Girl power | 2 June 2016

Many years ago, working on a project in Tel Aviv, I had a meeting-free weekend. I know, I thought, I’ll call my friend Brigid Keenan — at that time en poste to Syria with her ambassadorial husband — and nip up to Damascus — so close, only that smidgen of Lebanon in the way. I dialled Brigid’s number.

There were many odd whirrs and pings and beeps, and then, ‘Don’t ever call me’. Slam! It was an unexpected reaction from a voice I’m accustomed to hear burble merrily on about how last night their diplomatic reception was brouhaha’d because the dog puked on the First Lady of Baku’s shoes, or the joy of discovering a pink sandstone temple half buried in some hidden Kazakhstan valley, or tracking down Marmite in Outer Mongolia. Brigid is rarely at a loss for an anecdote, and never, bar this silenced telephone, for an audience.

I had to wait until we next met for her to explain that the international lines, particularly those from Israel, were, even in those far-off and palmier-seeming days, routinely bugged: but, had I managed to make it to Damascus, I would have been treated to a torrent of the highly comic and wildly improbable situations this most practical of diplomats has defused and delighted in, over her long career — many of which she has described in other enchanting books. This, her latest, looks further back: to her childhood, and to becoming, when barely in her twenties, the first star of fashion journalism at the very start of its sudden shoot into youthquake. It was a rollercoaster ride with minimal coasting.

Born in India to parents who had long held important positions in the army hierarchy, Brigid grew up in aya- and syce-staffed residencies during the last rays of that sullied sunset, though kept unaware of her father’s letters from the Northern Front.