called me ‘stuck up’ and ‘rude’ when I didn’t want to join them in visiting our neighbours, who put the kettle on for a cuppa, whatever the time of day, and served sugar-laden cakes and biscuits.
I had friends on neighbouring farms but preferred to be alone or doing outdoor jobs. Luckily Mum liked me to help Dad and I was with him every possible moment. She worked hard, helping on the farm when I was at school, and she kept our house spotless and our large cottage garden beautiful.
Some local families had electric power, but it hadn’t entered our valley yet, so Mum did her housework manually: polishing the linoleum floors on her hands and knees, beating her cake mixtures with a wooden spatula, and washing our clothes in a wood-fired copper. She prodded the clothes with a broken axe handle before heaving them into a concrete trough to rinse in cold water, and wrung them by hand before pegging them on the outside line. The steel-bladed Southern Cross windmill by the river provided our water supply, pumping water to a tank 100 metres uphill from the house to gain sufficient pressure. Careful usage was essential because otherwise, when the wind didn’t blow, the tank ran dry.
One night, lost in thought over how to avoid the shepherd’s pie that Mum was baking for tea, I forgot to turn off the tap into the calves’ trough. Next morning, Dad gently asked, ‘Did you forget to do something last night?’ The tank had run dry. I blushed and hung my head. I would not forget again.
The following week the doctor came to school. My chest was almost flat. As far as I could tell, Daryl stayed out of sight. Nobody laughed as I lined up with the other girls in panties and singlets. The doctor chatted, probed and listened to each of us in turn before passing us on to the nurse who weighed us. At 6st 12lbs (43.5 kilograms), neither the doctor nor nurse noted my weight loss because they hadn’t seen me for four years.
My report was good on every count. While dressing I looked sideways and was pleased to notice other Grade Six girls were growing breasts too.
I had worked hard for three months, preparing for the doctor’s visit. Now it was over. That afternoon, pushing my bike through the school gate to pedal home, I felt relieved I would not have to risk making Mum cross at mealtimes any more.
2. MY ILLNESS DEEPENS
Globules of fat on the meat chunks peered out of the lamb stew, daring me to eat them. It didn’t help that the stew’s rich brown gravy had merged with its companion—a large blob of white-as-snow potato mashed with generous lashings of creamy milk and butter. For the first time in months I had looked forward to sitting down to tea. Tonight Mum wouldn’t have cause to growl. But, confronted by the lamb stew and potato, guilt set in.
I loaded my fork, and could go no further. The fatty globs glared at me. I skirted them, eating the boiled carrot and cabbage, carefully avoiding the bits that touched the stew and mashed potato.
Mum grumbled. ‘Wasteful,’ she muttered, taking my plate away. Then she served steamed apple pudding with a rich custard sauce poured over top. This dessert, once my favourite, now sparked terror.
‘For goodness sake, eat!’ Mum begged. The pudding was one of Grandma Alexander’s recipes. I loved Grandma, but I couldn’t eat her pudding; I wanted to run from the kitchen and hide.
Everyone else finished the meal and I sat alone with my pudding, now cold and soggy. An hour later, Mum snatched my bowl and furiously scraped the contents into the slop dish. Wanting to please her by eating something, I decided on two dry biscuits. I knew exactly how many calories they contained and could eat them without feeling guilty.
Getting the biscuits out of the jar in the pantry cupboard, I nibbled them slowly, trying to make two seem like 12 to show Mum, ‘Look, I am eating, I am eating’. But Mum erupted. ‘Why eat those, and not what I cook?’ she snapped. ‘Isn’t my cooking good enough for you?’
‘Of course it’s good enough, Mum. Everyone loves your cooking,’ I wanted to say. But I didn’t know how many calories were in the rich pudding. My life had become complicated since my periods arrived. I wished they would go away. I was achieving top marks at school, and was helping with jobs on the farm, but was always thinking about food—what I would eat, and how much exercise I would have to do to burn the calories I ate. Mostly such thoughts were a comfort. They helped me feel I could cope, no matter what was going wrong in the family or on the farm.
Occasionally, Mum caught me out: washing my clothes, she would find dried egg yolk, cake crumbs and gravy in the pockets. She would growl but I could not do anything about it. (Neither of us knew that anorexia nervosa was taking over my mind.)
‘I can’t eat,’ I wanted to shout. She made me sit at the dinner table for hours, while she dashed about, doing jobs, but failed to weaken my resolve. She tried to coax, calling me Tim, and tried to threaten, calling me Toby, but the thoughts of my illness were stronger than both of us.
A new challenge arose when Dad announced he would take Joy and me to old-time dancing classes in a Bairnsdale church hall every second Thursday evening. This was in preparation for waltzing and foxtrotting our way into the social life of our local district. Saturday-night dances were held at community halls in our home district of Glenaladale, and nearby Fernbank and Flaggy Creek. I was still wearing bobby socks, but Mum decided the time had come for me to wear a bra. This was wishful thinking on her part because by now I hardly needed one.
She handed the bra to me when I was about to bathe and dress for my first dancing lesson. I shut myself in the bathroom. Probably a hand-me-down from my sister, the white cotton contraption with its multitude of hooks made me cry with frustration as I tried to fasten them. Fearful of being seen, I refused to call for assistance. Finally I solved the problem by doing the hooks up at the front and pulling the bra around my chest until everything was in place. I didn’t want breasts or a bra, but at least the dancing would be good exercise.
After each dance session Dad broke open an 8oz. (220g) block of Cadbury’s plain chocolate to share on the half-hour drive home. At first, having danced for more than an hour, I allowed myself to suck on three small squares, but as the weeks went by, I reduced this to two small squares, then one and then none. I believed that I did not deserve any chocolate. I was happy for Joy, and the neighbours’ children who travelled with us, to eat my share. With each weekly dancing lesson, my clothes hung more loosely.
Home life was changing too. Dad bought a lighting plant. This accumulation of batteries replaced the old diesel motor in the engine room at our dairy, and powered the milking machines. Instead of striking a match to light kerosene-filled Tilley lanterns in the shed in the early morning and at night, Dad now flicked a switch. Linked to our house, electric lights replaced our kerosene lamps, candles and torches. We were becoming modern.
The new power source meant Mum could purchase her first electrical appliances. She especially loved the electric cake mixer, because she could leave it to do the beating while she did other jobs. Dad said the sponge cakes didn’t taste as good as when Mum beat the butter and sugar mixture by hand with a wooden spatula. But there was no going back. Sometimes, while Mum went out to the clothesline or down to the chook yard, I had taken a turn at the hand beating and my arms ached within seconds.
Besides labour-saving devices, Dad bought something for us to relax with: a television set. This box on four legs was given pride of place in a corner of our sitting room. Even with a tall aerial attached to the sitting room chimney, the reception was poor. It bounced off one side of the valley onto the other and we saw two images instead of one. The images were more ghostly grey than black or white, but we could discern a picture. There was no squabbling over what channel to watch because there was only one: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). We watched television only at night. There was a strict rule
