October 1988
‘Can no one bloody help me with these bags?’ my mother shouts, standing beside the car boot.
I’m on the sofa. I’m aged fifteen.
I’m pretty busy writing a stinging letter on Basildon Bond notepaper to Steven Wells, aka ‘Swells’, at the NME who runs the letters page. I’ve recently had one printed – a glowing epistle about the Pixies. Seeing my name in print has felt like a shaft of celestial light bringing joy into my moody teen world. My name. In the NME. I’ve not told anyone at home as I’m a bit embarrassed. The words – extolling the wonders of Kim Deal – feel so naked and exposing. Anyone can read them. But the exposure is also addictive. I’m writing to Swells again about Throwing Muses, hoping to chance my luck.
The letters page was often my favourite part of any magazine. I’d written continuously to ‘Black Type’ in Smash Hits, the mysterious figure who edited the readers’ correspondence. His style was deeply irreverent and made an enormous mark on my sense of humour. Black Type’s replies were mainly faux-outrage and absurdity peppered with a string of nicknames for popstars that pricked their egos: Paul ‘Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft’ McCartney and ‘Sir Billiam of Idol’. I imagined the office was like a huge party and that by writing I might get invited. But that never happened, so now I was chancing my arm with the NME.
Mam’s voice gets angrier.
‘Ugggggggh,’ I grunt, and punch David on the arm. ‘It’s your turn.’ He’s watching You Bet! with Bruce Forsyth. Neither of us are available for menial work.
David kicks me back.
‘She’s shouting at you too.’
We both rise and stumble out of the house in the rain over the concrete driveway.
As a van driver my dad earned more than he ever did as a squaddie, a stacker driver or a security guard. We were not by any standards rich, but we were a little better off than we were. This meant one big thing to my mam: a better house.
The Dents had moved up in the world. OK, sort of sideways. My mam wanted more space and soon she had her eye on an odd, cavernous, detached doer-upper going for a bargain price close to our terrace. Our new house on Southdale Street dated back to the seventeenth century, some people thought. It should’ve probably, on reflection, been a listed building, if anyone in Carlisle had cared about that type of thing. But no one did, because Carlisle was swimming in old stuff. We were knee-deep in relics and artefacts. We bulldozed quaint Elizabethan vennels and built Laser Quests and Yates’s Wine Lodges. It was called progress.
Mam, in a similar manner, was not prepared to tiptoe around anything as creatively stifling as ‘original features’. After all our belongings had been moved in – not by professional movers, just by us carrying them ourselves, looking like a mobile circus – we wondered how long it would be before the changes began.
It wasn’t long. She had someone tear out supporting walls, hammer up MDF and pebble-dash the outside walls. She ordered a burgundy bathroom suite, Artex-swirled the ceilings herself and divided the walls with fake paper dado rails. She built a Venetian-inspired patio area outside for her rotary dryer and gnomes. She bought plantation fans and decorated the hallway with weeping Pierrot clown pictures and red-framed prints of elegant geishas. We were increasingly fancy.
Sadly, Mother’s aim to be posh was thwarted at each turn by our next-door neighbours, who were resolutely common. Mam was uncharmed by their Shetland pony Pegasus, which grazed on dandelions in their overgrown garden. It wouldn’t have any luck on our side; Mam had cemented over the garden to build a driveway. Now she could park closer to the house.
‘Can you at least help me with the bloody bags before you start pushing stuff down your throats?’ screams my mother.
It is the greatest moment of the week.
Mam is back with the big shop.
Me and Dave retrieve precisely one grocery item each – a box of Fairy Snow and a can of spaghetti hoops – then begin rifling through the bags and troughing down Penguins, both wearing damp towelling socks.
Bliss. Mam has been on one of her intergalactic space missions to a fantastic new galaxy. The weekend has landed.
It’s difficult to explain the seismic change the new ASDA superstore had on the lives of the Dent family. Or, for that matter, on Carlisle itself. Forget Princess Diana’s death or the Sex Pistols on Today with Bill Grundy – every Carlisle person of a certain age can remember the day they set eyes on the big new ASDA. This flash, modern, enormous superstore was built on a scrap of scrubland just off the M6, five miles from the Scottish border. In fact, the Scots even began travelling into England to shop there. They couldn’t resist this 34,000-square-foot grocery nirvana.
From the moment the big ASDA came, those little supermarkets – Presto, Lennards – would only ever be second best; somewhere you picked up ‘a few bits’. Life was never the same once you’d swept through big ASDA’s swooshing automatic doors, breathed in wafts of freshly baked, cheese-topped tiger bloomer from the in-store bakery and experienced the magical Narnia of chiller cabinets, each one crammed with at least eight different types of fish finger, burger or frozen croquette. The prices were incredible too. Forty-eight potato waffles for ninety-nine pence! Buy one, get one free!
But big ASDA wasn’t just about food. Oh no.
There was a toy department too. And you could get your dry-cleaning done and pick up your NHS prescriptions and get keys cut and sit down afterwards and have a cup of tea.
On the opening day my parents went twice. The second time, I reckon, was to check they’d not imagined it.
I mean, it was almost too good to be true. This was a place where you could pop in for a pack of pork luncheon tongue and come out with a Clairol Foot Spa and a CD of Barry Manilow live in Acapulco.
Around now, shopping took on a sense of largesse for my family. After a trip to ASDA, food was piled high from the front door onwards; mountains and mountains of stuff you didn’t know you needed, such as giftboxes of Ferrero Rocher, six packs of plump, glossy, American-style double-chocolate-chip muffins, crates of Tennent’s Lager and twenty-four boxes of Coca-Cola. It felt silly to just buy what you needed. Especially as every evening perishable items were sold off for practically nothing. This meant something remarkable – that every day could feel like your birthday at ASDA if you loitered by the Thomas the Tank Engine celebration cakes at closing time, waiting for the appearance of one of Cumbria’s most influential figures: the woman in charge of the reduced-sticker gun. This was the lady who dotted a big yellow ‘Whoops!’ label on each new bargain.
‘Thomas the Tank cake! Get in!’ shouts my brother, rifling through the big-shop bags.
‘It was meant to be three quid, but we got it for forty-four pence!’ my mother says, shaking her head all over again at the magic of this brave new world.
My parents’ earliest memory of eating was Second World War rationing: powdered egg, sugar shortages and pooling the street’s food tokens to make a wedding sponge cake. And now here they were, in the late Eighties, blindsided by choice. My parents had experienced scarcity and experienced abundance, and the latter was much lovelier. It did start to occur to me around now, however, that maybe everything was not as rosy as it seemed. It felt to me like ASDA, and later on Morrisons, which quickly opened just down the road, made shoppers feel slightly foolish for not wanting twenty-four reduced-price, slightly stale bleached-flour white rolls for thirty pence. These bargains were too good to miss.
‘But, Mam, we don’t need rolls,’ I say as I unpack the bag.
‘Oh, we can freeze them,’ my mam says.
But our freezer is overflowing, and the trunk one she’s installed in our lean-to is full too.
No one needed this much food in their house. But as our waistbands tightened and our chins multiplied, nothing was stopping us enjoying Whoops! reduced-price boxes of doughnuts. Six delicious, plump, sugar-sprinkled doughnuts for forty-eight pence. Can you believe it? Like a lot of the working classes in the Eighties, the supermarkets had made us accustomed to jam yesterday, jam today and jam tomorrow too.
When food experts sneer about supermarkets, there is a part of me – the little girl – who always feels oddly wounded. My loyalty still run deeps. During all those shopping trips I went on during the Eighties and Nineties with my family, ASDA was our refuge. It was a place of temporary family harmony. A happy place where we could put a pin in our urge to strangle each other. For my dad, ASDA was a night out with his family without actually having to take us anywhere. Once through the front doors, the Dents would disperse in different directions. My mother would veer off towards the homeware section to look at a new pedal bin. Me, to the clothes section where the mysterious, haute-couture designer George of ASDA peddled his latest range: shiny nylon ski-pants and pastel-coloured, cap-sleeved T-shirts. Then eventually the Dents would reconvene by the tills to pack the bags together – don’t squash the bread, all the tins in one bag, go and find an empty box for the bottles of wine to stand up in. Afterwards, we’d ride home together eating warm reduced-price sausage rolls with a boot full of bags and clinking bottles. We’d listen to my mother’s Engelbert Humperdinck cassette, singing ‘Lonely Is a Man Without Love’ together with great gusto.
We were, despite our faults – and I love to remember this now – a happy family. We weren’t perfect, but we had a laugh.
‘’Ere, I got a bottle of Bulgarian Merlot! It’s 14 per cent,’ my dad says when we get home, admiring his booze haul.
To my dad, strong wine means classy wine.
‘We had that last time,’ Mam sighs. ‘It’s like paint-stripper.’
‘It was one pound fifty-two for two litres,’ he says, unscrewing the cap.
‘I’ll have some, Dad,’ I say, chancing my arm.
I was keen to learn about wine for when I ran away to London to become the new Paula Yates or a celebrated NME writer. I would definitely be drinking wine when I began hanging around London in the star-studded Groucho Club with Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Janet Street-Porter. I’d read about this type of thing in Piers ‘Friend of the Stars’ Morgan’s ‘Bizarre’ column in the Sun.
‘You can have a little drop,’ he winks.
Until the late Eighties, the Dents did not buy wine. In fact, we’d hoot with glee at a lady on the telly called Jilly Goolden who would slosh it around her gob and claim she could taste babbling brooks and enchanted elderberries.
But now here we were, developing our own cosmopolitan palate. I could sneak tastes of Italian Lambrusco or Black Tower Liebfraumilch. I drank a peach-flavoured vodka called Taboo and developed a liking for Malibu coconut rum, which was exactly like the stuff they drank in the Caribbean, the advert said.
‘She can’t drink wine, George,’ my mother says. ‘She’s fifteen.’
‘A drop won’t do her any harm. She’s like me, she is,’ says Dad. ‘She’s got a sophisticated palate.’
Christmas Eve, 1988
My dad is shelling Brussels sprouts. He’s putting a cross at the bottom of each green cruciferous bullet with his secret good, sharp vegetable knife. It’s his knife. Not mine and David’s knife. We shouldn’t use it. After this task he will hide it again in a kitchen drawer under a pile of old kitchen-appliance instruction booklets. As my brother and I grow older, larger, more invasive of his space, my ex-army father often treats us like pain-in-the-arse young squaddies with whom he’s being forced to share barracks. He has his special knife. He has his chair. He lives in a state of constant ire over his evening newspaper – delivered each night. It is, he tells us in martyrish tones, ‘meeeee only pleasure in liiiiiife … and youse can’t even lerrrrmee ’ave that!’ And it’s true, we can’t. For Dad, reading that newspaper is true happiness. He can hold it up at his face like a barrier between us and him, then immerse himself in local crime, council business and the latest signings at Carlisle United. Dad is – he likes to tell us – a simple man with simple needs. He just wants his paper and his chair.
Dad’s obsession with guarding his newspaper has become frankly delicious to me and my brother. We must not touch it before he reads it. We must not tear coupons out of it. We must not move it from the living room and read it elsewhere in the house. But with every month, as me and David grow older, we become decidedly less manageable. On one occasion my brother grabs the newspaper from the delivery boy’s hands, rips the entire epistle into ten neat vertical strips and places it on the coffee table. Then we both roll around on the sofa howling at this open act of war. I can’t really explain why we did this. Me and him were listening to a lot of Public Enemy at the time. Dad says nothing. He simply goes to the shops and buys another.
We are starting to call the shots.
We’re not scared of him or his silences.
Dave, by the age of nearly fifteen, is around five foot ten, boy-band handsome, with Sun-In-streaked, rave-bobbed hair, an earring and a flip-top gold sovereign ring from Argos. He spends his weekends disappearing off to Legends at Warrington and coming home on Sundays with a wobbly jaw full of lies about where he slept. This club he is secretly going to sounds fantastic. Everyone is really friendly, he says. I am making plans to sneak there too. Our house is descending into small-scale anarchy. If we are grounded, we climb out of the windows and run off into the night – off to parties in student bedsits or to the pubs that will serve us. We are both on the Cumbrian truancy officer’s radar; we work as a team answering the home landline when they call, pretending to be Mam or Dad and fobbing them off with excuses.
However, it is now the Night Before Christmas, so a sense of goodwill has descended; it’s a time for scraping parsnips and thawing out sausage meat. Jona Lewie’s ‘Stop the Cavalry’ is playing on the kitchen wireless. My dad’s favourite Christmas song.
‘Poppa-poppa-pom-pom,’ hums my dad. ‘Poppa-poppa-pom!’
‘Poppa-pom-pom-poppa-pom!’ I sing back, bobbing along beside him.
‘Wish I was at home for Chrrrrrrrristmasssss!’ we sing together.
Years later, this tune will start to cut me to the quick each time it resurfaces every November, floating across the ether in Westfield Stratford City’s Costa Coffee, in late-night Ubers as I pass through Trafalgar Square, in Boots in Birmingham New Street Station. Festive whiplash, dragging you into a perfect memory you had no idea at the time was perfect. So cosily devastating. My grief that is not grief.
Dad found Christmas challenging. The enforced sociableness. All these folk popping by, invading his house. Unplanned. His tenseness drove my mother mad.
‘And heeee’s bloody walking around with a face like a slapped behind,’ she’d say. ‘The anti-social git … Well, I’m letting him stew in it.’
Words like introvert, social anxiety or even Asperger’s were not in our vocabulary in the North during all of my formative years. If you were in emotional pain and acting strangely, you were more likely to be told you were ‘acting like a knobhead’ and to ‘give yourself a shake’.
But still, I knew from an early age that my father could be very insular. He especially feared the festive tap on the door. He could live without neighbours he didn’t like proffering those miniature bottles of Bell’s Whisky in a yuletide box that people swapped back then as goodwill gestures. He did not want to share his drum of KP nuts with Billie the Coalman or Mr Fonatana from the house on the corner. And as for all these kids in his living room, it drove him mad. All these kids, making a bloody racket.
‘Your kids, George,’ my mother would remind him. ‘Your kids and some of their friends.’
But as 1988 was coming to a close, my dad seemed especially tricky. This may have had something to do with a gruff-sounding phone call I’d heard him having with his father in Liverpool. It was one of those phone chats I’d accidentally chanced upon by lying silently on the upstairs landing, earwigging.
Something something ‘responsibilities’.
Something about doing ‘the right thing’.
Something about sin.
My grandfather – or ‘Parsi’ as people in Liverpool called him – converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. What religion Parsi was before this was never discussed. He was brown-skinned in a sort of Middle Eastern way. Decades later I discovered that his marriage certificate gave his permanent address as a hotel close to Liverpool docks. My questions about why my Parsi was so brown went ignored. My dad had no brothers or sisters, so there were no cousins or aunties to ask either. Almost everything about my dad and his ancestors was a mystery.
When I was bolshie and demanded an answer, a collective deafness seemed to set in. But when David and I were ever taken to Liverpool as toddlers, my tiny brain could detect a sense of embarrassment.
All those awkward silences. Unsaid anger hanging in the air. Even when I won Parsi over, I could tell he was only softening towards me in spite of himself.
Parsi, like most late-life converters to Catholicism, was the most churchgoing of them all. Parsi and Nana never came for Christmas, as it was a particularly busy time of year for praying at St Kevin’s in Kirkby, six miles north-east of Liverpool. Nana was five foot tall, smoked Mace Line Super Kings and was stone deaf with bad ‘nerves’, aside from when she was down the Mecca Bingo hall, when she could play six bingo books at once without turning a hair, hearing every number perfectly. Nana was even more religious than Parsi. By now, the shine was really starting to come off the whole God business for me. I liked the nice stories about Jesus doing good deeds, but bloody hell, church itself didn’t half attract some gossips and nit-pickers. Or people flinging around words like ‘sin’ just to get stuff they wanted. And to top it all, there was something about Parsi’s last phone call that suggested he found all of us up in Carlisle distinctly unholy.
Dad is moving a dead turkey around the house again.
He’s tried resting it on top of the oven hob wrapped in tea towels, but Tadpole, one of our cats, has tried to sleep on it.
‘Blooody cats, gerrrrrrawaywityer!’ he shouts, swishing them off. Tadpole skedaddles for precisely three minutes before planning another attack.
Over the forty-eight hours prior to Christmas lunch, my father will move the frozen ‘bird’ between airing cupboards, outhouses and even the car boot in an ongoing war of attrition. After thawing, we will behold the annual gynaecological joy of watching my father retrieve a bag of giblets from the bird’s rear, before going up to the elbow inside it to pack in sausage meat.
I stand in the kitchen lifting the back of my Chelsea Girl miniskirt, warming my arse on the three-bar Calor Gas fire in our kitchen. My mother’s latest renovation plan – a new kitchen – has temporarily run out of money, so we only have central heating on one side of the house. We’re still trying to be fancy, but the odds are always against us.
By now we have given up trying to put a Christmas tree just inside our porch, like we’ve seen posh people on telly do. Last year one of the local heroin addicts, in an advanced opioid state, tried to drag the tree home with him. He managed to drag the entire pot, tree and fairy lights about ten metres up the cement drive before tripping and rolling around for a bit in the wires and baubles. It was sad, but at the same time weirdly festive.
‘They’re giving stuff away!’ Mam shouts, charging into the kitchen, back from her last-minute Christmas Eve supermarket raid. She throws twenty-four reduced-price mince pies down beside half a metre of marzipan stollen. She plonks the bags down beside my father without a hello, as they are presently only communicating via me. Maybe it’s a fresh argument. Maybe it’s a throwback to the ongoing tit for tat they’ve been having since November. Who knows?
As Mam fights to cram cartons of reduced-price brandy butter into our heaving fridge, my father pretends not to notice her arrival.
‘For God’s sake,’ Mam huffs. ‘Can you tell your father to eat something off these shelves. I need space. None of you are doing your share. Can he eat this duck pâté? It’s going off.’
‘Tell your mother I’m all right actually,’ he says.
I turn the Calor Gas up a bar and let my bum cheeks roast through my sixty-denier tights.
‘If you’d put a skirt on, we’d not need that fire,’ she tuts.
‘I’ve got a skirt on,’ I snap back, thrumming the hem of my nine-inch nylon pelmet.
‘You look like a street-walker,’ she says.
My father busies himself with the turkey, praying for invisibility.
My mother and I are arguing constantly these days. Our rows escalate rapidly, starting with a simple request from her to bring down the six used coffee cups now growing fungus under my bed and blowing up into full-scale, door-crashing spats. We have fights where we both shout melodramatic things at high volume, for maximum effect:
‘I wish you’d aborted me!’
‘Pgghghghg, well, I wish I had too!’
‘I hate you! You’ve never loved me!’
‘Well, I hope you still feel that way when I’m DEAD!’
My mother often plays the death card, despite being in her fifties, blonde, glamorous and healthy. She knows it will shut me up rapidly as I love her. A world without her is unimaginable. Yet still the fights go on, sometimes even turning physical. Earlier this year, during a vicious row over me ruining her best saucepan while dyeing clothes, I lunged at her to grab her by the hair.
Huge mistake.
My mother is Amazonian. Unshakeable. It was like watching King Kong swat away a helicopter.
I haven’t done that again.
‘I mean a skirt that’s actually a skirt,’ she says.
‘It is a skirt,’ I huff
‘Oh suit yourself,’ Mam mumbles. ‘Prance about with your arse out all Christmas if you like. Don’t come crying to me when you spend the New Year with haemorrhoids up to your back teeth. Piles are rife in this family.’
My dad sighs deeply. It is Christmas Eve. He has three days off from work. Nowhere else to be other than within the warm bosom of his family. And if today is bad, it will only be worse when more of us arrive tomorrow.
‘But it’s very cold out here in the snow
Marching to and from the enemy
Oh I say it’s tough, I have had enough
Can you stop the cavalry?’
Christmas Day, 1988
Every Christmas Day, Gran comes for lunch.
My mother’s mother, who is also called Grace, lives on the other side of Carlisle. She arrives bearing gifts: wrapped talcum powder for Mam, a bottle of Bell’s Whisky for Dad and for us kids, hard cash in brown envelopes. These offerings put a slim veneer on the fact that she thoroughly despises my father. She tries to be civil, but it is evident that Dad even wishing her ‘Happy Christmas’ in his sing-song Scouse twang visibly exacerbates her pernicious anaemia. Gran liked Mam’s first husband perfectly well; she saw no reason to change things even if Mam was unhappy. Especially if it meant marrying a Scouse Catholic.
‘Oh, she’s never liked him,’ Mam would say matter-of-factly if it was mentioned. I was also told that me and my dad were ‘two peas in a pod’, so where does that leave me?
Gran is wearing one of her good printed frocks, sort of like the ones Hattie Jacques wears in the Carry On films. On the lapel is a gold beetle brooch. She’s tapping her walking stick to ‘The Bluebell Polka’ by Jimmy Shand, which my mam has put on the cassette player to please her. Beside Gran’s feet sits her enormous white leather handbag – a hulking, voluminous, multi-pocketed contraption weighing at least twelve pounds. This handbag is never out of her sight. It sits on the chair by her bed when she sleeps. It contains every miscellaneous piece of paperwork needed to run her and my grandad’s home: bank statements, insurance policies, details of wills, birth certificates, plus a stack of premium bonds, or ‘Ernie’ as she calls them. My gran wins on the premium bonds so frequently – twenty quid here, thirty quid there – that she is affronted in the months when Ernie doesn’t deliver. Her handbag also contains clippings from the Cumberland News of local gossip she wants to remember, a box of scented ‘Thank You’ notelets and several thick felt pens.
In many ways, this handbag was a rudimentary version of the Internet.
My grandmother is abrupt. Quite terrifying. She speaks as she finds. She’ll cast an eye over your appearance, then root about in her handbag, produce a comb and hand it to you to tidy yourself up. She’ll lambast the local mobile-shop driver about the shoddy quality of his cream crackers. She once told Jimmy Saville to unhand her at a village fête as he ambled through the crowd kissing grans.
‘Well, for heaven’s sake, the man stank of flesh,’ she crowed. ‘He’s not right in the head.’
With hindsight, we probably should have listened.
Gran – Grace Senior – always carried a foldout family tree in her handbag, which she’d made herself, proving our family’s lineage to the fabled Northumberland lifeboat saviour Grace Darling. As if any proof were needed that she, I or my mother – the three Graces – came from a bloodline of strident, pig-headed women who’d row a boat towards a storm against all advice. Regardless of her faults, I loved Gran madly. She could be funny as hell and when she shoved one of those brown envelopes into your hand – often behind the other grown-ups’ backs – she’d do it with a little comment like, ‘’Ere, have this, for being a bonny lass,’ and you would feel completely loved.
Even on Christmas Day, Gran and Dad sitting together in a room never really felt breezy. Thankfully by the late Eighties the Dents could truly lose themselves in the feast itself. The big supermarkets had truly begun to make an impact on the festive season. We now wanted a Christmas-dinner scene like the ones we’d started seeing on TV. We would never be content with the dowdy, low-key Seventies-style Christmas meal: strictly two courses, bone-dry turkey, a couple of stingily dispersed, loveless roast spuds, boiled carrots, stewed Brussels and tinned Marrowfat peas. A gravy boat of bread sauce often lurked on the table like wallpaper paste; the grown-ups didn’t seem to like it but also felt short-changed without it. On Christmas Day in the Seventies, ‘afters’ meant Christmas pudding. If you didn’t like Christmas pudding, then you could bloody go without.
By 1988, as my gran looked at her wrist watch and waited for her dinner, in the kitchen Mam was more tense than she’d ever been before at Christmas. She was tense just like mams all over the country were now; fighting with four bubbling hobs and a full oven. Christmas Day – as a concept, a goal, a mission – had been ramped up right through December in ad breaks, on breakfast-TV cooking slots and in News of the World recipe pull-outs. The message was this: on Christmas Day things had to be bigger, better and perfect.
The new message wasn’t just that your family should eat like better people, or posher people, on the big day. No, you should eat like different human beings entirely. Like shapeshifters.
Every 25 December from now on, dinner guests should be treated like the visiting Ambassador of Bolivia and his lofty retinue. Lunch should feature a starter of prawn cocktail or some sort of pâté or a soup that filled you up so you didn’t really want the main course. And no more Paxo stuffing. The bird should be complemented with moist apricot and fresh herb stuffing, then served with a mountain of semolina-encrusted, duck-fat-smothered roast potatoes. Christmas pudding dislikers should be mollycoddled, cherished and presented with two or three alternatives: profiteroles, trifle or a Sara Lee yuletide log. The fruit pudding itself should be extra-special, a limited edition by a TV chef containing Cointreau and luxury peel. None of this could be eaten on your plain old dinner table using drab plates. No, Christmas dinner now needed better plates, nicer glasses and some sort of centrepiece. It may very well require a new extending dining table bought on 0 per cent finance, although I blame George Michael squarely for that. After 1984, we all wanted that dinner in Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ video, where a dozen of them all eat around a big long table, sipping fine wines, giving each other knowing glances and finishing with a snowball fight. There is no scene in that video where George explains to Pepsi & Shirlie that there’s no room at the six-person dinner table, so they’ll be eating their turkey on a pull-out wallpapering bench, sitting on deckchairs.
‘What can I get you to drink with dinner, Grace?’ my dad asks my gran, as we sit down at the table. ‘’Ere, Grace, little Grace, ask big Grace to get Grace something.’
With three Graces in the room, things could get very confusing.
‘I’ll have a glass of lemonade,’ says Gran.
Gran never drank alcohol. This was no secret. If you spent more than an hour in her company, she’d manage to inform you.
‘I have never touched a drop,’ she’d say.
Gran was the youngest of seven girls. At the turn of the century her dad was a publican running one of the most remote, godforsaken, spit-and-sawdust inns on the hills of Catlowdy. He was a drunk, by all accounts, among other things. But the drunk part was as far as me and Mam could ever decipher. Gran never specified what her dad’s other ills were, but we knew that all of her sisters – Sarah-Anne, Elsie, Francis, Jean, Nell and Beatrice – all packed a bag as soon as possible and went to Manitoba, Canada, on the strength of a small advert looking for farmhands in the back of the local gazette. Gone. None of them attempted, in any meaningful sense, to spend time with him again.
Gran stayed behind. The Second World War was her escape. She began nursing, firstly in a fever hospital and then she worked with the troops, where she met my grandad.
‘Not even a small sherry?’ asks my dad, semi-baiting her.
‘I’ve never had a drop past my lips,’ Gran says as I pour her a glass of pop.
‘Why?’ I ask, again hoping for a fuller answer.
‘I’ve seen what it does,’ she says, then she purses her lips in a way that says this line of enquiry is shut.
We’re sitting around our fake pine-cone and tinsel centrepiece, using plates we only get out once a year. I have just served the starter – yes, we have a starter. It’s supermarket-bought mini-smoked-salmon roulades, which I have served on chopped, undressed iceberg lettuce. It is thoroughly unlovable, but at the same time, I imagine, the type of thing Her Majesty the Queen is feasting on at Sandringham.
Gran – never one to cushion anyone’s feelings – has pushed hers to the side of her plate. All this choice, all this new finickity food, left Gran aghast. For Gran, salmon came in tins; it was cooked, flaky, bony and grey around the edge. She had no time for slimy, semi-raw, smoked fish. She felt similarly about cheese. Soft cheese was unthinkable. Cheese should be orange, solid and served with crackers. You did not melt cheese. You did not buy it in a box marked Philadelphia and spread it on toast. Gran never warmed to ASDA. She didn’t want twenty choices of sausage, she wanted sausage that was good. She wanted to see the man accountable for the sausage. This is why she loved the little shops. When Gran bought bacon she wanted to see the whites of the eyes of the fella who’d dismembered the pig.
‘Have you heard from Liverpool this morning, George?’ Gran says.
Dad’s side of the family were always simply called ‘Liverpool’. As if they were a scoring panel at Eurovision whom we might be going to live if the satellite link-up worked.
‘Yes, I gave ’em a tinkle on the phone this morning,’ my dad bats back. ‘They were just off to mass, but they send their regards.’
Dad taught me that the key with small-talk is often to just give the person the answers they want to hear. He almost definitely had not called them at all.
Likewise, Gran didn’t care about Liverpool. The Liverpool lot, to her mind, had several shortcomings. The main one being that they were Catholics. Gran’s views on Catholics were characteristically blunt: they bred like rabbits, drank like fish and weren’t to be trusted. They weren’t civilised folk like us Methodists.
‘Is there anymore graaaaaaaavy, precious?’ my dad shouts, wearing his gold cracker crown, just as my mother’s right arse cheek finally reaches her seat. The main course is much more to Gran’s liking. Turkey – however one tries – defies modernisation. No matter how one titivates it. It is dry, third-rate chicken that tastes oddly like fish.
Dad’s waving the half-empty gravy boat. Mam puts down her own plate, which has barely enough on it to feed a Sindy doll. She’s too high on post-hob plating-up adrenaline to eat.
‘Yes, there’s more gravy,’ she says.
Gravy is one of my mother’s superpowers. Give her some sort of fatty stock, tap water and a couple of spoons of Bisto browning and she will perform alchemy.
Finally, Mam sits down with her plate. We’ve already begun to eat.
‘All the best,’ says Gran, holding up her glass of lemonade.
‘Ah yes, all the best,’ repeats Dad. David mutters something and clinks my glass. We are both wrestling a hangover after stealing a bottle of Warninks from the drinks’ cabinet and sinking it during Carols from Kings.
No one says any other special Christmassy words.
No one adds a special wish or reflection. No one really looks each other directly in the eye.
For the Dents, this is verging on touchy-feely. Decades later, when I reach media London, I will spend time with families who don’t eat until everyone at the table has performed a poem or given a tribute to a dead relative or performed a soliloquy from Shakespeare. I will always feel awkward, if not a little irate, around such naked show-offy emotion. We show our love in my family in smaller ways.
‘Good gravy, Grace,’ my dad says to my mam.
‘Yes, grand gravy, Grace,’ agrees Gran.
Once the Christmas pudding has been microwaved in its plastic bowl and served with custard, there is a sense that Christmas has now peaked. A curiously post-coital sense of silliness sets in. What was all that about? All those weeks of rushing, plotting and panicking; who was the ritual for? For each other? For Jesus? Why do we bother with all this fuss? Yet here I am, writing this as a grown woman, knowing that while I have breath in my body, I will strive to make every Dent Christmas more or less exactly the same.
Gran and Dad retreat to the living room where they sit side by side, gobs open, snoring through James Bond, which is inexplicably playing at ninety-eight decibels.
Mam and me clear the table, sorting leftovers into piles for a turkey curry and bubble and squeak. A tap on the dining-room window heralds my mam’s best friend, Gail. She’s wearing her best Marshall Ward’s catalogue frock and bearing gifts: a packet of Embassy Reds, a bottle of Bacardi and some amazing tittle-tattle about other folks’ Christmas dinners.
‘Well,’ Gail says, gathering steam, ‘Heather’s lot aren’t even sitting down until five! She’s not even got her carrots peeled! They’re busy playing with the Scalextric.’
‘Well, five o’clock is too late,’ tuts my mother. ‘They’ll not want any teas later.’
‘’Ere, did I tell you her and Frank aren’t having turkey this year? They’re having roast topside of beef. He reckons he doesn’t like turkey!’
‘Well, that’s just peculiar, if you ask me,’ says my mother.
‘Well, he IS peculiar,’ says Gail.
I love earwigging on Mam and her friends. And on Gran when she’s in full flow. It’s around now that I’m starting to scribble things down in jotters. Not just the things I want to remember, but the exact way it was actually said. I love the Cumbrian dialect and sing-song rhythm of the words. I love the mesh of titbits about local life; whose bloke’s done a runner, who’s as ‘fat as butter’, who’s a pisshead, who’s up the duff and who’s a lazy slattern who never washes her sheets.
‘Well, her youngest, Marcus, had a bust-up face from Black-eye Friday,’ Gail says. ‘Got clouted by one of the bouncers outside Cat’s Whiskers.’ Black-eye Friday is the last Friday before Christmas in Carlisle when the majority of factories and offices finish early and the workforce hit the pubs and clubs and get sloshed. The ensuing annual carnage – involving many fights – has been given its own unofficial nickname.
Cat’s Whiskers nightclub on Black-eye Friday was not for the meek.
‘Terrible,’ tuts Mam. ‘What a way to be carrying on!’
I bring Gail an ashtray. She mixes me a small, potent Bacardi and Pepsi, and slyly hands me an Embassy Red that I stuff quickly between my boobs to smoke later.
I return to the kitchen, where I start stacking our fancy dishwasher. Obviously, I’m rinsing each plate under the tap first as it’s the Eighties and none of us trust this machine entirely. I’m listening to the Colorblind James Experience on John Peel’s Festive 50, which I’ve taped off Radio 1, as I stoop to fill the bottom shelf with dinner plates.
‘… well, he’s been in a right mard for weeks anyway,’ I overhear Mam say.
‘He’s been in a mard since you set eyes on him in 1971,’ Gail says. ‘How can you tell the difference?’
They both laugh.
I put the forks and knives standing upright in the holder and take a large slurp of delicious, sweet Bacardi.
They’re talking about Dad and his moodiness, although we all know it really isn’t that funny.
And then Gail draws on a ciggie, exhales and says: ‘So has he had any more word from the girls? After that first letter?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Mam says. ‘Not since the one I saw. I can’t make head nor tail of him, though. He’s very subdued.’
And then they remember that I’m next door in the kitchen and change the subject.
I knock back the rest of the Bacardi.
Who are these girls who have written my dad a letter?
1990
In the second-floor café in Binns Department Store in Carlisle, I’m sat with my friends Darren (Carlisle’s biggest Smiths fan) and Caroline (with blonde hair and all the petticoats), making a lukewarm hot chocolate with squirty cream last almost two and a half hours. Binns is the most glamorous store in Cumbria. It has an Estée Lauder concession and a homeware section where you can buy a Denby Pottery gravy boat or a Moulinex potato ricer. On the second floor, follow the whiff of chips and there is a restaurant where mams and aunties come to rest their feet mid-shop and eat scones and jam. Although annoyingly for customers and staff, the best tables near the window are perpetually commandeered by us: a band of teenage goths, hippies, fledgling ravers, Morrissey devotees, Stone Roses boys and the occasional off-duty soccer hooligan who reckons himself a hardman but secretly loves talking about Pink Floyd with the pretty indie girls.
Every town and city up and down the United Kingdom had a café like this in the Eighties; a place teens had taken to their heart. But while the Binns café was pivotal to our social lives, we in turn were disastrous for its profits.
I was its worst sort of regular customer, making a hot chocolate last as long as a three-course meal before inevitably stealing the cup. In my bedroom at home I had a growing haul of thieved Binns saucers, plates and ashtrays.
‘So how does it feel,’ Darren says, ‘to set yourself up as our very own Oscar Wilde?’
‘Oh shurrup,’ I say, a bit distracted.
I am not really myself.
As I lick cream off the teaspoon and push it into my handbag, Darren is teasing me about my second appearance in the NME letters page. Swells has chosen me for print again, this time defending The Cure’s Robert Smith. OK, not the whole letter this time, more a snippet. As I’d affixed a stamp to the envelope and pushed it into the post box, I knew even then it wasn’t one of the best things I’d written.
But I’ve had other things on my mind.
I cannot claim that the news that my father has two other daughters has come as a complete shock.
Shocked isn’t the word. Even if the way I found out was quite shocking.
This morning, Saturday, at around six, my dad walked into my bedroom when I was half asleep. He leaned into the bed, kissed my head and said, ‘All right, precious, I dunno if Mam’s told you what’s going on, but I need to go and see Jackie and Tina.’
He kissed me again on the forehead, then got into his van and drove off down the M6 motorway to Liverpool to make amends with his other kids. The ones he left behind in the Sixties.
I sat up in bed and rubbed sleep from my eyes.
I definitely did not cry. Or go and find my mam.
I sat in bed for a few hours watching The Chart Show on ITV, hoping for a rewind on the Happy Mondays on the indie chart. Teenagers in the Eighties were very outwardly undramatic. We’d not been primed yet by a steady diet of American TV drama and reality shows to emit neat soundbites about our feelings. We did not expect hugs when we left or entered rooms, let alone feel that our issues needed to be heard or seen.
And as I say: this news was shocking but not entirely a shock.
After all, during my attempt to win the Brownie matchbox game seven years before, I’d found that black-and-white photo while rifling through my father’s bedside drawer.
I shouldn’t have been in that drawer anyway.
I wasn’t supposed to rifle in drawers.
The photo was of two girls, standing by a countryside gate on a ramblers’ path. Smiling. On a day out. Just like the sort of days out my family went on, if Mam could ever prise Dad out of his chair.
I’d stared at that photo for a long time.
I did not know those little girls.
They could, I’d tried to reason, be the Canadian side of our family. But Dad had no affection whatsoever for Mam’s relatives. For a tiny family, we were certainly a pile of divisions.
Maybe, I’d thought, they were kids that belonged to one of Dad’s army friends and he’d kept them just to be polite. They didn’t mean anything.
I’d puzzled over the two girls’ faces for a minute or so, and then put the photo back in the drawer. Then I’d pretended I’d not seen it. Children’s minds are slippery, pragmatic things. We come fresh from the box, hellbent on self-preservation. Dad’s other kids were always there in a sense; they were a puzzle for me to solve. But being small and distracted by the magic of Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop or a bag of pink sugar prawns, or Adam Ant and Diana Dors doing the ‘Prince Charming’ dance, it took me a few years to focus properly.
And then the phone calls from Parsi to Dad had begun. I now realise he had been acting as a go-between.
I thought about the clues that had led me here. Dad’s daughters had been there in a thousand awkward silences whenever I’d asked about the past. They were there in bitten lips and half-overheard adult mutterings. They were there in the faces of my Catholic Scouse grandparents, who, being against divorce, treated us kids like an unpleasant smell.
They were there in my dad’s embrace when sometimes, out of nowhere, he’d seem taken by emotion and would drag my tiny face against his rough soldier stubble and say, ‘Oh come here, precious, you’re my only little girl.’
Which I realised now actually meant: ‘The only little girl I have left, because I have mislaid not one, but two others to date.’
As I sat on the edge of the bed, counting out coins for the 68 bus up town, I already felt slightly sorry for my dad. I was already making excuses.
Over the coming years, whenever I would talk of my dad’s life, people would reply with their own family skeletons, and then they’d bring me their own excuses too. They’d tell me of double lives or mams who disappeared overnight. And of grandads who left to fight in wars and forgot to go home, then got married again bigamously to prettier, younger women in warmer countries. They’d tell me of babies left on church doorsteps, or small children signed over to council care, with the original parents shuffling away without a trace. My dad’s charade in the Sixties was not a highly unusual state of affairs. In the ‘good old days’ people would, could and did just disappear. It’s less painful for us if we cling to the idea that our elders did these things for reasons that went with the era: out of shame or because of religion or poverty or some other very difficult set of circumstances. We don’t want to think it was down to pure selfishness. Or that sometimes, in the ‘good old days’, people were just absolute arseholes.
In the Binns café, interrupted by the arrival of the occasional toasted teacake, we’re discussing Johnny Marr from The Smiths making electronic music with Barney from New Order. It still seems weird to us, but it’s what lots of indie folk are doing now, making music full of bleeps and synths and stuff you can dance to. Some of my indie-worshipping friends are making excursions to a club in Manchester called The Haçienda, which is dead hard to get into but once inside I hear it’s like some sort of Shangri-La where everyone is friendly and no one drinks alcohol. This intrigues me.
Talking about music and telly and popstars and making my friends laugh with my thoughts is when I come alive. Almost all other times I feel swivel-eyed with teenage hormones. Carlisle is small and claustrophobic and full of people who care how you look and dress, and I’m sick to the back teeth of worrying what ‘they’ think. Whoever they are. They, according to all of our mams, are a shadowy group of ever-observant souls who are perpetually on the edge of ‘having a field day’ about the length of our skirts or our haircuts. Over the past twelve months I have been going on the train by myself to London to see Bob. I sit for seven hours, ten minutes – in the smoking carriage, where all the best people sit – to spend time with him and his girlfriend, Vron. They’re both twenty-five and squatting in Manor House. Mam agrees to this as I am supposed to be sightseeing – Nelson’s Column, the Houses of Parliament and so on – but instead, aged fifteen, I just tag along with their London life. We go to the Sir George Robey pub in Seven Sisters for a night called ClubDog, where they play Iggy Pop and The Cult, and to The Catacombs in Manor House. We go to Heaven on a Saturday with Bob and Vron’s gay friends and eat food on Sundays in Hare Krishna cafés. I become accustomed to being woken by their pets – liberated laboratory rats – nibbling my feet.
During this time Bob has kept a tactful silence about his stepdad, although he admits he once met the little girls in the photos. He buys a broadsheet newspaper called the Guardian. It’s not like anything I’ve ever read in our house before. I love to read the Weekend magazine, where a woman called Julie Burchill with big hair has the front-page column every week to write about almost anything: her love life, the Gaza Strip, the royal family. Then, the following week, the letters page is chock full of people absolutely pigging furious at her. Or – and this happens too – they’re madly in love with her. No half measures. She is a name that provokes a reaction. She is seen by everyone and she is making an impact. I want to make an impact like this too. I entirely gloss over how it must feel to be hated and focus on how it must feel to be so loved. I love this idea of being so loved. Being loved like this must be like the gates of heaven flying open and being constantly bathed in a celestial shimmer. How can you possibly feel pain, or sadness, or that your dad is completely not the person he pretended to be for the whole of your childhood, when you walk into a room and they all know your name?
But I have absolutely no idea how. I want to make people feel how I felt when I saw Kim Deal from the Pixies walk onstage in Preston and play the bassline to ‘Debaser’. I want to wind people up like La Cicciolina, with her flower crown, pink diamanté gown and one nipple bared, setting Italian politics alight. I’d settle for changing the atmosphere in the room like my Aunty Frieda, who married a posh man and now causes chaos whenever she appears. I mean, who the hell does Aunt Frieda think she is?! I want to be like Magenta Devine who presents Network 7 and especially Paula Yates off The Tube. Paula had all of Duran Duran and David Bowie at her wedding, holding her aloft in her deep-red dress in one of the photos. Sadly, I do not resemble Paula or Magenta or La Cicciolina. I am a short teenager from the arse-end of Cumbria – not even the Lake District part, the inner-city part where the heroin addicts live. I have weird teeth, a growingly huge arse from eating ASDA ‘Whoops!’ reduced cookies and an accent that sounds like an angry cormorant on Morecambe pier swooping to steal chips.
But I have had one and a quarter letters printed in the NME, and that is a start.
When Dad got home that evening, he was subdued. Mam gave him his tea on a tray. He did not wish to talk about any of this daughters business when asked. There was certainly no apology to me.
‘Hang on, I thought you knew,’ Mam said when I tackled her on the subject.
‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said.
‘Oh right, I thought you did,’ she said. ‘You had your nose in everything as a kid.’
‘Does David know?’ I said.
‘He must do by now,’ said my mam. ‘He’ll have overheard what’s going on.’
I still loved my dad, and the excuses I was making for him were getting more water-tight by the minute. None of this could be my dad’s fault. These terrible things could not possibly be his doing. Leaving an ex-wife and two children – I bet he didn’t want those things in the first place. She probably trapped him. Yes, the more I thought about it, my dad had almost certainly been tricked.