The next morning I said goodbye to Carly. She’d been such a good friend to me and I loved her. But at that point I was so stuck in my illness that all I could think about was what was waiting for me at Rhodes Farm.
I climbed into the back of Mum’s car and we set off for London. Soon we reached the western suburbs and the traffic grew thicker. This is it then, I thought. I’m just going to have to give myself over and let them get on with whatever it is they want to do to me.
I didn’t have to wait long to find out exactly what that was. Within a couple of hours of arriving at Rhodes Farm I was sitting in front of a mammoth plate of chicken Kiev and chips, followed by a large KitKat.
From the outside, Rhodes Farm Clinic, in Mill Hill, north-west London, looks like a large, detached family house. Inside too it was like a proper home, with a cosy blue-tiled kitchen complete with long dining table and Welsh dresser. There were lounges with sofas you could sink deep into and floral curtains at the windows. Upstairs it was a rabbit warren of one-, two-, three- and four-person bedrooms, each decorated in a different theme with matching duvet covers and curtains.
Rhodes Farm had been the home of Dr Dee Dawson when she first started taking in teenagers with eating disorders back in 1991. But by the time I arrived it had been turned over entirely to caring for up to 32 kids at any one time.
Mum and I stood on the front step and rang the doorbell. After a couple of minutes it was flung open and there stood Helen, one of my nurses from Great Ormond Street. She didn’t even need to say hello for me to hear her voice in my head again. ‘Neeekkeeee, I reeeally want you to eat that bisceeeeet,’ she had used to say to me time after time in her thick Geordie accent. Oh great, this is all I need, I thought as I summoned up all my energy to flash her a forced smile and step into the main hall.
As soon as I arrived I was weighed and measured and then Mum and I were shown into the garden for a meeting with one of the nurses, who spelled out exactly what was going to happen to me.
Rhodes Farm has an extremely strict policy whereby all patients must put on 1 kilo (2 lb) every week of their stay – not more and certainly not less. The clinic’s success rate with this is remarkable and they boast that no child remains in their care not putting on weight. I’d spent months and months in various different units never putting on weight, and I was terrified about how they could be so sure they would achieve it with me.
Under the 1-kilo-a-week scheme, everyone who goes into Rhodes Farm is immediately given the date they will be discharged at their target weight. I went in on 9 January 1998 weighing 31.3 kilos (4 stone 13 lb) and was given a discharge date of 8 May, at which point, they calculated, I would be 45 kilos (7 stone 1lb). But when they revealed this target to me, I went mad. ‘There’s no way I’m going up to 45 kilos,’ I stormed. ‘I won’t do it.’ I flew into a tantrum and threw myself around the garden for the best part of an hour, screaming and thrashing my arms around.
I smashed Mum in the face, I was so mad at her for bringing me there, and the following day she had a terrible black eye.
What I didn’t know then was that my every move was falling under the scrutiny of Dee Dawson, who was staring out of the kitchen window at my antics as the other girls quietly ate their lunch. ‘It would appear,’ she said to the girls in her very correct and considered manner, ‘that the child from hell has arrived.’
When I finally calmed down enough to go inside, Dee came over and slowly looked me up and down, before saying, ‘What a strange little thing you are.’ She was probably right as what she must have seen that day in front of her was a scrawny little creature with tear stains down her face, pink hair, umpteen rings through her nose and ears and purple nail varnish.
Dee, by contrast, was a strong-looking woman in her 50s, her suit and brown bobbed hair reinforcing her no-nonsense appearance.
Standing face to face, maybe at that moment we both met our nemesis. We were poles apart but in some ways very similar, both being determined to succeed. This was going to be my greatest battle yet.
‘No nonsense’ pretty much summed up the philosophy of Rhodes Farm. The main focus was on feeding up dangerously ill girls so that they could enjoy some of the activities on offer there – dance, drama, trips to the theatre, sport – and then begin to actively engage with individual, group and family therapy.
Dee felt other institutions placed too much emphasis on therapy in the early stages and gave girls too much choice and involvement in meal planning. At Rhodes it was ‘like it or lump it’.
Mum kissed me goodbye and Dee took me to the dining room, where the other kids were finishing their lunch.
Everyone in the room looked at me. I could see them assessing my weight, looking for the jagged edges of my bones jutting through my jeans and T-shirt. They’d heard about me already – how I’d been kicking around the anorexic circuit for seven years with no one yet able to sort me out.
I’m not sure what they were expecting me to do when I took my place in the empty chair at the table, but they weren’t going to get any dramas. Not that day, anyway.
Instead I picked up my knife and fork and calmly ate the chicken Kiev and chips placed in front of me.
All new arrivals at Rhodes Farm are on 1,500 calories a day for the first three days, which I could just about cope with. But then my daily allowance was upped to 2,000 and after a week to 2,500 until it finally hit 3,700 because I had so much weight to gain. Not even the stories I’d been told by former Rhodes Farm patients could have prepared me for day after day of 3,700 calories.
At Huntercombe we had eaten generally very healthily from a menu devised individually for each patient by a qualified dietician. But at Rhodes Farm all you had was a number – your calorie intake for the day. And they didn’t care if the food was healthy or unhealthy, as long as we got it down us.
In fact I thought at the time that I was on loads more than 3,700 calories a day because the portions were so huge. For breakfast I had 55 grams (2 oz) of high-calorie triple-choc muesli or maple pecan from Marks & Spencer mixed with 90 grams (3 oz) of Frosties, Golden Grahams or another sugary cereal soaked up with 0.15 litres (¼ pint) of full-cream milk – every morning. Thick globules of cream would float on top of the cereal. Disgusting. The milk alone was 68 calories but they didn’t even count that. Or the 50 calories in my fruit juice.
Then to finish breakfast there was a 200-calorie muffin with so much butter on it that it would slide down my chin and arms as I ate it.
Lunches and dinners were often chicken Kiev and rice or similar, which they loved because the rice was good at mopping up the grease. They’d put maybe one carrot and a tomato on the plate but that was just to make it look pretty.
For pudding it would be something like a steamed sponge pudding with two scoops of ice cream. The pudding was 350 calories and the ice cream was supposed to be 150 but one day I had such a huge scoop – they’d put at least 300 calories of ice cream alone on my plate – that I called Dee in to complain. She went mad at the nurses. ‘Who served this up?’ she said. ‘We’ll never be able to calculate the girl’s weight if we are confusing the portions like this. Take half that ice cream off her plate.’
After every meal I could hardly move, I felt so full. I was lethargic and uncomfortable all the time.
Then we’d go into class but we would only just have sat down and started on our work when it was ‘extras time’. They didn’t even bother calling it snack time at Rhodes Farm. ‘Extras’ simply meant extra calories. Four boxes were laid out, labelled to show their contents: 50-calorie biscuits, 250-calorie biscuits, 300-calorie biscuits and king-size Mars Bars (450 calories). You had to select the right combination to meet your quota for the day. My ‘extras’ had to total 500 calories, so that was a king-size Mars and a 50-cal biscuit. And that was only an hour and a half after I’d finished an almighty great breakfast. For the first couple of weeks I complied, though eating those portions was agony.
I had a few mealtime tantrums but the staff
weren’t interested in my histrionics – they just told me to sit down and eat. A couple of times I was sedated with an injection but as the weeks rolled on even I realised that tantrums weren’t getting me out of anything at Rhodes Farm.
Also, I think something in my mind had switched and deep down I was ready to cooperate and it was just habit which prevented me from doing so. Because for the first time in five years someone had offered me the chance to go home. To go back to my old bedroom, see my old friends and have a normal life again. Oh my God, I thought one morning. I could actually be going home in just 17 weeks’ time.
There were two kitchens at Rhodes Farm. The brown kitchen was for the very severely anorexic kids and the blue kitchen was for those who were on the road to recovery and so were allowed to prepare their own food. In the brown kitchen sat the three anorexic ‘pros’, Janice, Sara and me. We would all sit in a line at the dinner table, Janice at the top because she had been there longest, then Sara and then me. I hadn’t been there very long at all but my reputation as a ‘special anorexic’ won me a good position.
The meals would be handed by a member of staff to Janice, who would then hand them down the line. Janice, being first, would get first choice of whichever plate she thought looked smaller or lower in calories. Next it would be Sara’s go, then mine. It was all-out war between the three of us as we were all so desperate to get the smallest portion, even though in reality there was probably almost no difference between them.
As each day passed I felt more and more sick at the thought of how much food they were going to serve up. I started trying to hide food at mealtimes and I got away with it for a few meals, but then one day Rachel, a really strict nurse, spotted me.
You could never get away with anything for very long at Rhodes Farm. They knew every trick in the book and watched you like hawks at dinner in case you were hiding or rubbing grease into your hair or clothes. Then there were regular room searches and spot checks on weight.
‘OK – it’s a cheese sandwich for you, Nikki,’ said Rachel as she made me empty the food I’d just stashed down my knickers. They were the words everyone dreaded at Rhodes Farm. Cheese sandwiches were the punishment meals for breaking the rules. Each sandwich was about 500 calories, with chunky cubes of cheese put between two slices of bread lathered in butter so thick you could carve your name in it.
But if you refused the sandwich or spat it out you’d go on to a nasal tube feed. And this wasn’t any namby-pamby milk feed like I’d had at Great Ormond Street. At Rhodes Farm they liquidised a mixture of mayonnaise, double cream and Mars Bars, then squirted it up your nose. It seemed utterly barbaric. I couldn’t believe they would do that to people – but they did.
What I didn’t realise then, though, was that they rarely tubed people at Rhodes Farm and kept it for the absolute last-resort cases. Because in many ways tubing makes it too easy for anorexics – it gives them the option of totally retreating from food, which is what had happened to me at Great Ormond Street. By using the gastrostomy for more than 14 months I was able to remove myself from any interaction with food at all. I didn’t need to get better, I could just plod along, taking in the calories they pumped into me. That’s why they avoided the tube wherever possible at Rhodes Farm. Instead their philosophy was ‘just get on and eat it’.
It was only now that I was able to see how most of the units I’d been in up until this time had pussyfooted around me. I’d been allowed to select meals and persisted in my tantrums. But at Rhodes Farm I wasn’t being asked, persuaded or bullied into feeding. I was simply being told to do it. And I did.
There was no time or attention for people who messed around or wanted to hog the limelight. And, more than anything, there was the idea that if you did follow the programme you would go home – and soon. That was an amazing thought for me after so long away.
That’s not to say I didn’t continue to fight the system. It was still to be a while before I could let my guard down and give in. Meanwhile I continued to leave the dinner table with as much food still crammed in my mouth as I could squeeze in without looking like a hamster. As soon as I was out of the room I spat the entire mouthful into any bin or toilet. But when a member of staff spotted me doing it one day, it was cheese sandwich time again.
I was also exercising at any opportunity I could find. Every lunchtime we were allowed out for an hour’s walk, the idea being that a bit of fresh air would make us feel better. But as soon as I was out of eyesight of the building I would break into a brisk run, although that was risky because members of staff would often come out checking on us in their cars. In addition I was exercising every night that I could get away with it in my bedroom.
But my best trick was picking up my plate at the end of the meal and taking it over to the sink, where I would pretend to wash it up. Then, with my back to the room, I’d throw up my entire lunch into the sink and ram it down the plug hole with my fingers. I’d learned to do it totally silently so no one noticed a thing.
I could puke up a 1,000-calorie lunch in less than a minute. First up would be the ice cream, which would reappear like foam, and then the main course. When I started to get an acidic residue swilling around my mouth and teeth I knew I’d got the lot up. Then I’d feel good again – nice and empty.
A lot of trust was placed in us, but the staff were able to monitor exactly what we were up to through the weekly weigh-ins, at which we were supposed to have gained a kilo each time. If a fortnight went past and you hadn’t hit your target, all your privileges, including the lunchtime walk, were taken away and you were placed on supervision.
Once I’d started throwing up, hiding and spitting out food, my weight soon failed to make the weekly target and I was put on supervision. At first I was supervised for one hour after meals to ensure I wasn’t being sick. This meant that for the hour after a meal I’d have to sit with all the other kids on supervision in the brown kitchen, unable to go out of sight of members of staff for even a moment. But, the minute my hour’s supervision was up, I’d still run off and be sick.
But when my weight still didn’t increase it became two hours post-meal supervision, then three and four. Even after four hours of post-meal supervision I’d still go off at night and puke up anything that might be left in my stomach. By that point I was only really bringing up stomach juices but I still did it. My teeth are destroyed now by the amount of acid I regurgitated.
Around that time Janice, Sara and I went down to Argos one lunch break for our walk and bought a pair of electronic scales. It meant we could calculate our weight perfectly before our official twice-weekly weigh-ins, so we knew how much we needed to waterload if necessary. Sometimes I’d drink 5 litres (9 pints) of water, which weighs around 5 kilos (11 lb), before a weigh-in to ensure I hit my target.
I also had another brilliant scam for adding a bit to my weight. One of the other girls had come up with the idea of sewing fishing weights into her hair scrunchy, so one weekend I went into a fishing tackle shop and bought myself some too. I cut a neat slit in the scrunchy, slipped the weights in, then sewed it up again. It may have added only half a kilo or so, but it all helped.
We hid the scales in a boiler cupboard beside the fire escape and only referred to them by the codeword ‘hairdryer’. So Sara might say to me, ‘Can I borrow your hairdryer?’ and I’d reply, ‘Janice is using it at the moment but you can be next.’ It was a brilliant way of staying ahead of the game and the ‘hairdryer’ scam survived for a couple of years after I left Rhodes Farm before it was discovered.
There was one member of staff called Tony and I’m sure he knew something was going on but he didn’t know what. On weigh-in days he’d always say to me, ‘Isn’t it amazing, Nikki, how your weight is always bang on target every week?’
‘What do you mean?’ I’d say in mock horror.
‘Oh nothing,’ he’d reply. ‘It just seems quite incredible, that’s all.’
Because I was able to stay on my target week after week, I was allowe
d evenings out with my parents and even some weekends at home. For my first ‘meal out’ Dad took me to a Beefeater but he’d been given strict instructions about what I had to eat – something with chips for a main course and then the pudding had to include pastry and cream. A sorbet or mousse was out of the question.
Afterwards, though, I got Dad to give me a game of badminton at a gym in London. He loves sport and I just loved the chance to exercise.
Staff at Rhodes Farm must have become increasingly suspicious that I was manipulating my weight on weigh-in days because late one night my little scam came to a sudden end. I’d been fast asleep when one of the nurses knocked sharply on my door and walked in. I opened my eyes slowly, blinking as the brightness from the corridor pricked my eyes.
‘Hello, Nikki,’ the nurse chirped as if she’d just popped in for a chat. ‘I’m just going to take you downstairs to weigh you.’
When they put me on the scales I was 4 kilos (9 lb) lighter than they had thought. After that I was back on those enormous meals, being watched so closely now that there wasn’t a moment for me to exercise or vomit any more. I felt full to bursting with their disgusting food and it was unbearable. I felt I hadn’t got any other choice – I had to run away. I waited for the perfect opportunity when I could slip away unnoticed.
It came shortly afterwards, on a Sunday morning. There was no one around, so I didn’t pause for a moment but darted straight down the stairs and out of the front door without looking back. It was a chilly spring day and I was wearing a thin cotton purple dress and flip-flops, so I was soon absolutely freezing.
I ran to the tube station, desperately wondering where to go next. The only person I knew who lived anywhere nearby was Nina, my old friend from Great Ormond Street, who was back home in North London. I ran into a phone box and dialled her number. ‘Nina, I’ve run away,’ I told her. ‘I’m coming round.’
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