FULL MARKS FOR TRYING by BRIGID KEENAN

aunt talking about me – ‘It’s a pity Brigid is such a desperately plain child,’ one of them said, and the other agreed. I had no idea what ‘plain’ was, but it didn’t sound good, so I crept back and re-entered making a lot of noise. Later I asked Moira what ‘plain’ meant. ‘Oh it means something that’s almost, but not quite ugly,’ she said. I thought about this for years: Moira was attractive and clever and witty, Tessa was very pretty and funny, and I realised that I was going to have to do something – go for glamour, eccentricity, criminality, character, a career –
something
, so as not to end up at the bottom of the pile. There is a moment in her autobiography when the great beauty Lady Diana Cooper looks in the mirror, is disappointed by what she sees and says to herself, ‘Now it’s got to be nap on personality.’ I had the same sort of revelation, but aged nine.
    Mum told us that, through Granny’s family, we were descended from Edward III, via his son John of Gaunt (the brother of the Black Prince). When I married AW I proudly informed him of this, but he once glimpsed the family tree at a reunion of cousins and became deeply sceptical. ‘I have redrawn your family tree more accurately,’ he said to me afterwards, and gave me a piece of paper which looked like this:

    I laugh every time I think of it. In the meantime I have discovered that genealogists believe that 80 per cent of the English could be descended from Edward III because he had nine sons, so there wasn’t really anything to boast about in the first place.
    Dad was only eighth cowman on the farm but he had to take the cows up to London for the Dairy Show and watch over them all night in their pen or byre or whatever it was. His farmer-boss, a rich, landowning lady, used to introduce him to everyone proudly as her ex-general cowman, but quite soon Dad decided to train for a new career as a land agent. We stayed on in Fleet while he went away to the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester to learn his new trade, and every night Mum and Tessa and I knelt and prayed for him to pass his exams: the family desperately needed him to be working and earning a salary. Dad did succeed, unlike most of his fellow students who were young landed gentry dashing to London in sports cars to have Fun in their spare time.
    When we didn’t have to pray for Dad any more, we prayed for the Russian people to be liberated from Communism. Britain and America were paranoid about the evils of Communism in the early Fifties and I caught the bug: Communism became my next anxiety. My dread was that it would take over England, and that Tessa and I would be dragged away from our beloved parents and put in some kind of Soviet youth retraining institution for ever – little did I know that boarding school would be more or less exactly that.
    Because of its British and Indian Army connections, the area around Fleet and Aldershot was a brilliant hunting ground for all kinds of exotic textiles and bits and bobs from the former colonies brought back from their travels by people like us who’d spent lifetimes overseas – and had now fallen on hard times, or were dead. Mum became a regular at Pearsons Auctions in Fleet where Persian rugs, Kashmir shawls and lacquerwork, and intricately carved Burmese chairs and tables all came up for sale; she had a brilliant eye but hardly ever had the money to buy the things she spotted. If only we’d known then what we know now: one of the greatest textile experts and collectors in the world, Michael Frances, told me once – at a beautiful exhibition of old Uzbek
suzanis
he had put on in Bond Street – that a number of his best pieces had been bought at Pearsons. He was smart: as a young man he had worked out that where there were people retired from Africa and India, there were likely to be interesting things in the