FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (2 page)

Even journalism changed: in 1963 Katharine Whitehorn published a column on ‘sluts' in the
Observer
which altered the way women – or men for that matter – wrote. Katharine's definition of a slut was someone who took clothes out of the dirty laundry basket to wear because they were cleaner than the ones they had on, brushed their hair with someone else's nailbrush or changed their laddered stockings in a taxi. Until that column, journalists rarely wrote much in the first person, let alone about things like dirty underwear – in fact, the editor of the
Observer
made Katharine postpone publication of the slut piece until she had ceased being fashion editor of the paper. After ‘sluts', journalism became much more personal and intimate, leading to the many newspaper columns about the writers' own lives that we have today – or, indeed, you could say, leading to this book.

There were no women newsreaders until the mid-Fifties (as a teenager I thought women could
never
do the job because their voices were not deep enough); there were no women pilots on commercial airlines until the 1960s; and in 1944 a film,
National Velvet
, was made about a girl (Elizabeth Taylor) dressing up as a young man in order to ride in the Grand National. In reality it was not until 1977 that the first woman jockey competed in that race.

In the Fifties, women wore skirts: jeans were still workwear for factory hands, miners and cowboys ( James Dean wore them in
Rebel Without a Cause
to show just how rebellious he was). Trousers were called slacks, and were only worn by women for sport or on holiday. In fact, women wearing them were not
allowed
into more formal offices and restaurants; it wasn't until 1967, for instance, that a woman in trousers was permitted to eat in the restaurant of the Savoy Hotel. The difference a couple of decades has made in fashion is neatly illustrated by the wardrobes of female world leaders: Margaret Thatcher never wore trousers but Angela Merkel never wears anything else; Hillary Clinton was the first woman politician to wear trousers for her official portrait.

Last summer I found myself walking behind a group of girls in Oxford Street all wearing the shortest of shorts with bare legs, and I was suddenly struck by how they would be the stuff of heart attacks to anyone from the Fifties – even the Sixties – let alone further back in time. But this applies to so many things that we take for granted today . . . As for myself, I am just like the person who worked in a chocolate factory and never wants to eat chocolate again: having been so enthusiastic and so closely involved in fashion all through the Sixties and part of the Seventies, I find I can't take it that seriously any more.

Being Catholic, my family didn't eat meat on Fridays and fasted on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – fasting meant you could only drink liquids; I used to wonder if it would count if I chopped up a whole meal and put it into my aunt's new mixer and then drank it like a milkshake. When we went to Mass we had to cover our hair with a headscarf, and if we were going to communion we had to fast for an hour beforehand, which meant that if you were late getting up for Mass you couldn't have breakfast. You were never allowed to touch the communion wafer, or host as it is called: at communion, it was put on our tongues. A nun at school told me that if a host dropped on the floor you would have to lick it up. And you definitely couldn't go to communion if you had committed a Mortal Sin (this was the core of the plot of Graham Greene's 1948 novel
The Heart of the Matter
).

Now all that is out of the window: no head covering, no fasting, the host is placed in your hand, and I don't think most ordinary Catholics – as opposed to Mafia mob members, perhaps? – worry very much about mortal sins these days.

Perhaps that's because even SINS seem to have changed: all the things that we were taught were wicked (and some of them were
illegal
in those days as well) – sex outside marriage, contraception, homosexuality, abortion, masturbation – are now discussed openly and chattily in the
Guardian
's ‘Sexual Healing' column.

So there we are – a glimpse at what was going on in the background of
Full Marks for Trying
. It was a very different, much less complicated world (with less than half the people on earth than there are today) which I hope that older people might recognise and younger ones will find interesting. But, as well, I hope that readers will find themselves in some of my memories – for I was not the only child who came ‘home' to a grim post-war England after a Technicolor childhood in one of England's colonies, nor the only one to be a self-conscious and unattractive teenager, nor the only one blundering along in life, making mistakes; not the only girl who straightened her stocking seams in the Fifties, revelled in the bold new fashions of the Sixties or, to her parents' despair, didn't get married until over thirty.

Of course not everything that happened to me as I grew up is here – for a start there is lots I don't remember, some that I don't particularly want to remember, and masses that is tedious and dull and deserved to be left out. And not all the important events that happened in fashion in the Sixties are recorded here either, just the ones that affected me personally.

Note: In India nearly all the place names that I knew as a child have been changed. I have used the old names, but with the modern name as well when it is not obvious.

1

To tell the truth, I have never felt completely at home in my homeland, England. Deep down there's always been a tinge of anxiety, almost guilt: a feeling that I don't really fit in and am not quite adequate or up to the mark in some subtle way; it's how you feel at school when you know you are not in the cool group – or as a grown-up when you read
Tatler
magazine. My daughter Hester feels the same and puts it rather well: ‘It's as if the English all know a secret that we don't – and they know we don't, but are not going to tell it to us.'

The source of our insecurity is easily found – in the Jesuit sayings about the importance of early childhood: ‘Give me a child until the age of seven,' goes one version, ‘and I will make him mine for ever.' And there we have it – the reason I don't feel at home in England is obviously because I belong to India where I lived until I was eight years old. (Hester was raised in Brussels.)

I was born in the British Military Hospital in a place called Ambala, about 125 miles north of Delhi. Ambala sits pretty much at the centre of the ancient Grand Trunk Road which crosses the widest, top part of the triangle of India, going 2,500 miles from the Bay of Bengal, through Bangladesh, India, and then Pakistan, to Afghanistan (or the other way round), and so it was a natural place for the British, in the nineteenth century, to set up an army base, or cantonment as they are known in India (pronounced cantoonment). My father, who was in the Indian Army (Dogra Regiment), was posted there with Mum at the time I arrived in the world – which was in November 1939. Since India became independent only eight years later, and there was a world war which separated couples in between, I must be among the last of the British Raj babies, along with a few others of my age, the best-known of whom are Joanna Lumley, who was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, because her dad (like mine) was in the army (a Gurkha of course), and Julie Christie, born in Assam, because her father was a tea planter. (In older generations, Spike Milligan and Vivien Leigh were born in India, and I was once assured that Elizabeth Taylor had been born in Calcutta, but when I looked it up it turned out her birthplace was nowhere more exotic than Hampstead Garden Suburb.)

The India that I feel I belong to no longer exists because it was the India of the last days of the British Raj and can only be glimpsed in photographs and films now, but then again, no place is the same as it was seventy-five years ago, and the all-white England we ‘Indian' children felt so ill-at-ease in when we were brought home does not exist either, thank heavens. Curiously, though, no matter the changes, I have to say that for me those old Jesuits were right: I still feel nostalgic for the time and the country in which I spent my early years, and I still feel very much at home in India.

I should have grown up to be a spy because I learned recently that ‘Kim' Philby, the notorious British double agent, was also born in Ambala, in 1912. He was actually called Harold Adrian Russell but nicknamed ‘Kim' after the boy in Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, and the irony is that the Kim in the novel was also involved with the British Secret Services, being tasked with delivering a message to the Head of Intelligence – in Ambala of all places, of course. And weirdest of all, when reading his obituary not long ago, I discovered that Harry Chapman Pincher, the well-known British journalist who made a whole long career out of writing about spies, was also born in Ambala.

But I didn't turn into a spy; I did something very slightly similar by becoming a journalist, and then marrying a diplomat – I call my husband AW – and in 1986 we were posted to India where I immediately felt as if I belonged (despite living in a hotel room for months) but where AW and our daughters took a while to settle down.

Later, long after we had left India and were posted to Syria, AW and I went back on a visit, partly because our daughter Hester was doing a gap year there, and partly so that AW, who is a Buddhist, could visit Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama has his base. We hired a battered old taxi in Delhi for the journey to Dharamsala and at one point our route actually took us through Ambala – where the driver fell asleep and we very nearly had a head-on collision with a lorry which would have been fatal. AW said my obituary would have read ‘Brigid Keenan, born in Ambala 1939, died in Ambala 1994', and people would think I had never left the place in between.

My brother and sisters and I grew up aware that our family had been in India for a long time – at least four generations we were told – as railway engineers (my grandfather), army and customs (other grandfather), railway administration (great-grandfather), foresters (uncle), indigo planters (great-great-uncle). Furthest back, and most romantically, was a Frenchman, E. Dubus, apparently taken prisoner by the British in Bengal during the Napoleonic Wars, who was allowed to return to France for a year, on parole, in order to bring his silk-weaving business back to India from Lyons. He set up his factory, which was called Nakanda, in Bengal. I inherited a drawing he made of the building and in 2014 AW and I went – armed with a copy of the picture – to the once-French settlement of Chandernagore near Calcutta, and to various silk-weaving areas in the region trying, and failing, to find Nakanda. We came to the conclusion that perhaps it was in the part of Bengal which is now Bangladesh. We are still on the case. (What we
have
found, among Mum's and Dad's old family papers, is the marriage certificate of E. Dubus's daughter Madeleine (my great-grandmother) to an Englishman, Walter Charles Lydiard – another silk manufacturer in Bengal – in 1872 in India.)

Dad himself was born in Bangalore in 1902; we were always urging him to write down his memoirs for us but he only managed about half a dozen pages scrawled on the backs of envelopes or on already-used scrap paper, briefly telling how, soon after he was born, his family moved to Burma where his father worked for Customs and Excise; how they moved back to Bangalore in 1912 so their five children could go to school (nowhere suitable in Rangoon); how his father volunteered for the army in the First World War and was posted to Basra in Iraq (Dad's mother stayed in Bangalore with the children); and how Dad went to England when he was seventeen, swotted like mad at an army crammer and got into Sandhurst, after which he returned to serve in the Indian Army. (His parents eventually resumed their old life in Burma.)

My father lists these bare facts, but he writes a little more about two other, obviously rather traumatic and therefore memorable, events in his life. One was being bitten by a rabid dog when he was a young soldier of twenty-three, and having to go to the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli, ‘in the hills' (as people referred to the Himalayas), and endure two injections with a huge needle into his stomach, one on each side of his navel, every day for fourteen days. The other was how his grandfather, an elderly widower who had retired from the Great Indian Peninsula Railway to the Nilgiri Hills in south-western India, married the nurse who cared for him in hospital there when he developed pneumonia. She was called Mrs White. Dad went to stay with the newlyweds when he was in the Nilgiri Hills himself, convalescing from the rabies injections, but after that the family don't seem to have heard much from them again, and when the old man died a couple of years later, he left everything to his new wife. This must have been a bitter blow to the family: Dad wrote that his grandfather had a ‘fat' pension, and he'd been impressed by what he saw on his visit to them. ‘He [the grandfather] had acquired some acres of Shola forest which he cleared and turned into a very pleasant estate with a fully furnished and well-built house, servants' quarters, outbuildings, full staff and a motor car with driver.' Not a single penny – or perhaps I should say rupee – of all this was passed to Dad's family. Mrs White was never forgotten by the Keenans . . . An odd postscript to the story is that this grandfather and my mother's grandfather are buried practically side by side in the Christian cemetery of Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills: they did not know each other in their lifetimes, but two generations later their descendants married, and they themselves ended up neighbours in death.

Since Dad never got round to the memoirs, I can only follow our progress round India via the family photograph albums, and I see from the pictures taken at my christening in Ambala that, aside from the fact that I was a truly
hideous
baby, we lived in a rather pleasant, colonial-style white bungalow with a deep veranda enclosed by arches. There seems to be someone called Nanny in these pictures, but she never appears again, and I never heard her talked about. My half-brother David – eleven years older than me (his father was Mum's first husband who died not long after David was born) – was at school in England so she was not there for him; perhaps she looked after my sister Moira, who was seven when I was born, or maybe she was just taken on as a maternity nurse for my own first few weeks.