Track 5: Sisters are doing it for themselves

But not everyone approves

Welcome to track 5 of my mini memoir ‘Millionaire mixed tape’. You can catch up by rewinding to tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Peeling off the cellophane of a blank videotape was always exciting. My mum would get out her metallic gold pen for moments like these, carefully writing the names of the programmes she’d recorded for us. If it was something special, the title remained untouched - never taped over, never crossed out - her gold lettering a permanent mark of a choice well made.

Among the programmes she recorded - Bagpuss, Worzel Gummidge and The Wind in the Willows - was just one for her: Women of Substance¹, Parts I, II and III. I wasn’t sure what it was about, but the title alone seemed bold. It was unusual for her to show her own preferences so casually. She had a very timid music collection compared to my dad - just three LPs. Kate Bush, Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega sat there quietly among the vast array of Bob Dylans and Eric Claptons like their unhappy wives.

Beyond this, it was hard to know who my mother really was; she was caring and sweet and excellent at fancy dress costumes, but in the early days, when I was really little, she just existed as a woman to me. Someone there to do my bidding. So much so that I mockingly referred to her as Brabinger once, the long-suffering butler of Penelope Keith’s character in the BBC sitcom To the Manor Born. That didn’t go down well.

Barbed wire and dreadlocks

I didn’t notice much ‘feminism’ about when I was really young. Before the Spice Girls and ladettes overhauled it with boobs and drinking, it was just too earnest to have any mainstream impact. Sure there were the Greenham Common ladies, but they were a bit of an oddity - straggly looking women on the evening news tying themselves to barbed wire, probably not washing and having to wee behind a tree. Gross.

There were strong female characters on TV, but they were still quite polite. These programmes were for the family to enjoy, so big themes had to be wedged beneath other storylines, which meant that Wendy Craig in Butterflies and Jean Boht in Bread² could easily be dismissed unless you were really listening to them. I wonder if their characters were helpful to the women on those sofas watching, or if their relative smallness added to their feelings of suffocation. I’m sure my mum was listening to them - unless she was just looking at Joey’s leather trousers…

Phwoar

Women were much more bold in music, but this could still be just as easily dismissed. Annie Lennox, dressed as a man, chatting on Wogan³’s sofa was, like Boy George on Top of the Pops in a white tunic, bemusing, rather than serious. I remember Terry asking Annie confusedly why she felt the need to dress in a suit and tie. He used the same sad tone as my Dad when Sinead O’Connor sang Nothing Compares 2U with her shaved head in 1990. “She’d be so pretty with long hair.”

Uglifying oneself in order to make a point just seemed playful rather than intentional. Why were women bothering with all this when they looked wonderful as women? Why did they want to be something else?

Then there was Madonna, who was sexier than the Greenham Common women, but no less terrifying. I was far too shy to buy any of her albums - the closest I got was sitting outside a record shop looking at the True Blue album cover from the safety of the car. The way she wildly threw her head back, bold and unbridled in that famous Herb Ritts photo said everything about what she stood for. But she seemed to be answering a question I didn’t know was being asked. Like Terry Wogan, I wasn’t aware there was a problem.

Independeeeernce

Whether it was Madonna’s conical tits, Diana leaving Charles, or Annie Lennox splitting from Dave Stewart, there was a glut of women in the 90s my mum’s age who were being a lot more bold than they’d been in the 80s. They seemed to be morphing into a new stage of, as Lou Lou would put it Inderpenderrrrnce.

By this point they’d found a voice and a way out, but it was a little clunky and rough around the edges. There would be casualties. You can see this clunkiness when you look back at the styling of women who weren’t Madonna in early 90s pop videos. They seemed to have overshot Wendy Craig’s polite page boy hair cut by some margin and come out at a much more angry point.

Annie Lennox’s white face and charcoal hair was the perfect setting for her wide eyed expressions, but she looked a little deranged. Shakespeare’s Sister seemed to share the same make-up artist. It was all a bit too overwrought. If this was the face of independent women then it wasn’t going to encourage much sympathy among the masses - it still looked like another endearing peculiarity.

Of course, I just enjoyed the tapes.

So when my mum’s depression - which had crept onto the scene in the 80s and become very much a part of our lives by the time we were living in the pub - started to manifest itself towards this same message of independence, I hated it. I was already aching for my parents to be boring, but now as well as crying a lot of the time, my mum was also often uncontrollably happy, overly confident and dressed to the nines.

Whatever was going on, one thing was clear: we were getting further and further away from the conventional family life I was sure we once had. I felt foolish to be clinging onto an idea like this when it seemed so alien, but I was also having trouble taking all these radical changes in.

Wild boys

At some point - though I couldn’t say exactly when - the loud, messy nights at the pub just became the norm. It was always open, always full, always noisy, and there was no knowing what was really going on. And as the pub became wilder, so did the people in it. It became a place where boundaries no longer held. Staff took from the till, customers felt too familiar, drunk regulars blurred the line between punter and problem.

My dad had always liked a bevvy, but now liked it a bit too much, meanwhile my mum’s mental health was quickly unraveling. Drowning in the pressure and desperately looking for help, they trusted people to help them - accountants, managers, different people with different ideas - only to be ripped off to such an extent that there was no way back.

“To lose one business may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness,” to misquote Oscar Wilde. Two years to the day after we moved into the pub, we moved out. It was the happiest day of my life.

What was left? Absolute tumbleweed. When you get made bankrupt twice in three years it’s not just your credit history that shrivels to nothing, but so does the goodwill of others. Instead of the sympathy we got the first time around, there was silence. We were well and truly on our own.

The pub was supposed to save us, but instead it swallowed us whole.

Sad songs

A few months before we moved out of the pub, that Christmas, my dad had given my brother and I a ring each in a little grey felt box, bought from the local jeweller. It felt strange at the time because we’d usually get joint gifts from my parents. It was only afterwards I realised he was giving us something to remember him by - he could see that things were going downhill quickly, that the family unit was falling apart, and was worried we might never see each other again.

Little did he know it would be the other way around. That my mum would be upping and leaving and starting life again without us.

Thank you so much for reading! And again, thank you for all the thoughtful comments - it really does mean a lot to me. Please feel free to click the heart if you liked it. Track 6 will be out next week.

1. Woman of Substance was a TV mini-series based on a novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford that told the story of Emma Harte, a woman who goes from being a servant to becoming a wealthy businesswoman.

2. Butterflies and Bread were both popular 80s sitcoms written by Carla Lane.

3. Wogan was a British television talk show broadcast from 1982 to 1992 and presented by Terry Wogan.