FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  It was a bit of a nightmare at Daisy’s as I didn’t own an alarm clock and, no matter how earnestly I asked, no one woke me up in the mornings, so that every day I emerged, covered with confusion and embarrassment, just in time for lunch. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that perhaps leaving me asleep was easier for them than having to entertain me.

  I don’t know about the other pupils, but for me the most exciting school outing was when some elegant woman friend of Mademoiselle Anita’s took us to the hushed grey and white showrooms of Christian Dior in the Avenue Montaigne where we saw his Spring 1957 collection – Dior himself was still alive then. It was a revelation: another world; I had never imagined in my wildest dreams that either clothes – or women – could be so beautiful. Later in life I was to see dozens of Paris collections, but nothing ever matched the wonder of that first one: I can still remember an exquisite white organdie dress embroidered with lilies-of-the-valley that I just wanted to stare at for ever.

  When my younger sister Tessa followed me to Mademoiselle Anita’s a couple of years later, as a day-girl, there was no outing to Dior, but there was a fashion show of sorts: the woman with whom Tessa and the other students lodged lived in the same building as the prime minister of France, Monsieur Debré, and she would take her girls into his apartment (she seemed to have a key) and they would look at the dresses in Madame Debré’s wardrobe together. The Debrés were living in the prime-ministerial residence, the Hôtel Matignon, so they were not there, but Tessa used to wonder nervously what on earth would happen if Madame came back unexpectedly and found all these girls examining her clothes . . .

  Before leaving for school in Paris, I had developed a crush on a Fleet boy called Peter whom I had kissed once at a party. (At least this was a step up from having a passion for Gilles who hardly knew I was there, or for the brother of one of my convent schoolfriends whom I had only seen in a photograph.) I don’t expect Peter had ever thought about me again, but I daydreamed about him all the time and one of the highlights of my stay in Paris was on Valentine’s Day when I got a home-made card covered with cut-out lips of all sorts, with a message reading: ‘I wish mine were on yours.’ Of course I KNEW it was from Peter, and slept with it under my pillow – until the awful day a couple months later when I was leafing through the magazines in the school library and suddenly noticed that all the lips had been cut out of the pictures. My card was not from Peter but from my friends; how they must have laughed. (Actually they told me later that they hadn’t, because I took it all so seriously that they feared for my mental health should I discover the truth.)

  When I told this story to my daughter Claudia not long ago, she said pityingly, ‘Oh, Mum, as if any boy would make a card.’

  Thinking about it now, I realise that my generation of girls in the Western world was/is perhaps the most fortunate in history: the Second World War was over, no other conflict had (as yet) engulfed the world, we were able to train and work and earn money, we had access to efficient birth control and we had independence. Our little group in Paris didn’t understand most of that yet, but we had all been born in the years of the war and had known, to some degree (I was the luckiest), fear and instability, fathers away fighting (or taken prisoner or killed or wounded), food shortages, rationing, bombing raids – the French, Dutch and Belgian girls had lived through German occupation, and the persecution of the Jews – and we felt grateful, not only because we’d come out on the other side of all this, but because we now found ourselves in a kind of Promised Land. For it was not just the timing of our births in historical terms that was lucky, it was because a whole new world was being created especially for seventeen-year-olds like us as well. We were a new invention – TEENAGERS! Never before had our age group been looked on as particularly special, but now, it seemed, we were the most important people on earth. There was music being made especially for us – a far cry from the love stories of sad grown-ups like the jilted band leader and poor Miss Otis of my brother’s 78s; we had Frankie Laine with ‘Cool Water’, Tennessee Ernie Ford with ‘Sixteen Tons’, Paul Anka with ‘Diana’, Buddy Holly with ‘Peggy Sue’, Frank Sinatra with ‘Come Fly with Me’, Pat Boone and so many others, but it was really Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which hit the charts in 1955, that changed everything. I remember the first time I heard it – before the nuns at my convent banned it as ‘animal music’ – getting gooseflesh all over. I still do. And the music was all the more extraordinary when you think that Bill Haley was middle-aged, with a terrible kiss-curl on his forehead, and one of his musicians (the Comets, they were called) was actually born in VICTORIAN times. But then again, among our romantic heroes then was the singer Johnnie Ray, who wore a hearing aid and still sold more than two million copies of ‘Cry’.

  And then, in 1956, there was the volcanic eruption of Elvis with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. What can I say? We girls in Paris – like teenagers everywhere – were besotted with him, and with the whole United States for producing him and Bill Haley and all our other favourites, and with Hollywood and Audrey Hepburn and ballet flat shoes and pirate pants and ponytails and bobbysocks and headscarves tied round the neck at the back à la Grace Kelly, and big sunglasses, and open-topped American cars like the Thunderbird. (Cars became very important in the Fifties and Sixties – perhaps because they were the only place you could go to be alone with a boy as we all lived at home then; no wonder there were so many car songs: ‘Riding along in my automobile/My baby beside me at the wheel’ etc.)

  We bought American film magazines and papered our walls with pictures of Elvis, of course, and Natalie Wood, and Tab Hunter and Sal Mineo (incredible that no one has ever heard of any of them nowadays), and, it goes without saying, James Dean, who died in a car crash the year before I went to Paris but lived on in posters above our beds. A complete mis-match with all this Hollywood adulation was the fact that we were also besotted by a completely French phenomenon – the singing priest. This was Père Aimé Duval, who was a huge hit in France at that time – he played the guitar and sang gentle songs, which we loved because they seemed very personal and human, and not particularly religious. I found him on YouTube the other day and played one of his songs to Claudia, who groaned, but I hadn’t heard his voice for sixty years and suddenly I was seventeen again – it almost made me cry.

  6

  After six months in Paris, I was deemed to be adequately ‘finished’ (the other girls were staying on for a year) and I had to go back to England for the very un-new-world ritual of being presented at Court.

  Had Paris been worth my parents’ money? I could speak a bit of French, and I had gained a minuscule amount of confidence, but if I’d been asked to write an inventory of myself then, it wouldn’t have added up to much: medium figure, bitten nails, nice legs, small eyes, a plain but animated face, an obsession with open pores (I used to spend hours making face packs from oatmeal and egg white, following recipes in Woman’s Own, as well as sitting with my elbows in squeezed half lemons because that, apparently, would make them soft and white – as if anyone would ever notice my elbows) and, topping all this, thick, curled, dun-coloured hair.

  Hair was almost as painful an issue in the Fifties as class. At seventeen we all looked middle-aged because of our uniformly short, permed, and usually brown, hair. The American writer Nora Ephron once said that the most important invention of the twentieth century for women was not feminism or birth control or better living through exercise, it was HAIR DYE. She meant that for the first time in history older women didn’t have to go grey. ‘In the 1950s only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all,’ she wrote – but in fact, hair dye, or more especially bleach, saved my whole generation of young women too, transforming us from mousy frumps into blondes. And we owed another debt to Brigitte Bardot who showed that you could wear your hair long and loose.

  Before hair dye and Brigitte Bardot came along to rescue us,
the girls in our family could have been straight out of the home-perm advertisement that appeared everywhere at that time. WHICH TWIN HAS THE TONI? it asked, showing identical photographs of identical girls, one supposedly with short, naturally curly hair (that was Tessa who was born with curls) and the other with a Toni perm: she represented Moira and me who had poker-straight locks.

  Every time any of us went to the hairdresser’s in those days, we cried when we came out because they never made us look the way we wanted to. I was wiping away my tears outside a salon in Fleet one day (my permed hair had been arranged into two horn-like curls, one on either side of my forehead) and my mother was lying through her teeth saying, ‘It looks really nice, darling,’ when a friend passed by and said: ‘Glam!’ I wanted to throttle her. Moira and I used to joke about this friend, saying that she looked like a horse. We mainly did this to annoy our mother, and one day she fell into the trap and said, ‘You girls are so cruel, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that poor girl that soap and water wouldn’t put right.’ ‘Soap and a halter you mean, Mum, ha ha ha,’ said Moira, and we both fell about. I think this was my first experience of wit.

  At one point I grew my hair to avoid the perms, and wore it in a ponytail or a knot on top of my head like the cancan dancer, La Goulue, in Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting (we had all seen John Huston’s film Moulin Rouge a couple of years earlier). For this style to work it had to be puffy with side wisps, and absolutely not like our mother’s friend who had her grey hair scraped severely into a bun. Every time I put my hair up I had to ask Tessa: is it La Goulue or Mum’s friend? ‘Hmmm,’ she’d say, ‘it’s veering towards Mum’s friend, you need to pull the sides out a bit.’

  Bra straps were another worry in the Fifties: exposing even the very edge of one was considered sluttish and unacceptable, so bras came in all kinds of convoluted configurations: backless, halter-necked, strapless, with wide-apart straps or close-together straps . . . The idea that forty-plus years later Madonna would liberate women from all these inhibitions by actually wearing a bra with nothing over it, in public, on stage, would have shocked us rigid; when I see someone wearing a T-shirt with cut-away armholes that shamelessly expose the straps underneath (e.g., Laure in the TV series Spiral ), I have to remind myself that it is OK now.

  One of the day students at Mademoiselle Anita’s when I was there was a pretty pug-faced girl Henrietta Tiarks, who, like me, had to return to England to be presented at Court – she then married the future Duke of Bedford; another was Tessa Kennedy who caused a huge scandal when she ran away with a young socialite, Dominick Elwes, to be married secretly in Gretna Green. (Even more shocking was the arrest of Caroline, another pupil, for posing in obscene photographs.)

  Monika Löwenstein, one of my particular friends, left the school at the end of the year and, soon after, married a Habsburg prince in a Cloth of Gold cape (he not she); they travelled to the reception at her castle in a golden carriage drawn by six white horses – it was even reported in the newspapers in England.

  This is the sort of thing (well, not the cape and the carriage and horses, of course) that my parents – and I – hoped would happen to me, but it didn’t. When I was sixteen, and first went to finishing school in Paris, I remember thinking that I was SURE to be married within the next ten years, and then, ten years later, being positive that I would be married before the end of my Twenties . . . but I still wasn’t. (When I was about twenty-seven I made an agreement with my cousin Nicholas that if neither of us were married by the time we were thirty, we would marry each other, but just before the deadline the cad asked if we could postpone it – and not long after that he married a beautiful dancer.)

  Being presented at Court was supposed to help in the process of meeting ‘the right person’, and my mother’s friend Eileen, who had been presented at Court herself, had taken on this duty. I wore a navy-blue princess-line dress and a pink-flowered half-hat of the type Princess Margaret used to wear (she was a bit of a fashion icon in those days). When we arrived at Buckingham Palace, Mum and Dad and Eileen were taken off to sit in the audience, and I was led away to spend what seemed like hours queuing up in an agony of fear with dozens of other debutantes, as we were known, all dressed in similar outfits. Then our names were called out, and one by one, in front of hundreds of spectators, we had to walk across a vast room where the Queen and Prince Philip were seated on thrones, sink into a curtsy in front of each of them, and then walk out the other side. My knees made the most tremendous cracking sound each time I lowered myself down, and Prince Philip smiled slightly. I had been sent for a curtsying lesson to the famous Madame Vacani’s dance school (she taught the royal family) – not that I needed it; I could accomplish a flying curtsy while running down a corridor, because at my convent in Farnborough we always had to curtsy when we met Reverend Mother, no matter where we were or what else we were doing.

  Afterwards, at the palace, there was a garden party where my parents and I relished the relief of it all being over without any disaster, and tried to look as if this was the sort of thing we did all the time. And not long after this – demonstrating that even the British Establishment recognised that the world was changing – it was announced that, after the following year, 1958, there would be no more presentations at Court.

  Sadly – though perhaps it’s just as well – there don’t seem to be any snaps of me in my presentation outfit, but I do have a photograph that has become a treasure. My mother felt there should be a proper portrait taken to mark my visit to the Palace, and cousin Prue, who was at Guildford Art School then, recommended a fellow student, Tessa Grimshaw, so Mum asked her, and she came to Fleet and did some pictures of me peeking out from behind a tree wearing a Polly Peck dress (they were a good small fashion firm then and not a corporation racked by scandal) – and then, this is the best bit, she went on to become a very famous photographer under her married name, Tessa Traeger. Perhaps my portrait is her very first surviving commission. Mum and Dad also thought my eighteenth birthday, which came in the autumn of that year, should be marked in some way, so they invited three guests to join us for a dinner-dance at the Savoy (poor parents – it must have been sheer hell for them). I had been given the job of selecting the three and, instead of choosing chums from Fleet, I complicated things by suggesting Tim, the son of friends of my parents, whom I hardly knew, but he was tall, dark and handsome. And then, even more oddly, a girl who’d been at my convent – mostly, I think, because I remembered her being quite fat and even uglier than I was and I thought she wouldn’t be competition for Tim. But when we all assembled that evening, she had become a slender blonde beauty and she and Tim fell into each other’s arms and stayed there all night, leaving me plodding round the dance floor with the second man, who was probably as despondent at the way things had turned out as I was.

  Following our presentation, we debutantes ‘came out’ into society (you’d have to find different words for this now), and ‘did the season’ – this meant going to other debutantes’ balls (my parents couldn’t afford one for me, thank goodness) where you met eligible young men who, if they were handsome or rich, were known as Debs’ Delights. You also had to go to Ascot races and to Henley Regatta and, ideally, to the May Balls at Cambridge. (The unfortunate man who took me to a May Ball was known by my sisters as the Currant Bun as he had bad spots.) I went to some of these events but with a heavy heart: I felt a complete outsider. Debs’ Delights didn’t fancy me – I never had to worry about them being Unsafe In Taxis; I didn’t fit in, I hated it all, and spent a lot of time in ladies’ rooms wishing I could go home. But I felt guilty as well because I knew my parents were spending money they couldn’t afford trying to give me ‘a good start in life’ – it just wasn’t a life that I wanted, and there didn’t seem to be any other on offer.

  It would have been more fun if Anne, my best friend in Fleet, had been sharing all this, but she was not part of that scene; she was doing a secretarial course in Guildford. She met a deb at a part
y, though. ‘What do you do?’ Anne asked the deb. ‘Oh, I am doing the season in London,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I am doing the season in Guildford,’ replied Anne, not having a clue what ‘doing the season’ meant. I was really cheered when she told me this story because it proved there was another, normal life out there somewhere.

  Then I started a secretarial course myself, in London. This was more like it. Apart from typing THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG in time to a metronome, and learning shorthand (I can still scrawl ‘I am in receipt of your letter’ in one contraction, as they are known), we became obsessed with being Beatniks. We smoked like chimneys, outlined our eyes with black pencil, wore a perfume called Evening in Paris, untidied our hair and walked round in bare feet trying to look like the singer Juliette Gréco (I don’t know why bare feet came into it; was Juliette known for them?). The sack dress was invented by Balenciaga that year (1957) and Fenwick’s store down the road had some cheap copies, but we found you could get the same waistless baggy look by wearing a man’s black V-necked sweater back to front over a black pencil skirt. The only problem we had was with lip colour. Real Beatniks in Paris wore very pale pink lipstick – almost white, in fact (frogs’ lips, my aunt called them) – and you couldn’t get this in England. The first cosmetic company to understand what we wanted was Gala; before that you had to know someone going to France who could get it for you. We Brits were way behind the French then: for instance, the ONLY place in England where you could get your legs waxed in those days was Elizabeth Arden in Bond Street, which cost a fortune. (On the other hand, as we observed on our holidays, it took longer in France for proper lavatory paper to become available: they had cut up newspapers threaded on string for years.)

  I qualified as a secretary when I was seventeen and found a cosy job working for three middle-aged ladies who ran an organisation called the Dominions Fellowship Trust; my salary was five pounds a week. I was the junior to an elderly, gloomy spinster secretary – one of my jobs was to buy the stamps at the post office every week, so one day, in an effort to cheer her up, I brought back the biggest, prettiest new-issue Christmas stamps. ‘Look, Miss Porcheron,’ I chirped, ‘such lovely stamps!’ She glanced at them and groaned. ‘Oh no,’ she said glumly, ‘there’s so much more to lick.’