MY BODY, MY ENEMY: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa. Claire Beeken
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bed, a dressing table and a clock with a loud tick. By the bed there were always hardback books from the library by Catherine Cookson or Jean Plaidy, a pair of reading glasses with thick, milk-bottle lenses, and religious things like rosary beads and Mass cards. Lastly, there was a tiny boxroom which housed Grandma’s big brown sewing machine with its fascinating pedals that I loved to press.
Grandma and Granddad’s back garden was a sun-trap. You opened the kitchen door and stepped down two steps to the coal bunker, which we kids were just desperate to jump off. ‘Get down!’ the adults would yell. But we knew that if we were good Granddad would sit us up there. We weren’t allowed to move a muscle until he lifted us back down, in case we hurt ourselves. A thin concrete path ran the length of the garden, and an apple tree grew on either side. Behind the trees stood the shed where Granddad did his carpentry. He used to work as a chippy and he made amazing pieces of furniture. He retired when I was seven and I remember his retirement ‘do’. Dad has a picture of me at the party – I’m wearing a blue dotted dress and have two pink ribbons in my hair.
I am nine when he begins touching me. My parents have just started trusting me to make a pot of tea and I am keen to demonstrate my new skill to him. Grandma is out and I feel very grown-up as I stand in his kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, carefully heaping the right amount of tea leaves into the cracked white pot and setting out mismatched cups and saucers. I am surprised when Granddad comes up behind me and clasps me to him. Even more so when he turns me around, bends down and kisses me hard on the lips. His close tobacco breath makes me gasp. ‘I love you, I really love you,’ he whispers as his freckly old hands work their way over my body like a pair of poisonous spiders. Trapped in the sun-bright kitchen, a swell of unease washes over me, and my innocence begins to dissolve.
It next happens when Grandma is away. I go round one afternoon to find Granddad watching a film. He loves old films and likes a bet, and you can guarantee he’ll either be watching the horses or a black-and-white movie. I make the tea and sit next to him. ‘I’d really like to take you to my boudoir,’ he says softly. Boudoir? I don’t know what a boudoir is. I am sitting there, turning the word over in my mind, when he says ‘Kiss me.’ I peck him on the cheek, as a little girl does. ‘No, on the lips. Properly,’ he insists, grabbing my face and forcing my lips to his. When he releases me I pipe up, ‘What’s a boudoir, Granddad?’ ‘I’ll show you,’ he says; and he does.
I think I might have dreamed what Granddad did, but the pain between my legs tells me it’s real. He said he did it because he loves me, and I believe him. Granddad makes me feel special and, with all the attention on my sick little sister, I need to feel special. I know that Mum and Dad love me, but I am jealous of Lisa and her illness which takes up so much of their time. Granddad is showing me all this love and at first I want to hold on to it. ‘Don’t you love me today, Granddad?’ I say when he doesn’t touch me.
What he does to me hurts, but I switch my mind to other things: meadows, flowers, whole episodes of Coronation Street. I lie there re-enacting the antics of Jack and Vera Duckworth and Hilda Ogden in my head, while the white-faced alarm clock by my grandfather’s bed ticks away my childhood. Afterwards I feel like a zombie. I eat the Mars Bar he always gives me and walk home in a daze – alone if it is daylight, under grandfatherly escort if it is dark.
‘Why are you always kissing Claire, Granddad?’ asks my cousin. We are sitting watching television while the rest of the family are outside. Granddad keeps coming back indoors, leaning over the back of the settee and sticking soggy kisses on my forehead. Granddad doesn’t answer the question, but looks down at me and winks. I feel awkward in the spotlight of my grandfather’s attention, and wish I could fall between the settee cushions like a lost penny.
I love Granddad, but what he’s doing doesn’t feel right and I need to know if it is normal. ‘What does your Granddad do with you?’ I quiz a girl in my class at school. ‘Oh, he takes me to the park and buys me ice cream and we have fun,’ she breezes. ‘Does he cuddle you?’ I ask. ‘Yes, he cuddles me,’ says my classmate. ‘What else does he do?’ I probe. ‘Nothing, why?’ she says. ‘No reason,’ I reply, changing the subject quickly.
I start being frightened to go to my grandparents’ house on my own. Grandma goes away a lot – to her sister’s or her son’s, and once to see her brother in Canada for a six-week holiday. ‘Why don’t you go down and see Granddad?’ Mum would say. ‘You know you’re his favourite.’ I’d feel the familiar scream rise up inside me: ‘But I don’t want to be Granddad’s favourite. It doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t feel right being Granddad’s favourite.’ But my pain never slips out. Instead it moulders away in my head. I begin to develop searing migraines, and lie clutching my head while a rat seems to gnaw inside my skull. I cry a lot too, but never in front of anyone. I huddle up in my bed under the window, and through my tears I pray to God to take me away. I am always saying sorry to Him because I think I must be really bad. Why else does He let it keep happening to me? Why else am I being punished?
My 10th birthday is in April, and around this time my headaches become more frequent. I am also finding it difficult to eat – I can’t shake the feeling that a bad thing will happen to me if I put something in my mouth. Mum and Dad don’t notice at first, probably because I’ve been a difficult eater since the day I was born. During my first few months I had a bad chest and couldn’t eat and breathe at the same time; I had to be fed like a little chick, every hour, 24 hours a day. The cine-film of my christening shows me looking like a war baby in a television news report.
I grow to be a faddy eater and particularly loathe school dinners, which annoys the dinner lady, Mrs Bacon. Her real name is Mrs something else but for some reason I’ve got it into my head that she’s called Mrs ‘Bacon’. One day, when I am six, she insists I stay behind to eat the dinner which, as usual, I have barely touched. The other children scatter to the playground, and I am left in the dining hall listening to their distant shouts. Mrs Bacon sits over me in her sickly-patterned overall and makes me eat. ‘I’m going to be ill if you make me eat any more,’ I say, staring into my bowl of semolina. ‘You’ve got to eat it,’ she insists. I take another mouthful and my body gives a tremendous heave. Out fly the cabbage, the mash, the meat and the semolina with its little dollop of pink jam – all over the blue Formica tabletop and onto the floor. Mrs Bacon looks horrified, and shoos me off to the medical room as fast as she can. With a feeling of relief, I leave her to cover my dinner with the powdery disinfectant that always lies like a sand-dune after somebody has been sick.
As I get older, I refuse to eat anything resembling an animal or fish. I’ll happily tuck into sausages, beefburgers and fish-fingers but won’t touch sliced ham, roast beef or lamb. I eat chicken – but not the skin – and for some reason I never eat sandwiches unless they’ve been made by me or my mum.
Mum and Dad have always taken it for granted that I am a fussy, skinny kid, but when I get even fussier and skinnier during the autumn of 1980, they start to worry. After I’ve been off school for several days with a migraine and unable to manage any food at all, Mum takes me to the doctor. My plummeting weight and excruciating headaches point to meningitis, and I am whisked into the Children’s Annexe of Luton and Dunstable Hospital for tests.
At first they put me in a room on my own and I hate it: I pick at the awful food and am bored because I’m not allowed out of bed. Worst of all I am missing school. I hate school too, but I’ve been cast as the Virgin Mary in the school Christmas play. Grandma gave me a painted statue of the Virgin which I keep on the sill in my bedroom and carefully lift down onto my bed to dust. She is my pride and joy, and it has been my dream to play Mary since I was in the Infants. Rehearsals for the play have started, and I am worried that my understudy will get her hands on my part while I’m in hospital. Her name is Fleur: ‘It’s