by Dawn French
Dad: Some men wear eye stuff, in other countries … For instance, when I was in Aden –
Me: Anyway …
Dad: Anyway. This party tonight …
Me: It’s fine, Dad. There won’t be any alcohol.
Dad: I should hope not. Alcohol? You can’t drink alcohol!
Me: I know. That’s why there won’t be any.
Dad: You’re not allowed to buy it or drink it, young lady.
Me: I know.
Dad: It’s against the law.
Me: I know.
Dad: No alcohol whatsoever. Do you understand?
Me: Yes.
Dad: Right, I’m trusting you on that –
Me: There won’t be any.
Dad: There’d better not be any.
Me: There won’t.
Dad: How do you know?
Me: Because Karen said so.
Dad: She said there wouldn’t be any?
Me: Yes, because her parents’ll be there, they’re going next door during the party.
Dad: Nearby?
Me: Next door!
Dad: Good. If they weren’t next door, would there be alcohol then?
Me: Don’t know. Maybe.
Dad: There wouldn’t.
Me: Wouldn’t there?
Dad: No. I’m telling you. There wouldn’t. OK?
Me: OK … Can I come home late?
Dad: Here’s the thing I want to say …
Me: Can we hurry?
Dad: Shush. How much do you think Mum and I love you?
Me: Um … a lot?
Dad: More than a lot, Dawn. Much more. When you were born, you had scarlet fever, and for a couple of days there, it was a bit touch and go …
Me: I nearly died?
Dad: Yes, and when we thought we might lose you we realised just how much we loved you already, even your brother was worried …
Me: Yeah, worried I might survive …!
Dad: Don’t be facetious, which by the way is one of the few words in the English language with all the vowels in the correct order. No, we were all very anxious. It was then we knew that having a baby girl, having you, completed our little family. That’s all we ever wanted. The four of us together for ever. We had so much to look forward to, so much to learn. So much to do, so much fun to have. Mum and I fought hard to be together and to make this family. I know it’s been a challenge sometimes, with all the different relatives who have lived with us, all the travelling and moving and new schools. I know when I’ve had to go away on my own for work it’s been hard for you all. We haven’t had much money, no surplus certainly, but we have saved and shared everything together, haven’t we? In this family, no one is lonely because we’re always there for each other, the four corners that keep our square whole, each connected to and looking out for each other, equally. You are a vital part of that. You and your brother are our life, our reason and our happiness. We adore you both and we feel blessed to have you, and to witness you grow into the remarkable young people you are becoming. You are both so impressive! Truly, you are our world, our joy. Never forget what a treasure you are, and if your faith in that ever wobbles, have a look in the mirror and have confidence in what you see. You are a rare thing, an uncommon beauty, a dazzling, exquisite, splendid young woman. Look! You must know it’s true, you’re a corker. How lucky any boy would be to have you on his arm. They should fight tournaments to win your affection, they should kill for your favour. Don’t you dare be grateful for their attentions, you utterly deserve it and, more than that, you deserve the very best. Don’t think for one second you should settle for other people’s rejects. You are the princess, you are the prize, so be choosy and take your time. You decide how, when and where, not them. They will wait. Of course they will. Who wouldn’t wait for someone so priceless? There is no one better. Know this: if anything ever happened to you, Moo, our lives would fall apart, we would be devastated and this family would never be happy again. So, you must take care of yourself, you must guard against danger. When you are out of this house it is up to you to protect yourself, your reputation and your dignity. We love you and we need you.
OK. That’s all. You can go now. And yes, you can come home late, 1am at the outside, understand?
Me: Yeah … Thanks, Dad.
Then we had a big hug and off I went to the party, feeling ten foot tall and fabulous in my hot pants. Mark did come to talk to me that night, but I wasn’t that interested. He wasn’t really good enough, to be honest …
My dad gave me armour that night and I have worn it ever since. I could never quite buy the bit about being the best, but I do believe I am worth something. My self-esteem, still surprisingly intact after quite a few attacks, is still my strong centre, my metal, and I owe that to him. He spoke honestly of his faith in me and it was such a sunshiny warmth that I grew towards it like a tomato plant.
The comforting thing is, Bill, I may not have my dad around any more but I do carry his values and his belief in me. When I think of what he said to me – every word applies to you. I’m so sorry you didn’t get to meet him because he would have loved you so much and you would have loved him back. The only gift I can give you from him is this letter and the hope that you will read it, imagining his sentiments are addressed to you, through me and Dad. Hopefully, with time, you will come to know a greater and truer self-worth and know how valuable you are to us and to the family.
That’s all. You can go now. Be home by 1am at the outside, understand?
Dear David Cassidy,
IT’S VERY IMPORTANT that you read this letter because it is going to change your life in a BIG way. If this is being read by a minion or secretary or bouncer, I literally beg you to pass this on to David – he will thank you for it one day in the future. Big time. That of which, I can assure you.
David, if I may call you that, it feels so right to me, so natural, but I fear I may overstep my place to be so intimate so early on, but I am forced to be candidly open about my sheer knowledge in and about you, now and always. Let me put it like this – you don’t know me yet but one day in our future when we stand high on a desert rock with the sun on our faces instead of frowns, looking at a golden sunset after an oh-so-perfect loving day, you will wonder how you ever didn’t know me and how you ever survived and grew without me, both spiritually AND on the outside. Because, David, we are meant to be together, and to deny our hearts’ true path to joy would just be foolish, never mind devastating. I have never, ever in my whole life known something to be so truly real. You probably get loads of post from silly teenage girls who immaturely try to adore you just because they fancy you. That isn’t me. Let me make this clear, I don’t fancy you, I know you. My soul knows your soul even though there is a crater of nothingness between us. Sometimes when I see you on telly, I don’t even look, so that I won’t be taken in by your sheer and true handsomeness. Oh yes, I know it’s there, I know how fanciable you are, that is oh-so-obvious right from the start to me and whoreds of others but that’s not what I’m here for. I am not just some here-today-gone-tomorrow sort of person who blows hot and cold like a feather in the wind blown about by air. Oh no. Believe me, my love for you is, was and always will be true and oh-so-real. Hunt high and low over hill and dale forever and a day and you will never find a heart as big as mine for you is.
David, I am worried about you at the moment. Every time I see you on telly, you seem to be surrounded by whoreds of yes-men and yes-women. Not when you are doing interviews obviously, they are probably secreted nearby then. But David, is that what you really want? So many people around you simply doing everything you do/do not want? It is exactly these kind of people who will prevent you from meeting me. (When I came to see you at Wembley I waited outside, in the midst of a baying mob, for over two hours until someone finally had the manners to tell us you had left the area right at the end of the show before we could even get there.) You see? If things carry on like this, we will never meet and then how would you feel?
I have pu
t my address on the top of this letter so that you can write back to me and we can arrange to meet up away from all those endless looking eyes and listening ears. I can personally guarantee that you will find peace here in my house. I will make sure my parents are both out – they do sometimes go to archery together, so that would be a good time to come, on Thursday evenings. (Except at half-term when my brother comes home from boarding school and we are going on our boat on the Trent canal. Again. YAWN. I would much rather see you.) However we arrange it, I can assure you of peace and quiet and my 100% full attention, with snack refreshments and whatever drink you choose. Obviously I will have to buy those ahead of time so you will need to send me a list of your favourites, with most favourite as No. 1 and so on. (Bear in mind that we cannot always get American drinks here, e.g. soda pops or Popsicles or ice-cream sundaes etc., but we can get English drinks like Coke, Vimto or Kia-Ora squash. Plus my parents have got some sherry and a bottle of Asti Spumante if you so need or want.) When it comes to your transport here, I expect you will arrange that and I can get directions for you from the big roundabout near school or I can even call a taxi to pick you up from the station if necessary. But David, all that nickety-pickety arrangements stuff is for later, let’s not ruin it now with all that.
There is something else I just want to mention now because I’ve been thinking about it. Other than the mega luv we will have for each other which I take for granted already, we will have to learn about each other’s cultures and this might take some time, so we must be patient and tolerable about it. As of this moment, there is so much I don’t know about your fair land, the United States of America, but believe me, I am an oh-so-hungry learner and am oh-so-keen to digest it all! Before long, I will be jivin’ on the Sunset Strip, eating crabfish on the byoo and getting down all over the place! And perhaps, in time, you will come to love our crazy fish ’n’ chips in newspaper and our coins with the head of the Queen on one side as a mark of respect. What a fascinating time we have ahead as a future. So, unlike most other couples who simply come from the same place and already know all this stuff, we will have so much more exciting exploration to do. I can’t wait!
So, anyway, this is enough for you to take in all in one go so I will wait for your reply before I arrange anything. Please can you make sure it’s you who writes or calls me rather than a servant/secretary? That would be better. Until we finally meet and instantly know how in luv we are and always will be forever and a day to the moon and back, I leave you with one last thought to abide. ‘Could it be forever?’ Oh yes, my love, it could, is my answer. My heart in yours, have courage,
Lotsaluv,
Moo French age 14
(This is a family nickname which comes from when we lived in Cyprus and has nothing to do with me looking like a cow! – as you will see from enclosed photo, which you are free to keep. I have another copy.)
Dear Dad,
I LOVED LINCOLN, I thought it was the poshest city we had ever lived near. There was something grand about it. There’s that big ancient bow arch you can walk under, and an elegant river that runs right through the middle, reminding you what an important place you’re in. Plus of course a cathedral you can’t miss. I haven’t visited Lincoln since we left when I was 14 years old so maybe it isn’t as impressive as my memory insists, but I clearly remember shopping there and being in awe.
RAF Faldingworth was also impressive to me, but in a different way. The quarters and the NAAFI were quite compact and cheery but the actual base where you worked seemed sprawling and, as I recall, a large part of it was empty and virtually derelict. There were plenty of big old buildings that must once have been – what? Billets or meeting rooms or training areas or messes or something? It was like being in a spooky episode of The Avengers or The Prisoner where someone nearly always ends up in a deserted military base doing plenty of fast running and hiding and dodging. The perfect location for a teenager to get up to eight kinds of no good. And sorry to say, Dad, we did. We had secret parties where I was introduced to the mixed blessing that is sweet cider. We had romantic liaisons behind the doors of storage cupboards. (Most of these were innocent fumblings resulting in flushed frustration, nothing more.) We had terrifying seances where we tried to summon up the spirits of dead relatives. I once attempted to connect with Grandad McCarthy and was utterly petrified when the glass on our home-made Ouija board hurtled around accurately spelling out various clues about our family which no other soul there could have known. I was shaken to the core by this creepy, seriously weird experience, but I didn’t feel I could share it with you and Mum because it was so supremely bad to have done such a thing. Had I opened up a sinister portal through which my dead grandfather had been reluctantly sucked into our earthly plane? Was he going to haunt me from now on? Was he attached to me like some kind of astral teasel stuck on my jumper? I was freaked out for a while but lots of reassurance in the form of heavy petting with David Eccles alleviated my spiritual burden somehow. Ain’t it always the case?! I have never fully understood what happened but I have learned enough to keep a respectful distance from any inexplicable phenomena since (except for watching Most Haunted of course, of which I am a devotee). This explains why I have never tried to communicate with you through any of these odd channels which I find too eerie and strange to understand. I do hope you haven’t been sitting on the other side of that spiritual portal for these past 30 years, staring at the backside of a closed door waiting for someone to buzz you in. That would be awful. If that’s the case, Dad, just lock up, turn off the lights and go to bed cos no one’s comin’! Maybe we’ll see you in the morning … Who knows.
Do you remember taking me to look around Caistor Grammar, my first experience of senior school? I only spent a year there but I had a good time except for the hideous weekly cross-country torture. Why do schools insist on hurting children with ugly running kits and near-death experiences of exercise which is too demanding? Has anyone ever died of PE? I think I did, several times. At the least, I learned to reject any suchlike activity in adult life. Thanks, school. Otherwise Caistor was just fine. It was, however, the venue for my first criminal activity. There was a sweet shop just outside the school gates and, yes, I can hear you, I know how little the return is on sweets, especially when kids are nicking the profits. As the granddaughter of a newsagent I knew all this and I knew it was wrong because you had impressed that on me at a very early age, but what you didn’t know is that it was mandatory. Like a Herculean task, it was expected of you as a measly first-former to steal sweets for the older girls. You were a cretin and a smell if you didn’t and you would also be forced to suffer the humiliation of being actually killed, which I didn’t relish. So, you see, Dad, I stole in order to live. That’s entirely different to stealing because you’re just a greedy immoral grubby little twat, isn’t it? That’s my defence for my initial sticky-fingeredness. I have no such justification for what happened next.
There was an officer’s daughter called Heather (not her real name. Her real name is Hannah Black). She was big and bold and brave. She loved stealing. It was her passion and she was extremely talented at it. Like many illicit skills, her excellent pilfering credits won her a lot of attention and much admiration. She was cool, she was a bobby-dazzler, she was a hep cat. She was it. I was swept along with this frothy tide of admirers, and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that stealing was actually OK, that it was only our parents’ archaic morals that had fooled us into eschewing such exciting, rewarding delights. What did they know? They were ancient and ill-informed and, like, so establishment. I wanted to be like Heather. I wanted to be a proper thief, yay. We would go into town at lunchtimes and I would watch and learn from the Grand Mistress. She had no fear, she was cunning and stealthy and extremely smooth. My first attempt was in Smith’s. She advised me to start small, with something inexpensive so I could feign ignorance if caught – after all, what is the point of stealing a packet of pencils, sir, it’s hardly rich pickings, look, here, I have
enough money in my purse if I really wanted them. Good ruse. OK, here I go – a packet of six pencils. The execution of the ‘grab’ was awkward and the packet edges grazed my flesh as I shoved it up my sleeve. I went a bit sweaty and telltale red in the face, but I did it – I nicked the pencils and propelled myself out of the shop as if bitten on the bum by a beaver. My tutor was delighted with her protégée and promised a bigger, brighter, lucrative future if I stuck with her.
I went home that night and looked at my swag. Six lovely red pencils, sharp and perfect. My booty. Mine, all mine, and I hadn’t parted with a sou of my precious pocket money. How great was this? Yes, it was. It was great. Wasn’t it? So why wasn’t I feeling great? Was it simply that I was back in the home environment and thus back under the old, outdated regime of morality? Surely I should be feeling great? Like Fagin-type of great? I didn’t feel great – I felt awful. Full-of-guilt-and-self-loathing awful. Fagin-at-the-end-of-the-film-type awful. In the end, I tossed ’n’ turned in bed, feeling steadily worse as the night wore on. I was plagued with guilt. It was a massive dragon breathing hot fire down my neck until eventually I could bear it no longer and I came to speak to Mum and confessed all. It gushed out of me like spew, my litany of felonious misdeeds – well, the one dastardly pencil one and some sketchy info about the lesser but still vile prior sweet-shop crimes. She was very understanding but said that you, Dad, needed to be brought into the loop to make the big decisions about how we should proceed now that she was fully informed of how hopelessly miscreant I was. So, you sat on my bed and what followed was the most serious and sobering conversation I had ever had. Thanks for holding my hand, by the way, but it didn’t comfort me much during your frank assessment of the dire situation. You explained that in light of the extent of my villainous underhand dealings, there were only two options open to us. A, to call the police and inform them how bent I was, or B, to try and replace the contraband without anyone knowing. I had never known you be so solemn. You then commended me for my honesty and said it might take time to come to terms with the shame and the potential dishonour brought upon the House of French. Then you promised to make a decision the next morning and we went to bed.