up is Audrey (Vanessa Howard, born 1948) who Jamie meets while cruising the streets of Stevenage in the company of rugger bugger Craig Foster (Nicky Henson). The clearly underage gang end up in a strange bar/daytime drinking club where Audrey sits on Jamie’s knee (“It’s my tobacco tin!” exclaims an aroused Jamie) before she’s reclaimed by Craig.


“Wiiild.”


It’s in the club that we meet Caroline (21- year-old Angela Scoular, seen in the ’67 Bond spoof Casino Royale and TV outings like Wuthering Heights and Romeo And Juliet). Caroline – “terribly snooty” or “terrific” depending on which female member of the entourage you believe – plays the fruit machines clad in a microscopic mini while sipping a fruit cocktail, her trendy specs perched on the end of her perfect nose, her hair short but modish, her manner aloof and starry. The pair hit it off over – improbably – golf lessons.


There follows the film’s sole, obligatory “boutique” scene in which Jamie and Caroline try on a series of eye-wateringly decorative shirts and orange sponge hats with holes in. “The minute I walk out of here this lot will be old fashioned,” quips Jamie. “That’s the fun of living today – fast, zoom


zoom!” comes Caroline’s reply, possibly the key line in reminding us of the film’s youthful transience, just in case we’d forgotten in the midst of all the nob jokes. While Caroline effortlessly pulls off whichever outlandish outfit she cares to drape over herself, Jamie looks awkward and at odds with the green crushed velvet suit and mustard spoon- collar shirt he sports as she invites him to tea next Sunday. “Don’t bother about your bike, stay the night. Don’t bother about anything – life’s too short,” are her parting words. Jamie, my son, I think it’s time to dust off those rubber Johnnies.


Caroline, it turns out, lives in decadence with mummy (Maxine Audley), daddy (a scene-stealing Denholm Elliott), brother Charles and Ingrid the German maid in a towering country pile, complete with antique oaks and badminton court. As the upper class twits become progressively more pissed over dinner (“Clever people with grapes these, er, Yugoslavs”), Jamie and Caroline slip off to her room, only for her to pass out, leaving his ardour decidedly cooled. “Rotten, stupid women. I’ve had it! I mean I haven’t had it. Well I’moff you all from now on.”


Well, not quite all of you. Once home, Audrey invites Jamie to a “bed-in” (much snogging in an out-of-hours bed shop, in case you’re wondering) where, after much


“But I wanted runny old Linda!” The Spencer Davis with Vanessa Howard and Angela Scoular.


fiddling with zips and tutting, our hero finally gets his end away. Plainly underwhelmed, Jamie doesn’t hang around


and, filled with newfound confidence, grabs a bored Mary (remember her?) on his way out.


“And it was me who said goodbye.”


It turns out Mary isn’t quite the untouchable ice queen of myth and, following a date spent wandering around the Queensway and dispending platitudes about how “It all doesn’t matter”, the pair end up spending the weekend at a sailing club (Grafham Water, near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire). Quite why a pair of 17-year-olds would want to spend their Saturday hanging off a schooner is anyone’s guess but, for dramatic purposes at least, the setting is grown up, romantic and as idyllic as most suburbanites could have hoped for in ’67.


Jamie and Mary eventually find some lakeside seclusion and shed their clothes in a much talked about (and ultimately edited) skinny-dipping scene. However, the tender mood is shattered by Mary’s prying dog, leaving Jamie angry and Mary cold and disinterested. When coitus is finally achieved, you can’t help feeling the couple have already become disconnected.


Not surprisingly, Jamie ends up in the drink after the couple argue about morals during a sailing spree. “You could go with someone else and I wouldn’t mind,” opines Mary. “I think that’s the worse thing I’ve ever heard you say,” counters Jamie, the incurable romantic.


Back in Stevenage, Jamie and Spike work the buses and prepare for university in Manchester. Jamie spies Mary across a crowded shopping precinct. “It seems a million years ago now,” he smiles before switching his focus to Mary’s friend Claire (20-year-old Diane Keen). “Hair’s nice. Legs aren’t too bad. That’s the kind of girl I’d like to marry.”


Thoughts of marriage. At the age of 17. And herein lies the crux of the film. Jamie doesn’t want “a bit of a relationship here, a piece of sex there” – he’s fed up of going with “useless, grotty girls”. Ultimately, he wants what his parents have – marriage, security and one of those nice new builds in Pin Green.


27


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