Читать книгу A Girl Called Tim - June Alexander - Страница 11

'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 obstacles. One afternoon towards the end of January we drove to Bairnsdale so a childhood friend, 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 came to stay for the May holidays. The weather being too wintry to sleep on the verandah, I was back sleeping on Mum and Dad’s bedroom floor while my cousins took over my room. Luckily I had a water bag, filled from the kettle on top of the stove, to keep me warm for at least the first part of the night.

I set my traps again and fed the calves while my cousins, as usual, slept in. One morning I was busy in the yards with the calves when Alicia, one of my girl cousins, bounded down the hill to the dairy, calling my name.

‘I’m over here in the calf pen, look where you put your feet,’ I yelled back.

Some of the calves developed scours from upset tummies while adjusting from their mother’s milk to my powdered brew and they squirted smelly yellow ‘custard’ all over the place.

I had been treating the worst-affected poddies, holding them in a corner of the dusty yard, opening their mouths and stuffing pink scour tablets inside. This was a messy job and I was not in a good mood.

‘Ade’s reading your diary,’ Alicia said, with telltale glee.

I saw red. I opened the pen gate, shooed the calves out and raced up the gravel track towards the house. Ade was coming down to the dairy. Younger than me, but a good 15kg heavier, he was laughing but not for long. I met him halfway.

‘Have you been reading my diary?’

Ade thought this was a joke. ‘Yes,’ he grinned.

I sprung and pounded his tubby chest with my fists. He fell backwards into the grass on the side of the track. I rode him to the ground, sat on him, pressed his hands above his head with my feet and continued to pummel him. He was crying now.

‘Don’t-you-ever-tell-anyone-what-you-read, and don’t-read-my-diary-again,’ I said, punching home every word.

Alicia, who witnessed these proceedings, was crying too.

‘Ade’s not moving,’ she wailed.

I paused in my pounding.

She was right. I’d winded him. Now I’d be in trouble.

I patted his face.

‘Ade, Ade, come on Ade.’

Ade stirred and I heaved him into a sitting position.

We reached agreement: I wouldn’t punch him any more in return for him forgetting what he read in my diary, and not telling anyone I’d whacked him. We were quickly best of friends again.

I gained 7kgs in three months and was doing well at school, becoming more outgoing and making new friends. Both classmates and teachers said, ‘June, you are coming out of your shell’.

Following the subsidence of my anorexia, I had emerged from being the quietest to one of the most bubbly students in the class.

Unaware that this was the calm before a storm, I was enjoying the freedom of being me.

On Saturday, November 23, the USA was in the news again. I was helping Dad clean up in the dairy after the morning milking when we stopped to listen as the news crackled over our shed wireless.

I had not heard the word ‘assassinated’ before but wrote in my diary as best I could:

Very history-making day.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY OF AMERICA WAS SACINATED IN DALLAS IN TEXAS. VERY SAD! TERRIBLE.

Everyone is sad, as Mr Kennedy has done a great good many things to the world. He was only 46. He was shot in the head, died 35 minutes later.

As I trudged up to the farmhouse a short time later, carrying a billy of milk for breakfast, I wondered why some people were cruel.

One month later, I celebrated my 13th birthday with a big slice of birthday cake. I weighed 55kg, almost 18kg more than 12 months before, and was 160cm tall. Almost free of food thoughts, I embraced my summer holidays. Straight after Christmas, Aunty Carlie and Uncle Roy took me to Adelaide, South Australia, a 15-hour drive from home. My aunt and uncle had been providing regular cultural enrichment since my first holiday with them at the age of seven. In Adelaide, they took me to the art gallery, museum, zoo, botanic gardens, port, airport and Barossa Valley wine-growing region. When I arrived home, Dad had a surprise waiting in the paddock—a chocolate-coloured horse, 13 hands high. This new equine friend replaced my white Shetland pony, Tommy, who I’d been riding since the age of nine. The newcomer quickly earned the name of Nipper because he nipped my backside whenever he got the chance. I rode Nipper to fetch our cows for milking and to collect our mail from the cream-can letterbox around the corner.

Completing a great holiday, Corinella, who ran the children’s page in The Sun newspaper, invited me to her annual party. Invitations were issued to children who won the most points in drawing and writing competitions throughout the year. The party included a ticket to a pantomime in Melbourne, and this was a big cultural treat for a bumpkin like me. I travelled on the train and my Great Aunt Della, who lived in the suburb of Elsternwick, looked after me.

Life appeared wonderful, and I strove to ignore niggling thoughts that something was wrong. In the past 12 months I had not menstruated and during the summer holidays had gradually—so that nobody noticed—dropped 7kg in weight.

In February I began the new school year, in Year Eight, a much happier, more outgoing child than a year before when I was withdrawn and frightened to speak. Classmates elected my friend Helen, who lived in Bairnsdale, as class captain and myself as vice-captain. Weekends were spent swimming, horse riding and helping on the farm.

Joy turned 16 in March and enrolled at a hairdressing academy in Melbourne. She had wanted to be a hairdresser since she was three. She often practised on me and one day had fed Tommy the Shetland a cup of sugar from the pantry while giving his beautiful long mane a crew-cut.

With Joy leaving home to board with our Aunt Marion and Uncle Alf for the next 16 months, I had our bedroom to myself.

The age of 14 was a period of stability, when I suppressed the nagging feelings and was pretty much free to be me. Home life seemed less stressful and I was happy—developing friendships, doing well at school, and helping my parents on the farm.

My weight stabilised between 46kg and 47kg; I won a Junior State Government Scholarship, was dux of Year Nine at school, was in the school hockey team and won a school cross-country race. One day my mother was called to the post office to collect a telegram from Sydney. It announced I had won a bicycle for having the most articles published during the previous six months in The Australian Children’s Newspaper. I was chuffed with the award but, as my old bike was more suited to our gravelled and corrugated roads, Dad and I decided to sell my prize to a bicycle shop. I received $27, enough to pay for a 10-day trip with the Young Australia League (YAL) to Sydney and the Blue Mountains, more than 700km from home, during the next summer holidays. I was excited by the chance to travel and make new friends. Writing was starting to provide opportunities outside the valley but the farm was my major source of inspiration and contentment.

During this time I was conscious of my food intake, but managed to control it. If I wanted a chocolate bar, I would walk for an hour so that I could eat the chocolate as a reward. Anorexic thoughts remained, but I thought I was in control, turning to them as needed to supress anxiety.

Thanks to my father, I was even starting to think life had possibilities despite my gender. He never said: ‘You can’t do that because you are a girl.’ His usual advice was: ‘You won’t know unless you try.’ My love of, and affinity with, the land and the bush evolved from him.

Apart from hunting, which I learned from Dad, I loved to wander alone in the bush through the sweet-scented tea tree scrub, clambering over moss-covered rocks and across ferny gullies. I was not lonely. Kookaburras laughed overhead from branches in the big, shady gumtrees. Salamanders scarpered across rocks and fat goannas raced surprisingly fast to scale the nearest tree trunk or slip into the water. A platypus family lived in one section of the river. They playfully splashed and somersaulted near the bank while mid-stream, a pair of black swans glided by. The river and the bush, forever my friends, connected me with my soul and gave me strength to suppress my anxiety and food thoughts.

Almost.