What It Is to Starve

30 years of denying and being denied

From about the age of 13, I have starved myself.

It was that or face the insults, the body shaming, the excoriation via spittle-flecked swearing.

“You jump down the stairs like that, you’ll go right through the floorboards, you [expletive deleted] fat [expletive deleted].”

This was the woman who called herself my mother, just as she called me so many other things. I was prone, as all kids are — particularly before all enthusiasm for life is knocked out of them — to jump two or three stairs at a time. Which, yes, can be very aggravating. And might well lead to issues with the floorboards.

In our case, almost certainly, for our house was entirely bare floorboards. We’d had the woodworm treatment in something like 1986, and the carpets would never go back down. Not ever.

Of course not, that would have involved paying someone, and my parents — when there were still the two of them — had many an objection to paying for anything.

Unless it was in “shirt buttons,” as my late father would say to the laughter and applause of the studio audience he carried around in his head.

“Don’t know who you think you are, you [expletive deleted],” the woman who called herself my mother would continue. And then the fat comments would start.

I was never a particularly large child.

All the photos that exist from my childhood — all eight of them — show a spare, even skinny, kid, and that was less to do with activity such as running and jumping than it was to do with how very, very little we were fed.

Biscuits for breakfast.

Two or three.

Bourbons maybe.

You’ve seen the size of those.

Two or three Bourbon biscuits and a cup of milky — very milky — tea in a frosted glass Arcoroc mug.

I remember such things.

I remember the woman who called herself my mother complaining that, when she had first met my father and moved in with him as a means of avoiding ever answering to her parents ever again, they could share half a packet of biscuits each.

I presume, therefore, the 12 to fifteen were strictly halved.

Unless it was an odd number and he got the extra one.

Oh yeah, my father would have got the extra one. Every year, every Christmas, when we had our one tin of Quality Street for the year, he would whip all the green praline triangles from the tin before carefully resealing it with Sellotape, the better to pretend “it had been sold like that by the shop. No green triangles this year.”

I used to find them stuffed in his coat pockets.

Or just the foil wrappers.

Of course I did.

Anyway, by the time we get to me aged 13, I am not especially big on the back of not one decent breakfast in all my years and dinners that always consisted of something very, very brown and hockey puck like alongside tooth enamel chipping very fried chips.

If it wasn’t on the sale shelf in Kwik Save, we didn’t buy it.

And we didn’t eat out, not once in my entire childhood.

Not once. Not anywhere. Not with anyone. Not ever. No hyperbole needed.

It was, however, possible to afford fish and chips back then. Although the fact the woman who called herself my mother fancied the guy behind the counter for more than the size of his pea fritters certainly helped matters.

The Jumping Down the Stairs incident was somewhen in 1991. The same year my father eventually left us. Although, he had worked nights for most of my life and the most I ever saw of him, usually, was as a duvet covered figure in a darkened bedroom. Or sitting in front of the television watching the horse racing on a Saturday. When he wasn’t actually in the bookies placing the bets that would deplete his readies and ensure we didn’t have money for a pizza or a KFC or even a pre-packed sandwich if we had wanted it.

The Jumping Down the Stairs incident was around the time the woman who called herself my mother’s drinking became less bearable.

As in, the vodka bottles stopped being hidden in the toilet.

If she wanted to be cruel, she could be cruel. Very much so. “Punish the little [expletive deleted] in front of his four siblings” cruel.

After all, why ruin a perfect system? It had worked with my father when she had got tired of the pornography she had, she said, known for years he had kept around every place they had ever lived. Under the carpets. On top of the cupboards. Under the marital bed. You know, as people do.

It had worked when she had wanted to humiliate him, bringing out all of his “filthy magazines” and showing them to the children to shame him.

I was 13. The youngest of the five of us was then one year old.

I am not sure this is in anyone’s book of ideal parenting.

But then, neither is referring to the father as a useless lazy article, making repeated insults about his weight (are you spotting a pattern here?) and the shape of his bum (square, apparently). Oh, and belittling his work and every one of the friends he never ever saw. Not round the house, anyway. (None of us ever had friends round. Not before I escaped, anyway. My younger siblings may have later had more luck).

I was punished soundly for jumping down the stairs that day.

I think it was August.

Somewhen after the first suicide attempt, I think. The three days I was out after the overdose. The three days during which I was not taken to hospital and was allowed to wander the house, semi-comatose, to do things such as boil the kettle and pour the contents all over myself.

I expect somewhere in my head I thought it was breakfast time.

Time for me to put out the tea plates, divide the biscuits very equally (ensuring any extra went to the woman who called herself my mother), and then make the tea.

Oh, you weren’t expecting that she ever made breakfast, were you?

Here’s a thing — she didn’t cook dinner, either.

But I digress.

I was punished so soundly that day for making the woodworm treated floorboards creak under my clearly elephantine weight that I immediately went on a diet that has lasted — well… Lasted about 33 years.

I have written elsewhere about my trouble with weight whilst working as a teacher. I certainly put on a lot of weight during that time, but I was never once “not on the diet,” even while gorging on takeaways and chocolate.

And it started there, as I crashed down the stairs with whatever enthusiasm I still had left before the years of being a surrogate parent, the desperation to get out of that home, and the adult life in which my own parents (one now dead) have played as little part as they did during my childhood.

Actually…

No.

It didn’t start there, did it?

I was being starved from a much, much earlier age.

But then, if you have read any of these words, you already know that, don’t you?

Mike Hickman is a writer and former academic who says he comes from York, England, but that is just for now. He would wish to be anywhere but. Perhaps that is why he exists so much in his words?

If you would like more right now (because there is always more), here’s a piece about the therapeutic value of behind-the-scenes DVD extras and a musing on his experience in teacher training.