Look Back in Hunger Read online

  Baby weight has always seemed to me to be a totally dull subject, but it is always the second question asked of a new parent.

  1) Boy or girl?

  2) What did they weigh?

  Why not ask some other completely pointless questions like ‘What is the measurement between the bottom of the baby’s ear and the bottom of their neck?’

  There is, of course, a case to be made for a baby’s weight being interesting if it is at the extreme ends of the weight spectrum. For example, a baby weighing nearly a stone is of interest, mainly to the mother, who has to ensure its safe passage through quite a small tunnel that really doesn’t cater for that size. And once all your friends have said, ‘Bloody hell, that’s enormous!’ it is the poor mother who has to lie back in agony while some junior doctor practises his embroidery skills on her.

  Again, if the baby is a tiny little thing weighing almost nothing, there are obviously health concerns, unless it wants to be a model. Sorry, I’m rambling. Suffice to say, I was neither of these and my baby weight did not presage the horrors that were to come (not in my opinion, that is, but in the opinion of others).

  I was born in south London or, as we prefer to call it, ‘sarf’ London, destined to a life of taunts from those nobs who populate the north side of the Thames and think they’re so sophisticated and superior. Little do they realise they pay a high price for this, in that one has to park two miles from one’s own house if one lives in north London and one is congenitally debilitated by a damaged brain which forces one to compulsively make the same joke ad nauseam about cabs not going south of the river.

  My mum and dad are called Ron and Joyce. My dad was a structural engineer. No, I don’t really know what that is either, but as far as I understand, in between periods of going to college, he worked at various building firms as a site engineer and was responsible for such projects as new roofs or office blocks. One of the jobs he did, which I always thought sounded exciting, was a massive hotel block in Dubai. Apparently, the concrete had been mixed up wrong and the entire block was sinking into the sand. So my dad was called out there to devise some way of shoring the whole thing up. I also remember he would be called upon from time to time to go to the scene of something like a motorway bridge collapse and work out what had caused it.

  He also happened to be working at Brixton Prison when it was discovered that lots of prisoners were climbing out of a window and going to the pub and then coming back after last orders. I know it’s a bit scary to think of all those criminals knocking round Brixton pubs, but there’s something really entertaining about the idea, particularly that they actually went back after a sesh.

  My mum wasn’t anything at this point. I say that, but she was feisty and independent. Let’s just say there wasn’t much she could put on her CV.

  My parents met each other through the Young Socialists, which doesn’t seem to have been quite as worthy and dreary as it sounds. From what I can glean, they had a drink, a laugh, the odd meeting and country rambles fuelled by beer, as opposed to the Old Socialists who sat by the fire with a cup of Complan and moaned about the failures of the Communist elite in Russia.

  The Young Socialists’ official title was the League of Youth and it was based at Clapham Park Road. There was debating, during which I think my mum first caught my dad’s eye and ear, because she was one of the few women to get up and join in. In those days a woman with a bit of an opinion to express was rather unusual and slightly frowned upon, as women, to a large extent, were supposed to be decorative and domesticated. There were also table tennis, fundraising dances and public debates with the Young Conservatives—bet that was a hoot. But I know that my mum and dad’s favourite activity was the rambling. They would all meet at a pub on Clapham Common on a Sunday morning and then travel by train to a rural destination, get their book of rambling routes out … and ramble! The group was anything from five to fifteen strong and they would wander through beautiful countryside, singing songs and having a laugh.

  Sounds like quite good fun, doesn’t it? Apart from the actual rambling bit, of course.

  At this point my mum was seventeen or so and my dad twenty-one. Within a year they were hitched. There were a few hiccups, I think. My mum’s dad was very strict and at one point, as family legend has it, chased my dad round the garden waving a shotgun at him. My mum had done very well at school and was lined up to go to Oxford via a scholarship, which, of course, went by the board when she met my dad, thus causing the anger on my granddad’s part.

  The house into which I was born was a little terraced Victorian place on the Wandsworth Road with an outside toilet. See, I had it rough as a little un (I’m joking), although I don’t think I could manage to get out to the toilet on my own for a couple of years, by which time we’d moved anyway.

  I was the second child of three, being the girl sandwich in the middle of two boys. And this is what I think set me on the road to a career in comedy and comes loosely under the heading of ‘competition’. I never had a sister to point me in the direction of girliness, just two rather wild companions, Matt and Bill, whose major interests lay not in which piece of pink clothing they could don to promenade round town in, but rather which gun they could pick up to take a warning shot at the neighbours. Plastic, not real.

  Bill is the oldest, being eighteen months older than me, and Matt is two years younger. As adults they are lovely. Bill is one of those people who is enormously kind and will do anything for anyone to the detriment of his own time. He is also hugely entertaining and an ace joke-teller, preferring to relate jokes that have a proper structure rather than the wild ramblings of the so-called alternative comedian. Matt, on the other hand, is all things musical, an accomplished guitarist, composer and singer. He lives in Germany and I don’t see him very much. If they were not my brothers, I would have considered either of them a perfect husband.

  However, as children they were a different matter. I saw them as rivals in almost everything we did. Who got the most sweets, who had the most attention, who won at games, who could hit the hardest, who could give the best Chinese burn—everything.

  Despite this, and probably due to a somewhat rigid upbringing by my parents, who were sticklers for politeness, I was a NICE LITTLE GIRL with good manners. I do remember a very early incident with a neighbour, when I was probably about three years old, she being not the most hygienic of women, who invited me and my brothers into her hot flat for a drink, which turned out to be a slug of naturally warmed long-life milk served in a cracked, dirty and bluebottle-saliva-ed cup with some ominous-looking bits bobbing up and down in it. Having been taught not to refuse any polite offerings of food or drink, I duly but unwillingly swallowed it and promptly threw it up everywhere as my stomach wasn’t quite as polite as I was. Since that day, I haven’t been able to be within six feet of long-life milk without being filled with a huge desire to projectile vomit. Hardly a life-endangering condition, I know, but one I feel the need to warn anyone bearing such goods about, in case they are standing in the firing line.

  We weren’t long in the house with the outside toilet and pretty swiftly we moved a few yards up the road to a bigger house with an inside toilet.

  Other early memories are of days full of sunshine playing in the communal gardens with a gang of kids or being squired up to the paddling pool on Clapham Common by one or both of my grandmas to give my mum a day off to lie down and neck a couple of bottles of vodka in bed or whatever her hobby was at the time—probably tidying up and washing clothes, I should think.

  As a kid, it’s all Christmas and birthdays, if you’re lucky enough to have decent parents, and one Christmas I got a kitten. Only problem was it had been spooked and legged it up the chimney, refusing to come down, despite some rather amateur attempts to persuade it, ranging from a saucer of milk in the grate to trying to smoke the poor little bugger out by lighting a fire under it.

  I was worried. I thought perhaps it would never come down. I even wondered if this was a story the
adults had cooked up so they didn’t have to actually give us a kitten. When they tried to smoke the kitten down, I thought it might catch fire or choke. So the whole thing was a three-day anxiety fest on everyone’s part. We kids rushed downstairs every morning to see if it had appeared or not. And there was a bit of a family history of losing pets. The goldfish had been found floating on top of the water in its bowl and had then mysteriously disappeared (down the toilet as it happens, but we didn’t know that at the time) and my grandma’s lovely parrot, Gussie, which used to fly around the room during the day, had escaped out of a window to the dubious freedoms of southeast London. To be honest, I didn’t expect much and I think that is probably a good mantra for life as you never get too disappointed.

  The kitten eventually came down voluntarily and being a little black thing was promptly named Sooty. I realise that in this day and age that name would be totally inappropriate and it illustrates the chasm between today and the 1960s in terms of the approach most people took to race. After all, the first big wave of black people had only arrived in England some few years before and almost everyone was suspicious of them, if not downright hostile. My mum played a trick on my grandma, as she was somewhat outraged by the fact that my grandma had specified that her house should not be sold to ‘coloured’ people. Upon hearing this, my mother called up my grandma using a West Indian accent to wind her up and informed her she was on her way round to view the house. History has not recorded my grandma’s reaction when my mother arrived laughing heartily.

  This brings me to an incident in the nineties, when I took part in a benefit in Bradford. I was working with fellow comic and good mate Geoff Green, and the manager of the theatre asked me if it was possible for his friend, a Zimbabwean singer-songwriter, to do a few songs at the beginning of the show. This was all arranged. I was compering from off-stage with a mic. We were corralled in a dressing room in the bowels of the theatre when I heard the singer finish earlier than I’d assumed he would and was forced, in my extremely unfit fashion, to leg it as fast as I could up the stairs to the backstage area, to announce the next act, Geoff. The reason we were in a dressing room so far away from the stage was because we were performing on a Sunday, the only night off for the current show, Sooty, all of whose paraphernalia was locked in the dressing room right next to the stage. (For those of you who are too young, you lucky sods, Sooty was a bear glove puppet that appeared on our televisions. He couldn’t speak, just nod. Just as well. He was annoying enough as it was. Shouldn’t diss him. All kids loved him. Except me.)

  Arriving at the mic breathless and hardly able to speak, I grasped for a one-liner to amuse the audience and explain my shortness of breath. It was: ‘I’m sorry I’m gasping for breath but I’ve had to run all the way up from downstairs because that fucking Sooty’s got the best dressing room.’

  Complete silence. OK, it wasn’t the most brilliant line in the history of comedy, but not even a titter? It then began to dawn on me, with the help of Geoff, that in fact the audience assumed I was talking about the Zimbabwean singer and, bless their little hearts, had refused to laugh at a racist joke.

  To say that I was mortified is an extreme understatement, particularly as the story spread like wildfire round the comedy circuit and some people chose to interpret it in a way that made me look like a fully paid-up member of the National Front. It was reassuring, however, that in the space of thirty years attitudes had changed so radically(ish). More on this later.

  When I look at photos—black and white, of course—of my early childhood in southeast London, it’s like looking at a history book. The women, all dressed in the same uniform of flowery dresses gathered at the waist in summer and tweedy sort of suits in the winter, seem like an alien race straitjacketed by the fashion of the time. Trousers were rare and scruffiness a condition punishable if not by death then by the neighbours’ whispers. But behind the facade, stirrings were occurring. My mum, quite a force to be reckoned with, had already started a one-woman crusade to achieve some sort of power. When my dad was conscripted into the army and found out he was going to be sent to Benghazi in Libya, my mum wanted to go too. The only slight problem was one of status. Conscripts’ wives were not welcome abroad with their husbands and were supposed to wait dutifully at home, writing letters, polishing the step and generally accepting their lot.

  Accepting her lot was not something my mum was comfortable with, and off she went to visit some general or other, managing to secure during that meeting an agreement that she would fly out with my dad and be given accommodation in the officers’ quarters along with the much posher wives. This was the beginning, I suppose, of my mother becoming a lifelong role model for me. She refused to sit back in her chair and take what was coming to her, and as I grew up I began to realise that she wasn’t like other kids’ mums. Feminism hadn’t even been heard of at that time, but she was certainly a sister doing it for herself.

  I think my mum was unusual because she was what I would call a pre-feminist. Feminist didn’t rear its ugly (some would say) head until the sixties, although there were probably lots of women who would have liked it to. The role of women in British society was heavily prescribed. They were expected not to work, to have a family, to be a home-maker and do their best to look pretty. Old etiquette books of the time advise things like soothing your husband when he’s had a bad day, speaking in a low, calm voice, having his slippers ready for him. Jesus Christ. All very well for blokes, but how dull for women intellectually. I think my mum, like many other pre-feminists, just wasn’t satisfied with this small amount of power. She had a big brain and was interested in politics, the news and all those things that woman were encouraged not to worry their pretty little heads about in the forties and fifties. However, it’s much easier to be a feminist if you’re a lesbian because men don’t cross your orbit in the way they do if you’re heterosexual. And things like falling in love happen and, hard as that may be to arrange alongside your feminist views, it is something marvellous that women should not have to forgo. And obviously my mum didn’t want to miss out.

  My dad had had a pretty closed and somewhat rigid, though warm, upbringing. Socially, I don’t think that there was much going on at home—his parents just tended to stick to visiting and being visited by relatives. Also, my dad was a child during the Second World War and was evacuated to Reading, which apparently he was quite disappointed by. This was because when they left London they were not told where they were going and had visions of being housed in a lovely farmhouse on the Dorset coast or similar. You can see why Reading might have been a bit of a letdown. They didn’t even have the rock festival then. My dad and his little sister, Rene, were lucky that their mother went with them and eventually their father got a job in Reading, so the family were together again.

  I think my dad’s always been a sensitive soul and the vicissitudes of the daily rough and tumble of life and work were hard for him at times. This resulted in him getting down occasionally, although at that point it was no more than that. He just found it hard to cope sometimes. My mum, on the other hand, was tough, like her dad, although I suspect that she struggled with the routine of bringing up a family with no outlet for her intellect. There is a conspiracy among the parents of young children not to reveal to those about to embark on the wonder of having offspring just what bloody hard work it is and how squiring a gaggle of young children through their childhood leaves very little opportunity for what we would call ‘me’ time. Back then women weren’t really encouraged to work and I’m sure thousands of them sat at home, brains seeping out of every pore, longing for just a little break from the daily grind of housework, swings and shops. Taking children to the swings is a bizarre combination of quite dull and extremely stressful. They always want to stay longer than you do, but at any moment could potentially plunge headfirst off the top of the slide and break their necks. Also, if you were hoping for a chat with another grown-up and are accompanied to the park by them, it is almost certain that their children a
nd your children will want to play at opposite ends of the playground, ensuring that you are separated as you watch your children tackling what seems an enormously dangerous piece of equipment while you gaze longingly at your friend fifty yards away who is doing exactly the same thing.

  Perhaps the main aim of carers of toddlers, apart from feeding them, washing them, dressing them and entertaining them, is to stop them killing themselves. Toddlers have absolutely no sense of danger whatsoever. In fact, the opposite is true. They gravitate towards danger wherever it may be hiding, be it a main road, a bread knife, some bleach, a scary dog, a precipice, an open window, a saucepan full of boiling liquid, or a container of radioactive material. I often wonder if there couldn’t be some Mothercare gadget called Eyes-In-The-Back-Of-Your-Head whereby a series of tiny periscopes strapped on to your head would enable you to see what’s going on behind you. This would also be very useful for women walking home alone at night, but of course it would then also need a built-in shotgun.

  The weird thing about being a kid is that everything is normal, particularly under the age of five. This is because you don’t really have anything to compare and contrast your family life with. So say your dad goes round at home dressed as a gorilla with a tutu on, who’s to say that’s not normal? How would you know? It’s only when you start forming relationships with other kids, go to their houses and talk to them about their lives that you realise that your life is different from theirs.

  Our family was, I suppose, pretty traditional. We had three meals a day, we sat down at table to eat, we went to bed when everyone else did and celebrated Christmas in pretty much the way everyone else did, with a tree and some fruit. It’s hard to imagine these days that a satsuma in your stocking was a treat.

  One day a week the two grandmas looked after us and in the summer we would be taken up to Clapham Common where we could plunge into the paddling pool and run around screeching and laughing. Our grandmas were always slightly less strict than our parents; they let us have more sweets and turned a blind eye to vegetables that were not consumed. There was no sense of either of my parents being harried or pissed off. Apart from in the holidays perhaps. We always went on seaside holidays to places like the Isle of Wight. These memories are just collages in my head of the beach, the sun and endless days of simply enjoying oneself.