Hungry

by Grace Dent

  At some point, my mam will return from her job cleaning the betting shop, carrying a tattered copy of the Sun with all the racing fixtures and results filleted out of the back. I snap it up and sit reading the sexy problem page and puzzling over the vital statistics of the Page Three stunnas.

  ‘Nikki is 36-24-36! She’d love to work in a zoo one day … but for now she’s just making you fellas growl with pleasure!’ These measurements are destined to be seared on my brain forever as I stare down sadly at a tape measure a hundred times through my life.

  My mother, incidentally, would strenuously deny that I was allowed to stay up past 10 p.m., aged seven years old, reading the Sun problem page. My mother’s capacity for denial and revisionism would make Chairman Mao blush. She still claims she did not refuse to buy one of my infant school photos because it was taken on a day when I had a sty on my right eye and she’d cut my fringe wonky, so I looked like a small Hunchback of Notre Dame. ‘Well, we’re not gonna put that thing on the shelf, are we?’ she hooted, stuffing the photos all back in the envelope. I would say that I remember this specifically happening. My mother would say that I have an overactive imagination and have always made things up. We have been having a variation of this argument roughly three times a week since at least 1978.

  Inevitably, something smutty will occur on the telly: a pair of tits, a swear word, something that reminds Mam we’re past the watershed and she’ll look up from her sewing and say, ‘That child should be in bed!’

  My dad will wrap his arm around me, cuddle me into his armpit and say, ‘Oh, give her five more minutes here … she’s my only little girl …’

  My mother will roll her eyes and say, ‘You’re as thick as bloody thieves, you two.’

  And he’ll say, ‘Oh, she’s my only little girl.’

  And at this point in time, I have no reason not to believe him.

  November 1980

  ‘Six spoons of it. That’s what we agreed,’ my mother snaps.

  ‘I’ve had six,’ I lie.

  ‘You’ve had three,’ she says.

  I am sitting on our brown squeaky leather sofa, peering mournfully into a bowl of tepid Ready Brek. My mother, also called Grace, is scribbling on the back of the gas bill with a BIC biro. She’s doing some rough maths. She is planning some home improvements. It is not good enough that we merely own a home now. She must make it better. These types of doodlings will provide a constant source of peril during my formative years. They mean we will spend at least the next three months in a thin layer of cement dust while walls are being knocked through and other ones built.

  ‘If I put the door there,’ she says, ‘then it’ll stop the draughts and yer dad might stop being a mard-arse,’ she says.

  It’s eight o’clock in the morning, but Mam is already brimming with ideas about ‘partition walls’ and ‘opaque glass’. That is, I learn, glass you can but can’t see though, which sounds weird but at the same time very classy.

  The bleak lukewarm oatmeal mulch in my bowl has grown a skin.

  Mam stops doodling and stares at me. Her mid-length Diana Dors blonde hair spills down over her purple Marshall Ward-catalogue dressing gown.

  ‘Gerritdownya,’ she says, pointing at the Ready Brek. ‘A car cannot run without petrol.’

  ‘Ammnot a car,’ I argue. ‘Noteatingit.’

  ‘You bloody are,’ she says.

  Mam has been promised by a new TV campaign for Ready Brek – running in every ad break – that this porridgey slop in an orange box will be the solution to one of her other biggest problems. That neither of her infant-school-age children will touch breakfast. This makes her a very lacking mother indeed.

  ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ she’s been hectored for decades – by her own mother, by the government and by her teachers. It is her sole responsibility to administer it. Except that morning after morning, as Terry Wogan pipes ‘Forever and Ever’ by Demis Roussos across the ether on BBC Radio 2, we have rejected all of her options.

  Eggs were her first try; she poached them and served them on toasted Mothers Pride. But her whites went all stringy and the toast turned soggy, as she didn’t drain them properly. She then moved on to dippy soft-boiled eggs with soldiers, which we turned our noses up at. The good thing about the egg stage was that at Bishop Goodwin Infant School we were collecting the shells to make a large mural of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey. It was a religious school; we found bold new ways every term to praise the lord.

  After eggs, Mam tried Weetabix with warm milk, which we complained was both too sludgy, too soggy and too dusty all at once. She tried us with toast and orange marmalade, but the bitter slugs of rind caused hysteria. She tried us on Scott’s Porage Oats – very grown-up this felt – and let us add our own heaped teaspoons of Silver Spoon sugar.

  But that was ruined by her admitting that our eccentric great-uncle, John, in the days before refrigerators, used to make his porridge once a week, pour it into a kitchen drawer to set, then cut a slice out of the coagulated lump each morning. By Friday, Uncle John’s breakfast would inevitably contain a beetle or two, she admitted.

  Well, that was it for us with the oats. Game over.

  Eventually Mam caved in and splashed out on the Kellogg’s Variety pack of mini-cereals that David and I had become utterly fixated on after Karen Steeple’s mam down the street got some to take with them on their caravan holiday in Filey.

  They were exactly the same as big packets of cereal … but smaller.

  Our tiny minds were blown.

  ‘Can we have the mini-cereals, Mam? Can we?’

  Of course, once we’d got them, ripped open the cellophane, rejected the Bran Flakes and remembered we didn’t much care for Rice Krispies anyway, she was back to square one.

  And now it’s November and there’s snow on the ground and she’s been promised that Ready Brek is ‘central heating for kids’ and it’ll send me to school with a glowing aura around me. But I’m not having it.

  ‘Mam, it’s just the same stuff as the porridge, but slimier!’ I cry.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ she says.

  Winter’s arrival also means stiff north-westerly winds blasting the back of Dad’s head continuously as me and my brother fling open the front door, coming and going into the street to play. And then he ‘starts whining’, she says, or ‘being narky’. My parents, although I do not know this at the time, have been married precisely eight years. They made that decision in haste and spent the Eighties repenting at leisure.

  But, on one front at least, things were about to improve.

  Because we were getting a vestibule.

  ‘A vestibule?’ I repeat.

  This all sounds very grand.

  Mam shows me her drawings.

  It sounds continental and by default insanely glamorous. Like something JR’s house would have in Dallas.

  It’s like nothing anyone else has along Harold Street and is most probably the beginnings of my working-class delusions of grandeur.

  ‘We’ll take a bit off the living room,’ Mam says, ‘so when you come in the front door … there will be a little space … then another door!’

  ‘Like another little room inside the room?’ I say.

  ‘Yes … and we can have coat pegs in there,’ she says. ‘And a little table to put letters on. And maybe a shelf for our books …’

  Her voice trails off.

  The only books we have are a News of the World part-work on serial killers and a copy of The Thorn Birds.

  ‘OK, maybe we could put the phone in there,’ she says brightly. ‘And the phone book. Anyway, no more draughts.’

  I stare at her and then back at the Ready Brek. I’ve eaten five whole teaspoons of the stuff and I seem to have more of the evil sludge than when I set off.

  Seven days later, with a swiftness that accompanied ma
ny of my mother’s good ideas, work began. Frank the carpenter arrived with a spirit level under his arm and a pencil crammed behind his filthy left ear.

  He needed half the money up front for the wood, panes and the paint, and he’d have the job done between Tuesday and Friday as long as he could work until after midnight.

  ‘Dad, do you want a vestibule?’ I asked, as a terrific banging and clattering began and we all cowered in the kitchen, covered in dust.

  ‘Well, your mother does,’ Dad said. ‘She’s full of these good ideas.’

  News of the vestibule spread quickly along Harold Street. The neighbours were transfixed. It must have felt a lot like when Pope Julius II got artists in to do the Sistine Chapel. Except our vestibule was being hammered up by a man called Frank, who turned up every night after six o’clock, as he was being spied on by the dole office. Almost everyone who did odd jobs on Harold Street during this time was ‘signed off on the permanent sick’ from Cavaghan & Gray pie factory with bad backs.

  ‘He could not move until that day, your honour,’ local lawyer Geoff Clapp would say, defending another of my mother’s friends caught skipping out of a cul-de-sac in Morton Park carrying a twelve-foot stepladder and fifteen litres of Crown Marigold Emulsion, despite a debilitating spinal condition.

  In my mother’s mind, family bliss was only ever one more home improvement away. First came the pebble-dashing.

  ‘George, the stones add an extra layer of warmth to the house! Our gas bills will be right down,’ she informed my dad, as two listless skinheads on a Youth Training Scheme hurled around handfuls of shilly. ‘It adds value if we ever sell!’ she added. Before that, she added a spare toilet just off the kitchen to stop the arguments when anyone spent too long in the upstairs one. She did this by paying someone to hammer up MDF boards roughly two feet south of the chip pan. This was great as you could wee and still mind your fish fingers. The vestibule, however, was her most ambitious project to date – and she had her naysayers, like Stella at Number 3, who said it would make our front room poky, but things like that don’t derail a good woman like my mam.

  I learned tenacity from her. I learned from the best.

  When I was a little girl, my mother felt like a preternatural force. She was five foot ten with golden hair and pale-blue eyes. She had been married once before she met my dad. I didn’t know many facts about this, but I thought it was very exciting. Mam laughed a lot but was frightening as hell when angry. She would threaten to kill us often. Strangle us. She could, if the mood took her, move large items of furniture all on her own.

  It made no sense, us all facing that way, she’d say, when we came home from school at lunch to find the couch and TV somewhere else.

  In a time before health and safety, she would pull up outside Bishop Goodwin Juniors on netball-match day, cram nine girls in blue bibs into her Austin Princess and ferry them across town, no seatbelts, faces squashed against the windows, off to play Kingmoor Primary.

  She was a woman who just got things done.

  So within days, when you opened the front door to 21 Harold Street, you stepped into a brilliant-white, gloss-painted, three-foot-by-three porch.

  But please, this was not a porch.

  This was a vestibule.

  ‘We can hang out in my vestibule,’ I’d say airily as rain began to beat onto Harold Street’s flagstones, ruining our evening of chewing Hubba Bubba and swinging around a lamppost. Excitedly, we would tumble into the space. This was my own mini youth club. Obviously, this meant my father was now reading his Carlisle Evening News four feet away from five kids doing a dance routine to ‘September’ by Earth, Wind & Fire with only partition wood separating us.

  But, importantly, there was no longer a draft on his back, and this made him happier. And for a small moment in history, we had the poshest house along Harold Street, which made my mam happier too.

  ‘So, the vestibule,’ she said, weeks later as I sat before school eating a breakfast she had recently chanced upon that I’d begun to secretly enjoy – Shippam’s Sardine & Tomato Paste on toast with real butter. My mother had marked this as ‘something our Grace likes’ and was now making noises about something horrific called Bloater Paste.

  ‘Did I do the right thing, then?’ she said, pointing to the opaque glass and fresh paintwork.

  ‘Yer, it’s smart as owt. I love it,’ I told her.

  Over the last few years, as I’ve struggled to make sense of the present, I’ve thought about that living room in Harold Street: me, David, Mam, Dad, sometimes my big brother Bob appearing temporarily from the terrific din of Bowie, Japan and The Specials that always blared from his room when he was around. I’ve thought about nights when we’d sit around watching Name That Tune with Lionel Blair, eating bowls of butterscotch Angel Delight and Neapolitan ice cream and passing round the big red tin of Rover Assorted Biscuits, fighting over the pink wafers until only the crap ones were left. I’ve thought about us all in the living room, snug as bugs because the vestibule cut out the draughts, and always chattering and fighting and telling each other to bloody shut up as this is the only programme they want to watch and now everyone is blabbing on. I’ve thought about how there’s a weird happiness in the rhythms of a cat coughing up hairballs as five people bicker over who last had the News of the World TV supplement, until someone stands up to go to the loo and gets lumped with the chore of doing four rounds of toast.

  I would give anything to go back there for just one normal evening. I was loved and I was never hungry, and for a small girl from Currock, that was as good as things got.

  Carlisle, 1982

  ‘Warm up the teapot,’ says Brown Owl, ‘by pouring a little hot water in and swirling it around!’

  I’m doing my Hostess Brownie badge; that’s the one where you plop a teabag in a pot and arrange some Custard Creams on a plate before serving them to Brown Owl’s husband, Trevor, who plays the part of ‘an important man who you’re on your best behaviour for’. Trevor takes a biscuit and pretends to ignore my hands shaking as I pour his drink.

  Aged eight, there is much to cherish about being part of the eighteenth Carlisle Methodist Church Brownie Pack. The Brownies attempted to teach me discipline, forward planning, a sense of duty and, best of all, it gave me my first formal lessons in how to cook and entertain. Plus, there was a cool brown tunic pulled in at the waist with a brown buckled belt and a yellow cravat tie with a Velcro tie strip. I especially loved the shiny silver shamrock Brownie badge that we got after enrolment. This ceremony involved pirouetting around a large rusting metal ‘toadstool’ splodged with red and green paint, unlocked from the cleaner’s cupboard for this most grand of occasions. Dad came to my enrolment and watched from the sidelines, sitting on a stiff-back chair. He didn’t fall asleep once. Dad was rarely trusted to take me or my little brother anywhere outside the house after he fell asleep in Carlisle Odeon Cinema during a trip to see The Boys in Blue with Cannon & Ball. He only woke up when the usher pinched him and asked if those were his kids in the foyer. My dad looked dead proud when Brown Owl gave me my badge, and I think he was glad he came; even if his head was lolling about sleepily during our mid-ceremony performance, when eighteen girls sang ‘Alice the Camel’ in a three-part round.

  My second badge was House Orderly: a two-week crash course on shopping-list crafting, bed-making and dust vigilance. On reflection, this primed millions of little girls across Britain for a life, someday soon, as some bloke’s skivvy, but at this point trying to make an imaginary fiver stretch to feed a family for a week seemed like a terrific game. Then on to my Cookery badge. For this, Trevor got half a grapefruit, a scrambled egg on toast and a serviette folded into a triangle. The 1980s Brownie ethos, unlike today, contained no mention of us girls striving towards a career or a vocation. There were no balm-like words on body image or self-belief. We had been put on earth to be really, really helpful. The highlight of each Thursday-night m
eeting was when we separated into our three sub-sets – the Pixies, the Elves and the Gnomes – and sang our little theme tunes: ‘Here we come, the jolly Pixies, helping others with their fixes!’ Or ‘Here we are, the happy Elves, we think of others, not ourselves’.

  I often wonder how many women of my age still think it is purely wicked to think of themselves first.

  But where the Brownies may have ignored the concept of self-praise, we did not shy away from praising God. Oh gosh, quite the opposite. Loving the Lord went hand in hand with toadstool pirouetting, and my Brownie pack were smilingly coerced just before the weekend into going to church the following Sunday at 9 a.m. As a Bishop Goodwin Primary School child I was well primed in God’s mysterious ways, but this was next level.

  I began rising early for church and soon began confirmation lessons so I could taste the blood of Christ at communion and all that palaver. And why not? This Jesus, with his good deeds and magic tricks, sounded a decent enough fella. Be nice to everyone, he says! Sing hosannah for the king of kings! And say thank you to God who gave us his only son … and then let him die, except not really, because Jesus was only kidding and leapt up again from the tomb, shouting, ‘HALLO, FOOLED YOU ALL!’ and this was all further proof of how much God loved us.

  Something like that anyway.

  I found these bits of church really confusing.

  The very best thing about church was the coffee morning afterwards, where a small industrious troop of ladies laid out a table with slices of Madeira cake, jammy dodgers and sometimes even a Bakewell tart. This made it worth going.