Rita The Meter Maid

Patrolling the streets of London gave Rita a heady taste of the Swinging Sixties – even while she upheld the law…

Rita had barely left the police station steps when she saw two long-haired young men running towards a white Cortina parked on a yellow line just past the bus stop.

“Hurry up, it’s the Yellow Peril!” said one as he ducked behind the wheel.

“I never knew Hitler wore a skirt!” His mate gave her a cheeky wink as he slid onto the passenger seat and the car began to move into the traffic.

Rita smiled tolerantly. She’d heard worse and would probably hear a lot more before the day was out.

As she walked along the busy pavement, she remembered her training course at Hendon Police College.

“Did you put this ticket on my car?” The man was an actor, but his furious red face was scarily convincing.

Feeling self-conscious with two dozen other new recruits watching her in the windy car park, Rita’s fingers tightened on the strap of her satchel.

“It’s on a yellow line.” She tried to keep her voice level.

“I always park there!” The man waved the ticket around in protest.

“That’s not my fault, is it?” Rita snapped back.

“No, no, no,” the tall and burly police sergeant intervened. “Don’t argue with him, Mrs Cavendish. Now keep calm and try again…”

As Rita passed Woolworths, she caught sight of her reflection in the window. She felt proud to wear her sharp black skirt and jacket, with its shiny silver buttons, white blouse and black tie.

She adjusted her cap with its wide yellow band, pushing it down into her blonde curls at the back and pushing up the peak so that a www.myweekly.co.uk couple of curls escaped onto her forehead. She thought it looked quite chic, really.

In the window’s reflection she saw a Mini, painted in psychedelic swirls of purple and white, pull up on the double yellows outside the Tube station.

Dodging the red double-deckers and rattling black taxis, she stepped quickly across the street and reached the Mini just as a leggy young woman stepped out in a dog-tooth miniskirt, knee-high boots and a long, yellow cable knit roll-neck. “You can’t leave it here,” Rita said.

“I’ll only be a minute.” The girl flicked back her long straight hair. “I’m just picking someone up.”

“If you leave it here you’ll get a ticket and a six-pound fine.” Rita softened her expression and pointed down the street. “There are some meters just around that corner.”

It was better to move a car on than leave it obstructing the road with a ticket on it, she reasoned.

When the first traffic wardens hit the streets of London in 1960 they became instant figures of hate and fury among motorists.

Rita remembered laughing at her black and white television while a tubby, shiny-browed comedian in a tuxedo said in a northern accent, “D’you know why traffic wardens have a yellow line around their ’at? It’s to stop people parking on their ’eads!”

Her husband, Adam, though, was an ambulance driver. He reckoned that without the wardens there’d be so much inconsiderate parking that he wouldn’t get to half the emergencies he was called to in time.

When the Met started recruiting female traffic wardens in the mid-1960s, with shifts they could work around their home life, Adam suggested she apply.

Rita had previously worked as a sewing machinist in a busy clothing factory. She had hated the din of the machines and being trapped indoors under artificial light all day.

With their son about to start nursery school, the chance to work outdoors was appealing.

Patrolling the streets wasn’t much fun when it rained, but on bright sunny days she never looked back.

Up ahead, Rita noticed a middle-aged woman in a fancy red hat and matching coat skip across the high street with a well-stuffed department store bag in each hand.

The woman threw her burdens into the boot of a navy blue Hillman Minx, slipped something under the windscreen wiper and re-crossed the road towards a boutique.

When Rita reached the car, she saw that the parking meter’s dial was in the penalty zone.

She picked up the piece of paper that was flapping under the wiper, read it and sighed. She opened her satchel, checked

the car’s registration number and started writing out a ticket.

“I say, I say, excuse me!” Rita was half way down the road when she was hailed by a cut glass accent.

She turned to see the woman in the red hat and coat trotting towards her, a boutique carrier bag hooked over her wrist, a Cellophane-wrapped parking ticket in one hand and a piece of paper flapping in the other.

“Didn’t you read my note?”

The woman was wearing a red dress under her coat and matching shoes. Her face was almost the same shade.

“I did.” Rita nodded.

“It says I’m taking my son to the doctors and I didn’t have change for the meter.” The woman flapped the note under her nose.

“Well, you’ll have to write in with your ticket and explain that.” Rita smiled politely but firmly.

“Rest assured, I will!” the woman said haughtily. “I’ll be writing to the Commissioner himself!”

Goodluckwiththatruse, Rita thought, as the motorist strutted off.

She didn’t say it, though. Neither did she point out that she’d written on the back of the ticket: Loadingoutside Burbridge’sDepartmentStore.

After ten laps of her beat and about five miles of walking, Rita’s stomach was rumbling as she headed up the police station steps for lunch.

She was looking forward to taking the weight off her feet and unloading the morning’s grumbles with her colleagues.

In the smoke-yellowed canteen, she walked into an unexpected kerfuffle.

“Oh, Rita,” her friend Jackie exclaimed. “Have you heard what happened to Helen?”

“No, what?” Rita hurried over to a noisy group where Helen had draped her uniform jacket across a table. A nastylooking stain had eaten into the material.

“Someone threw bleach at her,” said Mary, another traffic warden, wide-eyed.

thunder, he shot onto a dark road as empty and inviting as a racetrack.

In the distance his brake light flared as he circled the roundabout in an attempt to make it back to the café before the record ended.

Sometimes there were dozens of bikers at the café, their street bikes stripped down to skeletal racing machines.

There were never more than two or three girls, though, drinking frothy coffee around a single table. Hanging out with the rockers until dawn was considered beyond the pale for a respectable girl in the 1950s – but Rita needed the excitement.

She’d grown up in a Britain exhausted by war and rationing, with a bombsite on every corner.

Her dad had come home with shellshock and couldn’t tolerate the slightest sound around the house, let alone loud music. So Rita had bought a leather jacket and escaped with Adam to a twilight zone where the jukebox never stopped rocking.

Their parents’ generation had fought on battlefields and kept the home fires burning.

With war just a memory, young men like Adam had only motorbikes to test their bravery on while Rita waited by the jukebox and imagined herself to be the girl in a song like TellLauraILoveHer.

As the whine of the motorbike spluttered into the distance, Rita thought how strange it was that Adam now made his high-speed dashes at the wheel of an ambulance with its blue light flashing, while she’d swapped her biker jacket for a uniform and worked to enforce parking laws.

From the wild ones to respectable suburban parents in just seven years.

She wondered what had happened to their younger selves.

She certainly didn’t feel like a girl in a song any more.

Yet her job had its heady moments. As she turned onto a leafy street lined with tall white mansions, she remembered the day a silver Bentley had slid up to a vacant parking meter.

A man stepped out in a high-collared grey suit and open-neck shirt. His mop of dark hair swished across his eyebrows.

Before she could stop herself, Rita broke into a dash like a teenager.

The man turned at the sound of her running footsteps and grinned like a cheeky cherub.

“You’re too late, luv,” he chirped in a

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