That very first time I denied myself, it felt good. Like I’d finally achieved something myself. And I liked the feeling so much that I did it again.
The other treats I had loved as a little kid were Kinder Eggs. I’d always been an early riser, which drove my parents mad, so years earlier Mum had made a deal with me that if I stayed in bed until seven o’clock I got a chocolate egg.
For ages it was just brilliant. Early in the morning I’d be wide awake but as soon as seven o’clock came round on my panda bear alarm clock, I’d go rushing into Mum and Dad’s room, climb into bed between them and claim my Kinder Egg.
But when I started wanting to be skinnier I started opening my reward, throwing away the chocolate and just keeping the toy inside.
And if anyone else, like my auntie, offered me a bag of sweets I’d just say I was full up or I didn’t like them. When I deprived myself it felt good. But even then I knew this had to remain a secret – I couldn’t tell anyone.
During that long, miserable summer the rows between Mum and Dad just grew more vicious. Mum was usually teary and weak, Dad raging or sullen. And Grandad was fading away. Everyone was pulling in different directions, caught up in their own personal tragedy.
For me, how to avoid eating became something to think about instead of what was going on at home.
By the end of the summer Grandad was really ill. One evening all four of us went to visit him. After a while Dad, Natalie and I went and sat in the corridor so that Mum and Grandad could have a bit of time alone together. We’d been sitting there about 20 minutes when she came out of his room shaking. She didn’t need to say anything. Grandad had gone. He was 69.
All the way home in the car I wailed until we got back indoors and Dad tipped me into bed exhausted.
Mum was utterly distraught and lost the plot entirely. She was 36 but felt her life was over too. It was like she was drowning but had no idea how to save herself.
‘Pull yourself together,’ Dad would shout at her when he found her crying yet again. It was his idea of tough love but Mum couldn’t pull herself together. Dad couldn’t understand why not, so they drifted even further apart.
Mum went to the doctor and said she was in a mess, she couldn’t cope any more with her grief, Dad’s anger and their fighting. The doctor said she would talk to Dad about things if he’d make an appointment to see her.
‘Please go to the GP, Dave,’ Mum begged one evening as she washed the dishes. ‘You need support for all the stress at work otherwise we’re not going to survive this. I haven’t got any energy left to fight you any more. We need proper help.’
But Dad just refused. ‘I’m not going,’ he said. And I think at that moment, with Mum leaning against the kitchen sink and Dad standing in the conservatory, my parents’ marriage ended.
A couple of days later – about a fortnight after Grandad died – Mum woke up and thought, Right, this is it. Life really is too short for all the rowing and fighting. I want a divorce. Just like that, after 15 years of marriage, she decided she’d had enough. Natalie and I would have had to be blind, deaf and very stupid not to realise that this time things were really bad. But, because divorce is such a big thing for a kid to get their head around, I don’t think either of us had really thought it would happen.
One morning, soon after Natalie had left for her school and I was waiting for Mum to walk me to mine, she came into my room, knelt down in front of me and just hugged me and burst into tears. I said, ‘Mum, why are you crying?’ And she just wouldn’t tell me. I kept asking her why, but she couldn’t say.
It was a Saturday morning a couple of weeks later when Dad and Mum told us what was really happening. They had been rowing for hours, shouting and screaming at each other. Nat and I just wanted them to hurry up because Dad always took us swimming on a Saturday morning.
Then they came out of the kitchen and took us into the living room. ‘Right,’ said Mum, ‘Your dad and I are going to separate.’
I felt numb. Mum was crying, then Dad started sobbing like a baby. Every time she went to speak, he would shout over her. Then Mum was screaming, ‘Let me speak, let me speak,’ but when she began he stormed out of the room. It was like something out of EastEnders – I didn’t think this could happen in real life.
My whole childhood had been blown apart.
Half an hour later, Dad took me and Natalie swimming and we had a really cool competition to see who could stay underwater the longest. Weird, isn’t it?
CHAPTER 3
A BIG, FAT LUMP
I pulled my Benetton stripy top over my head and slid my jeans with the Minnie Mouse patches down over my ankles, then just stood and stared.
I was standing, again, in front of the floor-length mirror inside the door of the wardrobe in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, wearing just my knickers. In reality I was probably a tiny bit chubby at the time, but all I could see was someone mega fat compared with everyone else at gymnastics and everyone else in my class at school, if not the rest of the world.
By now I was spending more and more time analysing my body and staring at the bodies of other girls around me to see how I compared. At that time cycling shorts were really in fashion and everyone was wearing them. I’d look at anyone wearing them and if their thighs touched when their feet were together they were fat. If their thighs didn’t touch they were skinny and I wanted to look like them. Mine touched.
School swimming lessons were a total nightmare – all those girls in their swimming costumes looking slim and gorgeous and athletic, and then there was me. I was just a big lump. I felt fat compared with all my friends and virtually everyone else.
I spent ages working out which girls in my class had bigger thighs than me, which had rounder tummies and which had chubbier arms.
And just when I thought I couldn’t look any worse plodding from the changing rooms to the swimming pool, the unthinkable happened – Nicola Carter got a green swimming costume with ruffles on it. Exactly the same as mine! Now it would be obvious to everyone that my bum was totally massive next to hers. I’d never ever live down the ‘Big Nikki’ label.
I hated the way I looked. Giving up chocolate had made me feel good but it hadn’t really done anything to make me lose weight, so I had to take more drastic action. At eight years old I was too young to understand about calories, but I knew – like all kids do – that some things are ‘bad’ for you. For goodness sake, adults never stop going on about it: ‘Don’t eat all those crisps, they’re bad for you’ or ‘Eat your cabbage, it’s good for you.’
So really it was quite easy to know what to do – just follow the grown-ups’ rules. I started denying myself all the ‘bad’ things that Mum, Dad, my friends’ parents and teachers had ever talked about – chips, pastry, custard, puddings, chocolate and crisps. If Mum was going to cook ‘bad’ foods I’d suggest something else instead, saying I’d gone off chips or wasn’t in the mood for custard. And at first, preoccupied with her own losses and sadness, Mum didn’t have a clue what I was up to.
I took any opportunity I could find to deprive myself of ‘bad foods’. One Saturday afternoon it was Joanna Price’s birthday party. Her parents had arranged for a swimming party but while everyone else was chucking each other in the pool and screaming crazily, I stood quietly at the shallow end, checking out their thighs and tummies. Afterwards, back at Joanna’s house, I carefully picked all the fruit out of a trifle, leaving the jelly and custard at the bottom of my bowl. I was determined I would be the skinniest girl in a swimming costume for the next party.
Then I started giving away my food at lunchtime. Every morning Mum would send me off to school with my yellow teddy-bear lunchbox filled with sandwiches, a bag of Hula Hoops, a Blue Riband chocolate bar and a satsuma. And every night I returned with the box empty except for a few crumbs stuck to the bottom.
What Mum didn’t know was that I’d hardly touched the food she had put inside. It was easy to offload the crisps and chocolate to any of the greedy-guts who sat
near me at dinner break. After a couple of months I started depriving myself of the sandwiches too. They were more difficult to give away, so I’d stick them straight in a bin instead.
With a couple of hundred kids all sitting eating their lunch in the school hall, there was no way a teacher could notice what I was doing. One day my friend Joanna asked why I kept giving my food away but I just laughed and changed the subject. I didn’t really have an answer for that question myself.
As I never, ever felt hungry, I didn’t care about going without lunch. I just felt good inside when I denied myself. I felt kind of victorious, as if I had won a battle that only I was aware was taking place.
By the autumn of 1990 my thinking had moved determinedly into a place where I was going to eat as little as possible and become as skinny as possible. Then I started skipping breakfast. Before, Mum had always made me and Natalie sit down for a bowl of Frosties or Ricicles. But it was so frantic in our house in the morning that it was dead easy to chuck them in the bin or ram them down the plug hole of the sink without Mum or even Natalie noticing.
Mum would be dashing in and out of the shower to get dressed and make her own breakfast and I quickly learned how to get rid of any evidence very fast indeed. Other mornings I’d say to her, ‘Don’t bother sorting any breakfast for me. I’ve already made myself a couple of slices of toast.’ Even then I was like a master criminal – I’d crumble a few crumbs of bread on a plate, then leave it on the draining board to make my story appear believable.
At first Mum bought it, but then she noticed I was losing weight and her suspicions were aroused. One afternoon I walked in from school and instead of her normal cheery smile and ‘Hi, darling,’ she just stared at me. I could see the shock in her eyes. She had noticed for the first time that I had dramatically lost weight. My grey pleated school skirt was swinging around my hips whereas before it had sat comfortably around my tummy. And my red cardigan was baggy and billowing over the sharp angles of my shoulders.
‘Nikki, you’re wasting away,’ she half joked. ‘You’ll have to eat more for your dinner.’ But behind the nervous laugh there was strain in her voice. Maybe in the back of her mind she had noticed I’d been getting skinnier for a while, but now it was blatantly obvious.
It didn’t bother me how worried she was, though. I was losing weight and it was good, good, good.
From then on Mum watched me like a hawk at every meal. The next breakfast time I used my ‘I’ve had toast earlier, Mum’ line she was on to me in a flash.
‘Well, if you have, young lady, how come the burglar alarm didn’t go off when you went into the kitchen, because I set it last night?’ she said.
She angrily tipped a load of Frosties into a bowl, doused them in milk and slapped them down in front of me. I spent the next 20 minutes pushing them around the bowl with my spoon until she nipped into the hall to find Natalie’s school shoes or something and then I leapt out of my chair and shoved them down the sink. Ha, ha, I’d won after all!
Dinner times got a lot harder too. For a long while I had been eating the meals Mum made me at night – I’d allowed myself that much, but no more. But that autumn, as the days grew shorter and the weather colder, I just got stricter and stricter on myself until there were only certain bits of dinner I would allow myself to eat.
Why was I doing it? I had started out just wanting to be thinner and a better gymnast but quite quickly my eight-year-old mind had come to see not eating as something I had to do. It was like a compulsion. I had to eat less and be in total control of what I was eating. And if Mum tried to stop me I had to find a way to get away with it.
By now, depriving myself was just as important as, if not more than, becoming skinny.
Dinner times became a battleground. As soon as the front door slammed shut behind me as I walked in from school there would be the usual yell, ‘What’s for dinner, Mum?’, that is heard in millions of homes across the country every afternoon. But while most mothers’ replies are normally greeted with a ‘Yeah, yummy’ or at worst a ‘Yuk, that’s gross,’ in our house Mum’s evening menu was just the beginning of a negotiating session that could last for hours.
Usually Mum gave in and made me whatever I demanded because she was desperate for me to eat something and she thought that if she gave in to me, at least I would have something. But even that didn’t always work. Often she would slave for ages cooking something that she thought I might find acceptable, chicken or fish, only for me to shove it away the moment she laid it down on the table.
Mum tried everything to make me eat. She tried persuading me: ‘Go on, Nikki, just for me, please eat your dinner up.’ And she tried disciplining me, threatening that I wouldn’t be allowed to go out with my friends or to gymnastics unless I ate.
Sometimes she got so frustrated with me that she totally lost it and started screaming and shouting. But that was fine. I’d just scream and shout back.
Other times she simply sobbed and sobbed, begging me to eat while I looked at her blankly. Getting Mum crying was always a result. It meant she hadn’t the strength to fight that particular mealtime and it was a victory for me. Dad was still living in the house but he was normally at work at mealtimes, which meant Mum was desperately trying to cope with me on her own – as well as watching her marriage collapse and trying to come to terms with having lost Grandad.
Although only eight, I was already an accomplished liar. ‘Did you eat your lunch at school today, Nikki?’ Mum would ask. ‘Yes thanks. The egg sandwiches were great,’ I’d say. I always gave just enough detail that Mum couldn’t be entirely sure whether I was lying, although deep down she must have thought I probably was.
I’d also discovered a brilliant new way of getting thin – exercise. I started with sit-ups every single night in my bedroom. It was great because Natalie now slept in the attic room, which meant I could get up to anything in my room and no one would know.
‘Night, darling,’ Mum would say, tucking me into bed and kissing my forehead. ‘Night, Mum,’ I’d call out to her as she shut the door, already throwing back the duvet, ready for at least 200 sit-ups before allowing myself to sleep.
Soon the bones started to jut out at my elbows and my legs looked like sticks. Mum was becoming more and more worried. She was equally concerned by what she saw in my face – a haunted, troubled look and eyes that had lost every bit of sparkle. My sense of fun had disappeared and I was withdrawn, distracted and sullen.
One Sunday lunchtime all four of us went to the Beefeater for a roast. It was a birthday ‘do’ and so we were all making a show of togetherness.
When we got to the table, Mum, Dad and Nat all sat down while I hovered at the edge. ‘Sit down, Nikki,’ said Mum. But I couldn’t. I had to keep moving, had to keep using up that energy inside me to make me thinner. And I didn’t want to be near all that food – it felt disgusting.
I refused to sit down for the entire meal. Mum and Dad both tried to persuade me and got mad with me, but nothing could make me sit at that table. That was when they really started to worry there was a major problem emerging. And they were scared.
It was about this time that The Karen Carpenter Story was on television. It was on too late at night for me but Mum saw it and immediately spotted the similarities. And it was then that the presence of ‘anorexia’ as an illness first entered our lives.
Anorexia – the name given to a condition where people, usually women, starve themselves to reduce their weight – has probably been around since the end of the 19th century. In Victorian times it was thought to be a form of ‘hysteria’ affecting middle- or upper-class women. It was only in the 1980s in America that it became more recognised and clinics began treating sufferers.
The death of Karen Carpenter, one half of the brother-and-sister singing duo The Carpenters, played a huge part in increasing understanding of the illness. She had refused food for years and used laxatives to control her weight before dying in 1983 from heart failure caused by her anorexia.
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br /> It was only after the film of her life, made in 1989, was aired in Britain that people here had any idea about what anorexia really was. And even then it was regarded as a condition which only affected teenage girls. That’s what made Mum think at first that it couldn’t be what was wrong with me. I was only eight, so how could I possibly have it? But still she was worried.
‘Right, if you won’t eat your dinner, I’m taking you to the doctor – tomorrow!’ she shouted at me at the end of another fraught meal.
The following evening after school – it was towards the end of 1990 – Mum marched me into our local surgery in Northwood. Our family GP was off on maternity leave, so we saw a locum instead. Mum explained to him how I would agree to eat only certain things and how at other times I’d refuse to eat entirely or shove food in the bin or down the sink when I thought no one was watching.
The doctor was one of those types who treat children as if they’re all a bit thick. ‘So, my dear,’ he said slowly, ‘what have you eaten today?’
This was going to be a breeze, I just knew it.
‘Well,’ I said quietly and hesitantly, my very best ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ look on my face. ‘I had a slice of toast for breakfast, then my packed lunch at school, although I didn’t have the crisps because they’re not very good for you, are they?’
Mum looked at me in disbelief. ‘Tell the truth, Nikki,’ she hissed.
‘But I am, Mum,’ I lied effortlessly, thinking of the one mouthful of sandwich that had passed my lips all day.
‘Well, Mrs Grahame,’ said the doctor. ‘I can see she’s a bit on the skinny side but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about at this time. It’ll all blow over, no doubt. You know what girls are like with their fads and fashions.’
‘She’s not faddy,’ insisted Mum. ‘I know my daughter and it’s more serious than that.’
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