October 2013
When the offer arrives via email, I examine it carefully to check it isn’t Matt playing a prank. It looks bona fide, but it seems almost ludicrous. Terrifying and ludicrous – but also too amazing to refuse.
Four weeks later, a Mercedes-Benz picks me up from my house to take me to the set of BBC One’s MasterChef: The Professionals, where I’ve been invited to be one of the critics. In the car, I feel so absolutely bilious with nerves I doubt I can swallow. Let alone swallow with TV cameras in my face and then discuss the intricate juxtaposition of jus and gel in erudite terms with Jay Rayner and William Sitwell either side. My thoughts turn to Dad. MasterChef has been on TV for thirty years, ever since a rather funny man with a sing-song voice called Loyd Grossman presented it. Loyd would invite serious French chefs to deliberate, cogitate and digest haute cuisine cooked by earnest amateurs. Me and Dad would laugh when Loyd called a custard slice by its posh name, millefeuille, pronounced ‘mieeeefieeeeeu’, sounding like a drunken dairy cow. Or when we learned that hen-of-the-woods is actually a fancy mushroom, not a big hen, or that tarte Tatin aux pommes is pronounced ta-ta-tah-oh-pom and is just apple pie.
‘Look at these silly sods,’ Dad would say as he sat in his chair eating an ASDA choc-ice. ‘Look at this one in the tweed. He looks like Rupert Bear!’
The car arrives on set, a TV producer in a headset rushes towards the outdoor smoking area and chivvies the contestants along, herding them away from my sight. Secrecy is paramount. The less information I have about who is cooking today, the better. The fewer things we know, the more natural our reactions will be when the chefs bowl through the doors carrying seared duck breast with enoki and pickled mooli.
‘Grace Dent is on set, door three, walking now,’ says the producer as I step out of the car.
‘This way,’ she says, leading me through a maze of kitchens, past shelves of pans and plates and cutlery, past racks of chef’s whites and buckets of dirty dishes. Gregg Wallace shoves his head around part of the set as I walk, takes one look at me and shouts, ‘Oh, it’s you! I like you! Welcome to MasterChef, Miss Dent!’
I’m left in a dressing room with a full-length mirror, a bowl of grapes and a large framed picture of John Torode. I breathe in and breathe out.
I’ve decided to wear my hair down rather than in a beehive so that I don’t look too severe and antagonise the audience – or more accurately Twitter, which I can’t really look at anymore as the strangers’ comments are too upsetting. Later, at the critics’ table, as each dish arrives, I find myself being resolutely positive about each element. I cut all the chefs some slack. After all, they’re probably nervous too, like me. They could be having an off day. That’s why their emulsion split and their béchemel tastes of flour. That’s why their rainbow chard is gritty and their chocolate crémeaux is a brown puddle. I don’t want to look like a ball breaker in the edit – I can’t face the blowback online. Jay Rayner from the Observer and William Sitwell, editor of Waitrose Magazine, are much more certain in their views. They’re much more offended by the droopy soufflé and the overdone halibut. Not just offended. Slightly outraged. They know how to deliver great telly. Worse still, when the second chef unveiled his rather delicious plate of monkfish, I suddenly found my appetite and gobbled down the lot.
‘You need to pace yourself, darling,’ says Jay. ‘There are five more plates to go.’
‘Oh I’m fine, I’m starving,’ I say. But by the time the last chef arrives, clutching calves liver in a port reduction, my face is a tad green.
I escape from the day’s filming without humiliating myself, at least, but I feel a little like I’ve let myself down. In the final edit, I get eight seconds maximum on camera, meekly head tilting like Princess Diana, saying the duck and the soufflé were lovely but the fish, not very controversially, ‘isn’t very nice’.
Matt, Tom and Courtney find my demure pose hilarious, and circulate the clip via email, playing it again and again. They laugh and laugh.
‘I think you need to be more you,’ says Tom.
‘Just tell them the truth,’ says Courtney.
Next time I vow to build my hair up big and walk with my shoulders back, like I’m completely meant to be there, to deliver some home truths. There’s no place on primetime telly for polite ambivalence.
Over the following year, being an increasingly familiar face on MasterChef begins to change everything. From that moment on, I gave up my right to eat dinner in private anywhere ever again.
When you appear on MasterChef, everyone from school mams buying Weetabix in the B&M Store to yuppies in the Farrow & Ball shop to flight attendants to traffic wardens to bin men to the woman who’s doing your smear test will stop, squint, and say, ‘Oh, hang on, I know you!’
The show, after thirty years and hundreds of hopeful contestants, is still so well loved by people from every demographic; it’s watched by folk of all ages, faiths, races and of every class. Just as me and my dad loved watching fancy food people getting overexcited about scallops, now people watch me with their own kids. It’s just a simple show where people cook and others judge, but it’s captured the nation’s heart. Deep down we are all food critics.
April 1976
We’re on holiday at Pontins near Southport.
Me, Dad, Mam, Dave and Bob.
There’s a fancy-dress competition and I’m a bunny rabbit. I put my blue gymnastic leotard on over white woolly tights. My bunny ears are Dad’s Odor-Eaters. The winner is a ghost, draped in bed sheets.
Afterwards there is a ‘Dance with your Dad’ contest. We spin around the floor to ‘Silver Lady’ by David Soul, then Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’.
My tiny feet fit on top of his big feet.
Whenever we walk around the holiday camp people tell Mam that my little brother David is gorgeous. They say nothing about me, as I’m not. I know I’m strange-looking – my eyes a touch squinty, my teeth wonky.
Dad says I am lovely, though. I am his only little girl. I eat mashed potato and battered fish in the Pontins canteen each teatime. Mam toasts crumpets with jam in our chalet before bed. I am fast asleep by seven, after half an hour of insisting I’m not going to bed.
At night I wake from nightmares and appear beside Mam and Dad’s bed, crying.
‘Can I gerrin?’ I say, crawling in between them where I carve out a space to lie in. Sweaty, wriggly.
I sleep with a foot in Mam’s back and a hand in Dad’s bristly face.
In the morning Dad wakes up grumbling.
‘How is she here?’ he says. ‘Does she not have her own bed?’
‘She was scared,’ Mam mumbles. ‘Of monsters.’
Dad pokes me in the stomach. He knows I am listening.
‘So if the monsters come from here and there,’ he says, pointing to both sides of the bed, ‘you’ll be here in the middle, safe.’
‘Yes,’ I say, opening my eyes, giggling.
‘Monsters?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Monsters.’
Carlisle, August 2016
‘Grace, are you there? Are you there, Grace?’
‘Yes, I’m here, Dad. Are you OK?’
It’s 3 a.m.
‘Yeah, I’m OK, presh,’ he begins. ‘I’m just thinking.
I need to get a ladder.’
‘Why?’ I say, sitting up.
There is a long silence. I am lying in bed in their flat in Carlisle. For months Mam’s health has been trickling downhill. She assures me it’s nothing – first a cold that won’t leave, or perhaps a chest infection, then almost certainly, an interim doctor assures me, bronchitis.
It’s certainly not cancer, nothing to worry about, and don’t worry about Dad, Dad is fine too, don’t worry about us.
For the last year the saga of Mam’s breathing has been flickering in the background of phone calls home. I’ve tried to keep an eye on it from afar; I liaise with Dave and Tam each day and grab days in the North when I can, but it’s not working. Not properly. Not like it would if I was there all the time. It’s too easy to lose track of doctor’s appointments and what has been prescribed and if it’s worked and what is being hidden. Mam has been playing down her illness to everyone close. Her doctor sent her away multiple times with instructions to rest and drink Benylin, before eventually giving her antibiotics, then more antibiotics, until eventually, after three months, she couldn’t walk or even stand up and was rushed to hospital. Dave called me as I was about to go on stage to talk at the Edinburgh Festival.
I descended on Carlisle, all sharp elbows with a notepad and pen, looking for answers and promises. Mam was in a ward for people with heart problems. The nurses looking after her there had no clue as to why she was breathless but were at least kind and made me tea.
Mam was fading. She was washed out and lifeless. All the colour in her cheeks had gone. And there I was, the pushy daughter from London, the one who wanted to solve problems by asking the right people the right questions. The one who wanted to speed things up and get her the right course of treatment. The one who wanted to know why we were in the heart unit when this seemed to have nothing to do with her heart.
No one was able to help me.
But of course there was tea if I wanted it.
A specialist may be around later, they told me, but it’s Thursday heading into a bank holiday weekend, so you probably won’t see him until Tuesday.
Mam’s biggest concern was my dad. He couldn’t be left alone.
‘I’ve told the nurses he has dementia,’ she said. ‘They’ve put him in the office until someone could come.’ It was the first time the word had come out of her mouth.
I nodded, because I knew it too.
Dad taps again at the bedroom door.
‘What’s up, Dad?’ I say, trying to sound very calm. ‘I need to get up into the attic,’ Dad says, poking his nose around the door.
Dad’s enormous nose.
‘It’s a Roman nose,’ he used to say to me. ‘It’s a Roman all over my face!’
Dad appears in the room. In a white vest and pyjama bottoms, much more unshaven than he would usually allow himself to be.
‘I need to get up there,’ he says. He points at the ceiling. ‘And, y’know, get behind the box and, well … y’know … do you know?’
‘OK,’ I say, doing the calm voice that I find works. ‘Well, let’s not go up there now. It will be dark up there now. Why don’t we do it first thing in the morning? It’s 3 a.m. now. Let’s get in the attic and find it when it’s light.’
He thinks a little, then he nods.
‘OK, presh, yeah, OK, when it’s light. We’ll do it then. The attic will be dark, won’t it?’
He goes back to bed. This is a flat. They do not have an attic.
I lie in bed and have a small, thoroughly futile cry. Dad gets back into his bed, but he does not switch his bedside lamp off as he is lying there waiting for the daylight so we can begin our job.
Carlisle, October 2016
Me, Mam and Dad are eating toast in their flat in Carlisle and watching Homes Under the Hammer.
Mam is eighty but adamant that cancer, in all the various places it has appeared, will not stop her, even if the pills and injections make her sick and tired.
‘Well, I’ve had a good innings,’ she says. Or, ‘Well, it is what it is, it’s just a pain in the arse.’ Dad’s dementia has no diagnosis. Mam says he doesn’t need one yet as she can carry on looking after him. I’m on one of my two-day quickfire visits to Carlisle. I know it’s not enough. David lives in Keswick, 35 miles away from Carlisle; I live 260 miles away in London. It would work so much better if we were all under the same roof. We could concentrate on getting Dad a proper diagnosis and caring for Mam properly.
I travel on the Virgin West Coast train, back and forth, forth and back, living in a spin between London and Carlisle, tearing through four or five restaurants a week to keep the column afloat, but the food is hard to stomach. My house in London becomes unloved and then unlovable. The pyracantha overgrows into a wall of dead black spikes, the lawn dies, Japanese knotweed takes root under the path and begins to kill one of the trees. Rats move into the ceiling in the kitchen and eat all the wiring in the kitchen spotlights. Geno, one of my beloved cats – the nearest thing I have to children – tires of being chucked biscuits by a cat sitter and moves in with the neighbours without a backwards glance. When I attempt to reclaim him, he lies impassively on their sofa, feigning amnesia.
‘When you were a kitten, I slept on my back for six months, so you could sleep in my armpit!’ I fumed.
In Carlisle, Dad stands by my bed at 3 a.m. in his flat cap and jacket, asking when we’re going out to ASDA. He will not grasp in any meaningful sense that Mam is ill. He has the news broken to him afresh each day. His reaction ranges from crying to petulant anger to saying we are trying to trick him.
I attempt to explain that Mam needs rest, that the treatment she’s having to contain the spread in her bones is brutal, that she is now the patient. But he walks about almost all of the night, so she can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and Dave can’t sleep. We are all sleepless.
If I can get a diagnosis, maybe we can get proper help.
But I’m scared that if I let other people in on our secret, we may have to let him go to a home.
There is so much I want to say to Dad, but I can’t bring myself to.
Dementia is really awkward.
Not just painful and frightening. Embarrassing.
I don’t like to be left alone with Dad. If I’m never left alone with Dad, it won’t be my responsibility to say, ‘Look, Dad, do you think you have dementia?’
Which is the start of a chat that means: ‘So, Dad, shall we talk about the fact that you’ve been handed a hideous, terrifying extended death sentence, which is making you humiliate yourself in public and will make our family splitting up and strangers looking after you inevitable?
But sometimes I can see terror in his eyes.
Sometimes, as Dad talks nowadays, midway through a nonsensical sentence his brain catches up. And right then he understands the total ridiculousness of what he is saying, and then pure shame passes across his face. I noted this last Christmas.
I find that shame so cutting. It hurts my heart. It stays with me all the time when I am back in London. I cannot eat the dinners I am supposed to review.
Sometimes, as my dad talks nowadays, midway through a nonsensical sentence he stops for a moment like his brain is catching up … but then he just carries on, becoming more nonsensical until he trails off, having completely lost the thread of his original idea.
Which one is worse? When he is conscious of his brain decaying and therefore panicked, or when he is blissfully unaware, completely barmy and also quite frightening to be with?
Sometimes I get up the nerve to ask him a question in soft words and cushioned terms. ‘Are you feeling like you forget stuff, Dad? Like when you got up for work the other morning … did you forget you’ve retired?’ But then he will deny it or pretend not to hear. Or he just tells me plainly no. I wonder if I should track down his other children, wherever they are, and warn them it’s now or never. They would need to come now if they want to catch a tiny glimpse of the man he was. But that feels like I’m asking for help during the worst times. He wasn’t there for them during the good days. Also, Dad’s in no state to be ambushed by an awkward family reunion. I put that dilemma from my mind. This is our problem – mine and David’s – the two kids he didn’t walk out on. We can cope.
At least, I thought we could. But too many bad things are happening at once now. We are struggling. Something has to give.