FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  One morning in the dining room we placed our breakfast order with Brigid, the waitress; nothing happened for a very long time and then Brigid’s sister, who also worked there, came and said she was sorry everything was running late but Brigid had just had a baby upstairs (she hadn’t known she was pregnant). It was all very Irish and very Catholic – it could have been scripted by Edna O’Brien – and there were endless problems, but the last straw was when Dad found out that the barman had tried to tunnel through the wall of the gents’ cloakroom into the back of the safe in the office. It was discovered because, Irishly, he missed his mark and came out in the middle of the wall. Dad eventually returned to his old land-agent job with relief, and Mum and Dad went back to live near Fleet, where we would join them at weekends.

  It seems to me now that my childhood was the exact opposite of a misery memoir – apart from the time spent at boarding school, it was almost too happy, too sheltered, too cosy. Is that possible? It took me years to gain any confidence outside my family circle: we had so much fun together that I never really wanted to separate myself from them or grow up at all. In fact, I still haven’t quite got used to the idea.

  5

  Though I say it myself, I was a bit of a star in the Sixties – actually, to be strictly accurate, I was not a star, but a meteor. And as a matter of fact I don’t have to say it myself because I was officially designated as one in a book written by Jonathan Aitken, best known now as the Tory MP who went to prison for telling a lie on oath, but back then celebrated as the author of The Young Meteors, the bible on the Sixties. I found a copy of the book in a charity shop the other day and looked myself up – I was twenty-seven at the time it was written, working on the Sunday Times, and Jonathan Aitken describes me as being one of the two best young fashion writers of the day. (The other one was Georgina Howell, then at the Observer, who, like me, left the fashion world long ago and now writes books, including a great biography of Gertrude Bell.)

  J.A. quotes me as saying: ‘Certainly we fashion editors have a lot of power, but I like to think we use it discriminately.’ I can’t imagine ever saying anything like that in a million years – and as for ‘discrimination’, that has never really been my strong suit.

  When Jonathan Aitken asked to interview me for the book, I invited him to dinner and then panicked as I couldn’t think what to cook for him, or who to ask with him. In the end I decided on a pork fillet stuffed with prunes (I like to think that the recipe came from Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World which was THE best-selling cookbook at the time, but I can’t really remember), and I had a trial run, inviting my sister Tessa and Malcolm, her boyfriend (later, husband), and when I served the cooked fillet they took one look at it and said, ‘Oh God, you’ll have to cut it up or do something with it because it looks exactly like a horse’s willy on the dish.’

  My glittering career as a young meteor was all a mistake really – in fact it was the last thing I ever intended, because a friend of my mother’s from the Bridge Club in Fleet once said to me, ‘You don’t want to be a career girl, my dear, men never like that at all.’ My future had been mapped out by my parents – basically in accordance with what middle-class people like us did then – and I went along with it since I didn’t know anything, and hadn’t any better ideas. Their plan set out that I would leave Farnborough Convent after GCEs, go to a smart finishing school, be presented at Court, and then do a secretarial course after which I would work as a secretary for a couple of years until I got married. (University, even A levels, didn’t come into it much for girls in the Fifties.) That was supposed to be how it went, but somehow, after the first part, it didn’t quite work out like that.

  The finishing school was in Paris, it was called Mademoiselle Anita’s, and it just happened to be the smartest, most exclusive school on the planet at that time. How my mother found this place, and how she got them to take me as a student and how she paid for it, is a complete mystery that I have never managed to work out – especially the initial question: how on earth did she know about it?

  It was not the first time I had been away in France – two years earlier I had done a French exchange with a girl, Marie-Ange, who came from a pleasant family whose nearest train station was Limoges. They met me there quite late in the evening and drove me to their home through silent villages of grey-shuttered houses that looked so un-English I immediately began to feel homesick.

  My sister Moira had done an exchange too, several years before (how did my mother, in Fleet, find these French hosts? I wonder), and, because she was staying with grand-sounding people who lived in a château, Mum sent her off with home-made but smart clothes and party dresses – only to find that the family was penniless and more or less camping in their mansion which had been wrecked by the Germans in the war, and they were all wearing old trousers and jumpers and screamed with laughter at Moira when she unpacked her bag. For this reason I was dispatched with cotton slacks, only to discover that the father of ‘my’ family would not allow the women in his house to wear any kind of trousers, so I had to put on the same home-made red-and-white gingham skirt every day for three weeks.

  I didn’t get over my homesickness, though falling in love with Gilles, Marie-Ange’s brother, helped a bit. I don’t think he actually ever even noticed that I was there, but I read a lot of Georgette Heyer’s romantic novels at that time, and lived in a completely unreal world in which it was entirely possible that a handsome, sophisticated 25-year-old Frenchman would see the hidden beauty in a dumpy fourteen-year-old in a skirt she’d made herself, and fall hopelessly in love with her.

  The finishing school was the annexe to a convent – Le Couvent de l’Assomption – in the posh 16th arrondissement of Paris, and it was where the noblest and/or wealthiest families in the world sent their daughters to learn savoir-faire (how to behave) and savoir-vivre (how to live) – and how you must never trust a man with your little finger because if you do he will seize your whole body.

  My schoolmates were princesses and countesses with names like Metternich and von Bismarck, Hohenlohe and Bourbon (the family of the kings of France before the Revolution), and I was very seriously out of my league. I was a boarder (which was even more exclusive and chic than being a day-girl) and there was only one other British boarder, Margaret. I was scared of her because, being a fellow-countrywoman, she knew that I had no business in this school, but then again, I knew that she didn’t really either, and in the end we became friends.

  Mademoiselle Anita was a terrifying person. Medium height and slightly stocky, with the most upright posture I have ever seen, she wore her grey hair scraped back into a perfect French pleat, was always dressed in black ankle-length gowns with old-fashioned but elegant laced-up shoes with heels, and carried a walking cane with a silver top. None of us girls ever knew her surname or anything else about her – was she the widow or the illegitimate daughter of a prince or a king, or could she be the victim of some aristocrat cad to whom she had entrusted her little finger?

  We boarders were not allowed out with anyone who had not been personally interviewed by her, so you can imagine how many dates I had (i.e., none) except for one afternoon when, on the pretext of meeting another girl from school for a coffee, I managed to sneak off with a young Russian who was studying in Paris (though I’d met him at a party in England). I can’t remember his name, which is strange, because Russians were an intriguing rarity in the West back then. He took me out for a ride on his motorbike – which means that I HAVE actually driven round Paris with my hair streaming in the warm wind, or whatever it was Marianne Faithfull sang that you had to do before you died. At the time, with no helmet, clinging to him from the back of the bike as it hurtled down the Champs Élysées, I just wished I was safely at school with my girlfriends. I never saw him again; Russians are not like us, I think he thought I was a bit wet.

  All invitations had to be passed by Mademoiselle Anita as well, to make sure they were smart enough. I had very, very few and only one of
them ever met with her enthusiasm – it was from a fellow pupil, a day-girl who was one of the daughters of Bao Dai, the last Emperor of Vietnam, exiled in Paris, asking me for lunch. At the meal a uniformed servant stood behind each of the many guests at the table, and when I wrote to my mother describing the amazing grandeur of it all, I didn’t know what these men should be called – ‘footmen’ or ‘butlers’ didn’t seem to be oriental or exotic enough – so I put innocently, ‘There was a eunuch behind every chair.’

  Some French friends of Mum’s invited me to a wedding but I was not allowed to go because Mademoiselle Anita could see from the invitation or their names (I was never clear on this) that they were not quite ‘the right kind of people’. I remember crying for the implied insult to my beloved mother.

  Perhaps I should explain here how crucial ‘class’ was in those days – and not just in a smart finishing school in Paris, it was even more so in Britain itself. The words you used really mattered – your place in the social hierarchy was judged by them – and it was so cruel: a person could be cast into social outer darkness for saying ‘pardon’ or ‘toilet’ – terms which were deemed ‘common’. Being ‘common’ was similar to, but worse, than being ‘naff’ or ‘chav’ now – an aristocrat can be ‘naff’ or ‘chav’ in their taste or behaviour, but they can’t really be ‘common’ because that implies lowly birth. There were euphemisms for ‘common’ – ‘not out of the top drawer’, ‘not one of us’. (And you had to be extra careful about being deemed ‘not one of us’ if you were an Irish-Catholic family from India, as we were, because those things in themselves were considered seriously dodgy – particularly if you were ‘Indian educated’, as my father was until he went to Sandhurst.)

  My sisters and I were brought up to use all the right words: ‘writing paper’ never ‘notepaper’, ‘scent’ instead of ‘perfume’, ‘sofa’ instead of ‘couch’, ‘coat and skirt’ instead of ‘suit’, and so on. Even putting a letter into an envelope (onvelope, by the way) was fraught with class – you had to fold it so that the signature was on the outside of the paper, and you should never hold your knife like a pencil, put milk in before the tea, lick your fingers to turn newspaper pages, have pierced ears (Irish maids), wear jewellery during the day (pearls were OK), have a loo-paper holder in the bathroom (rolls of paper should be in a basket), wear white shoes or jumpers that were too tight, or whisper behind your hand as in the famous photograph of Hillary Clinton talking to Cherie Blair.

  My cousin Simon went to Sandhurst to train as an army officer, and reported back that they were warned never ever to use the expression ‘Give the cruet a fair wind, old chap’, meaning pass the salt and pepper (cruet was a taboo word anyway), and on no account should they refer to an uncle as ‘my avuncular relative’. (It was so bizarre to imagine anyone using either of those phrases that our family immediately took to saying them non-stop.)

  As for our accents . . . I am amazed when I listen to old radio recordings to hear how clipped and grand middle-class people sounded in those days. They said orf, plahstic, elahstic, sawft, frawst, Orstralia, Orstria, crawss, and Catholics went to Mahss.

  In 1956, the year I started at finishing school, Nancy Mitford edited a book, Noblesse Oblige; it was illustrated by the famous cartoonist of the day, Osbert Lancaster (little did I know that in years to come I would sit next to him in the office at the Daily Express), and included a satirical poem on how to get on in society by John Betjeman.

  The book was a sort of jokey guide to improving your social status and Nancy Mitford listed all the words that were considered U (meaning upper class) and non-U (i.e., ‘common’) that we Keenan girls had been trained to use: drawing room was U, lounge non-U; looking-glass was U, mirror non-U; children was U, kids non-U; pudding was U, sweet non-U; napkin was U, serviette non-U; and so on. (In fact, the idea of U and non-U had actually been invented a couple of years before by a linguistics professor, Alan S.C. Ross, in an article about class in Britain for an academic journal in Finland, but Nancy Mitford got all the credit.)

  People rushed to buy Noblesse Oblige and the entire middle class of Britain became obsessed with U and non-U, and went round quoting Betjeman’s poem at each other laughingly, to show how they themselves knew perfectly well what was what.

  Phone for the fish knives, Norman,

  As cook is a little unnerved;

  You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

  And I must have things daintily served.

  . . .

  Now here is a fork for your pastries

  And do use the couch for your feet;

  I know that I wanted to ask you –

  Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

  To appreciate the in-jokes fully, there was a world of upper-class behaviour you had to know about apart from mere words, mainly that U people liked to keep things basic and restrained: no flashiness or glitz or showing off your money – even having central heating could be considered a bit ‘nouveau-riche’ back in the day (when, later, telephone answering machines were invented lots of U people wouldn’t use them; indeed, some still don’t) – and one should never ever try to be ‘dainty’ or ‘refined’ (U people never ate pastries with a fork or used fish knives or doilies, and so on). And ‘cook’ on its own wouldn’t do; it should have been ‘the cook’.

  Pronunciation was another whole can of worms – riding trousers were pronounced joedpurs not jodhpurs, but then, the opposite, scones not scoenes . . . At home my aunt announced that she had it on good authority that laundry and hydrangea should be pronounced lahndry and hydrahngea, and that corgi was supposed to be kergi, but we didn’t believe her.

  In the final analysis, though, I think all this U and non-U hysteria helped to make the class system ridiculous, and hastened its end.

  Just as I finished writing that paragraph, my eye fell on a quote in the Guardian from Lady Fellowes, wife of Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame, in which she says that she and her husband often enjoy a quiet little laugh at guests who fold their napkins after a meal, or who tip their soup plate towards themselves, rather than away, so perhaps nothing has changed after all.

  Back in Paris, one of our classes each week was midwifery – I hated this lesson (though I quite liked the bit about turning a drawer from a chest into an emergency baby’s bed) and I made an appointment with Mademoiselle Anita to explain to her that I was never likely to have to deliver a baby and please could I be excused from the session.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she snapped in French. ‘You never know when someone on your estate might need your help.’ I tried to point out that we lived in a flat in an Edwardian redbrick villa in Fleet – Fleet – and that the nearest thing to an estate in the lives of the Keenans would be a neighbouring council estate, but I could see that the very idea of Fleet was beyond her imagination, let alone our house in it; and I had to go back to the classes. So I know (or should I say knew, in case I am ever tested) how to deliver a baby, and how to bind the umbilical cord with thread (silk of course).

  Far worse than the midwifery class, though, was our compulsory Social Service – one afternoon every week had to be given to good deeds; I was allocated to teach algebra in a home for girls who had been saved from prostitution. They were the same age or older than me and infinitely more worldly-wise and sophisticated – I was absolutely terrified of them: to this day when I see the name of the Métro station Gaîté written up, I start a panic attack. When I told the nuns that my algebra O-level mark was 8 out of 100, they changed my subject to English conversation; I remember the first time I timidly asked my class of about half a dozen girls if they could speak any English and they all laughed and one said, ‘I can say keees me, Johnnie.’ After that I read to them from English books while they dozed off.

  When we went out and about in Paris, as we did most afternoons to see exhibitions and museums, our group of perhaps seven or eight teenage girls was escorted by a guide-cum-chaperone. Poor Mademoiselle Marguerite, she was a little old lady buttoned up
in a navy overcoat and scarf, who we never saw without her squashed navy felt hat, and we tormented her by disappearing down alleyways, or hiding from her in the giant galleries of the Louvre, and then giving her a fright. But when I look at the group photographs of us students then, I can hardly believe that we were so mischievous because we seem like a bunch of middle-aged women.

  Perhaps it was her revenge, but one day she took us to the military hospital at Val-de-Grâce, where we saw the most shocking wax masks of facial injuries from the two world wars: gaping holes where noses or eyes had been, lower jaws blown away and teeth exposed as on a skull – and these were from men who had survived. It took me years to erase the images of what I saw that day from my memory.

  My particular pals at school were Blanca Guardiola, whose family bred the best fighting bulls in Spain; Tati from Mexico, whose mother died when she was small and no one told her about menstruation so for a long time she thought there was something wrong with her; Brigitte, my lovely Belgian room-mate (who much later in life was briefly and unhappily in the headlines when she gave birth to septuplets who died); Mona from Lebanon, who was big and smoulderingly sexy; Marie-Sol, a lively Sicilian princess; and chic little Daisy de Montesson, who invited me to stay in her family’s enormous château during the Suez Crisis when everyone else’s parents took them home for fear of the upcoming global conflict (which didn’t happen); mine couldn’t afford to.