In for a Penny, in for a good romp of a read

Vincenzi’s 16th door-stopper (it’s 756 pages), The Decision, revisits the 1960s she knew as a fashion journalist and young wife, says Sue Leonard.

ELIZA was in the middle of curtsying to the Queen when she decided it was time she lost her virginity. So starts The Decision — the 16th door-stopper by Penny Vincenzi. It’s an apt line, setting the book, firmly, on the cusp of the 1960s.

It was a golden era — in England. The world loved Carnaby Street and the King’s Road. The Beatles, Mary Quant and Twiggy ruled. London was the centre of everything. And the young Penny Vincenzi was right there, living the dream.

She’s recreated that world through Eliza, a debutante who becomes a top fashion editor, until she marries and her husband, the property developer Matt, insists that she stays home with their baby.

The couple’s passionate love flails because of their differing attitudes. And after the loss of a child, the relationship flounders. And they end up in court, where a bitter custody battle ensues.

“That was the point of the book,” says Penny, as we sip tea at the Merrion Hotel. “I wanted a custody battle and I asked a lawyer friend if my book could be contemporary. He said, ‘no it can’t’. Those big battles that raged stopped in the mid-1970s. But it was good revisiting the 1960s with a long view,” she says, “because, at the time, we were so caught up in it.

“In the fashion industry, the sky was the limit. We thought the world was changing and it was the end of the class system; but that was a tiny shred of the whole picture and that was all totally different.

“The 1960s was viewed as a time of incredible moral freedom, but it wasn’t really. You couldn’t get the pill unless you were married, and until 1967 homosexuality was illegal. So it was wonderful and exciting, but looking back, it was a fantasy in a way.”

After school, eschewing university, Penny went to a posh secretarial college in South Molten Street. They taught journalism, so along with typing and shorthand, Penny learned to proof read.

“And we were sent out to interview people on the street, and to fashion shows to write reports. It was brilliant. And, because it was posh, one of the places it fed was Vogue. My first placement was there, but it was horrible. It was like the Devil Wears Prada, 1960s-style. The fashion editors wore hats, and I wasn’t allowed onto the street without gloves. I left after nine months,” she says.

Next came Tatler, where Penny was the editor’s secretary.

“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she says. After three years, her boss upped and went to the Daily Mirror, and Penny went with him. He left, and Penny worked for the legendary Marjorie Proops.

“She looked after me like I was a daughter. I was married by then, in 1960, at 21. I became pregnant and she was wonderful. She’d send me home early and she let me write bits and pieces,” she says.

After that, Penny became fashion editor. Life was exciting. She went to the Paris collections; she saw Chanel sitting on the stairs, but says it was more graft than glamour.

This was 1964 when London started to swing.

“But we weren’t part of the swinging scene, because we had a baby. My husband was a photographer, and that’s why I had to go back to work. You got six weeks maternity leave back then. So, at six weeks, I had to leave this baby and go back to work.

“You think you’ll be fine. But of course, it’s not. We had an au pair — we couldn’t afford a nanny, and every morning before I left the house I was sick. So I obviously wasn’t managing well. I had to be in at 9.30am and often stayed until six. So I hardly saw her.

“The view was that you were very lucky if someone took you on if you had a baby. You were automatically labelled unreliable. You never said your child was ill. You’d be inviting the sack. You said you were ill. Or, as Shirley Conran said recently, ‘like all working mothers, I had a lot of punctures’.” In spite of women’s lib, men didn’t see women as equals. So along with working, a woman was supposed to clean the house, iron the shirts, and have a meal waiting.

“You had the baby in bed when they got home. Men didn’t know they were alive. My husband had been brought up with a nanny and stuff. He didn’t know about doing things. It wasn’t that he was selfish; that was what men did,” she says. After a few years at The Daily Mirror, Penny was recruited by her original boss, who wanted her as fashion editor for a new magazine, Nova. She worked happily there, until her boss left, and the new one gave her the sack. “I went off to have my second baby. I told the editor I’d be away for a couple of months, and said if he wasn’t happy with my work to say so. He said it was fine; that he’d see me when I got back. So I went, and when Sophie was two or three weeks old, a PR rang and said, ‘I’m sorry you’re not coming back.’ He’d hired someone the day I left,” she says.

After a long stint at Woman’s Own, Penny went freelance. And she continued her successful career until 1989, when, as deputy editor of Options, she was signed up to write a sex-and-shopping book.

“I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. All the ladies who worked for glossy magazines were being signed up at the time. I found that I loved it. I loved reading those sort of books. A lot of people who wrote them for money were slightly ashamed of writing them,” she says. They have all fallen by the wayside. Apart from her friend, Jilly Cooper, Penny is the only one left.

“We both write huge books. (The Decision is a whopping 756 pages.) “And I still love it,” she says. It shows. The Decision is a sumptuous read — both page-turning and emotional, with its large cast of bohemian characters. I last met Penny two and a half years ago. Since then, life has been tough. “My husband, Paul, died 18 months ago. He had cancer,” she says. She pauses, too upset to elaborate. “The book was my salvation. I don’t know what I would have done without it. From the day after the funeral, when the house emptied, I went to my desk. I got up at the same time every day, took the dogs out on Wimbledon common, got to my desk and wrote the book. What I wrote for the first two months was rubbish; I didn’t make my deadline, but my publishers were marvellous. They gave me another six months. It just saved my life, that book, and I’m fond of it for that reason.”

Vincenzi’s readers range from teenagers to 90-year-olds. So some will reminisce on reading about the 1960s; for others its new. “I didn’t realise until I had all these funny queries from my young editor. Then I realised, my goodness, it really was a different world.”