Gaynor Evans spent the Easter of 1972 with her children, Mark, seven, and Joanna, four, and her husband Russell, a lecturer at Swansea University. The family lived in a modern detached four-bed home on the Mumbles coast, where she was pretty content with her lot.
She had, after all, just bought a second family car, and most of her spare cash, earned from her part-time job at a nearby hospital, went on fashionable new clothes. At that time, rather as now, velvet trouser suits were in vogue.
“I’m really quite happy about all my life,” she said then, reflecting on all the cleaning and cooking that faced her each week. “I got married because it was the thing my mother wanted me to do. It didn’t enter my head to do otherwise. I don’t feel a drudge. I did quite well out of it, actually.”
Something that did mark Evans out from her neighbours, aside from her “trendy” outfits, was her use of garlic in the kitchen. Her friends found the smell odd. But she was never one for throwing dinner parties. Instead, it was the discotheque that drew her at weekends. There, she and Russell danced “Top of the Pops-style” until the early hours.
We know all this detail about Evans, now 86, as she was picked out that April, more than five decades ago, as the subject of The Way We Live Now, a series of interviews with “ordinary” women in the Observer’s feature section. A portrait of her through her iron gate was taken by the late, great Jane Bown and captioned “Gaynor Evans is happy”.
This photograph presided over a newspaper page crammed with leisure and style advertisements. One promoted the “long and short” frocks available at Plum of Chelsea while others listed attractions included the coming summer’s 26th Edinburgh international festival and West End preview tickets for new “epic musical” Gone with the Wind.
Prompted by International Women’s Day earlier this month, Evans got in touch again with an update on her life, motivated by a desire to remind readers of the very different challenges facing women then.
Time has added perspective since that visit from Bown and the Welsh journalist Mavis Nicholson, who went on to become a well-known television interviewer. But some things remain true about her life, Evans says: “I do have aches and pains and a few things wrong with me, but as long as my mind is active, I’m still quite happy.” Her husband, by then a professor, died 18 years ago at 68, but she has her two children, two grandchildren, Rebecca and Thomas, and now two great grandchildren, Amelia, two-and-a-half, and five-month-old baby Sophia. She also has her rescue dog, a whippet called Louis: “I spend a lot of time on my own, apart from Louis, and he spends his life humping my cushions.”
Evans’s disco days may be long gone, but she is active. “I love to walk my dog on the beach as much as I can. I’m lucky I can do that. And I’m not lonely because I have lots of friends,” she said. On Easter Sunday, she will be enjoying lunch with her family at the Langland Bay Golf Club (also a favourite of local celebrity Catherine Zeta-Jones when she visits, notes Evans). “I play bridge there three times a week. I recommend it. It helps me forget my problems.”
To celebrate her birthday next month she is booked to see Jesus Christ Superstar in Swansea. The city, though, is not what it was, she regrets: “I don’t even shop there any more. I even used to go up to London to shop at Che Guevara back then, but now I order most of my clothes from catalogues. I still like clothes, and I went to a fashion show last Tuesday, in fact.”
Not a fan of watching telly in the 1970s, Evans now enjoys EastEnders and Netflix true crime series. Her opinion on what was then known as “a deep freeze” has also changed: “I did get a freezer in the end.” She had been wary, suspecting it was one mod con that would require too much domestic forward planning. “I don’t care what else I haven’t got, as long as I have my automatic washing machine,” she said in 1972.
What really has altered is Evans’s attitude to work. “I married when I was 21, and if I could go back, I would not do that so young. I worked part-time to help get my husband through his science and mathsdegrees and his doctorate. When I was interviewed by Mavis, I was doing occupational therapy at the hospital. I wasn’t a receptionist, like she said. I enjoyed getting people ready to leave, and I did it for 10 years. It’s what I’d have done if I’d had my own career. Before that, I had an office job at the Halifax, which I hated. Later, after the hospital, I ran an antique and bric-a-brac shop, Collections, for another 10 years.
“My daughter worked there with me on a youth training scheme.” Evans’s son followed his father into academia, lecturing in engineering at Swansea University.
But it is Evans’s memories of her impoverished wartime childhood that have come back with force. “I would not be the person I am if it wasn’t for my wonderful parents, Tom and Nelly. He was away in the army and she was in the land army, doing lots of jobs; picking mushrooms and blackberries in the Gower countryside.
“It was a hard life, and difficult if you moved in because people thought you were taking their work. We became homeless and had to squat, living in half a hut with the young family of a trawlerman. He would come home with fish and my mum would cook it for the whole camp. Those are things I don’t like to remember. There was a time a man got in the bedroom window, and I had to give evidence in court afterwards for my mum. It was very hard indeed. I don’t think people now understand what it was like for a woman alone with children in the war: what they had to do.”
Following Russell’s death in 2006, Evans downsized to a nearby bungalow. “I wanted to stay close to neighbours I’ve known for so long. And I’d very much like to stay in my bungalow and have someone come in to help me if I need it.”
A Welsh nationalist voter at the time of the Observer interview, Evans now describes herself as Labour: “I don’t speak Welsh and neither do my kids, and I don’t particularly regret that.”
She is not a fan of Brexit and does not like the government’s Rwanda plan for immigrants: “Truly, I think people should get by with helping each other.”
Her advice for life is “to face your demons”, but says it is having a sense of humour that got her through: “And the best landmarks of my life have been my grandchildren, who I was very hands-on with, and, of course, now my great-grandchildren.”
• The headline of this article was amended on 1 April 2024 because an earlier version incorrectly referred to 1972 as the year of marriage of Gaynor Evans.
