FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (26 page)

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.

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.