Having recently passed a Waterstones’ window that advertised a book based on a hideously abused childhood with the words: “Seriously honest! Feel his pain!” it was a relief to read Brigid Keenan’s assessment of her own past. “It seems to me now that my childhood was the exact opposite of a misery memoir,” she says; “it was almost too happy, too sheltered, too cosy.”
It’s a relief, of course, to read that, but at the same time quite daunting. Is it possible to produce a readable memoir that’s full of joy? The answer is “Yes”. Keenan writes feelgood books. I’ve devoured Diplomatic Baggage and Packing Up – both memoirs of her time as a diplomatic wife in India and eastern Europe – and this account of her childhood and early career in the 1960s is another compulsive and humorous read.
We sometimes read autobiographies to find bits that resonate with us. This one chimed with me more than most. There was barely a page where I wasn’t wanting to email Keenan to tell her: “But I did that! My mother did that!” I’ve met her occasionally, both of us being journalists with only five years between us, but I never realised the similarities that are paraded through these pages.
The first part, about her childhood in India, is, for me, the most interesting. Not because I was a child in India, but because my mother was. Keenan’s father served in the Indian army; my grandfather in the Indian civil service. She was wrenched away from her beloved ayah – her nanny – at eight, to live with her grandmother in Fleet; so was my mother – to a grandmother also in Fleet. Keenan was blissfully happy in India, with her own servants and Little Grey Rabbit books. “Forget Kevin McCloud or World of Interiors,” she writes, “my design guru has always been Little Grey Rabbit, with her patchwork, white walls, plates on a dresser and gingham.”
But in 1945, this pampered life came to an end with the second world war. Within a few years came partition and independence, and Brigid’s father joined the Punjab Boundary Force to keep the peace. His descriptions of the process of separating India from the emerging Pakistan were horrifying: “Firing a village is a normal occurrence, murder is like having a cigarette, and on long trails to the main roads you see everything from headless corpses to maimed women and butchered children.”
Years later, on meeting one of Keenan’s Indian friends, he started to cry. “You cannot imagine how envious I am that you have close Indian friends,” he said. “In my day it was not really possible.”
As Keenan writes, “Life in India was glorious Technicolor and in Britain it was horrible black and white.” She particularly dreaded the meals, having been used to a delicious diet of vegetable curries, sugar cane, passion fruit and Alphonso mangoes. In Britain there was rationing, the meat was all gristle, and she was forced to eat the flabby skin on both sides of the fish. The floppy lettuces were always full of caterpillars. The weather was freezing.
The only work Keenan’s father could find was as the eighth cowman on a nearby farm; he ended up as a land agent. She was not overly enthusiastic about her return. “It’s a pity Brigid is such a plain child,” she heard an aunt confide to her mother. And, after witnessing her taking part in a dancing class, all her father could say was: “Well, full marks to Brigid for trying.”
Her finishing school was full of girls from rich international families. It was ruled with a rod of iron by the formidable Mademoiselle Anita, her grey hair in French pleat, laced-up shoes and walking cane with a silver top. There Keenan was taught that “You must never trust a man with your little finger, because then he will seize your whole body.”
She was one of the last girls to “come out” at court – her permed hair forced into unattractive horns at the side of her face – but as it didn’t work as a marriage market for her, she got a job. A friend of her mother’s declared: “You don’t want to be a career woman, dear; men never like that at all.”
At 21 she became Young Fashion Editor on the Daily Express, then worked for the fearsome Ernestine Carter, doyenne of fashion on the Sunday Times, who replied to critical readers with such acidic letters as “Dear Mrs Throgmorton, Thank you for your letter. I would have taken your criticism more seriously had you not written ‘fashion’ with two Ss”. Brigid also worked on the Observer, then the super-smart Nova magazine, dealing with photographers such as Brian Duffy, Terence Donovan, Norman Parkinson and David Bailey (she was charmed by the way he would say “Hello, he lied” when he came into a room). So successful was she that she was even feted as a “Young Meteor” in a book by Jonathan Aitken.
Full Marks for Trying is entertaining, and a wonderful social document of small but telling differences between those born in the 1930s and 40s and those born more recently. We could walk freely around Stonehenge; there were no seatbelts on the few cars that existed; cut and paste meant cut and paste; all nice girls wore skirts over seamed stockings, and everyone smoked – not only on aeroplanes but during meals, between mouthfuls. Keenan recaptures her era beautifully, with style and humour.
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