A Girl Called Tim. June Alexander
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