by Grace Dent
With all this in mind, perhaps it’s unsurprising how the working classes have such a soft spot for that type of school-dinner pudding that they remember making their day feel slightly better – like sweet, cheaply made apple crumble with custard or honking square lumps of chocolate sponge smothered in some sort of pink creamy sauce. I’d dispatch a sainthood to whichever culinary genius invented Australian Crunch, crushed cornflakes, desiccated coconut, cheap margarine, sugar and cocoa-flavoured powder churned into a traybake and topped with thick melted cooking chocolate.
School dinners were where an entire generation of working-class kids learned that beige food is a blanket of happiness to snuggle around you on an otherwise shitty school day. This stays with many of us for life. After a woeful day dealing with dickheads at work, very few people experience a guttural yearning for a bowl of mixed leaves with oil-free dressing.
No.
Give me a chip butty covered in vinegar and so much salt I can feel my heart valves clogging. Give me pizza so inauthentic that it would make a Neapolitan weep. Give me food that helps in the short term but in the long term reduces my lifespan.
When Jamie Oliver finally went to war on school dinners and what mothers fed their kids back in 2005, I couldn’t help thinking: God love him, his heart’s in the right place, but he has no idea what he is taking on. These mothers were my age group, they’d lived my life. Oliver was on a hiding to nothing, telling them a plate of broccoli was a lunch option for their little Lee-Reuben. Even when he managed to ban the Twizzlers, some mams came to the school and pushed emergency Happy Meals through the school fence. It looked shocking, I know, but I understood. They just wanted their kids to be fed and happy.
By the age of fourteen, a division was growing between me and my father.
He could not protect me from Caldew or possibly understand how it felt for me growing up.
He left the heavy lifting of all my hormonal teenage stroppiness to my mother. And as I grew curvier, bolshier, more belligerent and less likely to show my face at school five days in a row, my father hid away from our arguments. I turned my mother’s hair silver with anger. I told every lie I could dream up to stay at home and read Jackie Collins novels in bed. Sore throats, bad heads, heavy periods, imaginary teacher training days. Sometimes just plain old-fashioned screaming ‘I’m not bloody going!’
All this was nobody else’s fault but my own.
Fourteen-year-old girls in the 1980s were a law unto themselves. We did not consider ourselves to be children.
We read Cosmopolitan magazine cover to cover and loved the articles on stronger, harder orgasms. We pooled our pocket money and bought Thunderbird or Merrydown cider or Kestrel lager to drink in the bogs at school discos. We stole Cinzano Bianco from our mothers’ drinks’ cabinets and knocked it back neat with a Feminax period pain pill to get us more dizzily drunk. We danced to ‘Rebel Yell’ by Billy Idol or ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order or ‘Male Stripper’ by Man 2 Man and we had sex in our grandparents’ seaside static caravans or standing up in bus shelters and it was all bloody brilliant. The pubs served us vodka and lime without question and we went to nightclubs without even needing fake ID, just with false birthdays and star signs memorised. We drank snakebite and black or shots of Dubonnet and pints of Caffrey’s and long vodkas made with Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial and Angostura bitters. We doused ourselves in Anaïs Anaïs by Cacherel and had older boyfriends with Sun-In-streaked mullets who drove Ford Fiesta XR2s and Escort Mk 3s, who would get banged up in young offenders’ institutes for low-level soccer hooliganism. We had boyfriends who smoked bongs and listened to AC/DC who were scaffolders and picked us up from school in their Ford Capri to drive us home.
The word grooming was just something posh girls did with their ponies.
We smoked Regal King Size, which we stole from our nans. We wore our school skirts rolled over at the waistline with Pineapple boxer boots and neon fishnet tights and Rimmel Heather Shimmer lipstick and we tried to hide the lovebites on our necks with Constance Carroll concealer stick, although we were secretly proud of them, especially the ones on our boobs. We put ourselves on the pill at the local family planning clinic (carting along random willing teenage boys to play the parts of steady, responsible boyfriends), which the nurses dished out with grateful abandon, because they knew the alternative was that many would fake consent forms to book abortions, which in a time before computerised records was as easy as pie.
And we did all this without many tears.
It didn’t occur to us that we were victims.
We were Generation X, raised without playdates, allergies, safe spaces and CRB checks, when getting your tits felt up – not entirely consensually – at the back of the Manchester Free Trade Hall was, we reckoned, the best part of going to see Spaceman 3. It was a world before TikTok, before cameras in every pocket, before it felt imperative to capture, log and broadcast every experience in order to harvest attention.
Teenagers in the Eighties knew the value of discretion.
Of sworn-to-the-heart secrecy.
Of sneaking about.
And we generally got away with it. And now that Generation X are the parents, we pretend none of it happened at all.
My dad stayed right out of most of this. He buried himself in work and tried hard not to be there at tea time. Thatcherism was working out beautifully for some portions of society – much less so for others – but for him it brought a new way to earn money. With consumerism on the rise, he bought a white Ford Escort van and set himself up as a delivery driver. He acquired a hard-luck-story Alsatian puppy with a black ear whom he called Cilla, who sat in the front seat guarding the goods. People needed more stuff – white goods, home office supplies, even the occasional computer – and now my dad worked night and day to deliver them, never refusing a job.
Dad was happiest when he and Cilla were on the motorway driving away from the fights in our living room. Driving away from the television that never played what he wanted anymore but was now showing ‘that clown’ Morrissey spinning with a handful of gladioli, Michael Hutchence in bike shorts ‘acting like a poof’ or endless episodes of Airwolf while me and David gave each other dead arms.
He found family life – being the one supposedly in charge – no fun at all. My mother took up the slack.
That said, he had very limited experience of being a good example. And his sins had only just come back to haunt him.
CHAPTER 2
A Galaxy Far, Far Away
October 1988
‘Can no one bloody help me with these bags?’ my mother shouts, standing beside the car boot.
I’m on the sofa. I’m aged fifteen.
I’m pretty busy writing a stinging letter on Basildon Bond notepaper to Steven Wells, aka ‘Swells’, at the NME who runs the letters page. I’ve recently had one printed – a glowing epistle about the Pixies. Seeing my name in print has felt like a shaft of celestial light bringing joy into my moody teen world. My name. In the NME. I’ve not told anyone at home as I’m a bit embarrassed. The words – extolling the wonders of Kim Deal – feel so naked and exposing. Anyone can read them. But the exposure is also addictive. I’m writing to Swells again about Throwing Muses, hoping to chance my luck.
The letters page was often my favourite part of any magazine. I’d written continuously to ‘Black Type’ in Smash Hits, the mysterious figure who edited the readers’ correspondence. His style was deeply irreverent and made an enormous mark on my sense of humour. Black Type’s replies were mainly faux-outrage and absurdity peppered with a string of nicknames for popstars that pricked their egos: Paul ‘Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft’ McCartney and ‘Sir Billiam of Idol’. I imagined the office was like a huge party and that by writing I might get invited. But that never happened, so now I was chancing my arm with the NME.
Mam’s voice gets angrier.
‘Ugggggggh,’ I grunt, and pun
ch David on the arm. ‘It’s your turn.’ He’s watching You Bet! with Bruce Forsyth. Neither of us are available for menial work.
David kicks me back.
‘She’s shouting at you too.’
We both rise and stumble out of the house in the rain over the concrete driveway.
As a van driver my dad earned more than he ever did as a squaddie, a stacker driver or a security guard. We were not by any standards rich, but we were a little better off than we were. This meant one big thing to my mam: a better house.
The Dents had moved up in the world. OK, sort of sideways. My mam wanted more space and soon she had her eye on an odd, cavernous, detached doer-upper going for a bargain price close to our terrace. Our new house on Southdale Street dated back to the seventeenth century, some people thought. It should’ve probably, on reflection, been a listed building, if anyone in Carlisle had cared about that type of thing. But no one did, because Carlisle was swimming in old stuff. We were knee-deep in relics and artefacts. We bulldozed quaint Elizabethan vennels and built Laser Quests and Yates’s Wine Lodges. It was called progress.
Mam, in a similar manner, was not prepared to tiptoe around anything as creatively stifling as ‘original features’. After all our belongings had been moved in – not by professional movers, just by us carrying them ourselves, looking like a mobile circus – we wondered how long it would be before the changes began.
It wasn’t long. She had someone tear out supporting walls, hammer up MDF and pebble-dash the outside walls. She ordered a burgundy bathroom suite, Artex-swirled the ceilings herself and divided the walls with fake paper dado rails. She built a Venetian-inspired patio area outside for her rotary dryer and gnomes. She bought plantation fans and decorated the hallway with weeping Pierrot clown pictures and red-framed prints of elegant geishas. We were increasingly fancy.
Sadly, Mother’s aim to be posh was thwarted at each turn by our next-door neighbours, who were resolutely common. Mam was uncharmed by their Shetland pony Pegasus, which grazed on dandelions in their overgrown garden. It wouldn’t have any luck on our side; Mam had cemented over the garden to build a driveway. Now she could park closer to the house.
‘Can you at least help me with the bloody bags before you start pushing stuff down your throats?’ screams my mother.
It is the greatest moment of the week.
Mam is back with the big shop.
Me and Dave retrieve precisely one grocery item each – a box of Fairy Snow and a can of spaghetti hoops – then begin rifling through the bags and troughing down Penguins, both wearing damp towelling socks.
Bliss. Mam has been on one of her intergalactic space missions to a fantastic new galaxy. The weekend has landed.
It’s difficult to explain the seismic change the new ASDA superstore had on the lives of the Dent family. Or, for that matter, on Carlisle itself. Forget Princess Diana’s death or the Sex Pistols on Today with Bill Grundy – every Carlisle person of a certain age can remember the day they set eyes on the big new ASDA. This flash, modern, enormous superstore was built on a scrap of scrubland just off the M6, five miles from the Scottish border. In fact, the Scots even began travelling into England to shop there. They couldn’t resist this 34,000-square-foot grocery nirvana.
From the moment the big ASDA came, those little supermarkets – Presto, Lennards – would only ever be second best; somewhere you picked up ‘a few bits’. Life was never the same once you’d swept through big ASDA’s swooshing automatic doors, breathed in wafts of freshly baked, cheese-topped tiger bloomer from the in-store bakery and experienced the magical Narnia of chiller cabinets, each one crammed with at least eight different types of fish finger, burger or frozen croquette. The prices were incredible too. Forty-eight potato waffles for ninety-nine pence! Buy one, get one free!
But big ASDA wasn’t just about food. Oh no.
There was a toy department too. And you could get your dry-cleaning done and pick up your NHS prescriptions and get keys cut and sit down afterwards and have a cup of tea.
On the opening day my parents went twice. The second time, I reckon, was to check they’d not imagined it.
I mean, it was almost too good to be true. This was a place where you could pop in for a pack of pork luncheon tongue and come out with a Clairol Foot Spa and a CD of Barry Manilow live in Acapulco.
Around now, shopping took on a sense of largesse for my family. After a trip to ASDA, food was piled high from the front door onwards; mountains and mountains of stuff you didn’t know you needed, such as giftboxes of Ferrero Rocher, six packs of plump, glossy, American-style double-chocolate-chip muffins, crates of Tennent’s Lager and twenty-four boxes of Coca-Cola. It felt silly to just buy what you needed. Especially as every evening perishable items were sold off for practically nothing. This meant something remarkable – that every day could feel like your birthday at ASDA if you loitered by the Thomas the Tank Engine celebration cakes at closing time, waiting for the appearance of one of Cumbria’s most influential figures: the woman in charge of the reduced-sticker gun. This was the lady who dotted a big yellow ‘Whoops!’ label on each new bargain.
‘Thomas the Tank cake! Get in!’ shouts my brother, rifling through the big-shop bags.
‘It was meant to be three quid, but we got it for forty-four pence!’ my mother says, shaking her head all over again at the magic of this brave new world.
My parents’ earliest memory of eating was Second World War rationing: powdered egg, sugar shortages and pooling the street’s food tokens to make a wedding sponge cake. And now here they were, in the late Eighties, blindsided by choice. My parents had experienced scarcity and experienced abundance, and the latter was much lovelier. It did start to occur to me around now, however, that maybe everything was not as rosy as it seemed. It felt to me like ASDA, and later on Morrisons, which quickly opened just down the road, made shoppers feel slightly foolish for not wanting twenty-four reduced-price, slightly stale bleached-flour white rolls for thirty pence. These bargains were too good to miss.
‘But, Mam, we don’t need rolls,’ I say as I unpack the bag.
‘Oh, we can freeze them,’ my mam says.
But our freezer is overflowing, and the trunk one she’s installed in our lean-to is full too.
No one needed this much food in their house. But as our waistbands tightened and our chins multiplied, nothing was stopping us enjoying Whoops! reduced-price boxes of doughnuts. Six delicious, plump, sugar-sprinkled doughnuts for forty-eight pence. Can you believe it? Like a lot of the working classes in the Eighties, the supermarkets had made us accustomed to jam yesterday, jam today and jam tomorrow too.
When food experts sneer about supermarkets, there is a part of me – the little girl – who always feels oddly wounded. My loyalty still run deeps. During all those shopping trips I went on during the Eighties and Nineties with my family, ASDA was our refuge. It was a place of temporary family harmony. A happy place where we could put a pin in our urge to strangle each other. For my dad, ASDA was a night out with his family without actually having to take us anywhere. Once through the front doors, the Dents would disperse in different directions. My mother would veer off towards the homeware section to look at a new pedal bin. Me, to the clothes section where the mysterious, haute-couture designer George of ASDA peddled his latest range: shiny nylon ski-pants and pastel-coloured, cap-sleeved T-shirts. Then eventually the Dents would reconvene by the tills to pack the bags together – don’t squash the bread, all the tins in one bag, go and find an empty box for the bottles of wine to stand up in. Afterwards, we’d ride home together eating warm reduced-price sausage rolls with a boot full of bags and clinking bottles. We’d listen to my mother’s Engelbert Humperdinck cassette, singing ‘Lonely Is a Man Without Love’ together with great gusto.
We were, despite our faults – and I love to remember this now – a happy family. We weren’t perfect, but we had a laugh.<
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‘’Ere, I got a bottle of Bulgarian Merlot! It’s 14 per cent,’ my dad says when we get home, admiring his booze haul.
To my dad, strong wine means classy wine.
‘We had that last time,’ Mam sighs. ‘It’s like paint-stripper.’
‘It was one pound fifty-two for two litres,’ he says, unscrewing the cap.
‘I’ll have some, Dad,’ I say, chancing my arm.
I was keen to learn about wine for when I ran away to London to become the new Paula Yates or a celebrated NME writer. I would definitely be drinking wine when I began hanging around London in the star-studded Groucho Club with Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Janet Street-Porter. I’d read about this type of thing in Piers ‘Friend of the Stars’ Morgan’s ‘Bizarre’ column in the Sun.
‘You can have a little drop,’ he winks.
Until the late Eighties, the Dents did not buy wine. In fact, we’d hoot with glee at a lady on the telly called Jilly Goolden who would slosh it around her gob and claim she could taste babbling brooks and enchanted elderberries.
But now here we were, developing our own cosmopolitan palate. I could sneak tastes of Italian Lambrusco or Black Tower Liebfraumilch. I drank a peach-flavoured vodka called Taboo and developed a liking for Malibu coconut rum, which was exactly like the stuff they drank in the Caribbean, the advert said.
‘She can’t drink wine, George,’ my mother says. ‘She’s fifteen.’