to stop but she was raging. My auntie was shouting, ‘Sue, stop it! Calm down, Sue. Leave her.’ But Mum couldn’t. She was terrified at what was happening to me and overwhelmed with frustration that she couldn’t do anything about it. Nothing she had tried was working, the doctors still weren’t taking her seriously and I was fading away in front of her eyes.
As the weeks went by I became weaker and weaker and was feeling so out of it at school that one day the headmistress called Mum in for a meeting. She said the school couldn’t deal with the responsibility of having me there any longer while I was so ill and I’d have to take some time off.
So that was it, no more school. But by then I was so tired and weak I was beyond caring. I became so weak and helpless that I’d get Mum to carry me around the house. I loved that. I could still have walked if I’d had to, but being carried made me feel like a baby again – it felt safe.
The state I was in gave Mum and Dad a whole new subject to row about. Dad blamed Mum, saying I’d got worse since she’d filed for divorce. Mum blamed Dad for, well, everything that had happened really.
Then, by the February of that year, I’d reduced what I would allow myself to water – which I’d only agree to drink out of one particular sherry glass from the kitchen cabinet – vitamin C pills and the occasional slice of toast or shortbread biscuit.
I was painfully skinny but not only had all my body fat gone, so had my spirit, my energy and my childishness.
Lying on our battered brown corduroy sofa watching television, I was locked in a world far away from everything going on around me. I was unable to concentrate on anything, play with toys, think or even move very much.
For a fortnight I ate virtually nothing at all. I chewed gobstoppers to keep away hunger pangs. And I screamed and lashed out if Mum or Dad tried to make me eat. I was so weak that at night I had to crawl up the stairs to bed as Mum tried to help, tears rolling down her face on to the carpet.
You might wonder why she wasn’t dialling 999 or camping outside the doctor’s front door, but she had been told so many times I’d just ‘snap out of it’ that she had lost all confidence in the system – and in herself. Her self-esteem was shot to pieces after everything she had been through and she had no strength left to fight. But one morning at the beginning of March she knew she couldn’t leave it another day. She helped me into the car and drove me to the GP’s surgery.
When we arrived she helped me out of the car and we found ourselves a seat in the stuffy waiting room. Mum went up to the receptionist and quietly but determinedly stated her case. ‘My daughter is very ill,’ she said. ‘I can’t cope any more. We are going to sit here and we’re not leaving until someone does something to help her.’
This time it took the doctor just one look at me to tell I was dangerously ill. I was malnourished and extremely weak. But most urgent was the fact that I had become severely dehydrated.
I was so tired I hadn’t got the strength to lie when the doctor asked what I’d eaten that day. And Mum was doing all the talking this time anyway. The previous day I’d had a quarter of a slice of toast for breakfast, no lunch and two slices of bread and a fish finger for my dinner. That was all.
The doctors weighed me and I was just 20 kilos (3 stone 2 lb). I had a BMI of 12.4, which meant I was severely underweight. A normal eight-year-old would be around 27 kilos (4 stone 4 lb) – that’s 7 kilos, or more than a stone, heavier than I was.
The doctor promised Mum that by the following day they would have found me a specialist unit where I could be assessed and helped. He turned to me and said, ‘Now go home and eat something – it’ll be your only hope of staying out of hospital.’
When we got home Mum heated up a Cornish pasty for me in the microwave and I ate the lot. It was delicious. After so many weeks of eating almost nothing, it felt amazing.
But within an hour of finishing it, a huge wave of guilt surged over me. I hated myself for being so weak and giving in. You must not do that again, I reprimanded myself.
I went to bed feeling angry at myself and guilt-stricken about how much I’d eaten. And I was terrified of what the morning would bring.
I was lying on the sofa wearing a billowing white dress dotted with huge purple lavender flowers when the call came saying they had found a specialist unit for me.
That morning I’d crawled up to the attic and dug the dress out of our big red dressing-up box. I had a porcelain doll that had an almost identical dress and I decided I wanted to look like her. It must be easy being a doll, I thought.
I put the dress over my head, then, exhausted by the effort, returned to the sofa, where I lay and watched Mum vacuuming around me. By this point I was so sick I could barely move.
‘We’ve got a place for your daughter at the Maudsley Hospital in south-east London,’ the official-sounding woman on the phone told Mum. ‘Can you come straight away?’
‘Oh yes,’ Mum replied. ‘I’d go to hell and back to save my daughter.’ She didn’t know then that hell and back was precisely the journey she would be making over the next nine years.
The following few hours were a flurry of activity. Mum rang Dad, who came straight home from work, picking up Natalie from school on his way. We drove to the station, then set off on the tube journey to the Maudsley.
The Maudsley Hospital is the biggest mental health hospital in Britain. It treats people with all sorts of horrific mental problems, including kids with emotional and behavioural problems, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress, depression and other serious psychiatric conditions. When we turned up there that day, 5 March 1991, I had no idea I was being bracketed with kids so seriously ill.
The journey from Northwood Hills tube station to the other side of London was exhausting. When Mum helped me off the train at Elephant & Castle, people were staring at me. I must have looked like a kid dying of cancer. And when I saw the stairs leading up out of the station, I thought I couldn’t do it – I just didn’t have the energy to get up there. But somehow Mum and Dad helped me and we clambered up into the daylight and through the dirty doors of a red London bus. After about ten minutes the bus lurched to a stop and the doors flew open again. In front of us was the Maudsley.
It was certainly a serious-looking building, with two grand pillars flanking a flight of stone steps that led up to the main entrance. I felt tiny as I crept up the steps and entered the monstrous great building.
Inside we were greeted by a smiley nurse who showed Mum and Dad into a side room for a meeting with Dr Stephen Wolkind, the hospital’s expert in child psychiatry. Natalie and I were taken into another room by a nurse – let’s call her Mary – who gave us crayons and paper to keep us occupied. It felt like Mum and Dad were gone for hours. After Natalie and I had coloured and drawn everything we could think of we wandered outside and sat on the low bars of a climbing frame in the fading spring sunshine.
‘I wish Mum and Dad would hurry up so we can just clear out of this place and go home,’ I said to Natalie. It had never occurred to me I wouldn’t be back in time for Neighbours.
Then Natalie pushed me on the swings for a bit. I was too weak to push her. But still Mum and Dad didn’t emerge from their meeting. What could they be talking about?
Finally Mary, the nurse, came out to the swings and told me it was time to go in. She led me down a corridor and into a small cubicle. Inside there was a narrow single bed, a table and a chair. She sat me down at the table and told me to wait a moment. A couple of minutes later she returned carrying a glass of milk, a couple of cream crackers and some cheese.
‘Here’s a snack,’ she