by Grace Dent
‘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 t
he 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 j
ust 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.
