Ken, could catch the train home to Morwell, a town about halfway to Melbourne, after a holiday on our farm. Ken and I had grown up having fun together during the school holidays: kicking the footy, setting traps for rabbits and wombats, playing table tennis, hookey, and board games such as draughts, but my illness denied me the freedom to have fun with Ken any more.
We arrived in town early enough for Mum to buy some fruit and vegetables at the greengrocer’s before going to the railway station. I tagged along behind her. Ken, spotting a Dairy Queen soft-serve icecream sign at the milk bar next door, was off like a shot. He returned at the same time as Mum completed her purchases, and was beaming from ear to ear, juggling three cones filled with swirls of the soft white confection. This was his way of saying ‘thank you’ for his holiday. His kind gesture must have used all his pocket money. He held a cone out to me. I wanted to reach for it, and say ‘thank you’, but instead mumbled, ‘I don’t want it,’ my arms hanging limp at my sides. Mum accepted her cone with grace and glared at me. I wanted to sink through the concrete footpath of Bairnsdale’s Main Street. For once the pull of my Mum, coupled with my desire not to hurt Ken’s feelings, enabled me to respond. I reached out and accepted my cone.
Ken was happy, my mother relieved. We crossed the street to the car. As we left the kerb I lagged behind and dropped my cone in the gutter.
Opening the car door, Mum turned to see my empty hands. Ken looked too; he looked hurt, bewildered.
‘I can’t help it, I was made to do it,’ I wanted to scream, but could manage only: ‘Sorry, I dropped it.’
After Ken departed on the train, Mum, angry and upset, took me to Foards, Bairnsdale’s main clothing store, to buy my new summer uniform—a grey dress and maroon blazer—for secondary school. The school year would start the following week and Mum had delayed fitting me out, hoping I would gain weight first. Now, the store had no uniforms left in stock. ‘This is my punishment,’ I thought, ‘for not eating the ice-cream’. I went home with the only items that were available: black shoes, grey socks and sandshoes.
I was up at 6.30am for my first day at secondary school. There were 38 children in my class, 20 boys and 18 girls.
My anxiety at being out of uniform gave me nightmares. Of 150 Year Seven students, I was one of five girls without the correct dress.
When told the store had sold out of uniforms, Mum, against her will, because she hated buying anything to fit my skeletal frame, bought me a new dress to wear to school until the uniform arrived. I hated this sissy dress, which I wore with my new black shoes and grey socks. Made of fawn-coloured gingham with a white lacy collar and short puffed sleeves, it was lined with a stiff net petticoat that prickled my legs when I sat down.
I wanted to sink through the asphalt of the quadrangle when the girls’ senior mistress called a school assembly and drew attention to students out of uniform. Two weeks passed before my school dress and blazer arrived in the mail.
Sitting alone on a wooden garden seat at school lunchtimes, I pretended to eat the sandwiches Mum packed for me and then, checking no one was looking, would drop them in a bin. None of my primary school classmates were in my class and I didn’t know or care where they were in the big school grounds. Joy was at a senior campus on the other side of town and had her own friends.
Going to high school meant I was away from home from 7.30am until 5pm. On my first school night Mum made a special effort and had tea ready early. I ate a tomato. Eating less was necessary to compensate for exercising less. I sat for hours on the school bus, and in class, and now didn’t have time to feed the calves before and after school.
The challenge of schoolwork was a diversion, but fresh problems were brewing. Almost a year to the day my periods had started, they stopped completely. When I was two weeks overdue, Mum took me to a doctor in Maffra, a town about 50km from home. The doctor, trying to find a reason why I wasn’t eating, told Mum I didn’t want to grow up, that I wanted to be a boy. My weight had dropped to 37kg. I saw another doctor the following week, so weak I no longer cared what happened to me.
Saturday, March 9, Joy’s 15th birthday, dawned hot. I mustered the strength to go swimming in the river and saw a big black snake slither into the water from the grassy bank. As with the red-backed spiders that spun webs in the stable, I treated snakes with guarded respect. This latest one was a whopper and I would tell Mum about it. My family had enough snake stories to fill a book. One brown snake had wrapped itself around Mum’s ankle as she carried a big basket of washing under the bougainvillea arch and through the back gate to the clothesline; another day, when our parents were milking the cows, Joy had shot a black snake on our front lawn, using the .22 rifle that was kept in our washhouse. One bullet and the snake was dead. I was impressed. Dad said a snake did not die until after sundown so we did not worry when it continued to writhe and wiggle.
Back at the house after my swim, I found Mum standing at her pantry workbench, preparing cake mixtures to bake for the birthday celebration.
She paused to wipe sweat from her brow while beating the sugar and butter with the wooden spatula. Dad hadn’t started to milk the cows yet so there was no power for her electric mixer. I stood at the end of the bench watching her fold in the eggs and flour, and wished she wasn’t so tired.
Dusting her hands on her apron, Mum poured the smooth mixture into two round sponge cake tins and carried them through to the little stove in the kitchen. With a potholder she opened the oven door, lifted out two trays of patty cakes and put the sponge mixture in. There was no temperature control on our stove. Mum managed the heat by monitoring the wood placed in the firebox, and adjusting the flue.
She checked the time for the sponges and carried the trays of patty cakes into the pantry. ‘Oh no,’ she cried. The patty cakes, nothing like Mum’s usual little peaked mountains of perfection, had shrunk into flat, rubbery pan-cake shapes.
‘I’ll have to throw these out to the dog and the chooks, no-one will want to eat them,’ she said wearily. She had no time to bake more patty cakes before helping with the afternoon milking and was about to cry. My heart went out to her.
‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll eat them,’ I suddenly said. My words popped out, just like that. For more than a year anorexia had imprisoned my thoughts and now suddenly released them.
Mum was thrilled. Her flop had turned out a winner. I ate the entire batch of 12 rubbery cakes before the day was out.
I was pleased Mum and Dad were happy but I felt strange. Soon I was eating more than rubbery cakes. I was eating my meals, and the urge to hide food and to constantly exercise ebbed away.
Because I was eating and gaining weight, my parents cancelled further medical appointments and Mum celebrated by taking me shopping for my first pair of stockings, complete with suspender belt and a small corset called step-ins. The step-ins held my stockings up and my tummy in. I didn’t have much tummy to hold in – in fact there was a lake between my bony hips—but felt I was starting to grow up. We were about to have a rare weekend away from the farm, to attend a cousin’s wedding near the central Victorian city of Bendigo. We went shopping again while we were in Bendigo and noticed scales outside a chemist shop. I’d gained half a kilogram but remained thin, weighing 14kg less than my mother, who was always slim and ate like a bird. My sister, who loved vanilla slices, chocolate and fresh bread, was 28kg heavier than me.
Each week I gained weight and, without anorexia dominating my thoughts with food, food, food, began to notice life around me. I noted in my diary that the United States sent a man into space. His name was Cooper and he orbited 23 times before returning safely to Earth.
My city cousins
