Look Back in Hunger Read online

  Halcyon was a good person who looked like a good person. She had beautiful blond hair and a very smiley face and there was not an ounce of malice in her. Her lovely family, consisting of lots of kids and a warm, cuddly mum, was a really comfortable group of people to spend time with. Halcyon went on to work in the caring professions, which I knew she would. My other main friend, Helen, from an Irish family, was laidback, warm and really good fun. We spent hours in her bedroom listening to David Bowie albums, trying on clothes and talking bollocks and an equal amount of time parading around town in our finest seventies garb, looking for excitement.

  If required to posh up I could run to a Laura Ashley patterned skirt and glittery top (sounds hideous, doesn’t it?). The effect was completed with a slosh of patchouli oil so strong it could repel local dogs from a distance of half a mile. So I dressed Bettina like me and did her hair and makeup. I took out the farm-girl pigtails and coaxed her into some more subtle make-up, used as she was to great slabs of bright-blue across her eyelids.

  I was looking forward to the night, as there was a boy going who I really fancied. Can’t even remember his name now, but we shall call him Rob. We set off excitedly and met a group of others by the pier, with my friends marvelling at the transformation of Bettina from horse-in-drag to passable beauty. The evening went well, we bopped about, had a few illegal drinks and then I looked over to the corner to see Bettina and Rob dancing together and snogging. And I still like Germans.

  I think every girl has at least one psychotic episode of love in her career as a teenager, the more unsuitable the bloke, the better. And it is a strange mix of the most exquisite torture and glorious abandon, the balance, of course, being affected by how unrequited it is. Poetry, music, lying on your bed staring at the ceiling, having butterflies, crying, looking at yourself in the mirror wondering if you’re ugly, waiting for the phone to ring, going for walks, staring out of the window, swearing at them and hating them fairly often, writing their name on everything, phoning them up and putting the phone down, writing letters and then tearing them up—these are all part of the unbearable, obsessive, ridiculous experience of ‘lurve’ as a teenager.

  Hastings was full of foreign students and for one idyllic summer my heart was given to a lovely Italian boy called Claudio, who was dark-haired, dark-eyed and very cheeky. It was all pretty innocent—of a holding hands and snogging nature—and we were frequently accompanied by his not-quite-so-attractive friend, a role I was used to playing, who was enormously entertaining and whose party piece was a spectacular rendering of Winston Churchill’s ‘We will fight them on the beaches’ speech, particularly appropriate for Hastings, as the local lads resented this influx of exotic maleness and were very threatened by it, to the point of encouraging big rucks on the seafront.

  These so-called fights were really just an opportunity to work off some testosterone. Lots of eyeing-up would go on, followed by a bit of flailing around with fists. Thankfully, serious injury wasn’t often a feature, but territorial feelings ran high and peppering them with a touch of xenophobia occasionally resulted in the cartoonish sight of a lot of grappling and quite a bit of falling over.

  Claudio melted away at the end of the summer. We wrote fervently to each other and at Christmas a present arrived from him, an expression of his undying affection. It was a chain belt, probably the major fashion item of the time … and it was utterly revolting. In the time-honoured custom of the fragile teenage romance, it completely put me off him. Our letters gradually dried up and I looked for joy nearer to home. The belt left home and went to take up residence in a charity shop.

  I went on a date with a strangely nerdy young man whom I had met at the pier one night. He was a lovely, shy, bespectacled boy, who turned out to be an even worse kisser than the first one of my life. We met at a pub and after enduring two bouts of this unpleasantness, which was reminiscent of receiving mouth-to-mouth from an old bloke without teeth, I decided I had to do something drastic. Telling him I had to go to the toilet, I headed out of the door, went for a wee and plotted my escape route. There was a corridor leading from the toilets to outside, but it meant passing the door to the bar he was in, which had a pane of glass which started at waist height. So I got down on my hands and knees and proceeded gingerly towards freedom. As I was passing the door, I looked up to check I was not being observed and there was my beau looking down at me, arms folded, with a half tragic, half furious look on his face. Much as I felt guilty, I could not bear to have to give an explanation, so I rose to my feet and ran for it. Haven’t seen him since.

  During this period, having a mother who was a social worker had its pros and cons. My mum had been training for the job since I was about nine or ten, when she began a course at a local college. There wasn’t a huge change in my life, we still saw her a lot. However, she would be on call several nights a month and I have a very strong memory of her one night, all done up in a posh dress, ready to go out to what they called a ‘dinner and dance’ in those days, and having to divert and go and section someone under the Mental Health Act. I suspect many social workers and doctors turn up for these things in an interesting variety of clothes.

  I think my dad found my mum’s new career quite difficult, and it caused tension between them. They were very careful not to let this spill over into our family life, but as a kid, when you know your parents so well, atmospheres are very easy to pick up. All us kids were aware that things weren’t going well. Snatches of arguments could be heard at night when we were in bed, and we all knew that things were very strained between them.

  Because of my mother’s social work, I felt it incumbent upon me to do vaguely defined ‘good works’. So Halcyon and I signed up to spend a week in a stately home in Cheshire, caring for adults who were severely physically and mentally disabled, to give their carers a break. I suppose my motives were to do with having had it instilled in us from an early age that we were very lucky to be who we were and that many other people were not so fortunate. For a while, my mum was attached to a psychiatric hospital and we would go there to play badminton when I was a teenager. There would be several patients wandering about in the grounds and I never felt scared in the way you were meant to. So I was happy to get involved with those with learning disabilities, totally different as they are from mental health problems. Also, in my selfish way, I thought we would have a good laugh and get pissed quite a lot.

  This trip opened my eyes to the harshness of the world in more ways than one. It was very exciting to be living in what effectively was a huge mansion, specifically converted for the purpose, but it was also weird to be forced to spend time with people whom you’d only just met. We, the carers, were a mixed bunch—men and women of all ages—and we all got on pretty well apart from one man who had rather a strange manner. He was slightly overfriendly and a bit too touchy for my liking. He would always invade my personal space, put his face too close to mine, put his arm round me or run his hand down my back in a completely over-familiar way. All of this made me feel most uncomfortable and a little bit intimidated by him. Time has mercifully erased his name from my mind.

  Our day consisted of washing, bathing and feeding our group, interspersed with visits to local attractions. In the evenings, after a long, hard day, we would all repair to the pub and get pissed. One night my companions were all knackered and wanted to go home, but I was up for a bit of a lock-in. I’d met a group of people who were mostly teenage locals. We’d sat near them and all got chatting. They were very friendly and a good laugh and I felt at ease with them, with the help of a few bottles of lager obviously.

  So I waved my colleagues away, saying I’d find a lift home on my own. They were dubious, but I assured them I’d be fine and continued drinking. When the pub eventually closed, a squaddie who’d been hanging round the fringes of the group said he was going past where I was staying and he’d drop me off. Alcohol had blunted my personal-safety antennae, as it does, and I gratefully accepted. We got in his car, chatted happily
together and as we came up to the rather grand gates of where I was staying, I pointed and said, ‘That’s it there.’

  He replied, ‘I know,’ and drove straight past it and on down the main road. Suddenly all the horror films I had seen started to play in my head. The cliché about being paralysed in these situations is absolutely true and the sheer, overwhelming panic cuts through the alcohol-induced blanket of smugness. Very soon after, he turned off down a little unlit lane, drove about two hundred yards, stopped the car and turned towards me. I seriously thought I was going to be raped or worse and so something inside me made me go on the offensive and I screamed at him, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re going to do now?’

  To my enormous surprise and relief, he put his head in his hands and began to cry, eventually explaining that he was lonely, missed his fiancée and could he just take me back home? Of course he could. Of such incidents are comedy routines constructed.

  We pulled up outside the house and as I got out of the car, he asked me if he could take me to dinner the following night. Yet again, I ran. It would have been bad enough if this had been the only traumatic incident on this volunteer holiday, but more was to come.

  After an enjoyable but hard week, we arrived at the final night. The group we were looking after had gone home and we were all staying that night and leaving in the morning. Of course, a party was suggested, drink was purchased and after a lot more drinking someone suggested the house, which was enormous, would be a good one to play sardines in. The lights were turned off and we scattered to hide in different rooms, the hazy rules dictating that people who found others had to hide with them. I found a quiet corner in a little room at the end of the corridor and lay behind a chair, feeling half excited, half terrified, as I’m not a fan of the dark.

  As kids, we always had a nightlight in the room, the implication being that the dark is not a good thing, although this may be for practical reasons— you bump into things. I think I just had a rabid imagination and took slightly too seriously those stories about bogeymen. I also remember my mum talking about the film Psycho and how much it had frightened her, and that played on my mind when I was a kid.

  For a while, I lived in a cottage in Shropshire. It was unusual for me to be there on my own and one windy, dark night I couldn’t sleep. It was about two in the morning and suddenly someone started knocking on the door. My heart nearly came out of my mouth. I tried hiding under the duvet but the knocking continued and in my head some mad, murdering type had made his way to my door and was waiting outside with a machete. But I couldn’t just lie there and do nothing, so I made my way to the door and stood there as the faint knocking continued. Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer and opened the door. There was no one there, the wind was causing the knocker to gently tap on the door. I stayed up the rest of that night with the bread knife next to me.

  Back to sardines. After a few minutes, I heard someone outside the door of the little room I was hiding in and, assuming it was one of the boys I was good friends with, I started to laugh. My laugh was answered with scary maniacal laughter and this thing burst into the room, screaming and hooting. I was terrified and ran for the door, hitting a low coffee table that had been obscured by the dark. I landed on top of it, breaking it and the thing landed on top of me, tearing at my clothes and slobbering on my neck.

  I screamed my bloody head off. Nothing happened for what seemed like ages, then eventually I heard shouts and the lights were turned on to reveal that Mr Slightly Pervy Man was my attacker. I was crying and accusing him, but he somehow managed to convince everyone that he was only having a laugh and got a bit carried away and I was hysterical.

  So we decided to call it a day, I was taken off to the kitchen for a cup of cocoa and a calm-down and Mr S.P.M. was sent off.

  As it was late, I set off for bed and started to get undressed in my room, still slightly shocked and upset. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the curtains move and did that weird thing of saying in a croaky voice, ‘Who’s there?’ like they’re going to say, ‘‘Tis I, Mr Slightly Pervy Man.’ For, indeed, it was he, there for round two. I screeched at the top of my voice and people appeared within seconds.

  Mr Slightly Pervy Man was offered the choice of speaking to the police or pissing off straight away. Unsurprisingly, he chose the latter and I was left to ruminate on some valuable if unpalatable lessons learned.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AN EDUCATION IN SKIVING

  My first year at my new school had not been very auspicious. I hadn’t spent long actually in the place and I hadn’t really done very much work apart from just enough to keep my head above water. Days were spent in work avoidance and dallying around on the seafront enjoying myself.

  The seafront had a lot to offer the out-of-control teenager. There were loads of pubs, there was the pier and there were many cafés to hang out in. Much of my time, if the weather was good enough, was spent just sitting on the beach. I could normally find some co-conspirators from school to join me. The main ones were Helen, Lucy and Mouse, and there were two girls I’d met who didn’t go to our school called Barb and Hattie. Everyone looked like a hippie and there were long skirts and bare feet everywhere.

  My parents used to go mad about the bare feet thing. Yes, I suppose they were right about all the stuff on the pavements. They weren’t exactly surfaces you could eat your dinner off, covered as they were with every imaginable substance ranging from ice cream to dog shit to chewing gum. I didn’t care though. It was a mark of honour to have filthy feet, and they became so toughened that it was easy to walk on the hard, pebbly beach and give my feet the occasional rinse in the sea.

  Although there were arcades on the pier, we didn’t spend much time in them, mainly due to lack of money. Pretty much the only time we went to the pier would be to see bands playing. I’ve never been a fan of fruit machines because I know they are going to swallow everything you own in the end, despite the false hope they give you along the way.

  When I was still at school, my friend Helen and I got a job as cleaners in a TB hospital. Oh the romance. We would do Sunday mornings from seven till about one. We wore charming overalls and caps over our hair, as we had to be very aware of the possibility of infection. The job consisted mainly of hoovering, mopping floors and what cleaners call ‘damp dusting’ round the wards. The wards were full of elderly, grey-looking people whom I felt immensely sorry for. We would try to get a break as often as we could and go out by the bins for a fag. Perhaps the aspect of the job that I found most difficult to deal with was emptying buckets of scraps into the deliciously named ‘pig bin’. This was a massive metal bin out in the yard, filled with all the food scraps from the week before, so you can imagine what it smelled like. I would find it very difficult to lean over it in order to pour the contents of the bucket in without gagging.

  We always used to do one little cosmetic task for ourselves every week, and that was sorting out what I called ‘smoker’s finger’—that is, dealing with the attractive yellow staining that the holding of a fag does to your hands. Helen would fill two mugs with warm water and put a tiny bit of bleach in and we would stand in the kitchen with our two fag-holding fingers dipped in the cup for about five minutes. Worked a treat.

  At the end of our shift we would always get a Sunday lunch, and then I would go home and have one there too. I’m sure that didn’t help my attempts to maintain a lovely, svelte figure.

  When I was about sixteen, I also had a Saturday morning job in Boots to give me some spending money for going out. It was good fun. I worked on the till, but was occasionally moved to the make-up counter, where, for some reason, lots of women would come and ask my advice about shades of eye shadow and lipstick and what would suit their colouring. Well, I knew bog all about make-up, but I got stuck in with gusto, offering my uninformed advice, and it seemed to send most women away happy.

  When I was on the till, a few shamefaced boys would line up with packets of condoms, and some were so embarrasse
d they wouldn’t even make it to the front of the queue. I felt so sorry for them. At least they were buying condoms and not leaving it up to the woman. I’ve always wondered if, apart from machines in toilets, there could be some other way for teenage boys to get their hands on condoms without having to face the amused look of a shop assistant. It’s hard enough getting boys to use them anyway, we shouldn’t put obstacles in their path.

  It was at Boots that I first set eyes on a man who was to become a rather powerful influence in my life.

  At this point, I was struggling against my parents’ rigid sense of what I should be and where my life should go. I think my parents judged me by their own generational standards, so that they expected me to reap the benefits of the hard work they put in to haul themselves up from very working-class roots to arrive somewhere in the lower-middle classes. This meant that I was expected to go to university and end up with a profession. Therefore, anything that happened in my life that seemed to demonstrate that I would become a bit of a no-hoper made them very anxious. It seemed impossible to explain to them that underneath I was an OK person and wasn’t going to dive headfirst into drugs or marry a serial killer. The gulf between us was just too wide.

  They didn’t like my friends much because, to them, they were sirens tempting me into venues where sex and drugs were available on tap, and I got the feeling they longed for the days when a clergyman’s daughter was my best friend and my worst misdemeanour was being late for bell-ringing practice.