Just as I joined the Observer I met AW, but cruelly, only a couple of weeks later, he was obliged to take up a posting in Nepal and our relationship had to continue by letter for the next year (there were no emails in those days of course). Looking back now, perhaps that was the best way for us to get to know each other: you can be more direct in a letter somehow.
By this time – the beginning of the Seventies – there was a lot of public debate going on about whether Britain should or should not join the Common Market, as the EU was known then; all very similar to the current argument about whether we should stay in it. A national referendum was planned, but long before it was to take place there were posters and advertisements urging people to say YES or NO to the idea. In the meantime I myself was in a bit of a dither about whether to marry AW or not (he hadn’t actually asked me as yet, but I suspected he would). I must at some stage have poured out my heart to the fatherly printers at the Observer, because just as I was given my notice and preparing to leave the paper, they presented me with my very own personalised poster which said BRIGID KEENAN SAYS YES TO AW. So when he did finally propose, I took their advice, and lived happily ever after.
Epilogue
Moira died in 1972, leaving us all desolate (as well as her many readers who looked on her as a friend). She was only thirty-nine years old and left two young boys and her husband who, luckily, are still with us. Her eldest granddaughter (there are three) looks exactly like her – she had a baby girl in 2014 so Moira became a great-grandmother, she would have been thrilled.
Tessa moved with her husband and son up to Scotland and then to Cumbria – I felt more and more thankful to have AW.
My brother David had a wonderful big family of six; he became Adjutant General of the British Army and was knighted.
Mum and Dad lived to a great old age – Dad to over ninety, Mum to eighty-eight. Mum became anxious and worried about things as she grew older and we christened her Doomwatch. I asked her once why she always expected the worst and she said, ‘Because in my experience that is what usually happens,’ and when I think of her life – widowed with a newborn baby at twenty-one, her brother disappearing in the Spanish Civil War, Moira dying of cancer so young; not to mention all the many heartbreaking partings through the years, plus the major displacement of moving back to England in middle age – I can see what she meant.
No one knew what happened to Uncle Dick for decades – the family all hoped he was in prison in Spain and would be released one day. My mother and aunt sometimes thought they spotted him in a crowd on TV, or in the background of a newspaper picture. There was no closure in their lifetimes, but not long ago an extraordinary thing happened: my cousin Simon picked up a free newspaper on a train, and in it – incredibly – was a letter asking for relatives of Dick Moss to get in touch. It was from a researcher looking into the men who had volunteered to fight in the International Brigade, and through him Simon learned that Dick had been killed by machine-gun fire very soon after his arrival in Spain, along with a colleague, Walter Caspers. Their deaths were witnessed by a fellow-fighter called Harold Collins. In 2006 a mosaic commemorating the volunteers, including Dick, was unveiled on the embankment wall under the Westway flyover next to Portobello Road.
Joan, our young aunt who married the Dutchman, had three children – which meant more, younger cousins to have fun with (they all loved dressing up as much as we did). Sadly she died when she was only fifty-three; we are close to her offspring.
The cousins my sisters and I grew up with – Jinny, Prue and Simon – all have families and grandchildren now; once in a blue moon we have a reunion.
I hope they recognise this account of our shared childhood – they may not, of course, because we all remember things in different ways. I have already come across this: when I finished Full Marks for Trying I rather timidly told Prue that I had written a memoir about the fun we had together with her and her family when we were children, and she said, ‘How strange, I have written a memoir too, and you and Tessa hardly come into it at all.’ I should not have been surprised – she and Jinny were older than us and away at boarding school a lot of the time; we younger ones must have hardly entered their thoughts.
I am aware that I have been incredibly lucky in so many ways – with the unexpected chances I have had, with my family, with the friends I grew up with – and the ones I have made over the years, with fellow journalists in Vietnam, with my work colleagues at Westminster Press, the Daily Express, the Sunday Times, Nova, News at Ten and the Observer. I’d like to mention the printers Mr Davy and Mr Darker who protected me like guardian angels – magically condensing or expanding my pieces to fit the available space and generally advising me on life. I thank them all, and I thank David Godwin my agent, and everyone at Bloomsbury, especially my other guardian angel and dearly loved editor, Alexandra Pringle.
The story of AW and my lives together is told in Diplomatic Baggage and Packing Up.
A Note on the Author
Brigid Keenan is an author and journalist. Now Fashion Editor at the Oldie, she has worked as an editor on Nova magazine, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She has published two fashion histories as well as Travels in Kashmir, Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City, the bestselling Diplomatic Baggage, and, most recently, the companion memoir Packing Up. Brigid Keenan is a founding board member of the Palestine Festival of Literature. She has spent most of her life in far-flung diplomatic postings, but now lives with her husband in Pimlico and Somerset; they have two daughters and four grandchildren.
Also available by Brigid Keenan
Packing Up
Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a ‘trailing spouse’, Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world.
Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from a tick, the local delicacy is horse meat sausage and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort. Then, as the prospect of retirement looms, Brigid finds herself on the cusp of a whole new world: shuttling between London, Brussels and their last posting in Azerbaijan, navigating her daughters’ weddings while coping with a cancer diagnosis, and getting a crash course in grand-motherhood as she helps organise a literature festival in Palestine.
Along the way, dauntless and wildly funny as ever, Brigid learns that packing up doesn’t mean packing in as she discovers that retiring and moving back home could just be her biggest challenge yet.
‘So funny and frank and moving’ Deborah Moggach
‘Hilarious and hair-raising by turns’ Daily Mail
‘With flashes of Nancy Mitford wit about embassy life, as a Facebook neophyte and surviving cancer, Brigid Keenan is as skittish as a kitten with needle claws, as stricken as a deer in headlights, and as smart as a cage of monkeys. Brava!’The Times
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/brigid-keenan
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First published in Great Britain 2016
© Brigid Keenan, 2016
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The extract here is taken from ‘How to Get On in Society’, from Collected Poems by John Betjeman © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray Press,
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-5227-9
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