FULL MARKS FOR TRYING Page 9

  At the convent one of our schoolmates was Anne Robinson (later known for The Weakest Link on TV). I read somewhere that she hated the place, but I quite liked it: most of the nuns were Irish (as usual) and superstitious, and would say things like ‘There goes Brigid Keenan doing the Devil’s work on earth’ or ‘Look at Tessa Keenan being blown along by the Devil like a little piece of fluff’ – and though I was hopeless at Latin and maths, and spent many miserable hours shivering on the muddy hockey/lacrosse pitch, we had a good English teacher and there were lots of other girls who lived abroad and had seen the world outside Hampshire, as we had done. (When she came back from India, my poor sister Moira got into trouble at her school because every time the geography teacher mentioned a place – Delhi, Lahore, Basra, Damascus, Beirut, Marseilles or Paris – she’d put up her hand and say, ‘I’ve been there,’ which of course she had, but the teacher accused her of lying.) My own lasting friend from that time, Diana, who lived in Guyana, came to school in England on a banana boat from Trinidad.

  The most shameful thing I did at Farnborough Convent was in my early days there: my form-mates and I put a wastepaper basket on top of the door so it would fall on our biology (bilge) teacher. All went according to plan except the teacher burst into tears and we were all appalled and mortified to have caused such distress. I still regret my part in it.

  The star event of my schooldays – because it felt just like something out of an old-fashioned boarding-school story – was the midnight feast we held in my last term. We boarders couldn’t leave the school grounds, but day-girls were commissioned to buy us various things to eat and drink, and we all sneaked out of our rooms and met, at midnight, under the stage, and tucked into the food we’d brought – all the time trembling with a kind of delicious fear that we would be discovered. Amazingly we weren’t.

  The organisers of the midnight feast included two of my best friends, Brenda Tandy (niece of the actress, Jessica Tandy) and Ann Coxon; we have stayed in touch. Ann Coxon became a high-powered doctor in Harley Street and, surprisingly perhaps, for the ex-head-girl of a convent, converted to Islam. Brenda met a rich Italian textile magnate not long after leaving school and it looked as though her story would have a fairytale ending, but at a society wedding in Turin, she leaned against a first-floor balcony for the photographer, and it gave way – she fell on to steps below, breaking her back. At the time, her husband made all the exquisite, pale, double-faced gaberdine fabrics for the popular couturier Courrèges, but then, suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, Yves Saint Laurent became everyone’s favourite Paris designer with his garments in black or navy jersey, and the textile firm, not equipped to make knitted cloth, went bust, and shortly after this catastrophe Brenda’s husband died. She has spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair, has raised three children with no one to support her, and no income apart from what she earned herself in a career as a fashion consultant. She has had the most difficult path, but all through it she has never ceased to be glamorous and indomitable, and I admire her more than anyone on earth. I sometimes think back to that midnight feast when, of course, none of us had any idea of what the future held.

  At Landour in the holidays we occasionally put on plays for the adults. Prue wrote these and sent us the scripts to learn at school, so we’d be ready to start rehearsing as soon as we got home. Once I had to play Dr Watson in a Sherlock Holmes-type drama; my lines, in verse, included the words ‘pursued by robber bands’, but when I spoke them they came out as ‘pursued by rubber bands’ and the play came to a sudden end with the cast collapsed in a heap of giggles. The passion for dressing up started again – it went on for years in various forms. Aunt Joan (who by now had become an air hostess working with a long-forgotten airline called Airwork at Blackbushe airport near Camberley) got engaged to a short, bald man whom we nicknamed the Golf Ball. One evening while she was waiting nervously for him to collect her for a date, we thought it would be funny for one of us (I think Prue was chosen) to dress up in a man’s suit, put a pudding basin on her head and kneel in the hall on a pair of men’s shoes, pretending to be the Golf Ball, to tease Joan. Of course he arrived early and Prue’s act had to be explained away – but I don’t suppose it crossed his mind that a teenage girl kneeling on the floor with a pudding basin on her head was supposed to be him.

  Or perhaps it did, because the relationship didn’t last and Aunt Joan then became engaged to a dashing Dutchman. Her future mother-in-law, who was wealthy and smart and lived in Mayfair (which impressed us all because of Monopoly), invited her to treat herself to some new underwear at Harrods as a present. Joan went and bought some pretty things, as well as a new roll-on (a roll-on was a sort of elasticated corset, a bit like Spanx knickers without the crotch), and then, not wanting to take her own disgusting, old grey and perished roll-on away with her, she hid it behind the radiator in the changing room. To her horror, Harrods found it, and sent it to her mother-in-law-to-be who asked if it was hers. She denied all knowledge of it, and she married the Dutchman.

  Around this time – I had just started commuting every day to secretarial school in London – a young American called Charlie Hudson, a friend of cousins in Philadelphia, wrote to our mother to say he was touring England and could he come and stay with us? AN AMERICAN! FROM AMERICA, THE PROMISED LAND! COMING TO STAY! I immediately developed a crush on him although I had never set eyes on him.

  To tease me, the family created a brilliant life-size dummy, ‘Charlie Hudson’, and one day propped him up on the sofa in my parents’ sitting room upstairs. When Dad fetched me off the train from London he said, ‘We must get back quickly, Charlie’s arrived . . .’ I was thrilled and quickly touched up my lipstick and powdered my nose in the car, and rushed up the outside stairs to our flat to meet the famous American. Everyone was gathered there ready to join in the joke when I discovered that ‘Charlie’ was a dummy, and we were all shrieking with laughter when THE REAL CHARLIE HUDSON arrived, earlier than expected, at our upstairs front door. Panic ensued, we couldn’t explain away the dummy on the sofa, so my mother picked it up and threw it out of the window. But then there was a new problem: how to stop Charlie Hudson going anywhere near the window and seeing a corpse lying on the lawn below. ‘Oh my! What a beautiful English garden you have,’ he said, approaching the window eagerly; he had to be tugged back, literally, by my father.

  Another dressing-up joke nearly ended in death. One afternoon we children put a ladder up to the same sitting-room window and opened it, so that later in the evening, Simon, disguised as a burglar, with some of his teeth blackened out, could climb up and appear through the curtains while we were all watching telly (we had just got our own by this time). It had been carefully planned so we cousins knew this was going to happen, but no one had foreseen our father’s reaction – he vaulted over the sofa and grabbed Simon by the neck, shouting, ‘I’ve got you, you bastard,’ and tried to push him back off the ladder. Simon was shrieking, ‘UNCLE JOHN! IT’S ME, SIMON!’, but Dad was too full of adrenalin to understand, and we had to pull him off poor Simon.

  Looking back at those years, it seems we had so much fun despite not having a computer or iPads or Kindles or mobiles or games consoles – we were so easily pleased. On Sundays, when all the shops were firmly closed, the family would happily go for a drive – sometimes to look at something specific, but more often than not just ambling about in the car looking at the scenery. (Our grandparents had done this too, in their Morris with its huge mudguards and running-boards – its number was BOR 718, and it’s a puzzle to me why I can remember that, when I can’t always remember the numberplate of my own car now.)

  Occasionally there would be a TREAT – a coach trip from Fleet to something cultural in London. Going to London was an event that involved dressing up: Mum would wear a hat – women never went out without hats or headscarves and gloves in those days – and Dad would wear a bowler. Every man wore a bowler – Waterloo Bridge at commuter times was a sea of bobbing black bowlers, and then a
t some point – in the late Seventies? In the early Eighties? – they vanished as suddenly and completely as the Indian vulture.

  We were usually taken to matinees – at the Old Vic for Shakespeare, Covent Garden for the ballet and to ‘suitable’ musicals: I still find myself singing bits of the songs from The Boy Friend and Salad Days, and I can recite that first verse of ‘The Hippopotamus Song’ (‘Mud, mud, glorious mud’), from At the Drop of a Hat with Flanders and Swann that has gone into the British DNA.

  Outside Harrods, on one of the London trips, Mum and Dad bumped into Danny Kaye whose films (Hans Christian Andersen, The Court Jester, Knock on Wood ) we’d seen and adored. They knew his face so well, but could not remember his name, so after they had exchanged smiles, Mum said, ‘I’m so sorry, I know we’ve met at the Bridge Club in Fleet, but I can’t remember your name,’ and he said, ‘Danny Kaye,’ and they were overwhelmed with embarrassment.

  My twelfth birthday treat was an outing to The Mousetrap and I screamed so loudly Dad said I would have to go out if I did it again. And during the Festival of Britain we were taken to the Pleasure Gardens in Battersea Park where we went on the Rotor which was the biggest thrill of all time. (To ride the Rotor you went into a giant metal drum, stood with your back against the wall, and then the whole thing spun round so fast that when they lowered the floor – and everyone screeched with fear – you remained glued to the wall by centrifugal force.)

  There were lots of young people the same ages as us in Fleet, mostly children of other army, or service, families, and we entertained ourselves pottering about locally on our bikes, or going for walks or playing tennis. Occasionally we’d make an excursion to the Lido swimming pool in Aldershot or to the cinema there where movies were seen through a fog of cigarette smoke and part of the entertainment was the witty barracking from the soldier audience. Once, on a cinema outing with my parents, a soldier dropped a huge lump of something sticky – bubble gum or toffee – between me and my seat back. It hardened over the hours I unknowingly leaned on it, and glued me to the seat so firmly that I had to struggle to stand up for the National Anthem at the end of the evening under Dad’s stern eye.

  Everything then seemed wonderful – or is it just that looking back from a distance of over sixty years has coloured it all with a rose tint? In my memory now, Hawley Lake, where we often went, lots of us together, to swim (and, in my case, to show off my new pink ‘playsuit’), is as glamorous as the French Riviera. I don’t ever want to go back there and discover that it is really just a pool of black murky water surrounded by mud.

  How anyone went on holidays abroad in the Fifties and Sixties baffles me as British currency restrictions meant that for much of the time you could only take forty-five pounds to spend. How we as a family ever went abroad baffles me even more, because my parents never had any money, but they were extremely thrifty, they saved, and somehow managed to give us great adventures: we went on pilgrimages by coach to Lourdes and to the Passion Play at Oberammergau, we had skiing holidays twice (more coach trips), and a couple of times we stayed with friends in Majorca where I went through the falling-in-love-with-a-Spanish-waiter/Ernest-Hemingway/bullfighting/The-Sun-Also-Rises/adolescent-English-girl-in-Spain ritual (we did actually see the great El Cordobés fight in Majorca on one of these holidays). Or we would go in our old car to the South of France and stay in a cheap hotel or with other friends there. At first, wherever we were Dad spoke Hindustani, but after a while he developed a vocabulary of simple French and Spanish words mixed together, e.g., merçias. In France once he asked for directions at a crossroads – ‘Ici or aussi,’ he said, indicating the two roads. ‘Aussi,’ pointed the Frenchman without batting an eye. At the tourist information office in Palma once (booking the El Cordobés bullfight tickets actually) he was trying to find the woman with white hair who had been so helpful earlier in the morning, so he asked, ‘Donde esta la madame avec les chevaux blanco?’, which could be translated as ‘Where is the lady with the white horses?’, but they understood him immediately.

  Dad was not a good driver – in the early days of motorways and motorway cafés in France, we watched from our table as he reversed into an empty police car parked outside (embarrassingly, the gendarmes from the car were sitting next to us and watching him too, whooping and cheering him on). He once won some sort of award from the British police for careful driving; they said it was because he had indicated ‘well in advance’ that he was going to turn right, but we all secretly thought that he’d probably had the indicator out all morning. On the other hand, there were very few motorways and no satnavs in those days, and it amazes me now that Dad managed to get us right across France – including through French cities like Rouen and Lyons – quite regularly, as well as finding our way in Spain, even to the door of our hotel in some back street in Barcelona, so I shouldn’t criticise his driving.

  It was in France that my new best friend Anne and I heard that an American aircraft carrier, the Newport News, had docked in Villefranche-sur-Mer not far from where we were staying. We must have been fifteen then, on holiday with our parents and our younger siblings, Tessa and Anne’s brother Simon, and slightly bored, and thought it would be nice to meet some sailors. When everyone believed we were asleep we got dressed, put on lipstick, crept out and started walking to Villefranche. Luckily for us, Simon and Tessa, who were obviously slightly more sensible than we were, decided to alert the parents. Anne and I were collected off the dark road to Villefranche by two furious fathers – I still breathe a sigh of relief when I think of it.

  Some of our holidays took us home to our roots in Ireland. We once went to a place called Glendalough in County Wicklow where I scrambled up to the top of a grassy bank, straightened up under a wooden sign to St Kevin’s Kitchen which I hadn’t noticed and was knocked out cold – my body must have dropped like a stone because it squashed a mouse that I fell on. (They found it when they picked me up.) I came round in the car, hearing Dad, who was normally famous for his charm, being brusque with someone who’d offered to help. ‘Not unless you are a qualified doctor,’ Dad was saying, but I suppose he was anxious.

  I didn’t seem to have much luck in Ireland – in the chaos of our arrival on an earlier family visit to meet our great-grandmother in Dublin, my finger got slammed in the car door. Just as I was getting over that trauma I was told to take my chewing gum out of my mouth and come and say hello, politely, to Great-Granny. Stupidly I stuck the chewing gum in the palm of my hand which she then shook (I thought she would kiss me) and when my hand came back the gum had gone.

  Before beginning the journey home to England by ferry after one of these Irish trips, Mum and Aunt Thea spent some time winding cloth around their top halves, over their bras, under their jumpers, and shrieking with laughter – much to the bafflement of us children. They didn’t really explain what they were doing, but I think that fabric must have been rationed in England and not in Ireland, and so, being keen dressmakers (almost everyone made their own clothes in those days), they were smuggling some home.

  Twice, along with our cousins and Aunt Thea, we went to stay in a convent in Brittany which took paying guests. We loved these particular holidays because all the family was together, the beaches were vast and there were activities on them organised by something called the As-Mickey Club – where we met other children we could hate together; plus the local café had a baby-foot machine (table football), and we were free to roam around. The convent locked its doors early in the evening and we liked the fact that if the grown-ups had been out having drinks they had to climb through our bedroom windows to get in again.

  I blame one of these holidays for turning me into the most indecisive person in the world. Dad took Tessa and me to a souvenir shop and told us to pick one little thing each as a present. Tessa chose quickly, but I hummed and hawed and couldn’t make up my mind between a small china clog and a tiny painted plate. This went on for so long that Dad began to get irritated, and then the shop owner said, ‘Ah, let the
leetle girl ’ave both, and I will only charge you for one zing.’ That was it – since then I have never been able to make a decision about anything, probably because my subconscious is telling me that if I drag it out long enough I can have it all.

  In 1956 the Hungarian Revolution took place. You wouldn’t think this could possibly have any bearing on our lives in Fleet, but in fact a big camp was set up for the refugees in the nearby barracks in Crookham, and we all volunteered to go and help; my job involved helping to sort the hundreds of donated men’s shirts into sizes. (In all, 22,000 Hungarian refugees came to Britain; not all of them were in the camp near Fleet, of course, but they got a good reception wherever they went – unlike the welcome their country has given to the recent influx of refugees from the Middle East.) Lots of the refugees seemed to be performers of one kind or another. A friend of ours who was helping list their qualifications for jobs in Britain asked a man who’d said he was a lion tamer if he could do anything else, and he said, ‘Oh yes, I can tame tigers too.’ Aunt Thea made lifelong friends with a charming couple who were illusionists.

  I only worked in the camp for about a week in the Christmas holidays, but naturally I developed a crush on a young, gypsy-looking Hungarian – I don’t remember his name now. We hardly spoke because we had no common language, but exchanged addresses and wrote to each other a couple of times: he from Canada where he had been sent to make a new life, and me from Paris where I was at finishing school. My local church, Saint Pierre de Chaillot, had a Hungarian priest who used to translate the letters – quite sadly for me, there was never anything in them that couldn’t be shown to the Father.

  Eventually all of us young left home to go to work or train in London or elsewhere, and Landour, the big Edwardian house in Fleet, was sold (for a pittance – no one realised it was going to be pulled down and half a dozen houses built in its place). Dad took a break from land agency because he was offered a job running a Catholic club in London. This was entirely staffed by Irish people, with a shifty-looking barman who ruled the roost. Tessa lived there with Mum and Dad, and I used to leave the flat I shared with Moira and go and stay when I felt homesick for the family.