MY BODY, MY ENEMY: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa

I start my periods at the end of the summer term when I am fourteen; and then, when I am on holiday in Blackpool with Mum, Dad and Lisa, my breasts grow – literally overnight. We are staying in a self-catering apartment and Lisa and I are sharing a bed. My little bumps are agony whichever way I lie, and my arms don’t know where to put themselves. Next morning I take off my nightdress to find that my molehills have turned into mountains. I am astonished – and ashamed.

I hate my boobs because he likes to touch them, and my periods because they excite him. My body feels infected and dirty, and when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, I am disgusted by it. My classmates are right – I am ugly and I probably do smell. I hate my body, hate my life and find myself looking at other boys and girls and wishing I could be them instead of me. God forgive me, I even wish I had cancer like Yvonne.

Yvonne has been off school for ages, and I visit her at home. She is really into the Royal Family, and shows me her scrapbook filled with pictures of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s wedding and baby Prince William. The last time I see Yvonne she has a patch over her eye, and talks a lot about a bone marrow transplant. I don’t really understand what she means, and it is a shock when Mum tells me one dinner-time that Yvonne is in a coma. ‘Will she wake up?’ I ask. ‘Nobody knows, love,’ says Mum, and I cry.

In December, a girl comes flying down the school corridor shouting ‘Yvonne’s dead!’. I want to go home and ask Mrs Patterson to let me off choir practice, but she won’t. I have to stand there and sing, my grief spilling onto the wooden floor. On the day of the funeral, I am in a real state. As Yvonne’s coffin is lowered into the ground, I weep and weep. ‘God’s got to get his angels from somewhere, Claire,’ says Yvonne’s auntie, putting her arms around me. She isn’t to know that part of me is crying because I want to be the one who is dead.

With my best friend gone, I hate school even more, and in June 1985 I am pleased to have three weeks off, doing work experience at British Home Stores. Each day I go into town on the bus, and work from 8.45 a.m. to 5.45 p.m. I love it. I am proud of my uniform – the pale-blue blouse and dark-blue A-line pinafore with its special loop for my locker key. I like the other staff who treat me like one of them, and not like a schoolgirl. Best of all, Mr Warner, the manager, says that if I am any good he’ll consider me for a Saturday job.

I work in all the departments – lighting, children, fashions, menswear, toys, the lot. When deliveries come I collect them from the stock room and sort them out. I tidy, count stock and fill out the DAS – the daily alteration sheet. I am too young to work on the till, but if there is a queue I jump up and wrap for the cashier.

‘You need fattening up,’ says Sheila, who works on one of the tills. She is an older lady and I am gobsmacked by her rings – three or four big gold ones, with diamonds, on each finger! She calls me ‘Little Love’, ‘Skinny Lizzy’ and ‘Rag Doll Annie’ and she’s always saying, ‘Let’s go and have a nice cream cake.’ It becomes a joke between us. She gives me sweets, and at tea break she sits next to me in the canteen and tries to tempt me with her cream cake. I don’t like cream and I won’t eat the cake, but I love Sheila to bits.

The canteen is upstairs and has a pool table and a table-tennis table, comfy seats and the sort of carpet that would hurt your feet if you didn’t have shoes on. I eat well during those three weeks. I feel happy and comfortable and the canteen food is lovely. A book of meal vouchers costs staff £1.50 each week, but because I am on work experience I get mine free: a white main meal ticket and two pink tea-break ones every day. In the morning you can help yourself to tea, coffee, orange or lemon, and there are warm rolls from the bakery across the road. The canteen cook fills them with cheese – the smell drifts down to the shop floor, and I look forward to my morning break. Dinner is home-made lasagne or steak and kidney pie with vegetables, and a hot pudding like jam roly-poly and custard. I tell Mum not to do me tea because I am eating so much at work.

At the end of my work experience Mrs Sansom, the personnel manageress, calls me into her office. ‘We’d like to offer you four hours’ work every Saturday,’ she says; and I am so pleased. My hours are 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. and my wages are £5.53 a day. With my bus fare at 55p each way I am left with a grand total of £4.43 – but I think it’s a fortune. Soon after, the summer holidays begin, and a vacancy comes up for a Saturday job with more hours. I am thrilled when Mrs Sansom gives it to me and increases my money to £10.37.

That summer, when I’m not working at BHS, I spend my days at Alka Patel’s house. I’ve known Alka since infant school, but after Yvonne dies we hang around together. Alka is pretty, and can put on liquid eyeliner perfectly – being Indian she’s worn make-up since she was little. Her family are so different – Alka has to help with the cooking and cleaning before she’s allowed out.

I watch Alka making chapattis. Her little flour-covered fingers coax the doughy mixture into perfect circles: she makes it look easy and I ask if I can have a go. Well I huff and puff over this chapatti, and the more I labour the more leaden and lumpy it becomes. ‘It looks like the map of India!’ I announce when I’ve finished, and Alka and her mother laugh their heads off.

I am the only English girl Alka’s mother likes because she thinks I’m polite – she doesn’t realize what we get up to when she goes out. Once we get into a play fight with a couple of squeezy bottles of tomato ketchup. Up and down the street we dash, squirting each other’s bare legs red, and my sister from head to toe!

Back at school after the summer holidays, despair descends. I am still being bullied at school and abused at home. When I know I have to go to Granddad’s house after a day of bullying, I feel absolutely desperate. The abuse seems to affect me more now that I am 15. It had always felt wrong; but now we are doing reproduction in biology, I know it’s wrong. It isn’t the sort of thing a grandfather is supposed to do to his granddaughter, and I begin to think that if Granddad stops perhaps I’ll feel better. I make up my mind to say something next time I see him.

It is a Sunday afternoon when he comes round. I am sitting at the kitchen table pondering over my essay which is called ‘Why I would make a good head girl’. Whoever writes the best essay becomes the next head girl, and I really want to show my parents that I can do something. Michael and Lisa study hard but I don’t, and Mum and Dad always say that I don’t try. ‘You won’t pass, Claire,’ they said when I asked them to pay for me to do English ‘O’ level. Even my English teacher said, ‘I don’t know why you are bothering. You’re not going to be able to do it.’ Everyone thinks I am incapable; but I’m insisting on doing it, and paying to take the exam with my paper-round money.

Mum and Dad are getting ready to take the dog for a walk when Granddad turns up. My essay has to be in on Monday morning and I really want to do a good job. ‘Oh, no!’ I think to myself. ‘If they go out, he’s going to start on me and I won’t get my essay done.’ I begin to get stroppy, trying to start an argument in the hope that it might stop my parents going out. Dad ends up slapping my face, but they go out anyway.

I begin to write my essay, but can’t concentrate because I can feel Granddad all around me. ‘Give me a hug,’ he says. I put down the pen, stand up and give him as loose a hug as I can. I go to sit down, but he clings on like an old mollusc. ‘I love you, I love you,’ he mutters, rubbing my boobs. ‘Stop; just stop!’ I say, my heart pounding and my voice rising. ‘I don’t like what you’re doing!’ There, I’ve said it. His hands fall away from my breasts and tears fly from his eyes. He stumbles from the kitchen into the front room where he crumples into a pathetic heap. I follow and find him sobbing into his handkerchief, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry darlin’. I just love you.’ I feel really bad about upsetting him and start to cry too. ‘I’m sorry too,’ I weep, ‘but you love me in the wrong way.’ He wipes his eyes and is gone before Mum and Dad get home, but my essay never gets written.

We have some right laughs, Lisa Duxbury and I. She has a Saturday job at British Home Stores too and, being the same age, we’ve become friends. In the early summer of 1986 we are both looking forward to getting our exams out of the way and leaving school for good. She’s at Icknield High, but we meet up in the town centre after school.

One day we are messing about in Boots on one of those electronic machines that print out your weight. We have great fun jumping on and off the scales and ripping off the print-outs. I don’t even bother to look at the slip of paper, just stuff it in my skirt pocket. Later, when I’m polishing my ATC boots on a piece of newspaper by the back door, I remember the print-out. ‘I wonder what my weight is,’ I think, pulling it out of my pocket. 8 stone 2. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it said 8 stone?’ says a little voice in my head, and I agree.

‘I know,’ I think to myself, ‘I’ll have an apple for breakfast, an orange for lunch and a banana for tea.’ I tell Mum what I’m going to do and she just gives me a look as if to say, ‘Faddy!’

Three days later the print-out says 7 stone 13. ‘It works!’ I say to myself. Up pipes the little voice, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it said 7 stone 10?’ ‘Mmm, that sounds good,’ I think.

‘You’ve got to eat more than an apple, an orange and a banana,’ Mum says, having no nonsense. ‘I dunno,’ I think, inspecting myself in the mirror, ‘the scales say I’m losing weight but I think I’m getting bigger.’ Down at Boots again the slip says 7 stone 10, but the number isn’t magic any more and the voice insists, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it said 7 stone 7?’

‘You don’t need to lose any more weight,’ says Mum, putting her foot down. ‘You’ve got to eat.’ ‘Okay,’ I say – anything for a quiet life. It’s June and I’ve left school early to start working full-time at British Home Stores, so it’s easy to tell Mum that I’m eating my main meal in the canteen.

When Lisa Duxbury comes to work on a Saturday, she says, ‘Claire, you’re only eating an apple, an orange and a banana and you’re looking really thin.’ ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I say. ‘I’m fat.’

‘Everyone’s stopping for a break, Claire. I think you should too,’ says Mrs Sansom. We are doing a Sunday stock-take and I’ve been asked to dress a set of mannequins – everyone says I’ve a flair for it. I’ve chosen emerald green and royal blue clothes, and am fiddling about with beads and bangles and having a great time. ‘Okay, Mrs Sansom, let me just finish this.’ ‘You can finish it in a minute, Claire.’ ‘Yeah, but I just want…’ ‘You can do that in a minute. Please go up to the canteen and have something to eat.’ The rest of the staff are tucking in to their roast dinners but I just have a glass of lemon. My stomach is grinding round and round like a washing machine. I am running on empty, but I’m high on an overwhelming feeling of control. I take agitated little sips with one eye on my watch: I want the lunch-break to end so that I can get back to being creative.

‘What did you eat at work today, Claire?’ asks Mum when she picks me up in the car. ‘Chicken, roast potatoes, vegetables,’ I say, automatically. ‘Liar!’ she spits. ‘Mrs Sansom rang to tell me you haven’t eaten a thing all day. All you’ve had are a couple of drinks, and she said other staff have been going up to her and saying that you haven’t been eating.’ ‘I have, Mum, they just haven’t seen me,’ I protest weakly. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she screams. ‘What are you trying to do; kill yourself? When you get home you’re not doing anything until you’ve had something to eat.’ ‘Oh my God, I can’t!’ I think, shaky with panic and anger. ‘How dare Mrs Sansom ring Mum up! How dare she!’

‘Go and sit in the garden and I’ll bring you out something,’ says Mum. I sink into a deckchair at the far end of the garden and watch Mum walk towards me with a tray and a determined look on her face. ‘They’re trying to make you fat,’ whispers the voice in my head as I gaze in horror at the two thick slices of freshly cut bread, the slab of butter and tub of cream cheese. To me they are huge doorsteps, if not whole loaves, and the sight of the cream cheese makes me want to retch. I can’t eat it. It’ll fill my emptiness and I won’t feel light any more. I’ll never reach 7 stone 4. Tears pour from my eyes as I beg my mother not to make me eat. Fear flickers across her face, and it makes her angry. ‘You’re not bloody moving until you’ve eaten that!’ she yells, adding, ‘I rang your granddad up this afternoon and told him about you and you broke his heart.’ Then I howl.

A few days later I nip into Boots and weigh myself again – 7 stone 4. ‘Wow!’ I think to myself. ‘I can’t stop this now; I want to get to 7. I want to be 7 stone.’ I have something that is mine, but it’s a game that people keep trying to take away from me and I’m not going to let them. Manipulation becomes my middle name. ‘I am eating,’ I lie to Mrs Sansom. ‘I’m just going to lose a few pounds and then I’ll stop,’ I convince my friend Lisa, adding ‘but don’t tell Mum; she doesn’t understand.’ I start taking a sandwich with me to work. I make sure people see me put it in the fridge at work and take it out again at dinner-time. Then I go out for my dinner hour, and bin the sandwich in the town centre.

I buy a calorie-counting book which gives the calories in every sort of food you can think of, and a set of bathroom scales. Stupid with worry, my parents think I’m going to work out a sensible diet with the book and use the scales to maintain my weight. And I let them believe it.

‘Nimble bread – 55 calories a slice.’ I read the calorie book like a bible every night. ‘Weight Watchers soup, minestrone – 53 calories per can; apple – 50 calories; banana – a whopping 95 calories!’ The banana will have to go! By the time I get down to 7 stone, my periods have stopped and Mum is at the end of her tether. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘If you’re eating at work, that’s fine; but you’re going to have something in front of me each night.’ There are tears, rows and screaming matches. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, Claire. Are you trying to kill yourself? Think of all the starving children in Africa!’ Mum and Dad rant and rave. On and on at me they go until things get so bad, I give in.

Because I am so thin, I gain weight on just one meal a day. The game appears to be over, but inside I am still trying to outwit the enemy. Destructive thoughts race about my head. ‘Look at that disgusting fat body. I’m too big. I take up too much space. I shouldn’t have had that. I’ve got to be small.’

Chapter five (#ulink_8fc2707b-39cf-5643-86ea-83231c82c4c4)

I am working in the children’s department when Kim Speight comes in for her interview. She’s wearing an electric-blue skirt, a leather jacket and carrying a fold-up umbrella under her arm. Her long brown hair has been tonged at the back into two fat sausages which bounce up and down as she walks upstairs to the office. ‘Snooty cow,’ I say to myself, peering at her from behind a rack.

‘I dunno,’ I think when Kim starts a week later. ‘Maybe she isn’t so snooty, and at least she’s someone my own age.’ So when I bump into her in the stock room, I say hello and we get chatting. The following week, BHS holds a shopping evening for staff and their families. Mum can’t make it, so Kim asks me to go with her and her mum. I go back to Kim’s house after work and her mum is really nice: she cooks sausages and jacket potatoes for tea, which are lovely. We have a real giggle at the shopping evening and go on to become inseparable: Sheila calls us the terrible twins.

I still see Lisa Duxbury, but not as often because she’s given up her Saturday job and is studying at college to be a hotel receptionist. Kim and I start going clubbing together and spend hours in her bedroom trying on clothes. Her parents live apart, and sometimes we go round to her dad’s for tea. Often he gets us a Chinese takeaway and he always has bowls of sweets and fun-size chocolate bars dotted around the house. Kim stuffs herself – Kim is skinny; and somehow it seems okay if I do the same. I rush at the sweets, excited by the forbidden. ‘This is bad; you’re bad,’ says the little voice as I chew and swallow and, afterwards, I hate myself.

‘What does your waist measure, Kim?’ I ask, eyeing her with envy. She’s bought the most beautiful royal-blue pleated skirt from Dorothy Perkins and her waist looks tiny. I’ve got the same skirt, but it isn’t as nice on me because my waist is bigger than Kim’s. ‘Twenty-two inches,’ she says. And with those three little words, the game cranks back to life. ‘Right,’ I say to myself, ‘I’m going on a diet.’ The delicate balance that has kept me at a steady 7½ stone tips, and sends me helter-skelter into the land of fun-house mirrors where thin is fat and food is greed, and the calorie book rules okay.

‘Do you girls want a Chinese?’ asks Kim’s dad, one night after work. ‘Yes please,’ says Kim. ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’ Kim asks. ‘You haven’t eaten much today.’ ‘I’m alright, I’m just not hungry,’ I lie. Kim chooses what I usually have – chicken fried rice, curry sauce and chips – and I want it so much. I watch her eat and, smelling it, I can almost taste it. I am hungry and cold and my body is growling in protest. I touch my tummy, but it isn’t there and I am temporarily sated by a sense of superiority. Later Kim and I go upstairs to change to go out. ‘Bloody hell,’ says Kim as I undress. ‘Look at your stomach – it’s gone right in!’

At work my uniform flops off me. ‘Wow! My legs have got longer and my bum’s disappeared!’ I think to myself as I run my hand down my skirt. ‘What an achievement!’ If someone offers me a sweet I say, ‘No thank you.’

There are rows at home and people notice at work. I am summoned to Mrs Sansom’s office where she and Mr Warner tell me that if I don’t eat properly, my parents will be informed and I’ll be suspended. My job entails running up and down ladders and lifting things, and it seems I am a danger in the workplace. I run crying to Kim. ‘But Claire,’ she says, ‘you know you’re not eating.’ The voice in my head is insistent: ‘They’re trying to make you fa-at!’

With all eyes upon me I have to go to the canteen every day and struggle with a salad. With Mum and Dad bullying me at home it is impossible not to eat, so once again the merry-go-round slows and I stop starving myself and put on a little weight.

A few months later Mum and I are watching telly together. A programme about a girl called Catherine Dunbar starts. I am riveted because the actress playing Catherine has the most beautiful long hair, and I want to grow my hair as long as that. It’s a true story about a stupid girl who worries about her weight one minute and stuffs her face the next. ‘What’s she doing, Mum?’ I ask when Catherine starts shovelling handfuls of pills into her mouth. ‘She’s taking laxatives,’ says Mum, and I can tell from her voice that it’s an awful thing to do.

‘You’re not going out of this house looking like a tart!’ yells Dad. ‘I don’t look like a tart,’ I protest. ‘Tell him, Mum.’ ‘Your Dad’s right, Claire,’ she says. I am into Madonna, big-time, and even dress like her. I wear big crosses and chains, gloves and masses of blue eyeliner. My hair is dyed blonde and permed, and I dry it upside down for maximum effect. My cropped top shows my black bra underneath, and a tiny black skirt falls around my hip bones. ‘It’s barely a belt!’ splutters my outraged father.

‘You can’t stop me,’ I say, stomping back upstairs to my room where Kim and my brother’s friend Kevin are waiting for me to finish getting ready. Seconds later Dad is at my bedroom door, ‘Out!’ he says to Kim and Kevin – you’ve never seen two people scarper so fast. ‘If you don’t take those clothes off, I’m going to rip them off you, throw petrol over them and burn them,’ he says, and leaves the room. I know he means business. Crying with frustration I take off the skirt and stick on some trousers. Then I go to The Saracen’s Head in Dunstable and get drunk.

Kim and I virtually live at The Saracen’s Head – we’re there Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I am going through a ‘what the hell’ stage and get drunk on cider and snog anybody. I am still paranoid about my weight and food is a problem, but not as big a problem as getting out of the house with my Madonna outfit intact! I am having one almighty crack, and later I will look back on the year that I was 17 as being one of the happiest of my life.

I love my job. I am made a senior sales assistant and, soon after, supervisor of menswear – it has been my dream to be a supervisor and I love it. My sales team consists of Claire McCann, a full-time assistant, and a college student called Veronica who comes in on Saturdays and in the holidays. Veronica is a big girl with albino colouring and a nervous tic. She is sweet but painfully shy, and whenever anybody speaks to her she goes bright red. Claire is the complete opposite. A chatty, laughing Irish girl, she is a year older than me and has worked as a butcher in her dad’s shop. She is stocky with short hair and huge owly glasses, and we get on like a house on fire.

‘Once, for a laugh, my friend and I stuck our fingers down our throat to see if it worked,’ says Claire one night when we are out drinking. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘You know,’ she says. ‘You stick your fingers down your throat to make yourself sick.’ ‘Oh,’ I say.

I get home, eat two Jaffa cakes, go into the bathroom, put my hair in a ponytail, turn on the cold tap, lift the loo seat and stick my index finger down my throat. Nothing happens. I try again, and graze the inside of my throat with my nail by mistake. I cough. Another jab with the finger and I cough again. My eyes start watering and the glands in my neck begin to swell. Poke, poke; cough, cough. My stomach jumps upwards towards my throat and bleaugh the contents hurtle through my fingers into the toilet bowl. The smell is awful, but I have to stay bent over the bowl spitting out great gobs of saliva and fumbling for the toilet paper to wipe my slippery fingers. It works alright.

Afterwards, I put down the lid of the toilet and flush. I lay my head on the grey furry loo-seat cover and listen to the deadly thoughts trickling back into my brain: ‘I’ve got to lose some weight, I’m so fat.’

‘I’ve always been a bit paranoid about my weight,’ I say, joining in on a conversation that Claire is having about dieting with Janet Chin, who works in the shoe department. Claire and Janet look at me in astonishment. ‘How can you be?’ exclaims Claire. ‘But you’re so thin!’ echoes Janet. ‘I think I’m fat,’ I say quietly, ‘and I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.’ In fact I am dieting like crazy and things are getting out of hand.

Other people’s lives revolve around going to work, getting home from work, feeding the kids, having dinner, going out, having a crack. My world revolves around how much I weigh, how big I look, what I can eat, what I can’t eat; and how much I have to eat to satisfy my parents, so they don’t nag, and Mrs Sansom, so she doesn’t suspend me. Food is my specialist subject and, most of all, I want rid of it.

I don’t like making myself sick – I’m not very good at it, but I’m brilliant at taking laxatives. I got the idea from the ‘Catherine’ documentary I saw on TV last summer. Taking laxatives helped Catherine lose a lot of weight. Sure, they also helped kill her; but she was anorexic, wasn’t she? I just want to lose a few pounds.