Uncle Henry & My Incredible Life

I had thought about asking June for a date and I think that something in my body language might have clued her to that, because she pulled a photograph of her and an attractive woman who looked a few years younger than her.

"This is Sandie, my girlfriend. We have been together for ten years. We met up in Idaho. I was visiting the state for a university research project I was doing. I met up with a bedraggled, soaking wet girl. I literally pulled her out of a rain-filled gutter. Her parents had found out that she was a lesbian, so they kicked her out. She often tells people that when I took her in, I saved her life. And though I tell her that was melodramatic, I actually think she is right. God alone knows what would have happened to her had we not crossed paths that evening."

I thought that was a neat way for her to sidestep any possibility that I'd even consider asking her out.

I picked her brains on the best clothing shops to buy from, and I asked her to accompany me so that I wouldn't make any fashion blunders. Although love for us would never, apparently, be on the cards, we instantly clicked and a genuine and very warm friendship bloomed between us.

After asking her to jot down the details of her printer, her office supply company and her accountant, I took my leave of her (as they used to say) and I left the coffee shop and went to the bank with my Uncle's letter of authority; they treated me like royalty.

I realised why when I looked in the safety deposit box. There were bundles of notes to the total value of $2 million dollars in it, plus some jewellery pieces and the bank account had been steadily earning interest down through the years. In the bank account were a further $2 million.

I had access to $4 million dollars. I felt a little giddy for a time. "Uncle Henry," I thought, with a grin, "what have you done to me?"

June later helped point me in the direction of some good quality clothing shops, and I recall being absolutely blown away by I. Magnin & Company. I'd always thought Lewis' Department Store in Corporation Street, Birmingham, was the epitome of high-quality shopping. That was until I walked through the doors of I. Magnin & Company's Union Square, San Francisco, premises. Sorry, Lewis'. You just haven't got it, in comparison.

We also shopped in some smaller boutique shops. This was a couple of years before the Flower Power era came to San Francisco, but even then, it was obvious that the city of San Francisco was a city that was in a state of flux; things were changing and not in a bad way, mainly. Though the open racism of some people really stunned me.

There were not many black people in Birmingham when I had left. I recall that we had a very friendly and caring Sikh dentist, but Birmingham was then still a fairly white city, for the main part, then. Though I understand it changed over recent years.

Although people in San Francisco complained about the pollution and the smog I thought, 'If you think this is bad, you should be in Birmingham for a peasouper, a fog so impenetrable you literally couldn't see your hand in front of your face. And as for real pollution, try the Black Country to the North of Birmingham!" It was called the Black Country due to the steel works, foundries and workshops, pumping foul smoke into the air, day and night, for a couple of hundred years. Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, or so they say.

Over the next several months I became quite friendly with June, and I met Sandi, her girlfriend or lover, as you might call her. She was okay, I supposed, but she sort of made me feel creepy. Not because she was a lesbian, there was just something about her that I couldn't put my finger on, but there was something that made me feel that she was a rum 'un, as Uncle Henry was wont to say.

I accepted June's recommendation about using her printer; she was really very good but also good on the prices, too, though I had to translate Dollars to Pounds Shillings and Pence, or LSD, as we Brits called our money in the pre-decimalisation days back in the 1960s.

June also put me in touch with an office furniture company who were good and fairly inexpensive, and also an office equipment outfit, and they convinced me to spend out on a couple of IBM Selectric golfball typewriters, the "Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter" version, which had only been introduced the year before I arrived in the States.

It was great as I was able to use it to do basic typesetting that I could then print up on a mimeograph machine I'd bought reconditioned from the guy who sold me the IBM typewriters.

Things were going really well for BDP's San Francisco office, as I was able to hire writers locally through adverts in a variety of what I suppose you'd have to call alternative magazines.

I decided early on not to pay by the word, as to our cost my Uncle Henry and I had found that some writers would take the piss and over-write a piece in order to earn more money from it.

We learned a fairly costly lesson and we decided to pay a flat rate price for each article, no matter how many words they wrote. Some writers wouldn't bite, but in general terms, they were the kind of writers we really didn't want, anyway.

I was in regular contact with Uncle Henry and his small staff back in Brum, I'd send the articles by airmail and although that was expensive, it meant the news was always up-to-date. The inclusion of a USA business news feature in the magazine, with stories on new companies such as Baytech Electronics and other companies created by students from Stanford University, plus a couple of established outfits like Hewlett-Packard really boosted our magazine's readership.

I went in to I. Magnin & Company and bought Uncle Henry some nice gifts, which I sent by express parcel airmail. My first Christmas was fairly low-key, I visited with June and Sandie for Christmas dinner, which was nice. We exchanged gifts. It felt weird, but apparently, Boxing Day isn't a thing in the States.

At first, the companies we featured really couldn't understand that we weren't charging them for the stories we wrote about them, but eventually they realised there was no catch and it was free to them.

The advertising revenue that the new features brought in (Uncle Henry had to take on extra advertising sales staff) more than covered the costs, and eventually, some of the companies actually began to book advertising space in our magazine as they'd heard good things about the Swinging Sixties in England and wanted a piece of the action.

I found that I very quickly fell in love with San Francisco. The cable cars, the Bay, Fisherman's Wharf, even the dreadful Embarcadero freeway, and China Town. I especially loved China Town, because we had lived very close to Birmingham's own China Town, but the China Town of San Francisco was much bigger and perhaps even more Chinese than its smaller brother in Birmingham.

I liked to eat in the restaurants there. The Chinese food was somehow different to the Chinese foods I was used to, but it was all delicious.

I had to take on a secretary and a part time office manager, again, people recommended to me by June, and after only nine months, things were looking really good for BDP's San Francisco operation and it began showing a modest profit.

One day, June approached me and said: "You're not dating anyone, are you?" I shook my head and replied: "I never get to meet anyone, really. I'm a member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the Northern California British American Trade Council and the British Expat Club, run by the wife of one of the diplomats at the British Consulate in San Francisco, but I doubt I'd ever find love there!" We both laughed at the absurdity of the idea.

But then she said: "Why don't we double date? It'd be Sandie and me, plus you on a blind date. Have you ever been on a blind date, before?" she asked me.

"I haven't," I replied, "but I know what's entailed. I go out on a date with someone I haven't met and we take it from there, right?"

She nodded. "Yeah. That's about it. You have any preference where we should eat?" When I suggested a particular Chinese restaurant she nodded slowly and said: "That will work. Leave it to me and I'll organise it."

And so it was, almost a week later I was introduced to my blind date and I fell instantly in love. It was a genuine case of love at first sight, and I think that was the case for both of us.

Mary Spencer was her name. She worked with June's lover, Sandie and she was a friend of theirs. When they had mentioned that they knew a cute young British guy, she was intrigued enough that June decided to ask her if she wanted to go on a blind date with me and the rest was history.

Mary was also interested in me, though perhaps not quite as keen on me as I was on her, but we continued dating, sometimes with June and Sandie, but more often by ourselves.

After just under a year of dating I popped the question; she accepted, I bought the engagement ring and the wedding rings from a jeweller in China Town, and we were married in a Welsh Presbyterian Church in the city. This was a nod to my mum's Welsh heritage. My dad had been on holiday in the Welsh seaside town of Prestatyn, Mom had been working in the bed and breakfast place where Dad had been staying and after a reasonably long courtship, mainly by post, they had married and she had moved to Birmingham to set up home with him.

Mary and I moved in to my apartment and we had a happy, loving marriage until we didn't.

With some irony, it all started to fall to pieces against the backdrop of the Summer of Love. Sometimes the hippies were sweet, funny or zany, sometimes they were a pain in the arse, but they were rarely boring, it has to be said.

I noticed that our lovemaking was becoming more erratic, rather than erotic. We started off making love once or twice a day, then all of a sudden it drifted down to once a week, sometimes never. And Mary seemed to be distancing herself from me, somehow. We used to go out to nightclubs in the evenings, and on weekends we often used to go out to wineries to sample wine and buy some bottles for our own wine cellar. I began to learn to love wine. Sort of. Or we'd go out and explore the parks of the Bay area.

Eventually, these trips and excursions stopped, too. When I asked her about it, she would snap at me and accuse of being too controlling.

I began to suspect that she was cheating on me. But why? After all, we'd only been married for just under two years, so why would she be cheating on me so early on? Goodness, wasn't I naïve, back then?

Eventually, I decided to take June for a coffee in our favourite coffee shop. I started off by making a flippant remark that if the Trojan company was relying on couples like Mary and I for their income, they'd have a slim time of things.

After I explained my concerns to June, she said: "It certainly doesn't look good, does it, Paul? I doubt she's cheating on you. Sandie hasn't mentioned Mary saying anything, though I'm not sure that she'd tell her stuff like that. However, I have an idea. I can help you, whilst you can help me."

I was intrigued. "I'd love to do that," I replied. How would we do it?"

"Baytech is working for a private detective business. It's a national concern, but it's not the biggest in the USA, that's still the famed Pinkerton agency, but the outfit I'm working for by doing research is called Coast-to-Coast Perception, and is second to Pinkerton in size.

"I am developing a miniature transistorised phone tapping device which can listen in to and record telephone conversations. I have built several models of the prototypes, but I want to test them out before I send them to Cost-to-Coast for their evaluation. I can quickly teach you how to put a discrete tap on your phone and if Mary is getting into things she shouldn't, hopefully you'll be able to record it evidence of it.

"Because people who are doing something like that, well, they often just can't keep it a secret. I'm not for one moment saying she is cheating on you, but it's possible she's having other issues and problems in her life that she might not feel able to share with you. If she speaks about them on the phone to someone, then you'll know what the problem is and how to address those problems and how to help her.

Though best not to tell her you spied on her."

It sounded so reasonable and plausible in the coffee shop. Just shows how little I, or rather we, knew. Hell. Maybe we were both naïve?

Later that day I had, using June's concise yet detailed instructions, put an unintrusive phone tap on the phone in our apartment. It consisted of a small aluminium box which was attached to the phone's junction box and a built-in small cassette tape recorder, which was able to record up to 120 minutes of telephone conversations as the recorder had been adapted by June to record on both sides without changing the position of the tape.

I tested it, found that it was working and then re-set it to find what the hell had been going on in my marriage. I sometimes wish I hadn't bothered, but really? I was glad that I did what I did.

I needed to create an excuse for me to be out of the apartment, and as luck would have it, I had the opportunity to arrange to visit a fellow Brummie, an actor called Alan Napier, who had been born in Kings Norton, which was six or seven miles from where I was born, in the city centre. And in the context of Birmingham, six miles made a hell of a difference, Kings Norton was a leafy suburb; Ladywood was not.

I had kissed Mary goodbye and took the scheduled helicopter to the airport and caught a Boeing 727 operated by Pacific Southwest Airlines to Los Angeles Airport.

Any road up (as we Brummies say, instead of anyway) you'll perhaps remember Alan Napier, he played the part of Batman's butler, Alfred, in the original Batman TV series.

He was a lovely man, very affable and full of stories about his life on the stage, in the movie industry and on the Batman series. He had no trace of a Brummie accent, although he was able to drop into it for a bit of comedic affect. The interview I did with him was one of the best pieces I ever wrote and it appeared in our magazine as a special feature of a Brummie who had made good in California.

The next two days I spent reading and smoking (I smoked in those days, as did most everybody) and drinking tea sat by the hotel swimming pool. I'd decided to keep a clear head, so no booze.

In the early afternoon of the third day, I arrived home. A day early to what I'd told Mary.

Mary was out, probably at work, I guessed, and I removed the phone tape device, noting that three quarters of the first side of the tape had been used.

With trepidation and an unpleasant feeling like a fluttering sensation in my guts I took the device into my office, my staff were not at work that day, I locked the door and listened to the recording.

Have you ever had that feeling when you are so drunk or high on something that suddenly your whole reality is instantly shoved to one side? That's what I felt. It was as if my reality had suddenly become badly misaligned. But I realised that it wasn't just my reality that had become misaligned.

I rewound the tape and then I took the device down to June in her Baytech offices. Luckily she was alone, the younger technicians she employed on a part time basis weren't in.

June saw my face and said: "Oh, God, no! Please don't tell me Mary is cheating on you, Paul?"

I nodded and said: "Yes, she is cheating on me. But it's actually far worse than that. June, please listen to the tape and..." She interrupted me: "If it's too personal, you don't have to do that, Paul."

"Please, June. It's really important that you listen to it."

We sat down at her desk, which, for an engineer was remarkably free of clutter, and she listened to the damned and damning tape that would, no word of exaggeration, change the courses of our lives for good, pretty much.

I'd recognised the voices on the important call. Or the devastating call, as you might say. It was Mary and also Sandie. Yeah. That Mary. And that Sandie.

The device was designed so that as soon as a call commenced it would immediately start to record and switch off when the call ended. It worked. Sad to say that it worked all too well.

June decided to listen to the tape on a set of headphones that looked as if they were army surplus. I watched her face. I knew what she was listening to, what she was hearing. I knew her pain, because I had felt some of that pain when I had listened to that taped conversation only minutes before, yet it felt like an eternity.

MARY: "Hello, who's calling, please?"

SANDIE: "Good morning, lover. Has your jerk of a husband gone away, yet?"

MARY: "Yes. He went off to interview some actor in Hollywood a couple of hours ago. But I wish you didn't disrespect him to me. He's not a jerk. He is called Paul and he is my husband."

SANDIE: "Yeah, maybe so. But you don't love him, do you?"

MARY: "That's got nothing to do with it. You wouldn't like it if I started saying insulting things about June, would you?"

SANDIE: "Don't really know if it would bother me all that much, really.

MARY: "Don't you love June, anymore?"

SANDIE: Well, sort of. Yeah, a little bit. But what I feel for June is nowhere near as powerful and as earth moving as what I feel for you, sugar."

MARY: "Thank you, that's so sweet of you. I do know what you mean, though, Sandie. My feelings for Paul have changed a lot since you and I first got together. I love him, still, but I'm no longer in love with him."

SANDIE: "Has it only been six months since we got together that first afternoon? It sort of feels like we've been lovers for years. For ever, maybe."

MARY: "Yeah, for ever!"

SANDIE: "You know, at some point we are going to have to dump Pinky and Perky, right?"

MARY: "What the hell? How did you come up with that name for them?"

Sandie: "It was a couple of puppet pigs I saw on The Ed Sullivan Show a year or so back. They appeared with the damn Beatles on the same show, if you can believe that, and two British song and dance men. Can't recall their names, though."

MARY: "You really love me so much that you'd dump June after like a whole decade?"

SANDIE: "Yeah. I would. Because I like it when you and I make love because it makes me feel complete."

MARY: "I know what you mean. I feel the same way, too. I stopped having relations with Paul."

SANDIE: "I never asked you to do that. Why'd you do it?"

MARY: "Because every time I had sex with him, it was like I was cheating on you, so I stopped being with him in that way."

SANDI: Awwwww, that's so sweet of you, honey! You do know we are going to have to break it to them at some point. We'll have to be as gentle and as kind as we can. Of course, it's going to be a little awkward with you and Paul. He'll be expecting for you to file for divorce, but seeing as you are still legally married to Al Small, that's just not gonna happen, right?"

MARY: "That's probably true. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Anyway, lover, I'll have to go, now. Gotta get ready for work. Love you!"

SANDIE: "I'm not too bad, time-wise, I'm making a late start today. See you at work, later, my little lover!"

The call had ended. June carefully removed the headphones almost as if they were made of glass and the slightest knock or jar would shatter them.

Tears were streaming down her face. She was crying, but she was also furious. "That damn little slut! I actually literally picked her up out of a rain-soaked gutter when her damned father had thrown her out of their family home in Bumfuck, Idaho! Damned, ungrateful little bitch!"

I had never heard June swear before and it made her anger even more "real," for want of a better word.