Hungry

by Grace Dent

  None of these things helped my route into academia. I may have written some terrible sixth-form poetry along the way (though like all poetry written as a teen, it should be put into a shredder and the remnants burned with petrol to spare everyone’s blushes), but as for actual studying, the problem was A levels need an eye for detail, and Mondays after a Saturday night were at best hazy and Tuesdays were just difficult. On Wednesdays I’d stare under duress at my A-level notes on the fourteenth-century peripatetic courts of Castile and Aragon. By Thursday we’d make plans, merge funds and then party at the Sub Club or The Arches in Glasgow. We’d brazen the queue for The Haçienda in Manchester or dance till three at the Arena at Middlesbrough, then travel home in the back of someone’s Ford Escort van.

  I’d love to blame Dad and his errant ways for all of this. But I’ve never been able to blame anyone else for my behaviour with a straight face. Blaming your dad for the idiotic stuff you do – in youth, as well as beyond – is very middle class.

  CHAPTER 4

  Never Mind the Tunnock’s

  October 1992

  ‘So that blue tattoo on his arm, the one he covers up,’ I say to Mam, ‘is that his first wife’s name?’ I’m packing a suitcase and detaching a poster of Michael Hutchence with his big doe love-me eyes from my wall, leaving Blu Tack scars behind.

  I am leaving home. Mam looks sad, but sad in a way that leaves room to start knocking down the MDF that separates my bedroom and the bathroom, and installing a mock neopalatial sunken bath with a two-speed whirlpool.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘Oh, that? That blurry tattoo? It says “Vera”. He used to scrub at his arm with iron wool to make it blurry. That’s how they got rid of tattoos then.’

  It’s October. I’ve just turned nineteen. Six weeks ago, clutching two Bs that I’d somehow scraped despite everything, I spent ten minutes on the telephone with a kind woman in a university administration office far away in Scotland. That call changed the entire course of my life. I got into uni on ‘clearing’. After some garbled chat about who I was and my love of words, whoever this brilliant, understanding human being was took pity on me and shoved me in to study a BA in English literature. I had a place at the University of Stirling. No, I didn’t know where it was either. Nevertheless, I said yes on the spot. I got my dad’s big AA map down and found it. Stirling was on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Dad said he’d drive me there.

  Two days later a reading list arrived via Royal Mail, with a cover note, which I carried around with me for years, that said, ‘Good luck, Miss Dent.’ The list was ten books long, consisting of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe and The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells. I didn’t know how I was going to shoplift all of them, but I could make a start that day. I’d slid downwards for a while on the game of snakes and ladders, but I was on the rise again. If I studied English and maybe worked for the student paper – wasn’t that what famous people did? They edited student papers or maybe performed in plays and then they were noticed by BBC Two and got their own series, were catapulted into the nation’s hearts and spent weekends hanging around the Groucho Club drinking White Russians with Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

  ‘How long was he married to Vera?’ I say to Mam, taking down a poster of Matt Dillon brooding in a vest.

  Mam’s face creases to think.

  ‘Oh, no, he wasn’t married to Vera, he was married to Maureen,’ she says.

  ‘You said Vera,’ I correct her. ‘On his arm, Vera.’

  ‘Oh, Vera was the one he was with before he went in the army,’ says Mam.

  ‘I’ve never heard of her,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, you have,’ she says. ‘That’s the one he had the little boy with.’

  ‘He had the what?’ I say, feeling the colour drain from my face.

  ‘Michael,’ she says. ‘Oh.’

  I look at her.

  ‘I thought you knew about this one,’ she says.

  ‘No, I didn’t know about this one,’ I say, the floor moving beneath me.

  My father, I had just found out, also had a son called Michael. Somewhere, out there. As far as Mam knew, he was not in touch with him.

  My father, it transpired, did not join the army as a teenager out of a post-war patriotic fervour; the line he’d spun my entire life. Dad was a military man! All he’d yearned to do from being a tiny boy was to join up and be prepared to fight for his country in case the Nazis made another appearance! This was a lie too. He just got someone in Liverpool up the duff and was basically on the bloody run. I wasn’t angry at Dad. It’s hard to stay angry at a person when your only chance of freedom requires them to give you cash for your first month’s rent.

  I never, ever spoke to Dad about Michael. He made talking about things he didn’t want to talk about impossible. But I did think over the years that it must have been very difficult for Dad getting someone pregnant early in the Fifties when he had such Catholic parents. My ability to find excuses for my dad was pretty honed by this point: Michael was all religion’s fault. If anything, this mess-up was on the Pope. And the telephone exchange. I mean, how was Dad supposed to stay in touch with his first child when he was in the army, right?

  I wandered out onto the tarmac outside Southdale Street, smoked a menthol Silk Cut and rubbed Cilla’s belly as she kipped with four paws in the air, under the ‘Warning – Dog’ sign. I loved Currock – shaking the Currock part out of me was going to prove very hard – but it was time for me to go.

  In Scotland I was introduced to the perilous joys of Buckfast Tonic Wine.

  ‘It’s made in an abbey by wee monks,’ my flatmate Agnes told me, pouring me a glass in my first week as a Stirling resident. This fortified caffeinated grape juice had quite the reputation, although not quite as holy water; rather for encouraging drinkers to roll about in the streets and fight the local police. If you overlooked all that, it was actually rather drinkable. For the mornings after, I was tutored in the restorative power of a can of cold Barr’s Irn-Bru: a bright-orange, bubblegum-flavoured, hangover-blitzing nectar. It was ‘made in Scotland from girders’ according to the adverts that played on Grampian TV. I found the adverts intoxicating. I’d grown up eight miles from the Scottish border in the blissfully ignorant belief that if you ever strayed over there they probably ate and drank the same things we did.

  I was wrong. Every day in my new adopted country was a fresh treat. In my first year I learned to love the claggy happiness of Tunnock’s caramel wafers wrapped in fawn tartan wrappers. These delicious things required serious commitment to chomp through. Any English fairy could eat a Penguin or a Breakaway. Only Scotland could invent a chocolate biscuit that actually hurts your mouth. They are a nation of glorious contrarians. They take something perfectly design-friendly, like a sausage, call it Lorne Sausage and serve it in regimented flat rectangles. They didn’t bother with fancy modern sliced bread like Mighty White; no, their sliced bread looked like something from 1940. It was a thin, tall loaf, wrapped in tartan-patterned greaseproof paper. At breakfast they added white tatty scones to their fry-ups – mashed leftover spud mixed with flour, cut into triangles and fried in a pan full of leftover bacon fat. Each Sunday night, my flatmates would return from visits to their families with ‘tablet’ – a sort of homemade fudge made from condensed milk and sugar. Everyone’s ‘wee nan’ had a secret recipe.

  None of the above did much for the size of my arse, because, roughly speaking, none of the real joys of Nineties Scottish cuisine were terribly healthy. Although I never set eyes on a battered Mars Bar – a tourist thing newspapers harped on about in the Nineties – it does give away something really, really brilliant about Scotland. They took chip shops very seriously; much more so than the English. In Stirling, the fryers were on from 11 a.m. till 11 p.m. daily, seven days a week. Chips were fresh, hot and fried in beef dripping, then pelted with salt an
d sweet brown sauce. Any item within reason was flung into the deep-fat fryer: slices of pizza, pakoras, onion rings, haggis, white puddings, black puddings, sausages and chicken tikka. The Scots, I found out quickly, had their own specific chip-shop language. Any item with chips was ‘a supper’, even if you were eating it at 11 a.m. Anything without chips was ‘single’, almost as if you were explaining its relationship status. The Scots – confirming that they are God’s own people – invented something called ‘the munchy box’: a fourteen-inch pizza box containing a sumptuous smorgasbord of pick ’n’ mix deep-fried things: onion bhajis, battered sausages, shaved kebab meat, chicken nuggets, scampi and so on and so forth. The munchy box was a positive boon during the Nineties for stoned people playing Mortal Kombat on Super Nintendo who could only eat with one hand while leading Sonya through martial arts battles.

  Dad drove me to Stirling in a van brim full of all my worldly belongings. Other Freshers seemed to be travelling light, arriving with a small rucksack containing The Dark Side of the Moon on cassette and some wet wipes to tide them over until they next went home. But as I made this leap from one world to another, I was sure that was the last time I’d live in Cumbria again. I arrived with my beloved fake Eames chair that made me look like one of the intellectuals on Channel 4’s cool anarchic debate show After Dark. I packed my stereo, my Deee-Lite CDs, my DJ Sasha bootleg cassettes and several split-leg dresses and feather boas, in case an emergency Brand New Heavies concert broke out. As the Nineties continued, my fashion sense did not improve.

  ‘Why are ye’ wanderin’ aboot like a pure bam?’ Agnes would say, when I appeared in the kitchen in a charity-shop cocktail dress that made me look, I supposed, exactly like Jackie Onassis.

  ‘You’re wearing a Rangers tracksuit,’ I’d snap back, putting on my oversized sunglasses. ‘You have no right to talk about fashion.’

  Agnes played football for Stirling Women and in the holidays, aged nineteen, ran one of the bars at Ibrox Stadium.

  ‘Seriously, mon, get te’ fuck,’ she’d laugh. ‘I’m casual. You’re chippin’ aboot lookin’ like a bluebottle.’

  As a settler from another country, I was always treated kindly by the Scots, despite the fact that thirty years of Tory government had left millions of them even more resentful about ‘the fuckin’ English’ than ever before. Many felt forgotten, looked down upon, swindled and snubbed all at once. The dream of Scottish independence never felt far from the surface in any pub chat. Cos they ‘hated the fuckin’ English, maan’. All of us.

  ‘The thing is, youse are all a bunch of posh yah-yah cunts, that’s why,’ my friend Gary would say in thick Kilmarnock tones.

  ‘What, even me?’ I’d say.

  He’d cave immediately.

  ‘Actually … no, not the Northerners,’ he’d say. ‘Youse lot are OK. Youse lot are like us.’

  Something has been vaguely troubling me about Dad, which happened on the very first day of term. It was a very subtle thing, but I dwelt on it for weeks afterwards.

  ‘This is Grace,’ my father shouts across the car park in a weird American accent. ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of her.’

  A group of bewildered Finnish PhD students, returning for their final year at university, turn around to stare at me. I’m an anonymous Fresher they have no reason to know, unloading a car. They shrug and walk away. I never see those students ever again. Or any of the other strangers my father insists on introducing me to on my first day at university, now feigning an ever-so-slightly German accent. The interactions make no sense. I go along with it at the time, but there is an exuberance and a lack of reasoning in his actions that is just a bit askew.

  It’s impossible to pinpoint when all the stuff with Dad began. It is one of the biggest kickers for families like ours when we try to remember. There’s no beginning to mark, should we even want to pause, take stock and get our bearings.

  But maybe this was it, decades before it got really bad. There. That moment in the car park. Early Nineties.

  No, it had to be later. When he became obsessive about peeling onions before stacking them in the fridge in a neat wall to save space? Their brown gossamer skins troubled him as they were ‘taking up too much room’.

  But aren’t dads just weird anyway?

  That’s their job. Being weird, embarrassing you and driving you places. And my dad loved to drive, although sometime in the Nineties he became mysteriously cagey about getting behind the wheel. Sometimes on the simplest trips, my mother said, he got completely lost.

  The confused Finnish students disappear out of the car park.

  Other Freshers wander past on their first day in Scotland carrying lava lamps and Betty Blue posters.

  ‘They seem like a good bunch,’ my dad says, not being American anymore. He was very proud that I’d got to uni. Even if he never quite knew what I studied. He was always proud of me – even years later, when he didn’t 100 per cent know who I was.

  ‘My only little girl, off to university,’ he says, picking up a box.

  Oh yes, his only little girl – he never stopped with that either.

  ‘Do you think there is something wrong with Dad?’ I said to Mam on the phone a few weeks after I left.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, just some of the stuff he does,’ I said. ‘It’s like he’s got dementia.’

  ‘Oh, Grace, he’s not got dementia,’ she sighed. ‘He’s just a dickhead.’

  This university campus that I’d made my new home felt oddly adrift from the outside world. Built in the grounds of the Airdrie Castle estate, our uni halls sat in the centre of 360 acres of greenery, overlooked by mountains and pelted by rain almost twelve months a year. From September until January the grassy knolls and forest glades behind our halls of residence would fetch up a sumptuous scattering of potent magic mushrooms. On news of a new crop ripening, students would converge carrying old ice-cream boxes to commence foraging. Soon, the sounds of Ozric Tentacles tormented the corridors as we lay around on our beds with our ankles in the air, beaming at the ceiling when we should have been finding the magic realism in Woolf’s Orlando. The first year passed in a joyous blink until the grades arrived. Friends began going home at weekends and instead of reappearing carrying their wee nan’s teeth-rotting tablet, they simply didn’t reappear at all, ever again, quietly throwing in the towel on uni life. Now this frightened me. Going home was not an option. I had to fix up, and sharpish.

  1993

  ‘The lead story should be that the tarmac is bought from England. From Hull,’ an irate student is telling us. ‘It’s not even Scottish tarmac. We make tarmac in Scotland!’

  At the second-year Welcome Meeting for the University of Stirling student newspaper, I am having my first experience of news. Inveigling my way into the world of print is very much part of my new five-year plan.

  ‘The scoop is the waste of university money,’ another agrees. ‘We should put that on the cover. “Cash Squandered in English Tarmac Scandal.”’

  This is not going well. Journalism, if the last seventeen minutes are anything to go by, does not seem terribly exciting. It feels nothing like Piers Morgan’s ‘Bizarre’ column where he’d have one arm around Bruce Springsteen by now and an exclusive on the Bros come-back. Instead, today’s red-hot topics include: press ethics, whether the campus rabbit population should be subject to culling (they were eating all the campus chrysanthemums) and a heady debate over whether bunnygate is a better front page than the absolute scandal of the tarmac expenditure. Several of them are dressed as actual grown-ups in shirts, ties and pleasant sweaters.

  ‘Is there any room for anything kind of, um, funny?’ I ask, raising a hand.

  ‘Such as?’ says the editor

  ‘Er, well, like satire, maybe.’

  I don’t really mean satire. I mean silliness.

  I just know they’ll go for satire bec
ause boring people since George I’s reign have claimed to have a great respect for satire.

  ‘Satire,’ they all nod. ‘Yes, satire.’

  Bingo, I think.

  ‘You could write something funny exposing this tarmac expenditure scandal for what it is? Like in “Rotten Boroughs” in Private Eye.’

  ‘Um …’ I say, chancing my arm, ‘I was thinking more like … a column about campus life. About all the different tribes … and, well, the gossip we’re all talking about on a Sunday morning on our sofas.’

  ‘We don’t have a gossip column,’ says a third year who has actual leather elbow patches on his jumper. ‘Gossip is a bit naff.’

  This may be true, but gossip is the lifeblood of the campus. We are 3,000 twenty-somethings living in a glorified nature reserve on the side of a mountain in sideways sleet. What else is there to talk about other than each other’s business?

  ‘Also,’ says the editor, ‘we can’t go around printing things about people that aren’t true.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be making things up,’ I say. ‘Just printing what happened and taking the piss out of things a bit.’

  I look hopefully at them as they stare back as if I’ve asked to whip off my top and bounce on a trampette on page three.

  ‘Let’s come back to that,’ the third year says. Then a Fresher who smells of chlorine asks if he could write up the regional front-crawl heats happening at the uni pool and debate moves on to the recent verruca outbreak.

  ‘Maybe that’s the cover,’ a voice says. ‘“Uni Wrongfooted by Verruca Scandal.”’

  I flounce out of the door, vowing never to darken their doors again. Not a soul notices.

  At a loss, yet undeterred, next I hit up the drama club. Here things then went from bad to worse. The first meeting involved playing a long improvisation game of swapping hats and pretending to be at a bus stop – the memory of which still gives me atopic eczema. The goal that term seemed to be to stage Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, despite my firm reasoning that audiences throughout time were only ever sitting through it out of politeness. Within a month, I had a strong sense that I was not cut out to hang with actor types. I just did not know where to look whenever someone in loon pants and leg warmers began hamming up Lady Macbeth’s speech. From reading the newspapers I knew that the Cambridge Footlights seemed to propel folk like Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry from unknown students straight into the heart of the media establishment. But being with people like this gave me clues as to why there were so few working-class thespians. It was just so show-offy. I was fine with being pretentious in the privacy of my own head, but in public? With people looking? Writing felt much more like a job for me. That’s showing off in private. But how?