I later found an air-gram from the Police Station amongst my mother’s belongings when I returned home. They wrote to my mother and informed her of my move from one home to another. I would be living with the Carters until arrangements could be made for me to return to the states. Somehow this was to tell her I was alright and she was to rest assured that I would be taken care of. My poor mother was having her resolve tested and facing fears, I was certainly not thinking of my mother’s feelings.
I had become an eccentric free spirited teen after I turned 18 and entered my senior year in high school. Teenage night clubs began cropping up and I had taken my tenacity into pushing my tired mother to let me go out at night. Once again school became secondary. When I went to school I hung out in the bathroom looking in the mirror complaining about not having color in my cheeks. My pale white English skin was not valued by me. Continually they were pinched for color. I wanted to know about myself by other teens' standards. A slanted form of getting peer approval. How I felt and their acceptance of myself was by their answers. I became the class complainer.
We couldn’t afford the clothing that every other girl in school had, the pinstripe dresses or madras plaid. I took to my sewing machine to copy the styles of the girls in England. I got Mary Quant patterns and made my own dresses. Mod seemed more to my liking, more than the Rockers in England. The Rockers had ruff edges and were dressed in Leather. I had to be different and now I was leaving from a more traditional highly educated home in England. I went to live in a more relaxed family who supported their daughters' more Mod style. This was where I began having fun again.
It was glorious that I was an adult by the age 19 and I could go to pubs with my new friend, Jill. I really only had one boyfriend in my senior year, given my mother’s fits about boys before that and putting a deep and resounding fear of them in me. Her attacks and warnings were about what boys could do to me.
Alan Goldstein was my first boyfriend in all of high school. A nice Jewish boy who was forever kind to me. I would sit on his lap and he would just kiss and kiss me. I ran into him years later and I asked him why he had never tried anything with me,more than kissing? He said I just seemed so afraid. Alan did send me off to England with hickeys all over my neck. What my conservative English family thought didn’t matter to me.
My first experience with a boy in England was sitting in the pub and he put his arms around me and began chewing on my lips. I was amazed by his style of kissing . That was not the tender kiss of my gentle Jewish boy. He literally engulfed my lips with his teeth. They were red and bruised the next day. Make-up helped conceal the redness. I went back and sat with the girls at the Pub as soon as I could. I told them about my experience and they said “oh” we should have warned you. He was cute! So that backed me off from boys in England for a while. I was going to hang out with Jill and explore Fish and Chips at the Bridlington Fair and walk the various streets carrying a square woven basket for our shopping goods. I wish I knew what I bought exactly but I still have a Bullseye black and white brooch which was the Mod thing to wear. Jill made me a rock pin which consisted of pebbles in an artistic format. Mine was square and I would wear that too.
The next night at the Pub, my girlfriends pointed to a long haired guy with bleached blonde hair who I hadn’t seen before. Giggling, they informed me he had been part of the Hullaballoos. I had been backstage with the Gene Pitney shower of stars in Rochester, NY where I found out that the Hullabaloos was joining the show after Rochester NY in Pittsburgh, PA. The girls encouraged me to go talk to him. I saw a story making possibility.
