Full Marks for Trying
Full Marks for Trying
An unlikely journey from the Raj to the rag trade
BRIGID KEENAN
This book is for my beloved mother and father, my brother David, my sisters Moira and Tessa, my aunts Thea and Joan, and my cousins Jinny, Prue and Simon. We had so many happy days – I was lucky to have such a family.
It is also for AW. We have been married now for more than forty years, which is why, in the pages that follow, I do not linger long on my love life before the happy day I met him.
And it is for my cherished daughters, Hester and Claudia, in the hopes that their childhood memories are as happy as mine.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Plate Section
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
A Note on the Author
Also available by Brigid Keenan
Introduction
A decade ago, I wrote a book about being married to a diplomat (Diplomatic Baggage, it was called) and someone gave a copy to my uncle. When he’d read it he said, ‘Well, it’s quite amusing, but it’s all about her, isn’t it.’
I have been worrying about those words since I started writing this new book because, though I don’t think Diplomatic Baggage really was all about me, this one certainly is – but on the other hand, how on earth do you write a memoir and make it NOT about yourself? Readers will just have to believe me when I say that Full Marks for Trying is not meant to be a giant ego trip, but a picture of what it was like to grow up at a certain time in history – in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s – in a family that was, like Britain itself, facing and adapting to the enormous changes taking place around us with gathering speed.
My parents’ generation lived through the horrors and dramas of two world wars but only saw the beginnings of all the profound social, sexual, gender, medical, religious and technological changes that have altered the world since my generation came into being – which have been, perhaps, the greatest ever to take place in the course of any person’s lifetime (so far).
I hadn’t really thought much about this before I began Full Marks for Trying, but writing about one’s childhood and youth highlights the changes, because you can remember what it was like before they happened.
There are the obvious, mundane physical ones, of course – motorways, seat belts, air travel, London’s changing skyline – and then there are more subtle ones: when I first came to live in London, Downing Street, now sealed off behind huge gates, was just another road – you could amble past Number 10 and stare at the policeman standing outside the door; similarly you could park, free, next to the stones at Stonehenge and go and touch them; the stunning Art Deco foyer of the Strand Palace Hotel was its foyer (now it belongs to the V&A Museum); and Wolseley was the name of a car and not a fashionable London restaurant in Piccadilly (where there used to be an old Wolseley garage, but everyone has forgotten that).
Then there are the humdrum domestic changes: duvets have replaced eiderdowns; tampons have taken over from sanitary towels and their ugly accompanying belts; hand-held hair dryers and heated rollers mean we no longer have to sleep in curlers. Disposable nappies have made redundant the whole rigmarole of towelling and muslin squares which had to be boiled on the stove because people didn’t have washing machines. Kleenex tissues are the new handkerchiefs (the idea of blowing your nose into a piece of cloth was never nice, but on the other hand, hankies were such a useful Christmas gift, especially for men – though little girls like me were always being given flat boxes of pretty, embroidered ones which we hardly ever opened, let alone used).
We all know about tights replacing stockings and suspender belts, but there was a slightly earlier, almost forgotten, liberation when seamless stockings appeared for the first time. Stockings with seams sound sexy now, but they were a nuisance to put on – you had to guide the seam with your finger and thumb up the centre of the back of your leg and then, all day, you’d be looking over your shoulder to check, or asking friends: ‘Are my seams straight?’
There were no credit cards in my youth, which meant cashing cheques all the time – usually at the bank, but at your local corner shop if you could persuade them – and persuading them was quite important because being stranded without money was a problem then as there was no easy way to get any.
In my day you couldn’t go to the lavatory on a train when it was in a station because the flush drained out directly on to the tracks – which made us wonder what was happening with aeroplanes: was it all likely to come plopping down on our heads?
In 1977 Dad and my sister Tessa and I clubbed together to give Mum her first ever washing machine for her seventieth birthday – but instead of being pleased she was furious because she thought it was some kind of negative comment on the way she’d always done the washing before.
My in-laws had the first washing-up machine I ever saw, but I was sceptical about it because they seemed to have to rinse all the plates before they put them in which I thought was kind of doing the same job twice.
The food we eat now would be unrecognisable back in the Fifties – I mean literally; few people then knew what an avocado pear looked like, let alone an artichoke, or a mango or passion fruit, or croissants, baguettes, wraps, pizza, sushi, or anything in a Tetra Pak. The nearest we got to hamburgers were found at a chain called Wimpy Bars and they were thin, stamped-out circles of grey something (mince would be too kind a word) in a tasteless white bun with a dollop of ketchup. Ice cream was served, not in a cone but in a slice between two wafers; spaghetti came in tins with tomato sauce – we knew so little about pasta in those days that in 1957 when Richard Dimbleby (the even-more-famous broadcasting father of David and Jonathan) made an April Fool film for Panorama about Italians gathering the ‘spaghetti harvest’, showing long strands draped over the branches of trees with cheery Italians on ladders ‘picking’ it, half the nation was taken in. Olive oil was only available in chemist’s, where it was sold in small bottles for earache; and there was no yoghurt in the supermarkets – indeed there were no supermarkets.
When I started work in an office my typewriter was one of those big upright ones you see in old films on which the carriage made a rather satisfactory zip-and-clunk noise when you pushed it back. Then I graduated to an electric typewriter, and it was not until the early 2000s that I dared to write on a computer – and that was only because my daughters persuaded me to try.
Before Xerox machines were invented we usually did copying (text only) with carbon paper sandwiched between sheets of plain paper and fed into the typewriter, but also, more curiously, with an A4-sized shallow pan of hard jelly. You wrote with special ink on to a sheet of paper which was pressed on to the jelly: this absorbed the ink and would then reprint it on to any fresh piece of paper laid on top.
Computers were the size of sheds when I was in my twenties: universities and corporations hired them, and students and particular employees were allowed to use them for short periods – obviously no one had one at home, and no one had as yet even imagined a desk- or lap-top, let alone an iPad or tablet. As teenagers we fantasised about telephones which would show you the person at the other end of the line (I was not keen on the idea: I
worried that someone might ring when I didn’t have my make-up on) but we never believed that these might one day become the norm. We didn’t even dream of the wonder of a telephone you could carry around with you, let alone a telephone you could carry that was a computer as well, i.e., a smartphone, let alone a smartphone in a watch . . . and there will probably – no, make that definitely – be something even more extraordinary coming up any minute now. In fact, I am not going to say any more about the vast, ongoing, world-changing revolutions in information technology because, for a start, I have no idea what most of them are as I can only just about manage emails and Facebook and Google.
There were curious medical conditions in the 1940s and ’50s that don’t seem to exist any more – ‘glands’ was one. I don’t actually know what ‘glands’ were, but when someone was really fat, people would whisper: ‘S/he’s got glands.’ When we came back from India, my sister Moira had to have an operation for fallen arches which meant both her legs being in plaster for weeks, though I’ve never heard of a single person having this done since. And then there were chilblains – does anyone get these now, I wonder?
When you went to the dentist in the Fifties there were no injections to numb the pain; instead they put a gas mask or a pad of ether over your face, and as you breathed in the fumes, you drifted into a sleep full of surreal and menacing happenings. My cousin Simon had an ether dream I’ve never forgotten – a terrifying clown was perched on the end of a long rope, swinging to and fro, chanting, and as it advanced and receded its voice got louder and then fainter: ABRIco spiNICO ABricoSPINIco AbriCO SPinico ABRIco . . .
But then there were the truly miraculous medical breakthroughs that have really transformed our lives. I came into the world at about the same time as antibiotics, but I was born long before chemotherapy changed the fate of cancer sufferers, and before the discovery of the Salk vaccine, when polio was a real, terrifying threat and almost everyone knew a child who had been disabled by it, and had heard of the Iron Lung (a breathing apparatus for polio victims).
The birth-control pill became available in my lifetime, which meant that the dread of becoming an ‘unmarried mother’ which had haunted women forever because of all the terrible things that went with having an ‘illegitimate baby’ – disgrace, being cast out by your family, poverty, a backstreet abortion (during which you could die), having to give your baby away, homes for ‘fallen women’ – was becoming a thing of the past.
Our language was different: ‘super’ was the word for anything good or pleasant; I suppose it is ‘cool’ now (or ‘sick’ if you are really what we would have called ‘with it’). Personnel was our word for Human Resources and I don’t remember ever coming across someone called a line manager at work. People were crippled not disabled, half-caste instead of mixed race, Negro as opposed to black or of colour. ‘Coming out’ meant a girl coming-of-age and entering society, not declaring your sexuality to the world. Cohabiting unmarried couples were ‘living in sin’; divorce was rare, and the word ‘divorcee’ for a divorced woman had a kind of racy ring to it . . . Being ‘tight’ was not being mean, but drunk – ‘tight as a tick’ meant really drunk. A pansy was a gay man; gay meant cheery, bright, fun. Poking someone meant having sex with them – I nearly had a fit when I first joined Facebook and people ‘poked’ me.
My favourite out-of-date expression, though, is ‘playing the giddy ox’ which Dad was always using – it meant mucking about, as in ‘You girls, for heaven’s sake stop playing the giddy ox and settle down to your homework.’
In the early Sixties girls were called ‘birds’ – which could be confusing: a young male friend of ours, staying in a village in France, invited his English neighbour, whom he didn’t know, to supper. ‘Can I bring my bird?’ the man asked. ‘Of course,’ said our friend, thinking how nice it would be if a girl came along too, but he turned up with his pet chicken.
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 youn
ger 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.
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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.)
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