Right from the beginning – well, my beginning anyway, when I was little – the real me wasn’t supposed to be fat. My parents made it clear they did not want a Fat Arabella. They wanted, expected, demanded, even, eventually, a Thin Arabella. The indisputable fact that Thin Arabella had never made an appearance (my birth weight was close to 11 pounds) didn’t seem to factor into my parents’ expectations. They seemed to think that Thin Arabella must be in there somewhere and that I, Fat Arabella, was deliberately hiding her to annoy them. As I grew up it became clear from their confused, slightly irritated reactions whenever I said I was hungry that they didn’t know who this girl was. My mum and dad couldn’t possibly have been meant to have a Fat Daughter. They’d both got degrees from Oxford, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, played musical instruments – good God, they went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t get fat kids. Other people get fat children, not people who drink real coffee and look down on people who wear driving gloves, go on package tours, and disguise loo rolls under knitted dolls wearing crinolines. My mum and dad were cut out to be winners, and winners’ kids aren’t fat.
The real me must surely be the one my parents were expecting, the one they had in mind when they longed for a daughter to follow their two boys. When a couple long for a girl they do not long for a fat one. They dream of a sweet, adorable, and, above all else, pretty girl. They must have been mystified. ‘Hey, Genepool, we didn’t ask for fat! Who ordered the fat one?! Not us!’ Who actually wants fat? No one. They certainly didn’t dream about having just any kind of daughter – thin or fat, ugly or pretty, three legs, four arms… They wanted what everyone who yearns for a girl wants: pretty, charming, a little bit cheeky maybe, bright would be a bonus, but not if it’s at the cost of being attractive. Winners have gorgeous girls. But what happens when she comes out fat? What then? You still love her, of course you do, you just set about… erm… modifying her. Encouraging her, shall we say, not to eat; and also perhaps to be a little embarrassed about her body and how much she eats – even if, at the start anyway, she eats only what her siblings eat, yet alarmingly it seems to make her fatter than them. That must be her fault.
So, right from the beginning, the scene was set for a lifetime of believing myself to be fat – whether I was or not. Fat in my head, whatever my body shape. I was a chunky wee thing, and although (I’m told) I was much loved, it felt more like much judged, particularly for my appetite and fluctuating size – a deadly combination, and inextricably linked, according to my parents. If I was hungry it must be because I was greedy, because – seeing as I was evidently not thin – I couldn’t ever be genuinely hungry. A message I learnt early on: fat people aren’t allowed to be hungry.
Of course, my parents’ attitude to my size as I was growing up isn’t entirely responsible for my lifelong struggle with food, eating, overeating, and weight. I’ve chosen a number paths that reinforced my deep-seated belief that Thinner Equals Better; but Mum and Dad’s effort to secure themselves a thinner daughter certainly set me off down that road – how could it not?
So here are a few stories from the life of a fat daughter, fat schoolgirl, fat girlfriend, fat actress, fat mum, and fat wife – or, to put it another way, how I got to thinking my bum looked big in everything, whether it did or not.
This book is for any woman or girl trapped in the wrong thinking that there’s another, better, ‘real’ her out there. It’s for any woman who has trouble accepting the size and shape she is. Really, it’s for any woman who’s ever thought twice about anything she’s putting into her mouth.
On 6 December 1957, in an uncharacteristically chilly San Francisco, it snows for the first time in 17 years. A much-longed-for baby girl is born. Encouraged by the forward-thinking obstetrician (and very unusually for the time), the father witnesses the birth. A sister for two boys: Andrew, a few weeks away from turning three, and Matthew, a few weeks past turning two. Now the parents have three under three (as they would often say in future years with an air of both pride and disbelief). A telegram – a wild extravagance in those days – dispatched to the parents’ parents back in Scotland contains only one word.
Arabella.
That’d be me.
They tell me this story many times over the years. My adored Granny Sheila, my mother’s stepmother, also repeats the story many times. It has always made me feel like an important event, like a ship’s maiden voyage or a spacecraft successfully circling the sun. No explanation necessary, no further information required. Everyone reading the telegram will understand: that’s it, mission accomplished – the longed-for girl has been produced. As the years pass, my mother never fails to add the extra, not so welcome, detail: ‘and she weighed nearly 11 pounds!’ So in some ways, given that the average newborn’s weight is 7 pounds, I sort of was a ship, actually more of a tanker, practically an ocean liner compared to the tiny dinghies most babies are.
The family was in San Francisco awaiting removal to Washington, DC, where my father was to start work at the British Embassy a few months after I was born. I have very few, fragmented recollections of the following four years, except of time spent with our wonderful Jamaican cook and nanny, Innes. She was a short, round, squishy woman who showered us with affection all day long. She wasn’t officially our nanny. A fierce Scottish woman had been brought with us to do that job, but she’d soon left, not able to compete with the loving and beloved Innes. Innes used to feed us in front of the television and give us Coca-Cola in glass bottles! A combination of thrilling indulgences tolerated by our parents, thanks to Innes’ irresistible charm and easygoing nature.
My parents’ marriage was probably at its happiest in Washington. And why wouldn’t it have been? Those were the Kennedy years, the Camelot years. Washington was full of exciting, young, politically active people. Professionally, Dad, though still very lowly, was right in the thick of it; Mum got to know other like-minded, bright, capable women and she didn’t have to cook. What could have been better? Although, unusually for the time, Mum had lived independently before getting married (and had therefore, presumably, fed herself), she’d managed to overlook the obligatory grind that was central to a successful married life – the provision of endless, appetising, not to mention nourishing, meals for children and spouse. It’s the iceberg lurking under seemingly calm waters, the unspoken yet taken-for-granted clause of most marriage contracts: there will be cooking, day in, day out, whether you feel like it or not, for year after year after year. In the early Fifties, when my parents married, this chore fell exclusively to women. And there was no discussion about it being a chore. More than 50 years on, little has changed. Sure, there are plenty of flamboyant male cooks around now, taking the sting out of cooking being a ‘girly’ thing to do, but the relentless daily grind of actually feeding a family still falls to the mother in the vast majority of instances.
In my mother’s case, I guess she’d imagined (as she often did about anything that irked her) that if she ignored this inexorable chore, it would somehow go away. Up until that time, though, she hadn’t had to deal too much with that most wearing of responsibilities, since they’d had only a few years of married life in London before being posted abroad – and a foreign posting always included an allowance for ’staff. Obviously, the poorer the country of your posting the more staff you could get, since you were paying wages at the local rate. So, in America in the Fifties as a First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, Dad’s staff allowance meant they could afford Innes, who was doing the job of both cook and nanny. I’m not sure how many of the changes promised by the burgeoning civil rights movement Innes was ever going to see, but she was much loved and greatly treasured by all our family, even Mum and Dad.
If they were having a big dinner or a party Mum and