Full marks for trying

Brigid Keenan's childhood in India ended abruptly when independence and partition arrived. She then moved back to a grey, postwar England and went on to a finishing school in Paris, where she mixed with the daughters of presidents and princes. Ordinary life was never really on the cards for her. At ten, she overheard her mother call her 'desperately plain', and she resolved to make her way through glamour, eccentricity, personality and a career, so she would not end up at the bottom of the heap. Somehow, true to form, she got all of them.

Fortune was often on her side. As a teenager in the late 1950s she took a job as an assistant at the Daily Express in London, and by twenty-one she was Fashion Editor at the Sunday Times. These were the early years of the swinging sixties, when London was the city to be in. Keenan worked alongside photographer David Bailey and model Jean Shrimpton, had her hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, toured London in a mini-van, covered the Paris collections, and was dubbed a 'Young Meteor' by the press.

Her determination was never in question, but her enthusiasm and a certain innocence sometimes led to awkward situations. One of the most memorable came when she arrived to report on the Vietnam War wearing a miniskirt.

This memoir traces Keenan's path from a childhood spent abroad to the fast-moving world of 1960s fashion journalism, and follows her coming of age along the way.