FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

FULL MARKS FOR TRYING Read Free

Book: FULL MARKS FOR TRYING Read Free
Author: BRIGID KEENAN
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different, much less complicated world (with less than half the people on earth than there are today) which I hope that older people might recognise and younger ones will find interesting. But, as well, I hope that readers will find themselves in some of my memories – for I was not the only child who came ‘home’ to a grim post-war England after a Technicolor childhood in one of England’s colonies, nor the only one to be a self-conscious and unattractive teenager, nor the only one blundering along in life, making mistakes; not the only girl who straightened her stocking seams in the Fifties, revelled in the bold new fashions of the Sixties or, to her parents’ despair, didn’t get married until over thirty.
    Of course not everything that happened to me as I grew up is here – for a start there is lots I don’t remember, some that I don’t particularly want to remember, and masses that is tedious and dull and deserved to be left out. And not all the important events that happened in fashion in the Sixties are recorded here either, just the ones that affected me personally.
    Note: In India nearly all the place names that I knew as a child have been changed. I have used the old names, but with the modern name as well when it is not obvious.

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    To tell the truth, I have never felt completely at home in my homeland, England. Deep down there’s always been a tinge of anxiety, almost guilt: a feeling that I don’t really fit in and am not quite adequate or up to the mark in some subtle way; it’s how you feel at school when you know you are not in the cool group – or as a grown-up when you read
Tatler
magazine. My daughter Hester feels the same and puts it rather well: ‘It’s as if the English all know a secret that we don’t – and they know we don’t, but are not going to tell it to us.’
    The source of our insecurity is easily found – in the Jesuit sayings about the importance of early childhood: ‘Give me a child until the age of seven,’ goes one version, ‘and I will make him mine for ever.’ And there we have it – the reason I don’t feel at home in England is obviously because I belong to India where I lived until I was eight years old. (Hester was raised in Brussels.)
    I was born in the British Military Hospital in a place called Ambala, about 125 miles north of Delhi. Ambala sits pretty much at the centre of the ancient Grand Trunk Road which crosses the widest, top part of the triangle of India, going 2,500 miles from the Bay of Bengal, through Bangladesh, India, and then Pakistan, to Afghanistan (or the other way round), and so it was a natural place for the British, in the nineteenth century, to set up an army base, or cantonment as they are known in India (pronounced cantoonment). My father, who was in the Indian Army (Dogra Regiment), was posted there with Mum at the time I arrived in the world – which was in November 1939. Since India became independent only eight years later, and there was a world war which separated couples in between, I must be among the last of the British Raj babies, along with a few others of my age, the best-known of whom are Joanna Lumley, who was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, because her dad (like mine) was in the army (a Gurkha of course), and Julie Christie, born in Assam, because her father was a tea planter. (In older generations, Spike Milligan and Vivien Leigh were born in India, and I was once assured that Elizabeth Taylor had been born in Calcutta, but when I looked it up it turned out her birthplace was nowhere more exotic than Hampstead Garden Suburb.)
    The India that I feel I belong to no longer exists because it was the India of the last days of the British Raj and can only be glimpsed in photographs and films now, but then again, no place is the same as it was seventy-five years ago, and the all-white England we ‘Indian’ children felt so

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