The Real Me is Thin

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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 (#ulink_b2c20189-0d82-5247-975b-b618bf4e06a7)

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 (#ulink_10424aaa-7ec9-5266-9113-3ead2a4a487a)

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!’

How accurate a report that is of what actually happened, I can’t tell. It is true that we rowed all the time and were both miserable and confused. Me because I didn’t understand why Dad had gone away and we hadn’t gone with him, and Mum, as far as I understand, because separating from Dad had not turned out to be the instant solution to her misery that she’d expected it to be. It is also a matter of fact that I did go and live with Dad in Bahrain while my siblings and mother stayed behind in England. I can remember, despite the rows, being shocked that she was ‘getting rid of me’ so easily. I knew I was a thorn in her side, but I didn’t know what it was I was doing that pricked her. I only knew that she found me unbearable and didn’t want me around.

As it transpired, the few months I spent living with Dad were one of the happiest, if not the happiest, times of my childhood. Bahrain is a small island in the Persian Gulf, on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. At that time Western diplomacy was finding its feet in the Middle East. Presumably, with a mixture of sensitivity to local customs and a wish to maintain independence, foreigners lived in compounds. These were made up of a group of houses, some offices, and a pool built by their own architects. They were, by design, little bits of Britain, UK oases in an entirely foreign land. Our small compound resembled a housing estate in the Home Counties. Dad’s house was a two-storey, archetypal Sixties – lots of glass and wood – functional box. It had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, with a large hall downstairs, a small study, a living room, and a dining room. There were servants’ quarters beyond the dining room, accessed by a swing door like those in restaurant kitchens, which were made up of a kitchen and two tiny bedrooms beyond it. Dad employed two servants: Bundoo and Bourey, Pakistani men he’d inherited from his predecessor. Having servants might sound terribly grand and from another era, and maybe it was, but it didn’t feel like that. With diplomats’ budget for ‘help’, that’s just the way it was, particularly for a man with no wife in tow. Bundoo and Bourey didn’t wear white jackets with polished buttons, or serve gin and tonics clinking with ice on silver salvers. They were part of the household. I’d often sit cross-legged on the kitchen counter watching them making curries or ironing Dad’s shirts or mending or darning – Bourey was a great needleman.

I went to school in Bahrain. The only establishment where the British curriculum was taught was 20 minutes’ drive from home and run by the RAF. Dad had also employed a nanny, Carole, to keep me company during the day. The weather was fiercely hot and there was no air conditioning at school, so lessons started at 7.30 a.m. and ended at 12.30, after which I’d go home, have lunch with Carole, and then spend the rest of the day at the communal pool or the beach or riding in the desert. There were very few other children on the island. All the other British diplomats’ kids were at boarding schools back home. And although there were a few Forces’ kids around – hence the need for the school – they lived miles away in the Forces’ compound. There was a minimal public-transport system for locals, but it would have been out of the question for a ten-year-old foreign girl to travel on it, alone. Consequently, I spent all my free time with either Carole or Dad, but I don’t remember ever being lonely, or, oddly, missing Mum.

During the time I spent with Dad out there he was indulgent, kind, and affectionate. In fact, he was wholly unlike the dad I’d known hitherto, who’d been remote, hardly ever there, and often bad-tempered when he was. I realise now that this softer dad was a result of a unique combination of things that were true for him at the time: he was still hopeful of a reconciliation with Mum, and uncharacteristically grateful both for my company and, I think, for the opportunity to be a full-time parent to me – something which he surely realised was very likely to end shortly. Perhaps the separation, unofficial though it was, made him more acutely aware of the loss of his children, or maybe he felt guilty about my being out there with no contemporaries; I don’t know, but the end result was that I spent more time with Dad than I’d ever done before or ever would again.

And I absolutely adored him. During that time Dad was never critical, never competitive, and always had time to talk to me. Looking back, I think I was Dad’s companion as much as his daughter. I was certainly aware of his dependence on me, and this sometimes made me uncomfortable, because I started to worry about him and if he was lonely. It’s probably not ideal for a ten-year-old to be in a position where she’s looking out for her father’s emotional welfare, and this too shaped a lot of my future relationships – but at the time I was just so pleased to be with my beloved father all the time.

Dad’s job in Bahrain involved having talks, ‘representing Britain’s interest’, with various dignitaries and leaders from Arab states around the Gulf. Sometimes he’d take me with him. On one occasion Dad was due to make an official visit to a very important man in the region: Sheikh Zaid, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and one of the principal architects of the United Arab Emirates. As the visit was scheduled to coincide with my eleventh birthday, Dad took me along. This was the kind of unworried-by-what-others-might-think, relaxed, loving easy-goingness with which I was very unfamiliar, and it was an unexpected joy every time I experienced it. A tiny propeller plane took us from Bahrain south-east to the Buraimi oasis in Oman, where the Sheikh lived in relative modesty.

After Dad and the Sheikh had had their talk (about the Saudi claim to Abu Dhabi’s southern and western territory, I learnt much later in life), our host invited us to join him, his sons, and his entourage for supper. Despite huge wealth gained from the discovery of oil, the Sheikh led a simple, traditional Arab desert-dweller’s life. Supper was served just as it would have been for hundreds of years. Dad and I were shown to a long kilim stretched out on the roof of the Sheikh’s fort, around which blazed flame torches, embedded into sand, providing the only light apart from the hundreds of twinkling stars filling an inky black, cloudless sky. Three huge unidentified limbless torsos stuffed with rice sat on massive plates equally spaced along the carpet. Between each ‘roast’ lay plates piled high with delicious-looking rice made with sultanas and pine nuts (I’ve had that before, I said to myself), plates of okra (I was OK with that, too) and dishes overflowing with what looked like tiny balls of white and black jelly. The Sheikh took his place in the middle and indicated that Dad should sit to his left. Taking my cue from Dad, I settled down cross-legged on the floor next to him, and waited for someone else to start.

Although by now I was familiar with Middle Eastern customs, I had never yet eaten Bedouin-style and didn’t want to make a wrong move. A china plate (surely not traditional) sat in front of each place, but there was no cutlery. I wasn’t quite sure what to eat or, without cutlery, how to go about it. As Dad was deep in conversation with the Sheikh on his right, I decided to watch what others were doing. Casually tossing his headdress behind him, presumably so that it wouldn’t trail in his food, the young man opposite me rolled up his right sleeve and thrust his hand into the hole his side of the beast’s torso. He grabbed a handful of rice and then proceeded to scrap the ribcage of the animal from the inside, eventually emerging with a fistful of meat and rice which he plopped on to his plate before helping himself, with the same hand, to the okra and some of the jellied things.

So that’s how it’s done, I thought, and followed suit. I thrust my hand into the beast and successfully landed some food on my plate. It was delicious: the meat was tender and moist and the rice perfectly cooked. (I later discovered it was camel and that the jellied balls, which I didn’t sample, were cooked camels’ eyes.) I was hungry and ate some of the okra and flavoured rice happily, too. It was then, for the first time, that I looked up and around at the other guests. The entire company was staring at me. Every single male face was staring at me in astonishment. (In keeping with tradition there were no women present, since the women ate separately from the men – my presence being a gracious concession to Dad.) I couldn’t fathom what I’d done to warrant their reaction. Soon, noticing that I seemed to have drawn everyone’s attention, Dad looked round at me. Seeing my dirtied hand, he smiled and whispered into my ear, ‘You’re eating with your left hand; that’s the hand they wipe their bottoms with. Most of them will never have seen a girl eat before, and they probably think you haven’t got very nice manners.’ I made a ‘sorry’ face to the assembled men, which mercifully was met with some kind smiles and a few laughs. Even then Dad wasn’t cross with me.

In fact, this period of living alone with Dad is the only time in my life I can remember him not nagging me about my eating habits and my size. It’s occurred to me, since becoming an adult, that this might have been because he was low and lonely at the time, and was therefore less inclined to criticise me for something that, after all, didn’t matter that much – certainly not as much as a disintegrating marriage. Maybe depending on me and enjoying my company meant that he was less inclined to be constantly noticing what was wrong with me.

Dad and I returned to London together in the summer of 1969 for a family holiday. I also had to start secondary school later that September. Thereafter I’d see him in bursts when he was home on leave, for visits, outings, slightly grim meals in cheap caf$eAs – the typical things estranged dads do with their kids. But in our case it was even more fractured because Dad, as it turned out, wasn’t going to live in Britain again until 1974. Estranged dads are bad enough, but longdistance ones, especially in an era of poor or non-existent phone lines and no email, are much worse. From then on I had what you might describe as an on-off relationship with Dad where, it transpired, there was little room for bad times. Seeing Dad very rarely, I soon learnt that best behaviour was expected at all times. There was no tolerance for Bad Fat Me – only Good Thin Me was welcome.

Happiness is a warm scone (#ulink_14ea9439-d6d3-553d-854b-1818766f6efd)

During all these early years of upheaval, disapproval, and the growing sensation that I wasn’t ‘good’ enough, there was always Granny She-She, my mother’s stepmother. Despite living in Scotland, miles away from London where we now lived, she had a hugely reassuring effect on me.

Every single time I bite into a slice of bread spread with raspberry jam I’m hurtled back into the freezing, stone-floored larder in Granny’s house in Melrose. I’m standing close by her as she puts the last touches on the scores of jars she’s just filled with her home-made jam. She covers each differently shaped jar, accumulated over the years, with carefully cut circles of greaseproof paper secured in place with a rubber band, followed by circles of remnants of faded material. Each one is then tied tight with old bits of ribbon she’s saved. On the top goes the handwritten label: ‘raspberry jam’, and the year. The jam’s still warm and glass around the tiny bit of space between the top of the liquid and the lid steams up. The jam’s been made in a ‘jam pan’ using raspberries Granny picked on her daily walks in the countryside around her house, Eildon Bank. ‘There we go, all done,’ Granny says, stepping back from the cold stone draining-board that fills the back larder, now covered with jam jars of all shapes and sizes. She puts her arm around me, gives me a loving squeeze, and I draw in that familiar smell of Granny – slightly musty Chanel No. 5, combined with many-times-washed lambswool. Adored and adoring Granny She-She, the first relative to show me unconditional love.

My mother’s mother, Eilidh, died when my mother was only 18. The story my mother told was that her mother ‘let herself die’ once she and my grandfather had retired from the boys’ school they ran, apparently saying she had ‘nothing to live for without her boys’. At this distance it’s hard to know how accurate an account that is. But whatever the circumstances of her mother’s death, it’s fair to say that my mother, an only child, had always felt unloved and untreasured by her parents.

Mum was brought up in the school – St Mary’s, a boys’ prep school of about 60 pupils – in Melrose, a pretty Borders town around 35 miles south of Edinburgh. The school had been established by her mother’s father in an attractive, large house with generous grounds.

By the time Mum was born in 1926, the running of the school had been handed over to her parents, and she was born in the house. It was a boarding school, and most of the boys saw their parents infrequently, since they lived either in colonial outposts or on remote farms too far away for even weekly visits. Mum’s parents took the view that the boys’ needs, particularly emotional ones, took precedence over those of their only child, the thinking apparently being that her parents were on hand whereas these boys had ‘no mummies’.

Shortly after her mother’s death, my mother went to university while her father went travelling to recover from his loss. When he returned he married a childless local woman, Sheila Fairbairn, who acquired a stepdaughter in my mum, whom she cherished right from the start, calling her ‘a gift’. And so it was that when Mum had kids, Sheila became, naturally, our Granny She-She, the abbreviation formed by her niece, who’d been unable to pronounce her proper name. Mum’s dad died in 1958, but Mum stayed close to her stepmother for the rest of her life. This was easily done, since Granny was the most generous-spirited, loving person imaginable. She was warm, cuddly, and physically affectionate – something that we, aside from during those few early years spent in Innes’s care, were not accustomed to. However, she harboured a dark secret, the evidence of which she kept closely guarded – so closely that I only found out about it after she died.

As a family we usually holidayed in Scotland, incorporating dutiful visits to both our grannies. First to Granny Nancy’s, Dad’s mother in Dunfermline (where we stayed as short a time as possible since she was so difficult and unfriendly), and then on, much more willingly, to Granny She-She’s. Later on, from when I was around nine years old and with different school holidays from my brothers, Mum would send me up to Granny’s alone.

It is those treasured times I recall best. My mother would put me on a coach at Victoria Station, nervously asking a random old lady if she’d keep an eye on me. An interminable 11 hours later Granny would pick me up in Galashiels, about 4 miles from Melrose, which was the closest the bus stopped to Granny’s small town. Coaches were very slow in those days and didn’t have toilets on board. Given the cost of coach travel compared to trains, it stood to reason that virtually all the passengers were OAPs, meaning the driver was required to stop every ten minutes for what was graphically announced over the tannoy as a ‘toilet visit’. Only the excitement of seeing Granny made the journey tolerable – that, and the knowledge that the kindly old lady into whose care I’d been entrusted would, upon seeing the meagre supplies Mum had given me, take pity on me and share her sandwiches with me or, better still, cake. Those old ladies always had cake – perhaps not the best cake, but cake is cake, especially to a child for whom cake has recently become off limits. Even half a slice of stale Battenburg was always gratefully received.

Mum would grudgingly concede that I probably had to have ‘something to eat’ during the long journey. She would equip me with a rancid piece of fruit in a wrinkled old plastic bag, still slightly moist inside from God-knows-what, an ancient, smelly Thermos flask filled with watery juice (‘not too strong because squash is full of sugar and that’s the last thing you need’) and, if I was lucky, a piece of sweaty Cheddar wrapped in re-used clingfilm.

But it was all worth it because everything was lovely at Granny’s. There she’d be, waiting for me at the bus terminal, with a slightly anxious, searching look on her face until we caught sight of each other, when I’d hare off the bus and throw myself into her arms and she’d squeeze me tightly. Granny felt like soft wool. She always wore the same thing – a ‘good tweed skirt, made to last’ and a twinset made of lambswool (or cashmere if she’d found a decent second in the local tweed merchants’ sale). Granny was healthy and strong from lots of hearty walks, but, like her sweaters, everything about her was soft and giving.

We’d go back to Granny’s house on the local bus and as soon as we walked through the front door I could smell the boiled mince and overcooked potatoes. Ever thoughtful, Granny would have prepared the meal before setting off to collect me. Boiled mince and overdone potatoes aren’t most people’s idea of a lovely supper, but to me this was a feast: hot food in plentiful quantities prepared by someone who loved me and wanted to feed me. Granny’s food tasted like what it was – unconditional love. It had all the necessary ingredients: care, forethought, and kindness.

Looking back, what I appreciate now is that Granny loved me enough to think, in advance, about what I might need following a whole day’s travelling on a coach which reeked of old people’s wee. Granny didn’t want me not to eat; she expected me to want to eat. Me eating didn’t make her cross. She thought I was entitled to be hungry. I loved her mince and potatoes. I loved anything Granny made, and some of her cooking was absolutely heavenly.

Nothing in the world comes close to her drop scones, still warm from the griddle, smothered in her raspberry jam, sweet and packed with fruit. And she always made cucumber sandwiches for tea. This was proper tea – cucumber sandwiches, followed by something sweet, usually the drop scones and jam. A proper tea to tide you over until supper. Thinly sliced cucumber sprinkled with a little salt on buttered bread. A snack so simple yet so tasty. When I slice a cucumber now and get a whiff of that fresh, wet smell, Granny’s teas by a roaring fire in her living room (even in summer – this was Scotland) immediately spring to mind.

Every morning of my stay, before I woke up, Granny would creep down the windy staircase to the cold kitchen. There was no central heating – she wouldn’t have dreamt of going to such an indulgent expense. She’d make two soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers, accompanied by tea for her and, for me, orange juice in a small can that tasted like aeroplane juice but which I loved anyway. She’d set the breakfast on a tray laid with a linen mini-tablecloth and bring it upstairs, where I’d hop into her bed to eat it with her and chat about what we’d do that day. It was the cosiest, safest place I’d ever been. I was with someone who wasn’t irritated by everything I did or said, and who fed me un-questioningly. I was never nervous with Granny, never worried that I might make her cross. She used to say she loved hearing me cry out, ‘Granny, where are you?’ – explaining that, as she’d never been a mother, she’d never expected to be a granny, and when she heard me call she was reminded of how lucky she was.

Granny’s dark secret, which I knew absolutely nothing about at the time, and which makes Granny’s capacity for unconditional love and consistent nurturing even more remarkable, was that she was an alcoholic. Granny was drinking so much that she had to get her booze delivered from the next town along, once she’d realised that the store in Melrose had noticed she was regularly ordering an unusual amount. As Granny knew only too well, a small town is a hard place to keep a secret and gossip abounds. Tongues would have wagged, and I could just picture Mrs Laidlaw, the grocer’s wife, arms crossed over her pinny-covered bosom, hissing into the ear of Mrs Muir, the baker, ‘See, Mrs Walker hasn’t had visitors for a good long while but that’s another bottle of gin goin’ up there with her messages and it’ll be the third this week!’ It was the norm to do your ‘messages’ (shopping) by visiting each shop, choosing what you wanted, and the goods would be brought up later in a box. That way there was a fair chance everyone would know what you’d ordered. Granny was a proud person and an active member of the church, St Cuthbert’s, situated just behind her house. She sang in the choir and did the flowers for all the weddings, funerals, and christenings. I can’t imagine she’d have found it possible to talk about her dependency with the minister.

Yet Granny’s drinking never affected my visits. She always seemed calm and in control. We had long walks with her beloved Labrador, Pani, and chatted away to each other happily, never short of topics, mainly the important question of what I wanted to be when I grew up (nurse, pop star, bride, then actress). Granny was never, ever cross or short-tempered. Every night, she’d fall asleep in the armchair by the fire while I watched TV – but all grown-ups did that as far as I knew, drunk or otherwise. So, here was an alcoholic, childless woman of strong Presbyterian faith, that most unforgiving of religions, the only notable joy in her life having been her marriage to my grandfather and the acquisition, thereby, of a cherished stepdaughter and four beloved grandchildren. Yet she harboured no rage, no nastiness, no frustration – outwardly anyway, since clearly the drinking was her antidote to whatever turmoil was going on inside.

Mum adored Granny, too; we all did. But when, after returning home from one of my stays with her, I mentioned to Mum what a good cook Granny was, Mum laughed and said, ‘Sheila is many lovely things, but she is not a good cook.’ I know now that what Granny cooked was wartime British meals, the very meals from which Mum’s generation was trying to escape, but at the time I was confused and upset. To me Granny was the perfect cook. She was my idea of that, at least: someone who provided regular food without resentment but instead with enormous love and affection. And, above all, she was happy for me to eat it. This was the complete opposite to Mum’s increasingly terrifying reaction to my need to eat.

Cooking blind (#ulink_197a9257-9124-580b-992b-fe99a1a00a40)

Without Dad or the boys around, Mum and I very quickly fell into a pattern of constant, extremely loud, bitter rows, punctuated – intermittently – by miserable meals invariably provided with rage and resentment.

But when the boys came home from boarding school for visits, Mum always made an effort. Suddenly, there’d be fresh bread, a variety of salamis, meat, lovely cheeses, salads – you know, proper, nourishing food. And if they happened to be there still on a Sunday, we’d sometimes get roast chicken followed by apple pie. However, lest I give the impression that my brothers never experienced Mum’s whimsical approach to food provision, let me recount the following story.

I’ve already said that Mum wasn’t a bad cook; in fact, she was extremely accomplished but only when she chose to be. She was knowledgeable about good-quality ingredients and was capable of producing an impressive variety of complicated dishes. However, in the Sixties the fashion for feeding children the same-quality fare as adults hadn’t yet evolved, at least not in Britain, so my awareness of Mum’s skills mainly came from being around when she prepared for dinner parties while she and Dad were together, or on the very rare occasions she gave them once they’d split up. Her culinary talents were hardly ever wasted on her kids. Except for one memorable day when the boys were home from school.

It was lunchtime and Mum announced that she’d made some ‘delicious lentil soup’. Ah. Now, this would be a good few years before the lentil had managed to shake off its reputation as the unremittingly dull pulse of choice for the kind of hippies who baked bread using their own placenta and wove their own shoes out of bark. Back in 1968, only Claudia Roden and a tiny minority of truly talented cooks well versed in the exotic ways of rendering a lentil palatable could possibly have dreamt of eliciting a positive reaction from four recalcitrant children who were already slightly wary of their mother’s idea of ‘delicious’.

In one synchronised movement we all slumped our shoulders as Mum plonked down the pale brown, lumpy slop in front of us. (My kids, at 10 and 11, around the age I was then, have taken up this physical means of showing displeasure. ‘Not pasta again!’ they moan and it makes me want to scream ‘Yes, bloody pasta again!’ – even though my starting point is not one of frustration, loneliness, and desperation. It can’t have been much fun for Mum.)

Of course, us doing this made Mum cross, crosser even than her constant default mood which was… cross. ‘It’s delicious, and what’s more you’ll like it!’ she yelled. We all peered nervously down into our bowls. It certainly didn’t look delicious. In fact, it gave every sign of being utterly revolting. I was sitting next to my sister and opposite both my brothers at the kitchen table. Mum had gone back to the cooker. We exchanged worried looks. ‘What are we going to do?’ We couldn’t eat it; that much was obvious. Andrew, always the peacemaker and, it has to be said, the one least likely to spark Mum’s rage, fell on his sword. He picked up his spoon and tasted the soup. Emboldened, Matthew, Christina, and I gingerly followed suit. As we had suspected, it was absolutely foul.

We dropped our spoons, which clattered noisily back on to the table.

Mum spun round. ‘What’s the matter? I spent hours making that, and you’re bloody well going to eat it.’

We knew better than to put up a fight. One by one we picked up our spoons and tried again, but we couldn’t get it down. It didn’t just taste horrible in an infantile all-lentils-are-yuck way. It tasted wrong. The soup had a tangy fizz – surely that wasn’t right?

‘Is this what lentils are supposed to taste like?’ I hissed at Andrew.

He furrowed his brow and hissed back, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but she’s going to go nuts if we don’t eat it all.’

He continued, bravely, with tiny spoonfuls, while I resorted to clanking my spoon about in the bowl in the hope that somehow this would reduce the level of the soup and convince Mum I’d eaten some. Mum’s rage could flare so suddenly, and you could never be sure what would spark it. We didn’t know how we were going to get out of this.

Then it happened – sudden, blissful, unexpected salvation. Andrew summoned up his courage. ‘Mum, I think there’s something actually wrong with this—’ But before he could finish his sentence, as if by magic, projectile vomit shot out of his mouth and nose, travelling at speed right across the kitchen table. The jet was so strong, it looked as if it had come out of a fireman’s hose. No one said a word.

As the last regurgitated lentils dropped off Andrew’s chin, Mum marched forward and picked up his spoon to taste the soup. Never one for apologies, she chose her words carefully. ‘Yes, very well, the lentils might have gone off, but it was delicious when I made it.’ Thanks to Andrew’s super-reactive stomach, unbelievably, we were off the hook.

I’ve since grown to like lentils (only when they’re fresh) but I still can’t eat them without instantly recalling the fizz they emanate when they’re off. But I’m not sure any child genuinely likes them. I made some delicious (no, really) lentil soup the other day and even persuaded my kids to taste it. My daughter went first, before urging her younger brother to try, too, but ‘not to look at it before’. He wrinkled up his nose: ‘I’m not being rude, but I think that’s more of a grown-up’s type of thing.’

I don’t think, for one moment, that Mum knew the lentils were off or that she was deliberately trying to poison us. Very irritatingly for her, they’d simply gone off since she’d cooked them, so, operating in the belief that she had something to give us kids, she suddenly found herself a meal ‘down’, as it were, and I can certainly relate to how bloody maddening that can be. You know you’ve got to feed your kids, find that the intended meal is sabotaged, and now have to find a substitute. An unfortunate episode such as this might be a small hiccup, hardly worthy of mention, to someone for whom cooking for their kids is no big deal; but if your default position is one of anger, resentment, and frustration at where you find yourself in life, as was Mum’s at the time, then it’s small wonder she was so pissed off. Those lentils exemplified Mum’s hatred of cooking and the insurmountable drudgery that it was for her. They also illustrate that we were not accustomed to food being prepared with love and care. Our food, such as it was, was angry.