Jade Goody: How It All Began - My First Book. Jade Goody
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you.’
And it was then that I realised how much he wanted to keep the baby, and deep down that I did too. It was our baby and from the start I was determined to give my child a proper family, a nice home and two parents who loved it. I think the media and the public were a bit shocked that I’d want to have a kid when I seemed to have so much other stuff going for me. But once we’d come to terms with it we were over the moon and I knew Jeff would make a fantastic dad – which he has.
Fast forward a few months and we were both still accepting jobs that had been offered to us. For me it was panto (as the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – very appropriately named ‘Dumplina’, which explained the fact that my dress was bursting at the seams) and as a fat heffalump trying to work out what to do behind the wheel of Comic Relief’s Celebrity Driving School. Jeff was the host for a new T4 show called Dirty Laundry with June Sarpong. While this was good for our bank balance, it wasn’t quite so good for our relationship, so inevitably the strain began to show and we started rowing (fighting, that is, not sitting in a boat).
To be fair, I think most of the fighting was down to me and my hormones. They were all over the place. I felt so fat and ugly. I couldn’t even do my shoelaces up, for God’s sake!
Jeff used to come home from work and I’d be lying in the bath, in complete darkness except for a few candles flickering around me. Mariah Carey would be blaring from the stereo and I’d be bawling my eyes out. Jeff would look at me and say, ‘Why are you crying?’ I’d stare at him for a few seconds, then blub, ‘I don’t know!’ I definitely wasn’t the easiest person to live with at that time. Jeff would be out at the shops or doing some TV work, and I’d be on the phone to him saying, ‘You’re leaving me, aren’t you? I’m pregnant and you don’t care!’ I became jealous of everything he did, and in the end I think that’s what drove him further and further away from me. I became a horrible person. I’d never felt this insecure before and I didn’t know how to deal with it.
So then, just to show the nation how many problems we were having, we stupidly agreed to take part in Channel 4’s Celebrity Wife Swap (great idea that one) with Charles and Diana Ingram (the ones accused of the big coughing scam on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?). Ironically, living with Major Ingram actually made me realise what a good thing I had with Jeff, and for a few weeks things got a bit better. I had Bobby four weeks early – brought on by a spicy curry, would you believe! He weighed 5lb 7oz at birth, so he wasn’t a big baby, but it was the most painful thing I had ever experienced. Jeff and I fell in love with him in an instant.
Pretty soon I’d lost the baby weight, done another fitness video and smartened up my look. By which time it was Jeff’s turn to feel insecure and paranoid about me, so the problems and the rows reared their ugly head once more. It was also during this time that I developed an eating disorder. I was making myself sick to keep my weight down, and when I wasn’t doing that I was developing a serious (and very secret) addiction to slimming pills. The more people said how good I looked – I had long dark hair extensions at the time and I nearly combusted on the spot when I read that one newspaper thought I looked like Liz Hurley – the more pressure I felt to maintain it. Slimming pills just seemed like the easy answer to keep the weight off. That was largely because I’d had to confess to Jeff and my mum about making myself sick, which meant it wasn’t very easy for me to hang out near the porcelain pot as often as I wanted to. Pills offered me a sneaky way of doing the same job. I got well and truly hooked on them. Soon I was taking more pills than I should, at up to £230 a bottle, and buying packets of stronger ones off the internet. At one stage I even took a £2,000 trip to America, pretending to be on holiday, just so I could buy the stronger pills. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
The sad thing is that slimming pills seem to be sold everywhere and are so easy to get hold of. It worries me how many other girls are out there now doing what I was.
One night I accidentally drank alcohol at a party after I’d taken a slimming pill, completely forgetting that you’re not meant to drink when you’re on them. I don’t think I’ve ever been so out of it in my life. My heart was racing so fast I thought it was going to jump out of my chest. I actually thought I might have a heart attack. It was frightening. I thought I was being buried alive and that night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I’m a good mother and my addiction never affected Bobby – or Freddy when he came on to the scene – but pills like these are dangerous enough without alcohol.
Still, I carried on popping pills on and off, refusing to talk about it. Even worse, I wasn’t aware at that time how much damage I was doing to my insides. My body is still paying the price now and will be for the rest of my life.
Jeff and I were fighting a lot, but we still loved each other. And then, unexpectedly, we discovered I was pregnant with our second child while I was in the middle of filming a reality show for Channel 5 called Back To Reality. I fainted on TV and was rushed to hospital, where it was confirmed. Even though Jeff’s attitude towards the pregnancy was so positive, our relationship was still a mess, and I spent the following week seriously thinking about whether or not to keep the baby. It was a really difficult time because I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. But I kept these feelings from Jeff and took some time out to think about things. I honestly think that, if I hadn’t already had Bobby, I might’ve had an abortion. Once you are a mother, though, things change. I could never deny Bobby the chance of having a brother or sister. I simply couldn’t do it. So that was it.
Then, while I was pregnant, Jeff and I had a huge great whopper of a row which involved me battering him with a spatula and anything else I could lay my hands on. The next day it was all over the papers. After that we split for good and I gave birth to Freddy as a single mum – although Jeff was present when he was born and, looking back, I’m so glad about that. But the birth was incredibly traumatic – I lost an untold amount of blood and had to have a transfusion (which I’ve since learnt is something to do with the mess my body is in from the slimming pills).
After Jeff I dated a footballer called Ryan Amoo for about two years. He turned out to be a complete psycho who turned on me one day and kept me a virtual prisoner in my own home. I was petrified he was going to kill me. He might have looked to the general public like a skinny little weed but that day he was one seriously scary motherfucker.
Then, towards the end of 2005, I got back with Jeff again – are you keeping up here? – and we really thought we’d be able to make a go of it the second time around. But in the long run we just weren’t right for each other. We’d been through so much from such a young age, but we had to accept that perhaps it was too much and we could never go back to square one.
So by 2006 I was a single girl again – and I was ready to find a nice handsome young man.
I didn’t have very long as a singleton because very soon there was another man in my life – Jack Tweed.
Only he was actually more of a boy. But we’ll get to that part in a bit.
I first met Jack in a nightclub in 2005, just before the time Jeff and I began trying to patch things up (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). Back then I thought it was just one of those encounters that nothing came of. I don’t remember much about that evening, only that I couldn’t help noticing how good-looking he was (but that was the extent of my lust – honest, Jeff!). All my mates were eyeing him up that evening, so he became quite the topic of conversation. Jack and I kept catching each other’s eye, which made me go a bit shy, believe it or not. Then Jen decided to go over and talk to him and give him my phone number. I was mortified because I could see them both talking about me and looking over. I hate stuff like that, it makes me cringe. So I legged it out of the club because I couldn’t stand to watch them.
But I still wanted to know what he’d said about me. When Jen came out