Joan Byrne, my Honorary Aunt, had a few reasons to land in London in December 1969, where we last saw her caring for her aged uncle – fulfilling the promise she made as a child to her Australian grandfather. From her base at Uncle Viv’s little house in Streatham, Joan was eager to dive into everything swinging London had to offer.
It’s always been the fashion for Australians in London to take a variety of jobs and Joan was no exception. “I worked in the cashier’s office in the Great Hall at Harrods, spruiked in Leather Lane, was a barmaid in a pub near Guy’s Hospital – where the clientele ranged from specialist surgeons to wharf labourers,” she said.
“Then there were jobs in Brixton, first as a cashier in a furniture store, then as a demonstrator for Hoover at London Electricity Board. That’s where I managed to let a washing machine overflow, inundating the floor…”
Joan said that as well as the chance to learn more of her English/Irish heritage, she was keen to get to know and understand the reality of modern England.
“There was a world with which I was familiar from childhood readings – the magic of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and adventures with Enid Blyton,” she said.
“Then there were later readings from Shakespeare, Jane Austen and William Wordsworth. There were alternative stories of convict hulks, of union riots and the darkness depicted by Charles Dickens, so I wanted to find out how these visions of England compared with the reality.”
But Joan also had to make a living and getting to know the reality of modern England was very much connected with getting a job.
“My first job was as a spruiker, trying to sell bottles of some dodgy product which was supposed to stop your glasses fogging up when you opened the oven, or the inner windows of the car reacting to heated activity or similar,” Joan said.
Joan and her fellow spruikers would set up their stands in department stores, boating shows and in markets like Leather Lane, one of London’s oldest street markets. Many were aspiring actors and artists or drifters of various kinds and their social life was an eye-opener for country girl Joan.
“There were frequent parties where marijuana was widely used, and a lot of time was spent discussing the minor messages in the Beatles’ music,” Joan said.
“There was also a lot of mindless consumerism. I was shocked to learn that some of the young women bought a new dress every week and simply discarded the old.”
It all got too much for Joan when she saw babies left crying in dirty nappies for most of the night while their so-called carers indulged in their out-of-this-world experience.
“Swinging London was too much for me,” said Joan, who next worked as a barmaid at a pub near London Bridge and Guy’s Hospital. She’d had experience in pulling pints from a holiday job in Sydney. “I’d spent a summer as a tea lady at a brewery where there was a tap for the workers in the lunch room, so I started the new job with some confidence,” Joan said.
The lunch session was still in vogue, with a break for a couple of hours before the evening session began, and the character of the clientele changed with each tolling of the time bell.
“At lunchtime they would be students from the hospital, in the early afternoon came the doctors and specialists, and then later came the wharfies,” Joan said.
“The wharfies treated me far better than either of the other two, insisting that I drink with them and tell stories of other lands. After a while I would forget I was working and probably made a few errors with the till.”
Joan’s most respectable job was as a cashier in the banking hall at Harrods. These were the days of the famous imperial boast that you could buy anything at Harrods for a price, even an elephant or a tiger.
“I had to learn quickly to deal with foreign currency, with impatient Americans, and with the attendants of the Royal family who came to the cashier with payment for goods bought by their royal charges.
“Royalty could not stoop to the indignity of exchanging money. And of course I was not at all familiar with the Royal family and often made the mistake of asking for Identification.”
Joan swapped the rarified atmosphere of Harrods for a job closer to Streatham, working as a cashier in a furniture shop in Brixton. The working class Asians and West Indians of Brixton were closer by far in spirit to my Extraordinary Aunt, and gave her a glimpse of modern London not covered by Shakespeare and Dickens.
“One of my clearest memories of this time is shopping in the open markets at lunch time, surrounded by all the produce needed by so many different cultures,” Joan said.
“The snow was falling, and I was cold, even though I was wearing a long maxi coat, scarf, hat and gloves. But it’s the warmth I remember, of being greeted in so many different languages. This was not the England I had expected, and I realised that there is no single static picture of a culture, that change is inevitable, and needs to be accepted.”
Joan’s last job in England was also near Brixton, at a London Electricity Board showroom where she demonstrated the latest in household appliances for Hoover.
“Oh, how shocked the family was back in Australia that I, the undomesticated one, could make a living selling domestic cleaners and washers,” Joan said. “And of course, I did come to grief once or twice, most spectacularly when I managed to let a washing machine overflow, inundating the floor…”
Joan’s time as a working girl in London had brought her in touch with some of the richness of England’s changing society, but there were also the timeless visions of the place to enjoy. She walked in Hyde Park, strolled through Leicester Square and Piccadilly and did all the things a young woman abroad might do. But the things she’ll mention are the moments that seemed to come straight out of a book she’d read somewhere.
“I was leaving work one evening and snow had stopped all traffic so it was walk or stay. I set out for home and on the way I saw a middle-aged suited gentleman, resplendent in his bowler hat, sliding down the middle of the street.
“I missed the last train from Guildford one night and was walking back towards London as the fog nestled around leafless trees. It was a picture that was so familiar in films of the time, and it was soon to disappear as people stopped burning coal for domestic use.”
Joan said it was while she was in London that homes, including Uncle Viv’s, were provided with a gas or electric heater to encourage the switch from coal.
The young woman who had left Australia with us on the Chusan in 1967 had changed a lot in the two years she’d been away. Joan had come from a very conservative background and when she started her travels in Asia she had been shocked to find it common for friends to walk with their arms around each other.
“This seemed a real affront to someone raised in a society where any show of emotion or affection was just not acceptable. Of course, today a hug is considered a necessity of life, but it wasn’t always so,” Joan said.
“When I was teaching in Hong Kong I used to find it troubling to see students walking around in an apparent embrace. But in time I realised that the problem was mine, not theirs, and I had talked about it with a number of people, including Christine and Cecelia, two sisters who had been my students in Hong Kong.”
Cecelia and Christine visited Joan in London and together they went to a ballet at Covent Garden. Snow was falling as they left the theatre and there was magic in the air. Joan recalls: “In that magic moment, Cecelia looked at me and said, ‘I feel good. Do you mind if I put my arm around my sister?’ And at last I was able to say, ‘Certainly. As long as you also put the other arm around me.’ What a joy to be freed of a cultural restraint!
“I had not achieved fame or fortune, or anything like that, but any ambitions I’d had to do so seemed irrelevant. Such things were fragile. It was far more important to share ideas of justice and peace, and to try and understand each other in a time of turbulent change.”
The latest in a series of articles about my extraordinary honorary aunt, Joan Byrne who left Australia with us in 1967 and travelled alone around Asia before heading to Europe via the trans-Siberian railway. You can read more of the adventures of My Extraordinary Aunt here:
You may also be interested:
Leather Lane Market – Stall Stories. A lovely video history.
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