Miss Americana and The Hearbreak Princess

Chapter Three - Tim McGraw

At fourteen, they made the move to London, buying a house in Kensington, the Edwardian terraced house hosting five bedrooms, a white facade and a few short steps leading up to the polished wood of the black front door. It had a gold knocker and a black wrought-iron fence, the wide streets lined with Audis and BMWs, and in complete contrast to the farm that Becca had grown up on. 

She was enrolled in a private school for girls in Barbican, in the centre of London, the annual fees an extortionate price, and Becca was thrust into the middle of upper-class girls, most of whom looked down on the daughter of a stockbroker. 

It was a competitive environment, and although Becca was comfortably wealthy, with enough talent to make some of the girls jealous, and pretty enough to be a threat, she found that she wasn't all too popular there. She only made one friend, but that was enough for her.

On her first day, towards the end of the school year, she was sat next to an American girl in English class. Her name was Monique, the daughter of an American politician, and soon enough they became best friends. 

She wanted to be a swimmer, hoping to make it to the Olympics one day, and Becca was likewise just as ambitious with her music, her sights set on making it to the big stage. Monique was to Becca what she imagined a sister would be, and they were inseparable, at school and outside of it. 

It was Monique who first introduced her to country music, the Nashville-born girl a huge fan of the likes of Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks, and Becca found that it held the Same feelings as the traditional Irish music that she loved so much. 

It every quite meant as much to her as the music she'd adored growing up, but there was something reminiscent about the Irish music in it, the high keening of a fiddle used in such different ways, but there nonetheless, and Becca loved the connection it brought her to her friend. After a trip back home to Nashville during the summer holidays, Monique brought her back a pair of cowboy boots.

Looking back on that, so much had changed. 

It was a different life entirely, and not a bad one either, and sometimes Becca would think back on how naive she'd been, and how she'd wished that things had stayed as simple as they had been. 

When she was fifteen, the most pressing concerns in her life were whether she would pass a Math test, if the field hockey team she played on would win their next match, and writing songs about love. 

It seemed silly to her when she was older, that she Ever thought she knew what love was when she was barely a teenager. Most of the songs she wrote back then were largely based on the girls in her class, gossiping about boys they knew, about their heartbreaks and first dates, and Becca found herself completely on the outskirts of those conversations. 

In a school full of girls, she every had much experience with boys, so she made it up, from movies, from wishful thinking, and anything else that struck her as something worth writing about.

It wasn't all about boys either. She wrote songs about her family, about friendship and school, of all the times she was bullied and ridiculed for her music. She wrote every day, about the trivial things that were so important to her at the time, and she played her guitar for hours at a time, until her fingertips bled and blistered. 

Yet, she never gave up. 

She played the songs for her parents, and over the phone when Richard called, and for Monique. The four of them were her biggest supporters, and Becca found herself settling into London nicely. 

School was hard sometimes, but not as bad as it'd been at the boarding school in Ireland, and there was a sense of purpose, with all the record labels and people dabbling in music crowding the city.