young as I was, I was old enough to know that my only option was to play the system.
OK, I’ll comply with their rules, I thought. But as soon as I get out of here I’ll eat whatever I want and get as skinny as I can as soon as I can. I’ll eat whatever they serve me up and pretend I’m better.
The food’s just like medicine, I told myself. I’ll take it to get them off my back. So every mealtime I sat obediently at the small, square table, pushed up against a blank wall, and slowly yet surely cleared my plate.
It was real old-fashioned school food, like liver with potatoes and green beans, steak and kidney pie and shepherd’s pie. All of it was disgusting but I got my head down and got on with it.
During mealtimes there was no one to talk to, nothing to look at and nothing to do. In some ways eating the food relieved the boredom – and knowing this was just a game, something I’d do to shut everyone up, made me feel like I was still in control too.
And when I ate my food everyone treated me so much more nicely. If I ate my meals I’d be allowed out of my cubicle to play with the other kids on the ward. There were about ten of them, but I was the only one with an eating disorder. The rest were just oddballs.
A girl called Janey used to run up and down the ward shouting and swearing at the nurses. She’d been kicked out of school and seemed totally out of control.
Then there was Anna, who was about the same age as me, and she had behavioural problems and Down’s Syndrome. At that stage I was really into Felt by Numbers, a cross between Fuzzy Felt and Painting by Numbers. I was mad about it and for a while Mum had been buying me a box of it every weekend. When I’d finished my felt works of art I Blu-Tacked them up all around my room and they looked amazing.
One morning Anna came into my room when I wasn’t there and pulled every single one of my Felt by Numbers off the wall and threw them on the floor. When I returned and saw hundreds of pieces of felt lying higgledy-piggledy all over the floor I was heartbroken. I squatted down, picked them up and stuck each tiny piece back in its correct place. It took hours.
Next morning Anna came back and did exactly the same again.
The boys on the unit were really naughty too – some had behavioural problems and others would shout and swear at any time of the day or night. And we had another couple of Down’s Syndrome kids too.
I’d never come across kids with mental problems before and it was utterly terrifying. The screaming and shouting at night, the dramatic mood swings and violent outbursts were all alien to me and I felt so isolated. If one of the kids was having a temper tantrum at night, I’d pull the sheets and blanket over my head and try to block out the noise by thinking about home.
But the other kids’ rages and fits taught me something too – it got them attention and for a short while it gave them control. I think that on some level this sunk into my brain because within the year I was ranting and raving like the rest of them.
My first week at the Maudsley seemed to last for ever but within a month I understood the system and just got on with it. As a child you become institutionalised very quickly.
I made friends with a couple of the other girls and even the really weird kids started to seem more normal with every day that passed. There was a girl called Emily who used to shout all the time and couldn’t stop lying. She probably had Tourette’s Syndrome or something similar, but at the time I thought she was just mental. Even so, we became friends and would hang around together. Well, it was either that or being on my own all the time.
I’d been in the Maudsley for a fortnight before Mum and Dad were finally allowed to visit. When it was time for them to leave I cried hysterically again, grabbing hold of Mum’s leg. After that they came every week and I got more used to the partings, but it was never easy. Mum was relieved that I had a bit more meat on me and that for the moment I was safe, but they didn’t dare look any further forward than that.
Natalie came to visit a couple of times but only because she was ordered to by Mum. I could tell from the way she looked around the place out the corner of her eyes that she hated it. I don’t blame her at all. She was still just a kid herself and it was a dark, horrible, looming building filled with all these nutcase kids.
I think she also felt sorry for me having to live there. As my big sister, she felt bad I was there and not her, but at the same time she couldn’t help feeling glad it wasn’t her too.
Spending all weekend on the ward was really miserable. All the other kids went home on a Friday evening so I’d be on my own apart from a couple of nurses who were called in especially to look after me.
Chesney Hawkes’s ‘The One and Only’ was number one in the charts at the time and whenever I hear that song I’m instantly transported back to the Maudsley with that playing on radio and me playing the hundredth game of KerPlunk with a nurse in a deserted day room on a Saturday afternoon.
Those weekends dragged on for ever. Sometimes one of the nurses would take me out on a little trip but other times I’d just watch films or write letters to my friends.
Then, after three months, I was told that as long as I continued to reach my target weight each week I would be allowed to go home at weekends. I was over the moon.
I was weighed every Friday afternoon and if I hit my target, Mum and Dad could come and collect me. If I didn’t hit the target, though, there was no way on earth I could persuade the doctors to let me go.
The first weekend I was allowed home, I was so excited. Mum and Dad came to pick me up and we went home together on the tube.
I kept thinking about climbing into my old bed, seeing Natalie and my friends. And best of all, I wouldn’t have to eat as much as in hospital. Re-sult!
‘Am I going to have to eat this weekend?’ I asked Mum as the train doors slid shut at Elephant & Castle.
‘Yes, you are,’ Mum replied firmly. ‘We’ve been instructed by the hospital exactly what you have to eat – they have given us menu sheets and told us how much weight you’ve got to maintain over the weekend. So you have to eat.’
Mum and Dad would take it in turns to pick me up for ‘home weekends’. Their divorce was finalised in July that year but they were still living under the same roof and on reasonable enough terms to present a united front to me. You didn’t have to dig far below the surface, though, to hit a wall of mutual resentment between them.
The moment I walked out of the gates of the Maudsley on a Friday evening, rush-hour traffic roaring up and down Denmark Hill, I felt elated, free and victorious that Mum and Dad were there together to pick me up.
But by the time I’d stepped through my front door an hour and a half later my thoughts had already turned to how I was going to get out of eating between then and Sunday night. My goal for home weekends soon became purely to lose the weight I’d had to put on during the week – and I’d do my damnedest to achieve it.
Relations with Nat could be pretty fraught on my home weekends too. In the months I’d been away she had been transformed from ‘Natalie Grahame’ to ‘Nikki Grahame’s sister’. At school she felt other kids and teachers only wanted to talk about me and how I was getting on, when I might be back and if I was feeling any better.
Things were tense between Natalie and Dad too, as she was mad at him about the divorce. She had always been closer to Mum than to him and in some ways had been quite pleased at first that they were splitting up because she felt he had been so horrid to Mum. But then Nat didn’t want Tony being close to Mum either. So she was mad at Dad for allowing that to happen too.
There was certainly a lot of anger in our house back then. Some of the doctors were concerned about me returning to that environment at weekends but Mum and Dad could have been attacking each other with chainsaws as far as I was concerned – I just wanted to be at home.
Yet as the weeks rolled by, home visits became more and more about skipping