FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (15 page)

At one point I grew my hair to avoid the perms, and wore it in a ponytail or a knot on top of my head like the cancan dancer, La Goulue, in Toulouse-Lautrec's painting (we had all seen John Huston's film
Moulin Rouge
a couple of years earlier). For this style to work it had to be puffy with side wisps, and absolutely not like our mother's friend who had her grey hair scraped severely into a bun. Every time I put my hair up I had to ask Tessa: is it La Goulue or Mum's friend? ‘Hmmm,' she'd say, ‘it's veering towards Mum's friend, you need to pull the sides out a bit.'

Bra straps were another worry in the Fifties: exposing even the very edge of one was considered sluttish and unacceptable, so bras came in all kinds of convoluted configurations: backless, halter-necked, strapless, with wide-apart straps or close-together straps . . . The idea that forty-plus years later Madonna would liberate women from all these inhibitions by actually wearing a bra with nothing over it,
in public
, on stage, would have shocked us rigid; when I see someone wearing a T-shirt with cut-away armholes that shamelessly expose the straps underneath (e.g., Laure in the TV series
Spiral
 ), I have to remind myself that it is OK now.

One of the day students at Mademoiselle Anita's when I was there was a pretty pug-faced girl Henrietta Tiarks, who, like me, had to return to England to be presented at Court – she then married the future Duke of Bedford; another was Tessa Kennedy who caused a huge scandal when she ran away with a young socialite, Dominick Elwes, to be married secretly in Gretna Green. (Even more shocking was the arrest of Caroline, another pupil, for posing in obscene photographs.)

Monika Löwenstein, one of my particular friends, left the school at the end of the year and, soon after, married a Habsburg prince in a Cloth of Gold cape (he not she); they travelled to the reception at her castle in a golden carriage drawn by six white horses – it was even reported in the newspapers in England.

This is the sort of thing (well, not the cape and the carriage and horses, of course) that my parents – and I – hoped would happen to me, but it didn't. When I was sixteen, and first went to finishing school in Paris, I remember thinking that I was SURE to be married within the next ten years, and then, ten years later, being positive that I would be married before the end of my Twenties . . . but I still wasn't. (When I was about twenty-seven I made an agreement with my cousin Nicholas that if neither of us were married by the time we were thirty, we would marry each other, but just before the deadline the cad asked if we could postpone it – and not long after that he married a beautiful dancer.)

Being presented at Court was supposed to help in the process of meeting ‘the right person', and my mother's friend Eileen, who had been presented at Court herself, had taken on this duty. I wore a navy-blue princess-line dress and a pink-flowered half-hat of the type Princess Margaret used to wear (she was a bit of a fashion icon in those days). When we arrived at Buckingham Palace, Mum and Dad and Eileen were taken off to sit in the audience, and I was led away to spend what seemed like hours queuing up in an agony of fear with dozens of other debutantes, as we were known, all dressed in similar outfits. Then our names were called out, and one by one, in front of hundreds of spectators, we had to walk across a vast room where the Queen and Prince Philip were seated on thrones, sink into a curtsy in front of each of them, and then walk out the other side. My knees made the most tremendous cracking sound each time I lowered myself down, and Prince Philip smiled slightly. I had been sent for a curtsying lesson to the famous Madame Vacani's dance school (she taught the royal family) – not that I needed it; I could accomplish a flying curtsy while running down a corridor, because at my convent in Farnborough we always had to curtsy when we met Reverend Mother, no matter where we were or what else we were doing.

Afterwards, at the palace, there was a garden party where my parents and I relished the relief of it all being over without any disaster, and tried to look as if this was the sort of thing we did all the time. And not long after this – demonstrating that even the British Establishment recognised that the world was changing – it was announced that, after the following year, 1958, there would be no more presentations at Court.

Sadly – though perhaps it's just as well – there don't seem to be any snaps of me in my presentation outfit, but I do have a photograph that has become a treasure. My mother felt there should be a proper portrait taken to mark my visit to the Palace, and cousin Prue, who was at Guildford Art School then, recommended a fellow student, Tessa Grimshaw, so Mum asked her, and she came to Fleet and did some pictures of me peeking out from behind a tree wearing a Polly Peck dress (they were a good small fashion firm then and not a corporation racked by scandal) – and then, this is the best bit, she went on to become a very famous photographer under her married name, Tessa Traeger. Perhaps my portrait is her very first surviving commission. Mum and Dad also thought my eighteenth birthday, which came in the autumn of that year, should be marked in some way, so they invited three guests to join us for a dinner-dance at the Savoy (poor parents – it must have been sheer hell for them). I had been given the job of selecting the three and, instead of choosing chums from Fleet, I complicated things by suggesting Tim, the son of friends of my parents, whom I hardly knew, but he was tall, dark and handsome. And then, even more oddly, a girl who'd been at my convent – mostly, I think, because I remembered her being quite fat and even uglier than I was and I thought she wouldn't be competition for Tim. But when we all assembled that evening, she had become a slender blonde beauty and she and Tim fell into each other's arms and stayed there all night, leaving me plodding round the dance floor with the second man, who was probably as despondent at the way things had turned out as I was.

Following our presentation, we debutantes ‘came out' into society (you'd have to find different words for this now), and ‘did the season' – this meant going to other debutantes' balls (my parents couldn't afford one for me, thank goodness) where you met eligible young men who, if they were handsome or rich, were known as Debs' Delights. You also had to go to Ascot races and to Henley Regatta and, ideally, to the May Balls at Cambridge. (The unfortunate man who took me to a May Ball was known by my sisters as the Currant Bun as he had bad spots.) I went to some of these events but with a heavy heart: I felt a complete outsider. Debs' Delights didn't fancy me – I never had to worry about them being Unsafe In Taxis; I didn't fit in, I hated it all, and spent a lot of time in ladies' rooms wishing I could go home. But I felt guilty as well because I knew my parents were spending money they couldn't afford trying to give me ‘a good start in life' – it just wasn't a life that I wanted, and there didn't seem to be any other on offer.

It would have been more fun if Anne, my best friend in Fleet, had been sharing all this, but she was not part of that scene; she was doing a secretarial course in Guildford. She met a deb at a party, though. ‘What do you do?' Anne asked the deb. ‘Oh, I am doing the season in London,' she said. ‘What are you doing?' ‘I am doing the season in Guildford,' replied Anne, not having a clue what ‘doing the season' meant. I was really cheered when she told me this story because it proved there was another, normal life out there somewhere.

Then I started a secretarial course myself, in London. This was more like it. Apart from typing THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG in time to a metronome, and learning shorthand (I can still scrawl ‘I am in receipt of your letter' in one contraction, as they are known), we became obsessed with being Beatniks. We smoked like chimneys, outlined our eyes with black pencil, wore a perfume called Evening in Paris, untidied our hair and walked round in bare feet trying to look like the singer Juliette Gréco (I don't know why bare feet came into it; was Juliette known for them?). The sack dress was invented by Balenciaga that year (1957) and Fenwick's store down the road had some cheap copies, but we found you could get the same waistless baggy look by wearing a man's black V-necked sweater back to front over a black pencil skirt. The only problem we had was with lip colour. Real Beatniks in Paris wore very pale pink lipstick – almost white, in fact (frogs' lips, my aunt called them) – and you couldn't get this in England. The first cosmetic company to understand what we wanted was Gala; before that you had to know someone going to France who could get it for you. We Brits were way behind the French then: for instance, the ONLY place in England where you could get your legs waxed in those days was Elizabeth Arden in Bond Street, which cost a fortune. (On the other hand, as we observed on our holidays, it took longer in France for proper lavatory paper to become available: they had cut up newspapers threaded on string for years.)

I qualified as a secretary when I was seventeen and found a cosy job working for three middle-aged ladies who ran an organisation called the Dominions Fellowship Trust; my salary was five pounds a week. I was the junior to an elderly, gloomy spinster secretary – one of my jobs was to buy the stamps at the post office every week, so one day, in an effort to cheer her up, I brought back the biggest, prettiest new-issue Christmas stamps. ‘Look, Miss Porcheron,' I chirped, ‘such lovely stamps!' She glanced at them and groaned. ‘Oh no,' she said glumly, ‘there's so much more to lick.'

The Dominions Fellowship Trust office was just off Sloane Square, by the side of Peter Jones, which was great as my parents and friends could come and chat to me through my window. The boss was called Miss Macdonald of Sleat (pronounced Slate); she was very grand and had been a childhood friend of the Queen Mother. What the Trust did was to look after students from the Commonwealth coming to study, often on scholarships, in the UK. We had, for instance, to find them places to stay during the holidays if they couldn't go home. This involved endless letters to potential hostesses and students, which I would type and send off – quite often in the wrong envelopes, so that I had to spend a good deal of time standing by the pillar box on the pavement outside the office praying that the postman would come and give me back my letters because otherwise disaster would strike. ‘Dear Lady Fotherington, thank you so much for offering to take Njogo Ceesay for the Christmas holidays. He is twenty-four years old, very dark and a little unusual to look at because of the tribal scars on his cheeks, but he has a heart of gold, is an excellent student and I am sure you will find him a perfect guest' would be en route to Mr Ceesay, and ‘Dear Mr Ceesay, I am delighted to tell you that Lady Fotherington has kindly agreed to host you for the Christmas holidays. She is a very large lady with unusual blue hair and you might find her intimidating at first, but she had a heart of gold, etc., etc.' was on its way to Lady Fotherington.

I loved the postman because he always let me go through the letters to find mine, even though it was against all the rules. He used to call me his Little Ray of Sunshine.

Eighteen months later, I left my old ladies and went to work as a typist at Westminster Press Provincial Newspapers's office in London. I didn't want to work on a paper, I had no ambition to become a journalist (‘Men don't like career girls'), but Moira, who was on the
Sunday Times
by then, had begun her own successful newspaper career at Westminster Press as a temp (which is probably why I was offered the job) and she persuaded me to make the move. I worked for the same boss as she had – a wonderful woman with nicotine-stained hair and fingers, called Margaret Pierce, who put together daily women's pages, including fashion articles, which were sent out to the provincial papers in ‘our' group, the main one being the
Northern Echo
of Darlington. I was happy in the typing pool with a couple of new friends, doing letters, and Margaret would occasionally pluck me out and get me to work with her on fashion captions or choosing photographs.

And then a vacancy came up for a fashion assistant at the
Daily Express
and Margaret and Moira urged me to apply. I wished I hadn't when I got there. My boss was Jill Butterfield, aka the Golden Girl of Fleet Street, whose photo appeared on the sides of London buses and I found her – and everyone else for that matter – utterly terrifying. My biggest shock was the swearing – my parents never swore (strangely, I happened to be watching the television with them when Kenneth Tynan said the F-word on it for the very first time; none of us made any comment, it might never have happened). The only person who took any notice of me was the cartoonist Artie – he was short and plump and half-Indian, I think, and whenever there was a particularly gruesome murder, everyone used to tease him by shouting out, ‘Where were you yesterday, Artie?' and Artie would look guilty.

I don't think I dared raise my eyes far off the floor of the
Express
for most of the time I was there, though I did eventually make a lifelong friend in my protector and ally against the Golden Girl: Meriel McCooey, who was the senior fashion assistant. My job was mostly to telephone manufacturers and call in clothes that the Golden Girl had seen at fashion shows and wanted to feature on her pages, and then to help Meriel carry them to the studios where she had arranged for them to be photographed. And I was supposed to contribute IDEAS at brainstorming sessions which were agony because I never had any, and even if I had, I would have been too shy of being laughed at to mention them.

It's hard to imagine now, but the
Daily Express
was
the
cutting-edge newspaper at that time. It had a brilliant associate editor, Harold Keeble, who understood the importance of layout, and the paper employed two legendary art directors: Ray Hawkey, who went on to the
Observer
(he also designed Len Deighton's state-of-the art book covers as well as the first paperback James Bonds), and Michael Rand, who became art director of the
Sunday Times
and designer of its colour magazine – the first one published in Britain. This meant that on our fashion pages the photographs were used bigger and more dramatically than in any other paper – or even in most magazines – so all the best photographers were keen to work for us.