Hippiedom? No, I want a Sindy doll and a mum with a bra
MEMOIR
HIPPY DINNERS
by Abbie Ross (Doubleday £12.99 £11.49)
One of the best things about being a grown-up is that you tend to forget the fury and helplessness of being a child. Unless, that is, you grow up to be a writer with an exceptionally vivid memory.
Abbie Ross had the kind of childhood that many of us would regard as idyllic. In the mid-Seventies her parents, Barry and Anna, gave up the rat race and relocated from Islington to a farmhouse at the top of a hill in north Wales.
There, to the horror of Barry’s parents Les and edna, an impeccably dressed Jewish couple whose friends’ sons had all gone into respectable professions, they embraced an alternative lifestyle involving facial hair (Barry), no make-up (Anna), lumpy home-made food and equally lumpy home-made clothes.
What with the fresh air, freedom and proximity to nature, it must have seemed to Barry and Anna that they were doing t he best possible t hi ng f or t heir daughters, Abbie and Katherine. They weren’t proper hippies: Barry kept his job in advertising while Anna’s standards of housekeeping were almost neurotic compared with the creative squalor that prevailed at a nearby commune. They even had a dishwasher.
But egged on by Les and edna, Katherine and Abbie longed for the trappings of a sophisticated urban life: clothes made from crackly synthetics, telly, white bread, a Sindy doll and a mother who wore a bra.
Les and edna’s semi in the suburbs of Liverpool was done up like a shrine to edna’s hero, the flamboyant pianist Liberace: ‘There were ornate gilt mirrors and vast crystal chandeliers and stemmed bowls filled with foil-wrapped chocolates in every room, even the downstairs loo.
‘It was hard to believe, their house, like something you would only ever see on television. It hummed with possibilities and promise: glamour and fabulousness is open to all, it said.’
The contrast with Abbie’s house, with its beanbag floor cushions, homemade patchwork quilts and sisal carpets, was vivid.
But it wasn’t just the decor that made north Wales such a challenging place for a glamour-fixated child to live.
Abbie and Katherine’s city origins made them objects of half-fascinated, half-contemptuous interest to their Welsh peers.
Their closest neighbour was Phillip Brown, a pallid, red-haired boy whose many phobias included going outdoors, eating yellow food, and wearing trousers or underpants.
The latter foible at least came in handy when it came to Katherine’s favourite game, doctors and nurses, although that particular diversion came to an abrupt end on the day when she decided to inject him in the bottom with a spud gun.
Then there was Lisa evans, cherished daughter of evans the Butcher, who lived
in a house with lace curtains, full of Lladro porcelain figurines, and wore lilac eye- shadow and lipstick with iridescent blue lights in, like bacon that has been left out of the fridge too long.
Faced with this vision of feminine loveliness, Abbie decided that she wanted to be John Craven of Newsround. ‘How can it be explained? I can only think that at eight years old, and too young to love him exactly, it made some twisted kind of sense for me to embody him instead.’
She asked her mother to cut her hair short, and took to wearing one of her father’s old ties.
Happily, it was a shortlived phase: the manly charms of John Craven were swiftly overtaken by a longing to look like Charlie’s Angels, or Olivia Newton- John in Grease, all flicky hair and skin-tight Lycra. And almost imperceptibly, Abbie came to feel at home in the place that had once struck her as so alien.
At the identical moment, the rural charm began to fade for her parents. The hippy neighbours who seemed so mellow and creative turned out to be dealing drugs in a serious way; the idyll of peace, love and being at one with nature turned out not to be so innocent, after all.
A move back to England beckoned. One by one, Abbie bade farewell to her friends, leaving them suspended in time like an old snapshot behind dusty glass.
It is a tantalising ending: we long to know what became of characters such as Phillip and Lisa. A tinge of melancholy colours Ross’s gently comic descriptions of her schoolfriends’ foibles. Strong, idiosyncratic characters they may have been, but some were living in circumstances that suggested a future that might be anything but happy.
Ross’s vivid evocation of a Seventies childhood is stronger on atmosphere and description than incident, but it has great charm. Anyone who grew up in t he era of Benny Hill, cheesecloth and Charlie’s Angels will find it irresistible.