A Girl Called Tim. June Alexander
and poor manners. ‘Blow Louise’s mother,’ I thought. She had phoned to ask if I was sick, but I’m sure both mothers considered my behaviour just plain rude. I couldn’t wait to get outside to start my jobs and to be alone with the bossy thoughts in my head. Mum did not make me go for meals at anyone’s house again.
There was one social event I could not avoid. One evening during the week before Christmas, everyone in the Glenaladale, Woodglen and Iguana Creek district gathered for our primary school’s annual concert in the ‘Glen’ Hall. Gum tips, colourful paper streamers and bunches of balloons camouflaged the unlined timber walls. The Christmas tree was a big cypress branch, standing in a 44-gallon drum covered in red and green crepe paper. Our mothers helped us to decorate the foliage with balloons and paper chains, angels and Chinese lanterns that we had made with small squares of coloured paper at school. Set in the corner beside our little performance area, the tree evoked much excitement as the mothers’ club members placed gifts around its base. ‘Which one is mine?’ the children looked at each other and giggled. Anticipation mounted as we presented our carols, skits and nativity play. Our parents laughed and clapped.
Normally I would be as excited as everyone else, but tonight I stood in the back row, trying to hide in the shadows of the tree. The concert over, a bell clanged and the children clambered to sit on the front wooden bench, as big, jolly Santa entered the hall door, waving his bell and singing ‘Ho, ho, ho’. He called to us, one by one, asked us what we wanted for Christmas and gave us our gift from the tree. Over the years I had asked for a pony, a gun, and a cowgirl suit. I didn’t know what to ask for this year and didn’t care. I could not laugh or smile. Santa gave me a pen, commemorating completion of Grade Six, and I hurried back to my seat.
I wanted to go home. I felt removed from my friends and sensed their parents were looking at me.
My chest was flat and my periods were sporadic; my mind was full of thoughts of food and exercise. Anorexia had dominated my final year of primary school.
Christmas Day was not happy for my family that year. My city cousins, who gave me an excuse to sleep on the verandah, didn’t visit because they had moved from Melbourne to Portland, on the western side of Victoria,
too far to travel to our farm.
So there was just Mum and Dad, Joy, me, Grandpa and a few old family friends for Christmas dinner. For a gift, my parents gave me a beautiful, solid timber, locally made desk. Complete with pencil tray and drawers, it was an encouraging acknowledgement of my budding writing passion. I’d won my first essay competition at the age of nine; I wrote about rice and the prize was a fountain pen. More recently I had been writing adventure stories, sometimes reading them at school, and some were published in the Australian Children’s Newspaper.
For Christmas dinner I tried to impress Mum by eating a boiled chicken leg, my first meat in months, and a big serve of boiled cabbage. Lately I’d been eating a tomato for dinner so this was a feast. By now Mum had accepted that putting food on my plate was a waste if I said I would not eat it. There was no point giving me roast beef, lamb or pork, roast potato, pumpkin, and thick, brown gravy, or any of the plum pudding, served with warm custard sauce and cream. Mum did not need to hide any threepences or sixpences in a pudding serve for me that year.
She was pleased I ate the chicken but afterwards I ran up the hill behind our house, to work that chicken leg off while bringing the cows home to be milked. We were in a drought, and the cows had to walk a long way from the dairy to feed on pasture between milkings. Now that I was on holiday, I happily herded the cows to the far paddock in the morning, and collected them in the afternoon. 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