The Real Me is Thin

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’.