FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  Putting it all together took weeks, plus several trips to Paris, not to mention the costs – the suit, the photographs, the retouching – but it was enormous fun to do and added to Nova’s fame. It makes me sad to think that nowadays, with Photoshop, it could all have been achieved in about one and a half minutes.

  Then Dennis sent me to India with Nova’s star funny writer John Sandilands (sadly he died a few years ago) to do a story on the Nizam of Hyderabad, the richest of all the Indian princes. I was so scared of the flight that I booked an appointment with a hypnotist in Harley Street to see if he could help, but I never found out because when I got there he asked me to take off my bra and, as I couldn’t really see what that had to do with fear of flying, I left.

  For economy’s sake, the Nizam story was to be combined with a couple of fashion shoots in Rajasthan, so we also had the photographer, Harri Peccinotti, and the gorgeous model Greta Norris with us (she became a lifelong friend). At one point during the fashion photography, Greta and I were shown around a princely palace in Rajasthan. We climbed all the way up to a viewpoint on some high turret and looked down into the courtyard below, where, to our horror, we could clearly see an elephant with five legs, one of them badly withered. ‘Oh my God,’ I said to Greta, ‘look at that crippled elephant. Only in India would they keep an animal with a leg like that alive and not do something about it.’ Full of concern, we both turned to our guide to see what he had to say – but he waggled his head and seemed embarrassed, and it suddenly dawned on us that we were not looking at a deformed elephant, but an elephant WITH AN ERECTION. I have never got over it.

  In Hyderabad, John had a rather scary time – the Nizam demanded he wore a specially made military uniform and set him various challenges: e.g., to jump across a very deep and rather wide crevice in the hills near the city. One evening, in the dark, John was told to fill up a huge tin trunk with stones, which he and the Nizam (with help from the staff) then heaved on to the balcony above the palace swimming pool, and into the water. The object of all this was to make an enormous splash and give Greta, me and Princess Esra, the Nizam’s wife, who were sitting chatting around the other end of the pool, the fright of our lives. It succeeded.

  Harri Peccinotti did our fashion pictures in India, but another photographer, Greta’s husband, Tony Norris, came out to do the Nizam story (he and Greta knew him already) and pictured the prince with his 200-piece solid-gold dinner service; in his 1916 custom-built yellow Rolls-Royce which had a crown on the top and a throne inside; and with boxes and boxes of stuff – crockery, toy trains, soap, tablecloths, linen, picture frames, furniture, you name it – that his grandfather (the richest man in the world) had bought from the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay.

  Apparently, the old Nizam had paid a visit to the department store back in the Thirties, and its British manager had of course personally shown him round. At the end of the tour, the Nizam had not commented or bought a thing, so the manager said, ‘Is there absolutely nothing in our shop that pleases you, Your Exalted Highness?’ and the Nizam replied something along the lines of: ‘You don’t understand, I would like everything in the shop.’ And so lorryloads of crates and packages were delivered to Hyderabad where they remained, mostly unopened, in one of the Nizam’s many buildings.

  We did more pictures in the grand old state palace, Falaknuma, a vast place which had a beautiful big silver mango tree in the hall with gold mangoes on it (I don’t know what happened to the mango tree, but the building is now a luxury hotel run by the Taj group). Seeing all these treasures somehow infected John and me with greed – we went round the palaces praising everything: ‘Oh, that’s nice’, ‘That’s REALLY pretty’, ‘That’s beautiful’, ‘Look at that, it’s gorgeous’, vaguely hoping, I suppose, that the Nizam might give an object to us. We’d got into the habit of doing this, and one day John looked at a hideous life-size Victorian statue of a shepherdess and said, ‘That’s nice,’ and the Nizam said, ‘I’d like you to have it, John.’ John was appalled but there was nothing he could do, and he had all the trouble and expense of getting it back to his home in England.

  One evening the Nizam took us to a circus in Hyderabad. We sat in special seats – the rather rickety equivalent of the Royal Box – and at one stage the ringmaster tried to coax the biggest elephant to approach the Nizam and bow, but it all went wrong: the elephant came up nicely, and then turned round, slowly backed up to the Nizam and did the most enormous poo. It reminded me of being taken to the circus in India when Tessa and I were small. Before the big-cats act began, they put up a kind of wobbly cage of bars around the circus ring, but just as the lions and tigers entered the arena, the cage fell down and most of the audience, including us, got up and ran.

  John had a curious experience in Hyderabad: one day three of us went out to explore the dry scrubby land beyond the palace, and, as we walked along, John lobbed his empty cigarette lighter far into the bushes. We were not aware that anyone had followed, or was watching us, but that evening John found the lighter placed ostentatiously on the desk in his room. It was quite creepy.

  Christmas was coming and I had promised my parents to get home in time to be with them, so when the Nizam invited us all to stay on and celebrate with him and Princess Esra, I had to refuse. He was upset because he was planning all kinds of fun, but I had to stick to my plan and not disappoint the family. A few days later he invited John, Tony and Greta to go into his jewel vault and choose a Christmas present (they chose diamond watches); I was not included because I was not going to be there on Christmas Day. Then, as I sat on the veranda waiting for a car to take me back to my hotel and wishing I could have chosen a jewel, the prince himself suddenly appeared and threw a tiny package into my lap. ‘Have this,’ he said, smiling a little, ‘I believe it is unlucky.’ I undid the parcel and inside was a beautiful opal ring. Opals are supposed to bring bad luck, but happily not for Scorpios – my sign.

  Later, the Nizam did something extremely kind for me. Uncle George, the relative we’d stayed with in the Nilgiri Hills when Tessa and I were children, had died; his lawyer in India described his papers as ‘fascinating’, but no one could think how to get them back to the UK. Then the Nizam, who had yet another palace in the Nilgiri Hills, offered to have a suitcase of them collected and sent to my parents. Actually, it might have been better if he hadn’t – when Mum and Dad went through the case it was full of IOUs: old Uncle George seemed to have become a moneylender. But in amongst them were two fat Victorian letters which, looked at very briefly, seemed to be an account by an English woman of her capture, escape, recapture and further escape, from mutineers/freedom fighters in the Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence. The letters were written and overwritten, and very hard to decipher, so Dad put them to one side and took all the other papers out into the garden to burn on a bonfire. We never knew how it happened, but when we settled down to read the historic letters, they had disappeared – somehow they had been put on to the bonfire too, and gone up in flames. We were devastated; we hadn’t read them, we didn’t know the story and we had no idea who they were written by – had she been our ancestor? It was all gone for ever.

  The night before I left my hotel in Hyderabad to begin my journey back to London, I sorted out all the stuff I’d been carrying around on my travels in India and threw the things I no longer needed into the wastepaper basket, including a half-empty Tampax box.

  I thought no more about this until, just as my taxi was pulling away from the kerb and into the traffic to head for the airport, a man came running out of the hotel waving my Tampax box – but it was too late, we were already en route. That wasn’t the end of it, though: just after I’d gone through Departures I heard someone calling and turned around, and there at the end of the hall was the man from the hotel still waving the Tampax box. They wouldn’t let me go back, so I tried to mime that it didn’t matter, not to worry, but he was still sadly waving the box when I took a last look. As the plane started its race down the runway, I ha
d a horrible fear that I might see him running alongside, still waving the box.

  The fashion shoot we’d done in India went into the magazine, and a short piece by John about the old Nizam’s purchases, still in their boxes from the Army and Navy Stores, did too (photographs by Tony), but Dennis never used our Nizam piece in Nova, I am not sure why. I think perhaps he felt it was a bit remote and meaningless to our readers, and he was probably right, but I am glad I had the adventure.

  18

  One of the stories I was responsible for at Nova was Nostradamus. At that time very few people, apart from some academics, had heard of the medieval seer, but I went to a dinner party and met a young woman Erika Cheetham, who had studied him at university, and she had me spellbound all evening with stories about his prophecies. I rushed into Nova next day to tell Dennis about it, and asked if we could commission Erika to write a piece about him. ‘If he is so darned clever,’ said Dennis, ‘why can’t he write the piece himself?’ (I had forgotten to mention that Nostradamus had lived 450 years before.) I thought this was so funny that I told the story to Private Eye at one of their lunches – I was always so grateful to be invited that I felt I had to pay my way somehow – and they put it in the magazine. Dennis was furious and was about to fire someone he suspected of the leak, so I had to step forward and admit it was me – which I found hard, because you never wanted Dennis to think badly of you. He forgave me because I’d confessed. Once I was leaning over Dennis’s desk, going through the typescript of a piece I had done, when he suddenly turned and said, ‘If you think that’s the way to get your work published you are very much mistaken.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about but then I looked down and realised my blouse was half undone, revealing my cleavage – I was utterly mortified to think that Dennis might imagine I’d done it on purpose, and rushed to button it up again.

  In the spring of 1970 Brigitte Bardot, our early-Sixties idol, whose hair and clothes we copied so enthusiastically, was thirty-five. THIRTY-FIVE! It seemed so old. I thought it would be a great coup if I could interview her for the magazine – and it looked as if I had struck lucky when I found a photographer friend of hers, Ghislain Dussart, who said he would approach her on our behalf. She agreed, as long as the photograph was taken by him, and so I went to Paris to talk to her, but at the last minute, in the studio, she decided she did not want to meet me face to face, and I had to write out my questions – which were passed to her in the next room, where she wrote the replies. ‘Who does your hair?’ was one of my queries. ‘My right hand,’ she responded. There were several pages of my questions and her slightly flip answers and I took them back to London and used them to write my piece, after which they disappeared from my desk: someone obviously thought they might be worth something one day. I was upset because they were such a wonderful souvenir of the great star.

  We worked hard at Nova – I am astonished when I look back through my old copies to see how many pieces I did each month and how elaborate they often were. A feature about networks had seven photographs with between five to fifteen people in each one: my subject had a ‘family’ network, a ‘work’ network, a ‘riding’ network, a ‘young-mums’ network, an ‘army-wives’ network and so on, and we photographed them all. It must have taken days to set that lot up. The other thing that amazes me when I flip through the old mags is the number of man-made fibres being advertised – page after page of Crimplene, Terylene, Orlon, Trevira, Celon, Tricel, Terlenka, Courtelle, Ban-Lon, Dacron and Bri-Nylon (they made terrible sheets out of this that produced shock-giving static). Do these all still exist? I wonder.

  I was fortunate to share an office with a man I liked as much as Dennis: David Jenkins. While I was doing frivolous pieces like revamping the Queen, David was covering serious social and political stories. Something he wrote upset the head of IPC, our uber-boss Hugh Cudlipp, and David was summoned to a meeting with him. As he set off rather nervously for the appointment he said, ‘I’m just off to chew the fat with Cudlipp – or . . .’ he paused ‘. . . should I say I am off to chew the cud with Fatlipp?’ Whenever I remember this it makes me laugh out loud.

  For some crazy reason David was determined to celebrate his thirtieth birthday in Ouagadougou in West Africa – he did, at a restaurant called L’Eau Vive, run by nuns. He never came back to British journalism, ending up, many adventures and two books later, in Japan, with a Japanese wife and daughter, translating haikus. He died much too young, in 2000. I miss him still.

  In March 1968, three months after Tessa and I returned from our adventures in the East, the famous anti-Vietnam War rally took place in London. Tessa and I, already veteran marchers, and now with our first-hand experience of the war, obviously had to go. Somehow – he must have been in my sister Moira’s office when I visited her at the Sunday Times one day (as I did very often) – I found myself chatting to Fabian of the Yard, the famous detective who was now retired and working as head of security at the paper. I told him we were planning to march and he said, ‘You’ll have to watch yourselves, girl. My sources tell me that the American Embassy will open fire on protesters rather than let them storm the building; be very careful.’

  Tessa and I joined the rally in Trafalgar Square where everything was good-humoured, but when we got to Park Lane the huge Maoist group decided to go for the American Embassy and branched away towards Grosvenor Square. With Fabian’s words in our minds, Tessa and I tried to get out of the crowd, but instead found ourselves swept along and finally pushed against a wall of policemen who had formed a barrier across the street to try and prevent anyone getting near the square; I remember us trying to tell the policeman we were crushed against that we were casual bystanders, not Maoist troublemakers. Protesters were throwing marbles and firecrackers under the police horses’ hoofs, it was becoming ugly and violent, and even more so when the police cordon broke and the Maoist crowd surged forward down the street towards the embassy, but in the chaos we managed to fight our way out and escape. (The Maoists did reach the square and the embassy; lots of people got hurt and lots more arrested, but no one got shot by the Americans.)

  One of my best friends at that time was Felicity, a kindred spirit, funny and kind, who worked in public relations, made dangly hippy necklaces (I still have one) and was married to the star newsreader of the day, Reginald Bosanquet. Somehow, towards the end of that year, they contrived to get me the job of fashion reporter on the ITV News at Ten (which was quite a new programme then). I didn’t have to do a huge number of stories for them, so it didn’t clash with my job on Nova, and I had lots of ideas for the programme, but I was hopelessly nervous and everything I did involved dozens of ‘takes’: ‘Here I am in the House of Dior . . . oh sorry, can we do that again’; ‘Here I am . . . oh sorry’; ‘Here I am at the House of Dior, in only a matter of hours we will know what women will be wearing next winter . . . oh sorry’, and so on. Every scene had to be filmed about ten times. The only thing that made it bearable was that my cameraman was so patient and kind. Once, I thought it would be interesting to interview the famous Sixties designer Ossie Clark, but this became a different kind of nightmare because the only response I could get to any question was a grunted ‘Yeah’, so I ended up babbling away, the only one of us doing any talking: ‘Ossie, do you see women dressing in a more feminine way this summer or do you think the idea of trousers is going to catch on and stay popular?’ ‘Yeah.’

  Even now, all these years later, my stomach does a little lurch when I hear that dramatic music that introduces News at Ten.

  The one thing I was really proud of there was a very short film we made about all the different fashions being worn by ordinary women in the streets – hot-pants, miniskirts, long skirts, hippy clothes, trouser suits, etc. The background music we chose was ‘Melting Pot’ by Blue Mink (‘what we need is a great big melting pot’); the film was unusual for ITN and made an appropriate finale to that most exciting decade when it was shown as the last item on the news, on the last night of the Sixties.


  Reggie Bosanquet was renowned for his drinking which gave him a flushed complexion; this hadn’t really mattered as everything had always been in black and white, but when colour came to ITV in 1969 (the year I worked for News at Ten) I heard two girls from the make-up department talking in the ladies’ room. ‘What are we going to do about Reggie?’ one asked. ‘What do you mean?’ responded the other. ‘Well, he is purple, isn’t he. What are we going to do about that?’

  Dennis left the magazine, David went to Africa, new people came and the Nova I loved began to turn into something else, so when I was offered a job as women’s editor on the Observer, I accepted it. Moira, who was by then the distinguished women’s editor of The Times, was a much more suitable candidate for the Observer, and we joked together that it was all a mistake and that they had approached the wrong sister. (Which, since I was sacked a year and a bit later, was probably true, but I never managed to get them to confess to it: when I left, I asked the editor why he had hired me; he said it was because he hadn’t felt very well that day.)

  In the meantime, what none of us close to her knew was that Moira had found a small lump in her breast which, over the months, had grown from peanut- to walnut-size. Cancer was a taboo subject: she had no idea that there was any treatment available so she’d kept all this to herself and worried alone – until one day, looking through a magazine in the hairdresser’s, she saw a small advertisement for bras made for women who had had mastectomies. She had never heard the word before but quickly found out what it meant – and went straight to the doctor. Moira was probably the first person to write openly and honestly about breast cancer and about her own mastectomy and primitive radiotherapy treatment (there was no chemotherapy at that time); until then everyone had shied away from any mention of ‘breasts’ or ‘cancer’. Moira changed all that.