realise that this time things were really bad. But, because divorce is such a big thing for a kid to get their head around, I don’t think either of us had really thought it would happen.
One morning, soon after Natalie had left for her school and I was waiting for Mum to walk me to mine, she came into my room, knelt down in front of me and just hugged me and burst into tears. I said, ‘Mum, why are you crying?’ And she just wouldn’t tell me. I kept asking her why, but she couldn’t say.
It was a Saturday morning a couple of weeks later when Dad and Mum told us what was really happening. They had been rowing for hours, shouting and screaming at each other. Nat and I just wanted them to hurry up because Dad always took us swimming on a Saturday morning.
Then they came out of the kitchen and took us into the living room. ‘Right,’ said Mum, ‘Your dad and I are going to separate.’
I felt numb. Mum was crying, then Dad started sobbing like a baby. Every time she went to speak, he would shout over her. Then Mum was screaming, ‘Let me speak, let me speak,’ but when she began he stormed out of the room. It was like something out of EastEnders – I didn’t think this could happen in real life.
My whole childhood had been blown apart.
Half an hour later, Dad took me and Natalie swimming and we had a really cool competition to see who could stay underwater the longest. Weird, isn’t it?
I pulled my Benetton stripy top over my head and slid my jeans with the Minnie Mouse patches down over my ankles, then just stood and stared.
I was standing, again, in front of the floor-length mirror inside the door of the wardrobe in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, wearing just my knickers. In reality I was probably a tiny bit chubby at the time, but all I could see was someone mega fat compared with everyone else at gymnastics and everyone else in my class at school, if not the rest of the world.
By now I was spending more and more time analysing my body and staring at the bodies of other girls around me to see how I compared. At that time cycling shorts were really in fashion and everyone was wearing them. I’d look at anyone wearing them and if their thighs touched when their feet were together they were fat. If their thighs didn’t touch they were skinny and I wanted to look like them. Mine touched.
School swimming lessons were a total nightmare – all those girls in their swimming costumes looking slim and gorgeous and athletic, and then there was me. I was just a big lump. I felt fat compared with all my friends and virtually everyone else.
I spent ages working out which girls in my class had bigger thighs than me, which had rounder tummies and which had chubbier arms.
And just when I thought I couldn’t look any worse plodding from the changing rooms to the swimming pool, the unthinkable happened – Nicola Carter got a green swimming costume with ruffles on it. Exactly the same as mine! Now it would be obvious to everyone that my bum was totally massive next to hers. I’d never ever live down the ‘Big Nikki’ label.
I hated the way I looked. Giving up chocolate had made me feel good but it hadn’t really done anything to make me lose weight, so I had to take more drastic action. At eight years old I was too young to understand about calories, but I knew – like all kids do – that some things are ‘bad’ for you. For goodness sake, adults never stop going on about it: ‘Don’t eat all those crisps, they’re bad for you’ or ‘Eat your cabbage, it’s good for you.’
So really it was quite easy to know what to do – just follow the grown-ups’ rules. I started denying myself all the ‘bad’ things that Mum, Dad, my friends’ parents and teachers had ever talked about – chips, pastry, custard, puddings, chocolate and crisps. If Mum was going to cook ‘bad’ foods I’d suggest something else instead, saying I’d gone off chips or wasn’t in the mood for custard. And at first, preoccupied with her own losses and sadness, Mum didn’t have a clue what I was up to.
I took any opportunity I could find to deprive myself of ‘bad foods’. One Saturday afternoon it was Joanna Price’s birthday party. Her parents had arranged for a swimming party but while everyone else was chucking each other in the pool and screaming crazily, I stood quietly at the shallow end, checking out their thighs and tummies. Afterwards, back at Joanna’s house, I carefully picked all the fruit out of a trifle, leaving the jelly and custard at the bottom of my bowl. I was determined I would be the skinniest girl in a swimming costume for the next party.
Then I started giving away my food at lunchtime. Every morning Mum would send me off to school with my yellow teddy-bear lunchbox filled with sandwiches, a bag of Hula Hoops, a Blue Riband chocolate bar and a satsuma. And every night I returned with the box empty except for a few crumbs stuck to the bottom.
What Mum didn’t know was that I’d hardly touched the food she had put inside. It was easy to offload the crisps and chocolate to any of the greedy-guts who sat near me at dinner break. After a couple of months I started depriving myself of the sandwiches too. They were more difficult to give away, so I’d stick them straight in a bin instead.
With a couple of hundred kids all sitting eating their lunch in the school hall, there was no way a teacher could notice what I was doing. One day my friend Joanna asked why I kept giving my food away but I just laughed and changed the subject. I didn’t really have an answer for that question myself.
As I never, ever felt hungry, I didn’t care about going without lunch. I just felt good inside when I denied myself. I felt kind of victorious, as if I had won a battle that only I was aware was taking place.
By the autumn of 1990 my thinking had moved determinedly into a place where I was going to eat as little as possible and become as skinny as possible. Then I started skipping breakfast. Before, Mum had always made me and Natalie sit down for a bowl of Frosties or Ricicles. But it was so frantic in our house in the morning that it was dead easy to chuck them in the bin or ram them down the plug hole of the sink without Mum or even Natalie noticing.
Mum would be dashing in and out of the shower to get dressed and make her own breakfast and I quickly learned how to get rid of any evidence very fast indeed. Other mornings I’d say to her, ‘Don’t bother sorting any breakfast for me. I’ve already made myself a couple of slices of toast.’ Even then I was like a master criminal – I’d crumble a few crumbs of bread on a plate, then leave it on the draining board to make my story appear believable.
At first Mum bought it, but then she noticed I was losing weight and her suspicions were aroused. One afternoon I walked in from school and instead of her normal cheery smile and ‘Hi, darling,’ she just stared at me. I could see the shock in her eyes. She had noticed for the first time that I had dramatically lost weight. My grey pleated school skirt was swinging around my hips whereas before it had sat comfortably around my tummy. And my red cardigan was baggy and billowing over the sharp angles of my shoulders.
‘Nikki, you’re wasting away,’ she half joked. ‘You’ll have to eat more for your dinner.’ But behind the nervous laugh there was strain in her voice. Maybe in the back of her mind she had noticed I’d been getting skinnier for a while, but now it was blatantly obvious.
It didn’t bother me how worried she was, though. I was losing weight and it was good, good, good.
From then on Mum watched me like a hawk at every meal. The next breakfast time I used my ‘I’ve had toast earlier, Mum’ line she was on to me in a flash.
‘Well, if you have, young lady, how come the burglar alarm didn’t go off when you went into the kitchen, because I set it last night?’ she said.
She angrily tipped a load of Frosties into a bowl, doused them in milk and slapped them down in front of me. I spent the next 20 minutes pushing them around the bowl with my