Track 4: We are the pigs

From pork scratchings to pork belly

Welcome to track 4 of my mini memoir ‘Millionaire mixed tape’. You can catch up by rewinding to tracks 1, 2 and 3.

There was no time to dwell on the trauma we’d endured by the end of 1990. We had to try and salvage what was left.

My parents didn’t have qualifications or any experience that would enable them to get normal jobs, even if they’d wanted to, but they had two kids in private school and were desperate to keep at least that plate spinning, so they formulated a new plan.

My dad borrowed a large sum of money from his brother and mother-in-law, and we moved out of our house - which had been repossessed along with everything apart from the cat and dog - into the smelly old man's pub that would become our new home and business.

This kind of thing

It was far from the life we’d known, with its nicotine-stained wallpaper, flea ridden carpets and sense of decay emanating from the aforementioned old men. But there was no room for acknowledging any of this - we were to see it as a new beginning rather than a humiliating downgrade.

Moving into a run-down pub in the back end of the New Forest sounds, on the one hand, fun – it’s the premise of so many Grand Designs programmes, where people find themselves so numbed by comfortable domesticity that they embark on a gruelling challenge in order to test themselves and find the ‘real them’. As in: “I’ve decided to quit my six-figure salary job, the rat race and riverside penthouse to live in a crumbling boozer in a really shit part of Hampshire and see if I can turn it around.”

But the clue is in the ‘put themselves’ bit. If you had the choice, you wouldn’t. It’s very similar to when married friends say, “I’d love to try Tinder, it must be so much fun”. No, Sue, it’s not fun. Why don’t I try out your husband for the night for some marriage tourism and see how you feel about that?

Sorry, I digress.

We moved into The Hare and Hounds in Sway, on my 15^th birthday - this photo says it all. We were very much putting a very brave face on things.

And for the next two years I hardly saw my parents. They worked all hours, managing the pub from lunchtime until midnight, while my brother and I were at school. When we got up the next morning, they were still asleep, exhausted from the previous night’s grind, pulling pints and breathing in old man’s breath (a little-known Farrow and Ball paint colour).

It wasn’t that we were latchkey children – it was more like we were flatmates with our own parents. We shared brief exchanges as we each navigated our separate worlds under the same roof, but the closeness of family life had long gone. Our meals together became a rarity, replaced by quick, solitary snacks in the pub kitchen. Ok, a Danish pastry grabbed from the industrial freezer on the way to school wasn’t exactly life in the Gorbals, but it was a far cry from muesli in the homely kitchen with its mod cons and an ever-present mum.

Hampshire’s first gastro pub

My parents meanwhile embarked on transforming our no-frills boozer into something much more refined and family friendly.

This was the very start of the ‘gastro pub’ era, when pubs went from functional to respectable. They became not just places to drink in, but places to sit back, relax and eat ‘restaurant quality’ food in. Gastronomy wasn’t something that had been associated with ale houses before – you might get chicken in a basket if you were lucky – but this was food presented on actual crockery. Out went the pork scratchings and pickled eggs, and in came pork belly, fish pie and moules marinière with crusty bread.

You couldn’t serve this within a lino-floored setting though – you had to make it feel like someone’s living room rather than somewhere you’d go to drown your sorrows: so the pub was transformed into a casual, relaxed dining environment with mismatched furniture and worn leather sofas, wing backed chairs so you could settle in with a pint and a paper, decorative copper jugs and antique clocks. Part country house, part old inn, with a touch of Victoriana for good measure.

This is how gastro pubs look now.

Party on

And it worked. Within a few months many of the disgusting old men had retreated and been replaced with families and foodies. And that might have been ok. But the rowdiness didn’t disappear - the place was still full of pissheads. Pissheads have money, afterall. They’d come from far and wide for the legendary theme nights and Sunday night music quizzes my dad put on once the families had left. Even the most innocuous date in the calendar could be made into something to celebrate.

These nights were lucrative, and I made good money waitressing, but they were also a front-row seat into adult chaos. I was a nascent Saffy from Ab Fab¹ at this point and seeing all this revelry and wild abandon up close cemented that character formation. I looked on from the sidelines, unsure where to put myself. Meanwhile my parents seemed to be actually enjoying it.

Where had the people I’d grown up with gone? They looked and sounded the same, but behaved completely differently. The people who’d a few months ago taken us to places like Harrods and taught us to eat from the outside in when it came to cutlery settings, now seemed completely at home getting trolleyed with the sweaty regulars and laughing at their crap jokes.

I know they were doing it to keep us all afloat, but it felt as if this is where they really belonged - this was the real them. Whereas I was a half-complete work in progress - stuck between Howards’ Way and the Princess and the Pea². Was I supposed to continue to be the delicate, ‘posh’ person they’d been in the middle of creating or was I supposed to forget all that and understand dirty jokes and laugh off the wolf whistles?

China girl

The pub had a similar layout to the Queen Vic in EastEnders which meant there was little privacy, but once I did get upstairs to the relative quiet of the living room, I’d walk past a box of porcelain pigs carefully wrapped in tissue still waiting to be unpacked. They’d been part of a display in our Habitat drinks cabinet at home and belonged to my dad. They were never unpacked - they didn’t seem to fit into this new life. We were no longer in a position to care about delicate pink pieces of pottery. We were about survival.

My dad never received another china pig. It turns out he never really liked them anyway. He just went along with it as something for people to buy him at Christmas and birthdays.

But I desperately wanted to go back to a life where things like porcelain pigs mattered. Because it would mean we had the luxury not just of excess money to while away on frivolous foibles, but the luxury of excess feeling - of sentimentality, of caring too much about small, unimportant things simply because we could.

The grand plan was to get back on our feet and move out of the pub and back into a family home as soon as we’d made enough cash. So I’d go round our flat upstairs and turn all the lights off, trying to save as much money as possible in order to speed up this process.

But we never went back to how we were. Over time the pub would break us again financially – and this time emotionally too.

Thank you for reading! And thank you for all the great comments and discussion last week. Please feel free to click the heart if you liked it. Track 5 will be out next week in all good record shops. Sorry I haven’t got to the B-side I promised just yet - it’s still in production.

1. Absolutely Fabulous is a British sitcom created and written by Jennifer Saunders, first airing in 1992. The show revolves around Eddie, a chaotic, fashion-obsessed PR agent who desperately clings to youth, whose daughter Saffron (Saffy) is sensible, studious, and responsible - aka the mature one.

2. A story by Hans Christian Andersen. A prince insists on marrying a real princess. When a woman comes to his door maintaining that she is a real princess, the prince's mother tests her by burying a pea under a huge stack of mattresses and then ordering the woman to sleep on the mattresses.