Dear Fatty Read online

  For you, though, it must have been very difficult to make a home. If it’s any consolation, Mum, believe me when I say that everywhere we went was our home because you made it so. You were and are the absolute centre of all of us, and you kept us anchored when we could so easily have felt lost and confused. There might have been endless new doors but behind each one was you and Dad, making a safe and happy place for me to be. Any confidence I have had since stems from that one unassailable fact. I am loved.

  Thank you.

  Dear Dad,

  I THINK I was about four years or so when you were posted to RAF Leconfield and we all moved to Yorkshire. Only now do I realise that I’ve lived in Yorkshire at all – I was so unaware of our personal geography then. I did know it was a long way from Grandma and Grandad French in Plymouth because I clearly remember those endless hours in the car on numerous family visits. Gary and I would physically fight the entire time, mean pinches and punches and stabs and Chinese burns. You tried word games and songs to distract us, but we were compelled to battle. That was our kid purpose. If we were scolded, we resorted to verbal taunts and competitive face-pulling, but in the main it was the corporal torture that was most excruciating and most thrilling. If any of our squabbling became too dangerous, or if he was winning, I would be sure to whinge loudly to you and appeal for justice. Gary called me ‘the Foghorn’ for this crime of breaking rank and grassing him up, and accused me of being ‘a girl’. A girl?! How very low.

  Another reason I recall these journeys is the smoke. God, the smoke! I don’t know how many fags you and Mum were smoking a day but it must have been 100 each. You obviously regarded these journeys as a perfect opportunity to catch up on any non-smoking minutes you may have carelessly frittered away not smoking, and so put in extra smoking time to get up to smoking speed. One cigarette lit the next and we travelled along in this stinking, acrid foggy tin box for hours. Gary and me and the dog in the back seat, sucking up thousands of fags’ worth of used smoke and gasping for air in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Heaven forfend we should open the window. Mum would screech, ‘You’re letting in the cold air! Shut that immediately!’ Yes, it would have been awful to allow fresh air to dilute the thick pea soup of swirling smog that had built up inside the car. I swear sometimes I couldn’t see as far as the back of your head. How did you see out at all? Is this why you often inexplicably used the windscreen wipers on a perfectly clear day? For years I thought I was a sufferer of carsickness until I travelled in a smoke-free car and realised that smoke was the reason for my queasiness. Perhaps Gary’s cries of ‘Foghorn!’ were more apt than we knew.

  Anyroadup, I remember one particular journey back up North because there was only one topic of conversation the whole way. The Queen Mother. You told us that you had been selected as a typical serviceman, a chief technician with an average family – one boy, one girl, one nursery-school-teacher wife, dog (comes with or without clothes). A perfect family, safe and presentable enough to display to a visiting royal on a very special day for our air force base. She was coming to visit and inspect in two weeks’ time! All I could think was, ‘Why is she called the Queen Mother and not the Queen’s Mother? Was my mum therefore the Dawn Mother?’

  Apparently there was a lot of preparation to be made before she could possibly cross the threshold of our humble G-Plan, red-brick quarter. What?! What did we have to do? Surely, you suggested, she was supposed to take us as she found us, that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Absolutely not as far as the Dawn Mother was concerned. Do you remember she flew into a flurry of excitement and didn’t sit down or sleep once in those two weeks? Everything was dusted, mopped, antisepticked, hoovered, pinned up on the line and beaten, including us kids. Our house would be perfect, we would be perfect, it would be perfect. That Queen Mother would NOT find fault with us. We would do you proud. Gary and I had haircuts, new outfits – mine was a tartan kilt and new red patent-leather Start-rites which I had been longing for, so yay and respect to the Queen Mother for those; Gary’s was a grey suit so he could be a perfect mini-man. The Dawn Mother had a twinset and a perm and you of course wore your uniform, which I always loved because you looked so spruced and tip-top and important. Who would have thought drab bluey-grey would suit anyone? You shone in it, and it shone on you, with all buttons and belts and medals and significant regalia-type badge things duly buffed till they glinted. Nothing less would do. Mum tried to get the same shine on our faces, using a chamois leather and Vim. Well, all right, not that, but something like it – Brasso maybe? Gary’s newly cut but still renegade thick hair was semi-tamed with liberal dollops of Brylcreem and Mum’s spit on the crown. There were new socks and new pants all round. This alarmed me – was the mother of the Queen going to be inspecting our pants? This visit was seemingly more thorough than I had anticipated. Shit. Or rather, not shit. On pants, or anywhere. No shit!

  We practised bowing and curtsying for hours until our backs and knees buckled and bled. We tried to rehearse being humble and quiet so that if the mother of the Queen ‘chose to converse with our parents, she could do so in peace, please!’. The little pamphlet on royal etiquette gave us some tips: we were to speak only if spoken to (royal rules, not family rules), so – should we say hello, or wait to be said hello unto? Could we try on her crown? Or feed sugar lumps to the unicorns that would pull her pink carriage? After the initial ‘Your Majesty’ we were then to address her as M’am, rhymes with Spam, not M’arm rhymes with farm, and never M’erm … This threw me into a panic because I felt sure I would mistakenly call her Spam from start to end.

  The day came and, boy, were we prepared and perfect. Beds made with crisp hospital corners, books neatly on shelves with spines facing outwards, teddies and dolls scrubbed and lined up on the pillow. The house smelt of furniture wax and Mr Sheen. A newly baked cake was on the table and the best – in fact, the new – china was arranged beside it, as if it were commonplace that we had high tea in porcelain lady-cups. The Dawn Mum was virtually still licking us clean like a mumcat when SHE arrived (do I remember it correctly, Dad?) in a helicopter! All the neighbours were out in the road to watch. She first went for a quick visit to a suitably presentable officer and his family at the other, pedigree, end of the camp. We were always segregated like this from the commissioned officers – they had posh detached houses with huge gardens front and back whereas us oiks lived in rows around a central play park (freshly painted for the visit – several children bore the marks on the arses of their best clothes).

  And so we waited and waited for her to come. Finally, just when I was starting to get lockjaw from the rictus of holding my Queen-Mother-welcoming cheesy grin in readiness, she walked up our garden path. I had a quick glance at the stunning outfit with the matching huge hat (hang on, where’s the bloody crown?!! She’s forgotten the crown. Someone’s nicked the crown! The crown for Chrissakes! Call the police!!), before taking a very low stoop into my ballet-influenced curtsy, holding my tartan skirt out at the sides for maximum effect so that the QM could view the wondrous calibre of the cloth. Gary did his gentlemanly bow simultaneously, and both of us remained like this for an uncomfortably long time – possibly two days. During our punishing rehearsals, we hadn’t worked out when the correct moment for closure on the bow/curtsy should be. It was best to just stay there till a cough from you brought us both upright, if a bit dizzy. Looking at the photos of the event, the overlong bowing was the last thing you needed since it immediately became apparent that Gary had not washed the back of his neck. Ever. It was truly grimy from a seven-year build-up of gladiator-game mud. He brought shame on the House of French at this critical moment but I don’t entirely blame him, because what happened next would overshadow the whole day for me and haunt my dreams for years to come. As I stood up from my deep curtsy, and the blood rushed away from my head, I blinked in the light and looked directly into the face of the mother of the Queen. She was about my height (I was four years old and three foot), which surprised me. Was she, in fac
t, a munchkin? Excellent! I smiled my special show-every-tooth-in-your-head smile, carefully avoiding saying hello first and definitely not calling her Spam (don’t say hello Spam, don’t say hello Spam). She then reciprocated with a huge ear-to-ear beaming smile and – horror of horrors – she had a mouthful of BLACK TEETH! What? Eh? No carriage, no crown and now she turns out to be a fully certified evil witch! And she’s coming into my house! I was dumbstruck and with my heart beating fear in my ears, I hid behind your knees and grabbed on to your legs. I remember you trying to shake me off and you even did that dadfirmpull thing to remove me, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I was holding on to your leg with the grip of a randy terrier, trying to make legpuppies with you. She was in our house, chatting and drinking tea for all the world as if she wasn’t evil incarnate …! She looked at Gary’s train set, she asked polite questions and complimented us on our lovely neat house. Had no one else noticed? Perhaps true evil, the soldiers of SATAN, can only be seen through kid-vision? So why was my brother being so suckuppy? Didn’t he know? Perhaps it’s only girl-kid-vision that works? I knew what to do. Hold on to your leg and refuse to either speak to her or look her in the eye. So that’s what I did. I said one word when she asked me about my school. I said, ‘Nice.’ That was it. That’s all I gave her and that was only to appear civil to the unknowing humans, the fools who knew not who she truly was. She left our house and went off to spread her evil seed elsewhere, after 20 minutes or so. The scariest 20 minutes of my life. Does she get back in the helicopter or simply hop on her broomstick to get home? Does the Queen know what’s in her midst? I’m only four, there’s nothing more I can do. No one believes me. I’m helpless, hopeless, inconsolable.

  I was left with this deep hidden fear for years, and then I happened to meet the QM at a reception for the arts many moons later and found her to still be alarmingly short, but much less evil, with lovely teeth.

  Thanks, Dad, for the use of your leg that day. It saved my life.

  Dear Hannah,

  RIGHT FROM THE moment you were born, on Boxing Day 1993, and when I first looked into your eyes, I knew we were linked in a profound way. If feels a bit like we are twins born 40 years apart. I know you. Because I was you. I have watched you grow into your teenagehood, negotiating the assault course of your childhood using exactly the same techniques as I did. I see your thinking, I see your actions, I see your doubt, and I see your method and I know them as my own. Is it the family connection? I guess that must be a huge part of it. Is it some great cosmic joke that I should appear again in my brother’s life as his daughter, just when he thought he was safe, a spooky mini me, to continue the torture? Whatever the reason, I am so glad you’re here, that you’re my niece and I cherish our mysterious sameness.

  I can’t apologise enough for the lifetime of comparison to me you have already had to, and will in the future, endure. The endless comments about how you and I are so similar must be agonising. I am quite often the culprit myself, even when I am aware of how tiresome and frankly frightening it must be for you. I remember when I was 14 like you, I thought anyone over the ripe old age of 40 might as well throw in the towel and die to alleviate their unsightly and off-putting decrepitude. Surely, it would be a favour to themselves and to everyone else if they just, like, weren’t there? So I understand how alarming this comparison must seem. For a start, how could anyone be alive and so very fat?! What is the point of that? Well, all I can say is that I am just as surprised as you. I honestly cannot fathom the dimensions of this curious body I’ve been given. I was aware, from very early on, that it wasn’t quite like anyone else’s. None of the laws of physics, nature, chemistry, biology, art or universal order seem to apply. I know I am a human life form, but not as we know it, Captain. Why, for instance, am I so short? I know the Frenchies are not tall in the genes department, hailing as we do from labouring stock, heavy, beefy men who built the first tar roads in Cornwall and from fishermen who, again, need to be robust and sturdy to haul in their living. Surely, though, their proportions were not quite as startlingly dwarfish as my own? What is my physical category, actually? Plump? Rotund? Squat? Corpulent? Buxom, possibly, in poor light? No, I defy these definitions. I’ve seen folk who fit those descriptions and they are not like me. I am more hobbitish, with a big dollop of Weeble. You know, the ones that wobble but don’t fall down? Except I do, due to alarming lack of foot size which might otherwise offer some stability. You would think that in return for the shocking lack of leg/arm/torso length, God might have been prepared to barter and bless me with elegant long fingers suitable for pianos and rings, or even exquisite toes for sandal and nail-polish use. No no no. Not to be – got the dumpy Wall’s sausage fingers and the cocktail sausage toes. Thanks, God. What about an aesthetically pleasing, well-arched neck? No no no. Got the full, direct-from-chin-to-chest fortification, with impressive turkey-gobble flaps attached. How generous of the Almighty to gift me with not just the one chin, but several reserve chins – lest I lose one? Or perhaps so that I might fashion a sail from my own face if I am stranded at sea on a raft?

  Above all, what in the name of all that is holy is the purpose of these massive ocean-going buoy chests? I know bosoms are womanly but these surely belong to many women. How did I get the rations for the whole queue from here to the edge of the earth? Every time I see a flat-fronted woman, I want to apologise for my seemingly appalling greed. This is the kind of hoarding that gets you sent to your room with a stinging arse. I would happily share, given half a chance. I’d love to see my chipolata toes again – it’s been so long. I’d love to hold a friend’s baby without seeing that strange slavering glint in their eye when they bounce off what must seem to be enough food to propel them into their teens. I’d love to run and still see ahead on every other stride. I’d love to lie down on my back without gathering underarm beach balls. I’d love to pick up a bra catalogue and find my size in all ranges rather than turn each page ever more forlornly till I come across the trusted industrial ‘Doreen’ in white polyester – the only bap-scaffolding that comes in my staggering 42H. I have tried to customise the ‘Doreen’ so many times – I’ve added lace, I’ve hacked away at it with pinking shears to create a sexular-looking shelf-like effect, I’ve covered it in intriguing fabrics in an attempt to make it more comely. On one occasion, fortified by drink, I wore it back to front, which was ill-advised and dangerous to all in my immediate vicinity. I’ve hunted high and low and under and over and beyond and back to find beautiful, supportive equipment for these unfeasibly large norks. Thank God then, and June Kenton, for Rigby & Peller, a place where physical freaks like me can find refuge, get measured properly and finally get heaved into something nearly pretty. I don’t think you’re heading this way in the front upper department, Hannah, but if you do, fear not – I will guide you beyond the darkness, through the portal of light that is Rigby & Peller’s door, with the comforting Queen’s royal warrant above it. There shall you find mammiferous fulfilment and happiness.

  Any road, I know you will look at me from time to time and dread the onset of this odd body shape. Fortunately, I think your mum’s genes might save you. Evidence thus far points towards early intervention of good strong height genes. You even seem to have an actual neck, which goes in under the jaw and then down, providing you with a place where necklaces apparently go. How lucky you are. But should this fleshy strangeness befall you, I want to allay your fears a tiny bit and tell you that it’s not all bad. I have discovered that big breasts can precede you into a room and announce the arrival of someone to be reckoned with. This can be very useful if you are feeling nervous or shy, because the knockers do the attitude for you; meanwhile, you have enough breathing time to let your courage catch up with them. I’ve also experienced big bosoms as a sort of theme park for boys. They just can’t seem to resist them. Every single boy I have known intimately has been utterly entranced by them and can’t wait to earn access so they can play all day. Of course, not all of them have been well apprenticed in
the art of bosom management. A big tip I offer you is to give boys with very small hands a wide berth. It seems cruel to exclude them but, believe me, they can’t seem to get past the turnstiles into the park. They just can’t. You will have to train boys to treat the pleasure domes with all due respect and to cherish them like the magnificent cherishable things they are. You will have to gently discourage any unconfident twiddling or tuning, you will have to insist on their close face-shaving to avoid chafing or grazing. You will have to fight off all attempts at actual breastfeeding, which some boys seem to regress to with zealous and baby-like oversucking. I once had a situation where a total nincompoop created a kind of vacuum on one of my pinnacles and had to be jabbed hard in the cheek in order to force a release. Painful for both of us and potentially fatal for him. You will also experience, should you be similarly endowed, a kind of sisterly regard verging on rampant jealousy from other women. They, too, wish to join in the fun or at least behold the actual wonders or at the very least hear tell of saucy chesticle adventures so as they might vicariously enjoy the thrills.