From Indian childhood to Ab Fab life on Fleet Street
FULL MARKS FOR TRYING by Brigid Keenan (Bloomsbury £16.99)
BRIGID Keenan should be played by Celia Imrie in the film of her life. She is the kind of disaster-prone posh lass with a big, bright smile who at an ambassadorial reception will be found sprawled across a broken table (‘it made such a noise and was so embarrassing’).
If she falls down the stairs, she’ll inevitably land on a cactus (‘it took days to tweezer out all the prickles’). And when she goes to the circus, the lions escape.
This jaunty book is a prequel to Keenan’s previous memoirs, Diplomatic Baggage and Packing Up, about traipsing the globe with her long-suffering diplomat husband, known only as ‘AW’.
He’s actually Alan Waddams, for whom I would cast Martin Clunes.
Brigid Keenan was a privileged daughter of the Raj, her father a major-general in the Indian Army who had witnessed at first hand the horrors unleashed when the British left, particularly ‘the fast-growing communal hatred’ between the religious sects.
Keenan had been packed off to England for safety and never forgot being separated from her beloved Indian nanny.
She also recalls that in the family bungalow in Madras, ‘the furniture stood in saucers of paraffin to stop ants getting to the wooden legs and eating them’.
England was less tropical. Indeed, Aldershot and the Home Counties were wretched places in comparison — the morose people, the ghastly food. ‘In those days, greens seemed to be full of caterpillars and slugs,’ remembers Keenan.
Hampshire, where the family ended up, was filled with retired Colonel Blimps and Major Bloodnoks who spent their time playing bridge.
One former admiral was even to be found augmenting his pension by working as a lavatory attendant at Waterloo Station.
Keenan’s father trained as a land agent, which paid for her to be sent to a finishing school in France.
There, she learnt never to hold a knife like a pencil, never to put milk in before the tea and not to get one’s ears pierced unless one didn’t mind being mistaken for an Irish maid.
Keenan was presented as a debutante at court, where ‘Prince Philip smiled slightly’. She then, without any trouble, landed a job in Fleet Street as a fashion assistant. How nostalgic is the account here of a long-vanished journalistic culture — when the trade was still adventurous, highly paid, drunken and amateurish in the very best ways.
‘My biggest shock,’ she says, ‘was the swearing.’ Also ‘cigarettes and alcohol were consumed in large quantities’. At all-expenses-paid lavish lunches, ‘we alternated a forkful of food with puffs on the fag’.
She went on shoots with David Bailey. She knew Don McCullin, the legendary war photographer, Michael Parkinson, then a lowly sports hack, and Molly Parkin, the style icon.
Keenan befriended Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes. Vidal Sassoon cut her hair. She went to Paris for the annual collections. On a free trip to Dubai, ‘like a dusty town in a cowboy film’, she met ‘AW’, who was toiling as a junior consul.
It isn’t only traditional Fleet Street that has gone — so has the world it served and reflected. The landscape brilliantly described here could be on another planet.
People suffered antiquated ailments such as glands, chilblains and boils. Divorce meant expulsion from society and illegitimacy was a total taboo.
In Keenan’s youth, there were no motorways, seatbelts or hand-held hairdryers. ‘Few people knew what an avocado pear looked like.’
Whether that’s a plus or not, this magical book brings the Fifties and early Sixties flooding back, even if you weren’t actually there.