FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  I can’t defend the British Raj in India. But I know my parents – good, honest, kind people who, as far as I could tell, always did their duty as they saw it – loved the place and thought about it until the day they died. When Dad was in his eighties, he and my mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease by then, were invited to lunch with a group of AW’s and my friends, among them a Kashmiri, Afzal, who is dear to us. Somehow, while we were all admiring the garden, Afzal came across Mum wandering around on her own looking for the loo and he helped her find and use it. Dad was touched and appreciative, and on the way home in the car he said, ‘You cannot imagine how envious I am of you having close Indian friends; in my day it was not really possible,’ and he began to cry, and I wept too for those lost friendships and the cruel artificial barriers erected by time and place, and power and history.

  And I will be forever grateful for my eventful, scary, loving, warm, colourful childhood in India.

  4

  I have to hand it to my parents – they returned from life in Flagstaff House, Poona, with Dad as an acting-general and servants waiting on them hand and foot, to live in our grandparents’ house in Fleet once again. Last time we’d stayed there, Dad had been in the Indian Army, but now it was 1948, he had no job and there were none available – the demobbed soldiers of the British wartime army had scooped up most of them, and the Brits who returned from India the year before us had got the rest. The only work my father could find was as eighth cowman on a farm. (One of his friends, an ex-admiral, became a lavatory attendant at Waterloo station.) I never really heard Mum and Dad grumble or complain or look back to the Good Old Days; Mum, especially, was homesick for India (she was not burdened with the terrible memories that haunted Dad), but they launched themselves into their new lives. Dad would set off for the farm on his second-hand motorbike at crack of dawn every morning in time for milking; it was tough for a middle-aged man, he lost weight and started getting boils, but Dad believed in getting on with things – we were brought up with his advice for life ringing in our ears (though why it was always said in French has been a perpetual mystery to me): ‘Il faut saisir les occasions quand elles se présentent’, which basically means seize the day (it’s the reason Tessa and I found ourselves in a helicopter in the Vietnam War, but I’ll come to that later). Dad’s other rule in life was Never Take No for an Answer – which, put together with his great charm, meant that shops were persuaded to let us in if we’d arrived late and found them closing, we always seemed to find seats even if the cinema or theatre was full, and he once talked our way into going behind the scenes at London Zoo to meet the chimps after their tea party.

  Mum, who had never had to do anything in a kitchen before, tried to cook (she became good at it in the end) and she started a little kindergarten at home for a handful of kids so that Tessa could go to it. (When the children recited the alphabet they couldn’t wait to shout out K is for KEENAN!)

  I was sent to Miss Seed’s, a small school in Aldershot where I was teacher’s pet and had to make her Camp Coffee every morning (Camp Coffee was – is, because I believe it still exists – a kind of sweetened coffee syrup that you diluted with hot water or milk).

  One of my fellow students from Fleet was an ‘illegitimate baby’, as the children of unmarried mothers were known then, called Anthony. We all felt sorry for him, and one day when he was crying because he’d lost his lunch box, I said, ‘Tell your mum it was my fault.’ Next day at the bus stop there was a furious, shouting mother demanding to be paid for a replacement, so I had to ask my parents for the money which got me into trouble with them too. That was the first time I realised that no good deed goes unpunished.

  Mum used to tease me by saying ‘Moira is the emerald in my crown, Tessa is the ruby and you are the little bit of glass that got in by mistake’; but she did it laughingly, and in such a way that I knew the little bit of glass was extremely precious to her – perhaps (I liked to think) even more precious than the others.

  Something quite important to me happened at that time. For some reason I came home early from school one afternoon and no one heard me enter the house. I was approaching the kitchen and about to call out when I heard my mother and my aunt talking about me – ‘It’s a pity Brigid is such a desperately plain child,’ one of them said, and the other agreed. I had no idea what ‘plain’ was, but it didn’t sound good, so I crept back and re-entered making a lot of noise. Later I asked Moira what ‘plain’ meant. ‘Oh it means something that’s almost, but not quite ugly,’ she said. I thought about this for years: Moira was attractive and clever and witty, Tessa was very pretty and funny, and I realised that I was going to have to do something – go for glamour, eccentricity, criminality, character, a career – something, so as not to end up at the bottom of the pile. There is a moment in her autobiography when the great beauty Lady Diana Cooper looks in the mirror, is disappointed by what she sees and says to herself, ‘Now it’s got to be nap on personality.’ I had the same sort of revelation, but aged nine.

  Mum told us that, through Granny’s family, we were descended from Edward III, via his son John of Gaunt (the brother of the Black Prince). When I married AW I proudly informed him of this, but he once glimpsed the family tree at a reunion of cousins and became deeply sceptical. ‘I have redrawn your family tree more accurately,’ he said to me afterwards, and gave me a piece of paper which looked like this:

  I laugh every time I think of it. In the meantime I have discovered that genealogists believe that 80 per cent of the English could be descended from Edward III because he had nine sons, so there wasn’t really anything to boast about in the first place.

  Dad was only eighth cowman on the farm but he had to take the cows up to London for the Dairy Show and watch over them all night in their pen or byre or whatever it was. His farmer-boss, a rich, landowning lady, used to introduce him to everyone proudly as her ex-general cowman, but quite soon Dad decided to train for a new career as a land agent. We stayed on in Fleet while he went away to the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester to learn his new trade, and every night Mum and Tessa and I knelt and prayed for him to pass his exams: the family desperately needed him to be working and earning a salary. Dad did succeed, unlike most of his fellow students who were young landed gentry dashing to London in sports cars to have Fun in their spare time.

  When we didn’t have to pray for Dad any more, we prayed for the Russian people to be liberated from Communism. Britain and America were paranoid about the evils of Communism in the early Fifties and I caught the bug: Communism became my next anxiety. My dread was that it would take over England, and that Tessa and I would be dragged away from our beloved parents and put in some kind of Soviet youth retraining institution for ever – little did I know that boarding school would be more or less exactly that.

  Because of its British and Indian Army connections, the area around Fleet and Aldershot was a brilliant hunting ground for all kinds of exotic textiles and bits and bobs from the former colonies brought back from their travels by people like us who’d spent lifetimes overseas – and had now fallen on hard times, or were dead. Mum became a regular at Pearsons Auctions in Fleet where Persian rugs, Kashmir shawls and lacquerwork, and intricately carved Burmese chairs and tables all came up for sale; she had a brilliant eye but hardly ever had the money to buy the things she spotted. If only we’d known then what we know now: one of the greatest textile experts and collectors in the world, Michael Frances, told me once – at a beautiful exhibition of old Uzbek suzanis he had put on in Bond Street – that a number of his best pieces had been bought at Pearsons. He was smart: as a young man he had worked out that where there were people retired from Africa and India, there were likely to be interesting things in the local auction houses, and he was right.

  Our house, Landour, was in the middle of Connaught Road, three blocks from the high street (an easy bike ride) where there was still Madame Max’s patisserie shop, as well as a new toyshop staffed by a wacky young man
who would hide behind the door and fire at people passing on the pavement with a peashooter. We nicknamed him Peter Pan. Later he went to work in the lingerie store which was quite off-putting – it’s a bit creepy buying a bra from a man who has never grown up. Closer to our house was a greengrocer’s where, bizarrely, they sold a few books alongside the potatoes. There I found the object of my dreams: a craft manual which told you how to make things out of lavatory rolls and cotton reels and straws and felt. Being a worthy kind of book, I thought my parents would buy it for me but they wouldn’t; I had to hand over my pocket money for weeks to get it. Truth to tell, though I felt resentful at the time, my mother’s words came true: I did value it more because I’d had to save for it.

  Down one side of our typical redbrick suburban road there was Sergeant Mitten who lived in a bungalow with a flagpole in the garden; every night he would lower the Union Jack to the ‘Last Post’ played on a gramophone indoors near an open window, and every morning he raised it to ‘Reveille’. Occasionally we used to lurk nearby and watch this ceremony. Beyond the sergeant was the canal where my father once staged a brilliant detective game: it started with a phone call at home one Sunday, allegedly from the police, saying they were looking for a missing person and could we children help. Then various clues led us to the canal towpath where, eventually, we found Dad lying in the undergrowth with a knife smeared with ketchup on his chest – and his finger on his lips saying ssssssh to a group of traumatised walkers who had come across him before all of us had. I have just rung my sister Tessa because I suddenly wondered if this wasn’t a completely false memory; she says she’s almost, but not quite a hundred per cent, sure about the knife and the ketchup, but Dad in the undergrowth and the traumatised walkers is definitely true because she sometimes wonders how he hadn’t been arrested before we arrived on the scene.

  At the other end of the street, a four-minute walk away, was the Catholic church, built like an ugly garrison church, in red brick. Because we were all Catholics (except Grandpa who was determinedly Protestant), this church figured large in our lives. The first priest we knew there turned out to be an abuser; he didn’t abuse us, but we children were deeply suspicious of him – for one thing he often invited us to sit on his knee. The odd thing was that he was not in the mould of abusive priests, being English, an ex-vicar and a widower, but eventually he was found out and sent away, and Fleet was rewarded with a wonderful parish priest to make up for it: Canon Walsh, who remained a friend of the family for the rest of his life. (Twenty years on from this time in Fleet, he married AW and me, and twenty-eight years after that he married our daughter Hester and her husband.)

  Religious services in the church in Fleet seemed to involve all of us children from Landour getting the giggles for one reason or another, and being helpless with suppressed laughter. Once it was because, late as usual, we entered a pew which was already full – we hadn’t realised because they were standing up but when we all came to kneel it was bedlam – and once it was because an altar boy standing too close to the candleholder caught fire. No one understood what had happened; we were just flabbergasted to see the priest (it was the abusive one) suddenly turning on the boy and whacking him – not realising he was putting out flames.

  As I have said before, for Tessa and me the main thrill of being in England was living in a house with our cousins. We shared a passion for jokes involving dressing up. One day, we all spent hours disguising our brother David as an Indian carpet seller – we painted his face brown, cut up hair to glue on his chin for stubble, tied a turban round his head, and he set off on his bicycle with Mum and Dad’s rugs rolled up on the back to ‘sell’ them to a friend of our parents. She was in the garden when he cycled in through the gate, looked up and said, ‘Hello David,’ so that was a failure. A better effort was when we pretended that Simon was ‘Mary’, a friend of Jinny and Prue’s from school. He wore one of their school uniforms and a school hat with someone’s long-since-cut-off plaits pinned to the inside. He/she came to tea (we used to have proper tea every day, everyone sitting round a table with our parents or aunts or whoever was in the house) and we were all in stitches because my father was completely taken in. At one point Dad said, ‘Mary, wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you took off your hat?’ and we fell off our chairs laughing and he was cross with us for being rude to our guest.

  When Simon was about ten he painted an advertisement for Guinness – I think it was a picture of a man wrestling with a giant octopus on a beach with GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU written underneath. Tessa and I were quite scathing of it, but he sent it off to Guinness and got back a boxful of goodies: little enamel pins of toucans (the Guinness logo) and foaming Guinness glasses, plus posters and pencils. We were sick with jealousy and quickly painted our own advertisements and sent them off – but we received rather sharp letters in return, saying, basically, not to bother them.

  David, a decade older than us, had a stack of ancient 78 records which we loved listening to: ‘Buttons and Bows’, ‘Miss Otis Regrets’, ‘Bless You for Being an Angel’ and ‘So You Left Me for the Leader of a Swing Band’. (I always wanted to be asked on to Desert Island Discs so I could hear these songs again but I have just discovered that you can find them all on YouTube.) We had no idea what a swing band was, and in fact half the time we misheard the words of the songs: there’s a line in ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ which goes ‘when the marb came and got her and dragged her from the jail’; I thought a ‘marb’ must be some sort of policeman in the US, and then I grew up and realised it was a mob in an American accent. AW thought Elvis was singing ‘Pardon me, if I’m second man’ in his song ‘A Fool Such as I’, instead of ‘Pardon me, if I’m sentimental’, and Mum once told us that when she was a child she thought the words in the Creed, ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’, were ‘shuffled him under a bunch of violets’.

  In the evenings in Fleet we all gathered in the sitting room listening to the big brown radio which Grandpa first had to tune for what seemed like hours of EEEEEEE OOOOOOOO ZZZZZZZZ BRRRRRRR noises before we got to hear any words. (Cars that start first time and radios that work as soon as you switch them on are luxuries that we didn’t know about in the Fifties.)

  Our grandfather sat next to the radio in case it needed a little tweak now and again, and played patience on a big wooden board that was greasy from use, while Mum and Granny and my aunts (our widowed Aunt Thea, and our young Aunt Joan who was living with us on and off then) and the rest of us all worked on some kind of knitting or embroidery or sewing. Very often, one of us young ones would be coerced into holding out our arms with a skein of wool stretched between them so that Granny or Mum or an aunt could wind the wool into a ball. For months on end I patiently did netting, which Grandpa had taught me, using string and a slat of wood. I was making an adult-sized hammock and when it was finished the whole family assembled to watch it being strung up between two trees in the garden. Then a boy who was staying with our cousins jumped into it – and went straight through the bottom . . . It was a crushing disappointment for me and the end of my enthusiasm for netting (but not other crafts).

  The days seemed longer then, perhaps because they weren’t gulped down by television and social media. We children did chores: helping Grandpa in the garden by picking up fallen leaves between two boards and putting them on the compost heap, or weeding the lawn with a neat little fork-like gadget that levered plantains and dandelions out by their roots; and in the house we laid the table and did the washing up which was even quite fun when we did it all together. Aunt Thea had just bought a set of unbreakable tumblers – a new invention. For some reason none of us knew the glasses were unbreakable apart from Jinny who decided to play a joke on us all; while we were busy drying up she stacked a whole lot of them together in a tall, wobbly tower and then called out, ‘Look everyone,’ and dropped them on the floor – where they broke into a million pieces. Everyone stared at Jinny as though she was mad . . . she says she has felt guilty about it ever since. Why ha
d the unbreakable glasses broken? We discovered later that they had shattered because they were wedged into each other.

  After a while Dad got a job in the West Country, and we moved to Exmouth. Tessa and I went to a local convent where I got into trouble in Art for drawing women with bosoms, i.e., with a triangular bit sticking out of their fronts. This was considered ‘rude’ but as a child brought up in India, with all those improbable breasts on Hindu sculpture, I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. Almost the worst thing that happened in Exmouth was that Tessa and I got chickenpox and had to stay in the school OVER THE EASTER HOLIDAYS. I don’t know why we couldn’t go home; Tessa thinks it might have been because our parents were doing something to our house – redecorating it? – and didn’t want two sick children around. She has just reminded me that there was an up-side to having to stay on after term ended: we found a drawer full of the comic School Friend. At home, we had a subscription to Girl (which had a popular character called Lettice Leefe, the Greenest Girl in the School) and we loved it, but it was more educational and less racy than School Friend which was considered slightly naff – or, as they would have said in those days, ‘common’ – and wasn’t allowed.

  Other bad things that happened in Exmouth were that I fell downstairs on to a cactus on the landing and it took days to tweezer out all the prickles, and another, more serious, was that poor Mum was going through the menopause (though of course we didn’t realise that at the time) which meant that she often had rapid heartbeat and believed she was dying, so the doctor would be called in the middle of the night – they still came out on house calls in those days – and we’d be woken by grown-ups whispering loudly and moving up and down stairs. It only occurs to me now that perhaps we had to stay at school when we got chickenpox because Mum couldn’t cope?