This wasn’t the first or the last time my parents brought my size and, as they saw it, my need to lose weight to the family’s attention; but it sticks in my mind as emblematic of all that was wrong with me. I was wrong for being fatter than anyone else in the family. My parents believed they were helping me by pointing out to me that I ought not to waltz through life thinking it was OK to be me. They thought they were warning me of the pitfalls. As I was, I wasn’t good enough. I must learn denial in order to reach a better me and one more pleasing to my parents. The only trouble was that that’s quite a tall, if not unreachable, order for a child.
It’s hard enough trying to diet as an adult, so tenuous is one’s grip in any given moment on how badly one wants to be thin over how badly one wants to eat. And, at the tender age of nine, I wasn’t yet up to the levels of self-loathing I’d go on to achieve later in life – the requisite, self-perpetuating levels of self-hatred required to not eat all the time.
This supper was also the first time I remember thinking that life overall wasn’t fair. How could it be that I got fatter and my siblings didn’t? How was it that they had got automatic membership to the Thin Person’s Club, the club that was evidently going to exclude me for life, while I’d got automatic membership to the Whatever You Eat Will Make You Fat Club?
But I learnt to crave food in unnecessary amounts after I’d been stopped from having ordinary amounts when eating with the family – not before. I was just destined to be plumper than my siblings. I wasn’t doing it on purpose to annoy them. There are scientific experiments where large groups of rats and mice are given exactly the same amounts of food and identical exercise regimes. It turns out that some lose weight, some stay the same, and some gain weight. Well, I’m the fat rat. I’m the rat who eats a Ryvita and puts on a pound. My brothers and sister were the rats who could eat apple pie until the cows came home and never gain an ounce. There’s got to be room for all the rats in a family, though, however fat they may be.
I do know Mum and Dad loved me, very much – but not enough to impart the most important message: We’ll love you whatever, unconditionally. Their love was more from the ‘We love you, but don’t be fat, OK?’ school of thought.
I can see how they must have felt. I can imagine the difficulty of watching your child increase in size and feeling that something must be done. By monitoring me as they did, they made it clear that it was their pain they didn’t want to deal with, the pain of having a daughter who didn’t conform, who wasn’t gorgeous, who wasn’t a winner. But they were not experiencing the very real pain, as it must be, for parents of a genuinely obese child locked into an overeating downward spiral.
The irony of my parents’ apparent willingness to take the bull of my increasing size by the horns was that they weren’t dealing with the thing that really needed tackling: their rapidly deteriorating relationship. It was the elephant in the room by comparison with the ‘problem’ of my weight. But perhaps their marriage – the thing they should have been wrestling into shape instead of me – was too difficult, too terrifying, too impossible, too terminal. Meanwhile, they did have this one issue bringing them together, something providing unity between them: the pressing and, for them, much simpler need to prevent their first-born daughter from getting any fatter.
Everything changed when I was about ten years old. I can’t remember my exact age but I do recall vividly the period, because it was around then that Dad didn’t seem to live with us any more. I say ‘seem’ because, although he’d left London, having gone off to his latest posting as the flamboyantly entitled Deputy Political Resident in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, no announcement had been made that my parents had actually split up. You’d think you’d remember the day your father moved out – but so much had changed in such a very short space of time. My brothers had gone off to boarding school (and, as it turned out, we never really lived together again); we’d moved to a new house in a completely new area; and I’d changed schools, again. So Dad going to work 3,000 miles away became part of the whole upheaval. And anyway, officially, they hadn’t split up: the only reason Mum wasn’t going out to Bahrain with him as expected, or so we were told, was that she now had a job teaching. Instead, it was presented to us that we would all go out there at holiday times as a family. (This was the late Sixties, when it was still fairly unusual for married women with children, even highly educated ones, to work, so although I appreciate now, from a distance, that Mum was doing something brave and important in terms of realising her own potential for fulfilment, at the time it came across not as a feminist rite of passage but more as an exit from the unsatisfying half-life of being a diplomat’s appendage.)
So Mum, my little sister Christina, and I were now at home, in the long-sought-after recently purchased house to which they were both very attached, alone. It soon became obvious that Mum was quite depressed – although the reasons why were much more obscure. (Mum later said she had loved teaching and she was a very popular teacher of English to A level students. However, I don’t think she ever felt it was enough of an achievement. Being a teacher wasn’t ‘good enough’.) I couldn’t or didn’t ask her what was wrong at the time, as I’d become increasingly frightened of her – not physically, but I could sense her rage all the time. She started shouting a lot, and flying off the handle at the slightest thing. It was around this time that I also began to notice a paucity of food, and correspondingly developed a growing anxiety about how and if I’d get fed. There had been plentiful supplies in the cupboards and fridge when we all lived together, albeit generally off limits to me, but now that the family had fractured, often there just wasn’t any food in the house. That can’t be an entirely accurate recollection, or else we’d have starved to death, but that’s what it felt like. So the association between boys and their entitlement to food was reinforced. No men around seemed to mean that no food was needed.
To make matters worse, my little sister was a waif, a flaxen-haired slip of a five-year-old who clearly wouldn’t require as much daily sustenance as the chunky ten-year-old I now was. My very physique – in all its solid difference from that of my little (in every sense) sister – must have felt to my mother like a rebuke, a constant demand to be fed. It is also true that I soon started asking why we hadn’t moved to Bahrain with Dad. The constant questioning made Mum furious, but her evasive answers just didn’t add up, so I kept on asking.
I have a vivid memory of what little food there was being either covered in mould or festering with maggots. Once I opened the fridge to discover that it was completely empty apart from a lone packet of bacon that was quietly throbbing, so heaving with maggots that it moved as if to an unheard beat. I screamed and Mum appeared and took one look at the offending item before telling me crossly not to be so ‘bloody bourgeois’. I had no idea, at that young age, what ‘bourgeois’ meant, but later realised it was Mum’s catch-all way of dismissing anything that was regular, tidy, or conventional. I soon discovered that the whole project of feeding children regularly was also ‘bourgeois’. The consistent provision of planned meals was the preoccupation of those too dreary and mundane to do anything more interesting, the kind of people ‘who buy fish fingers’, my sister and I were told.
That whole unhappy time is encapsulated for me in a scene that took place in the kitchen. Mum was there, in front of an electric, freestanding cooker that, entirely typically of our house, never fitted properly into its designated hole. A gap had been created out of an old fireplace from which the mantelpiece and grate had been removed. The central-heating boiler lived on the left-hand side of the space. In an effort to hide the boiler it had been boxed in, but not very well (again typically and as a result of an attempt to economise), leaving a narrow slot into which the cooker slid. A small, dark, redundant sliver of space remained between the boxed-in boiler and the cooker. It was too small to be useful and just lurked there as a perfect receptacle for all the bits of old food that fell off the cooker during cooking and never got cleaned up.
It