FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (19 page)

My Jane Fonda moment – and possibly my most embarrassing picture ever: posing with a mortar shell at the Filipino base in Tây Ninh, Vietnam. I honestly only did it to please our hosts.

 

The photographer Norman Eales could make anyone look glamorous: he took this picture of me for a
Sunday Times
feature in which the women's-page writers chose what we wanted for Christmas. The article was mostly done to please advertisers and I
had
to choose this coat because it came from one of them – which is not to say I wouldn't have liked it.

7

While I did my secretarial course I had commuted to London every day and since I was often running late I would sometimes have to buy my ticket at the end of my journey:  Waterloo. One day there, instead of asking for a ticket from Fleet, I had the bright idea of saying I'd come from Woking which was nearer and cheaper – whereupon the man at the barrier said, ‘When you caught the train at Woking, did you have to cross the bridge to get to your platform?' My jaw dropped, I couldn't answer the question; I stood there with my mouth gaping and then I burst into tears and said, ‘It's all a lie, I've come from Fleet.' I confessed to Mum and Dad that evening what had happened, and they told me the story of Professor Joad, an immensely celebrated philosopher and radio personality who caused one of the biggest scandals of their era when, in 1948, he dodged his rail fare (also on a Waterloo train), was caught, fined (two pounds), sacked by the BBC and became a ruined man. I never dared cheat again.

Once I started work at the
Daily Express
, I went to live with Moira at first, and then moved into another flat which I shared with a girlfriend, Margaret, in Chelsea, but I nearly always went home for the weekends. Almost every time I did this journey I would forget my suitcase on the train and have to run to the stationmaster in Fleet and ask him to phone the next stop down the line, Hook, and ask them to take it off. ‘Look, 'Ook,' he'd say, endearingly, each time he rang them. Then my father and I would have to do a five-mile detour to Hook on the way home. I must have driven my parents mad. Luckily they never knew about my worst misadventure. My friends in Fleet decided to organise a jolly picnic one Saturday; for some reason, I was not coming home on that Friday night, but I said I would come down by train next morning and join them.

‘No, no,' they replied. ‘We know you – you'll miss the train, you will never be in Fleet in time, you'll hold us up and ruin everything . . .'

‘I
promise
I'll be there,' I pledged. ‘You'll see, I won't let you down, I will be there.'

‘OK,' they said, ‘but if you are late, we are going on without you.'

The Saturday came and I missed the train. In utter panic and desperation I hailed a taxi – A LONDON BLACK CAB – and asked him to drive me to Fleet. We arrived at the station (the rendezvous) at the same time as the train I would have caught if I had simply stayed at Waterloo. My friends had gone, the taxi (I paid by cheque) cost all my savings. I didn't dare tell my parents what I had done; I just went back to London with the taxi-driver, crying, and told them the picnic had been cancelled. My friends never knew I'd come; they thought I'd just stood them up.

Weekends in Fleet couldn't have been more different from life in London – they seemed to revolve around horses (not that we ourselves had a horse, or even knew anyone with one). There were point-to-points (races) on Saturdays at a place called Tweseldown somewhere near Aldershot, and hunt balls. My memories of hunt balls could send me into a downward spiral right now: cold damp evenings freezing to death in a hideous pale-blue-tulle party frock with a tweed overcoat on top, scared stiff at being driven by some youth who had not long passed his driving test (and would probably have lots to drink in the course of the evening) to the Hog's Back Hotel or wherever the party was, and back.

One particular evening stands out. On the way to the ball in a car full of young people, I decided I should touch up my lipstick. Being shy about doing this in public, I didn't take out a mirror but fumbled around in my bag until my fingers felt the lipstick tube, and then I went over my lips boldly enough to last all evening. When we arrived, I went in smiling and greeting friends but got an odd, embarrassed response. What was wrong? I went into the cloakroom to leave my coat, glanced in the mirror – and saw with horror that my lips were bright turquoise-blue (eyeliner came in lipstick-like tubes in those days; my fingers had settled on the wrong little cylinder). It's impossible to understand now how shocking blue lips were, back in the Fifties – let alone in that staid venue; I like to imagine that perhaps Sid Vicious was there as a young guest or waiter that evening and that my lips inspired Punk.

At hunt balls there was a dance called the Paul Jones, designed to discomfort not-particularly-attractive young women. In a Paul Jones, all the young men form a big circle and revolve around an inner circle made up of all the girls. The men and women are facing each other, and when the music stops, they must dance with the person they find themselves opposite. It should have been entertaining, but you were never
exactly
opposite someone when the music stopped, and in my experience, the men who should have danced with me usually made a dive for the girls on either side. (Step forward, offender Jeremy Quinlan!) To be fair, I expect it was all just as unnerving for young men – years before, when my brother went to his first hunt ball, the girl he was dancing with suddenly slapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘I'll be man now.'

Hunt balls went on, I suppose – and probably still do – but pretty soon I could forget about them because the New World arrived in our neighbourhood. The Officers' Club in nearby Aldershot (still ‘Home of the British Army' in those days) introduced Rock and Roll evenings. I could rock and roll far better than I could waltz or foxtrot, and in my circular felt skirt (made by Moira who was trying to earn extra money by sewing these for friends) with a paper nylon petticoat underneath to puff it out, and my wide cinched-in belt and Diana Dors bosom (i.e., two ice-cream cones) under a tight sweater, I was suddenly in my element. Nearly all the girls in Fleet in my day met our first boyfriends there – I was madly in love with two young officers, not at the same time of course, but one after the other; they were both from the Parachute Regiment. My sisters called me the ParaPet. I could have become engaged to one of them but, extraordinarily, was sensible enough not to take that step.

8

My career on the fashion pages of the
Sunday Times
hardly needs explaining if you have seen the film
The Devil Wears Prada
. My boss, an American called Ernestine Carter, was the terrifying editor played by Meryl Streep, though she looked entirely different. Mrs Carter was tiny, with a black velvet bow or a small Jacqueline Kennedy-type pillbox hat on short, greying curly hair; her clothes were simple and immaculate (again, like Mrs Kennedy's) and she wore low-heeled pumps in patent leather. I can't really put my finger on why she was so scary; she had odd, flecked browny-green eyes, but it wasn't them that made your stomach turn over if she looked at you; I think there are just some people in the world who instil fear. Mademoiselle Anita in Paris was one, and Mrs Carter was another – and she was similar to Mademoiselle Anita in so far as no one seemed to know anything about her past or her background in the US, or how she got to be at the
Sunday Times
; the only thing we knew about her is that she was married to the Old Etonian antiquarian book expert at Sotheby's.

I worked for her for years, went on press trips abroad with her – once all the way to Hong Kong – but I never called her anything except Mrs Carter, and though I became quite fond of her, I never lost my fear. Years after I had left the newspaper world, married AW, gone abroad and had children, I happened to be in London when she died, and the
Sunday Times
asked me to write her obituary. I was horrified, it was like lesé-majesty, I couldn't possibly do it, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy, and I came to the conclusion that she was dictating it herself, from above.

One of Mrs Carter's many quirks was a belief that people who wrote to newspapers were mad, and that mad people couldn't spell – and the weird thing is that she was often right about the spelling. Her letters back to her readers would go something like: ‘Dear Mrs Throgmorton. Thank you for your letter, I would have taken your criticisms more seriously had you not written “fashion” with two s's.'

(I myself was to continue to put letters in the wrong envelopes; most embarrassingly when I replied to a reader who wanted to know what to do about her hairy legs, and put my letter in an envelope addressed to another woman who had complained about a special-offer dress she had bought from us being so transparent that her black shirt showed through. The result was that the hairy-legged reader got advice suggesting she lined her dress so ‘the black' didn't show through, and the transparent-dress reader got a letter suggesting she wax her hairy legs.)

My main job on the
Sunday Times
was to assist the journalist doing the ‘Young Grown-Ups' column (the very name of the column tells you what ‘young' fashions were like then), and I also had to help Mrs Carter's assistant organise the photographs for the main fashion page. Both of these jobs involved doing almost exactly what I had done at the
Daily Express
 – ordering in clothes and taking them to the studios to be photographed – but the really good part was that my beloved sister Moira was there in the same office (writing features).

Then an extraordinary thing happened – it was like another, smaller Hollywood film within the main
Devil Wears Prada
one. The woman I was assisting was expecting a baby, and one morning something began to go wrong and her doctor told her to go home and rest and not to even think of going back to the office for the remainder of her pregnancy.

There was no one else to do her job and so it fell to me to get her column to press that week, and start working on another one for the following Sunday. I remember I wrote about accessories made of cork (probably because I'd managed to think up what I imagined was a snappy headline: ‘Corking Good Fun!' or ‘What a Corker!' – I can't now recall what I called the feature) and the text was pretty much as dire as the story I had done on the
Daily Express
. But somehow the weeks went by and no replacement was found for me, and so I simply segued into being the editor of the Young Fashion page – as we now decided to call it because girls were not dressing like Young Grown-Ups any more.

What an incredible piece of luck for me – and it was luck I could really enjoy because my previous boss's pregnancy went well and her baby was safely delivered. To be truthful, none of it had anything much to do with my ability; it was just that I happened to be a person of the
right age
in the right place at the right time. I suppose the only thing you could say in my favour was that I accepted the challenge and gave the job my best shot – and, all of a sudden, on my own, I began to get the ideas I had never managed to come up with on the
Express
.

Socially, though, I was still pathetically naive and extremely shy but with an impulsive streak – a combination that tended to land me in awkward situations. Some of them wouldn't have happened if only we'd had mobile phones. This was one: Martin, my boyfriend at the time (he worked in the advertising department of the
Sunday Times
), was going to stay with friends in Ibiza and asked me to go with him. I couldn't because I had work to do over the bank holiday weekend, so he wrote down the address – it was all in Spanish – in case I changed my mind, and left. I managed to finish my work sooner than expected, so I sent Martin a telegram (we still had them in those days), saying I was on my way, and giving the flight details. My plane arrived in Ibiza very early in the morning so I was not completely surprised that there was no one there to meet me. They'll be along at a more civilised time, I thought to myself, maybe eight or eight thirty am, but no one had come by ten so I asked a taxi to take me to the address on the piece of paper. When we arrived, however, it wasn't a private house, but a villa agency, a place that sold and let accommodation. I didn't know the surname of Martin's friends – and without that the agency couldn't identify or locate them. As I stood there, dazed by the awfulness of travelling all this way and spending all that money for nothing, the agency man said, ‘Oh, we have a telegram, maybe it is from you? It has no name on it so we couldn't deliver it,' and he produced the telegram I'd sent Martin – which meant that no one was even aware I was coming. I knew there was a flight back to London that evening and I had five pounds in my pocket, so I decided to go and get something to eat at a café which Martin and I had been to on a previous holiday and try to while away a few hours there before catching the flight home again. Through my tears I told the agency man my plan and then went and sat, despairing, in the café (the English couple who ran it were much less nice to me when they knew I only had five pounds than they had been the year before when I'd had Martin and more money) where I prayed for a miracle. It happened about an hour later: Martin and his friends drove up in their car . . .