Claire Beeken - MY BODY, MY ENEMY - My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa

‘Mum, you know Granddad?’ I say one day when I am 12 and desperately wanting to tell. ‘Yes?’ she replies. But the words wedge in my throat – what if she doesn’t believe me, what if I split up the family? I change the subject and swallow my terrible secret. As it festers inside, my behaviour worsens. I am either extremely high or extremely low. When I come home from school I often go upstairs to my bedroom and shut the door. I lie there for a good hour listening to my stereo before I can bring myself to speak to anyone. I love my family, but one of them is hurting me.

I have to share my bedroom with Lisa. We have Holly Hobbie wallpaper and matching duvets – Lisa is allergic to sheets and blankets. There are two white fitted cupboards along one wall with a dressing table in the middle. On it I keep my jewellery box which plays Swan Lake when you open it, and a bottle of ‘Rose’ perfume that I bought from the Avon lady. Lisa is hard to share a room with because when she isn’t having an asthma attack she is being neurotic. Before she can go to sleep she has to touch the light switch over and over again, and say ‘Goodnight, God bless, sweet dreams’ to me 50 times. But I pay her back with my own catalogue of nocturnal twitches.

Sometimes, when I’m asleep, my eyes open. I go to bed early one night and Lisa comes in, thinks I am awake and starts talking to me. My subconscious may be keeping watch for the enemy, but I am fast asleep. Poor Lisa runs screaming down the stairs to Mum, thinking I am dead.

My sleep-walking frightens the hell out of Lisa too. She wakes to find me shouting, pulling the curtains and trying to climb out of the window. Another night she has one of her nosebleeds and, thinking I am awake, asks me to get her some loo paper. I go downstairs to the bathroom and come back with a hairbrush. ‘What good’s that going to do?’ she says, packing me off downstairs again. Apparently, I wrench the toilet-roll off its holder, go into Mum and Dad’s bedroom, turn on the light, lob the loo roll at Dad’s head and go back to bed. I am asleep the entire time.

‘Play with me, Claire,’ Lisa is always moaning. I don’t want to, but sometimes Mum makes me. We play The Wizard of Oz, but I always make sure that I am Dorothy, and Lisa is the Witch. As we grow older we have more in common, and when I am 13 and she is 9 we are both Fame mad – I have a Fame T-shirt and a Fame dance outfit – and love Thursday nights because Fame is on TV. I am finding it harder and harder to stomach my evening meal and, to Mum and Dad’s annoyance, pick at my food and push it round the plate; but on Thursdays I eat everything. I am always extra-hungry because I’ve had dance at school and then done my paper-round which means a lot of uphill walking. Mum cooks burgers and ravioli or a curry – I love her curries – and then she goes late-night shopping, leaving Lisa and me scoffing toffees in front of Fame.

‘Karen Carpenter has died from the effects of anorexia,’ it says on the News on 4 February 1983. They show a video clip of her singing ‘Mr Postman’ while she flies around on the elephants at Disneyland. ‘What was the matter with her, Dad?’ I ask. I like The Carpenters: when I was little I used to stand on Dad’s toes and we’d dance around to their music. ‘She bleedin’ starved herself to death, didn’t she! Silly girl, throwing all that away,’ he says. I don’t understand it. I’ve never heard of anorexia, and my poor father never dreams that it is a word that will become all too familiar.

Everybody calls me ‘Stick Insect’ and takes the pee out of me, but I don’t think I am as thin as a girl in my class called Kate; now, she is disgustingly thin! ‘You’re very thin, Kate,’ I say. ‘You’re a lot skinnier than me,’ she protests. ‘I’m not,’ I say, getting annoyed. We end up in some almighty rows. When we are in a childcare lesson, we get out the scales to settle it once and for all. I am gutted, absolutely gutted – she weighs 7 stone, I weigh 6½. I really thought I was bigger than her. It makes me so angry to be constantly teased about my weight, but it never crosses my mind that if I eat more I’ll get bigger.

I might be skinny but inside I boil with an aggression that puts the fear of God into my fellow cadets in the Air Training Corps. My brother Michael is in the ATC first and I keep badgering his squadron leader to let me join. ‘Girls put up wallpaper and paint pretty patterns. They can’t be in the ATC,’ scoff Michael and his friend Glyn, who are both in Icknield Squadron. But I want to do athletics and shoot with guns and go on weekend camps like the boys. When I am 14 the squadron leader relents and lets me enrol; and the boys in the squadron hate it.

‘Get over here!’ the squadron leader yells, and I love it. I try really hard not to be girly; I practise shooting with a 303 rifle until my shoulder is purple with bruises, and scrap with the best of them. I adore my airforce blue uniform – the thick serge trousers, the big jumper with patches, the beret with its badge and, best of all, the huge pair of Doc Marten boots with steel toe-caps.

We are on night exercise near Aylesbury and have been split into two teams. My team has to find the bomb the enemy has planted and bring it back to camp. The squadron leader blindfolds us and drives us round and round in a van until we don’t have a clue where we are. Then he unties our blindfolds and dumps us in a field. It’s pitch-black and we have a great time diving on haystacks thinking they are the enemy. And then I spot a boy we call ‘Mong’ who is on the other team. Leaving my team behind I charge through the bushes, grab his legs, and throw him to the ground. Before he can scramble up, I sit on him. ‘Where’s the bomb? Where’s the bomb?’ I shout, laying into the enemy with my fists. ‘Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me!’ the poor bloke begs. I am the lightest in the squadron, but I am on a mission and ‘Mong’ doesn’t stand a chance. After that, all the boys want me in their team, otherwise I end up half-killing them!

When I’m not exorcising my anger in the ATC, or pushing myself through punishing dance routines to ease my pain, I spend hours and hours playing with my pets. I prefer them to people – animals don’t hurt you.

Our house is a regular zoo. After Sabre dies, we get another Alsatian called Drummer, and have three fish – Freddie, Goldie and Rainbow, so-called because she has red lips, and four rabbits which I name Bramble, Holly, Smoky and Thumper. We start off with Bramble and Holly, and we kids buy Smoky for Mum and then Thumper for Dad one Father’s Day. With each new addition our long-suffering father extends the existing hutch upwards.

Out shopping one Saturday I fall in love with a guinea-pig in the pet shop. I know Dad won’t be pleased when I come home with yet another pet, but I want this guinea-pig badly. He looks just like a ginger scrubbing brush and I call him Fibre. I pay £3 for him, and carry him home in a cardboard box. Well, Dad goes spare! There is no room to add another floor to the high-rise hutch and he says I have to take Fibre back to the shop. But good old Granddad saves the day. He offers to make Fibre a hutch but says I have to help him. Grandma says if I go down one night after school she’ll do me tea. I know what I’m letting myself in for, but I want to keep my guinea-pig so much that I agree.