The Older Woman

By Jay Myrdal

In 1966, Photographer Mark Hamilton had lots of clients when I was working as his assistant, age 22. One of our regular jobs was to produce high quality head shots of very masculine men smoking cigarettes (Those were the days). One of our models was George, he was an amateur Mark had found via a friend, and George wanted to get a model card done so he could tout for additional work in the industry. He didn’t have much money so l suggested that I could make him a photo composite model card quite cheaply.

George agreed so we went to Hampstead Heath and shot some suitable photos for the purpose. As I was driving him back after the shoot, he suggested we stop at a pub near his home for a beer before parting. Agreeing, I pulled up and parked near the Sun in Splendour, a well-known and popular pub at the top of Portobello Road, Notting Hill Gate.

The place was lively and quite crowded, but George spotted some friends sat in a nearby booth with a couple of seats to spare. A quick greeting was exchanged and Gretchen, an attractive blond woman slid out of the bench seat and motioned to me to slide into the vacant spot, Gretchen then followed me in on the bench as George plopped his coat on the seat opposite and, after asking what we wanted, went to the bar to get the drinks.

Sitting on my right was a petite thirty something woman with short black hair and darting eyes. There was the hint of bohemian about her, no doubt emphasized by the beret she was wearing at a jaunty angle over her left eye. Her name was Jeanie. There was also a third woman, Pauline at the table. It was obviously a girl’s night out.

George returned with the drinks and a relaxed and friendly conversation ensued. I found myself getting on very well with these ladies and George and I chatted with them until closing time when Jean invited us all back to her flat for more; we piled into my Borgward Combi and motored off to Queensway, half a mile away.

As we settled down with a glass of wine, and a bit more conversation, Jean asked if we wanted to try some dope. She said that her husband Keith had left her a stash before he went off on a film shoot in his job as an assistant camera operator. At this time of my life, I was still a beginner when it came to the weed, but I was keen to learn more, so I readily agreed. I recall that we had some trouble working out just how to roll a suitable joint, but we must have got it more or less right because I was beginning to feel very nice indeed. What is more I didn’t seem to be sitting alone on the sofa anymore, and I found myself wrapped in a passionate embrace with the beguiling Jeanie. I was no longer aware of anyone else in the room.

…

I spent the night. – I spend a magical night – enjoying beautiful, erotic, congress with this pixie like woman. Our wonderful merging seemed to go on forever.

I awoke to the sound of young voices on the other side of the bed. I was horrified as I realized two small children were about to jump up on the bed and crawl in with their fast asleep mummy. I slipped quietly onto the floor on my side of the bed, picked up my shoes, socks and clothing and crept, ballock-naked, out of the room as quickly as I could. I dressed hurriedly on the landing and made my way out of the flat, down a long featureless concrete staircase, and left the building.

I came back of course

It was the start of a new and exciting relationship and the first of a sequence of events which set the direction for the rest of my life.

I began to see Jeanie regularly now, every time her husband was away working on a film, which was quite often. This was the middle 1960s, the new age, and sexual freedom was the word of the day. Keith, her husband was also interested in the “new age” It seemed. He had apparently suggested that his wife might experiment in the new freedoms while he was away. He had his eye on an actress in the film he was working on and was obviously looking for an excuse.

Well, she took him at his word but there didn’t seem to be a good reason to broadcast It so our relationship was kept a secret, and I would only come around after her two young children were asleep in bed. I was always careful to leave before morning of course.

This went on for many months and I was loving it. Jean was the experienced older woman for whom every young man yearns. She was able to guide and encourage me in all the obvious and not so obvious ways of love and passion. The sex was wonderful. But there was a lot more to Jean than just sex. She was a very intriguing, talented, intelligent, and fascinating woman. Oh! She was terrific looking too. I was falling in love.

—

I awoke to the sound of small voices again but this time I was too late. The children were already on the bed.

“Daddy’s back.” The little girl said excitedly to her two-year-old brother as she tugged at the blanket covering my head. I was trapped! I did my best to keep my face covered but inevitably I lost the battle and found myself looking into four-year-old Lisa’s innocent blue eyes.

“You’re not my daddy” she announced with considerable annoyance.

The jig was up. I hurriedly left of course, expecting that I had seen the end of this exciting relationship, but a few days later I got a message via Gretchen, saying Jean would like me to come round the flat the next evening. Enthusiastically, I ran up the long staircase to find husband Keith sitting at the kitchen table grinning like a Cheshire cat. Not only was he not upset by the revelation of our affair, but he introduced himself, shook my hand, and asked me if I minded taking the Fiat into the local garage for a service on Monday as he was going to be abroad on the next film. He said I could use the little van too if I needed it. — Well! — it was the sixties after all.

Keith, nine years my senior, turned out to be a nice guy, at least from a male perspective, and we became close friends and even began working together on film projects. This odd arrangement went on for the better part of a year until Jean finally got fed up, threw Keith out of the flat and broke it off with me. Despite that, Keith and I continued as friends and to work together, much to Jean’s annoyance.

During this time, while I had returned briefly to the States, I had made up my mind to try to settle in the UK. I had now been here for about two or three years, coming and going briefly to renew my visa, as one did in those days. Unfortunately, the Home-Office was beginning to renew its efforts to chuck me off this island. My method of dealing with them in the past had been to send my passport back to them and write an argument as to why their enclosed demand for me to quit the country was unreasonable and unnecessary. Once my passport was in their hands I couldn’t leave anyway, so it would usually buy me four or five months, while the bureaucracy ground through the contents of my letter, to work out some other compelling reason why my continued stay should be allowed. Sadly, this practice was wearing thin, rather like the ice my ‘right-to-remain’ was standing on, and it was looking like I might have to quit the country after all. — Fortunately, I discovered that if I formed a company with a British partner, it might improve my chances of remaining in the UK.

Keith had already been thinking of setting up a cutting room and camera hire facility, so he kindly offered to go into partnership with me and we signed an agreement. Keith was also able to provide some capital as was I to a lesser extent, and we found a couple of rooms on the top floor of a stationers at the Kings Cross end of Gray’s Inn Road. We fitted one out as a film cutting room, office and storage area and I converted the other room into a dark room/office for me. Mobius Films was born.

A few months later a letter arrived from Elizabeth J. Swann, my assigned case officer and frequent correspondent, at the Home Office. … “The Secretary of State has decided to raise no objections to you continuing as a freelance photographer and conduction a business with your British partner Kent Wilkinson as a registered company called Mobius Films.” …

Well… Kent – Keith, it all meant the same thing, I was saved. Whether or not that partnership made a difference I never knew, but it sure as hell didn’t hurt. Thanks Keith.

That chance meeting with the wonderful Jeanie in 1966, at the Sun in Splendour, in Notting Hill Gate was the beginning of a very import chain of events in my life. Through that enchanting and delightful encounter with a fascinating woman, I met her husband Keith and set up a business. A few years later we expanded into the ground floor of an ex-beansprout growing operation in a Paddington mews where we build a larger cutting room, an office, and a moderately sized studio. A few more years later the freehold became available at an exceptionally good price and Keith, who now had other interests, generously allowed me to buy it myself on the condition that I gave him space for his cutting room – rent free for as long as he wanted it. Considering the way property prices inflated over the next 40 years, that turned out to be a pretty good deal.

The freehold also included the sub lease to the second floor of the building and after five years the sub-tenants, a furniture store annex, moved out, and I was able to further extend my premises to the floor above. I was now the proud owner and occupier of an entire 2000 sq. foot commercial building in a fashionable West London mews. The Ideal advertising photographer’s studio.

Wow! I had achieved much of my youthful 1966 dream in ten years, and it was all down to that chance meeting with the fabulous Jeanie. Ain’t life grand!

—

Jeanie and I were never again lovers, but we were always remained close friends. I kept in regular contact with her for the rest of her life. An attractive woman, she was never without a man when she wanted one, all younger than she was of course, and all younger than me too for that matter. More than one of them were also good friends of mine. As her children grew up, I became a de facto uncle, and I had a lot to do with her kids, especially her son Otto.

Otto Wilkinson was a particularly interesting guy. He had inherited his father’s mechanical ability, which was quite extensive, if not a bit frantic at times. Otto was an enthusiastic inventor and created prototypes of all manner of useful items. He made me a rechargeable torch in the ‘70s which worked beautifully and reliably for thirty years until I finally lost it. He was developing battery operated scooters years before they finally appeared on our streets and had working, practical prototypes on the road long before the existence of Lithium batteries.

Very tragically Otto developed bowel cancer in his thirties and was never able to complete his potential. He fought his illness very hard, but he lost the battle in the end. His death in January 2004 was extremely hard for us all to bear.

But bear it we did and life carried on.

Jean was an artist as I have previously said. She displayed dozens of large canvases up and down the staircase of their spacious three-story Queensway flat. Being, as she was, of the latter day beat generation, she moved in the bohemian creative circles around Bayswater and Notting Hill Gate. She had many interesting and creative people in her circle, and I was delighted to meet most of them.

Many years Later, when I sold my Paddington studio and was converting an old schoolhouse in an Oxfordshire village into a live/work/studio premises, she came to visit and presented me with a painting she had recently completed as a moving-in gift. It was a copy of Modigliani’s “Female Nude” painted in 1916. She told me that the reference image she had used was cut off at the waist, so she had to imagine the model’s lower half. Comparing Jean’s version to the original — Jean’s is an inspired copy, but her woman, perhaps like Jeanie herself, is much more erotic.

Jean astounded us all when she was accepted as a student at Central St. Martin’s school of art in the middle two thousands. She graduated and obtained a degree in two thousand and seven when she was over seventy-three years old. A truly amazing woman, I loved her dearly. … When she died a few years ago; the world lost a great lady. RIP Jean Reynolds Wilkinson, Thanks for everything. xxx

I’m very sorry to report that Keith also died in late 2021 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Little Lisa is now all that is left of my adopted English family the Wilkinsons. Little Lisa; the four-year-old girl who looked into my eyes in 1966, extremely annoyed that I was not, as she was excitingly expecting, Her daddy!

I’m very glad to say we remain close friends.

…………………………