ADVENTURES IN AUSTRALIA, 1975: 5 Looking back

I’d spent my teens filling out my Chart of Food and Drink Consumed, seeing how little I could eat without my mother noticing.

    There were lots of reasons why I had anorexia nervosa, the main one perhaps that I didn’t know how to deal with the emotions that flooded my being from the moment my periods started at age thirteen.
    Then my periods stopped and my mother took me to the doctor.
    ‘Is she eating?’ the doctor asked my mother over my head as I lay flat on my back and he felt my stomach.
    ‘Oh, you know, these girls,’ joked my mother.
    I don’t think either of us quite realised what was going on. Anorexia was something new, or at least the name was. As far as I could remember, heroines in novels were always going into decline.
    The doctor put me on pills for three months. ‘These should sort the problem out,’ he said.
    My mother and I studied the packets when we got home.
    ‘I think it’s The Pill,’ whispered my mother, wide-eyed, and we both giggled.
    The pill was new too and just as shocking as anorexia.
    My periods came back but the eating problem didn’t go away.
 
I’d never had an emotional education.
    Neither of my parents was capable of it because of their upbringings. Both had lost mothers young. Both were brought up by nannies. Both had been to boarding school. Both had been through a war.
    The nearest we had to it at school were the Religious Education lessons where one teacher regaled us with terrifying stories of hell, until she was summarily removed, and the Sex Education lessons (at least that was what they were but I don’t think they were called that) where we were summoned a small group at a time to a secret attic room and shown pictures of rabbit insides.
 
When I left school and went to university I plunged into a hideous world of uncontrolled eating. I dropped out of university after my first year and went to London where I learnt typing and a rudimentary shorthand and started work as a temporary secretary.
    I wanted to be free. I wanted to experience something other than academic work, meet people who were different - which I hadn’t done at university. The people I met there were exactly the same as the sort of people my parents had been pushing me towards all my life. I wanted to rebel, but I’d never dared. I was too frightened of my parents. I’d always been taught ‘not to contradict’.
 
I ended up at a ‘fringe’ bank as they were known – one of a new crop of suspect organisations that lent money to businesses. I liked it because the offices were white and new and open plan, in a tower block with spectacular views of the sky. I hated the greyness of London. The concrete and the litter. The small dark dusty offices that I’d staggered between and the small dark dusty people who inhabited them. The people at the bank were in a hurry. They laughed a lot. They were going somewhere.
 
They liked me too and gave me a permanent job working first for and then with P and B. P and B were the creatives of the organisation – the research analysts. They were allowed to leave their desks untidy at the end of the day. They wrote long essays about what the company should be doing, where it should be going. They had a Sex Maniac’s Diary straddling their two desks, which they consulted every morning and tittered over.
 
They were completely unlike anyone I’d met before. Both had come from working class backgrounds through grammar school and free university education. Both were from ‘up north’ - P from the Midlands and B from near Newcastle. Both were much older than me, in their late twenties. I started going out with B.
 
Like me, he was interested in art. He read a lot. He wrote poetry. We went together to concerts, plays, exhibitions. He even came to parties with me. He was fascinated by my background and the people I mixed with. He wanted to know all about them.
 
The only trouble was, he was married. It was an open marriage – they’d ‘had to marry’ in their teens (which meant there was a baby on the way) and, B said, were now making up for lost time. B had several girlfriends other than me and he told me all about them.
 
Even so, I knew it was wrong to ‘commit adultery’, even though I hadn't actually done so yet. It was my fault. I was guilty.

   I was a failure having abandoned university. I was a failure doing secretarial work when so many of my friends and acquaintances were high-flyers, Oxbridge graduates.  I hated the seemingly uncontrolled building the bank was financing. They didn't care about anything but money. I shouldn't be working for them. I was a failure because I was fat.

    I had a parrot on my shoulder giving me a running commentary on everything that was wrong with me.

 
‘You’ll never sleep with me, will you,’ said B one night at a new Thai restaurant to which he was taking me as a special treat. We’d now been together about nine months and I’d always refused him. I wasn’t really interested.
    It was a challenge and I fell for it. I might as well, I thought. Get it over with. I’m 21 now. It’s about time.
    He came back with me to my room in the house I shared with Bella and several other people.
 
Immediately afterwards he got up and started dressing.
    ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, aghast.
    ‘Home of course,’ he snapped.
    A black shutter crashed down on my life. I started to fall down an endless black hole. I sat in the bath and watched my blood seeping into the water. I went back to bed and played a song from a record that Bella had left behind for me. It was by Nina Simone.
 
    Ne me quitte pas
    Ne me quitte pas
    Ne me quitte pas.
 
It was the only thing that stopped me disappearing forever.