Why didn’t I speak out in the Sixties?

WRITER Elisabeth Luard, 75, partied with high society in the Sixties. She is the widow of former Private Eye owner Nicholas Luard, with whom she had four children. COMING of age in the Sixties, I considered myself a feminist to the core — and still do.

When I married Nicholas Luard, I refused to obey as well as love and honour, but I stuck to the rules. Not so Nicholas, who was busy from dusk to dawn at the satirical nightclub he owned with his friend Peter Cook.

That famous photo of Christine Keeler in a striped swimsuit at Cannes? It was taken at Nicholas’s request for a movie he was trying to get funded at the festival. During the trip, he shared a room with Christine — for ‘economic reasons’, he said.

It’s hard to explain why I didn’t object to a philandering husband. For those of us ill-educated at girlsonly boarding-schools, those were the rules. We kept quiet. If you told on anyone, you were a spoilsport. And society, as Christine found to her cost, didn’t like spoilsports.

Growing up, I’d spend half-term weekends with school friends and their parents. I was 14 when one of the fathers asked me if I was homesick. What started as a comfort hug went on too long and his hands were suddenly everywhere. Instinct told me what he was after and I escaped with a just few popped buttons.

I never told anyone at the time or since. Why not? Perhaps I knew I wouldn’t be believed. I still remember the name, the place and the events 62 years later.

During my (younger) career, I encountered an ancient, ugly Hollywood producer, who was considering, or so he said, investing in a TV cookery series I was to host. The offer, it turned out, was dependent on the casting-couch. I didn’t cooperate, but I never complained.

So the MeToo experiences of the new wave of feminists are all too familiar to my generation. They’re a reminder of how much we didn’t achieve. They also pose an uncomfortable question: did we betray our sons and daughters by not speaking out when it happened to us?