And Mum didn’t care. She never cared about cleaning up. That was bourgeois, too. Later in life, I actually grew to admire Mum’s ability not to care about stuff like that. And I only care now because I’d rather have a clean floor than read Proust. If I could choose to care more about reading Important Books than cleanliness, I certainly would. I don’t actively want to be the kind of person who puts time and effort into searching the house for dirty cups to make up a full load for the dishwasher. I’d love to be someone whose mind is so packed with great thoughts that they forget to hang out the washing. But when I was a kid I didn’t admire Mum’s defiant refusal to be house-proud. On the contrary, to an angry, hungry, confused ten-year-old, the filthy cooker ‘corridor’ summed up everything that was wrong with her. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.
Ignoring the greasy, food-strewn runway, which made me feel sick every time I caught sight of it, I approached my mother. I remember feeling slightly scared, but hunger was driving me on, blinding me to any oncoming danger. ‘What’s for supper, Mum?’ I asked cheerily, hoping the question wouldn’t enrage her. After all, we had to have supper, surely?
Mum looked down at me, raised her eyebrows, and drawled theatrically, ‘How the fuck should I know?’
My reaction, surprisingly, wasn’t fury or indignation or even panic. It was more steely. I remember gathering myself, thinking, OK, right, I know where I am now. In that moment, Mum’s response crystallised all the suspicions I’d been harbouring since Dad had gone. I was on my own, and there was no one to help. Specifically, I wasn’t to count on being fed. There were meals, of course, but crucially I couldn’t assume they’d be either regular or edible.
I now know that, however much she’d thought she wanted it, Mum wasn’t coping with her newly single state. She wasn’t coping with the house. She wasn’t coping with the absence of a sparring partner. She wasn’t coping with life. She hadn’t ever really wanted to be married – but then, it turned out, she hadn’t really wanted to be separated. She had wanted babies but she hadn’t really wanted kids. How much worse must her miserable confusion have been made by having small, dependent people making demands for sustenance that she could not meet. Mum simply did not feel she was equipped to cope with it all.
Of course, I must surely have been fed, at least now and again, before and after that episode in front of the cooker. After all, I was alive, wasn’t I? And not just alive but noticeably chunky, if the photos are anything to go by. No, I shouldn’t have said chunky. Chunky implies greedy, fat, unattractive. Shall we settle, then, on a less loaded description – say, ‘not slim’? Unlike my sister, who had those funny little skinny legs kids draw – the ones like two completely unconnected pipe cleaners that stick out of the bottom of a skirt as if they aren’t attached to anything at the top.
Later that year, the physical difference between the two of us was publicly paraded – to my utter humiliation – on our first visit to see Dad. Mum, in what must have been an unconscious act of complete madness, used a pattern by Mary Quant (the designer of the day) to crochet two identical minidresses in glittery gold silk lam$eA for my sister and me. By 1968, girls and women of all ages wore miniskirts anywhere and everywhere. It had become a democratic fashion item crossing chasms of class and age. However, it did not cross the chasm of fat. Girls like me, who had more generously fleshed-out legs, tended not to wear miniskirts. After all, there’s nowhere to hide in a miniskirt.
Despite her total lack of interest in other domestic arts, Mum was an extremely gifted seamstress and the dresses were absolutely beautiful – simple shifts, sleeveless, with a round neck and falling in a narrow A-line down to a scalloped hem. The perfect shape for a girl with no hips, no bottom, and stick legs. Like Twiggy. And my sister. But not me. Christina looked adorable in hers. She had white-blonde hair cut in a gamine style. On her, it was a suitably fashionable dress that wasn’t too grown-up but just grownup enough to look sweet. In the same dress I, on the other hand, looked like a loaf of bread wrapped in gold cellophane. The dress fitted snugly all the way down. From neck to hem every inch of my body came into uncomfortably close contact with the dress. It was designed to hang off the shoulders and swing gently over a sylph-like form beneath. I looked as if I’d been shrink-wrapped into it. I wanted to die.
I remember Mum laughing as she stood back to survey us both in our new dresses. She wasn’t laughing at me, but at the stark contrast between how the two of us looked. All the same, she wasn’t about to let me change. I pleaded with her not to make me wear the dress. She’d ‘sweated blood and tears crocheting that wretched thing’, and I was going to wear it whether I liked it or not. And, of course, I didn’t like it. How could I? I knew I was larger than most other girls, certainly than my sister. She looked exactly like the picture on the dress pattern; I looked – well, the opposite. What could possibly be more humiliating?
But Mum was immovable, and my sister and I set off wearing the identical dresses – perfect outfits, in theory at least, for a hot, balmy Bahrain evening. We were the new family joining the island’s small ex-pat community, and this party was to be our first meeting with the many kids and teenagers from the other families, all of whom had been on the island for a while. And I was making my first entrance dressed as a lump of dough wrapped in gold cheese-wire. Great. My sister was completely, unthinkingly comfortable in hers. Why wouldn’t she be? Meanwhile, knowing what I looked like and how my unprepossessing appearance was thrown into hideous relief by how she looked, I began to panic. I could feel the tops of my thighs sweating and rubbing together as we walked. (I once complained to Dad about the horrid, sore red patches that occurred as a result of this. His response was that I should ‘push myself away from the table more often’. At the time, I took this literally and could not work out how this ‘exercise’ would deal with the fat on my legs.) It couldn’t have been worse, as far as I was concerned. I was going to a party filled with trendy young people, none of whom, I just knew, would be fat, but all of whom would notice how fat I was – especially thanks to That Dress.
Needless to say the party itself is now a blur, since the all-consuming fear of what I looked like blocked out all possible enjoyment and participation. I do remember, though, that I was right about one thing: I was the only fat kid there. By the way, I’m not suggesting that there were no other overweight kids around in the Sixties but it was definitely more unusual than it is now. Kids now, as we’re constantly being told, are bigger than they used to be. (Childhood obesity rates were 5 per cent in the Sixties and Seventies and are now at 17 per cent.) I wasn’t obese – well, not obese in the way we now think of it, i.e. as meaning very fat. (In fact, the World Health Organisation’s definition of obese is ‘abnormal or excessive accumulation that may impair health’.) However, I had more wobbly bits than most of the kids I knew and certainly thought of myself as fat.
It’s not that I think Mum made the dresses with the express intention of humiliating me, but I am inclined to think that putting me in exactly the same style as my much thinner little sister was some sort of subconscious punishment for being larger – larger in every way, noisier, angrier, hungrier. I certainly felt as though my outward appearance embodied what Mum felt about me – that there was just too much.
Following Dad’s