by Grace Dent
The best thing about the Cosmo lunch was how proud it made Mam.
‘Our Grace is off to work for Cosmo,’ she told the other mams in Morrisons, unless they spotted her first and went and hid behind the Eccles cakes.
‘Marcelle D’Argy Smith, the editor of Cosmopolitan,’ Mam would say, ‘she asked for our Grace in person.’
I open the door. And there she is. She is not alone. This is by no means a tête-à-tête. There are fifteen other girls here.
At the far end of a large oval table, looking like a glorious high-sea captain, Marcelle D’Argy Smith stands wearing a navy blazer, a nude Breton-style jumper and navy culottes. She is as tiny as a fawn. A perfect mini-sized woman.
I had never seen her like, although I would grow accustomed to these forces of nature over the years: Tina Weaver, deputy editor of the Mirror, clip-clopping across the newsroom in her Giuseppe Zanotti heels. Ad guru Sly Bailey, imperious in Hervé Léger. There is extraordinary power in an expensively pulled together woman. A mensch with all her aesthetic plates spinning at once. Marcelle, for example, had that specific genre of hair that media women possess, which needs not one hairdresser but three different specialisms: one person who cuts, one person who colours, one who comes to your house to blow-dry at 7 a.m., after your tennis lesson but before your 10 a.m. cosmetic launch breakfast at The Ivy.
Her pink-ash manicure was offset by a chunky gold Rolex watch. Her jawline was razor sharp, with no under-flapping wobble, and her sharp cheekbones jutted upwards like two signposts to the gods. Marcelle was the type of perfect woman who, when I stand next to her, makes me feel like a diplodocus jumping into a child’s sandpit, hoping to play nicely, but instead maiming the residents. Still, however intimidated I felt, and however I felt about women’s magazines, I wanted to be in this sandpit.
Marcelle’s long eyelashes flap as she humours the gaggle of hot young things in smart-casual clothes. As a Northern working-class woman, I will always be exceptionally bad at smart-casual. I just don’t have the bone structure. I’m either ‘smart’ (a bit like Imelda Marcos) or ‘casual’ (going to the tip). I manage to take a seat at the far end of the table with no one noticing.
This is a group lunch of competition winners. How have I missed this?
At my end of the table, the girl beside me is chatting about sailing. Not sailing as in seven nights all-inclusive around the Med with your own porthole, but sailing in her family’s yacht. The other girls chat confidently about steady boyfriends, intriguing fourth-round interviews, their shorthand skills and their places on post-graduate print journalism courses.
What? I need another course on top of my degree?
Most alarmingly, they all seem to have sorted out placements at the magazine.
Can you just do that?
Don’t you have to wait to be asked?
Then lunch arrives and things get much worse.
‘Carré d’agneau,’ murmurs a waitress, placing an angular section of lamb, ribs protruding, the lower side leaking blood, in the space before me. It comes with a small silver terrine of white gloop, which she informs me is ‘pommes aligot’.
Pomme à la go?
Quickly cooked apples?
Why didn’t I listen properly in French?
There are at least four choices of knives and fork.
What would Aunty Frieda do? I think.
I sneak a quick spoon of the white stuff into my mouth. It’s cheesy mash.
This is all fine, I am supposed to be here, I tell myself quietly.
The lamb sits on the plate, glowering back at me. This is nothing like the lamb my mother makes, wrapped loosely in foil and whacked on a low heat for four hours. It looks like an autopsy with a garnish. It’s bloody and sharp and green in places. I take the knife and fork and begin at the west wing of the beast, realising quickly that this fat and flesh are rock hard. I regroup and attack again between the boney ribs. Blood oozes across the plate. It is raw.
‘Oh, I love it rare,’ one of the girls says.
You can eat raw lamb? How do I not know that?
Back then there were a million things I didn’t know about the world of fancy food. Thank God I didn’t. If I’d known about the rules of etiquette and the faux pas waiting to trip me up, I’d never have left my bedroom.
After ten minutes of sawing and chewing and listening to a girl with a blonde bob tell us about being up in a helicopter with CNN, I’ve eaten two forkfuls of hard lamb fat with a powdery herb crust. Either my plate is getting fuller or I am getting smaller. Smaller and smaller with every bite, like Mrs Pepperpot.
‘I really feel like I’m in the presence of some very special young women.’ Marcelle gestures to a girl wearing a Chanel jacket over a floaty vintage Ghost dress who is off on a trip to Malawi to build an AIDS hospice with her bare hands before returning to her internship at the magazine.
‘You were lucky,’ one of Marcelle’s assistants says to her. ‘You got the last free space. We’re booked up until next year.’
A large piece of wispy sage has wrapped itself around my back tooth. I try to dislodge it with my tongue, while nodding and smiling. As Marcelle leaves, after the main (which she didn’t eat) and before pudding, I know that not only have I not spoken to her, as I was too shy and completely intimidated, but I will never see her again.
In the BHS café in Oxford Street, down the road from the Groucho, I ordered an all-day breakfast and somewhere between the beans and the fried bread I had a little cry. I knew a good daughter would stay close to her dad as his health declined, but I also knew that, despite the disaster of that Cosmo lunch, the lure of London and the media life was huge. I thought about the catch-22 of paying rent every month without work, but not being able to work without any experience of actually working. Then I thought about Marcelle D’Argy Smith striding into the Groucho Club with her just-stepped-out-of-a-salon hair, all heads turning as she moved around the room, brimming with power and steely charisma.
As I lifted the delicious life-restoring beige stodge to my mouth, the answer seemed clear. I had to jump one way or the other, and I chose London. No matter if I had nothing to come here for. Or anywhere to stay aside from Bob’s floor for a few nights (I couldn’t impose on him for longer than that, no matter how kind he was about it). I needed to pack a bag and come to London for good. But I was going to have to toughen up. And stop being so polite. And start lying. Really, really lying.
CHAPTER 5
By Royal Appointment
October 1996
‘So you’ve worked for Cosmopolitan?’ says the deputy acting features editor, looking at my CV.
‘Yes,’ I lie.
I’d never set foot in the Cosmo office and a woman called Camilla wasn’t returning my phone calls about placements. I knew that a real go-getter would pitch up at Nat Mags reception and beg, but I was far too proud. I’d decided to change tactics and send letters begging for work to every magazine in the address section of the Amateur Writers’ Yearbook.
‘Are you one of the London City print journalism post-grads?’ the woman asks. She’s chucked my CV on the pile by now so doesn’t seem likely to check. Her desk was a chaotic mess of press releases, empty Cup-a-Soup sachets, receipts and dying pot plants. She looked like she needed help.
‘Um, yes,’ I mumble.
‘And you live in London?’ she asks.
‘Yes, I do,’ I say more confidently.
I had seventy-five quid in my purse, a one-way ticket to Euston, an almost maxed-out credit card and a shabby suitcase full of ‘nice work blouses’ from Next. I was currently living on the outskirts of North-west London on borrowed time, cat-sitting for a friend of a friend in Mill Hill. The tenant hadn’t warned me that all four cats brought live frogs through the cat flap with great enthusiasm and that it would be commonplace to wake with a live frog in bed with me or decapitated on my pillo
w. These animals were the polar opposite of emotional-support pets. I sent emails on a cranky library computer to editors during the day and read a free newspaper called Loot every night, circling ads for flats that either did not exist or were veiled invitations to enter the world of sex work, which I was beginning to feel was really all a 2.1 BA Hons in English equipped me for. I could dissect passages of Beowulf while waiting for trade.
‘Can you do shorthand?’ says the acting deputy features editor.
‘Mmm-mmm,’ I mumble.
‘Do yer’wanna Hobnob?’ she asks.
‘Yes, please,’ I say.
This bit wasn’t a lie – I’d lived mainly on Frazzles and cans of Diet Lilt for three weeks. I was starving.
From the hundreds of magazines I’d dispatched ‘electronic letters’ to begging for work, Chat magazine was the last one I’d expected to hear from. Or had ever considered working for. If Cosmo was considered the strutting peacock at the top of the magazine parade, Chat was generally considered to be down in the gutter with the earwigs. While Cosmo had Cindy Crawford on the cover and features on matching your career to your erogenous zone, Chat had an everyday-looking lass with her gob open as if she, too, was amazed at the cacophony of working-class misfortune emblazoned on the cover. Home hair-dye kits that had burned eye sockets, hen-weekend punch-ups, villainous stepdads and women who’d climbed onto the roof to waggle their Sky dish during EastEnders and blew away into next door’s paddling pool.
But I understood the lives of Chat ladies much better than those of Cosmo women. Chat-world was where I grew up. Every street in Currock was resident to an eccentric or a family from hell. It was my mam’s daily job to try and instil in my mind some sort of class distinction between me and Shanice Hastings ten doors down, with the dad who bred Jack Russell puppies. We might not be as posh as Darlene Phillips’s lot with their SodaStream and breakfast bar, but we were more hoity-toity than the Hastings family. They didn’t even have a vestibule. Their living room was right in off the street.
‘Don’t let me catch you in Shanice Hastings’ house!’ she’d scream. ‘They’re common as muck. I don’t like how that dad of hers always walks about with a bag of sheep’s eyeballs. Don’t tell me they’re for the dogs.’
‘But, Maaaaaaam, Shanice’s house is fun.’
Me and Shanice spent Easter weekend 1982 robbing Mace Line Super Kings out of her nan’s handbag and learning to double-draw. Shanice would definitely buy Chat – she’d shove it through your letter box afterwards with the word search done, so you didn’t need to buy it too.
The acting deputy features editor looks me over, dressed up in my best weird office attire, with a tangle of split ends and chipped nail polish.
‘If you did maternity cover for us for a few weeks, you’d be writing up the real-life stories,’ she says. ‘You interview readers, then write up their stories in house style but in their own words.’
I nod furiously.
‘You know what that means?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ I lie.
Lying gets easier the more times you do it. This is how Dad must feel all the time, I thought.
‘The rough facts are on a form they’ve filled out,’ she continues. ‘But you need to call them and tease the details out of them. We need at least six stories per issue, fifty-two times per year, so it’s busy. Are you good on the phone? Do you like to have a chat?’
I loved to have a chat. No lies there.
‘Sorry, the stories come from where?’ I ask.
‘The form in each week’s magazine. We pay £100 a story. Sometimes more. Today’s mailbag is over there,’ she says, nodding at two enormous mail sacks next to the filing cabinets.
Each week in the back of Chat magazine, and many other women’s weekly mags, there was a headline that read ‘Do you have a story? We pay £100 cash for your real-life tale!’ Then some questions, such as, ‘Say in your own words what happened …’ and ‘Are you happy to be photographed?’ The lure of this £100 was strong. Chat magazine was, it seemed, topping up electricity meters and buying bags of Iceland fishcakes in housing estates the length and breadth of Britain.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘if you’re not too busy with all your Cosmopolitan work, could you do the next two weeks? That’s ten shifts. We pay fifty quid a day.’
And in that moment, I officially entered the glamorous world of the media.
On my first day at King’s Reach Tower, I grabbed the silver mail bag and pulled it towards the desk and turned it over. At least 300 envelopes fell onto the floor. As I opened them and began to read, I started to file them into the regular themes: ‘Tattoo gone wrong’, ‘Wedding brawl’, ‘Boyfriend tried to kill them’ – that last pile was quite big, almost as big as the one I called ‘Double life’. Britain seemed full of men with a similar approach to facing the truth as my dad. Funeral wakes across the land, it seemed, were regularly ruined by mistresses kicking off by the potted meat baps. Coffins were prised open last minute to grab back jewellery. Conmen, fantasists and bigamists were rife. This put my father’s behaviour into perspective. I mean, he’d only lied for almost all of my life about two secret children. Actually, three secret children.
That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Or maybe every day, in different ways, I got better at making excuses for him.
In the few years since I’d learned about my sisters and other brother, I’d wondered a lot about the ones who were left behind. I worried about how their lives had worked out. But I also felt oddly disloyal to Dad for worrying about them or wanting to forge a relationship. I loved the idea of having sisters. But Dad liked things as they were: all on his terms, no fuss, no blame, no comeback. Also, he was the ill one now. He was the one we should worry about.
‘As the key turned in the lock, I knew it must be Sheila back with the prawn crackers and the vino,’ I typed.
After my first fortnight at Chat I was getting rather good at this real-life business. I was invited back to cover more holidays and maternity leaves.
‘We always had a girlie night in on Thursdays to discuss fellas. But when I smelled diesel oil I knew something was wrong. It was our Kevin back early from jail …’
‘Jesus Christ,’ coughed Karen, the other staff writer, ricocheting back in her chair. ‘Not again.’
‘What’s up?’ I said.
‘We did a health spread last year on STDs,’ she said. ‘Ladies keep sending in, um, samples for us to examine, wanting our opinion. It’s another pair of pants.’
She picked up a pencil and fished a pair of used women’s knickers out of the envelope and put them directly in the bin.
This was not the glitzy life I’d promised myself when I came to London to be a national treasure. Still, at the end of the first week, they’d put £350 into my bank account. One of my colleagues warned me that I’d have to pay something weird called pay-as-you-earn tax out of this in the future, which made no sense at all, but who cared about that? Right then I was the richest I’d ever been.
Rich and totally starving.
June 1997
The Friday-night kicking-out-time queue for the beigel shop on Brick Lane, East London, spills out of the glass door and into the street. I’m with my friend Clare, propped against the sticky shelf that runs along the wall inside, eating an onion platzel with chopped herring.
This type of thing was new to me. There were very few Jewish people in Cumbria in the Seventies. Or the Eighties or the Nineties. Or for that matter many Caribbeans or Indians or Bengali folk or Greeks or Turks or … well, anyone who wasn’t more or less like me. And although I cannot sum up neatly why Carlisle stayed so pale and Protestant, the plain truth was, people of colour and different faiths rarely found themselves in Southwaite Services car park, ten miles from the Scottish border, pelted by sleet from Shap Fell saying brightly to each other, ‘Fellas, this is the place.’
&n
bsp; The demise of the factories throughout the Eighties didn’t help. Or the fact that if you did set up home, being the very first family representing your skin tone or culture would inevitably be exhausting. All these things and others meant that, aside from the Renuccis, some Italians who owned chip shops in the area, and the well-loved Chung clan, who gave Cumbria its very first chow mein, I came from a landscape peopled almost exclusively by Anglo-Saxons within a few miles of Hadrian’s Wall. And I’m not saying white people’s food wasn’t delicious – my fat little thighs throughout the Eighties, swelled by rock buns and Tizer, were proof that it was – but when I moved to London I realised I’d been missing out on a lot. Like beigels and chollah and platzels.
Clare and I are slightly inebriated and discussing a guy called Larry I’ve just met in Happiness Stan’s on the Farringdon Road – a club made up of four rooms, playing ‘an eclectic mix’, as London folk say. My friends down south all love the drum-and-bass room; I think it sounds like being chased by bees. Regardless, David Bowie has been seen at Happiness Stan’s, and although we missed him, we definitely saw Robbie Williams. Clare is my first proper London friend. She’s a Manc who arrived in the South before me and is currently freelancing at Mizz magazine. She is slender and tall, with a shock of brown curly hair right down her back, and wears tailored wide-legged trousers. We drink gin and tonics in the Stanford Arms next to the IPC Magazines tower, flirt with the boys from Loaded, buy Melon Berry Snapple cocktails and Otis Spunkmeyer cookies for breakfast and plan our route to the top of the media tree. Clare once did work experience at The Face, which is quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever heard. Although even more magically, she knows about this wonderful thing called ‘the guest list’, where with just a little prior wrangling you can breeze into parties and nightclubs for free. You can sip fizzy plonk from trays near the door, make the correct noises at the public relations person who is footing the bill, rub elbows with a famous person off the telly like Mark Lamarr or Sanjay off EastEnders and then scoot off again without paying a penny to anyone. Gratis. Free. Complimentary bars are commonplace in London media land. It blows my mind. Especially as everyone behaves so relatively well, taking a couple of glasses, then leaving. If they set up a free bar somewhere in Carlisle every weekday evening at least one person would stay until they had wet themselves. I am working on moderating my alcohol intake.