After carving a life for herself in the dawn of Swinging London and then leaving it behind, author Brigid Keenan tells us how moving from place to place led to revelations she never thought possible.
Brigid Keenan
Did you give up your career for love?
Posted on: Thu 02-Jun-16 11:50:59
(16 comments )
I left school early (at 16), didn’t go to university, and then married late (at 33), which meant that I had a whole decade and a half to build up and enjoy a wonderful career – until love sabotaged it all.
I started as a typist, taking dictation (in my newly acquired shorthand) and typing out letters, which I often put into the wrong envelopes and then had to re-do.
Next, the typing pool at the London headquarters for a group of provincial newspapers where my boss was the fashion editor and would sometimes ask me to help her write the captions for the photographs.
After a year or so, I was recruited by the Daily Express as a fashion assistant and I wrote my very first article for them – it was so bad that the fashion editor passed it round the office so everyone could have a laugh. I was timid, innocent and a fish out of water, however within a year or so I went to the Sunday Times where, by an astonishing piece of luck, I became Young Fashion Editor of the paper. I was just 21 years old, it was 1961, the dawn of Swinging London, and probably the best ever moment to be in fashion journalism.
But then, in 1970, I fell in love with a young diplomat whose life was always going to be in foreign countries and, quite soon, I had to make a choice – to follow him or stick with my career. Of course, I chose him and for a couple of years I enjoyed the best of both worlds. But then he was posted to Brussels and I gave it all up and went with him.
Moving from place to place breaks down barriers and leaves you open to everything, non-judgmental, unsnobbish – and somehow if you have this state of mind, things happen to you.
It was the first time since I left secretarial college that I wasn’t working in an office. I remember going to a dinner party and the man beside me asked me what I did, and for a moment I was tempted to put my head on his shoulder and sob, ‘I don’t know. What DO I do? What am I? Who am I?’ but in fact I gave a nervous little laugh and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I suppose I am a housewife’, and he moved his chair, just slightly, towards the woman on his other side and never spoke to me again.
As we were posted around the world, I mourned my glittering career, but gradually the things I had learned working on newspapers and magazines turned out to be useful in my new life. In journalism, the most valuable commodity is IDEAS: ways of looking at things differently, stories – and I began to look for stories in the places we were posted to. When my husband was sent to Syria, I spent every available moment researching and exploring the Old City of Damascus and ended up writing a book about it.
When we were posted to India, I became fascinated by Kashmir and eventually published a traveller’s guide to the country.
Moving from place to place breaks down barriers and leaves you open to everything, non-judgmental, unsnobbish – and somehow if you have this state of mind, things happen to you: stories, ideas, contacts, luck – they all erupt around you.
Another piece of advice for life is to keep a diary. When my husband was posted to Kazakhstan, I fell into a depression because I didn’t speak Russian and couldn’t find any stories, and so, in despair, I decided to turn my chaotic diary - written for decades in notebooks but also on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper - into a book. It became a best-seller and so, extraordinarily, I found the greatest professional success of my career at the age of 70. Never give up hope!
Brigid's new book Full Marks for Trying is published by Bloomsbury and is available from Amazon.