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 pillow. 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.’
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.
‘Larry worksh in the patissherie section at Harrodshh,’ I slur, wiping chopped herring off my face, having drunk at least five glasses of cheap white wine at a private gallery viewing. This was before we’d even reached Alphabet Bar on Beak Street and ordered some très à la mode glasses of vodka and cranberry juice.
‘Does Harrods even have a patisserie section?’ she asks.
‘It’s in the food hall,’ I say airily. ‘He’s a trained pastry chef.’
I knew this as I’d been to the food hall during one of my first weekends in London, just so I could walk in, like Aunt Frieda, with my shoulders back, feigning that I thought eleven quid for a loaf of bread made with ‘ancient’ grains was normal.
As Clare sips tea from a polystyrene carton, I begin shoving a piece of apple strudel into my head. The no-nonsense woman behind the counter is slicing a mountain of gelatinous salt beef. In the backroom kitchen, men hurl bags of flour into a giant mixer, chucking in jugs of water, yeast and salt. Soon circular lumps of beigel dough appear, plunge into boiling water, then rest on wooden boards before being shoved in the oven. Sammy Cohen’s shop, at this time of the morning, is full of happy drunks and sad drunks. It’s jampacked with smooching couples, hungry taxi drivers, the Met police night shift and a steady stream of miscellaneous night-time weirdos. I love this about London: things stay open. Sometimes all night long. As Dad always says about Carlisle, ‘It’s a nice place, princess, but you need to be home by seven cos that’s when they take the pavements in for the night.’
‘When is Larry ringing?’ says Clare.
‘Tuesday,’ I say, flexing my new chic Nokia Aida 8146, rented from the One2One in Wood Green Shopping City.
A man waiting four entire days before contacting you – by telephoning to speak in person – is completely normal. Sure, my new phone has an option called SMS, which sends and receives text messages, but only an absolute weirdo would send one of those. And this gap between meeting Larry and hearing from Larry will transpire, when I look back on it, to be one of the best parts of the dating game. Human beings didn’t appreciate its pureness at the time. We thought the wait was agony, which it was, but the time between meeting someone in a club and setting eyes on each other was often deliciously long and filled with knowing barely an iota about each other. No texts, no Facebook, no LinkedIn, not even Myspace. You were in an information drought with only your imagination to fill in the gaps. By Sunday night I won’t even be sure what Larry looks like anymore. Meeting up will essentially be a blind date. Nevertheless, this is how people met the loves of their lives.
For what it’s worth, Larry the artisan baker did not turn out to be the love of my life, but he was incredibly good fun on the three dates we went on – until I pushed him to bring me some of those super-expensive Harrods patisserie treats he was making By Royal Appointment for Her Majesty. Then he became vague. After three weeks of wild passion, Larry went quiet, so, imagining he’d not paid his mobile phone bill, I called the landline number he’d given me for emergencies.
‘He’s down Tesco’s,’ his flatmate said.
‘OK, tell him I’ll call when he gets back from shopping,’ I said.
And his mate said, ‘No, he’s not shopping. Larry works in Tesco.’
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘Oh God,’ the flatmate said.
So I pushed him a bit further and it turned out Larry was not an artisan baker; he was a shelf-stacker in the big Tesco on the Old Kent Road.
‘He’s going to kill me,’ the flatmate said, his voice trailing off.
I never heard from Larry again. He did not return my calls. He was probably off making imaginary cakes By Royal Appointment to woo other women until he got busted. In absolute fairness, I had another lad in Clapham on the go anyway. And I wasn’t an important contributing editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. We all got away with this kind of thing a lot more in the Nineties. The Internet ruined a lot.
October 1997
‘How’s it going, presh? I’ll get Mam,’ Dad says.
I can hear A Touch of Frost playing on the TV in the background. Calling home makes me homesick, although not enough to ever want to go home. I’ve not been back for a year.
‘Are you OK, Dad?’ I say. ‘Are you sticking to your diet?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he says. ‘Mam’s got me on a regime. Are you looking after yourself? Are you being a good girl?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
The best thing about me and Dad is that we let each other lie.
In the first twelve months of living in London, along with a small group of female cohorts – Eleanor, Clare, Billie, Lucy, Sophie – I have been anything other than the dictionary definition of good. The previous Friday night we’d been permitted to use the IPC advertising department’s private box at the Albert Hall to see a Geordie kids’ television duo called PJ & Duncan, aka Ant and Dec, who’d had some pop hits and were finishing their tour with a triumphant sell-out London gig. After draining dry the endless free champagne that comes gratis with a posh Albert Hall corporate box and dancing to ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble’, me and my gang of girls infiltrated a small, private friends ’n’ family after party. In a drunken haze, I was caught helping myself to Dec’s mam’s favourite wine and speedily identified as neither Ant’s nor Dec’s cousin and chucked out onto the street by two security guards. Undeterred, I dusted myself off, gathered my troops and cabbed across to the Leopard Lounge in Fulham, where we convinced John Leslie from Blue Peter to throw us a party at his palatial Barnes mansion. Oddly, he complied, and soon we were all in his lounge as he DJ’d for us by playing his CD single of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos again and again, while I necked shots of tequila and slid down the stairs on the back of a framed poster of Cannon & Ball in panto. I left at 7 a.m., stopping the minicab driver halfway down the drive so I could be sick in John Leslie’s hedge. I did not mention this to Dad. Neither did I tell him about the Friday before when I’d ended up at a Loaded magazine party and made friends with glamour models Jo Guest and Linsey Dawn McKenzie. Or the other Fridays I wound up at Browns nightclub in the West End with my friend, a model called Michelle, chancing my arm at its varying levels of VIP room, each one smaller and more difficult to get into than the last until I reached the top layer, which was just a broom cupboard with Martine McCutcheon and Sophie Atherton drinking bottles of Sol with Mick Hucknall. None of these things did I tell my dad about. And I was especially secretive about the fact that my credit card bill was now somewhere over £6,000. Each time I paid off a lump of the debt via a set of freelance shifts, the credit card company kindly wrote to extend my credit. First to seven grand, then to eight. Wasn’t that nice of them? And ever so handy, as I did not want to ever go home. Life in London felt like starring in Smash Hits, not reading it.
And there was another important reason why I was never going back: after a year of being in the big city, I knew for sure that until then I’d been missing out on a lot of great food. After twenty years short of heat and colour and joy, I was now living in one of the most delicious cities on earth. Yes, I very often had an empty purse and a nose full of black bogies, but I was also living somewhere where food allowed me to feel the extremities of taste and texture. How could I go back to Carlisle now I’d fallen in love with the slimy pink lox and pungent mashed herring at Sammy Cohen’s all-night beigel shop? Or Korean gochujang sauce over a bowl of bibimbap? Or fierce Scotch Bonnet chilli, hiding in a plate of ackee and saltfish? I loved chow mein, but I also now loved pho, ramen, udon and fideu. I loved spending Sunday afternoons in Chinatown, down Gerrard Street, consuming bowls of dark, wobbly, cloud ear fungus in vinegar, savouring the spongey bittersweet mushroom as it slid down my gullet. I’d begun to see that eating out was every bit as much fun as pubbing or clubbing or partying. It was maybe more fun. I’d started reading the pithy restaurant critic Michael Winner in the Sunday Times each weekend. His life sounded amazing. Winner loved dinner so much he’d made an entire life from it, and that was the name of his column. ‘Winner’s Dinners’ was so well known that angry chefs even put signs in restaurant windows in Covent Garden that read: ‘This is a Michael Winner-free zone.’ The more he snarked, the more readers like me loved him.
How the hell, I began to wonder, did you become a restaurant critic? In fact, how did you get any of the good jobs in writing? There seemed to be a secret way in which these amazing roles were being handed out.
‘So you’re looking after yourself, precious?’ asks Dad.
‘Yeah, I’m doing good,’ I said.
It wasn’t the full story, but neither of us ever told each other that.
October 1998
At around 1.15 p.m. each day in the highly unglamorous IPC Magazines staff canteen, four or perhaps five fantastic, confident and deliciously self-important women would appear, and I’d watch them from behind my plate of chips. I was doing shifts covering staff-writing at a women’s weekly called Eva – a sort of semi-ladette version of Woman’s Weekly. I’d been writing a back-page, first-person column called ‘Eva on the Couch’, in which the fictitious Eva talks about her love life and friends. My byline was in a minuscule font and printed vertically, close to the staples on the side of the page. However, I didn’t care, as this was probably the first time since university that I’d written anything that allowed me to be a bit funny. The sub-editors were even leaving in some of my funnier turns of phrase. It was like a lightbulb had switched on in my head.
Trying to be funny in women’s magazines in the Nineties was hell. Jokes, by their very nature, require a writer to be specific in their use of words. Each cultural reference, turn of phrase or brand name in a punchline is chosen with care. Being funny is a science. A ‘campervan’ isn’t funny, but ‘a Vauxhall Rascal’ is. The phrase ‘I drank until I couldn’t see straight’ is not funny. ‘I drank until I was doing press-ups outside the pub to impress some lads’ is much better. When a woman wrote funny things for magazines in the Nineties, she would often see it trimmed and steamrollered back into ‘house style’. I found it exasperating. Surely there were more women out there like me?
In the canteen, the gang of tall, glamorous women with small waists would cavort past my table wearing belted trench coats and tweed skirts. These women never seemed to wear make-up; they just had fresh, clean skin, cheekbones and blue eyes. Their tastefully blonde or mousy hair was tucked neatly behind their ears. Their canteen tactic was to commandeer a large table at the back, before approaching the hatch one by one to scan the metal terrines of catering-company-supplied mush. They did this, always, while frowning, as if each lunchbreak was their first time ever seeing macaroni cheese, and each time they were newly appalled.
Eventually one would return with a plate of dressed chickpeas and a green salad. Then another would venture off and return with a small bowl of the soup of the day and an unbuttered roll. Or perhaps merely a big pile of green runner beans.
I asked the Eva girls who they were, but the names I was told couldn’t possibly have been true. They sounded a bit like this: ‘I think that’s Taffeta Flinty-Wimslow and Araminta Losely-Glossop, and the one in the cape is Laurence Chevalier-Ducarte.’
They were the girls from Marie Claire magazine. And they were amazing. I stared at them like a child with her nose up at the sweetshop window. Although Marie Claire was part of the IPC Magazine family, they worked in their own separate building across the road from the high rise. These women were living the dream: they appeared on morning television shows giving their opinions on fashion, beauty, showbusiness or current affairs. I often spotted them getting out of black cabs with teams of assistants rushing to gather their suitcases. Sometimes you’d see them marching down Stanford Street to the office, frequently carrying a huge bunch of flowers or at least three impressive-looking goodie bags.
All this made me take stock of my life. Winter was coming and I was living in a shared flat in Bounds Green at the end of the Piccadilly Line above a building merchant’s, with dodgy floorboards in the hallway that I had on one occasion fallen through with both feet up to the waist. I was scurrying off to the Piccadilly Line before sunrise most mornings and standing up in rush hour, dangling off a handrail in a fetid broth of builders’ morning farts and hangover breath, and doing the same thing in reverse many evenings, but now with hair that emitted filthy grey grease puddles in the shower. I was dating a guy called Nik – with a k – who was starting his own Internet dot-com firm in Shoreditch and was nice enough but clearly still in love with his ex and also had a latex fetish, which I did not. This did not stop him turning up for dinner at Andrew Edmunds with rubber underpants on under his Moschino trousers, shouting, ‘I have the pants on now!’
It put me right off my risotto.
I was also writing for a small free magazine called Girl About Town, which let me do a small profile of a new comedian called Noel Fielding, alongside doing shifts on an outsourced property section for the London Evening Standard. I lived from overdraft to panicked credit-card minimum-amount repayment, so although I read Michael Winner’s column hungrily, my own dinner was often a jar of salty bottle-green pesto with a dusty lid from the corner shop stirred into cheap fusilli.
It was that sort of pesto, made of oil, dried basil and E-numbers, that stayed put on my thighs for months on end, forming a shimmering layer of trans-fat cellulite. I ate dinners of toast – made with the last of the frozen bread – with Marmite for the main course and lemon curd for the pudding. I ate it on my single bed, avoiding my housemate and his new girlfriend, who were conspiring to move me out and her in. Often after the toast I fell asleep without washing a shirt or in fact doing any laundry again, for the second week running, and would need to go to work without knickers, feeling not like a real woman but more like a feral animal. None of these things happened to the girls from Marie Claire. Their lives were 100 per cent perfect and I was going to become one of them.
‘It’s funny,’ says one of the junior writers after I’ve been at Marie Claire on work experience for four weeks – two more weeks than scheduled – my overdraft and credit card groaning and swelling, my rent day looming. ‘Your name is so long and grand,’ she says. ‘And then you actually see you.’
‘Yes,’ I laugh, leaving it hanging in the air. ‘And then what happens?’
‘Well, you begin talking and you’re, well …’ She pauses to find the word.
‘What?’ I say, raising an eyebrow.
‘You’re you,’ she says.
‘Hahahahaha, yes,’ I laugh. She means common; I let this slide over me.
I’m pretty sure I only got through the doors at Marie Claire on unpaid work experience due to the use of my middle name, Georgina. Grace Georgina Dent. The Georgina, obviously, after my dad, George. This lengthened the short Northern fishwife grunt of Grace Dent and made it sound posher. I’d fooled them. And now I was in, like knotweed, taking root.
‘So there’s an editorial assistant job coming up?’ I say.
‘Yah,’ she says as we wait at the fax machine. ‘But they’re still waiting to see if Chris and Lavender Patten’s daughter is coming home from Hong Kong.’
‘I see,’ I say.
I could not afford to work for free. Nor did I give two hoots about Marie Claire’s output, which consisted of serious features like ‘Avon ladies of the Amazon’ and fashion spreads where a fourteen-year-old model from Denmark would be flown to Rio de Janeiro to stand in a favela and model £600 hot pants. But the lifestyle was certainly glamorous. It was intoxicating. I was the envy of everyone I knew from university. They were doing boring graduate training schemes for British Telecom; I was having fun at Marie Claire, doing the lunch run for beauty editors who just that morning had been on breakfast TV discussing armpit Botox. This was the new age of the ridiculously hip artisan sandwich: each day a delicatessen faxed a menu to the Marie Claire office, and I would ferry it back to the editorial floor and read it out loud in my Italian accent that I’d learned mainly from Dolmio adverts.
‘Ahem … focaccia al rosmarino, stracciatella and marinated Egyptian luffa, £3.95. Alsatian tarte flambée with leaves, £4. Organic pistou rustique with fougasse, £3.50!’
After announcing the menu, the assorted editors and sub-editors would wrinkle their noses and say, ‘Ugh, not focaccia, I had my fill of that in Tuscany,’ before stalking off to commandeer their table at the canteen, which they all hated.
I needed to shapeshift from being an anonymous, loitering, dispensable presence known to staff as ‘the Workie’ into something they saw as a payable human. The Workie – few people in Nineties media bothered to spare Generation X’s feelings with terms like intern or job shadowing.
‘So, this Patten girl?’ I say.
‘Yah, sweet thing. Tabitha is friends with her mother,’ says the woman.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘How long are you here?’ she asks, but it isn’t a genuine question. No one in glossy magazines listens with both ears to the work experience girls.
‘Not sure at the moment,’ I say. ‘I’ve got things to sort out.’
At Marie Claire, the unpaid fashion work experience girls were called, without even a wince, ‘the cupboard people’. These young hopefuls lived for months on end in a small room with no windows at the back of the editorial floor filled with rails and rails of sample-size items. From 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. they telephoned stockists, called in garments from fashion houses, spoke to foreign embassies, stuffed clothes into suitcases and lugged suitcases up and down stairs.
‘Where are my suitcases for Ghana? Where are the cupboard people?’ the fashion editors would roar, stomping into the cupboard.
‘I’m shooting with Testino on Saturday. Have they had all my customs waivers signed off by the embassy?’
Glossy magazine editors in the Nineties were accustomed to being a terrifically important deal. Within a decade or so this world would implode, killed by the Internet, their influence nigh-on decimated. Magazines would be bought mainly by hair salons to give customers something to look at when their stylist was hungover. But at one point, these people were gods. Their behaviour was legendary.
‘You can’t slap Taffeta, even if she really deserves it,’ Clare told me on the first week of Workiedom – she was now working there too.
‘She stood at my desk and stamped her feet like a little pony when I wouldn’t drop all other jobs and ring a dispatch bike for her.’
‘I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve a slap,’ Clare said. ‘But her dad is much richer than yours, so she will have much better legal representation.’
Clare’s words would ring in my ears many, many, many times over the next twenty years.
Despite all this, I wanted to stay at Marie Claire. I rather enjoyed these London high-society girls’ whims and weirdnesses. Their lack of touchy-feeliness suited me; unabashed Nineties bitches were far easier to navigate than today’s duplicitous blowhards staging elaborate Women’s Day events and presenting as living saints with one eye on an OBE.
Not a jot of writing would be involved as editorial assistant. It was a secretarial dogs-body job. My desk would be right by the front door and referred to by the fashion department as ‘reception’. However, if I got it, my name would go on the Who’s Who list in the opening pages of the magazine, known as the masthead.
Grace Georgina Dent – Editorial Assistant.
I would also get paid about £13k per annum, which would allow me to pay rent and move to Camden Town, where I would, I planned, meet Malcolm McLaren, become his muse and forge a path to my role as a national treasure. There was definitely a job going here as dozens of CVs were beginning to arrive from posh girls with double-barrelled names and covering letters name-checking their fathers. As I stood by the shredder feeding them in, watching them turn to piles of ribbons, I knew one thing for sure: none of them were having it. The year before New Labour had swept to power making the D:Ream song ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ their anthem, and its title had become something of a mantra among the well-off metropolitan media set. I used to laugh when I heard them say this, because I’d known Currock, then Scotland, then the media world, and I thought, Well, literally how could life be any better than this?
October 1999
Flying first class for the first time, at the age of twenty-six, ruined me.
Absolutely ruined me.
It was as though a structural change happened to my DNA in mid-air, undoing centuries of lowborn family ancestry and topping me up with regal genes.
I had no idea life could be so fabulous. Until then, I didn’t realise travelling could even be pleasant.
At Gatwick, as I boarded the flight, trip-trapping up the plane steps, I experienced something magical. I turned left at the top of the steps. Left. I entered a whole new cosmiverse called Club World. The air hostesses called me madam, ushered me to my seat and fetched a small, cold glass of champagne on a tray, with a paper-doily coaster. Then, an actual menu. Today’s lunch would be salad Niçoise, then baked ravioli, chocolate torte and Brie de Meaux with port. A stiff grey curtain was then pulled across to separate me from standard-class hoi polloi. This was so that first-class people didn’t have to look at everyday folks wearing loose-fitting travel garments with their bumbags, munching on big Toblerones. My first ten minutes behind the big curtain was already nicer than any actual holiday I’d been on. It was a long way from my first foreign excursion: the Dent family’s package holiday by coach to Spain in the late Eighties. This getaway began with a thirty-six-hour coach ride from Carlisle Civic Centre, heading south via London, then to Calais before making a long trek to Catalonia. As I sat in first class with British Airways hostesses spooning treats into my lap as if I were a petulant baby starling, I thought about the shabby coach to Santa Susanna with the overflowing loo and the onboard ‘snack bar’, which was mainly supermarket-brand cup noodles and cans of warm Top Deck. The onboard entertainment was a single sixteen-inch TV screen playing Smokey and the Bandit on a loop. We arrived in Spain fed up, with swollen ankles and constipation.
First-class travel was not like that. I tottered down the plane’s staircase in Austria feeling like a more special class of human being entirely. Even the most tub-thumping class warrior would find it hard to turn down their return ticket home. No one has ever, ever, ever left the upper-class side of an airplane thinking, that was nice, but I like sitting right at the back by the loo, getting my funny bone smacked by the perfume trolley.
After passport control, on a cold spring lunchtime in Austria, on my first official trip as editorial assistant at Marie Claire, I walked nervously towards the arrivals gate, pulling a small, cheap suitcase with a wonky wheel. I’d been sent to Vienna. I wasn’t really sure why. Or even really where Vienna was. Aside from hearing Midge Ure scream about the place on Top of the Pops in the Eighties, I knew no real facts about the place. It meant nothing to me. However, as I walked through the arrivals gate I saw something else I’ll never, ever get sick of: a smartly dressed man clutching a small white board with my name on it.
Miss Grace Georgiana-Bente.
OK, not my actual name. But he did mean me.
As hundreds of fellow travellers struggled with bags, searching for their connecting bus or train, Lukas swept the suitcase from my hand and walked me to his Mercedes-Benz, where a copy of American Vogue and a small glass bottle of gently carbonated Badoit Eau de Minérale sat in the armrest.
‘You here for the conference, Miss Bente?’ he said as we began our route to central Vienna.
‘Ummmm, yes,’ I said, hoping he’d not ask about any specifics.
‘You are doctor – sorry, oncologist?’ he said.
‘Oh no, not an oncologist,’ I said. ‘I’m a writer.’
‘Ah, writer, excellent, good,’ he said, as if this was just as good.
I was not really there to write anything. This was a freebie. In glossy magazines the freebies were abundant. At Eva magazine the only things I’d been sent for free were ‘women’s neck massagers’. At Marie Claire, the freebies were much classier. We were knee-deep in free luxury leave-in conditioner, designer boar-bristle tangle combs, nail-strengthening vitamins and eye caviar. Oh, and flowers, never-ending flowers.
‘Will someone take these vile Blushing Bride canna lilies that McQueen sent and give them to a hospice?’ my favourite fashion editor Liz would shriek as I whisked away the offending bouquet – about 300 quid’s worth – and left it out by the toilets. All this excess had probably begun to change me a bit. I was definitely not ringing Mam and Dad as much. With my job now permanent and my life faster and more glamorous, I was getting bad at keeping in touch with Clare too. She had left Marie Claire and gone to work on a special project in a different magazine house. We’d been missing each other’s calls. And now I was distracted by a trip to Vienna.
‘Next weekend?’ I said to Tilly, the managing editor.
‘Yah, it’s a pharmaceutical thing, they want some press bods out there,’ she said.
This editor liked me a lot, as I could perform magic tricks like ‘retrieve a Chanel jacket from one of London’s fanciest, grumpiest dry cleaners without the actual ticket’ – a feat of charm and bloody-mindedness that would earn me a round of applause when I came back carrying the item.
‘They can’t teach that at Roedean,’ she once said to me.
Stuff like this, and the lack of other good applications, is possibly why I got the job.
So now here I was, one year into officially being Editorial Assistant, checking in at the exceedingly grand Hotel Imperial, Vienna, being escorted by the manager to one of their largest suites for a two-night stay. He turned the key in the lock and I squeaked with joy. This was an enormous apartment, with a large sitting-room area, two bedrooms, many sofas and decorative chaise longues and a glittering chandelier lighting up the main room. This suite was at least three times the size of the Dents’ self-catering accommodation all those years ago in Spain, where me and David had slept on pull-out beds.
I stood, mouth ajar, not quite listening as the manager reminded me two, no, three, maybe four times that if I required anything, literally anything, it would be his pleasure. He left, moving backwards, sort of genuflecting as he closed the door. I immediately flopped onto the super-king-sized bed and lay in the middle, flailing my arms and legs out like an octopus. Then I did some shots from a tray of the finest small-batch schnapps, which was in a little glass jug on a tray on the antique dressing table. I considered calling my old Brown Owl from the phone beside the loo in the second bathroom to tell her to shove her Sixer Badge up her arse, but it felt petty, so instead I opened the handwritten letter from the hotel manager, which came in a thick cream envelope with a seal of soft red wax. This letter assured me – Miss Grace Georgina Bente – that I was an absolute priority. And should the merest hint of any whim that might accentuate my pleasure during this trip cross my mind over the next two days, I needed to contact him personally.
Day or night.
My needs would be top of their list, my pleasure was their one concern.
The entire staff of the hotel were waiting breathlessly for my call.
OK, this wasn’t exactly what it said, but it was something equally as overblown, because this is how, I was learning of late, people spoke to you almost all of the time if they thought you were rich or important or useful to them.
You were a priority.
If you have ever noticed wealthy people boarding an easyJet flight looking flummoxed and ashen, this could be because they paid for Priority Boarding and then the Priority Boarding call-out didn’t happen, and they complained and no one cared, and, well … it was a lot to take in. Maybe the greatest difference between being rich and poor is the number of instances per day that strangers inform you that you’ve been seen or your needs noted.
At this moment, I noticed a large set of doors on the far side of the room fastened by a large antique bolt. They seemed to lead somewhere. After some pulling and heaving, the bolt gave way and the doors clattered open to reveal a balcony! And there was the courtyard of the Vienna State Opera House, lit ethereally as if prepared for a fairytale ball. I let out a shriek. It was quite simply the most beautiful view I had ever seen in real life. But quickly the joy felt bittersweet. To be all alone in this hotel room with this view felt a little bit sad. This room was priced at just short of £3,000 for a one-night stay. My family could never, ever experience it. This entire world was absolutely inaccessible to them. I tried to imagine them there: Dad on one of the sofas, with his slippers on, reading his newspaper. Mam giving the antique knick-knacks a onceover, saying, ‘See that vase? Your Aunt Mildred had a bedpan that looked like that’, and my brother Dave pouring us more schnapps.
For a millisecond I felt a little bit lonely. My London life was certainly gathering pace: I had a paid job that turned heads when it was mentioned at parties; I’d pitched some pieces to the Guardian via email and had the breakthrough of some ‘try again, please’ feedback. Better than that: I’d been put on some ‘possible’ lists to appear on late-night TV debate shows after getting my face in a few magazine spreads. They were always the kind of humiliating jobs all wannabe writers take at the start of their career to get exposure and live to regret. I appeared in Marie Claire’s health-and-beauty spin-off magazine holding rollerblades beside a totally made-up caption that said, ‘I am devastated the body-doctor says my hourglass shape means I should give up blading or suffer thick thighs. It is my life and I can’t imagine stopping.’ My flatmates Eleanor and Craig had laughed until they were sick. Another time I was sent on a date with Sir Clive Sinclair to test what it was like to date a man with brains. He ditched me in the American Bar in the Savoy after one drink. This type of fame had led to semi-invites on the types of show where low-grade writers come on and shout a few things before the microphone moves on. TV fame. Now, I’d flown first class to Austria.
Why did I feel a tiny bit sad?
I imagined Clare spinning about on the balcony, saying, ‘Grace, this is some serious Hans Christian Andersen nonsense.’ Something had cooled between me and Clare, and it was totally my fault and I needed to address it. A few months before we’d had a silly run-in about a guestlist spot to a party – an ex-boyfriend of mine had taken a spot that was meant for me, and I was hurt, and she hadn’t got that I was hurt, and we’d ended up bickering in the road outside IPC Magazines, but halfway through I’d jumped into a cab with the Marie Claire girls as I was late for a perfume launch, which now I thought about it was a little starry on my part. Her last words to me were, ‘The thing with you, Grace, is that when you have been hurt it’s like you go into witness protection. A wall goes up and then no one can reach you.’ I’d thought as I got in the car that was very bloody astute. Maybe I should send Clare one of those SMS texts? Then a Public Relations girl called Jemima knocked on the door of my suite to tell me I had an hour to get ready before we all met in the lobby for champagne and I forgot all about London.
The Viennese trip – a weekend of non-stop eating, drinking and partying with surgeons and doctors in a luxury five-star hotel – was all paid for by a big pharmaceutical company. All I had to do in return for this splendid time drinking sturm and scoffing wiener schnitzel was hear the odd lecture about some research, pills and potions, and remember what nice people worked at this firm whenever I wrote about HRT, breast cancer or fertility problems. On the Sunday morning, when I woke up in a damp vintage Armand Basi frock after flinging myself into a hotel pool at 2 a.m. still clutching a bottle of Moët, I stared at the press releases for HRT pills strewn all over the carpet and thought, well, where is the harm in all this?