Sophie Dahl - Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights

For reasons complicated and long, we left the sophisticated city when I was fourteen and fell heavily down to earth, onto England’s sodden soil, in 1991. No one seemed to have heard of ‘low-fat’ in England, not even in London where I was now at day school. They didn’t seem to care all that much. I tried for a few gruelling months to avoid the fat in food I’d learnt to be careful of, but it just kept coming back, persistent as a lover spurned.

I eventually surrendered on a half-term holiday in France with school friends who were eating their croissants and drinking their full-fat milk hot chocolate with deep abandon. Having ascertained that there really was no skimmed milk in the house (or indeed the country), I took the plunge. But oh! How delicious! My taste buds awoke from their New York slumber with the tenacity of Rip Van Winkle and they never slept again.

My body responded, and how; my cheeks plumped up like an indolent Matisse lady’s. On the street, my complicated curves and awkward wiggle sent a message that my brain and heart could not keep up with. Grown men called out to me; dark adult things in sly tones. I found this unsettling and felt naked even when I was dressed. Yet I dressed the part of the vixen in viciously-heeled shoes, breasts jutting forward proudly, betrayed only by my eyes. I was constantly followed home from school, and flashed at on the bus. My mother despaired and sent me to a progressive boarding school in Hampshire, surrounded by fields, where I could stomp around in my inappropriate clothing without being accosted by potential rapists. We lived on bread, and I filled myself brimful with it; warm and soft from the local bakery, covered in butter and Marmite.

Because of my school’s nice progressive nature, there was an abundance of personal choice and options. I discovered one could opt out of games and do something called ‘Outdoor Work’, so I opted out and tottered off to the woods in my suede miniskirts, lamely clutching a saw as I pretended to erect fences with the boys who still played dungeons and dragons. Our fences were spindly rickety efforts and our pig-tending was not much better.

On Wednesday we had a half-day of school to make up for the fact that we had school on Saturday and we were allowed to go into the nearby town in the afternoons, as long as we stayed clear of the pub. My interest in the pub was cursory. On Tuesday nights I planned epic gastronomic excursions, formulating the menu of what and where I would eat, the conclusion invariably involving an epic fiesta of cake and clotted cream.

Unsurprisingly, at boarding school I gained two stone. It happened quite by accident, and I didn’t even notice to begin with, but you can’t exist on bread and cake, with your sole exercise taking the form of watching other people build things, and stay thin. It didn’t occur to me how I could have contributed, or that I could do anything about any of it.

I just thought it was yet another adolescent unfairness foisted upon me. I ate more cake, read tragic French novels and hated the fields and stupid fences I was surrounded by. I longed for London, a minor Parisian appetite, lithe limbs, complication and Chantal Thomas knickers. Mercifully, the knowledge of how to acquire such things remained totally out of my reach.

My country sojourn over, I arrived back in London at sixteen with child-bearing hips and a trunk full of smocks. Everyone pretended not to notice. Sixth form was in Golders Green, and instead of café dining once a week on a Wednesday, planning lunch in the local establishments became a blissful daily affair. This is where all of my summer babysitting money went. At the bottom of Golders Hill, near the station, there was an amazing kosher deli where I ordered fresh bagels, sweet and doughy inside, smothered with thick cream cheese and smoked salmon. In Golders Hill Park, it was the sweet little Italian café where you could get a plate of al dente penne with a smoky tomato sauce and dear little cream-filled pastries for pudding. The pub at the top of the hill was all about jacket potatoes and a fine ploughman’s. But what jacket potatoes—twice-baked and filled with butter, gruyère and watercress, or the alternative: tuna, mayonnaise and sweetcorn. I think I tried to go on a diet once, and it involved, from what I can remember, eating a lot of brown rice and apples and lethicin, because a friend of my mother’s told me that they all lived on it in the seventies and that it melted fat clean away. In the sixth form games were no longer compulsory, and I began to feel the same way about school, causing an academic rift that I rue to this day.

Between school and modelling, before I met Isabella, I was first a nanny, then a waitress. Both were perilous where food was concerned. As a nanny, I was constantly picking at leftover fishfingers, Twiglets, egg sandwiches and Victoria sponge. The two girls I looked after were incredibly sweet: a round baby and a six-year-old with a voice like Marianne Faithfull. We went to lots of rather posh tea parties where the mothers greeted me as ‘Nanny’. I adored the little girls but was a bit hopeless really; not ironing their clothes, taking naps with them and trying on their mother’s scent when she was out. I was very much eighteen. We did, however, make each other laugh, and I loved Jaffa Cakes as much as they did.

I tottered off to the woods, lamely clutching a saw

And not for me the kind of waitressing job where I ran on skinny legs around a steamy frantic environment, collapsing at the end of a twelve-hour shift in sheer anaemic exhaustion. No, I went to work the 7.00 am shift in a coffee-shop bakery after the baking had already taken place. Thus, my arrival coincided happily with things coming out of the oven; a muffin with apple butter, a dark molasses banana bread. I think it was my all-time favourite job. It involved chatting, smiling, eating and concocting lovely coffee-based milkshakes which I would sip through the day. I was an awful waitress, because I was clumsy and could never remember anyone’s order. But they were terribly sweet there, and I learnt how to sweep a floor properly, and that you cannot wear five-inch peep-toed mules to waitress in.

I was dripping in diamonds and not much else

When I began modelling after those brief jobs, I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it. I was in that funny teenage place of being both very aware of, and yet somehow forgetting I had a body. I wanted to look the same as my friends; I wanted to be able to borrow their clothes. Beyond that, I didn’t think about it too deeply.

Issy had never told me to lose weight; she had just said rather vaguely, ‘Now, my love; no more chips and puddings for you, and always wear a good bra and red lipstick.’ My concession to this advice was a DIY diet; eating instant powdered soup with dry pitta bread for three days, which was revolting, and certainly had no effect. I ended up being measured for a bra at Rigby and Peller, which had an infinitely more tangible result than the soup, and also developed a lifelong love affair with Yves Saint Laurent’s Rouge Pur, which smells of roses.

It was Issy who introduced me to Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm Model Management, and when she signed me, weight loss was nowhere on the day’s agenda. Sarah is famously visionary; she discovered Kate Moss at JFK airport when she was fourteen and manages her to this day. With her customary canniness, she saw that there might actually be a place for me in fashion, given the vocal protest the media were making against the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look that was defining style. The timing, and her instinct, made a happy marriage to set the scene for what was about to happen.

My first job was being photographed nude by Nick Knight for ID magazine. They gave me five-inch long silver nails, silver contact lenses and a canvas of skin powdered silver. I don’t remember feeling naked; I felt like an onlooker, such was the transformative power of the hair and make-up, which took four hours. The overriding memory I have of that day is of being turned into someone else; some alter ego with comic-book curves and a rapacious smile. Being naked seemed almost incidental. A few hours later I was sent in a cab up to Park Royal to be shot by David La Chapelle for Vanity Fair in a portfolio about ‘Swinging London’, this time clad in a string bikini. When I went home late that night, I didn’t wash my make-up off because I wanted to wake up looking like that forever. Of course the next morning I was a smeared shell of a creature, my sheets covered in silver dust.