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| 2015 - Selfies in the loo.. because that's what people do... |
It was a passport booth picture that did it. That finally pushed
me into action. I was 49, sliding into 50, and peri-menopausal. I looked old,
and tired, and fat.
I won’t avoid the word. I was indeed, fat. Some 4 stone
overweight.
I knew exactly how I had piled it all on. 15 years previously, my mother had died of a brain tumour, and my brother and I had to orchestrate the despatch of our family life onto a council lorry to be taken to some squalid warehouse for carrion house clearers to pick through what they might be able to flog, and what would go to the tip. Neither he nor I could afford to stay in the only family home we’d ever known. Having had to stomach over 30 years of a sitting tenant’s ‘peppercorn’ rent from our mother, if we wanted to carrying on living there, they would have market rent from us.
So we watched it all go down the bog and went back to our one-room
studio rentals. His, in West London. Mine in Homerton.
Grief hits differently every time. When my father had dropped dead
in the street some 8 years previously, I had simply stopped eating. When my
mother died, I spent the next 12 months sitting on my sofa, drinking red wine,
and eating Toblerone and pizza after pizza. Anything to fill the ineffable pit
of nothingness in my middle.
I had never been what anyone might call ‘delicate’. I took after
the sturdy side of the family. As a family friend had once thoughtfully
observed (out loud, naturally): “the Wyndham women are beautiful, but they all
turn into little Welsh pit ponies.” My own brother referred to the propensity
for the women of our family to become overweight and “box shaped” in middle age
as “the Wyndham curse”.
Indeed, I could not remember a time in my life when someone didn’t
have something to say about my body. When I was ten years old, a reporter from
the Radio Times came to interview me about how I had approached playing the
role of ‘Heidi’ in the BBC television series of the same name in 1974. I
remember I had liked him, enjoyed talking to him. I had chatted freely in what
was my trademark chirpy way about my cat, my school, my love of horses, and how
I had liked the character of Heidi as she wasn’t a “goody-goody.”
When the article was published, he used the first paragraph to
describe me physically for the readers. I was apparently “a powerful little
girl… verging on tubby.”
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| "Verging on tubby"... At 10 years old. With the whippet that was Nicholas Lyndhurst aged 13 |
When I got to Secondary School, the boys would taunt me for my
“horse-rider’s arse”, which started me on a lifelong quest for shirts, tunics,
and jumpers that would cover it. A quest, and look, which would last until I
was 50 years of age. I would envy girls who could wear jackets that didn’t
cover everything down to their mid-thighs. I would stare in wonder at others
who didn’t seem to care about the size of their bums and would wear whatever
they liked. I would wear ‘boyfriend’ jumpers or A-line skirts with boots – so
convinced was I that I had ugly ‘bottle legs’ – or at least, as I had been told
that I had...
I was full-blown anorexic between the ages of 13 and 17. I existed
on one Greek yoghurt and an apple a day, pretending to my mother I had eaten
breakfast by making toast so the kitchen smelled of it, then scraping crumbs
onto a plate, smearing a butter knife with jam, and then throwing the toast to
the pigeons when I left the house and ran for the bus.
I was 18 and 9 stone when a music manager took an interest in me.
My singing voice was pretty impressive for a teenager. I could belt out blues,
opera, soul, and folk with equal authority, and I was regularly guesting with
bands, making an impact.
The manager wanted to take me on. She thought she could make me a
star. She wanted to take me to L.A. to introduce me to some record producers.
“Can you get down to under 8 stone in the next few weeks, though?”
She asked.
I was already living on fuck-all.
My mother stepped in. “You’re not going to L.A.” she said. She
feared a ‘fate worse than death’. I was naïve, I would be eaten alive. She was
probably right. I didn’t go.
By the time I met my first serious boyfriend, I was about 10
stone, and a plush size 12-14. He was a chubby lad himself, but we went on a
diet together, and I went down to a size 10, whilst he went happily to his
tailor in Savile Row to order several new suits.
When (at my instigation) we broke up, his parting shot to me was
“please don’t put any weight back on.”
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| Stuffing myself with a glass of wine in the South of France - aged 24 |
It didn’t work. 15 years later, and I am a size 16, and being told
by my next ‘serious’ boyfriend (note the lack of relationships in between) that
not only am I the ‘oldest’ woman he’s ever been out with (I was 39 to his 43), I
am also the ‘fattest’.
Working as a Jazz singer at the time, one gigantic saxophonist
bandleader booked me often to be the canary for his gigs. He thought I was a
fantastic singer. In spite of the fact that he himself was about 12 times my
size, he still insisted on calling me “big momma”.
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| "It's not over 'til the fat lady sings..." - 'Big Momma' at the Oxford Jazz Festival - 2009 (Pic: Barker Evans) |
When exchanging pleasantries and asking after the family of the
Paraguayan cleaner at my next job, I was told in response, and right out of
left field, that I was “gorda” (it means ‘fat’ in Spanish), I decided to take
some time away from life and hide in the Spanish mountains.
Coming home to England, I settled for a while in Oxfordshire,
where, still a whopping size 16, I
was used as debris dam material to aid the Flood Alleviation scheme*, before
being made redundant and moving to the New Forest.
That’s where the fun really started. New friends, strangely all
male, felt it their bounden duty to keep me updated as to the state of my walloping
unattractiveness and comedy value at all opportunities.
At an envelope stuffing party for an organisation to which I
belong, and indeed, for which I sit on council, we all raced through the task
in record time, but…
“It’s not over until the fat lady sings” chirped one of the
officers. “Give us a song, Emma.”
I went quietly outside into the car park and sobbed.
Somehow, in amongst all this slobbing about being fat all over the
place and providing such Class-A merriment and diversion for everyone who
believes that overweight people a) don’t have any feelings, b) exist simply for
their entertainment, and c) are completely unaware that they are overweight and
need to be told – often; I have been an actor, a voice teacher, a Journalist, a
Jazz singer and even an Executive PA, and Office Manager – working in some
pretty prestigious places and believing I was making a contribution.
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| 'Gargantua' at Sotheby's aged 27 and a size 14 - cataloguing the Vivien Leigh Collection prior to sale in New York. That's her Oscar for 'Gone with the Wind' I am holding like a holy relic... |
The long and the short of it is that I dumped over 5 stone in a year. Furthermore, I have kept it off.
Now of course, I am being told I am too thin.
I am ‘fragile’ looking. A tiny size 8. My hip and collar bones
protrude. People are worried.
“You’ve gone too far.”
“Do you actually eat anything?”
I want to scream: “rearrange this well-known phrase containing the
words 'off' and 'fuck'..."I am so angry, it actually sometimes makes it hard for me
to eat. Especially when one of those now expressing ‘concern’ for my new found
fragility is the same guy who made me cry at the envelope stuffing party.
So what have I learned? Maybe that if you’re female, the world
always seems to have something to say about what size you are, what shape you
are, and what your bloody hair is doing in a way that men never seem to have to
deal with – which is perhaps why they seem to be the ones who dish up the most
in the way of running commentary.
Why is this? Maybe because thanks to the non-stop drip drip drip
of our facile media, they’ve been given the impression that most women strive
to be attractive and acceptable to them. They must feel somehow bound to let us
know if we’re passing muster or not - to help us attain goal - that being their
sexual interest - even if we haven’t asked for their opinion, and wouldn’t
micturate on these bouncers at the gates of life if they were combusting in the
street.
As Erin McKean said: “You Don’t Have to Be Pretty.
You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your
boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men
on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your
children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying
a space marked ‘female’.”
And as I say: "My body. My business."
Mind your own.
© Emmeline Wyndham - 2015
* Sorry, got a bit carried away there. I was in fact, the Events
Coordinator for the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University. I still had big
ear-lobes apparently – according to one Don...
