by Grace Dent
But I have absolutely no idea how. I want to make people feel how I felt when I saw Kim Deal from the Pixies walk onstage in Preston and play the bassline to ‘Debaser’. I want to wind people up like La Cicciolina, with her flower crown, pink diamanté gown and one nipple bared, setting Italian politics alight. I’d settle for changing the atmosphere in the room like my Aunty Frieda, who married a posh man and now causes chaos whenever she appears. I mean, who the hell does Aunt Frieda think she is?! I want to be like Magenta Devine who presents Network 7 and especially Paula Yates off The Tube. Paula had all of Duran Duran and David Bowie at her wedding, holding her aloft in her deep-red dress in one of the photos. Sadly, I do not resemble Paula or Magenta or La Cicciolina. I am a short teenager from the arse-end of Cumbria – not even the Lake District part, the inner-city part where the heroin addicts live. I have weird teeth, a growingly huge arse from eating ASDA ‘Whoops!’ reduced cookies and an accent that sounds like an angry cormorant on Morecambe pier swooping to steal chips.
But I have had one and a quarter letters printed in the NME, and that is a start.
When Dad got home that evening, he was subdued. Mam gave him his tea on a tray. He did not wish to talk about any of this daughters business when asked. There was certainly no apology to me.
‘Hang on, I thought you knew,’ Mam said when I tackled her on the subject.
‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said.
‘Oh right, I thought you did,’ she said. ‘You had your nose in everything as a kid.’
‘Does David know?’ I said.
‘He must do by now,’ said my mam. ‘He’ll have overheard what’s going on.’
I still loved my dad, and the excuses I was making for him were getting more water-tight by the minute. None of this could be my dad’s fault. These terrible things could not possibly be his doing. Leaving an ex-wife and two children – I bet he didn’t want those things in the first place. She probably trapped him. Yes, the more I thought about it, my dad had almost certainly been tricked.
CHAPTER 3
Pickled Egg
1982
‘Always begin at the outside and move inwards,’ she says, pointing to the extra knives and forks. ‘And after a few glasses of wine, no one cares what you do anyway.’
Aunt Frieda is so incredibly glamorous.
At a family function, aged almost nine years old, I find myself sat close to her. It is Gran’s birthday and we are going somewhere far too posh for the likes of us. The fuss about what we should wear and how we will all get there has gone on for weeks. Twelve of us are eating in a function room beside an auction mart in West Cumbria, which does something slightly above pub meals.
Frieda, a distant relative on Mam’s side, arrives wearing a chunky gold bracelet with her name on. Whispers at the table price it at over £200.
From the very limited set menu, she chooses the Florida Cocktail starter with bitter pieces of grapefruit and pink Thousand Island dressing, while everyone else sticks safely to cock-a-leekie soup. Then she orders fish on the bone with its head still attached.
Back then, the story of Aunt Frieda was told to me as a terrible warning.
In the Fifties, Aunty Frieda played the fiddle. A large man-sized fiddle set against her tiny booby frame, offset by a shock of honey-blonde, Cumbrian-farming-stock hair and a smattering of pale-brown freckles. She played ‘The Bluebell Polka’. She played ‘Scotland the Brave’. She played ‘D’ye Ken John Peel?’ and all the other tunes that got a Cumberland party started in 1955. She played ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, flanked by a band of burly men with flyaway, badger-like eyebrows and tweed trousers that smelled of piss and ale even after being sponged down and hung to dry night after night in damp outhouses. They accompanied her on the accordion and tin whistle. She played at pie-and-pea suppers in dusty village halls from Caldbeck to Gretna – gatherings where farm folk pedalled miles on pushbikes and for a shilling they’d get some music and a slab of pie filled with oxtail or cheap stewing steak, wrapped in homemade shortcrust made with suet, all gleaned from cows who’d chewed the cud within two miles of the hall. Pie, with a ladle of fat, soft peas and a thick beef gravy made from blood, fat and bones. It was a chance to sit down, escape the farm for a few hours and have ‘sech a gran’ craic’, as Cumberland folk would say.
My Aunty Frieda played the fiddle at beetle-drive evenings where local women with tight mouths and twenty-four-hour girdles played cards and politely took cash off each other, sweeping their vast bosoms westwards and discussing lesser women’s errant husbands. She played at point-to-points where farmers raced their horses. She played hunt balls where landowners and local minor aristocrats gathered to chase a fox and rip its tiny frame from nose to snout into a pile of entrails – for fun – then drink whisky and eat pork pies. And then the band would play. Everyone the next day always remembered Frieda: full of confidence, spark and music.
Obviously, a lot of people found all this confidence and spark infuriating. They liked the music, but it came with a lot of sheer brass neck. That said, if they thought about it – which they did a lot, because there was nothing else to do in Fifties Cumberland – Frieda wasn’t breaking any laws. It wasn’t against the law to be confident. In time, Frieda began to play her fiddle at society weddings, which meant she occasionally stayed out late, past midnight, sometimes until dawn. She drank gilt-rimmed coupes of brandy with Babysham and began to mingle with people far above her station. She met doctors and factory owners and even the local lord. She met people the likes of whom my family only ever saw by appointment, or if they were up before the court. Folk we’d never dream of just striking up a chat with, let alone biting back at with a punchline. ‘She carries on like she’s one of them,’ people said. ‘Like she thinks she’s supposed to be there,’ people said. ‘She thinks she’s it, she does.’
Frieda was as good at talking as she was luring people to dance the Eightsome Reel. When a job came up as a part-time secretary at Barley Grange Hall, up at the big house, to work for a local toff called Lord Eric helping with his correspondence, well, off she trotted. In her good skirt and her mother’s good blouse, she went up the long gravel drive, where no one common ever went other than to clean the floors or perhaps take a chance to sell tea towels. ‘Well, she wasn’t there long before she was taking down more than notes,’ people at the beetle drive said, their lips as tight as a cold cat’s anus.
Lord Eric – divorced once, twenty-five years older – found Frieda indispensable. Soon she was driving about with him in his Aston Martin with a headscarf on. Her accent became clipped and her vowels flatter, and if you had no idea of where she’d come from she could pass as posh. ‘She isn’t just talking like the Queen,’ women crowed at gin rummy nights, ‘I think the Queen these days models herself on Frieda.’ Every syllable of their envy was audible. The sound of their cards being chopped and dealt echoed around the chilly village hall now that Frieda didn’t have time to play the fiddle for them anymore.
Eventually Aunt Frieda married Eric and that is how she got her title. Lady Frieda. An actual title. Her use of which lasted much longer than their mutual love. That liaison burned bright and fast until it became icy and belligerent, although the details of the eventual split gave the locals even more entertainment. Regardless, being a Lady, which she still was, was terribly useful. People’s faces shifted when she walked into a room. I loved it. The way the energy changed. The low-level pandemonium she caused at wakes and wedding receptions. There was always a table in any restaurant for her when she telephoned.
This was all meant to be a terrible portent.
That racehorse she invested in with her plentiful divorce settlement and spent weekends watching from a box at the side of tracks? Money down the drain. Those handsome younger men she romanced? They were just using her for her money. The time she toured South Africa in a campervan? She was living like a gypsy, basically. None of this sounded b
ad to me. It sounded absolutely bloody brilliant. On our flickering Grundig telly, I saw the inside of five-star hotels on a travel programme called Whicker’s World. I saw Manhattan through the eyes of Clive James. I saw Keith Floyd in France eating truffle and foie gras and caviar on blinis with Krug champagne. In Jackie Collins novels the heroine flew on first-class flights where you turned left at the top of the stairs, drank Gran Marnier at 38,000 feet and, if you were lucky, got titted up by the pilot. I saw pictures of Princess Margaret in Antigua and I thought, well, that seems much nicer than Currock. Sometimes folk from Carlisle went on coach trips to London. Proper fancy it was; you spent two days in a B&B in Bayswater, which included a trip to Madame Tussauds and Knightsbridge. They’d come home clutching their prized Harrods shopper bag and use it to bring back spuds from Walter Willson’s supermarket.
This status symbol proved you’d been brave enough to walk through the doors.
‘They check your shoes and what you look like on the way in,’ Margaret at Number 17 told us, whisking by with her crumpled green shopper. ‘They weren’t going to let our Kenneth in, as he had a hole in his moccasins.’
When I get there, I thought, Harrods will be the very first place I go.
Something that is very misunderstood about some of the working classes is that, given the flicker of a chance, we will become the greatest dandies of all. The showiest of show-offs. The grandest eccentrics. We’ll have the biggest gobs and the hardest nerves. With the most imperceptible beckoning, we will pirouette from the thirty-watt-bulb glow of our MDF-divided box bedrooms and behave in the most obstreperous, albeit charming, manner. As if we had not just as much of a right but more of a right than privileged folk. And once we’re in, you can’t get us out. The day after that posh birthday meal, I sat in the fields in Currock by the railway track, by the gypsy horses, eating a pickled egg out of a paper bag. I did not know how I could possibly get from one place to the other, but I knew that one day, like Aunt Frieda, I wanted to walk into restaurants and feel the invisible chaos I’d caused. And when I did, I would do it with my shoulders back, and my chin tilted upwards, and a swish in my step. And I would con everyone completely that here, yes, exactly here, was where I was supposed to be.
1990
In 1990, I styled out imposter syndrome heading into sixth-form block in a MK One batwing jumper and a pair of bold fractal leggings, which were unforgiving on my tree-trunk thighs. Sixth form took place in a few classrooms with their own stairwell at the side of the school. In the common room a manky third-hand sofa spewed its innards onto the floor and a large graffitied Aciiiid House smiley face beamed on the wall. The place stank of Loulou by Cacherel, Insignia shower gel, damp trainers and Options Choc-o-Orange sachets. On day two of the new term someone who will remain nameless put magic mushrooms in the communal kettle and I had to go home early as I was getting tracers trying to look at the blackboard. As ‘young adults’ we were now allowed to ditch our uniforms, wear as much make-up as we desired and express our own personal styles. The results, in my case, were perpetually woeful. The Nineties were not a vintage time for everyday girls who bought their fanciest clothes from the local C&A or market stall and their make-up from a cut-price shop called Cosmicuts at the top of Botchergate. A lot of Eighties and Nineties make-up did more to hinder than help. Foundation came in three colours: anaemia white, ripe peach or terracotta. If you were a woman of colour in the United Kingdom in the Nineties, well, God help you. You had to get your stuff by sending a postal order to an advert in the back of Woman magazine and choosing shade one, two or three. And if you were pockmarked, sallow, bumpy or had pores like a sieve, well, hard cheese, because primer wasn’t invented. Furthermore, Nineties lipsticks always bled after about ten minutes, all sheer lip shades seemed to contain cheap glitter and most dark red shades often came out blue once you got them home. Most of the time I looked atrocious. But then we all did.
No mortal woman knew how to apply blusher correctly. We splodged it roughly over ‘the apples of our cheeks’ so that our faces slid downwards like Salvador Dalí clocks. Eyeliner was still only really on the shelves in the form of cheap kohl pencils that were too scratchy to apply to your eyelid and cracked every time you tried to sharpen them. I used to shove this kohl on my watery eye rims to look like Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue but instead looked like Beetlejuice.
‘Your eyes look like pissholes in the snow,’ Mam would say helpfully as I ambled out of the door.
‘Thank you,’ I’d say.
‘And your lips look like a corpse,’ she’d add.
‘It’s Heather Shimmer actually,’ I’d grump. ‘What do you know about looking nice? You’re, like, fifty-four years old. You’re an old-age pensioner.’
Being fifty-four felt like an actual crime. How dare she try to tell me anything? She had a point about the eyeliner, though. And the foundation tide marks and the split ends from backcombing my hair too much. God knows how any of us found each other sexy. All early-Nineties sex was fuelled mainly by Thunderbird, peach Lambrini blush and low standards. I didn’t know a woman who wouldn’t have given Kurt Cobain one, and he looked like a poorly stuffed scarecrow.
Sixth form was also the beginnings of my lifelong battle to be slinky. After a few relatively carefree years of snacking on reduced-price double-chocolate muffins for breakfast, there was a price to pay. By the age of sixteen I was noticing how easily fat would settle on my hips, bottom and stomach.
‘Oh, you’re like me and your gran – big hips,’ Mam would say with some level of glee.
Obviously, I could take it off again just as quickly. I’d just starve for a bit and go to bed hungry. I’d smoke half a packet of Consulate menthol a day and drink a lot of Diet Coke. Or just eat the exact same food as before, but drier. Because what we knew for sure in the Eighties and Nineties was that fat, oil and butter were the actual problems.
‘You can eat as many chip butties as you like,’ Alison Bright would say as we puzzled over our French pluperfect verbs, ‘as long as it’s oven chips and no Golden Churn on your bread or ’owt!’
At this age, me and most of my female friends became masters of calorie counting. Our minds hoovered up and stored for life every approximate kcal per hundred-gram portion. Few Generation X women can look at a plate of food and not make a rough guess of how much it eats into a 1,200-calorie-per-day target. These things would be there in my mind, lurking forever. The fewer calories you consumed a day, the better. One thousand calories per day was being good.
‘It’s sixty-five calories a tin,’ my slim, gorgeous friend Sonia would tell me as we dawdled to the school bus. She is extolling the wonders of Weight Watchers’ Mediterranean tomato soup. ‘You can have it with two dry Ryvita, and that’s your dinner. My mam did it for six weeks and she could wear a cossie in Menorca!’ The can was as big as your palm. It was opaque red seepage with an occasional decadent fleck of tomato skin. It tasted of vinegary ditch water. The dry Ryvitas stuck in my throat and then I couldn’t sleep at night as my stomach growled while I dreamt of morning when I could have three tablespoons of Special K with skimmed milk.
Yes, I knew 800 calories a day was too low and might make me feel faint, but fuck it, by Saturday I could wear a catsuit to The Haçienda and dance to Todd Terry and I would look fucking incredible again, for a bit.
I took English, history and French at A level. They felt like the kinds of subjects someone arty might take. And now, with all the illiterate kids and the pyromaniacs gone, there was a chance to get down to some actual learning. Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and sixteenth-century European history were hard-pressed to be as compelling as the fantastic-quality MDMA that was freely available across north-west England during the early Nineties.
‘We’re going to Leeds tonight,’ I’d announce to my mother at Saturday teatime, breezing through the living room in a second-hand crushed-velvet Lady Miss Kier trouser suit that smelled of mothball
s with three doves stashed under my right tit. My father would immediately stand up from his chair under the pretense of remembering a light bulb that needed changing. He now had one daughter who was a pseudo intellectual sixth-form crackpot who was either fighting her mother or going to shady parties, another daughter in Liverpool who sort of but not quite forgave him for his twenty-year absence and wanted to be in touch and a third who had met him again, thought some more and then realised that she didn’t forgive him at all. He wasn’t having much luck with women.
‘Leeds?’ Mam’d say.
‘Leeds,’ I’d say.
‘That’s about a hundred miles away!’ she’d explode.
‘Yeah … it’s a party,’ I’d mutter.
‘In a house?’ she’d say.
‘No … just a thing. In a warehouse where you dance,’ I’d say, hoping she hadn’t read any of the tabloid newspaper reports on this type of thing too closely.
‘Will there be any food?’ screams my mother.
‘Yes, there’s a bloody buffet,’ I’d say.
‘Well, I hope you eat some of it,’ she’d say, ‘and not just booze.’
I wouldn’t be boozing.
And I wouldn’t be hungry at all.
I often wonder what happened to the millions of people I met during these years. That whole generation of wasters double dropping in the queue, then staggering about with their eyes rolling back in their skulls like boiled eggs escaping from their faces. All those Sunday mornings lost in strange houses, dancing in people’s attics, in barns and back houses, walking home from parties across fields with no shoes on. Where are they all now?