Further afield, Africa is throwing off our colonial yoke and ordinary
Americans are getting a better deal from Lyndon B Johnson, even if they are
being sucked into the escalating war in Vietnam.
These world-changing affairs seem very far away in
Grafton, a small ex-mining and ironworking town in an area studded with woodlands and
set in green hills. Despite the Sixties swinging elsewhere, Grafton is an
old- fashioned kind of place. Some boys still join their fathers to watch
football, race dogs and keep pigeons. Men still drink in clubs where women
are banned. Labour-intensive Sunday dinners still keep the womenfolk out of
mischief on Sundays.
At the Gaiety Dancehall they play Beatles songs but
remember times when dancing Rock’n’Roll was only permitted if you confined
your excesses behind the sateen rope that divided you from the ‘proper’
dancers. The memory of bopping in the cinema aisles to Bill Hailey’s Rock
Around the Clock is the new nostalgia.
The contraceptive pill is nudging Grafton women into a
new way of looking at things. Even so the dynamism of the ‘sexual
revolution’ centres more around the rootless universities in the North,
than here at its working class core. On the bright side, more working class
children than ever before are climbing the new rickety ladders into higher
education, to new-build colleges and polytechnics, working-class Meccas.
Grafton relies on its big factory, Marvell Domestic
Appliances. for its income and prosperity. Marvell’s two and a half thousand
workers - mostly women - support eighty percent of the households in the
town. Some of these women are third generation workers, their mothers and
grandmothers having worked on the Marvell site in WW2 to assist in the
making of bombs to drop on Hitler.
My name is Cassandra Fox and in the summer of 1965 I am
one of these workers. My own mother works at Marvell’s, so it is allegedly
my good fortune to work here on the production lines in that summer in the
week when Sandie Shaw – that thrillingly iconic singer – is flown in at
great expense to present the millionth Marvell cooker to their millionth
customer.
At Marvell’s popular music – a weird echo of the
wartime Worker’s Playtime - blares out from the factory tannoy, punctuating
and sometimes overlaying the industrial clamour. These days, rather than the
old swing bands we have Bill Hailey. Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry. Elvis
Presley, the Everly Brothers. And now The Beatles. The girls sing along from
time to time as a favourite track catches their ear.
The week I start at Marvell’s the tannoy is blaring out
Sandie Shaw’s Always Someone There To Remind Me instead of Yellow
Submarine and Imagine – much to the disgust of youngest workers
who think their taste is far more sophisticated than this. After all the
Rolling Stones are where it’s at these days.
My own tale of the Sandie Shaw visit to is only one of
many stories, told and untold, that fuse together to make that week in 1965
so very extraordinary.
© Wendy Robertson 2007
