Teeth have been a life-long source of misery, from my childhood onward. It was only recently borne in on me that, unlike my own children, I never got visits from the Tooth Fairy, almost certainly because my parents could not afford her. My mother had her own favourite methods of dealing with these things. She regularly brushed my teeth, and those of my sister Maureen, with soot from the chimney back of our kitchen fire, presumably a folk remedy dating from mediaeval times. When our teeth, unsurprisingly, objected, Mum would clamp a large piece of brown paper suffused with vinegar over our jaws, meant to reduce any need for further, impossibly expensive treatment.
The threatening financial burden of healthcare was, of course, lifted from the shoulders of poor working class families like mine by the post-war health reforms of the new Labour Government. This turned out to be a mixed blessing for me, for it meant that a dentist could now be let loose on me and my ever recalcitrant teeth. There was only one dentist in the nearby small town of Boroughbridge, and he appeared to have inherited the agricultural practices predominant in the locality. I bled for days after this first appalling intervention and didn’t even have anything to offer the tooth fairy by way of appeasement. Wild horses would not drag me to a dentist thereafter, which naturally ensured that I would always have need of one. So the Tooth Fairy and I have kept a love-hate relationship going for most of my life. Good NHS dentists have got fewer, but so have my teeth. Clearly, the chimney soot treatment hasn’t worked.
The past, it is said, is another country; they do things differently there. Well, Sarah tells me that in the 1930s and 40s it was thought that the best present a would-be bridegroom could give to his bride, was the present of a completely new set of teeth to show off at the wedding. In the more recent setting of Thatcherite Britain, the novel Shuggie Bain (by Douglas Stuart) shows us young working class girls with bad teeth, who have them all removed at once and replaced by a set of pearly gnashers with which to outface the world. Perhaps the soot treatment had not worked for them either.
Interesting that wholesale teeth removal still going on re Shuggie Bain! But even expensive treatment doesn’t necessarily get rid of the way teeth trouble our identity – viz Martin Amis.