FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

Full Marks for Trying

Full Marks for Trying

An unlikely journey from the Raj to the rag trade

BRIGID KEENAN

This book is for my beloved mother and father, my brother David, my sisters Moira and Tessa, my aunts Thea and Joan, and my cousins Jinny, Prue and Simon. We had so many happy days – I was lucky to have such a family.

It is also for AW. We have been married now for more than forty years, which is why, in the pages that follow, I do not linger long on my love life before the happy day I met him.

And it is for my cherished daughters, Hester and Claudia, in the hopes that their childhood memories are as happy as mine.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Plate Section

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

A Note on the Author

Also available by Brigid Keenan

Introduction

A decade ago, I wrote a book about being married to a diplomat (
Diplomatic Baggage
, it was called) and someone gave a copy to my uncle. When he'd read it he said, ‘Well, it's quite amusing, but it's all about
her
, isn't it.'

I have been worrying about those words since I started writing this new book because, though I don't think
Diplomatic Baggage
really
was
all about me, this one certainly is – but on the other hand, how on earth do you write a memoir and make it NOT about yourself? Readers will just have to believe me when I say that
Full Marks for Trying
is not meant to be a giant ego trip, but a picture of what it was like to grow up at a certain time in history – in the 1940s, '50s and '60s – in a family that was, like Britain itself, facing and adapting to the enormous changes taking place around us with gathering speed.

My parents' generation lived through the horrors and dramas of two world wars but only saw the beginnings of all the profound social, sexual, gender, medical, religious and technological changes that have altered the world since
my
generation came into being – which have been, perhaps, the greatest ever to take place in the course of any person's lifetime (so far).

I hadn't really thought much about this before I began
Full Marks for Trying
, but writing about one's childhood and youth highlights the changes, because you can remember what it was like before they happened.

There are the obvious, mundane physical ones, of course – motorways, seat belts, air travel, London's changing skyline – and then there are more subtle ones: when I first came to live in London, Downing Street, now sealed off behind huge gates, was just another road – you could amble past Number 10 and stare at the policeman standing outside the door; similarly you could park, free, next to the stones at Stonehenge and go and touch them; the stunning Art Deco foyer of the Strand Palace Hotel
was
its foyer (now it belongs to the V&A Museum); and Wolseley was the name of a car and not a fashionable London restaurant in Piccadilly (where there used to be an old Wolseley garage, but everyone has forgotten that).

Then there are the humdrum domestic changes: duvets have replaced eiderdowns; tampons have taken over from sanitary towels and their ugly accompanying belts; hand-held hair dryers and heated rollers mean we no longer have to sleep in curlers. Disposable nappies have made redundant the whole rigmarole of towelling and muslin squares which had to be boiled on the stove because people didn't have washing machines. Kleenex tissues are the new handkerchiefs (the idea of blowing your nose into a piece of cloth was never nice, but on the other hand, hankies were such a useful Christmas gift, especially for men – though little girls like me were always being given flat boxes of pretty, embroidered ones which we hardly ever opened, let alone used).

We all know about tights replacing stockings and suspender belts, but there was a slightly earlier, almost forgotten,  liberation when
seamless
stockings appeared for the first time. Stockings with seams sound sexy now, but they were a nuisance to put on – you had to guide the seam with your finger and thumb up the centre of the back of your leg and then, all day, you'd be looking over your shoulder to check, or asking friends: ‘Are my seams straight?'

There were no credit cards in my youth, which meant cashing cheques all the time – usually at the bank, but at your local corner shop if you could persuade them – and persuading them was quite important because being stranded without money was a problem then as there was no easy way to get any.

In my day you couldn't go to the lavatory on a train when it was in a station because the flush drained out directly on to the tracks – which made us wonder what was happening with aeroplanes: was it all likely to come plopping down on our heads?

In 1977 Dad and my sister Tessa and I clubbed together to give Mum her first ever washing machine for her seventieth birthday – but instead of being pleased she was furious because she thought it was some kind of negative comment on the way she'd always done the washing before.

My in-laws had the first washing-up machine I ever saw, but I was sceptical about it because they seemed to have to rinse all the plates before they put them in which I thought was kind of doing the same job twice.

The food we eat now would be unrecognisable back in the Fifties – I mean literally; few people then knew what an avocado pear looked like, let alone an artichoke, or a mango or passion fruit, or croissants, baguettes, wraps, pizza, sushi, or anything in a Tetra Pak. The nearest we got to hamburgers were found at a chain called Wimpy Bars and they were thin, stamped-out circles of grey something (mince would be too kind a word) in a tasteless white bun with a dollop of ketchup. Ice cream was served, not in a cone but in a slice between two wafers; spaghetti came in tins with tomato sauce – we knew so little about pasta in those days that in 1957 when Richard Dimbleby (the even-more-famous broadcasting father of David and Jonathan) made an April Fool film for
Panorama
about Italians gathering the ‘spaghetti harvest', showing long strands draped over the branches of trees with cheery Italians on ladders ‘picking' it, half the nation was taken in. Olive oil was only available in chemist's, where it was sold in small bottles for earache; and there was no yoghurt in the supermarkets – indeed there were no supermarkets.

When I started work in an office my typewriter was one of those big upright ones you see in old films on which the carriage made a rather satisfactory zip-and-clunk noise when you pushed it back. Then I graduated to an electric typewriter, and it was not until the early 2000s that I dared to write on a computer – and that was only because my daughters persuaded me to try.

Before Xerox machines were invented we usually did copying (text only) with carbon paper sandwiched between sheets of plain paper and fed into the typewriter, but also, more curiously, with an A4-sized shallow pan of hard jelly. You wrote with special ink on to a sheet of paper which was pressed on to the jelly: this absorbed the ink and would then reprint it on to any fresh piece of paper laid on top.

Computers were the size of sheds when I was in my twenties: universities and corporations hired them, and students and particular employees were allowed to use them for short periods – obviously no one had one at home, and no one had as yet even imagined a desk- or lap-top, let alone an iPad or tablet. As teenagers we fantasised about telephones which would show you the person at the other end of the line (I was not keen on the idea: I worried that someone might ring when I didn't have my make-up on) but we never believed that these might one day become the norm. We didn't even dream of the wonder of a telephone you could carry around with you, let alone a telephone you could carry that was a computer as well, i.e., a smartphone, let alone a smartphone in a
watch
. . . and there will probably – no, make that
definitely
 – be something even more extraordinary coming up any minute now. In fact, I am not going to say any more about the vast, ongoing, world-changing revolutions in information technology because, for a start, I have no idea what most of them are as I can only just about manage emails and Facebook and Google.

There were curious medical conditions in the 1940s and '50s that don't seem to exist any more – ‘glands' was one. I don't actually know what ‘glands' were, but when someone was really fat, people would whisper: ‘S/he's got
glands
.' When we came back from India, my sister Moira had to have an operation for fallen arches which meant both her legs being in plaster for weeks, though I've never heard of a single person having this done since. And then there were chilblains – does anyone get these now, I wonder?

When you went to the dentist in the Fifties there were no injections to numb the pain; instead they put a gas mask or a pad of ether over your face, and as you breathed in the fumes, you drifted into a sleep full of surreal and menacing happenings. My cousin Simon had an ether dream I've never forgotten – a terrifying clown was perched on the end of a long rope, swinging to and fro, chanting, and as it advanced and receded its voice got louder and then fainter:
ABRIco spiNICO ABricoSPINIco AbriCO SPinico ABRIco
. . .

But then there were the truly miraculous medical breakthroughs that have really transformed our lives. I came into the world at about the same time as antibiotics, but I was born long before chemotherapy changed the fate of cancer sufferers, and before the discovery of the Salk vaccine, when polio was a real, terrifying threat and almost everyone knew a child who had been disabled by it, and had heard of the Iron Lung (a breathing apparatus for polio victims).

The birth-control pill became available in my lifetime, which meant that the dread of becoming an ‘unmarried mother' which had haunted women forever because of all the terrible things that went with having an ‘illegitimate baby' – disgrace, being cast out by your family, poverty, a backstreet abortion (during which you could die), having to give your baby away, homes for ‘fallen women' – was becoming a thing of the past.

Our language was different: ‘super' was the word for anything good or pleasant; I suppose it is ‘cool' now (or ‘sick' if you are really what we would have called ‘with it'). Personnel was our word for Human Resources and I don't remember ever coming across someone called a line manager at work. People were crippled not disabled, half-caste instead of mixed race, Negro as opposed to black or of colour. ‘Coming out' meant a girl coming-of-age and entering society, not declaring your sexuality to the world. Cohabiting unmarried couples were ‘living in sin'; divorce was rare, and the word ‘divorcee' for a divorced woman had a kind of racy ring to it . . . Being ‘tight' was not being mean, but drunk – ‘tight as a tick' meant really drunk. A pansy was a gay man; gay meant cheery, bright, fun. Poking someone meant having sex with them – I nearly had a fit when I first joined Facebook and people ‘poked' me.

My favourite out-of-date expression, though, is ‘playing the giddy ox' which Dad was always using – it meant mucking about, as in ‘You girls, for heaven's sake stop playing the giddy ox and settle down to your homework.'

In the early Sixties girls were called ‘birds' – which could be confusing: a young male friend of ours, staying in a village in France, invited his English neighbour, whom he didn't know, to supper. ‘Can I bring my bird?' the man asked. ‘Of course,' said our friend, thinking how nice it would be if a girl came along too, but he turned up with his pet chicken.