FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  As we kept writing to Mum, who was desperately worried about us, we were in the centre of Saigon and did not feel in any danger from the enemy – little knowing that the Tet Offensive, when waves of Vietcong fighters came right into the heart of the city, was to happen shortly after we left. Instead, as we did NOT report to Mum, we did feel wary of the US Army. I am not saying this in a vain way – we could have been the two Ugly Sisters, we could actually have been Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals: just being female and Western and in our twenties made us horribly desirable to the American soldiers, even after we’d swapped the miniskirts for trousers.

  We were adopted by an American officer who’d taken a shine to Tessa – I think we met him at one of the evening press briefings (which, in my role as ‘war correspondent’, I solemnly insisted we attend) – and this was quite a good thing in the way that when you are surrounded by a gang of beggars in Morocco or India, it is better to select one as your ‘guide’, and then the others will leave you alone. But I never quit Tessa’s side for an instant. One afternoon the officer invited us back to his army quarters in Saigon to buy something in the PX (the store for military personnel), or for tea, I don’t remember. Time went by, and then, suddenly, it was: ‘Whoops! Oh dear! I am so sorry, but I can’t take you back to your hotel now because the curfew has started, and we would be shot.’

  We had to stay in his room which had two beds, one empty. (Why? Had he got his room-mate to move out? Was this all planned in advance?) Tessa and I slept in one bed and he in the other, and every time he turned over in the night I was awake and on the alert to protect Tessa, but he made no move. The worst part was that in the morning he had to drive us back to our hotel in his jeep in front of everyone. We decided that he had set the whole thing up just so that all his friends and other soldiers would see him with not one, but TWO young Western girls, who had obviously spent the night with him. It was deeply embarrassing, I wanted to call out: ‘IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK. NOTHING HAPPENED AT ALL.’ In fact, he was a kind-hearted man, with a wife and family he loved in the States, and I don’t think he minded too much me supergluing myself to Tessa as her chaperone; in fact he was probably a bit relieved.

  He arranged an extraordinary trip for us – to visit the Filipino base in Tây Ninh Province, stopping on the way at the famous Cao Dai temple. Before we left, Tessa asked him what we should wear – ‘I guess you should go for something like these fatigues,’ he replied, indicating his own khaki camouflage combat shirt and trousers. ‘Oh they’re very nice,’ said Tessa. ‘I wonder if they come in other colours?’ She has never lived it down.

  15

  The journey to Tây Ninh was in a Huey military helicopter flying over hostile territory, mostly denuded of vegetation by Agent Orange. It was the most frightening trip I have ever made in my life; I think Tessa and I only agreed to it in the first place because of Dad’s constant advice ‘Il faut saisir les occasions . . .’ ringing in our ears. We had young armed machine-gunners on either side of the helicopter, strapped to ledges on the outside; a big open door; and a few seats inside. ‘You know, a single shot from the ground could bring this chopper down,’ said one of the gunners casually as we were climbing in, and my true nature as a total coward was revealed as I headed for the innermost seat, which meant that Tessa had to sit by the door.

  The Cao Dai temple was almost worth the terror. Tây Ninh and the temple both come into Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, but we hadn’t read it then, and had never heard of Caodaism before; now we discovered that it was/is the religion of several million Vietnamese. It seemed a wonderfully open-hearted one, with Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, Julius Caesar and Sun Yat-sen as saints, and the temple itself a delicious kitsch fantasy of blue pillars with red dragons twined around them, and stained-glass windows, and walls painted bright yellow with dashes of shocking pink and red here and there. Imagine the gaudiest Chinese decorations and multiply them by two and you have something approaching the Cao Dai temple.

  Our visit to the Filipinos, which was next on the itinerary, happened to be on the same day as an official tour by one of the American ambassadors to Vietnam at the time (there were two). Tessa and I were put sitting next to him to watch a parade, and we both had the same thought – that when someone tried to assassinate him they would miss and hit us instead, so whenever he leaned towards us to say anything, we craned our heads as far away from him as our necks would bear; I expect he guessed why.

  The Filipinos were almost as pleased to see us as the American troops in Saigon, and persuaded Tessa and me to be photographed pretending to load a mortar with bombs – we knew this wasn’t really appropriate, but everyone had been so kind to us and we were polite girls, and it did seem rude to refuse, so there we are, immortalised in these pictures, posing with the shells in our hands, and smiling like two fools. If we’d known about the controversy that would be caused, five years later, by photographs of Jane Fonda sitting on an anti-aircraft gun on her visit to North Vietnam, we might have thought twice about it. But this was early days, the Vietnam War was not yet the target of universal disapproval – we had friends in London who even supported it; and by the time the great anti-Vietnam protests took place in 1968, I am happy to say we were onside.

  We were asked if we would visit wounded American soldiers who were being treated in an inflatable hospital nearby. These extraordinary places were made on the same principle as bouncy castles, but on a huge scale; the advantage of them was that a whole sterile hospital unit could be pumped up anywhere, at a moment’s notice; the danger being that if it was hit, the inflatable hospital collapsed on top of the patients – which did indeed happen in Vietnam, though this applied to solid buildings too.

  Most of the very young men we talked to were suffering from the same kind of injuries, caused by punji traps; these were carefully disguised pits in the ground lined with sharpened, poisoned bamboo staves (punji sticks, they were called). When patrolling soldiers stepped into one of these traps, the sticks would pierce through their boots and clothing and into their flesh, causing infections, and often meaning they had to have their feet or lower legs amputated. These were the young Americans we were asked to cheer up – their lives had been ruined, it was heartbreaking.

  I had begun to realise, humbly, that I was not the stuff of war correspondents within about half a minute of our arrival – when I saw David Bonavia’s face actually – and this was confirmed when Tessa had to cancel my scoop interview with President Thieu. I decided instead to do a story on women war correspondents (perhaps this was to atone for my own failure as one) so that at least I wouldn’t return completely empty-handed, and now I concentrated on finding and interviewing some of them.

  The Vietnam War was the first in which women reporters were authorised to go to the front line along with fighting soldiers – by the time Tessa and I were there, two women journalists had already been killed. Only one of the five women I spoke to had actually been sent to Vietnam; the others had come independently (rather like me but a million times more fearless) on the chance of being taken on by an agency or newspaper, and had succeeded – the Vietnam War was a great career opportunity for some. Cathy Leroy, who belonged to this group, was the most extraordinary member of the women’s press corps: French and chic (she owned a Chanel suit in Paris), twenty-three years old, and tiny (five feet tall), she was the only reporter, man or woman, to have parachuted into action; she had also been kidnapped by the Vietcong and badly wounded in battle: five pounds of shrapnel had entered her body. I stood in awe of her, as did all the other correspondents, not to mention the American Army.

  My story was illustrated with wonderful pictures of her and the other women reporters in action, taken by Nik Wheeler (one of the journalists we met on our first day who has remained a lifelong friend), and it appeared in Nova magazine a few months later.

  Soon, our time in Saigon was coming to an end because we had at last managed to find seats on a plane out, but Tessa and I h
ad one last mission – to visit an English doctor friend-of-a-friend of our parents who was working in Cholon, the Chinese part of Saigon. We had been told about him and his good work in glowing terms and felt Mum and Dad would be pleased if we made the effort to see him. We never told them what happened during our visit.

  He invited us to supper at his home, but I don’t remember any food, only that he plied Tessa and me with wine, and then attempted, rather insistently, to snog us, under the pretext of showing us where to find the lavatory. We only discovered on the way home that he’d tried this on both of us.

  What helped to bring the awkward evening to an end was me falling on to a huge brass tray on legs that served as a coffee table. To this day I don’t quite know how it happened: I was just leaning over from the sofa to stub my cigarette out when my centre of gravity suddenly shifted and I toppled slowly forward, crashing on to the table which gave way under my weight so I ended up spread-eagled on the tray on the floor. It made such a noise and was so embarrassing that it was a good excuse to gather up our stuff and leave. After I became an ambassador’s wife I sometimes used to torture myself imagining the same thing happening at some diplomatic function in Syria or India, where they go in for those brass-tray tables, and I would break into a cold sweat.

  16

  When we were in Vietnam we were told that if we heard an explosion, we should throw ourselves to the ground, covering our heads with our arms. Tessa and I once tried to do this in the smallest taxi in the world – a tiny French Simca in Saigon; it was a bit like two sardines trying to turn over in their tin. And then after we’d struggled to the floor, it transpired that the explosion we’d heard was nothing more than a car backfiring.

  The effects of being in Vietnam, even though it was only for twenty-one days or so, lasted for ages; weeks after we were back in England we would throw ourselves to the ground at, literally, the drop of a hat – or if someone slammed a door or even put a cup back on a saucer noisily, which must have been a bit disconcerting for everyone around us. One of the women reporters I’d interviewed had said, ‘Getting used to peace is the hard part,’ but I never thought that could possibly apply to us.

  We saw Albert Poon and our friends in Hong Kong, then stopped briefly in Thailand again (to collect Tessa’s coat that she’d left behind) where we were invited to supper by a friend, Maeve Fort, who worked for the British Embassy in Bangkok. It was a nerve-racking evening because as we arrived she told us that there was a cobra behind the fridge in her kitchen but she hadn’t been able to get it out yet; I still had my horror of snakes and wondered how we’d cope if it emerged while we were there (it didn’t). Then we paused for a day or two with friends in India – all this was free on our tickets – and finally began our homeward journey.

  The highlight of this was to be a visit to our cousin Simon in Dubai, in the Trucial States (as the Emirates were known then), but as we checked in at the airport in Bombay they told us that we were not allowed to get off the plane in Dubai because we had no visa for that country.

  OK, we said, we’ll go on to London, but when we stopped in Dubai, which was a very small airport then, we decided to give it a go, so we crept off the plane and round to the door of the hold and got someone to unload our cases and then went and hid in a ladies’ room until our plane had taken off again. It was the boldest thing we’d ever done and we were amazed that it had been so easy, but travelling was so much simpler then. It was even more so when my mother’s friend Pauline flew from England to India on an Imperial Airways flight before the Second World War. One of their overnight stops – in those days planes didn’t fly at night – was also in the Emirates, at Sharjah. Next day, when they were en route again, Pauline suddenly realised that she had left her handbag on the Customs counter there. It had her passport and all her documents inside, so, in desperation, she begged the steward to ask the pilot to turn back in order to collect it. The pilot agreed, they returned to Sharjah, and Pauline was reunited with her bag. That is a true story.

  Now, in Dubai, hiding in the ladies’ room, we were not worried; we knew that Simon would be waiting for us, and that he would be able to sort out our visa problem. But Simon had mistaken the time and was not there when we emerged from the ladies’ and went through immigration, so Tessa and I were arrested and locked in a small room at the airport for what seemed like an awfully long time before he eventually arrived and got us out.

  Dubai was like a dusty town in a cowboy film then, all one-storey houses – I went back there again for the first time forty years later, and couldn’t believe it was the same place. Actually, on this second visit I thought it was PARADISE – mostly because it wasn’t Kazakhstan where we were posted at the time. AW had arranged a weekend in Dubai together, as a treat. I was to break my journey back from a visit to England there, and he would fly down from Almaty to join me, and then we would both travel back to Kazakhstan together.

  My plane arrived the night before AW’s, so in the morning, on my way to breakfast, I went to the hotel receptionist, a charming Syrian, and explained that my husband would be coming in shortly and please could he tell him I was in the dining room. When AW arrived the receptionist said to him, ‘Your rose is in the dining room.’ Being an Englishman, AW didn’t get this at all – he stomped into the dining room and said, ‘Hello darling, where is my rose?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Well, the receptionist said, “Your rose is in the dining room,” so where is it?’ ‘I think he meant me,’ I said sadly. ‘I think I am your rose.’ AW looked seriously disappointed.

  17

  To Mum’s relief, Tessa and I arrived safely back from our travels, and I went off to my new job at Élan, but while I’d been away, the owners (International Publishing Company) had decided not to launch a new title after all, and I was transferred to Nova magazine, which they also owned, to be assistant editor there. (I still have the dummy edition of Élan, the mag-that-never-was; perhaps it will be worth a fortune one day.)

  This turned out to be another piece of luck: I think I was happier at Nova than in any other job. The magazine had being going for about two years by the time I arrived in 1968, and in those years the photographer Harri Peccinotti, who was art director; Molly Parkin, the fashion editor; and Dennis Hackett, the editor, had done some extraordinary, groundbreaking work. Dennis was full of ideas: he longed to publish Nova back to front because he noticed how people often read magazines backwards; or, for a piece on the Catholic sacrament of confession, he wanted to cut a hole in the page so the priest could be on one side of it and the penitent on the other – but his bosses always stopped these extravagances. Nova was daring, but not everyone approved – one of the first things I did there was a piece on brightly coloured underwear: tights, knickers, vests in vivid pinks, reds, purple, lime green, all wonderfully photographed in close-up (revealing no flesh), which earned me a severe letter of disapproval from an aunt.

  For others, Nova was/is iconic: to this day when I tell people of a certain age that I worked there, they look at me with new respect – even reverence – and issues of ‘vintage’ Novas can now fetch eighty quid on eBay, not a bad return on 3s 6d or 4s a copy, which was what it cost.

  I could never imagine why Dennis Hackett was on a women’s magazine at all – he was a newspaperman, originally from Yorkshire, charismatic and plain-speaking – but he was the best editor ever. We all wanted to please him so we racked our brains for good ideas, and if he liked them he would back you to the hilt. He gave me such a wide brief: one moment I was interviewing Madame Binh, the Vietcong negotiator at the Paris peace talks in 1968, next I was in Rome spending a few days with the Italian socialite Princess Pignatelli who had just been nominated the Best-Dressed Woman in the World for the second time, in order to find out what went into achieving that title. (I discovered the princess was so dedicated to the cause that she even plucked the hairs out of her legs individually with tweezers.)

  Dennis spent a fortune on another of our stories: ‘What Paris could do
for the Queen’ (i.e., what the Queen would look like if she dressed in Paris). This was so complicated that it is difficult to explain here, but it involved finding out the Queen’s vital statistics (I got them at Madame Tussauds); booking a model with the same measurements; commissioning André Courrèges, the Paris couturier, to design and make a suit for Her Majesty; and then photographing this on the model. In the meantime Carita, the leading cosmetics firm in Paris, and Alexandre, the world’s top hairdresser then, redesigned her make-up and hair. After that, all the different images were sent off to some state-of-the-art retouching place in the US to be put on to a real photograph of the Queen – producing an (almost) authentic-looking picture of Queen Elizabeth as she would appear if her clothes and hair and make-up were done in Paris.

  The only problem was that the retouching people in the States didn’t understand that they should have lengthened the skirt of the suit (Courrèges, the pioneer of short skirts, had refused to make it any longer), so that when the pictures arrived at the British Customs and were opened, they showed the Queen in a miniskirt, and were confiscated. Dennis had to ask permission from the Palace to have them released.

  The feature caused a big stir – it was bought by magazines all around the world – and it was reported back to Dennis that the Queen was quite amused by her revamped self: she thought we’d made her look like Queen Farah Diba of Iran.