Jackie magazine saved my life

Surely the best thing about being a teenager in grizzly 1970s Britain?

NEWSFLASH! My new novel, The Woman Who Ran Away From Everything, is out now! You can grab a copy here!

I had such a lovely response to last week’s column about my Just Seventeen memories. So I thought I’d share another piece about those long ago magazine days - this time, scooting back to the days of a single office telephone with a curly wire and agony aunts who counselled readers against ‘going too far’…

Like last week’s piece, a version of this was originally written for Friends on the Shelf magazine, which you can read about here. This week, we’re pinging back to the days of..

A few years ago a group of former Jackie magazine staff members made a pilgrimage to Dundee. Although a London address - 185 Fleet Street - appeared in the magazine, the real Jackie office was nearly 500 miles north*. So it mades sense for Jackie The Musical to include Dundee on its tour. 

Naturally, as members of the Jackie team back in the day, we were all keen to see it.

*Why the subterfuge, you might ask? Because London sounded glamorous and Dundee, well… slightly less so. 185 Fleet Street was just a mailing house really. A lorry laden with readers’ letters, including sackloads to agony aunts Cathy and Claire, trundled up to Dundee every night. This was known as ‘the overnight bag’.

Anyway, Jackie The Musical featured a 50-something woman who found herself struggling with modern dating - and so naturally turned to her old Jackie annuals for advice.

Well, she would, wouldn’t she? I learnt everything I knew - at least everything that mattered - from its hallowed pages: what my face shape revealed about me, ways to tell if ‘he’ fancied me (basically he didn’t!) and how to transform my bedroom into a groovy boudoir by draping (probably highly flammable) scarves over lamps.

I didn’t have a boyfriend or indeed any lamps - just a big retina-searing centre light in the middle of my bedroom. I was shy and swotty only child, living in a pretty remote and tiny West Yorkshire village. We weren’t on a bus route and there wasn’t even a shop. Mum still made my clothes and, slathered in Clearasil spot lotion, I had no access to Miss Selfridge or Chelsea Girl. But somehow, Jackie spoke to me.

My friend Wendy Rigg was Jackie’s Fashion Editor in the late seventies. ‘It represented how you imagined life might be when you were a little bit more grown up,’ she remembers. ‘The girls in the stories worked in typing pools which seemed incredibly glamorous at the time. They met gorgeous boys with long curly hair and perhaps a bit of a neckerchief going on. In real life, that just didn’t happen.’ 

Sensibly, Wendy picked her first boyfriend because he looked a bit like this:

Illustrated stories, drawn like comic strips, featured doe-eyed girls and ‘dreamboats’ called Gary or Dave. ‘In my favourite Jackie story the girl ran away with a boy from the fairground,’ Wendy says, dreamily.

My God, I was there too. Jackie was a weekly passport to a thrilling and glamorous world which I ached to be a part of.

‘I want to work on Jackie,’ I told my dad. He didn’t laugh or say I had no chance. A couple of years later, as I neared the end of secondary school, he spotted a tiny recruitment ad in our local paper, headed, ‘Trainee journalists wanted for teenage magazines.’ Off went my letter, and an invitation to an interview at the Dundee offices soon followed.

In my ensemble of sparkly red jumper and rust-coloured cords, I met then-Jackie editor, Maggie Dunn. Emanating warmth and kindness, Maggie took me on as a rookie writer. My first job was to write the horoscopes. Of course I made them up. It was 1982, and I was 17 and could barely make toast without setting my hair on fire. But I couldn’t believe my luck.

‘When I think of those days I remember the fun we had in the office,’ says Maggie tells me. ‘Remember the day you started? It was my 33rd birthday. We had a party at my house and stayed up all night, and at dawn we were all running around on Broughty Ferry Beach.’

Office life, Maggie remembers, involved ‘mainly laughing, playing jokes and dancing around the office. We went everywhere en masse and that spirit of fun, and all being in it together, came across in the magazine.’ 

Jackie girls reunited! Me, Gayle and Fiona at our Dundee reunion

We all shared flats and socialised together. DC Thomson, Jackie’s publisher, didn’t hold with a long-hours culture: at 5pm, there’d be an almighty exodus as the mainly teenage staff surged to the loos to ‘refresh’ make-up (ie, pile on more) in readiness for hitting Dundee’s sizzling pubs and clubs.

In the office, we all shared a huge, messy desk scattered with page proofs, albums sent to us by record companies and make-up samples sent by beauty PRs. Across from me sat a glamorous girl from Kircaldy in Fife called Jacqueline Brown - still a great friend. ‘I’d written to Jackie at 185 Fleet Street when I was 16,’ she reminds me, ‘telling them I wanted to be their Pop Editor.’

Well, why not?! ‘I received a letter back asking me to come to the offices in Dundee for an informal chat and, after a two-hour interview, I walked out with a job,’ she says.

Somehow Jackie managed to be both aspirational and utterly accessible, perhaps because it was produced by girls (and, yes, a couple of boys) from ordinary backgrounds who loved what they did. Another friend had applied for a job there after being kicked off her secretarial course as her shorthand was rubbish. Jackie snapped her up.

Wendy reminds me of the basic facilities in our office. ‘There were no phones on our desks - not even the editor had a phone.’ Telephone interviews with pop stars were conducted from a phone in a booth at the end of the office (to be used after lunchtime only, when calls were cheaper).

My pal Wendy, Fashion Ed and cover model!

Gradually, illustrated stories made way for photo stories. Readers had no idea that the teenage ‘actors’ were generally the little brothers or sisters of the magazine’s staff, or even the staffers themselves. Once, I had to lie in the road in Dundee city centre, pretending to have been knocked down by a car. When my mum saw it, she screamed.

By the mid-eighties we were moving away from the beautiful long-legged fashion illustrations to actual fashion shoots. I was Fashion Editor by then. Although most were shot in London, I was keen to use our local beaches as a location, and so a photographer and model travelled up on the sleeper train to Dundee.

It seemed perfectly normal for the model from the Cadbury’s Flake gypsy caravan ad to sleep on a fold-out camp bed in my mouldy shared house, where mushrooms sprouted from the bathroom carpet. She cheerfully threw herself into the spirit of the thing.      

Jackie team scoffing cakes! (17 year-old me on the left, Maggie on the right)

Now many of us former staffers have young adult offspring of our own. Of course, magazines don’t mean much to them. Jackie belonged to a gentler time, decades before social media. Sex was never referred to directly in Jackie. The phrase we were encouraged to use was ‘going too far’, as in, ‘I love my boyfriend but he wants to go too far. What should I do?’ 

‘The advice was always reassuring,’ remembers Maggie. ‘If a reader wrote to Cathy and Claire saying, “My friend’s prettier than me, all the boys like her best”, then the advice would be, “It really doesn’t matter because you have a great personality and everything is going to be okay.” That might sound glib now but it was what was wanted at the time before gritty reality set in.’ 

Me and my pal Cathy - Jackie’s Fiction Editor and later super-selling author Cathy Cassidy - at our reunion

A few years ago, I was in the midst of my own gritty reality when caring for my mum, whose Alzheimer’s was progressing at an alarming rate. The Jackie reunion to the musical had been arranged, but an appointment with Mum’s psychiatrist meant I couldn’t go. My husband virtually manhandled me onto the Dundee train, insisting that he’d go to the appointment and that I needed to see my old friends.

We went to see Jackie the Musical and it was wonderful to all be together again. Never mind that we’d needed to put on our reading glasses to fix on our false eyelashes. Because that night I could forget the months of dealings with social workers and doctors and the stresses of being a woman in her fifties with a very ill mum.

For one night only, my head was filled with the joy of being young and free, in a world of Charlie perfume and roll-on lipgloss when everything was fun and hilarious and all that mattered was being with friends.

That night, I was a Jackie girl again. 

Love,

Fiona xx

‘Hello, this is David calling you on my curly-wire phone!’