Hungry

Mudlark

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London SE1 9GF

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First published by Mudlark 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Grace Dent 2020

Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Author (girl), Shutterstock.com (all other images)

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Grace Dent asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008333171

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008333195

Version: 2020-10-01

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Dedication

For David Dent.

The funniest person I know.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  Preface

8  Epigraph

9  CHAPTER 1: Sketty

10 CHAPTER 2: A Galaxy Far, Far Away

11  CHAPTER 3: Pickled Egg

12  CHAPTER 4: Never Mind the Tunnock’s

13  CHAPTER 5: By Royal Appointment

14  CHAPTER 6: BMW

15  CHAPTER 7: Limitless Gravy

16  CHAPTER 8: Sex on the Beach

17  CHAPTER 9: Monsters

18  CHAPTER 10: Your Own Personal Toby

19  CHAPTER 11: Whelks in Jam

20  Epilogue

21  Acknowledgements

22  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Preface

This is a sort of memoir.

It’s about my memories.

Other people’s memories of how my life happened may differ.

Names have been changed in order to give privacy to people who never imagined their secrets would end up in a book published by HarperCollins.

Some places, events, dates and times have also been changed for that reason.

The past is a foreign country; they eat chips differently there.

Grace Dent, 2020

Epigraph

‘When I was a little lass, the world was half a dozen streets, an’ a bit o’ waste land, an’ the rest was all talk.’

Ena Sharples, Coronation Street, 1965

CHAPTER 1

Sketty

Carlisle, 2017

‘Where would you say Carlisle is, George?’

I shift uncomfortably in my seat.

‘Where’s Carlisle?’ the nurse repeats.

My dad does not answer.

‘Have you heard of it?’

I look at my phone, merely to self-soothe.

Instead, an email from a Guardian editor arrives, begging for the incredibly late 800-word restaurant column that I had promised to write on the 10.03 out of Euston. I did not write the piece. Instead, I placed my face against the cold window and drifted off, letting Milton Keynes become Wigan North Western become Shap become home.

‘Can you have a guess?’ she says. He looks at her and says nothing. His silence wounds me.

The nurse marks something down in her notes.

I look at her and maintain my gaze. She believes me, doesn’t she? She looks away, sharply.

Carlisle, summer 1980

My dad is making sketty for our tea. And I am helping, because I’m seven years old and nothing goes on in this house that I don’t have my nose in.

Any rustlings of supermarket carrier bags, any raised voices, any arrival at the front door of 21 Harold Street, I’ll know about them. Tonight my dad’s in charge, as my mother is out doing the job that she doesn’t like mentioned. My dad’s childcare regime, like that of most Seventies dads, is a rudimentary affair. As long as we’ve had food, we’re allowed to ‘play out’ until it’s dark. Sometimes later. We roam free over two square miles of back-to-back terraced streets and fields. We’re warned to mind the busier roads. Me, my little brother David and the eleven or so kids from along Harold Street ‘play out’ for hours and hours, chucking tennis balls at the sides of the houses and hurtling ourselves on roller skates down the cement slope from the nearby Bishop Goodwin C of E Primary School car park. Or we’ll break off in splinter groups into different kids’ bedrooms. I’m often found loitering around Tracey Scaleby’s house at Number 17, sending Sindy dolls on a sexy caravan holiday with her brother Scott’s Action Men, a burly gang with eagle eyes and clasping hands. On Sundays we go to the Currock Villa Youth Club and dance in long formation lines to ‘Freedom’ by Wham!, throwing our arms in the air to ‘once, twice, forever’, and then we’ll play dodge-the-local-shady-grown-up-helper-who-wants-to-wrestle-you-for-a-little-bit-too-long.

On warmer nights we’ll take the bags of misshapen mint Viscounts our aunties buy us from the factory shop inside Carr’s biscuit factory down to the abandoned allotments near the West Coast mainline railway track, which takes you the 317 miles into Euston, London – a terrible dirty place where everyone is unfriendly. It’s not like here. If you got attacked in the street in London, no one would help you. They’d pretend not to see. Not like in Carlisle where folk would shout and scream at bad people and think it was wrong.

We take our biscuits down to where the gypsies keep their horses and feed the tamer ones bread crusts from our mams’ bread bins. Or we’ll play houses or make grass cuttings into the boundaries of princess castles. We’ll hurtle through hedges playing Japs and Commanders. We’ll sit in our favourite den inside an enormous overgrown bush, sharing bottles of Barr’s Scotch Cola and leafing curiously through tattered copies of Fiesta, gawping at women in no knickers holding their knees apart. Sometimes we’ll roam beyond our boundary of Currock, wantonly searching out the dens that belong to rival gangs of kids from nearby Carlisle districts like Upperby, Harraby or Botcherby. We howl with glee as we stomp all over their leafy hideouts.

But I am equally happy when I’m indoors just kicking about with my dad, and tonight we’re making sketty – the more complex of his two-recipe artillery. His other stock standard is baked beans on fried bread. At a push he could open a tin of corned beef. Sometimes – and this is the very best possible turn of events – we’ll get a bag of Salt ’n’ Shake crisps and fifty pence to buy us all chocolate at Cellar Five, the off-licence at the end of Harold Street. My little brother David likes a Curly Wurly and my dad, always, a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut. My big brother Bob doesn’t stay in with us anymore. He lives at Gran’s house sometimes. Now seventeen, he comes and he goes, always with hair that antagonises my mother – too long, too short, too dyed, too spikey; the neighbours must be having a field day – often off out to one of the many pubs in Carlisle that serve the underage unblinkingly.

My dad sits in his chair and skims his thumbnail through the foil on his chocolate. I will never see Cadbury’s purple without thinking of my father. Cadbury’s purple is love. Cadbury’s purple is me and him toddling slowly back from the NAAFI shop before he left the forces. My first memories of Dad are him in his REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) uniform in 1976. Me holding one finger of his big hand, examining the puddles, dawdling; both of us laughing together. Me carrying a bag of Cadbury’s Buttons with a nursery rhyme of ‘Little Jack Horner’ on the side. Cadbury’s purple is two identical Dairy Milk Easter eggs from Gran. One for me, one for David, perched on the top shelf of the living-room dresser. We are forbidden to touch them before Good Friday when Jesus gets on his cross. The waiting is agony. Cadbury’s means being sent down the ‘offy’. That said, I’m also partial to a Rowntree’s Lion Bar, as it lasts longer than other chocolate. It is the best thing ever when David wolfs down his Curly Wurly in two minutes and I’m still sat watching World in Action, languishing through at least two more inches of knobbly chocolate heaven.

Dad lets me peel an onion. He lets me take a knife with a serrated edge and begin to chop it up on our glass chopping board. The knife isn’t that sharp. None of the knives in our house are sharp. The onion makes my eyes weep, but I am not put off as I’ve watched a lovely lady called Delia who cooks every Saturday on Noel Edmonds’ Multi-coloured Swap Shop and she says that the onion tears are normal.

Me and Dad locate one of our cheap, stained frying pans and Dad puts it on the most reliable electric ring and adds a glug of Spry Crisp ’n Dry. We add the onion and Dad smooshes it around in the warming oil with a wooden fish slice as it gently softens.

My dad’s large blue inky tattoo scrawled across the hazelnut-brown skin on his lower right arm will never not be fascinating. Nor will his refusal to answer questions about it.

‘What is it?’ I say.

‘Oh, it’s a daft thing I did in the army,’ he mumbles.

‘Is it a picture?’ I say. ‘A lion? Is that bit a heart? It looks like a heart.’

‘No, it’s just a thing,’ he says, moving things on.

‘Is that a word?’ I say, tracing the smudged letters under the blurred picture. ‘V? E?’

He has put the spatula in my hand. Now I am smooshing the onion.

‘Mind what yer doin’. Yer don’t wannalerritburn,’ he says.

‘I’m not lerrin’ it burn,’ I say, my accent already speckled with his Merseyside tones.

My father was born on the Scotland Road in Liverpool. He is known to all his old ex-army crowd, and in his civilian role now with the RAF, as simply ‘Scouse’. Dad is there in some of the ways I sound my words. In the way I laugh and the way I have begun to make other people laugh. Liverpool genes are like a rogue pair of red knickers in the washing machine with your whites. They leave a trace.

Softening an onion will be a lesson that lasts a lifetime. It will be the genesis of shepherd’s pie, frittata and a thousand restorative soups, stews and curries. Decades later, I will attempt to teach highly intelligent, otherwise practical friends to cook and realise that the fine art of onion softening is almost unteachable. It is a deeply mindful act that needs to be carried out absent-mindedly.

Now into the pan we tip a pound of raw beef mince bought from the local Co-op butcher’s counter. It stinks something awful at first as I mash it about, like flesh, like something wrong, but as it browns and meets the onion it becomes marginally less disgusting. My childhood – in fact, almost all British childhoods in the 1970s and 80s – contains a lot of mince. Mince in a pie, made on a plate at my gran’s house in a kitchen that always smelled vaguely but rather deliciously of gas. Mince in bread-crumbed Findus Crispy Pancakes with McCain oven chips after swimming lessons. Mince inside a ball of mashed potato, battered, from Donny’s Chip Shop on the Five Road Ends in Currock.

Sometimes when my dad gets home from work he gets a piece of steak. Maybe now and then a piece of liver with fried onions, although offal is generally balked at in our house. My mam and dad grew up through the 1940s and 50s when tripe and tongue were delivered to your front door by mobile van. It lurked, unrefrigerated, hairy, veiny, in the pantry for days. They lived through mysterious faggots and dripping smeared on toast. They lived through guts, stomach linings and offcuts being the only options. By the time I appeared in the 1970s, a nice sterile tin of Fray Bentos Chicken Pie felt to them like progress. Or a shiny tin of Spam, so cheap and so easy to cut. Sirloin steak, if you were lucky enough to afford it, was fried ‘well done’. Only ‘that French lot’ ate it with blood. Steak, to us, was the epitome of fine eating. A symbol of eating like a king, living like rich people do. Today, the moneyed boho foodie crowd revel in eating the gnarliest, most disgusting parts of any animal. The brains. The tendons. The ears. The hooves. ‘Oh, the pig’s tail is the most delicious part, Grace. Just flash-fry them with Szechuan peppercorns and some Madeira wine and eat them with your fingers. Try them with a good New World Burgundy!’ But it will be at least 2018 before I see one of my Dent family order something as outré as a slow-cooked beef cheek. Why put yourself through that when something as openly delicious as a gammon steak with a fried egg is on offer?

I push the browned mince around the pan. It is time for its glamorous transformation into bolognaise. But I won’t know this word for several more years; I’ll just carry on calling it sketty. This is dad’s Scouse way of saying ‘spaghetti’. His recipe is Spag Bol à la Skelmersdale and the magic ingredient is a tin of Campbell’s Condensed Cream of Tomato Soup. It flops out of its tin in a vivid orange, coagulated, tube-shaped lump. Condensed soup was how we did ‘Italian’ in Currock. I did not see a bulb of garlic until the mid-Eighties and that was round the neck of someone in a beret in ’Allo ’Allo, to illustrate that they were truly French. It will be at least the late-Nineties when I accept the wild nonsense that celery, carrots, milk and bay leaves should form a delicate sofritto base to Italian sauces or stews. On the other hand, I will always think that hurling a small can of Heinz Baked Beans into a spag bol is no disaster if you need to make it stretch further. As for seasoning, my dad’s cooking only ever had nods towards it. ‘Salt,’ Dad says, nudging the big barrel over to me. I fling two handfuls in. Salt is brilliant. Salt makes everything nicer. Then, a liberal shake of Saxa ground white pepper from a white plastic canister – grey, powdery and liable to fly up my dad’s big nose and make him sneeze.

Our road, Harold Street, is a row of terraced houses in the most northern part of North-West England, eight miles from the border of Scotland, close to where Hadrian built his wall. I was born in Aldershot, where we lived on the army base. We moved to Carlisle soon after, back to my mother’s hometown, first living in a council house on the outskirts, before my parents bought their first home. Our house sits in the centre of the row. It is newly pebble-dashed, with a front door that opens straight into the living room. Like every dad along Harold Street, all my dad wants is a quiet life, the pinnacle of which would be to read his paper every night. Reading the newspaper is one of Dad’s only interests. His others are squirting WD-40 at squeaky things and watching telly in his armchair uninterrupted. But for George, this peace is constantly marred by the endless flinging open of the front door, followed by five or more children running past, heading for the muddy back lane behind our terrace. This is a time before ‘playdates’ and long before scheduled fun. The kids along Harold Street live largely to their own schedule. We are always in and out and in again at 21 Harold Street, shouting and sobbing and sometimes carrying a kitten. We are bouncing past on pogo sticks and begging to make Rice Krispie cakes for the Blue Peter bring-and-buy sale, and always, always leaving the door wide open and makin a drrraughhht.

Dad stands at the stove sliding an entire packet of spaghetti out of its long plastic covering and snapping it in half to fit it into a pan of cold water. The pan will take at least half an hour to come to the boil on our temperamental stove, but this will give me time to find David. At half past six, along Harold Street the air will be peppered by a dozen front doors opening and the yelling of names.

‘Tracccccccey?

‘Gerrard?’

‘Kevin?’

‘Daaaaaaaavid, yer tea’s ready, gerrrrrinside!’

Dave appears, pulling his Raleigh Tomahawk through the living room like he’s been told not to twenty times.

Me, Dave and Dad eat the sketty from bowls on our laps using old copies of the Evening News to stop our knees getting hot. We watch the end of the news show Nationwide or Play Your Cards Right, or The Krypton Factor, where brave contenders in Bri-Nylon tracksuits puff and pant around an army assault course. Dad’s sketty is always, always delicious. Comforting, sweet and gloriously stodgy, because Dad boiled the pasta for at least thirty to forty minutes too long.

I eat it without thinking about calories or portion size. I am hungry and I devour it freely and take second helpings if there’s any left, filling my belly without the smallest trace of guilt.

I am not a cuddly child. I am a slightly Machiavellian one who hates being sent off to bed, and I can always stay up later if I wheedle my way under my dad’s musky armpit and stay very quiet. Now invisible, I keep my trap shut, lapping up The Professionals. Or, very best of all, The Kenny Everett Video Show with my absolute hero, Cleo Rocos. Cleo is an amazingly funny lady with big messy hair and lipstick and smudged eye make-up, who often only wears her knickers and sexy stockings, and her friend is a man called Kenny who sometimes pretends to be a punk. It is naughty and silly and rude and I am not meant to be watching it, which makes it all the more delicious. At the beginning every week, the Thames Television ident flashes up with a loud triumphant jingle. It is terrifying and exhilarating all at once. It’s a bright-blue skyline with St Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben and the Post Office Tower reflected in the bright-blue River Thames. In London, Cleo and Kenny hang out all day long and have fun together and I want to be there too. But London is a very, very long way away from Carlisle. It is the other side of the world.

At some point, my mam will return from her job cleaning the betting shop, carrying a tattered copy of the Sun with all the racing fixtures and results filleted out of the back. I snap it up and sit reading the sexy problem page and puzzling over the vital statistics of the Page Three stunnas.

‘Nikki is 36-24-36! She’d love to work in a zoo one day … but for now she’s just making you fellas growl with pleasure!’ These measurements are destined to be seared on my brain forever as I stare down sadly at a tape measure a hundred times through my life.

My mother, incidentally, would strenuously deny that I was allowed to stay up past 10 p.m., aged seven years old, reading the Sun problem page. My mother’s capacity for denial and revisionism would make Chairman Mao blush. She still claims she did not refuse to buy one of my infant school photos because it was taken on a day when I had a sty on my right eye and she’d cut my fringe wonky, so I looked like a small Hunchback of Notre Dame. ‘Well, we’re not gonna put that thing on the shelf, are we?’ she hooted, stuffing the photos all back in the envelope. I would say that I remember this specifically happening. My mother would say that I have an overactive imagination and have always made things up. We have been having a variation of this argument roughly three times a week since at least 1978.

Inevitably, something smutty will occur on the telly: a pair of tits, a swear word, something that reminds Mam we’re past the watershed and she’ll look up from her sewing and say, ‘That child should be in bed!’

My dad will wrap his arm around me, cuddle me into his armpit and say, ‘Oh, give her five more minutes here … she’s my only little girl …’

My mother will roll her eyes and say, ‘You’re as thick as bloody thieves, you two.’

And he’ll say, ‘Oh, she’s my only little girl.’

And at this point in time, I have no reason not to believe him.

November 1980

‘Six spoons of it. That’s what we agreed,’ my mother snaps.

‘I’ve had six,’ I lie.

‘You’ve had three,’ she says.

I am sitting on our brown squeaky leather sofa, peering mournfully into a bowl of tepid Ready Brek. My mother, also called Grace, is scribbling on the back of the gas bill with a BIC biro. She’s doing some rough maths. She is planning some home improvements. It is not good enough that we merely own a home now. She must make it better. These types of doodlings will provide a constant source of peril during my formative years. They mean we will spend at least the next three months in a thin layer of cement dust while walls are being knocked through and other ones built.

‘If I put the door there,’ she says, ‘then it’ll stop the draughts and yer dad might stop being a mard-arse,’ she says.

It’s eight o’clock in the morning, but Mam is already brimming with ideas about ‘partition walls’ and ‘opaque glass’. That is, I learn, glass you can but can’t see though, which sounds weird but at the same time very classy.

The bleak lukewarm oatmeal mulch in my bowl has grown a skin.

Mam stops doodling and stares at me. Her mid-length Diana Dors blonde hair spills down over her purple Marshall Ward-catalogue dressing gown.

‘Gerritdownya,’ she says, pointing at the Ready Brek. ‘A car cannot run without petrol.’

‘Ammnot a car,’ I argue. ‘Noteatingit.’

‘You bloody are,’ she says.

Mam has been promised by a new TV campaign for Ready Brek – running in every ad break – that this porridgey slop in an orange box will be the solution to one of her other biggest problems. That neither of her infant-school-age children will touch breakfast. This makes her a very lacking mother indeed.

‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ she’s been hectored for decades – by her own mother, by the government and by her teachers. It is her sole responsibility to administer it. Except that morning after morning, as Terry Wogan pipes ‘Forever and Ever’ by Demis Roussos across the ether on BBC Radio 2, we have rejected all of her options.