I also set more rabbit traps.
Nature had a strange effect in a drought. Rabbits were plentiful and I caught some without disguising the traps with the usual square piece of newspaper under a layer of soft, powdered dirt, at the entrance to their burrows. Grey, white, ginger and black—I’d not seen such colourful little bunnies before. They were emaciated like me. I could not eat because my anorexia was dominating my mind. The bunnies could not eat because there was no food. I put them out of their misery, breaking their necks, not bothering to take them home to skin.
Two days after Christmas Day, Mum baked a big sponge cake, filled the halves with whipped cream, iced the top in pink and decorated it with sprinkles for my 12th birthday. A year ago I was full of fun and vigour. Now, almost a skeleton, I tried to appear excited when unwrapping my parents’ gift to find my first wristwatch, but could not eat one crumb of the beautiful birthday cake.
3. PATTY CAKE BREAKTHROUGH
'A holiday will bring back your appetite, make you well in time to start high school,’ Mum said, coaxingly.
I was to stay two weeks of the summer holidays with my Aunt Marion and Uncle Alf in Blackburn, an eastern suburb of Melbourne. Immediately I began to worry about how to avoid the delicious meals my sweet aunt was sure to serve. But I agreed to the holiday because Uncle Alf was promising to take me to the cricket.
Not just any cricket, but the Test Cricket: a five-day match between Australia and England, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. On December 28, 1962, the day after my 12th birthday, Mum drove me to Bairnsdale to catch the train called the Gippslander for the five-hour journey to Melbourne. In my small blue suitcase, safe among the clothes that Mum had neatly packed, was my box brownie camera, my new pen from Santa and a Christmas gift from Daryl—a small, soft-covered, green diary. I treasured Daryl’s gift. I had not seen a real diary before, with a calendar and a page for every day, and now I had one of my very own. I felt grateful to my cousin. He knew I was not well and that I loved writing.
There was also a jar of vitamin tablets. Oval-shaped sores had broken out on my fingers and wouldn’t heal. On hot days my ankles swelled like balloons and my feet were heavy to lift up, put down, lift up and put down as I worked through my daily exercise routine. Puffy veins ran like blue streams down my arms and over my hands. I felt removed from my limbs, as though they were not part of me. I felt removed from my self. I did not understand what was happening.
Mum took me to a doctor before I boarded the train. She was pleased I sat still in the waiting room. She did not know I had walked for five hours the day before and two hours early that morning. The doctor insisted the only way to ease the swellings around my ankles, and to heal the sores on my fingers was to take two vitamin tablets daily. I hated their smell. ‘Must be calories,’ I thought. I would have to walk more as payback for swallowing them.
‘Your ankles will swell and the veins will stand out on your arms until you gain weight,’ the doctor warned. My thin arms, covered in soft, fine hairs like on a newborn baby’s head, embarrassed Mum, so I wore a cardigan on hot days, when my veins were puffiest.
Mum waved goodbye until the train left the railway station. As soon as I sat down I opened the latches on my suitcase and withdrew Daryl’s gift, the small diary. I’d made occasional notes in exercise books before but this was my first real journal, and I looked forward to sharing my life with it. We would be best friends. I tried but could not wait for the New Year; I began writing immediately, December 29, 1962, on a spare page at the back of the book. I recorded my daily exercise, amount of food consumed and, starting the next day, the cricket scores.
At my aunt and uncle’s place, without outdoor jobs to burn energy, I walked around the suburban streets for more than an hour each morning and evening, before and after attending the cricket. An icy pole or a soft drink required an extra hour’s walk.
I attended the cricket for three days, but did not go on the last day when England was set to win the match, the second in the Test series.
My aunt and uncle, who had two children younger than me, did not scold me for not eating. One evening I tried really hard and ate a lettuce leaf, two pieces of tomato, one piece of meat and half a potato for the evening meal, which they called ‘dinner’. Another evening, my aunt and uncle took my cousins and me to Luna Park, an amusement venue at St Kilda, on the foreshore of Port Phillip Bay. A ride on the roller coaster, called the Big Dipper, enabled me to forget my bossy thoughts for a moment and smile. Nothing in the city, however, could match my longing for the farm, the bushland and the Mitchell River, and I was glad to catch the train home on January 14. Mum had been hoping my holiday would encourage me to eat more food, but my weight had dropped from 39kg to 38kg.
In Blackburn, I had weighed myself on scales at the local chemist shop. I had wandered into newsagents and bookshops, looking for magazines and books featuring diets and exercise, sneaking a look and memorising lists of calories.
The holiday had backfired. My illness had acquired new tricks to increase its hold.
Two weeks later, Mum and Dad took me to a doctor in Sale, a town on the Princes Highway, about an hour’s drive from our farm. I was vaguely aware that my parents were worrying about me but I was tired and unable to respond.
Blood tests revealed no abnormality.
Since my holiday I had become fixated on meat pies and peanuts. With no freezer, and being frugal, Mum did not buy pies; she made them. As one of a large family growing up in the Great Depression, she steadfastly refused to buy anything she could make herself.
I was fussy. The pie had to be exactly like the Four ’n Twenty meat pies sold at the MCG. I was obsessed with this brand of pie because one of my aunt’s women’s magazines had listed its calorie content. I could eat one pie a day but first I had to walk or run the equivalent of that many calories. Every moment of every day was focused on controlling the calories to avoid feeling a huge and frightening emptiness.
Flabbergasted and annoyed, because I refused to eat anything else, Mum banged away with her rolling pin in the hot pantry, making pastry with flour and butter, lining special little pie tins, cooking the mince over the hot wood stove, covering the pies and baking them in the hot oven, fair in the middle of a scorching summer.
Mum could not understand why, if I would eat a pie, I wouldn’t eat food she cooked for the rest of the family. She made the pies against her will, and she had to make them carefully. I watched her make them and wouldn’t eat them if the pastry was too thick, or the meat too fatty.
‘They have to be exactly like the bought ones,’ I stubbornly said. They had to have the same weight, the same amount of meat, pastry and calories. The possibility of one extra calorie caused me great anxiety. The only way to appease this fear was to exercise more, just in case. I appeared difficult and selfish but couldn’t help it.
Mum didn’t know that I struggled to convince myself that I should eat anything at all.
The salted peanuts were easier to control. I counted them and allowed myself up to 60g some days. As with the pies, first I had to burn the equivalent number of calories, and make myself wait until late in the afternoon, when I would eat each one slowly, sucking the salt off first, and letting each half nut almost melt in my mouth before starting to chew it.
Reading was a luxury. If I had completed all my exercise routines and jobs for the day, I allowed myself to read a book while eating my peanuts, but I had to avoid Mum. If she found me she would scold: ‘If you can eat peanuts why can’t you eat one of my biscuits?’
Food created an endless stream of
