ELLE.COM/UKNove mbe r 2O19ELLEMemoirand lime and shimmied around her room to T- Rex, spraying herself into a
L’Oréal Elnett mist. My dad sloped around in his bleached denim jacket,
smoking Lambert & Butler cigarettes and scribbling misspelled poems in
capital letters on the backs of old receipts. They went out dancing to Lloyd
Cole and the Commotions, twisting across sticky dancefloors together.
The recollections of their first meeting are vague and I can never
quite remember the way the story fits together. I collaged my own
version from boxes of photographs put away in the loft and a pile of
damp records I found in the garage. But the chance wonder of
them meeting seems unimportant. The sadness that came later is so
significant that it shaped their whole lives – and mine.
My father is an alcoholic and his drinking got worse over the course
of my parents’ marriage. He went missing for nights on end, sitting in the
pub until closing time and then sleeping under trees in the fields behind
our house. As a child, I believed he worked away a lot. My motherWhen I was at school in the 199Os, the phrase, ‘my parents
are divorced’ still warranted sympathetic smiles and awkward
glances. I went to Catholic school and a teacher surreptitiously
loaned The Suitcase Kid by Jacqueline Wilson to students she
suspected were from ‘broken homes’. Once, in a religion class,
I argued that the church’s teachings on divorce were outdated
and was kept behind after the lesson.
‘You seem quite passionate,’ my teacher said. ‘I just want to make
sure everything is OK. Are you going through something like this at
home?’ I told her I was fine and fled from the room with beetroot
cheeks. She thought she was being kind, but her message was that
I should stay quiet. She suggested that parents who did not ‘persevere’
to stay together were people to be ashamed of.
My parents met in Sunderland, in the 198Os. My mother had a curly
perm and wore men’s shirts knotted at the waist. She drank pints of lager
PHOTOGRAPH by DAN MARTENSENWhen her parents divorced, Jessica Andrews didn’t feel sad,
she learnt a whole new way of loving
47A MOT HER ’S love