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

Title Page My Body, My Enemy My thirteen year battle with anorexia nervosa

Note Note To protect the innocent – as well as the guilty – I have changed and omitted some names. While I am pleased to be able to tell the story of my life, I am only sorry that I am still having to protect others. Claire Beeken

Dedication This book is dedicated to my dear friend Caraline. Caraline, I told you that while I was alive people would speak your name. I have kept my promise. Claire Beeken

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Epilogue

Appendix

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

To protect the innocent – as well as the guilty – I have changed and omitted some names. While I am pleased to be able to tell the story of my life, I am only sorry that I am still having to protect others.

Claire Beeken

This book is dedicated to my dear friend Caraline.

Caraline, I told you that while I was alive people would

speak your name. I have kept my promise.

Claire Beeken

The man who ruined my life was dressed as Father Christmas. We were sitting in the front room – Grandma, Mum, Dad, my big brother Michael, my new baby sister Lisa and I – when he walked in with his white beard, red suit and jolly ‘Ho-Ho-Ho!’. I didn’t realize who he was then, when I was three; and it’s funny because now – when I watch the cine-film of Christmas 1973 – I still don’t recognize him as my grandfather.

Granddad and Grandma were Dad’s parents. They lived in the same street as us in Luton and we were a close family. Every Sunday they’d come to our house for dinner or we’d go to theirs. Michael and I totally adored them – there was no reason not to. Grandma was plump and always on a diet, but she loved her food too much. She had dark-grey hair and smoked in those days. Granddad smoked too. He liked Clan tobacco and walked round with his pipe in his mouth even when it wasn’t lit. He had a hooked nose and, under the trilby he always wore, his pure-white hair was thinning. You could tell from his freckly skin that he’d once had bright-ginger hair. Michael and I favoured Granddad because he gave us sweets. So did our dog, Sabre, who was always sniffing his pockets. Granddad would fumble in his pocket, fish out his white handkerchief and the mints he always carried, dig a bit deeper and produce a Mars Bar for us each.

Mum and Dad were poor and really struggled when we were young. Dad worked across the road for a factory manufacturing ball-bearings. As soon as he came in at night, Mum would go out to her cleaning job at the same factory. Dad worked weekends as well, and on Sundays Mum would sit down with us kids to watch the afternoon movie on TV. I liked the old Elvis films and Mum loved anything starring Mario Lanza. Sometimes Mum would point out of the window and say, ‘Look, there’s Daddy.’ We’d look up from the TV screen and there he’d be, waving from the roof of the factory wearing a big black coat with the name of the factory written on the back.

By the time my sister was three months old, money was the least of my parents’ worries. Lisa developed serious breathing problems and at first it was thought she had cystic fibrosis. She was eventually diagnosed as a brittle asthmatic, and the doctors told my parents that she was unlikely to make it to her 18th birthday. Poor Mum and Dad were constantly in and out of hospital with Lisa, and my brother and I increasingly found ourselves at Grandma’s for tea.

Grandma was a great cook – she made homemade doughnuts and did lovely roast potatoes. She used a lot of fat in her cooking and you’d be hit by the smell as you walked through the door. It was a typical old people’s house: the carpet in the hall was an orange and brown pattern and in the front room stood Grandma’s organ and a record-player in a long, old-fashioned cabinet. The records were Granddad’s: he liked popular songs like ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark and ‘Stupid Cupid’ by Connie Francis. The fireplace was almost completely obscured by a battery of family photographs, and on the wall opposite hung a rug with deer on it – I loved that rug. The stairs twisted up to the first bedroom which was Granddad’s. It was a plain room with a wardrobe and two single beds. There were no books by his bed – he didn’t read. Next door was the toilet with its creaky door and cold lino floor. It smelt of hospitals in there and sometimes, instead of toilet paper, there would be newspaper. In the bathroom there was a white enamel bath with lime-scale round the taps – but the house wasn’t dirty, just old. My grandparents had separate rooms, and in Grandma’s there was a double 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.