Hungry

I have been finding tiny items to stuff in the matchbox for days. Rooting in drawers, opening folders, putting my face in places I really shouldn’t. I have been looking at two photos I have found stored in an envelope and reading letters that are not for my eyes. Some things I have seen are very confusing. I have found a black-and-white photo of two little girls in my father’s bedside drawer. Two happy little girls. Smiling and waving. I do not know who they are. I will not mention them to anyone for many years. My dad taught me that everyone has secrets. He taught me that no one is ever truly knowable. Dad taught me that everybody – and I mean everybody – fibs.

I skip to Brownies the following evening, quietly confident that I am in with a chance of winning, because me and my dad have properly put the graft in over this.

As all the little Brownies gather round the trestle table in the Methodist Hall clutching their Lion matchboxes, a whisper begins to grow throughout the pack that Darlene has forty-five items inside hers.

‘Forty-five?’ I say.

‘But her matchbox is different,’ says Tracy Fitzackerly.

‘How is it different?’ I say.

‘Her matchbox is sort of longer,’ Tracy says, not seeming overly fussed as she’s only stuffed ten items in hers anyway.

I walk down the table to find Darlene Phillips holding a neatly packed-to-the-brim yellow Swan Vestas matchbox.

Some girls are muttering that this doesn’t seem fair. The Swan Vestas box is much larger than a normal box. We all had to have the same size box. Brown Owl, who looks ruffled at first, is now saying she did not specify which type of matchbox we could use. Also, if you think about it, Darlene’s box is not as deep, so that makes everything fair. People seem to bend the rules for girls like Darlene. It’s like anything is possible.

‘I don’t think this is fair,’ mutters Tracey Fitzackerly.

‘Oh Darlene, that is very clever,’ says Brown Owl. ‘Jesus is in there too!’

Brown Owl is thrilled that as Darlene opens the box, a tiny gold crucifix is inside among the other items. A tiny Jesus on the cross, borrowed from Darlene’s mum’s necklace.

‘Isn’t that marvellous,’ says Brown Owl.

‘It’s a bigger box,’ I say audibly.

‘No, it isn’t, Grace,’ says Brown Owl. ‘They’re the same size.’

Somehow I manage not to say some of the best swearwords in my nine-year-old cursing artillery. I do not say ‘piss’ or ‘arse’ or the bizarrely effective showstopper ‘twat’.

I do not say any of that.

I don’t say anything.

I stand quietly, inwardly bubbling, as Darlene Phillips is given the box of Terry’s Harlequin.

And then, in the final minutes of the meeting, Darlene is made Sixer of the Pixies and is given her silver lapel badge.

I find my BHS ski jacket under the pile of other coats, pull it on over my Brownie uniform and skulk home alone.

As I reach the Five Road Ends I see my dad in Donny’s chip shop, fetching everyone’s tea. I tell him what went on. He hugs me into the armpit of his work jersey. It smells of sweat and WD-40.

‘Oh, presh,’ he says. ‘Bugger thalorro’them.’

And then he buys me a pickled egg.

Life, I was starting to see, was really not fair and some people simply had a much smoother ride than others.

That said, seven years later, when Darlene Phillips had a surprise baby in their utility room, then wrapped it in a towel and handed it to her mother after she kicked the door down, everyone at church was completely scandalised.

Except for me.

I thought it was really, really funny.

My mother is pushing a small rickety shopping trolley with a wobbly back wheel down a narrow aisle at Presto supermarket on Botchergate, Carlisle. She’s trying to do the big Friday shop between five o’clock and half past six, leaving enough time to drive across the city, drop off odds and ends to my gran, spin back, unload our car, then make everyone’s teas before my dad gets narky.

‘He won’t think to make his own,’ she says.

Being a mam never looks like very much fun. I am starting to have notions that I do not want babies of my own.

Even as a toddler, on being handed a Tiny Tears doll I was slightly flummoxed as to the point of it all.

‘Look, she cries,’ my mam said, ‘so you pick her up to cuddle her. And she wees herself so you can change her nappy!’

It was fun for half an hour.

Grocery shopping, however, felt more like a fun game. By modern standards, Presto was little more than a mini-mart – as big as a couple of tennis courts – but in 1980 it was one of the largest places in Cumbria to buy groceries. It even had a multi-storey car park with exciting concrete ramps. My mother never seemed more like a warrior than when she was jamming the accelerator on her Austin Princess and speeding up the steep entry ramp, yelling, ‘Weeeeeeeeee!’

There were very few men in the supermarket.

Women in cream tabards ran the tills, stacked the shelves and cut and weighed out slices of that spooky pork luncheon tongue slab with the boiled egg lurking inside. Women roamed the aisles, peering at shopping lists, trying to make housekeeping stretch a full seven days, pleading for their kids’ patience but inevitably losing them in the aisles. Leaving your kids at home alone became very much ‘not the done thing’ in the 1980s. A cacophony of ghoulish public-safety ads played on Border TV during all daytime ad breaks, warning mothers that slipping out to the shops was hazardous. Within moments of popping out to get bread we would drink bleach, drown in slurry or climb electricity pylons. Presto’s tannoy system rang incessantly with news of missing or found kids. Being one of the found kids, I learned quickly, was actually rather exciting. You sometimes even got a biscuit. Sometimes I’d lose myself purposefully, taking right turns and wrong turns along the aisles, merely for the thrill of sitting in the petty cash office in Lennards hearing my name being read out.

‘We have a little girl here who is lost called Grace. She is three years old.’

This was my first taste of fame and I loved it.

My mother found it less jolly. Once, in Woolworths, after being reunited with me by the Pick ’n’ Mix, she grabbed me, turned me round and smacked my arse as passers-by begged for clemency. This story, which is now part of Dent folklore, is always told humorously, but I can’t help but think that it was not remotely funny at the time, when Mam was struggling with two kids under three.

My little brother had arrived very quickly after me. Me in October 1973, him in May 1975.

‘I still have no bloody idea where he came from,’ my mother has often remarked. ‘I could hardly stand your dad for most of 1974.’

But I have a pretty good idea. My father was swarthily handsome. He was witty and devil-may-careish in a world of dour-faced, rule-abiding Cumbrians.

He was Lee Hazlewood to her Nancy Sinatra.

They fought like hell, due to his moods and her big plans, but never fell out for that long.

By the age of nine I was at least useful on the big Friday shop.

‘Box of Daz,’ she’d say, and off I’d run to the washing-powder aisle.

‘Two tins of peach slices,’ she’d say. ‘And a tin of Tip Top.’

Back I came, with an extra Heinz Treacle Sponge Pudding under my arm. The one you pierced with a tin opener, then steamed in a pan of boiling water. Sticky, satisfying, delicious.

‘Yeah, shove it in,’ she’d nod.

That nod was the best thing ever.

Supermarkets made me happy.

I liked the methodology of filling the trolley, trying not to squash the bread or bruise the fruit. I liked the set-in-stone way that supermarkets always seemed to be laid out: fresh fruit and veg aisles giving way to tinned fruits and dried packets, then shampoos, then toilet paper, then wonderful-smelling washing detergents and then finally booze and tins of cat meat.

The Heinz steamed pudding, I knew by the age of nine, would come in handy for a quick after-tea pudding. Each grocery we bought at this stage had a roughly assigned purpose. We didn’t buy willy-nilly. The small tin of Heinz Vegetable Salad was to go with the curly lettuce and the tin of red salmon for the 4 p.m. high tea when Gran came over on a Sunday. The tin of Smedley’s Marrowfat Peas was for fishfingers and mashed potatoes on a Tuesday night. I still adore fat, squashy, slightly bland tinned Marrowfat peas, even if nowadays they’ve been eclipsed in the public’s heart by trendy takes on mushy peas. I learned a deep respect for things out of tins early on; tinned macaroni cheese on white toast with ketchup will always cheer me up. Eating cold beans with a spoon from the tin will forever be one of my least attractive habits.

Choice, when shopping in the early Eighties, was limited. If you wanted tinned spaghetti, orange squash or raspberry jam, there were often only two sorts: supermarket brand or the posh one you’d seen on telly that your mam wouldn’t let you buy.

‘Shut up, it’s all out of the same factory,’ my mother would yell, as me and Dave begged for Robinsons Lemon Barley Water like Björn Borg drank at Wimbledon. ‘’Ere, this one is nice,’ she’d add, loading in the Presto Mixed Fruit Squash.

The Dents’ trolley contained virtually no spice, heat or evidence at all that Britain was part of the global commonwealth. Or that we even had much to do with Europe. We fried in White Cap lard. We ate Presto medium-sliced, slightly plasticky white bread. Our cheese was orange, almost always Cheddar, and we were still cagey about the idea of melting it. Rice was always white and it was used almost exclusively for puddings, which my mother would make in the oven in a glass dish. But, despite these narrow horizons, watching Ivor the Engine at 5.50 p.m. on a cold autumn night with a bowl of Mam’s rice pudding on my knee is one of my happiest memories of all.

The lack of choice back then only made the sparkly, frivolous things off the telly that we were allowed all the more magical in my mind. The box of Nesquik Banana Milkshake powder we were allowed to mark the start of the summer holidays. The occasional box of Cadbury’s chocolate zoo animals sneaked into the trolley but given the ‘OK’ nod. The tension along Harold Street as we waited for one of our mothers to cave in and buy Birds Eye Supermousse: sweet strawberry-and-vanilla-flavoured goo, in a small pot, with a brightly coloured cardboard lid. Those adverts played from 4 p.m. every evening and every fifteen minutes on Saturday mornings. Our small, determined hearts and minds were hostages to Kellogg’s, Rowntree’s, Smith’s Crisps and Wall’s. If you could sweet-talk a Sara Lee gateau or a bottle of Bird’s Ice Magic onto that conveyer belt on a Friday, you were one of life’s winners. Although more likely was that your mam would discover all those items you’d sneaked into the trolley when she got to the tills and hit the roof. Cue: more screaming, more smacked arses.

Primary school started so well for me. As one of the top kids in our class, I learned my times tables by heart and was doing joined-up writing when the others were still peering at vowels. I galloped through the Griffin Pirate series, in which the Red Pirate faffs pointlessly around the Black Cliffs for sixteen arduous volumes. Outside of ‘the three Rs’ of reading, writing and arithmetic, I took a keen interest in the small array of completely useless topics a Seventies working-class kid was taught: fictitious hokum about the life of Robin Hood, the feeding habits of a brontosaurus (which may or may not have existed), Viking longship building and, at my school, New Testament parables – water to wine, the feeding of the five thousand, the good Samaritan and so on.

‘Grace is a bright spark,’ it said on my school report each term, but without any further nod to where this could lead.

It is hard, perhaps, for some younger people nowadays to understand a world where no one mentioned further education to the lower classes, ever. Not once. Not even in passing. Perhaps it feels unfeasible that this vacuum of ambition or aspiration could possibly exist. But it did. The only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was glamorous. This was within my power. I wanted to be really, really glamorous. Like Margi Clarke in Letter to Brezhnev. Or Joanne from The Human League in the ‘Don’t You Want Me’ video in an ankle-length mink coat. Or Alexis Colby in Dynasty striding from a helicopter to push Blake’s annoying second wife Krystal into the koi carp pond, again. Glamorous was something I could get my teeth into. It was there on the telly on Coronation Street or the Miss World competition.

Still, despite doing well in school, by the age of eleven I’d seen almost none of the classic children’s books that make those broadsheet ‘100 Best …’ lists each year: A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit. Those tomes that apparently enrich the soul. I’d never heard of Dickens, Shakespeare or Tolkien. I knew nothing of Greek mythology or been tipped off that Latin was even a thing. The stuff you need a smattering of if you want to pass as posh.

Like most kids of my ilk, as a small child I was exposed to no foreign languages at all. And while I knew basic spelling, I was taught next to no grammar. I still feel these gaps constantly, despite incessantly trying to improve and catch up during my twenties and thirties. The difference between ‘fewer’ and ‘less’, for example, is something I only discovered in my late thirties when people sneered, ‘Surely, you mean FEWER restaurants have opened, not LESS?’ But that’s generally always the lower middle classes, for whom pedantry is their affliction; an inability to stop pointing out minor errors in people with less bright starts, before basking for the rest of the chat in a dank pool of bad feeling. Speaking perfect grammatical English, for people with my childhood, will always be like speaking a second language near fluently. We’re very impressive – and such a breath of fresh air to have around – but of course we make minor errors. That said, my primary-school days had their uses – if you want help nurturing frogspawn into tadpoles and releasing them in a patch of marshland around the back of Allied Carpets, look no further. It’s a shame that even this relatively bright start soon fizzled out.

I arrived at Caldew Secondary, a state comprehensive, in 1983, at the tail end of corporal punishment, just as the teachers had been requested to stop beating the pupils with belts, canes or shoes. It was a disappointment for them, as they clearly missed it. Now, in this moribund centre of non-excellence six miles outside of Carlisle, the powers of this old guard of angry male tutors were sorely reduced. Shouting was their only option. The corridors rocked with their stale-breathed impotent threats. Hurling kids out of class, out of sight, out of mind was a chief tactic to deal with the troublesome. While a small sixth form catered for the more promising handful after the age of sixteen, until then you were part of a one-thousand-strong mob. There had been no grammar-school option to spirit me away to more promising climes – not that the eleven-plus exam had done my family any favours. Both my parents had failed it. My mother – bright as a button – went to a secondary modern and by fourteen was working in a local hat shop. Now a similar fate awaited me and my little brother. My big brother Bob had left school at fifteen and, after a few futile Youth Training Schemes, had packed a bag and left for London with friends. He told us in a letter he was working washing dishes.

I missed Bob a lot. His dad was my mam’s first husband, she explained delicately when I was about seven. This made no odds to me: he was my brother and that was that. After he left, the house was much more boring. I missed the sound of David Bowie coming from under his rude remarks about Margaret Thatcher – Bob wasn’t a fan like Mam was. I loved him bringing home videos for me to puzzle over, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Bob was funny and brave; he dyed his hair wild colours, rode a Vespa scooter and would travel to other towns to go to nightclubs with his friends. Mam and my dad were always furious at him for not ‘sticking in’ at his latest job creation scheme at a carpet warehouse or a gent’s barber. The fights about his hair, his nocturnal hours and ‘Maggie’ were loud and endless. Then one weekend Bob left. He gave me a turntable and a copy of Parallel Lines by Blondie. He moved to Kilburn and then to a squat in Manor House. No one could tell him what to do anymore. One day, I will run away too, I thought.

The 1980s British comp-school education was a rudimentary affair. I learned French language for five years from a woman with a broad Carlisle accent who I am now unsure ever set foot in France. ‘Uhhhhn sandweeeech, seel voooz play,’ we’d all repeat, sharing Tricolore text books full of scenes of everyday life in La Rochelle. The French were weird; they couldn’t even buy a lump of cheese without a three-hour round trip on a bicyclette to a specialist fromagerie. The French made a right fuss of food. It seemed bizarre to me. They spent three hours having dinner, as they wanted to chat to each other and enjoy their food. Absolute madness, I thought.

By the age of thirteen, I was already predicted to leave school without a maths GCSE. No teachers made any attempt to explain that a university application form in the 1980s needed a maths GCSE as an absolute minimum requirement, plus at least one GCSE in a science like chemistry, biology or physics. Instead, to worsen matters, I was chivvied towards a qualification called modular science: a sort of holding pen for children too frightening to be allowed near Bunsen burners. In modular science our teachers attempted to explain difficult concepts like rainbows, before inevitably pinching the soft skin between their eyes and letting us draw a rainbow instead. In absolute fairness to the science department, I can’t blame them for giving up on us. I’d been brought up loving the Lord, who created all things heaven and earth in six days and spent the seventh watching Bullseye and drinking Kia-Ora. I had no interest in anything as unfeasible as physics. When Heston Blumenthal shows up making a risotto with a Dyson Airblade and a conical flask of formaldehyde, I still think: Use a pan, mate. Stop dicking about.

Lessons began to leave me behind. I loved swinging on my chair at the back, surrounded by a mob dissecting last night’s Top of the Pops. I loved doing impressions of popstars or making up song lyrics. Words were my one strength: daft poems, song words, nicknames. Finding joy in the mundane. In fact, the very same things that pay my mortgage now. But then, as a difficult pupil – gobby, booby, easily distracted by anything in Insignia body spray – I made a natural ally for the kids in King Kurt T-shirts who liked setting fire to stuff and locking staff in cupboards. To our credit, we always let them out in the end.

So, by fourteen, despite being a shining star at infant school, I was quite patently out of the running for Oxford or Cambridge. Or Durham, Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds or, for that matter, any of the tried-and-tested routes to where actual power lay in the 1980s. This story is not remotely unusual. It is absolutely bog-standard, Grade-A humdrum. Being bright but working class in Eighties Britain was a huge game of snakes and ladders. You could ascend for a while, but a few bad choices here and there and down you’d go again. Thankfully, in that era, Carlisle still had industry. Pupils who left school at sixteen could pack mint Viscounts at Carr’s biscuit factory or count pies off the conveyer belt at Cavaghan & Gray, and there was always a job at the Southwaite service station on the M6 clearing tables. The good thing about these jobs was the ten-till-three shift option, which you could fit around picking up kids, and then grandkids, from the school gate.

My one joy at school was home economics, where I mastered toad in the hole and the incredibly chic party canapé stuffed boiled eggs (the innards mixed with salad cream and Cheddar). At Christmas I perfected yule log by smearing a Co-op chocolate Swiss roll with a rudimentary ‘ganache’ made of Stork SB and hot-chocolate powder. Home economics was the only lesson where my teacher’s eyes actually lit up at my ‘panache’. I had panache. My chicken and tinned pineapple skewer was praised hugely both for presentation and seasoning – even if Dad did look a bit green around the gills on the twelfth occasion he got it for tea afterwards. At least here was a class where I could shine.

But when I think about secondary school now, I never think of learning at all. I think of crowded corridors, the arch cruelty of kids and, from just before noon every lunchtime, the uplifting aroma of gravy.

‘What’s that up your sleeve, sonny Jim?’ screamed Haggis, the school dinner lady.

The small boy shuddered in fear.

‘Is that an iced bun? Gimme that bun. Gimme it!’

Caldew’s head dinner supervisor was a terrifying lady from Scotland who we called – with great ingenuity – Haggis Basher.

She was six foot two, broad-chested like a sergeant major, with a curly mop of black hair and a voice like an angry velociraptor. If Roald Dahl had created Haggis for one of his books, he would have probably edited her out of the final draft as a touch unbelievable. Her greatest obsession was the school rule ‘No food items are to be consumed outside the hall’. Haggis, who had at least six sets of eyes, some definitely on her back, adhered to this rule with great tenacity.

‘You can get this bun back tomorrow!’ she shouted, snatching the boy’s sticky baked treat (which he’d hoped to enjoy on the playing field) and plopping it into her tabard pocket. As good as her word, Haggis would give him that bun back the next day at noon – squashed and with washing-machine lint tangled in the icing.

Haggis ran the hall like a military manoeuvre because – I see now only with hindsight – hurtling one thousand children, in three sittings, through a dining hall in seventy minutes is no small task.

Every day she delivered nothing short of a gastronomical miracle.

Three sittings, three hundred kids at a time, fed by a squadron of fierce women in duck-egg-blue tabards flinging beige, battered and breadcrumbed items out of a hatch in the wall. Dinner consisted of three stainless-steel terrines of mushy, lukewarm, delicious chips sat close to warm jugs of lumpy, powder-based gravy. There were fearsome fist-sized breadcrumbed balls of mashed potato and diced ham known as ‘rissoles’ and square slices of ‘vegetable pizza’ – spongey white bread strewn with diced carrots, runner beans and melted cut-price Cheddar. Those Turkey Twizzlers that upset Jamie Oliver so greatly were yet to be invented, but instead we had ominous burgers and cheap hot-dog sausages, which were 20 per cent salt water, 80 per cent pig’s lips and bumholes. Prices for all these things were rock bottom: for sixty pence a day you could eat like a king. Albeit a king who might have died quite young from scurvy.

To be fair, health and wellness were not ignored completely. There were jacket potatoes – never with fancy fillings, mind; just the potato. The true sophisticate ate theirs smeared with sachets of ketchup. And for the very stiff-nerved fitness freak, there was salad. Well, to be exact, three salads – that’s three pre-made salads to cater for one thousand pupils. They were plated up, cling-filmed over and placed by the chips. But, by Christ, it would be a raffish, vagabond child who’d touch one of these la-dee-dah fucking school-swot salad plates of chopped iceberg, grated carrot, boiled egg and a few dessertspoons of canned sweetcorn. Salad was one of those things a posh person like Penny from Just Good Friends might eat. And as kids, the majority of us were desperate to never, ever stand out. Standing out was suicidal.

Haggis needed to keep us all eating inside the hall because no sane person wanted to linger there: it was a hotspot for bullying. If we’d had our way, most of us would have bought food and fled, scattering crumbs and ketchup through the yard. This was the era of proper old-fashioned Eighties face-to-face school bullying. The more headbanger kids at our school took a pride in their daily visitations. The school pond was full of dumped satchels, the toilets were perpetually blocked with coats and matron’s office perpetually full of sick children who were actually hiding. Secondary school affected how millions of British children felt about other human beings forever. Home-schooled children are a liability in the workplace and in social groups; they are naive, malleable and overly trusting, because they didn’t ever learn at school how awful people can be.