Page 17 - C.A.L.L. #39 - Spring 2015

Rougham Tree fairs to rowdy student union gigs. Sometimes the kids came too and
Jamie loved going on the road taking every opportunity to join the band on stage.

The bad times were impossible. What had been so wonderful when shared, took on a
nightmare quality when it was over something unpleasant. You couldn't genuinely like
everybody, and it could get ugly if you fell out and there was nowhere else to go.
There were squabbles over parenting styles, too. As with most parents, it was
sometimes hard for us to be unbiased about who had done what to whom.

It was often a tiny thing that upset
the balance between sanity or holding
it together. The men really had no
idea, and the hardest part of the
lifestyle was that it was heavily gender
biased. The men were in the band, or
were roadies for the band, and often
on the road: the women were the

domestics and child carers – at home.
That isn't to say that women didn't go Dinah Jefferies: 'What I would give to return
to gigs, or that there wasn't eventually to those sunshine days, for just one afternoon.'
a female roadie. And the men were good with the kids when they were there. They
played with them, took them out for rambles and generally loved them.

This traditional division of labour was not really up my street. I felt miserable when
we were left behind and suffered debilitating bouts of depression. Cooking, growing
vegetables and milking goats were not fulfilling me. I had been a teenager in the
60s and from the age of 15 had felt the need to reject the cloying, oppressive 50s.

There were other problems too. That some of us had money, and some did not, came
to matter. And it was strange to see Jeremy Thorpe striding about the house
before his fall from grace. He would turn up in his hat and long black coat, with a
beautifully dressed and very generous-hearted Marion, to visit her sons and
grandchildren, who would normally be looking like ragamuffins.

Times changed and so did some of us. We became tired of scratching around trying
to make ends meet. We ended up taking normal jobs, paying off mortgages, and
buying expensive tumble dryers. But despite the difficulties, there was something
special about that time. Something magical in the air whenever the band were
playing their bright foot-tapping music, something lovely about the long, hot
summer days when we wore very little and collected elderflowers to make
champagne, and something enchanting about kids running about freely from dawn to
dusk, and nobody minding when they came in filthy. It was idealistic and didn't last,
but for a brief few years it did feel as if there could be a shiny new world.

Reprinted from The Guardian, UK. ‘The Separation’ by Dinah Jefferies is published
by Penguin

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