Our luck changed, and Frankie’s Favourites was cancelled. Dad’s viewing figures had slumped dramatically; it seemed that no one wanted to make Grand Marnier soufflés any more. His slot was replaced by Lite Bites, a breezy show filmed on location with the emphasis on low-fat cooking. Yoghurt replaced cream. Artificial sweeteners took the place of sugar in pastries and cakes. It was, Dad asserted, ‘just a fad. It’ll flop, wait and see.’ Lite Bites spawned its own spin-off magazine and range of low-calorie desserts (‘Not naughty… just nice’).
‘What will happen to us?’ I asked Mum.
‘What do you mean, darling?’
‘Now we’ve got no money.’
‘We’ll be fine,’ she said, mustering a wide smile which didn’t quite reach her eyes.
My brother Charlie and I had to make do with our old uniforms until the end of the school year, despite the fact that his sweaters were unraveling and my pinafore had an immovable inkblot on the front. I noticed that, if we didn’t finish our orange squash, Mum would pour it back into a jug which she’d place in the fridge. One newspaper nicknamed Dad ‘Frankie Coronary’ and ran a cartoon depicting two ambulance men carrying a stretcher. One speech bubble read, 'Did you hear Frankie Moon’s been sacked?' The other man said, 'Damn, that'll put us out of a job.'
My move to secondary school coincided with Lynette terminating our friendship abruptly. I’d hear her in the playground, singing, 'What's the recipe, Frankie?' Although I’d try not to look, I knew she was honking away with her new best friend Victoria Nixon and the boys with whom they sneaked to the bottom of the hockey field. I had no desire to be taken to the bottom of anywhere by a boy. I certainly didn’t want to return to class with bits of dandelion leaf stuck in my hair. ‘Hey, swot!’ Lynette yelled across the playground. ‘Been to orchestra practise lately?’ At the word ‘orchestra’ her new cronies yowled with laughter. She might as well have said, ‘Had the inside of your bottom inspected lately?’
‘You’re worth fifty Lynettes,’ Mum said later. ‘She’s just jealous.’
‘Jealous? Of what?’
‘Your playing, of course. Your talent. And was that a lovebite I saw on her neck the other day?’
‘I want to stop playing the flute,’ I said dully.
‘I’m sure it was. A purple mark, right here…’ She indicated the hollow above her collarbone.
‘Mum, I’m sick of being different.’
She folded her thin arms around me and said, ‘Be proud of what you are, Stella. Don’t give up.’ Not after all that money I spent on that flute, she added silently.
‘Okay,’ I managed.
‘You’ll find a new best friend, I promise.’
As usual, Mum was right. I was scooped up by Jen, whose fine-boned beauty allowed her to get away with gaining top marks in spelling tests and owning a viola. I'd assumed she was too blessed with looks and talent to bother with me, until our school trip to London. She was sharing a room with Linda Dewy, a fragile girl who cried for her mum and tried to barricade herself in the hotel lift.
Jen was mesmerised by the sprinkling of stars in the Planetarium. She blurted out, 'We're so lucky, being here, but Linda's up all night crying and spoiling it all.' For the rest of the week we were inseparable. Jen said, 'What I like best about you is that you're so un-homesick.' We wondered what the opposite of homesick might be, and decided there wasn't a word for it.
I took photos of things, not people. A stuffed bat, suspended by a clear plastic thread, and an enormous speckled turtle shell in the Natural History Museum. Swans in St James’ Park. Celestial globes at the Planetarium. The other kids photographed each other in front of landmarks - Big Ben or Tower Bridge - or messing around in bath-towel togas and complimentary shower caps in the hotel. I’d been thinking about Charlie and tried to take the sort of photos he'd like, although I could visualise him already, flipping through my pictures at breakneck speed, pausing only to study the tortoiseshell.
I loved being away from the clouds of tension which hovered between my parents. I felt so free from Dad's ill-humour, and Charlie's sullenness, that I even forgot to miss Mum. Jen didn't care who my dad used to be. She was the only person outside our family who knew how bad things had become. I returned home feeling as light as the air which Mrs Bones urged me to suck into my lungs.
Dad made a new series eventually - Frankie's Feasts - which was described by one newspaper as ‘ludicrously overblown’, and was canned after six episodes. The Mirror had ditched Dad's column, although Woman’s Life limped on for another year or so. No one wrote fan letters any more, not even in green Biro, and no bras were pushed through our letterbox. Dad looked exhausted. His face appeared to have flattened, and turned beige - the colour of envelopes containing final demands. He spent long, tense evenings in his study, shuffling papers around in a Café Crème fog.
Mum confided, 'If Woman’s Life drop him, I'm going to start looking for work.' She’d dropped her ‘It’ll be fine’ act and grown gaunt and pale, which made her startling blue eyes look bigger than ever. I was shocked by the concept of her doing anything other than glide around, looking pretty.
She was offered a job as an orderly at the hospital but gave it up after something bad happened involving one of the doctors and a cupboard. He'd 'tried it on', apparently. She came home with her eyebrows knitted together with tension, and told Dad, ‘I can’t do this any more.’ Instead of buying new clothes, or even the fabric to make them, she wore the burnt orange trouser suit until it went thin and finally transparent at the knees, and had stopped having her hair trimmed in a sharp line. I heard Dad telling her, 'For God’s sake, Eleanor, you're letting yourself go.'
I wanted to help her but didn't know what to do with a worried grown-up. While I waited for her to come from work - she'd taken a waitressing job at the Golden Egg - I'd blast Crispy Pancakes under the grill to be served with thick slabs of beef tomato. Mum didn't seem to enjoy food any more. I raided Dad’s coin jar to buy Lite Bites magazine, but was forced to improvise as we never had the red peppers or mange tout that the recipes required. Mum picked at my offerings, growing even thinner, and would sparkle only when she talked to her friends on the phone.
'What's wrong with Mum?' I asked Charlie, finding him sprawled, belly down, on his musty eiderdown.
'She's just tired,' he said. 'She'll be okay when Dad gets a proper job again.' Both of us knew that Dad had never had a proper job.
'Don't you care?' I snapped at him.
Charlie looked up from the books which were spread all over his bed and said, 'Of course I do. I just don't worry like you do.' He must have felt bad for being so dismissive, because he appeared in my room later that evening with a folder covered with sticky-backed plastic in which I could store my loose pieces of sheet music.
I started to spend as much time as possible at Jen's pebbled-dashed semi which smelt not of cigar smoke and worry, but of her mother's freshly-baked scones. I'd really believed I was lucky when Lynette told everyone at school about our trip to the Bristol studios to watch dad’s show being filmed. Being Frankie Moon's daughter was, I’d reckoned, the best thing that could happen to a person.
And then I grew up.

© Fiona Gibson

Fiona is an author and journalist who has written for many UK publications including The Observer, The Guardian, Marie Claire, Red, New Woman, Top Sante and Elle. For several years she has written a popular weekly column chronicling her family life in The Sunday Herald newspaper (www.sundayherald.com). Fiona lives in Scotland with her husband, their twin sons and daughter. She likes to draw, run 10k races, play her saxophone and lie in the bath with a big glass of wine, although not all at once.

Lucky Girl is Fiona Gibson’s third novel, published by Hodder & Stoughton. It’s a story about Stella Moon, a flute teacher with a demanding and difficult TV chef dad. When Frankie fell from grace, his overblown 1970s cooking style having become outmoded, Stella feared what would become of her family….

You can also read an earlier contribution of Fiona Gibson in our July 2005 Showcase.