Visiting Brook in 1966: Linda’s Story

I escaped from Pinner, North West London, to do my teacher training in Warrington. Although I wasn’t a Catholic, I had been to a Catholic girls school and had chosen to go as far away from home as possible. I’d had enough and I wanted something different. I went to a college for men and women, I went to the north to Warrington, the most industrial town you could possibly imagine between Manchester, and Liverpool.

It was 1966 and my second year at college.

I’d just fallen in love for the first time in my life.

We were both in plays together and he was he was the son of a Liverpool milkman. He’d had a previous relationship with a woman and there’d been a pregnancy and I knew people who’d had to have abortions, so I became more and more aware that I needed family planning.

The college was in an old Canadian Air Force camp. We had one doctor for the for the entire campus and when I went to see him, he was shocked that I was even asking [about contraception], he was Catholic. I realised I was going to get absolutely nowhere with him, and there wasn’t anything else.

I just didn’t know where to turn.

I must have heard about the Brook clinic somehow or other. I must have been desperate, because it wasn’t that I was pregnant; it was the fact that I didn’t want to become pregnant.

I didn’t go home to do it. I just went direct, because I didn’t want to stay with mum and dad, with this as my aim. I would have had to lie and invent a reason for coming down to London at an odd time and I certainly wasn’t going to wait for a holiday!

I went down on the overnight bus to London because it was cheap. I arrived in the morning hours to Euston Station. Brook was in Whitfield Street. I can remember a line of shops, and there it was. And I just stood there, you know, and I remember the feeling, does this place really exist? Is it really here? Am I here? I haven’t told mum and dad, they’re just up the road in bloody Pinner! And I would never normally come down to London without letting them know.

It was like everything that I was doing was banned.

I just felt that what I was doing was illicit, but necessary.

I remember entering and going up some stairs, and there were a few other people. And that was a relief, that there were a few other people doing what I was doing. And they seemed very quiet and they didn’t look as though anything terrible was happening.

I can remember just talking about something that – up to that moment, had been totally banned, totally whispered and not talked about openly. But it was as if this was the most normal thing in the world. I just sat there and I discussed everything with the female doctor, and she asked me lots of questions and told me about what kind of methods I could use. If I remember rightly, I just I got the pill.

It just felt as if I had, in fact, become legal; that this was normal. This was how it was. And it made a huge difference to how I felt about everything really, and in terms of my relationship with Dave.

It was a validation that I received and I know that 100%, it made a difference for me.

There was absolutely no judgment. It was simply almost like a “welcome to sanity”. I was looking into the eyes of a woman who knew. I was only young but that was very important.

I got the bus back and I told everybody at college. I told them “..this is what you’ve got to do; this is where you go…”

Every time I went down to London afterwards, and it’s still the same even now when I’m in that area. I always feel fondness. Donovan released a song called Sunny Goodge Street [the nearest London Underground station to the first Brook clinic] and that had extra meaning. I bought that bloody record straight off!

I was so innocent at that time, but going to Brook, it was almost like I was on the edge of a diving board, and I dived. From that moment on, I was swimming.