Hungry

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 many 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 meeting 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.

Around now, despite being merely a stubby little thing with scabbed knees poking out of a sixth-hand Brownie tunic, I was experiencing a subtle awakening on class.

On every third Sunday of the month, the most shining glory was awarded to one of us: the chance to carry our bright-yellow flag up the aisle at church, during ‘parade’.

Here, as one of the stars of the show, you would parade side by side with key members of the Boys’ Brigade and Currock Girl Guides. The Guides were so impossibly chic I trembled in their presence. They wore neat navy shirts with a pencil skirt, navy-blue bonnet hats and forty-denier tights. Through the congregation, made up largely of sour-faced OAPs, local businessowners and people nudged towards God by their Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, you’d walk up the aisle hoisting your flag. Then, to a tuneless rendition of ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, it was placed behind the altar by the vicar, who asked God to bless our pack for another month.

Flag-carrying was a role I was never, ever given.

We were all normal, everyday sort of people where I came from. We were all more or less the same. Except I was starting to suspect that maybe sometimes we weren’t. There were tiny, subtle differences. Some of us were better, a bit fancier, and I had my suspicions that, in the eyes of Brown Owl at least, I was a bit common. Brown Owl, in real life, was a woman called Joyce who lived in a detached house, drove a Ford Cortina with a National Trust sticker and was once spotted by my mother in our newsagent’s buying the Telegraph. She had her card marked as ‘up herself’.

Brown Owl was not supposed to have favourites, but I knew I did not make her eyes light up like, say, Darlene Phillips. Lovely Darlene, with her long legs, blonde bob and nose smattered with freckles – evidence of her family’s two-week Canvas camping holiday in France. ‘Camping? Pghghg, lying in a bloody tent being feasted on by bugs,’ my mam tutted when I asked if we could go to Brittany instead of Pontins, Weston-super-Mare.

Darlene’s life was much fancier than mine. Her dad was a builder, and by this I mean an actual builder, not just someone with a spirit level conning the dole. Her dad built them a breakfast bar – with tall barstools to sit at – and he designed and hammered up a lean-to on the back for their washing machine, which Darlene loftily called ‘the utility room’. And she had her own SodaStream at home.

An actual SodaStream.

She sat at her breakfast bar drinking SodaStream Dandelion & Burdock in tall glasses with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. When we did our Cookery badge she brought all her ingredients in Tupperware and carried it to the hall in a wicker basket. I brought mine in a crumpled Lennards carrier bag full of old ice-cream cartons. What dismayed me most of all was that Darlene was a natural type of pretty; whereas by the age of nine I was already wondering how I might improve. Just a dab of my mother’s blusher on my cheek gave a defined cheekbone, I found. A touch of pale-blue shadow on my lids made my eyes bluer. Darlene’s mother, a gossipy type who came to church each week, once took Brown Owl to the side and tipped her off about my tinted lip-gloss. It’s not right, she said, that a girl that age should look so much like a little tart.

‘How can you decorate your Christingle orange with sweets when you’ve eaten all your sweets, Grace Dent?’ asks Brown Owl as I sit beside an empty Revels packet with my cheeks distended like a pre-autumn hamster.

We are making Christingle oranges. I am trying extremely hard to symbolise God’s fruits on earth by attaching a packet of Revels to an orange with cocktail sticks, but it’s a shambles. This is the wrong sweet for the job.

The whole point of Revels is that they are a random assortment: the Malteser one, the coconut one, the orange cream and the coffee one that has to be a joke as it tastes of armpits.

Revels are a surprise each time. Christingle is a task that needs definites. I haven’t thought this through.

At least I’ve got my ribbon wrapped around the orange, representing Christ’s blood, which he shed to save us.

Darlene Phillips’s Christingle orange is perfect.

It has a perfect red ribbon around the centre. It is festooned with midget gems on cocktail sticks, representing Mother Nature’s abundance. She has scooped a hole out of the top and pushed in a candle to symbolise Jesus, ‘who is the light of the world’.

‘Darlene really is so good with arts and crafts,’ says Brown Owl proudly. ‘She should take her orange up to the Reverend Kevin at the Christingle Ceremony.’

I push the last of the Revels into my gob and seethe. Darlene is always up at that flipping altar with the flag and her mother cheering her on. The Son, the Father and the Holy Ghost must be sick of the bloody sight of her.

1980

‘Worrya doin’, precious?’ my dad says, looking over his Evening News as I clamber up the back of the sofa, attempting to fish an object off the top of the dresser in our living room. I’ve been told off for this at least sixty times and warned it’ll topple over and kill me. It went in one ear, out the other.

‘I’m just gerrinthisbutton off the dresser,’ I tell Dad, mirroring his scouse lilt.

‘Whah button?’ he says.

‘The one that fell off me school blouse,’ I say. ‘Mam purrit up here to keep it safe.’

‘Mam’ll go wild about you climbin’ on that settee in yer shoes,’ he tells me.

Dad is not quite telling me off; he is merely pointing out the inevitability of my mother’s ire. It is a technique he uses throughout my life.

‘Oh yeah,’ I say, remembering that I am wearing my Polyveldts; a pair of chunky treated-leather monstrosities that Mam has bought me and David. She cannot afford to keep up with our rate of destroying shoes. Polyveldts – a hybrid of moccasins and trainers – will survive the rough and tumble of Bishop Goodwin life. We hate them but have agreed to wear them ‘until they wear out’. This was sheer folly on our part, as Polyveldts do not ever wear out. They are unkillable.

I sit down on the couch and take a small empty Lion matchbox from my grey school cardigan pocket. I open it and pop the button inside.

‘Worrayou up to?’ he says.

I sigh in a defeated manner.

Last week’s take-home task at Brownies was to find an empty matchbox – a small one like any of us would have around the house – and see how many little tiny items we could cram inside. And the winner would get a prize!

‘How about’, Brown Owl hinted, ‘if you took a grain of pudding rice? Or a tiny dried pea? Or you folded down the wrapper off an Opal Fruit?’

We stared at her in wonder.

‘So next week’s winner will get these,’ she said, producing a small box of Terry’s Harlequin.

‘Wow,’ we all gasped, ignoring the fact that these chocolates had clearly been hanging around her house a bit, as the corner of the box had been gnawed by her golden retriever, Clement.

Dad has put down his Evening News & Star and is stood up, peering into one of the drawers on the dresser.

‘There’s a tiny nut and bolt in here I saved off your roller skate,’ he says.

He retrieves it and then unscrews the small, delicate fastener from the tiny bolt. He plops them both inside the matchbox.

‘Two things!’ I say.

‘Yeah, two things. The nut and the bolt count as two. Don’t be tellin’ Brown Owl that nut was ever attached to that bolt or she might count it as just one.’

Dad’s ethos in life was always that rules were for bending. And that you can get away with anything if no one finds out.

We add three more things to the matchbox:

The corner of a 67 bus ticket from Five Road Ends, Currock, to the Town Hall.

A piece of thread off the hem of my dad’s work sock.

An apple pip we find on the floor, both rolling our eyes in agreement that my mam’s hoovering skills can’t be up to much. We’ll mention her slackness to her when she returns from driving Grandad to dominos at the Working Men’s Club and has got all our teas on.

‘OK, let’s see what we can find in the kitchen,’ he says.

(It’s funny how those magical moments that parents strive to create for their children very often make no impact at all. Daytrips to theme parks, Christmas pantomime afternoons, trips to the zoo; they can pass without much joy. But I remember vividly standing on a chair, shoulder to shoulder with my father, rooting through the kitchen cupboard in joint determination to win the matchbox game.)

We add to my tiny haul:

A tiny dehydrated pea from a Bachelors Barbecue Bacon & Tomato Cup-a-Soup.

A tiny piece of dehydrated carrot.

A grain of long-grain rice.

A grain of tapioca pudding rice.

A Whiskas duck and liver cat biscuit.

A red lentil my mam put in pressure cookers of Scotch broth.

A corner of foil from an Oxo cube.

A corner of a Smith’s Salt ’n’ Shake salt packet.

A hundred and thousand from a Birds Trifle.

The toe of a Pickled Onion Monster Munch.

Eventually, after some rooting around down the back of the sofa and in the lean-to at the back of the house, we have pushed twenty-eight items into the matchbox, cramming them in until the tray can barely slide into its white Lion outer cover.

‘’Ere, don’t be opening it again before you do the big count,’ Dad says, ‘cos we might not gerrit shut.’

‘I won’t,’ I say.

‘And don’t you be letting that Brown Owl make you feel daft,’ he says. ‘Does she know that you’re top of the class in your reading and your writing? You wanna tell her that.’

I’m not sure how I’m going to drop that into conversation, but I like that he is clearly proud.

My dad helped teach me to read at the age of four with flashcards made from the back of cereal packets.

Cake.

Bake.

This.

That.

Tree.

It took me at least another two decades to work out how poor he was at reading and writing himself.

It took me years to realise how much he had shaped who I am. Dad taught me never to say no to paid work, even if you’re snowed under, because work dries up. Dad taught me that keeping money rolling in – no matter what – and relying on no one is the most upstanding thing a person can do. Dad taught me that no one is indispensable; never think you are above being replaced – perfect advice, though it wasn’t his intention, for a career in media. The story he used to demonstrate this, which he told me often, involved one of his friends when he was a young man in the REME, who accidentally shot himself through the head one weekend in the barracks. The following Monday morning everyone was very sad, until about lunchtime when all the man’s tasks were redistributed and no one mentioned him again. It took me at least three decades to work out that his friend had not accidentally killed himself. Dad also taught me that work is a fantastic place to hide. Head down, chop-chop, keep busy, keep working: you can keep on running from yourself.