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Title: Full Marks for Trying

Subtitle: An Unlikely Journey from the Raj to the Rag Trade

Author: Brigid Keenan

Narrator: Jane Copland

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-02-16

Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

Brigid Keenan was never destined to lead a normal life. From her early beginnings - a colourful childhood in India brought to an abrupt end by independence and partition, then a return to dreary postwar England and on to a finishing school in Paris with daughters of presidents and princes - ordinary didn't seem to be her fate.

When, as a 10-year-old, she overheard her mother describe her as 'desperately plain', she decided then and there that she had to rely on something different: glamour, eccentricity, character, a career - anything so as not to end up at the bottom of the pile. And in classic Brigid style, she somehow ended up with them all.

Fate often gave Brigid a helping hand - in the late '50s, in her teens, she landed a job as an assistant at the Daily Express in London, and by the tender age of 21 she was a fashion editor at the Sunday Times. It was the dawn of the swinging '60s, and London was the place to be. Brigid worked with David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton, had her hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, drove around London in a minivan, covered the Paris Collections and was labelled a 'young meteor' by the press.

Despite always trying her hardest, Brigid's enthusiasm - and occasional naiveté - could lead to embarrassing moments, such as when she turned up to report on the Vietnam War in a miniskirt .Candid, wickedly funny and surprisingly touching, Full Marks for Trying is a coming-of-age memoir that will delight, entertain and make you cry with laughter.

Members Reviews:

Living colourfully through gigantic social change

Brigid Keenan's memoir is a welcome change from misery memoirs! The best part for me was her first eight years of life in India which were a blissful time with her beloved ayah in a dazzlingly colourful life of luscious fruit, exotic animals and golden warmth. It all came to a shuddering end when she was wrenched away from her ayah without a goodbye (that poor ayah) to sail to England in 1945 after the horrors and dangers of Partition. Her father was part of the Punjab Boundary Force whose role was to oversee the terrible debacle of Partition. Keenan's account taken from letters which her father wrote to her mother at this time are one of the most vivid and harrowing I've ever read of this terrible time, and it was an experience which haunted Keenan's father to the end of his days.

Returning 'home' to her grandmother's house in Fleet was no 'home' for Brigid and her sisters who had known only India. The colour had gone and everything was grey and dreary, the food (still on the ration) repellent to her - she was horrified to be expected to eat the grey flabby skin on fish and where were the mangoes and papayas? Brigid was a plain child ('What a pity she'd so plain!' she heard an aunt say once) and her father rewarded her galumphing dance with the title of the book, 'Full marks for trying!'. But she grew into a highly successful journalist and fashion editor.

After her finishing school and her introduction to the Queen (one of the last debs to go through this event on the social calendar), she became Fashion Editor of the Daily Express at the age of 21, and continued through the late Fifties and early Sixties, through The Sunday Times, Observer and the dazzling new magazine Nova.