pair of £375 Gina shoes. It was the most I’d ever spent on an outfit and I had never, ever felt so special.
I’d been dropped off at the Royal Albert Hall in a limousine and as I walked down the red carpet, hundreds of people stood 20 deep at either side, calling my name and elbowing one another out of the way to ask me to sign autographs. Beyond them was a bank of paparazzi photographers taking my photograph from every angle.
For anyone, that night would have been special. But for me it was miraculous. Because for so long no one had even imagined I would still be alive then, let alone receiving a coveted television award.
I had been just eight years old when I began a determined and resolute campaign to starve myself to the brink of death. Or beyond that if need be, as I wasn’t much bothered if I lived or died.
At that time, the late 1980s, I was one of the youngest people in Britain to have ever been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa – a psychiatric illness which makes people, usually teenagers, desperate to become as thin as possible and develop an obsessive fear of gaining any weight at all.
For the best part of the next decade I stumbled around a miserable circuit of hospitals, specialist units, my own home and foster care, as doctor after doctor tried and failed to make me eat.
My childhood was shattered and I grew up in institutions surrounded by kids with the most horrific mental problems. At night there was no one to kiss my head as I curled up in my hospital bed. In the morning there was no one to cuddle me when I woke up sleepy and scared.
I became brutalised, like a wild child who had lost touch with normal behaviour. I’d scream and scratch and yell and fight when people tried to make me eat.
A perfectionist from the start, I was determined not just to be anorexic. I wanted to be the best anorexic Britain had ever known. Many of my doctors think I achieved that. They stuck tubes up my nose, stitched tubes into my stomach and pumped me so full of drugs to control me that I became like a zombie. But still I wouldn’t willingly give in to their demands that I should eat.
Once I lay in a hospital bed just 15 minutes from death as my mum begged me to cling on to life. Twice I took overdoses in a bid to end my misery. The first time I was just 13 years old.
But gradually, miraculously, I discovered that there could be a special life for me outside of hospitals and institutions if I chose to live it.
This is the story of that choice, and it is the choice I hope and pray other kids with anorexia will one day find the strength to take.
Looking back to the house at 37 Stanley Road before everything went wrong, it always seems to have been summer. Back then everything was good, better than good. I had one of those childhoods you normally only see in cereal adverts.
We didn’t have bags of money or live in a huge mansion, but we had fun. There were summer holidays to Greece, Mum and Dad would cuddle up on the sofa to watch a video on a Saturday night, I had a grandad I adored who had an endless supply of corny jokes, and sometimes my older sister/occasional friend/usually arch enemy Natalie even let me play with her collection of scented erasers!
There was Mum and Dad and Natalie and me (and Rex, our dog). And it worked. My mum, Sue, was tall and slim. She was shy compared with other kids’ mums but she doted on me and Nat. She worked as a dinner lady but was always home in time to cook our tea – and she was an amazing cook. Nothing fancy, but proper home cooking that we all sat around the table to eat. Every night it was something different – spaghetti Bolognese, lasagne or a macaroni cheese that was worth running the full length of Stanley Road for.
Then there was my dad, Dave. And while of course I loved Mum, with Dad it was something more – I adored him.
Mum always laughs that the love affair between me – Nicola Rachel-Beth – and Dad started within minutes of my arrival at Northwood Park Hospital on 28 April 1982. After Natalie, Dad had been hoping for a boy but when I burst into the world screaming my lungs out he was, for some reason, totally smitten. From that point onwards I was the apple of his eye.
After the birth, the nurses wheeled Mum away to stitch her up. She left Dad sitting in a corner of the room by a window, holding this little bundle with jet-black, sticky-up hair and chubby cheeks.
When Mum was brought back an hour later, the sun had gone down and the room was pitch-black but Dad hadn’t even got up to switch the light on. He was still sitting in exactly the same position, transfixed by the new arrival – me.
As I got older the bond only grew stronger. But it was kind of OK because there was an unspoken agreement in our house – Mum had Natalie and Dad had me.
I couldn’t leave Dad alone. And for him little ‘Nikmala’ was pure delight.
By the time I was four or five, every time Dad left the house to go to work or pop down the pub I’d go belting down the road after him, begging to be allowed to stay with him.
I’d spend hours standing outside the betting shop at the corner of our street after Dad disappeared inside, rolled-up racing pages clenched in his hand as if armed ready for battle. Kids weren’t allowed in and the windows were all covered over, but whenever the door was pushed ajar I’d sneak a glimpse of that mysterious male world of jittery TV screens, unfathomable numbers and solitary gamblers, all engulfed in thick cigarette smoke.
It became a standing joke in our family that whenever Dad emerged from the bookies’ with a brisk, ‘Right, off home now, Nikmala,’ I’d reply, ‘Can’t you take me to another betting shop, Dad? Please?’
By the age of five I’d started going running with Dad. He loved keeping fit and so did I.
Dad worked shifts at a big bank in London, looking after its computer system. It meant he wasn’t around a lot of the time but the moment he stepped inside the door I was all over him.
Everyone wanted to be around Dad, to laugh at his jokes and hear his stories. Well, at the time I thought it was everyone, but looking back I think it was probably just women. In fact even at seven I knew that Dad was a bit of a ladies’ man. He couldn’t take us for a plate of chips at the Wimpy without chatting up the girl behind the counter.
You name her, Dad would try to turn on the charm for her – my nursery school teacher, the lifeguards when he took me swimming on a Sunday morning, holiday reps; pretty much anyone really. But at that point it just seemed harmless, a bit of a fun. I had no idea what was really going on in my parents’ marriage and how it would soon tear our family apart.
We also spent a lot of time with my Grandad, my mum’s dad. He always had a pipe sticking out of the corner of his mouth and Natalie and I called him ‘Popeye’. He had just one tooth in his bottom gum which he’d wiggle at me, ignoring my squeals, as I sat on his lap, cosy in the folds of his woolly cardigan.
Up until I was seven everything was fun. With just two years separating us, Natalie and I were constant playmates. Then, as now, our relationship veered between soul mates one day and sworn enemies the next, but hey, at least things were never boring.
We were always very competitive with each other. Natalie was a jealous toddler the day I first appeared home from hospital in the back of the family Morris Minor. And we still fight over Mum’s attention now. Mum always went out of her way to treat us fairly and make sure we both felt included in everything. But it was never enough to stop the bickering. If I even thought about touching one of Natalie’s favourite Barbie dolls, she’d go mad. But I was just as protective over my toys.
When I was five or six I would pore over the family photo albums and jealously interrogate Mum about any pictures I didn’t appear in.
‘Why are you cuddling Natalie in this picture and I’m not there?’