A Posh Girl's Summer Of Love

It was 1967, when hippie dreams of peace and love migrated from San Francisco across the Atlantic. Ingrid Jo Boissevain was a sixteen-yearold grammar school girl, an architect’s daughter, living in Tadworth,Surrey. Fifty years on, here is her diary of those sunny months.

Tuesday, 30th May – Surrey 

My face is gruesomely red. Read a jolly good article on pop music in yesterday’s Times – one of the best articles I’ve ever read. William Mann [the music critic] thinks The Beatles’ new LP is marvellous, and that ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is ‘beautiful and Bach-derived’. But I’m so MAD: Mummy’s taken the paper down to the rabbit hutch, so I’ll have to go down the moment I wake to save it.

Drew quite a good picture of Dutronc [astonishingly attractive young German I met on a skiing holiday] in ski-clothes in my rough book. Somehow, I can’t see myself falling in love with him. It would be so lovely though, if I did fall in love with Dutronc and he fell in love with me. I’m sure he’s awfully nice – despite what Daddy says about him having no deep feelings.

My hair is CHRONIC at the moment, it’s never been so foul. Thank goodness, I can put it into bunches.

At supper, we talked a bit about universities. Daddy says there is supposed to be rather a lot of drug-taking in Cambridge, and girls go to bed with their boyfriends, etc. Does he think it’s immoral, I wonder? I expect he feels it ought to be kept for love.

Friday, 30th June – London