was The Box. I desperately missed the shared meals and the group-fun I was used to as part of London’s itinerant young colonials … the vibrancy, the feeling of belonging! I expressed some reservation, noting that I had to extricate myself from the current situation, but I could be interested. Of course once off the phone I fist-pumped and did a little jig.
And the rest as they say is history. During my notice period I popped around with a friend one week-night for a reconnaissance visit. The flat was a familiar happy throng, some folk I knew well, others not so well. I recall as we left and were getting into the car my mate saying “That Little Steph’s got a nice arse!” This was not something I would have articulated aloud … well not before five or six pints of beer … but he was so accurately observant, even if a little boorish. The raven-haired Little Steph was petite and full of energy. She was also gregarious and thoughtfully welcoming.
46 Alexandra Grove was a two storey semi-detached villa set back a little from the road with off-street parking and a driveway leading to a small garage and a substantial backyard. I was able to relocate the black cab and the motorbikes. The Ural and sidecar was stowed at the rugby club in Hounslow. Alexandra Grove was also only a bicycle ride distance to the double-glazing work … so an old treadlie was bought and put into action.
It wasn’t long before I was completely in thrall of Little Steph, who was now just Steph with the departure of her bigger namesake. She worked as an agency nurse and in her off-hours she barmaided at The Cricketers, the local tavern. It was clear that she was a popular part of the pub’s community. She’d sweep in near closing-time after a nursing shift and greet most of the clientele by name before asking all with half-empty glasses what their tipple was. I couldn’t see how she would ever get
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a return from this but was impressed by her selfless generosity. I learned later that she also topped up the flat’s pantry when it ran low between the flatters’ pay-in periods. She preferred food on the shelves to the groans of the flatmates when asked for more money. Small-breasted and liberated, Steph never saw the need to own a bra and in the wonderful and long ‘Summer of 76’, was in my eyes as exhilaratingly stunning as anything on the big or little screen. A visual treat in flimsy summer clothes, she was high on life and it was a pleasure to be in her realm, especially as she was beginning to demonstrate a fondness towards me.
It could never be said that I was a lothario in my youth. Apart from being a bit shy around young women, my Catholic upbringing had left me overly inhibited. I was often worried about getting out of a relationship, before I had even got in. The Exit Strategy always concerned me. Those bloody priests had indoctrinated us with a mantra of ‘copulation is for making new life’ and of course the act was not to happen outside of the sanctity of marriage … and marriage was forever. Over-arching this was the knowledge that straying from the true path and the many doctrines and dogma of Rome would lead to hellfire and damnation. The only redeeming part of the equation was the church having confessionals where, upon giving a salacious account of your failings, the slate