The Real Me is Thin

A few months after the biscuit-stuffing episode, things had not improved. Although I can’t recall any more stuffing-in-secret sessions, they must have been going on because I was getting plumper and I certainly wasn’t getting away with eating anything ‘fattening’ in front of my parents.

One night, at supper, Dad decided to employ a new tack as part of the effort to wrestle my increasing size into shape. Very unusually, the whole family, Dad included, were gathered for a family meal. I’d have been about nine, just before it become evident that my parents’ marriage had begun to falter beyond repair.

Supper was mince and potatoes accompanied by some overdone cabbage – standard fare at our house in those days. For Mum, who was becoming increasingly depressed, and for whom the importance of dreaming up varied meals with which to delight her family had never been at the forefront of her mind anyway, the fact that there was anything to eat at all was good enough. I can be more generous now than I felt then about Mum’s lack of energy, because now that I’m a mother I’ve become familiar with the tedium of providing an unrelenting supply of meals for small people who invariably take them for granted. I understand now how unhappy and inadequate she felt.

Once the dishes were on the table, my father stood up, cleared his throat, and said, ‘Now, Arabella won’t be having any potatoes because she’s fat.’

What?! I thought, shocked and surprised. They wanted me to be thinner – they’d made that abundantly clear. But this was obviously a new tactic, a new means of ‘encouraging’ me to lose weight: public humiliation. It’d always been a great favourite of Dad’s: we siblings were always set against each other, being told the other was better at whatever it might be you were trying your hand at, and we were always being compared unfavourably to either each other or other people’s much more brilliant children. The idea being, I guess, that we would feel spurred to do better by the idea of being less good than the person we were being contrasted against. My parents were staggeringly competitive – with each other, certainly, but also, bewilderingly, with their children. Dad was always trying to beat us at tennis, bridge, swimming, speaking foreign languages. But then Dad was competitive with the world; it was what made him such a good golfer, tennis player, and skier. It was also the characteristic that ensured he was professionally so successful.

Humiliation had played a big part in Dad’s upbringing or rather, as it would have been referred to then, being ‘taken down a peg or two’. According to Dad’s sister, Lesley, he’d plumped out around adolescence (something he never told us), and this had brought out the worst in their mother, Nancy. Lesley told a story that exemplified this horribly. Dad was 14 when his mother, taking in the sight of his rear, exclaimed, ‘Look at you, with a great, big, fat bottom, just like a woman’s!’ Their mother was a snippy, fierce woman and as such, later, not an ideal grandmother. Nasty teasing from his mother must have contributed to Dad’s adult horror of fatness. I’m told Nancy was the life and soul of the party when she was a young woman but she’d been widowed very young, leaving her with little money and two young children, and life was hard for her thereafter which, perhaps, accounts for her unforgiving nature.

Public humiliation, or rather the fear of it, was also probably what drove Dad through an ordinary Fife high school to become head boy and then on to get a scholarship to Edinburgh University. (The Second World War meant he was delayed going to university and, as a result, he went to Oxford instead – unheard of, then, for a Scottish boy.)

Notwithstanding the evidence of my father’s success, public humiliation usually brings out the worst in people, and in my case that night, specifically, it instantly made me confused, angry, and, above all, defiant. My unvoiced reaction was, and still is when denied something on the grounds of my perceived ineligibility, ‘If you think I’m bad now, just wait: I can be so much more bad than this…’

So, the potatoes, very much thought of as ‘fattening food’ in those days, loomed threateningly on the table and Dad was compelled to stop me having any. My eldest brother, Andrew, who was by that stage carrying the chubbiness of an adolescent boy emerging into puberty, sweetly piped up, ‘Erm, I’m a bit, erm, you know, and I’ve got potatoes.’ I was touched, and I agreed with him. I couldn’t for the life of me see why there should be one rule for him and another for me.

But Dad had that query covered and quickly replied, ‘That’s different: you’re a boy.’

What’s being a boy got to with anything? I raged silently. Dad hadn’t otherwise favoured my brothers over me. He hadn’t spent more time with them than he had with me. He didn’t do ‘boys’ activities’ with them. In fact, we spent hardly any time with him; he was always at work. I couldn’t fathom his ploy; how could being a boy have anything to do with what food you were given? I later understood that it was, in fact, a central part of Dad’s beliefs and, to a great extent, Mum’s, too. Girls need to be thin and pretty, boys need to be bright – it doesn’t matter so much what they look like. Brains for boys do what looks do for women. They both took it as read that an intelligent man has every expectation of being regarded as sexy while the same is rarely true for a woman. However, the unusual element in my particular situation was that both my parents were very intelligent and accomplished – that was one of the few things they had in common. They must have known, deep down, that the message being trotted out at supper was deeply unsound and profoundly flawed; but then again, clever or not, they simply did not want and could not tolerate a fat daughter.

Predictably, Andrew’s brave intervention didn’t help, and I didn’t get any potatoes. I spent the rest of the meal seething at the injustice of it all. I hadn’t even had a moment in which to work out whether or not I wanted the potatoes; being told I couldn’t have them, though, instantly transformed them into forbidden fruit and therefore highly desirable.

Occasions such as this and the many others in which various foods were publicly declared off limits to me meant that I ended up unable to assess whether or not I actively wanted the thing. I couldn’t consider the food items on their own merit and in my own time. I couldn’t think about them neutrally. Eventually and over time I developed a sort of mania: I had to have whatever it was because I wasn’t allowed to.

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.

Too much

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 was a graveyard for food debris: inches of spaghetti, Bolognese sauce, carrots, stewed prunes, portions of old toast, carbonised bits of lost bacon, an old floret of broccoli, and many other less recognisable scraps of stray food that had escaped from the pans. (These delicacies would all, obviously, have been prepared when the boys were home for breaks from school, not for Christina and me.) And grease, layers of ancient grease, covered the debris and the black-and-white lino tiles beneath. Portions of anything that had ever been cooked on that cooker lay festering in the miniature slipway. Thinking about it now, I suppose you might just have been able to get a brush in there, or maybe a vacuum-cleaner nozzle, but you’d have had to go in sideways, jamming your shoulder right up against the boxed-in boiler on one side and the cooker on the other, all the while trying to avoid the grease that also filmed the cooker’s front. It would certainly have been a bit of a struggle and, most of all, you’d have had to care enough to make the effort in the first place.

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.

Daddy’s girl

Following Dad’s departure, and after a few very unhappy months dominated, as I recall, by awful daily rows with Mum, it was decided that I should join Dad in Bahrain. I don’t know who made the decision. I don’t think Mum and Dad talked it through – how could they have done, with no phone contact possible? The story goes that Mum came up with the idea because I missed Dad so much. On paper this made sense: I was still a year away from secondary school and not very settled or happy at my primary school. However, it remains in my mind as an extraordinary decision for a mother to make. The very vivid picture I still have is that it came about following yet another violent yelling match with Mum, which culminated in her shouting, ‘I can’t bear the sight of you any more – you’ll have to go and live with your father!’