FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (14 page)

Pronunciation was another whole can of worms – riding trousers were pronounced
joedpurs
not jodhpurs, but then, the opposite, scones not
scoenes
. . . At home my aunt announced that she had it on good authority that laundry and hydrangea should be pronounced
lahndry
and
hydrahngea
, and that corgi was supposed to be
kergi
, but we didn't believe her.

In the final analysis, though, I think all this U and non-U hysteria helped to make the class system ridiculous, and hastened its end.

Just as I finished writing that paragraph, my eye fell on a quote in the
Guardian
from Lady Fellowes, wife of Julian Fellowes of
Downton Abbey
fame, in which she says that she and her husband often enjoy a quiet little laugh at guests who
fold their napkins
after a meal, or who tip their soup plate
towards
themselves, rather than away, so perhaps nothing has changed after all.

Back in Paris, one of our classes each week was midwifery – I hated this lesson (though I quite liked the bit about turning a drawer from a chest into an emergency baby's bed) and I made an appointment with Mademoiselle Anita to explain to her that I was never likely to have to deliver a baby and please could I be excused from the session.

‘Absolutely not,' she snapped in French. ‘You never know when someone on your estate might need your help.' I tried to point out that we lived in a flat in an Edwardian redbrick villa in Fleet –
Fleet
 – and that the nearest thing to an estate in the lives of the Keenans would be a neighbouring council estate, but I could see that the very idea of Fleet was beyond her imagination, let alone our house in it; and I had to go back to the classes. So I know (or should I say knew, in case I am ever tested) how to deliver a baby, and how to bind the umbilical cord with thread (silk of course).

Far worse than the midwifery class, though, was our compulsory Social Service – one afternoon every week had to be given to good deeds; I was allocated to teach algebra in a home for girls who had been saved from prostitution. They were the same age or older than me and infinitely more worldly-wise and sophisticated – I was absolutely terrified of them: to this day when I see the name of the Métro station Gaîté written up, I start a panic attack. When I told the nuns that my algebra O-level mark was 8 out of 100, they changed my subject to English conversation; I remember the first time I timidly asked my class of about half a dozen girls if they could speak any English and they all laughed and one said, ‘I can say keees me, Johnnie.' After that I read to them from English books while they dozed off.

When we went out and about in Paris, as we did most afternoons to see exhibitions and museums, our group of perhaps seven or eight teenage girls was escorted by a guide-cum-chaperone. Poor Mademoiselle Marguerite, she was a little old lady buttoned up in a navy overcoat and scarf, who we never saw without her squashed navy felt hat, and we tormented her by disappearing down alleyways, or hiding from her in the giant galleries of the Louvre, and then giving her a fright. But when I look at the group photographs of us students then, I can hardly believe that we were so mischievous because we seem like a bunch of middle-aged women.

Perhaps it was her revenge, but one day she took us to the military hospital at Val-de-Grâce, where we saw the most shocking wax masks of facial injuries from the two world wars: gaping holes where noses or eyes had been, lower jaws blown away and teeth exposed as on a skull – and these were from men who had
survived.
It took me years to erase the images of what I saw that day from my memory.

My particular pals at school were Blanca Guardiola, whose family bred the best fighting bulls in Spain; Tati from Mexico, whose mother died when she was small and no one told her about menstruation so for a long time she thought there was something wrong with her; Brigitte, my lovely Belgian room-mate (who much later in life was briefly and unhappily in the headlines when she gave birth to septuplets who died); Mona from Lebanon, who was big and smoulderingly sexy; Marie-Sol, a lively Sicilian princess; and chic little Daisy de Montesson, who invited me to stay in her family's enormous château during the Suez Crisis when everyone else's parents took them home for fear of the upcoming global conflict (which didn't happen); mine couldn't afford to.

It was a bit of a nightmare at Daisy's as I didn't own an alarm clock and, no matter how earnestly I asked, no one woke me up in the mornings, so that every day I emerged, covered with confusion and embarrassment, just in time for lunch. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that perhaps leaving me asleep was easier for them than having to entertain me.

I don't know about the other pupils, but for me the most exciting school outing was when some elegant woman friend of Mademoiselle Anita's took us to the hushed grey and white showrooms of Christian Dior in the Avenue Montaigne where we saw his Spring 1957 collection – Dior himself was still alive then. It was a revelation: another world; I had never imagined in my wildest dreams that either clothes – or women – could be so beautiful. Later in life I was to see dozens of Paris collections, but nothing ever matched the wonder of that first one: I can still remember an exquisite white organdie dress embroidered with lilies-of-the-valley that I just wanted to stare at for ever.

When my younger sister  Tessa followed me to Mademoiselle Anita's a couple of years later, as a day-girl, there was no outing to Dior, but there was a fashion show of sorts: the woman with whom Tessa and the other students lodged lived in the same building as the prime minister of France, Monsieur Debré, and she would take her girls into his apartment (she seemed to have a key) and they would look at the dresses in Madame Debré's wardrobe together. The Debrés were living in the prime-ministerial residence, the Hôtel Matignon, so they were not there, but Tessa used to wonder nervously what on earth would happen if Madame came back unexpectedly and found all these girls examining her clothes . . .

Before leaving for school in Paris, I had developed a crush on a Fleet boy called Peter whom I had kissed once at a party. (At least this was a step up from having a passion for Gilles who hardly knew I was there, or for the brother of one of my convent schoolfriends whom I had only seen in a photograph.) I don't expect Peter had ever thought about me again, but I daydreamed about him all the time and one of the highlights of my stay in Paris was on Valentine's Day when I got a home-made card covered with cut-out lips of all sorts, with a message reading: ‘I wish mine were on yours.' Of course I KNEW it was from Peter, and slept with it under my pillow – until the awful day a couple months later when I was leafing through the magazines in the school library and suddenly noticed that all the lips had been cut out of the pictures. My card was not from Peter but from my friends; how they must have laughed. (Actually they told me later that they hadn't, because I took it all so seriously that they feared for my mental health should I discover the truth.)

When I told this story to my daughter Claudia not long ago, she said pityingly, ‘Oh, Mum, as if any boy would
make
a card.'

Thinking about it now, I realise that my generation of girls in the Western world was/is perhaps the most fortunate in history: the Second World War was over, no other conflict had (as yet) engulfed the world, we were able to train and work and earn money, we had access to efficient birth control and we had independence. Our little group in Paris didn't understand most of that yet, but we had all been born in the years of the war and had known, to some degree (I was the luckiest), fear and instability, fathers away fighting (or taken prisoner or killed or wounded), food shortages, rationing, bombing raids – the French, Dutch and Belgian girls had lived through German occupation, and the persecution of the Jews – and we felt grateful, not only because we'd come out on the other side of all this, but because we now found ourselves in a kind of Promised Land. For it was not just the timing of our births in historical terms that was lucky, it was because a whole new world was being created especially for seventeen-year-olds like us as well. We were a new invention – TEENAGERS! Never before had our age group been looked on as particularly special, but now, it seemed, we were the most important people on earth. There was music being made especially for us – a far cry from the love stories of sad grown-ups like the jilted band leader and poor Miss Otis of my brother's 78s; we had Frankie Laine with ‘Cool Water', Tennessee Ernie Ford with ‘Sixteen Tons', Paul Anka with ‘Diana', Buddy Holly with ‘Peggy Sue', Frank Sinatra with ‘Come Fly with Me', Pat Boone and so many others, but it was really Bill Haley's ‘Rock Around the Clock', which hit the charts in 1955, that changed everything. I remember the first time I heard it – before the nuns at my convent banned it as ‘animal music' – getting gooseflesh all over. I still do. And the music was all the more extraordinary when you think that Bill Haley was middle-aged, with a terrible kiss-curl on his forehead, and one of his musicians (the Comets, they were called) was actually born in VICTORIAN times. But then again, among our romantic heroes then was the singer Johnnie Ray, who wore a
hearing aid
and still sold more than two million copies of ‘Cry'.

And then, in 1956, there was the volcanic eruption of Elvis with ‘Heartbreak Hotel'. What can I say? We girls in Paris – like teenagers everywhere – were besotted with him, and with the whole United States for producing him and Bill Haley and all our other favourites, and with Hollywood and Audrey Hepburn and ballet flat shoes and pirate pants and ponytails and bobbysocks and headscarves tied round the neck at the back
à la
Grace Kelly, and big sunglasses, and open-topped American cars like the Thunderbird. (Cars became very important in the Fifties and Sixties – perhaps because they were the only place you could go to be alone with a boy as we all lived at home then; no wonder there were so many car songs: ‘Riding along in my automobile/My baby beside me at the wheel' etc.)

We bought American film magazines and papered our walls with pictures of Elvis, of course, and Natalie Wood, and Tab Hunter and Sal Mineo (incredible that no one has ever heard of any of them nowadays), and, it goes without saying, James Dean, who died in a car crash the year before I went to Paris but lived on in posters above our beds. A complete mis-match with all this Hollywood adulation was the fact that we were also besotted by a completely
French
phenomenon – the singing priest. This was Père Aimé Duval, who was a huge hit in France at that time – he played the guitar and sang gentle songs, which we loved because they seemed very personal and human, and not particularly religious. I found him on YouTube the other day and played one of his songs to Claudia, who groaned, but I hadn't heard his voice for sixty years and suddenly I was seventeen again – it almost made me cry.

6

After six months in Paris, I was deemed to be adequately ‘finished' (the other girls were staying on for a year) and I had to go back to England for the very un-new-world ritual of being presented at Court.

Had Paris been worth my parents' money? I could speak a bit of French, and I had gained a minuscule amount of confidence, but if I'd been asked to write an inventory of myself then, it wouldn't have added up to much: medium figure, bitten nails, nice legs, small eyes, a plain but animated face, an obsession with open pores (I used to spend hours making face packs from oatmeal and egg white, following recipes in
Woman's Own
, as well as sitting with my elbows in squeezed half lemons because that, apparently, would make them soft and white – as if anyone would ever notice my
elbows
) and, topping all this, thick, curled, dun-coloured hair.

Hair was almost as painful an issue in the Fifties as class. At seventeen we all looked middle-aged because of our uniformly short, permed, and usually brown, hair. The American writer Nora Ephron once said that the most important invention of the twentieth century for women was not feminism or birth control or better living through exercise, it was HAIR DYE. She meant that for the first time in history older women didn't have to go grey. ‘In the 1950s only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all,' she wrote – but in fact, hair dye, or more especially bleach, saved my whole generation of
young
women too, transforming us from mousy frumps into blondes. And we owed another debt to Brigitte Bardot who showed that you could wear your hair long and loose.

Before hair dye and Brigitte Bardot came along to rescue us, the girls in our family could have been straight out of the home-perm advertisement that appeared everywhere at that time. WHICH TWIN HAS THE TONI? it asked, showing identical photographs of identical girls, one supposedly with short,
naturally
curly hair (that was Tessa who was born with curls) and the other with a Toni perm: she represented Moira and me who had poker-straight locks.

Every time any of us went to the hairdresser's in those days, we cried when we came out because they never made us look the way we wanted to. I was wiping away my tears outside a salon in Fleet one day (my permed hair had been arranged into two horn-like curls, one on either side of my forehead) and my mother was lying through her teeth saying, ‘It looks really nice, darling,' when a friend passed by and said: ‘Glam!' I wanted to throttle her. Moira and I used to joke about this friend, saying that she looked like a horse. We mainly did this to annoy our mother, and one day she fell into the trap and said, ‘You girls are so cruel, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that poor girl that soap and water wouldn't put right.' ‘Soap and a halter you mean, Mum, ha ha ha,' said Moira, and we both fell about. I think this was my first experience of wit.