Full Marks for Trying by Brigid Keenan

Author:Brigid Keenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

6

After six months in Paris, I was deemed to be adequately ‘finished’ (the other girls were staying on for a year) and I had to go back to England for the very un-new-world ritual of being presented at Court.

Had Paris been worth my parents’ money? I could speak a bit of French, and I had gained a minuscule amount of confidence, but if I’d been asked to write an inventory of myself then, it wouldn’t have added up to much: medium figure, bitten nails, nice legs, small eyes, a plain but animated face, an obsession with open pores (I used to spend hours making face packs from oatmeal and egg white, following recipes in Woman’s Own, as well as sitting with my elbows in squeezed half lemons because that, apparently, would make them soft and white – as if anyone would ever notice my elbows) and, topping all this, thick, curled, dun-coloured hair.

Hair was almost as painful an issue in the Fifties as class. At seventeen we all looked middle-aged because of our uniformly short, permed, and usually brown, hair. The American writer Nora Ephron once said that the most important invention of the twentieth century for women was not feminism or birth control or better living through exercise, it was HAIR DYE. She meant that for the first time in history older women didn’t have to go grey. ‘In the 1950s only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all,’ she wrote – but in fact, hair dye, or more especially bleach, saved my whole generation of young women too, transforming us from mousy frumps into blondes. And we owed another debt to Brigitte Bardot who showed that you could wear your hair long and loose.

Before hair dye and Brigitte Bardot came along to rescue us, the girls in our family could have been straight out of the home-perm advertisement that appeared everywhere at that time. WHICH TWIN HAS THE TONI? it asked, showing identical photographs of identical girls, one supposedly with short, naturally curly hair (that was Tessa who was born with curls) and the other with a Toni perm: she represented Moira and me who had poker-straight locks.

Every time any of us went to the hairdresser’s in those days, we cried when we came out because they never made us look the way we wanted to. I was wiping away my tears outside a salon in Fleet one day (my permed hair had been arranged into two horn-like curls, one on either side of my forehead) and my mother was lying through her teeth saying, ‘It looks really nice, darling,’ when a friend passed by and said: ‘Glam!’ I wanted to throttle her. Moira and I used to joke about this friend, saying that she looked like a horse. We mainly did this to annoy our mother, and one day she fell into the trap and said, ‘You girls are

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