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  Moira was the one who had to deal with all this; she was still living at home then, working as a secretary in Exeter. She earned so little, she told me later, that when she sent her suit to the dry-cleaner’s she had to stay home until it was ready because she didn’t have another outfit she could wear at the office.

  After a year or so, Dad was offered another job, this time with a firm called I.J. Morgan in Taunton – I only remember that because Tessa and I made up a rhyme which went ‘Silly old I.J. Morgan/Blows his nose like an organ’, which must have annoyed our parents even more than the one about the banded krait in India.

  We moved to an old rented farmhouse in a village not far from Taunton and went to the village school where all the classes were taught in the same room, and we developed Somerset accents. Tessa had a party piece: ‘The cuckoo is a telltale, a mischief-making burrrrrrd, he floys to east, he floys to west, and whisperrrrrrs into every nest the wicked things he’s hurrrrrrrrd.’

  The folk in our village were like characters from Cold Comfort Farm: our cleaning lady, Ivy, and her husband were proud of the fact that they had not addressed a single word to each other for twenty years (messages were transmitted via their daughter, June), and we knew a grumpy farmer who never spoke to his family at all – at meals he would just stare fixedly at whatever he wanted passed to him, and eventually someone would notice and hand down the salt or salad cream or whatever it was. We could never imagine how he and his wife had ever managed to get together to produce children.

  All my life I have been prone to sudden obsessions – in Fleet once, I doggedly modelled and painted little clay candleholders in the shape of choirboys (basically a cone shape with a round head on top). It was Prue’s idea, and the local giftshop bought them from me at Christmas. In Somerset my craze was for curing mouse skins to sell to furriers. It had occurred to me that you never heard of coats made of mouse or rat, so there was obviously a gap in the market which I could fill and become rich. I found out about curing skins and bought alum from the chemist, and when all was ready I collected dead mice from the traps which were set around the farm and borrowed a sharp knife from the kitchen to cut and skin them with. But when I laid my first mouse corpse out on the chopping board, tummy up, and held my knife ready, I realised I could never cut it open and skin it, even if my life depended on it.

  A more enduring passion was my collection of matchbox labels – why couldn’t I have gone for something like Dinky Toys or Hornby trains that would now be worth a fortune? Matchbox labels are probably one of the very few items in the world that haven’t gained an iota of value since the Fifties. I looked through one of my albums of labels recently and out fell a letter from the secretary of the British Governor of Uganda whom I had obviously plagued with correspondence. It is written on paper embossed with the words ‘Government House’, and is dated 15 January 1951; it reads, ‘Dear Brigid. Both your letters, the one you wrote in November, and the second one written on 6 January, reached His Excellency the Governor; but I am afraid that whoever told you that he collected matchbox tops made a mistake for he does not do so. All I can do is return your own tops and hope that you may be able to find someone else to “swap” with.’

  Mum and Dad gave me four hens for my birthday that year – I think it was to teach me responsibility or perhaps to make up for the failure of my mouse-coat enterprise. I was to look after them and collect their eggs and sell them to Mum to earn some pocket money. The hens were huge Rhode Island Reds and I was terrified of them, especially as they fought and pecked each other’s feathers out so they had horrible bald patches as if someone had started plucking them for the oven. In the end I was too frightened to go into their enclosure so I used to throw their food over the netting and Mum had to collect the eggs. Eventually she took them over altogether.

  Two or three classes above me at the village school (meaning she was about fourteen), there was a farmer’s daughter called Marge who was having an affair with a boy called Eddie, a young cowman (I’ve changed the names). She wondered if I’d like to watch them ‘doing it’ at their next rendezvous in a barn. I said yes – I was genuinely curious, but Eddie said no.

  It was all very simple and innocent in those days – somehow even Marge and Eddie seemed quite innocent. Tessa and I thought the naughtiest thing we’d ever heard was my mother’s story about some boys she’d known when she was young who would look in the phone book for people called Smelly and then ring them up and ask, ‘Are you Smelly?’ and when they said yes, the boys would say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? Ha ha ha.’

  But gradually the bad old outside world was beginning to impinge – I think my parents took the Daily Sketch as well as The Times because I was horrified by the sensational stories in some tabloid at home and it couldn’t have been the Mail because that was a broadsheet in those days, and it wouldn’t have been the Daily Mirror because that was LABOUR. (My grandmother would never buy TUC biscuits because she believed they were made by the Trades Union Congress.)

  The first news story that shocked me was the appalling murder of the Drummond family in 1952: Sir Jack Drummond, a distinguished biochemist, was camping in the South of France along with his wife and daughter and they were all killed one night, for apparently no reason. (The murder was never solved satisfactorily.) Oh God, I remember thinking, no one is safe anywhere. That same year another violent case made banner headlines – a shoot-out on the roof of a warehouse in London between the police and two young men, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley. A policeman was killed and Bentley was hanged the following year. There was huge discussion about this across the nation – and at home – because he had not been the one to pull the trigger, but he was older (twenty) and had shouted ‘Let him have it’ to the younger man (sixteen) with the gun.

  But there were heroes as well as villains: Captain Carlsen who clung for days to his stricken ship, the Flying Enterprise, until just minutes before it sank off Falmouth (the exact opposite of the Italian captain who, fifty years later, became famous for abandoning the Costa Concordia and its passengers). And there were newspaper celebs too – I remember everyone at home tut-tutting over Lady Docker who, in the early Fifties, was the first person I can think of who was famous for no other reason apart from the fact that she was married to a very rich man and had a golden Daimler car.

  After a while, Tessa and I were packed off from the farmhouse to what had once been a large convent near Taunton, but now had only a couple of dozen or so boarders. I hated not being at home with our parents, especially as they lived in the same county and I couldn’t really understand why we’d been sent away. Only the other day my brother-in-law suggested that it was probably because our mother wanted to play bridge, and perhaps that was it, but it could have just been because putting your children in boarding school then was the ‘done thing’. Whatever the reason we were there, I cried all the time – the nuns said I was washing all the colour out of my eyes – but I think Tessa must have quite liked it because I remember having to urge her to cry too, so that they would send us home, but of course they didn’t.

  In my homesickness I wet my bed, which brought the punishment of having to sleep alone in a dormitory that had twenty empty beds in it, which of course made me wet the bed even more. But back in my proper dorm it wasn’t much better; the other girls used to throw my beloved teddy bear, Valena, a distinguished ‘older woman’ in my eyes (she had been my sister Moira’s), from one side of the room to the other, and because she was ancient and bald they said she didn’t look like a bear but a pig, and since she had no eyes and was shabby, they said she probably had fleas and named her Flea Pig. I felt such hurt and humiliation on behalf of my old friend – I imagine it felt a bit like being a mother whose child is being bullied. After the holidays, I never again took her out in public, but kept her in my bedroom at home which I shared with Tessa.

  Tessa and I still bickered and argued non-stop and this led to the worst punishment we ever had. It happened one half-ter
m at home: Dad warned that if we didn’t stop quarrelling he would take us back to school for the rest of the holiday – and we didn’t, and he did. Crying and pleading, clinging to the banisters, on to the front door – nothing melted his heart: we were told to get into the car and were driven back to school. Following that trauma, we managed to live peacefully together by dividing our room with a piece of string that neither of us was allowed to cross; later we were given separate rooms (I loved mine passionately and painted all the terrible brown junkshop-type furniture pale turquoise-blue).

  My moment of glory at the convent – rapidly followed by total humiliation – came when I was chosen to play the part of God the Father in the school concert. I had to stand on a table hidden behind a tall screen so as to be mysterious, and recite the gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word . . .’ I was doing fine until the screen fell down and God the Father was revealed in school uniform perched on a table, and the parents in the audience started to giggle. In the end even I could see that it was funny. My real acting triumph came on another occasion when, sadly, there were no parents present, just nuns and girls. I was squashed into a cardboard box with a TV-screen-shaped hole cut in it so that only my face showed, and acted the part of the hugely popular TV presenter Sylvia Peters. No one remembers her now, but she was on the original Come Dancing and was the person chosen to present the Coronation in 1953; she also trained the Queen for her Christmas speeches – which is probably why, if you listen to the Queen’s voice and Sylvia Peters’s voice, they are indistinguishable one from another.

  One of the younger nuns at school was a brilliant storyteller – but to this day I have never been able to be in a room at night without the curtains drawn because of her tale of someone seeing the devil’s face pressed against a window in the dark. That was frightening enough, but then army friends of my parents rented a house that turned out to be seriously haunted and wrote an account – it was a diary – of their life there. We were not even supposed to know they’d had any such experience, let alone read the diary, but of course we children overheard them talking about it and ‘borrowed’ the diary from Mum’s room and ever since then the combination of their terrifying ghost stories, plus the nun’s tales, plus Daily Sketch crime stories, plus the scary memories from India, has meant that I cannot stay alone anywhere that isn’t on a second or third floor with four locks on the doors and windows for fear of ghosts/burglars/murderers. (Years later, when I became a journalist, I tried to persuade my parents’ friends to publish their extraordinary diary, but by then their children had grown up and had careers and they didn’t want the kind of publicity this would bring – but I often remember it and still think it would make a gripping book, and it must still be around somewhere . . .)

  My best pal at school was called Fatty (I was known as Beaky because my initials were BK). Fatty and I drew up a written pledge vowing that we would never wear lipstick, and signed it in our BLOOD. I think this was because we’d decided we hated grown-ups, especially our mothers (who wore lipstick), because they had sent us away to school in the first place. At that time I must have looked an even worse sight than I’d been in the days when my mother and aunt thought I was so plain, because by now I had a plate to straighten my teeth, as well as glasses – which I got by pretending I couldn’t read the eye test, I so badly wanted them as I felt they were glamorous.

  Aside from having ordinary friends like Fatty, all the younger girls at school seemed to have passionate crushes on the older ones. I’d never come across this before, but soon developed my own which was on the sporty games captain, Grania Fetherstonhaugh (I have not made this name up), whom I worshipped from a distance. As far as I know, everyone’s passions remained this way – from a distance; the nearest we got to our heroines was to send them holy pictures with doting messages on the back. Just before I left this school at around twelve years old, I received my own admiring holy picture from one of the new girls. She was called Vivien, I couldn’t really believe it, and to this day wonder if someone was pulling my leg or felt sorry for me.

  Tessa and I had to leave the convent when my father got a job in Aldershot and we moved back to my grandparents’ house in Fleet. By now they had died, and the house had been converted into two flats – we Keenans had the top one, and my widowed Aunt Thea and Jinny and Prue and Simon lived downstairs. We pushed a Hoover tube through the floor in the corner of our dining room and this became our home-made house phone for family communications. I was sent as a day girl to Farnborough Convent and Dad ferried me to Fleet station to catch the train every morning – we were nearly always late because I was never ready in time, and that quite often meant having to run down the platform and make a terrifying leap on to the moving train, something that still comes into my dreams.

  The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth was looming; somehow Dad got two tickets for it and promised me I could go with him if I gave up biting my nails. I had always bitten my nails – despite bitter aloes painted on them, a special plate with loops over my teeth so they couldn’t meet to bite, plasters on my fingers, gloves on my hands; all backed up with hundreds of firm resolutions, but I could not give up the habit. A place at the Coronation was the ultimate bribe and I really meant to stop, but when the Great Nail Inspection came, I failed it – Dad took Moira instead. Miserable, I decided to run away and packed a little cardboard attaché case. Halfway down the road I met Aunt Thea. ‘Where are you off to?’ she asked. ‘I am running away,’ I said sulkily. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s a pity, we are having scones for tea.’ Greed overcame rage and self-hatred and I turned back. (I went on biting my nails for decades; definitely not a good look – especially for a fashion editor, as I was later to become. I held cigarettes and wine glasses with my knuckles, or wore Eylure false nails that risked coming off at any moment, and then – just as built-on artificial nails were invented which would have solved my problem – I gave up the habit, surprisingly in Kazakhstan which, of all AW’s postings, is the one that gave me the greatest stress.)

  In the meantime the rest of us watched the Coronation on television at our neighbours’ house. They were a mother and daughter: the mother was ancient and had an eye that looked, rather disgustingly, as if it was popping out; the daughter, also old, was strict but kind. They were the only people we knew who owned a television – it had a small screen with a kind of magnifying glass over it, and wasn’t anything like the ones we watch today, but they were generous with it, cramming chairs into their sitting room for all the important ‘national’ occasions: the Coronation, the Boat Race, the Grand National and any big sporting events. These all seemed to be about running, with the four-minute-mile record being broken every week in the Fifties, but what strikes me now is how white British sports were then – all the athletic stars were thin, sinewy, white men with hairy legs like Roger Bannister and Chris Chataway.

  Everyone in Britain looked at the same TV programmes in those days because there wasn’t any choice; as soon as there were more channels available this didn’t happen again for decades – until quite recently with the coming of brilliant series such as The Wire or The Killing or Spiral or Wolf Hall – not to mention MasterChef – which have reunited the viewing public again.

  In the early Fifties everyone seemed to read the same books as well (I still have some of them: The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Seven Years in Tibet and The Ascent of Everest, passed down from my parents), and we watched the same films, mostly war movies then – The Wooden Horse, Above Us the Waves, The Colditz Story, The Cruel Sea (from the book which was notorious among teenagers because it had rude bits in it) – so that as far as we children were concerned the war had been won by the actors Jack Hawkins, Richard Todd, John Mills, Michael Redgrave and John Gregson. My own favourite film was Where No Vultures Fly, about a game warden in Africa, with Anthony Steel and Dinah Sheridan (in Horrockses frocks). It was the big ‘family’ film of 1951; every person now my age was probably taken to see it as a child. I loved it – because of its Af
rican location which felt a bit like India to me – much more than I did Genevieve, the next great blockbuster starring Kay Kendall and Kenneth More, which came out two years later.

  Our cousins were all away at school by now, and it wasn’t long before Tessa and I were both sent off to board at Farnborough Convent, but during the holidays, especially when Moira came down from London at the weekends to join us, it was like being in an Enid Blyton sort of family of six, aged between nine and nineteen. (David was married by now and had left home.) The others used to tease me about having a big mouth, and once betted me that I would not be able to fit a whole orange into it. Triumphantly, I manoeuvred the orange in – but it lodged behind my front teeth and blocked up my nose and my throat so that I couldn’t breathe, and they were all so busy laughing that they didn’t notice I was suffocating. I was grunting and waving my arms in panic when Moira suddenly realised what was happening – but there was absolutely no way to pull out the orange, so she cut a hole in the bit that showed at the front of my wide-open mouth, and then squeezed my cheeks to get the juice out until the orange was shrunken enough to remove, and I survived.

  Dad’s land-agency duties in Aldershot involved the disused Longmoor Military Railway which most people weren’t even aware existed – and that is how he knew that the Hollywood superstars Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger were coming there to film Bhowani Junction, a story by John Masters about Indian freedom fighters trying to blow up a train. Ava Gardner played an Anglo-Indian woman and Stewart Granger a British officer (in love with her of course). Dad arranged for us to go and watch the filming which was extra thrilling as it had to be done at night in the dark. Tessa did – probably still does – a good imitation of me tripping along the railway line in my little Louis heels (I’d dressed up) holding out my autograph book and calling: ‘Miss Gardner, Miss Gardner . . .’