Mum was a good cook but lazy or rather unconventional about how and when to cook. Added to that she was breezily capricious about meting out food, constantly, and always on a whim, changing her mind about who deserved what. It was like being fed by King Lear. She cared greatly about good-quality food; just not if she was the one who had to provide it. But I can still remember some fantastic things she cooked: chocolate souffl$eAs she’d unintentionally leave in the oven too long, so that the top skin crustified a bit and became chewy and nutty, like a brownie; leeks slow-cooked in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and brown sugar (again); mushroom risottos; apple crumbles with raisins and cloves, the crumble buttery and crunchy with sugar. And bread. Mum used to make batches of delicious wholemeal bread long before wholemeal was trendy and everything was suddenly supposed to be home-made and not-white.
But all this stopped when she and Dad started breaking up. I say ‘started’ because, like some unloved old clapped-out car, they let the marriage limp along for years, giving it an occasional kick to see if it could be made to work properly, but then letting it conk out again, not really knowing if either of them cared enough to put the effort into getting the engine restarted. It’s hard to make something work if you don’t know whether or not you really want it to. The first time I think I realised my parents were in real trouble was when I bit into a slice of Mum’s bread and got a mouthful of rock salt. There was so much of it that the skin on my lips puckered up instantly, as if I’d dived into the Dead Sea with my mouth open. Mum hadn’t crushed up the salt properly before mixing it in. That’s when I knew things were really beginning to fall apart.
I started changing shape and gaining weight as they started breaking up. Actually, I’d say, using as evidence the few photographs there are of me from around that time, 1965–6, my body was simply plumping out, maybe in readiness for puberty, or maybe I was just putting on weight. I don’t look as though I’d have needed two seats on the bus, but neither could I be described as svelte. As if to accentuate my non-sylph-like self, I’d been given an all-the-rage-at-the-time Beatles-style pudding-bowl haircut. I don’t know whose idea that was. I knew who the Beatles were and I liked them well enough, but I was more of a Monkeys’ fan. I don’t remember yearning for a Beatles’ haircut; quite apart from anything else, they were boys. It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate choice for a not terribly pretty, not very confident, chunky nine-year-old girl. Like some awful judgement barometer, as they started arguing more and more, I started getting rounder and rounder. At the same time Mum became more openly and vocally angry about and resentful of her ‘wifely’ duties, chief amongst which seemed to be cooking.
After we’d returned to Britain in 1963, with my little sister, Christina, born the year before, we set up home in a large flat in central London while Dad looked for a suitable house to buy. Dad was back in the Foreign Office and I can barely remember him being around at all, and Mum clearly wasn’t happy. One day, outside ‘eating hours’, I complained to Mum, ‘I’m hungry.’ She replied brusquely, ‘Fine. It’s good for you.’ I didn’t know what she meant. I had no idea what she was talking about. At that young age I knew nothing about dieting and the process of denying yourself food in order to lose weight. Mum didn’t go on to explain the procedure or my apparent need to know about such things. However, I did immediately realise that my telling her I was hungry had made her cross. And I remember quickly thinking I’d have to get something to eat without her finding out.
There must have been other ’ticking off incidents related to my hunger and or food before this, but it’s the one that sticks in my mind as the moment when the dreaded box was first opened: the box marked ‘how to have a neurotic relationship with food’ or, depending on who’s responsible for producing the box in the first place, you might call it the ‘how to give your child an unhealthy attitude to food’ box. Or put simply, and without apportioning any blame, it was a key lesson in ‘how to get fat’.
Thwarted and confused, I was – naturally – still hungry, and could not begin to work out how the gnawing in my stomach was in any way ‘good for me’. Satisfied that I was going to accept her reaction to my announcement, Mum went off while I hung around in the hall. I allowed a few minutes to pass and then strolled casually, with as best a nothing-to-see-here-rm-not-thinking-about-food-anymore-at-all air as I could fashion, past the open door to the living room, where my mother was now immersed in a book, and snuck into the kitchen.
Once there, I did something I’d never done before and it surprised me. After a last-minute perimeter check I went over to the cupboard, sneaked out a packet of biscuits, and wolfed down the entire thing. As each successive one made its dry, crumbly way down my throat I quickly realised that I didn’t actually want the whole packet at all. I knew I only really wanted one or two, but I was panicking by now. It had been made clear that I wasn’t going to get any through the approved channels, so I thought I’d better secure as many as I could covertly, and by any means necessary. I was anxious that, when official ‘biscuit time’ came round, my hunger, left unsated, would be so massive that there simply wouldn’t be enough biscuits in the world, never mind in our flat, to hold it at bay. In any case, the prevailing ‘biscuit law’ in our house meant that no one was ever really allowed more than two for fear of unleashing an avalanche of eyebrow raising and sharp inhalation of breath, accompanied by a tirade of unfavourable comments about what wanting more than two said about your entire personality, and that’s leaving aside the very real possibility of being called a ‘greedy pig’ in front of everyone else.
But to me this hunger wasn’t my friend, it wasn’t being nice to me, so how could it possibly be ‘good for me’? When has hunger ever helped anyone do anything? I was completely bemused. It wasn’t like brushing my teeth, which I was always being nagged to do. It was tedious but did at least feel good after I’d done it and I believed it stopped my teeth from falling out. An unfed hunger is a monster on your back. And when you’re a hungry child, unable to cater for yourself and someone, apparently deliberately, won’t feed you, you just feel upset, enraged, and powerless. From then on the whole ‘hunger is good for you, eating is bad for you’ became established as a recurring theme in my life and I very quickly lost all sense of proportion regarding food. I lost the ability to distinguish between nice food and food I didn’t fancy. I lost the ability to eat moderately. I lost the capacity to know what ‘full’ meant. I just had to eat what I could when I could. I began to crave food, in any form, all the time.
On that particular biscuit day something had to be done to kill my hunger, and if Mum thought it was so ‘good for me’ to be hungry, then obviously she wasn’t about to help me tackle it to the ground. I couldn’t waste time thinking about how many biscuits I actually wanted. Now that I had in my grasp the means of reducing my hunger I just had to stuff in as many as possible before I was discovered. Only that way would I get rid of the hunger, ensure it didn’t return soon, and, most importantly, avoid being at the mercy of Mum’s erratic feeding regime again that day.
In adult life I’ve learnt that this kind of bingeing is known as ‘ensuring your supply’, where you (or more specifically me) do something irrational like, say, cramming down a whole loaf of bread in one go because you fear you won’t be allowed any, even a perfectly reasonable slice or two, when the time for eating bread comes along. I’m told that, when a social event is looming, alcoholics who are acknowledged as such by family and friends drink in advance and in secret, downing much more than they need to reach the inebriated state they crave, because they know they can’t have one or two drinks in public like everyone else, since that will inevitably lead to questions about their drinking.
My mum and dad, by this time at loggerheads