The Good Girl Stripped Bare

By Tracey Spicer

From bogan to boned and beyond -- a full-frontal 'femoir' by one of Australia's best-loved journalists
From bogan to boned and beyond – a full-frontal femoir

Tracey Spicer was always the good girl. Inspired by Jana Wendt, this bogan from the Brisbane backwaters waded through the 'cruel and shallow money trench' of television to land a dream role: national news anchor for a commercial network.

But the journalist found that, for women, TV was less about news and more about helmet hair, masses of makeup and fatuous fashion, in an era when bosses told you to 'stick your tits out', 'lose two inches off your arse', and 'quit before you're too long in the tooth'. Still, Tracey plastered on a smile and did what she was told. But when she was sacked by email after having a baby, this good girl turned 'bad', taking legal action against the network for pregnancy discrimination.

In this frank and funny 'femoir' - part memoir, part manifesto - Tracey 'sheconstructs' the structural barriers facing women in the workplace and encourages us all to shake off the shackles of the good girl.

"Glows with the wisdom of a woman who has learned essential truths about love, life and happiness" - Caroline Overington

"Wickedly witty and wonderfully wise" - Wendy Harmer

"Fiercely smart and ferociously funny" - Benjamin Law

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780733335631

Tracey Spicer

Tracey Spicer is a multiple Walkley Award winning author, journalist and broadcaster who has anchored national programs for ABC TV and radio, Network Ten and Sky News. The inaugural national convenor of Women in Media, Tracey is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers and emcees in the region. In 2019 she was named the NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year, accepted the Sydney Peace Prize alongside Tarana Burke for the `Me Too’ movement, and won the national award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership through Women & Leadership Australia. In 2018, Tracey was chosen as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence, winning the Social Enterprise and Not-For-Profit category. She was also named Agenda Setter of the Year by the website Women’s Agenda. For her 30 years of media and charity work, Tracey has been awarded the Order of Australia.

Book preview

Prologue

A crew from A Current Affair is chasing me – like a dodgy plumber – down the street in front of the TV station.

I’ve been kicked to the kerb after more than a decade at Network Ten for committing a crime against television: spitting out sprogs. A wraparound dress covers the lumps and bumps of the woman formerly known as a ‘yummy mummy’. (Apparently it’s a ‘pregnancy pouch’, as though I’d somehow morphed into a marsupial.)

Gone are the power suits, tight-fitting frocks and camel-toe trousers that are de rigueur for a television newsreader. I’m beyond the AMAZING POST-BABY BODY stage, lauded by the trashy mags after the birth of my first baby. Such stories are the children of commerce and envy, chimeras designed to deceive women. The publications that propagate these myths should be destroyed in a bonfire of the vanities.

‘Will you ever work in television again?’ the journalist asks, thrusting a microphone towards my mouth.

It’s feeding time and I need to express. As I spin around, I feel the ‘let-down’ and breastmilk almost squirts in his face. It seems there’s nothing dodgy about my plumbing, after all. The milk seeps through my bra, saturating the dress. Imagine the tabloid headline: Twin Peaks Leak. (It’s so surreal, I expect The Man from Another Place to appear – speaking backwards – from Agent Cooper’s dream in the David Lynch series.)

‘I hope so,’ I say, scuttling into the adjacent café. But what are the chances of that? No one sues a television network and gets away with it. Perhaps I should have signed that press release saying I’d elected to leave for ‘family reasons’. That’s what a good girl would have done.

But I can’t let them get away with it. I want to fight – not just for me: for all women.

Still, questions niggle like chafed nipples. Can women stand up for their rights without retribution? Should you cry over spilled milk? And what happens when a ‘good’ girl turns ‘bad’?

Chapter 1

‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’

‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’

Simone de Beauvoir

I am born with something missing. Mum knows it. Dad knows it. But the doctor is oblivious.

‘Are you sure it’s not there?’ Mum inquires. She’s a teenage bride – barely nineteen – and this is her first child. Her new beau is somewhat of a closed book, but she does know this: a girl hasn’t been born into his family for almost four centuries.

‘I’ve checked,’ the obstetrician says. ‘She doesn’t have a penis.’

‘We don’t have a name for a girl,’ Dad says. ‘We were going to call the boy Tony.’

‘What about Toni, the female version?’ Mum asks.

‘No, that’s a boy’s name. How about Debbie?’

They settle on Tracey, which in Celtic means ‘fierce’ or ‘fighter’. In this era, such characteristics are flaws: girls should be ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’, according to the nursery rhyme. (However, these attributes are awfully handy in adulthood . . .)

Despite being born in a developed country – one where girls are wanted – I learn early that vaginas cause problems. This is reinforced repeatedly over the next five decades, with the extra ‘X’ of lesser value than a ‘Y’. To compensate for this deficit, I’m determined to be the ‘good girl’: ingratiatingly polite, in eternal apology for my gender. Which is not to say my parents are to blame. They’re egalitarian and open-minded, scrupulous about avoiding sexist stereotypes.

Mum and Dad – Marcia and Paul – fell in love over the phone talking about transport logistics. Romantic, I know.

They’re Yin and Yang. She’s an effusive ex-model, who dances on tables and stands on soapboxes; he’s the shy son of Methodists, who loves books and loathes crowds. Paul is a reservations clerk at Ansett in the golden age of air travel. He dons a leather jacket to ride a motor scooter to work. (No helmet, of course. It might muck up your hair.) Marcia is the first female courier driver for TNT. (Thomas Nationwide Transport, not trinitrotoluene. That’d be a dangerous delivery.)

In the 1960s, the company advertised for ‘pretty young female’ drivers to appeal to the men in dispatch departments. The Courier Mail reported on Mum’s remarkable achievement with this line, ‘Who would have thought? Women can drive after all.’

This isn’t an unusual attitude. In a letter to the editor of the Canberra Times during that decade, a reader bewails the ‘timorous ditherers’ on the road, ‘women drivers obviously clueless and inept’.

In the early days of driving, only wealthy women could afford it. Their feistiness, and ability, was admired. As car ownership spread to everyone after the war, motoring was reclaimed as a masculine pursuit. ‘The less privileged women . . . didn’t have the social cache of their predecessors, with which to effectively dismiss these criticisms,’ Dr Sean O’Connell writes in Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists.

Much of the criticism is disguised as humour. In 1965, Robin Adair writes in the Australian Women’s Weekly about a survey into the Sydney taxi industry, which recommends increasing the number of women drivers. ‘Picture the operations of the all-female-staffed Chartreuse Cab Company. Where are you, car thirty-four? asks the radio controller. Oh, I’m at the intersection of that yummy fur shop that’s having a clearance in peschaniki muffs and that darling boutique where car sixty-four picked up that positively dreamy hat.’ Four years on, he – begrudgingly – endorses women behind the wheel. ‘I see that London underwriters have announced that women car drivers are better insurance risks than men. It follows that they must be, overall, better drivers. I won’t argue about this.’

We live in a two-bedroom timber house in Brighton, hemming the outskirts of Brisbane. Mum and Dad bought this tiny abode after a bomb went off near their flat in Normanby: bikies, I believe. In contrast, this area is nice and quiet, home to a huge aged-care facility.

As a three-year-old, I receive the best birthday present ever – a baby sister. (I asked for a bike, but a small human will suffice.) Suzanne is as dark as I am fair, as quiet as I am confident, and as chubby as I am weedy. I write this because fat is a feminist issue. My sister spends much of her childhood being teased mercilessly. Few creatures are more maligned than an overweight female, because popular culture says our sole purpose is to act as eye candy. During the 1970s, children’s ‘fat camps’ are popular, accompanied by workshops in ‘charm’. There’s even a Barbie book on dieting, telling little girls, ‘don’t eat’.

I reckon my little sis looks super cute, whereas I’m the victim of a severe bowl haircut. This is one of the few pics in which we’re not wearing matching clothes.

Suze and I support each other through thick and thin. Sometimes, we finish each other’s sentences. Frankly, we’re two halves of the same whole.

It’s an idyllic upbringing, scoffing potato scallops on the beach (screw you, Barbie), catching yabbies in Bramble Bay and tadpoles in Cabbage Tree Creek. Watching a tadpole turn into a frog is an early lesson in metamorphosis (and nowhere near as disturbing as the eponymous Kafka novel, which I study at school years later). Yabbies are the scavengers of the sea, known as the ‘the poor man’s crayfish’. I know this because we’re poor.

Not arses-out-of-our-pants, holes-in-all-of-my-shoes, please-sir-can-I-have-some-more poor. Bog standard, Australian working-class poor. But you’d never know it by looking at us. Mum is a superb seamstress, creating matching outfits for her girls. My favourite is a pair of purple bell-bottoms with a patterned smock. A SMOCK. Even the word is daggy. I reckon I look like the girl on the Simplicity sewing pattern, whereas in reality I appear to be an exploded eggplant. Suze has the same set in green. In retrospect, it’s a crime against humanity. But we’re delighted to wear homemade clothing because it’s ‘just like a bought one’.

In any case, my sister and I are as rich as Croesus because we’re adored to the ends of the earth. Or, richer: Croesus showed excessive hubris, leading to the death of his wife and son, and defeat at the hands of the Persians. (NO ONE does tragedy like the Greeks.) One day, I tiptoe out the back to climb the towering mango tree in our yard. Reaching for the forbidden fruit, I touch something smooth – like Mum’s patent pumps, which I totter around in. I grab the mango, salivating at the thought of it on my tongue, when I hear an angry hiss.

IT’S A SNAKE.

I don’t know whether to shit or go blind. This is a Queensland expression, used in such circumstances. It’s up there with ‘suffer in your jocks’, ‘off like grandma’s pants on payday’, ‘up and down like strippers’ knickers’, and ‘ya slack mole’, the latter hollered at women from passing cars. (Oh, what a time to be alive!)

Damn you, Dendrelaphis punctulatus. The green tree snake may be harmless, but try telling that to a five-year-old. This is the last time I’m going out on a limb, I vow, literally and figuratively. Dear God, if I survive, I promise to ALWAYS be a good girl. I release the reptile – and my grasp on the branch – falling into the aboveground pool.

Mum runs outside and roars with laughter. Guess I’m not going to be expelled from the Garden of Eden after all. ‘Darling, that’s why we told you not to go up there,’ she says, patting me dry. Luckily, the pool water dilutes the other liquid running down my legs.

Aside from the serpent, Suze and I are on the lookout for spiders. Genus: redback. Location: toilet seat. Yes, we have an outdoor dunny. It stinks like Satan’s sphincter (assuming Satan has patchy personal hygiene). I remember being dressed in a white frock, white tights and shiny white shoes, ready to attend a wedding. (Not as a child bride, I hasten to add.) I rush out to the thunderbox – another fine Aussie expression – ‘to vacate my bladder’, as Mum suggests. Next to the seat is a web. At its centre is a jet-black spider, a red stripe bifurcating its back. Female redbacks are sexual cannibals, in order to fertilise more eggs. (Do NOT try this at home: it doesn’t work for humans. Not yet, at least.) She has enough venom to kill a child. I back away, aware of the answer to that earlier expression: I vacate my bowels and don’t go blind.

Whenever I think of the perils of parenting, I picture Mum cleaning faeces from my tights. Now THAT’S unconditional love.

Dad’s a motorsport aficionado who, of a weekend, takes us to Lakeside to watch the V8s tear around the track. He admires his car-driving wife as a Thoroughly Modern Millie. They share the workload – both inside and outside the house. At night, we eat tuna casserole on tray tables in front of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or sing along to Barbra Streisand ballads on the phonograph. The role modelling of these women is welcome when the most popular television entertainment is The Benny Hill Show, in which the titular star gropes young women. (That, and Number 96, the first program to show BUSH. Not George. Pubic hair. Although which has led more men to war, it’s hard to say . . .)

During the day, we walk to the corner store for bread, milk and cancer sticks, which is a perfectly legal pastime for children.

‘A carton of Black & White Extra Mild,’ I say, as pleased as punch. Smoking is glamorous! Sexy! And good for you! Or so the media tells us.

‘More doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette,’ according to the ads. Our home is like the set of The Maltese Falcon, with a constant smoke screen. (Everyone in film noir is smoking, as if to say, ‘Aside from the three crimes I have to solve today, I’ve got to get through these three packets, as well.’) Cigarette advertising has already been banned in Britain and the United States, but Australia drags the chain – so everyone chain-smokes. The last cigarette commercial in Australia is aired in 1976. It’s an homage to women, ‘from flapper to female liberation’. Mum, like many, sees smoking as empowering.

She’s grateful for her opportunities, compared with the previous generation. ‘Women had to leave the public service once they were married,’ she tells me one night. ‘The law changed in 1966. We’ve come a long way, baby.’

Dad’s mother hasn’t been so fortunate. Born in 1914 – at the start of the First World War, as women infiltrated the workforce – Olive Margaret Bevan is as smart as a whip. (I don’t know how smart a whip is, but I’m sure it smarts.) The daughter of the Vice-President of the Trades and Labor Council, at the age of fourteen Olive is the fifth-smartest student in the state; at the age of sixteen she’s employed in the mail-order room of a department store selling ‘handsome and effective evening gowns’. Effective at securing a husband: Olive is engaged at nineteen and married at twenty-two. Another ad from this era features a child’s dress with the tagline, ‘She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set’. (These days, the young ‘she’ in this ad would be a 42-year-old male police officer, with an online alias, setting a trap . . .)

In later years, Nan confides her dream of being a doctor. But she was destined to be domesticated, because she, too, was born with something missing.

Instead, she bore three boys in brisk succession. Her husband was sent overseas to the war, and Olive was consumed by depression.

As a naïve child, I’m unaware of this. What I am aware of is a soft voice in my ear, the scent of lavender, and tissuey skin under my fingertips. Nan reads to us for hours. ‘But you’ve heard that one twenty times before,’ she says in a crepe-paper voice.

‘It’s my FAVOURITE,’ I insist.

‘It seems they’re ALL your favourite,’ she replies. We stay overnight in her Queenslander house – in the charmingly named Best Street – during the 1974 floods.

Every Queenslander above a certain age remembers where they were on the Australia Day weekend that year. As a child it’s exciting. Swimming in the street! Sidestepping cane toads! A whole week off school! With water lapping at our steps halfway down the hill, we wade to our friends’ home at the bottom. Mack and Jan are chest-deep in brackish water, watching their furniture float away. ‘Bloody water everywhere and I’m as dry as a dead dingo’s donger,’ Mack says. ‘Better get a beer.’ The adults submerge their sorrows as the children chuck toads at each other. This is every Queenslander’s favourite sport, aside from ‘thugby’ league.

The Spicer legacy – aside from penises, reading and Methodism – is the wingnut. Technically, this is found in a toolbox in the shed. It’s a metal nut with a pair of projections for the fingers to turn it onto a screw. Colloquially, it’s a person with protruding ears, also known as Jughead from the Archie comics, or Dumbo the elephant in Disney. I swear I could flap my ears and fly to school. But I receive a bike for my next birthday, instead of another sister, so I’m able to ride.

Never underestimate the sense of independence arising from operating your own mode of transport.

Hundreds of years ago, women had to rely upon men to get around. Then some clever clogs invented the bicycle, otherwise known as the ‘boneshaker’. Cycling in the 1890s was ‘a general INTOXICATION, an eruption of EXUBERANCE like a seismic TREMOR that shook the economic and social foundations of society and rattled the windows of its moral outlook’, according to Irving A. Leonard in When Bikehood Was in Flower. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony writes that bicycling has ‘done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world’. The so-called New Woman broke conventions to work outside the home (GASP!) and go to suffragette meetings (EEK!). But powerful players didn’t want women to have the vote. I mean, what’s next? WOMEN WEARING TROUSERS?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Who could ride a bike in those fussy, frilly petticoats?

Something has to be done about these uppity ladies. So, doctors make up a medical condition called ‘bicycle face’ to deter women from leaving the hearth of home. These are the symptoms, from the Literary Digest of 1895: ‘Usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness. Characterised by a hard, clenched jaw and bulging eyes.’ (Not unlike a squashed toad, actually.)

Don’t escape your shackles, ladies! It might RUIN YOUR LOOKS.

My bicycle face is nothing like that. After strapping my port on the back, I pedal along with a song in my heart. (Being the early seventies, it’s probably ‘I Am Woman’, which Mum plays repeatedly, or ‘The Monster Mash’, by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers.) I love going to Brighton State School, with a bottle of milk in the morning, pineapple pieces for little lunch, devon sandwiches for big lunch, and a lick of Clag as a snack.

I don’t understand how to be popular, so I stalk Laurie to find out. Laurie has glossy blonde hair and wears a different pair of Bobby Dazzler sports socks each day. After I follow her gang of ‘cool girls’ for a week, one of them turns around to talk to me. FINALLY, I’m accepted. ‘Go away,’ she says. ‘We don’t want to be seen with you.’

I feel like the ugly duckling in the Hans Christian Andersen book. I realise I’m a bit of an odd-bod, avoiding cracks in the concrete, counting footsteps out loud, and burying my head in books. Anne, from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, is my touchstone. She’s the only girl in the group, and has equal billing with the dog. ‘As a small girl, she sometimes lets her tongue run away with her,’ the outline reads, ‘but she generally takes care of their domestic duties.’ What a girl!

I’m also interested in politics. NERD ALERT. Our house falls silent for the evening news. Mum and Dad are compassionate souls who side with the underdog. ‘It’s dreadful what the government’s doing to that poor person,’ is an oft-heard refrain. ‘I wonder whether we can do anything to help?’

My Year 3 teacher at Brighton State School is also vocal about social justice. Miss Miller comes to class sniffling, one warm November morning. ‘Why are you upset, Miss?’ I ask.

‘Children, Gough Whitlam has been dismissed as prime minister,’ she says. ‘He was a good man. Tried to do a lot for this country.’

I shoot up my hand to say – somewhat insensitively – ‘But Miss, the man on the news said he was sending the country broke.’

‘Well,’ she says, eyes searing into my soul, ‘some people would say that.’ She turns towards the blackboard. ‘Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.’ Despite this misstep, I remain at the top of the class. In my mind it’s an equation: good girl = good marks.

In Year 4, we analyse a song by Skyhooks. The lead singer, a man called Shirley, performs topless. HOW RAD. He sings about buying drugs, suburban sex and the homosexual scene. But we’re looking into ‘Horror Movie’, which is about the chaos on the ‘6.30 news’.

I ride home, pondering the contrast between this song and our somnolent suburb, when there’s a jerk at my sleeve.

Within seconds, I’m grazed and on the ground. My left leg is caught under the wheel. Squinting in the sun, I see someone loom over me. A boy. A big boy. Years older than me.

‘What are you doing? Go away,’ I say.

Freckles swim on his face as he starts to sweat. He’s scowling now. And panting. He hitches up my skirt. With a rough hand, he pulls aside my underpants. They’re as yellow as sunshine. Then he stares at my vagina. Just stares. For what seems like a lifetime.

I want to scream, ‘WHY ARE YOU STARING?!!!’ but I can’t speak. I open my mouth and a squeak comes out. The clock stops. I’m frozen with fear. Then a car careens around the corner.

‘Shit. I’m sprung,’ he says, scampering away. I don’t understand what’s just happened.

My knee is bleeding. So are both elbows. I right the bike and limp home.

I don’t yet know what the word ‘violated’ means. But that’s the only way to describe how I feel. Aside from sore. And scared of everything: leaving the house; going to school; and the child-eating broccoli under my bed (not to mention Gregor, the gigantic insect). A sense of shame prickles my skin. I can’t articulate it, but I feel somehow at fault.

But I don’t complain because I’m a ‘good girl’. There’s no need to worry anyone. I wouldn’t want to be a burden.

In retrospect, I wish I did. Perhaps he would have been punished. Instead, I live with an expectation of injustice. And face decades of being treated like a blow-up doll – an inanimate sex object, endangered by pricks, and often deflated.

Besides, we’re on the move. Nan now lives in a war-service unit, so we’re buying her neat brick home.

In the First Settlement City! Reddy Reddy Redcliffe! Across the bumpity bridge!

When it was built, the Hornibrook was the longest bridge in the southern hemisphere; when we relocate, the bridge is so buckled it’s like driving over corrugated iron.

This is a metaphor for the road ahead.

Chapter 2

Nowadays, Redcliffe is a gentrified village, with sea-changers escaping the bustle of Brisbane. But in 1977 it’s dubbed Deadcliffe, because of the high crime rate and proportion of pensioners.

Deceptively, it looks lovely: a shimmering sea stretching to the sand dunes of Moreton Island. But dangers lie beneath the surface. Oysters cut your feet to ribbons; stingrays skitter in the shallows. Not surprisingly, the Indigenous name is Kau-in-Kau-in, which means Blood-Blood. You’re caught betwixt the devil and the deep sea.

The boys from the Bee Gees lived here for a billisecond, before realising they prefer ‘Stayin’ Alive’. They were based in Humpybong, which means ‘dead house’. Like the Gibb brothers, actor Mel Gibson and swimmer Geoff Huegill left Redcliffe as soon as possible. So did the first European settlers. The brave men (always men, because women weren’t allowed adventures) of the vessel Investigator stumbled upon the peninsula in the early 1800s. Explorer John Oxley recommended Red Cliff Point to Governor Thomas Brisbane for the new colony. Barely a year later, they upped sticks and moved south to a site on the Brisbane River, because of a lack of drinking water and too many mosquitoes. The mudflats breed mozzies the size of Iroquois. You can hear the ‘waka, waka, waka’ as the chompers come in to land.

As a young teen – between the mozzie bites and angry zits – I look like an anthropomorphic pizza.

But I love it here for one reason: the rollerskating rink, creatively called Skateland. This is my Xanadu, a place to escape earthly troubles. Instead of swirling in Dante’s circles of hell, I lap the cracked concrete to the sweet sounds of ‘Ballroom Blitz’. Like Olivia Newton-John, I wear knee-high lace-up skates, a gold halter-neck top and hot pants. THIS is bliss. Except for Barbra Streisand (sorry, Mum). As soon as ‘Woman in Love’ starts, I’m ensconced in the corner. This is the song for the Couples’ Skate. And no one ever – EVER – asks me to hold their hand.

Ah, yes, I bathe in your sympathetic tears. But when your hormones are gyrating like Jagger’s pelvis, with little in the way of satisfaction, you actually want to die.

There’s a gaping hole in my life, as I yearn for Prince Charming. That gap is soon filled by Harry. Spiky on top and smooth down below, he’s my stand-by suitor. You guessed it: he’s my hairbrush. First, I flirt with him, teasing hairs from his bristles. Then I hop on top, rhythmically rubbing till we’re wet. But the real object of my affection hangs on the wall: Adam Ant, AKA Stuart Leslie Goddard. This slim-hipped singer – unthreateningly feminine yet sexily masculine – stars in my moist dreams. Really, the entire oeuvre of the New Romantic period, from Duran Duran to Spandau Ballet, is masturbation material. And what a wonderful hobby this is! It takes fewer than five minutes, doesn’t cost a cent and ends in petite mort, a fate infinitely better than death. My advice is to engage in onanism early and often. And, much like electoral fraud – ‘vote early and vote often’ – it’s best performed secretly.

The rest of the family is unaware of my nocturnal frolics. Mum says if I bring home anyone who looks like Leif Garrett, with his Kermit-green pantsuit, she’ll ‘put him in a pot plant’. (As it turns out, he’s already well acquainted with this particular type of plant.) Still I wait, for a young man, perhaps in a puffy shirt, to ask me to mate – I mean, skate. I don’t want to be a wallflower, but it’s not the done thing to ask a boy. As always, I’m the ‘good girl’.

The manager of Skateland, Eric, sees my imitation of a shrinking violet. (This seems to be my role in life, after playing the tree, bush or shrub in school productions.) With long limbs and bug eyes, Eric resembles a praying mantis. ‘Hey, baby, you look lost. Want to do some hours behind the Yummies Bar?’ He winks as light from the mirror ball bounces off his bald pate. As part-time jobs go, I’ve hit the jackpot. I’m too young to work in Coles or ‘go on the game’ – the main means of employment for teenage girls – and too old for a homemade lemonade stand.

I arrive for work on my first day wearing a tight-fitting uniform – think Laverne & Shirley – feeling like a fraud. How does a soda fountain work? What if I hand back the wrong change? Or can’t remember the prices?

The Yummies Bar is a neon dream of Cherry Ripes and Chokitos, Jaffas and Fruit Tingles, Minties and Redskins. At its centre is a soft-serve machine, Mr Whippy style. Gingerly, I squeeze one into a cone. It looks like a cartoon turd, only white. My chest swells with pride. But this proves to be a problem. The women in our family – ahem – mature early.