FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (11 page)

One of the younger nuns at school was a brilliant storyteller – but to this day I have never been able to be in a room at night without the curtains drawn because of her tale of someone seeing the devil's face pressed against a window in the dark. That was frightening enough, but then army friends of my parents rented a house that turned out to be seriously haunted and wrote an account – it was a diary – of their life there. We were not even supposed to know they'd
had
any such experience, let alone read the diary, but of course we children overheard them talking about it and ‘borrowed' the diary from Mum's room and ever since then the combination of their terrifying ghost stories, plus the nun's tales, plus
Daily Sketch
crime stories, plus the scary memories from India, has meant that I cannot stay alone anywhere that isn't on a second or third floor with four locks on the doors and windows for fear of ghosts/burglars/murderers. (Years later, when I became a journalist, I tried to persuade my parents' friends to publish their extraordinary diary, but by then their children had grown up and had careers and they didn't want the kind of publicity this would bring – but I often remember it and still think it would make a gripping book, and it must still be around somewhere . . .)

My best pal at school was called Fatty (I was known as Beaky because my initials were BK). Fatty and I drew up a written pledge vowing that we would never wear lipstick, and signed it in our BLOOD. I think this was because we'd decided we hated grown-ups, especially our mothers (who wore lipstick), because they had sent us away to school in the first place. At that time I must have looked an even worse sight than I'd been in the days when my mother and aunt thought I was so plain, because by now I had a plate to straighten my teeth, as well as glasses – which I got by pretending I couldn't read the eye test, I so badly wanted them as I felt they were glamorous.

Aside from having ordinary friends like Fatty, all the younger girls at school seemed to have passionate crushes on the older ones. I'd never come across this before, but soon developed my own which was on the sporty games captain, Grania Fetherstonhaugh (I have not made this name up), whom I worshipped from a distance. As far as I know, everyone's passions remained this way – from a distance; the nearest we got to our heroines was to send them holy pictures with doting messages on the back. Just before I left this school at around twelve years old, I received my own admiring holy picture from one of the new girls. She was called Vivien, I couldn't really believe it, and to this day wonder if someone was pulling my leg or felt sorry for me.

Tessa and I had to leave the convent when my father got a job in Aldershot and we moved back to my grandparents' house in Fleet. By now they had died, and the house had been converted into two flats – we Keenans had the top one, and my widowed Aunt Thea and Jinny and Prue and Simon lived downstairs. We pushed a Hoover tube through the floor in the corner of our dining room and this became our home-made house phone for family communications. I was sent as a day girl to Farnborough Convent and Dad ferried me to Fleet station to catch the train every morning – we were nearly always late because I was never ready in time, and that quite often meant having to run down the platform and make a terrifying leap on to the moving train, something that still comes into my dreams.

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth was looming; somehow Dad got two tickets for it and promised me I could go with him if I gave up biting my nails. I had always bitten my nails – despite bitter aloes painted on them, a special plate with loops over my teeth so they couldn't meet to bite, plasters on my fingers, gloves on my hands; all backed up with hundreds of firm resolutions, but I could not give up the habit. A place at the Coronation was the ultimate bribe and I really
meant
to stop, but when the Great Nail Inspection came, I failed it – Dad took Moira instead. Miserable, I decided to run away and packed a little cardboard attaché case. Halfway down the road I met Aunt Thea. ‘Where are you off to?' she asked. ‘I am running away,' I said sulkily. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘that's a pity, we are having scones for tea.' Greed overcame rage and self-hatred and I turned back. (I went on biting my nails for decades; definitely not a good look – especially for a fashion editor, as I was later to become. I held cigarettes and wine glasses with my knuckles, or wore Eylure false nails that risked coming off at any moment, and then – just as built-on artificial nails were invented which would have solved my problem – I gave up the habit, surprisingly in Kazakhstan which, of all AW's postings, is the one that gave me the greatest stress.)

In the meantime the rest of us watched the Coronation on television at our neighbours' house. They were a mother and daughter: the mother was ancient and had an eye that looked, rather disgustingly, as if it was popping out; the daughter, also old, was strict but kind. They were the only people we knew who owned a television – it had a small screen with a kind of magnifying glass over it, and wasn't anything like the ones we watch today, but they were generous with it, cramming chairs into their sitting room for all the important ‘national' occasions: the Coronation, the Boat Race, the Grand National and any big sporting events. These all seemed to be about running, with the four-minute-mile record being broken every week in the Fifties, but what strikes me now is how
white
British sports were then – all the athletic stars were thin, sinewy, white men with hairy legs like Roger Bannister and Chris Chataway.

Everyone in Britain looked at the same TV programmes in those days because there wasn't any choice; as soon as there were more channels available this didn't happen again for decades – until quite recently with the coming of brilliant series such as
The Wire
or
The Killing
or
Spiral
or
Wolf Hall
 – not to mention
MasterChef
 – which have reunited the viewing public again.

In the early Fifties everyone seemed to read the same books as well (I still have some of them:
The Kon-Tiki Expedition
,
Seven Years in Tibet
and
The Ascent of Everest
, passed down from my parents), and we watched the same films, mostly war movies then –
The Wooden Horse
,
Above Us the Waves
,
The Colditz Story
,
The Cruel Sea
(from the book which was notorious among teenagers because it had rude bits in it) – so that as far as we children were concerned the war had been won by the actors Jack Hawkins, Richard Todd, John Mills, Michael Redgrave and John Gregson. My own favourite film was
Where No Vultures Fly
, about a game warden in Africa, with Anthony Steel and Dinah Sheridan (in Horrockses frocks). It was the big ‘family' film of 1951; every person now my age was probably taken to see it as a child. I
loved
it – because of its African location which felt a bit like India to me – much more than I did
Genevieve
, the next great blockbuster starring Kay Kendall and Kenneth More, which came out two years later.

Our cousins were all away at school by now, and it wasn't long before Tessa and I were both sent off to board at Farnborough Convent, but during the holidays, especially when Moira came down from London at the weekends to join us, it was like being in an Enid Blyton sort of family of six, aged between nine and nineteen. (David was married by now and had left home.) The others used to tease me about having a big mouth, and once betted me that I would not be able to fit a whole orange into it. Triumphantly, I manoeuvred the orange in – but it lodged behind my front teeth and blocked up my nose and my throat so that I couldn't breathe, and they were all so busy laughing that they didn't notice I was suffocating. I was grunting and waving my arms in panic when Moira suddenly realised what was happening – but there was absolutely no way to pull out the orange, so she cut a hole in the bit that showed at the front of my wide-open mouth, and then squeezed my cheeks to get the juice out until the orange was shrunken enough to remove, and I survived.

Dad's land-agency duties in Aldershot involved the disused Longmoor Military Railway which most people weren't even aware existed – and that is how he knew that the Hollywood superstars Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger were coming there to film
Bhowani Junction
, a story by John Masters about Indian freedom fighters trying to blow up a train.  Ava Gardner played an Anglo-Indian woman and Stewart Granger a British officer (in love with her of course). Dad arranged for us to go and watch the filming which was extra thrilling as it had to be done at night in the dark. Tessa did – probably still does – a good imitation of me tripping along the railway line in my little Louis heels (I'd dressed up) holding out my autograph book and calling: ‘Miss Gardner, Miss Gardner . . .'

At the convent one of our schoolmates was Anne Robinson (later known for
The Weakest Link
on TV). I read somewhere that she hated the place, but I quite liked it: most of the nuns were Irish (as usual) and superstitious, and would say things like ‘There goes Brigid Keenan doing the Devil's work on earth' or ‘Look at Tessa Keenan being blown along by the Devil like a little piece of fluff' – and though I was hopeless at Latin and maths, and spent many miserable hours shivering on the muddy hockey/lacrosse pitch, we had a good English teacher and there were lots of other girls who lived abroad and had seen the world outside Hampshire, as we had done. (When she came back from India, my poor sister Moira got into trouble at her school because every time the geography teacher mentioned a place – Delhi, Lahore, Basra, Damascus, Beirut, Marseilles or Paris – she'd put up her hand and say, ‘I've been there,' which of course she had, but the teacher accused her of lying.) My own lasting friend from that time, Diana, who lived in Guyana, came to school in England on a banana boat from Trinidad.

The most shameful thing I did at Farnborough Convent was in my early days there: my form-mates and I put a wastepaper basket on top of the door so it would fall on our biology (bilge) teacher. All went according to plan except the teacher burst into tears and we were all appalled and mortified to have caused such distress. I still regret my part in it.

The star event of my schooldays – because it felt just like something out of an old-fashioned boarding-school story – was the midnight feast we held in my last term. We boarders couldn't leave the school grounds, but day-girls were commissioned to buy us various things to eat and drink, and we all sneaked out of our rooms and met, at midnight, under the stage, and tucked into the food we'd brought – all the time trembling with a kind of delicious fear that we would be discovered. Amazingly we weren't.

The organisers of the midnight feast included two of my best friends, Brenda Tandy (niece of the actress, Jessica Tandy) and Ann Coxon; we have stayed in touch. Ann Coxon became a high-powered doctor in Harley Street and, surprisingly perhaps, for the ex-head-girl of a convent, converted to Islam. Brenda met a rich Italian textile magnate not long after leaving school and it looked as though her story would have a fairytale ending, but at a society wedding in Turin, she leaned against a first-floor balcony for the photographer, and it gave way – she fell on to steps below, breaking her back. At the time, her husband made all the exquisite, pale, double-faced gaberdine fabrics for the popular couturier Courrèges, but then, suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, Yves Saint Laurent became everyone's favourite Paris designer with his garments in black or navy jersey, and the textile firm, not equipped to make knitted cloth, went bust, and shortly after this catastrophe Brenda's husband died. She has spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair, has raised three children with no one to support her, and no income apart from what she earned herself in a career as a fashion consultant. She has had the most difficult path, but all through it she has never ceased to be glamorous and indomitable, and I admire her more than anyone on earth. I sometimes think back to that midnight feast when, of course, none of us had any idea of what the future held.

At Landour in the holidays we occasionally put on plays for the adults. Prue wrote these and sent us the scripts to learn at school, so we'd be ready to start rehearsing as soon as we got home. Once I had to play Dr Watson in a Sherlock Holmes-type drama; my lines, in verse, included the words ‘pursued by robber bands', but when I spoke them they came out as ‘pursued by
rubber
bands' and the play came to a sudden end with the cast collapsed in a heap of giggles. The passion for dressing up started again – it went on for years in various forms. Aunt Joan (who by now had become an air hostess working with a long-forgotten airline called Airwork at Blackbushe airport near Camberley) got engaged to a short, bald man whom we nicknamed the Golf Ball. One evening while she was waiting nervously for him to collect her for a date, we thought it would be funny for one of us (I think Prue was chosen) to dress up in a man's suit, put a pudding basin on her head and kneel in the hall on a pair of men's shoes, pretending to be the Golf Ball, to tease Joan. Of course he arrived early and Prue's act had to be explained away – but I don't suppose it crossed his mind that a teenage girl kneeling on the floor with a pudding basin on her head was supposed to be him.

Or perhaps it did, because the relationship didn't last and Aunt Joan then became engaged to a dashing Dutchman. Her future mother-in-law, who was wealthy and smart and lived in Mayfair (which impressed us all because of Monopoly), invited her to treat herself to some new underwear at Harrods as a present. Joan went and bought some pretty things, as well as a new roll-on (a roll-on was a sort of elasticated corset, a bit like Spanx knickers without the crotch), and then, not wanting to take her own disgusting, old grey and perished roll-on away with her, she hid it behind the radiator in the changing room. To her horror, Harrods found it, and sent it to her mother-in-law-to-be who asked if it was hers. She denied all knowledge of it, and she married the Dutchman.