I’m sitting at Round Table because I’m a new girl. It’s the summer term so there are only two of us. This is where Mrs Ford sits too, she’s the headmistress, and Miss Brice, who’s the Matron. Mrs Ford is called Fodder behind her back, and Miss Brice is Beezer. I learned this in bed last night, after lights-out.
I ate the cornflakes, even though the milk had white spots on it and tasted funny. Now I have a slice of bread and someone’s put a cube of butter on my plate and a spoonful of slimy black treacle that smells bitter and is spreading like an oily puddle. I cannot eat this, I cannot. I want to go home. I don’t want to cry. But my eyes do anyway and drips slide down my face. I look down but Mrs Ford notices and says, “Jane, you’d better leave the table. Go and stand in the corridor.”
I get up, scuttle across the dining-room in my new noisy clodhoppers, pull open the heavy door and shut it behind me. I stand in the corridor of dark wood walls. After a while I hear everyone scraping back their chairs. The others come out and I join the rush upstairs where I get told, by Beezer, how to make my bed with hospital corners.
Here is my first letter home, written two days later:
Dear Mummy and John,
I hope you are well, I am. (I’d learned the format from seeing my older brothers’ letters.) For meals I am on round table. I go to bed at ten to seven. I am in Remove A, but I am working in Remove B. We have not started work yet. So we can get settled in. In our dormy we have great fun, and play catch with my Gonk. On Saturday we made our timetable and gave out books. Each classroom has it’s own libery, and I have been reading ‘I wanted a pony’. We have gorgous food, and today for breakfast we had cornflakes and butterd rols. I ride on Thursday 2nd ride. There is one girl who is five years old in our dormitory. Yesterday some of the girls cleared out the swimming pool. Our form mistress is Miss Kenwright. On Saterday Joanna and I went second bed because everyone said we were 2nd bed. I am greatly looking forward to seeing you in three weeks time.Lots of love,
Jane
I already knew I mustn’t bother or upset parents. And had learned to lie to them, and to start the process of convincing myself I was ‘fine’.
My first breakfast at prep school, aged nine, was what I call the defining moment – when I realised care was and would be absent, when I learned that crying was abhorred, and when I decided to ‘refuse to mind’. To not show distress (suppressing) meant not letting myself know I felt it (repressing). This worked even when my mother’s letter arrived on Monday mornings. I did sometimes feel wistful if I looked out of my dormitory window – the Sussex downs were in the distance and my house was just behind them, but no-one else would have known. My resolve didn’t work when Mrs Ford employed her key instrument of torture. Whenever shamed, my cheeks let me down, flushing red. What could I do but apologise for not being perfect, and try harder to make not one mistake; and at the same time cling to some trace of aliveness – rejected as bumptious, impertinent, obstreperous, bolshy.
Food offered with love is very different from food delivered as reward or punishment. Food offered with love can be tasted, taken in or not, swallowed if desired, then digested. Food offered with love nourishes the soul as well as the body, and fosters self-love, self-value. My first breakfast at prep school severed any residual connection between food and heart – at my Victorian pre-prep school I’d already witnessed my friend being forced, every day, to swallow repellent-to-her rice pudding; competition with my brothers, back home for holidays, obliterated discernment regarding quantity: I just wanted as much as them.
The message I did swallow from being banished from the dining-room was, ‘Your distress, your you-ness, is not welcome here.’
Food became my enemy, fighting desire for sweets and stodge was a battIe I couldn’t win. My body, hunger included, became my enemy too. Being shamed at home (my name was Fatso, then shortened to Fat) didn’t stop me eating; neither did the dread of end-of-term weighing. Through my teens I tried diets, skipping meals, starving; the idea of eating less immediately made me crave, this beast called ‘need’ would not relent. I was caught in a loop that fed self-loathing, and led to seeking proof I wasn’t disgusting: being wanted was the goal, however temporary, whatever I had to do to earn it. The impasse lasted for as long as I didn’t realise it was love I was hungry for, emptiness I was attempting to fill.
It wasn’t until I found a therapist I could confess my greed, and learned that need for nurturing wasn’t greedy but natural, that I dared opening my heart to digest love. Not in one gulp, any more than someone deprived of regular meals over years can tolerate more than a mouthful at first. Years later, self-love and value much restored, I eat mostly shame-free and with pleasure. Early evenings can still activate the urge to stuff: memories of not going home need ongoing tender attention.
Discovering the sensual pleasure of eating is a delight: the smell, taste, touch, sight, even sound. Shaming sensuality is, of course, central to boarding school regime: deprivation, a known torture, keeps a child striving. Success in terms of achievement becomes the goal rather than joy in living.
Not any longer…