My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  This is my . . .

  Acknowledgements

  Some names, circumstances and identifying details have been changed to protect the identity/privacy of the individuals concerned. All of the events happened to the author as described.

  MY FAT MAD TEENAGE DIARY

  Rae Earl

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Rae Earl 2007

  The right of Rae Earl to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 9781444739817

  Paperback ISBN 9780340950944

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For

  My husband – for not letting me burn these diaries when I wanted to . . .

  Kevin Earl – for three decades of comedy genius but especially for the card game ‘Wolf’

  But most of all

  For my mum – for not letting me watch Threads and for saying the immortal words ‘You can print what you like if I can have a new cooker’

  THIS IS MY FAT, MAD TEENAGE DIARY, Volume 1 – 1989.

  It’s pretty self-explanatory, but for things to make sense, you need a bit of background. And I need to warn you – some of it is odd. As in a juicy-episode-of-Trisha odd.

  When I tell people about my life, some of it does sound like a load of bullshit. I mean, most 35-year-olds don’t have a 64-year-old mother who is married to a Moroccan champion bodybuilder 20 years her junior. Most people don’t have a mum who has a photo of the aforementioned bodybuilder tattooed on her backside. I do. So it’s that sort of detail you are just going to have to accept.

  At the time of writing these diaries I was a 17-year-old public schoolgirl who had recently been released from a psychiatric ward. The public school was courtesy of the 11-plus scholarship scheme. (Lincolnshire has always been 50 years behind the rest of Britain – education policy no different.)

  The psychiatric ward? Courtesy of a complete nervous breakdown.

  The funny thing was, in the late 1980s, healthcare professionals seemed to think it was a good idea to put you in a mental hospital with adults, overlooking fields and fields of root crops – when it’s common sense that anybody would go over the edge if they were forced to look at Brussels sprouts and sugar beet in the Fens all day.

  So I was still a bit loopy, though I managed to finish essays on Henry VIII’s foreign policy, while my mum’s second adolescence was about to crash headlong into mine. The main bone of contention was that Mum was getting man action – and I was getting none.

  In 1989 my mum was still married to her second husband. He turned out to be homosexual. (Lousy bloke, but what a record collection! Nobody had 1970s coloured vinyl European disco imports like we did.) He lived abroad teaching English in Morocco. Like many mothers and teenage daughters then and now, we lived together in an atmosphere of almost constant intense mutual antipathy. She had very high hopes for me. She wanted me to get away from the lack of opportunities in our small Lincolnshire town, and to avoid the thing that she thought was the cause of most of her problems – men.

  She was right to be worried. Frankly, to use late 1980s terminology, I was gagging for it. Like most teenagers, I was desperate to lose my virginity. However, I already had a lover that made me look pregnant but actually ensured that I would never, ever become a teenage pregnancy statistic: Food.

  I can’t remember when I fell hook, line and sinker. I think it was a packet of Happy Shopper violet creams in 1981. I took one. Then another. Then another. From that point on, Food and I cavorted with each other for most of the waking day. At home, it was chocolate multi-packs and blocks of cheese sliced daintily but consumed in bulk. Once at school, the problem was compounded by dinner ladies – they always loved me. I think they saw a fat kid as a chance to make one of their own.

  I’ve always had the ‘feed me more’ look – even when I was spilling out of my clothes. Mrs Cook at St George’s Primary School first deemed me ‘Cheeky Face’ (really meaning ‘fat cheeks’) and that woman was impossible to melt – but by class three I was getting extra milkshake and pink custard and ‘tarmac’ (technical late 1970s term for chocolate goo on Rice Krispies). Secondary school was even more food-intensive – my school was so posh we could have cheese and biscuits for dessert, so an average day meant a full cooked breakfast, then a three-course school dinner, then tea at home (something shoved in the slow cooker – but even stews are fattening when you’re eating a whole chicken a night). All this was in addition to endless chewing the cud of whatever thing in a shiny wrapper came my way.

  So at 17, and at five foot stumpy four, I was pushing 14 and a half stone. And once you are that fat, the ‘fuck-it factor’ comes into play. The fuck-it factor means that you know (even with the most basic grasp of nutrition) it will take ages to lose your excess weight, so you might as well get an easy lay by sticking half a packet of Hula Hoops into a tub of cheese spread.

  Fat girls were quite an unusual sight in 1989. These days you see chubby children everywhere, but then we were a rare breed. We had more enforced PE tortures, fewer human rights, more fresh air, more calories expended and consequently less flabby flesh. You really had to be going some to be young and fat in the 1980s. But fat girls were there. We didn’t just turn up with supersizing in the drive-through. You may just not have spotted us. Funnily enough, it’s pretty easy to cling to a wall when you’re five stone overweight, downing Cadbury’s Mini Rolls and chanting the Fat Girl’s Prayer:

  Please let it be true that men secretly fancy Alison Moyet and Dawn French . . .

  Please make my big personality count more than a little waist squeezed into something small and revealing . . .

  Please let my inner beauty REALLY matter like Oprah Winfrey says it does, and let me grow up to look like Kylie Minogue . . .

  So some man can free my inner minx that’s squashed underneath these pounds of flesh . . .

  And please . . .

  Oh, please . . .

  Make Walkers prawn cocktail crisps fat-free.

  Amen.

  PS Even Dannii Minogue will do.

  So this little fat girl was fed up, lonely and stuck in a small town in the 1980s surrounded by a sea of thin. Every day I boiled over with a stew of hormones, sexual frustration, jealousy and lust, and so, as all these things were banned in Lincolnshire until the late 1990s, I threw down everything I felt into three top-secret exercise books I’d nicked from school.

  That’s where the diary started.

  So that was me, my mum and Food. It’s January 1989 in Stamford, and we are living with a deaf white cat in a council house with a mint-green bathroom suite and a larder full of naughty things. It’s a small town – famed ironically for being the burial place of Britain’s fattest man, Daniel Lambert. There are no mobile phones, we are scared of the Russians, Charles and Di are still married, the Berlin Wall is still up, Kylie Minogue isn’t expected to last another year in the charts, an
d I am about to start a diary that will take me all the way through sixth form and beyond.

  Everything I’ve written is true. I’ve changed people’s names, but they all existed. (One person is actually a mixture of three people: Bethany – she’s three girls rolled into one. There is never just one bitch in a fat, mad girl’s life.) I’ve taken some liberties with time, but everything happened. Every word. I’m sharing it because these days it makes me laugh – and because I still see fat girls everywhere labelled as ‘bubbly with a nice personality’. And I suppose I want to tell them (and everyone else) that in the end it’s all OK. You can be fat and nuts and a virgin when you are 17 – and things can still turn out OK.

  Volume 1 starts on Tuesday, 24 January 1989.

  Tuesday 24.1.89

  I’VE GOT THIS REALLY MAD urge to start a diary up again. I don’t know what it is but I think things are on the ‘up and up’ as it were. My last entry in the other diary was nearly two years ago. God, that was the biggest load of bullshit ever – it was CRAP! (in its rawest form). Actually, I think I am going to burn it. It is no longer entertaining or useful, so I’m reading it and then I’m binning it. So what’s happened? Urmm . . .

  Record collection’s pretty impressive. Over 1,000 singles because of the record sale every three months where the bloke sells off ex-jukebox records for 10p. Half of them are scratched – my copy of ‘China in Your Hand’ by T’Pau lasts less than a minute – but who cares?

  Had ‘diffy’ illness. OK, I lost the plot. Ended up in psychiatric ward 4 of Edith Cavell Hospital for the weekend – jigsaws, mashed potato and group exercises. I had to get out so I lied to them that I felt better. I know some of the stuff I think and some of the stuff I do is wrong as hell but I will never make the mistake of telling anyone what’s really in my head ever again. I don’t want to be locked up in a brown room with a personal stereo that’s run out of batteries and 58 copies of Reader’s Digest – it was as bad as it gets.

  I’ve still got ‘women’s problems’ but they keep fobbing me off by saying it’s my age. They say the same thing to my mum and she’s going through the menopause. So I’ve only got another 30 years of this. Great.

  Doing 4 A levels. English. Politics. History. And theatre arts.

  Chloe is pregnant! Can you believe it? She has had to leave school and everything. She told me in the sixth-form toilets as she was sitting on a windowsill downing a Twix, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

  I’m fat – really fat. I’m fatter than Chloe and she is up the duff.

  The bloke out of Soft Cell has made a record with Gene Pitney!!! He’s so old my bloody nan likes him!! It proves everything is going to shit.

  I feel so weird! Perhaps I should wait for page 2. Oh, I want to be loved. Oh, it’s SO CORNY, isn’t it?! But I just want to be loved by a bloke that loves ME! I want to feel special, you know. I almost feel guilty for feeling it. Every night I dream about it. Just someone special. I’d still be the same but I am fat and ugly and I don’t like pubs and parties where everyone gets pissed and throws up. I just long to be in bed with a bloke. It’s not like me but it’s how I feel! I want to do it. I want to be loved.

  11.50 p.m.

  Just done bloody Paradise Lost rough plan for tomorrow. How I hate that book. Also had a massive argument with Mum about nothing as per normal. She plays ‘The Logical Song’ by Supertramp and sits there looking miserable. It’s very difficult to concentrate on Milton’s portrayal of Satan when Supertramp are wailing about being a vegetable and asking who they are.

  Mum sits there looking pained like she is the one with problems. Her life is a piece of piss – just reading Woman’s Realm and shouting at me. I know she was in a Barnardo’s home as a kid, but come on – that was about 1952 when that happened.

  Feel really nothing – confused, angry, peeved, but not depressed. I had planned loads of profound and emotive things to say, but as always when it comes to writing them it all goes to crap.

  I don’t want to write the next bit – I don’t want to bugger up my diary on the second page, but I know what it’s about and I will get my revenge on all the people who have brought me down and made me feel small. I have just watched Dirty Dancing again and just like Patrick Swayze says, ‘No one puts Baby in the corner,’ well, NO ONE will put Rae in the corner.

  I will make the pretty girls pay.

  Wednesday 25.1.89

  7 p.m.

  I’VE JUST LOOKED AT YESTERDAY’S entry. I think it’s pathetic already – what a brilliant start. Oh, today was pretty crap. Guess what English book I had to write about? Paradise Lost. I wrote crap. Didn’t even understand one of the questions: ‘Milton is a Christian apologist. Discuss.’ Went for second question: ‘Milton’s language is like organ music. Discuss.’ I bullshitted for four sides of A4. But all the school shit paled into insignificance today after all the Megan shit came to a head.

  Megan has been making herself sick after food for ages. Now she has started to take laxatives. After scoffing two Mars bars today she went to the bog. I went to see if she was doing the fingers-down-the-throat job. Yes she was.

  Dinnertime – I had a whopping great roast and Megan had a salad. After everyone else at the table had gone, me and Megan were talking. She goes, ‘I feel full up,’ and I say, ‘I’m surprised after you emptied your stomach at break.’ Anyway, we went back to the form room and she burst into tears. I gave her a lecture, etc., etc. Oh, Mum is shouting me for tea – I’ll come back later.

  9.40 p.m.

  Sausage stew and a Supermousse is hardly enough – my brain needs more than that to do an essay on Cardinal Wolsey.

  Anyway, Megan got to her English exam and walked out about five minutes in. She went home eventually. It’s funny – I was going on about feeling fat and ugly and that’s what Megan was on about today, yet I would KILL to look like her. Men still do primarily go for a pretty face and figure, etc. I’d like to lose weight but I don’t want to get obsessive about it. When you watch things about African war and starvation and that, you think, ‘I have got a decent bed, and food,’ and you think, ‘Stop moaning! They are real people, and how would I feel?’

  But watching famine doesn’t stop you wanting sex and fancying George Michael. If it did, I would have stopped thinking about shagging after Band Aid in 1984.

  Off to hospital tomorrow to discuss lack-of-period situation.

  Can’t believe Kylie and Jason are still number one – bloody tragic. People are slagging it off at school but secretly I love that song. They reckon they are not romantically involved – yes they are. You can see the way they look at each other. I tell you what – if Kylie don’t want Jason, I’ll have him.

  Thursday 26.1.89

  11.10 p.m.

  WENT TO HOSPITAL TODAY. The specialist I usually see wasn’t there. I’m pleased about this because it’s somebody at school’s dad. I know these people have signed a confidential oath or whatever it is but you are not telling me he wouldn’t mention that he’d seen me when he got home. I don’t want people to know I’ve got the womb of a middle-aged woman already.

  Anyway, I saw this woman who basically said, ‘Come back in four months.’ And she was on time so I missed hardly any school, which was inconsiderate of her. She said I would really benefit from regular exercise, and did I do PE at school? Of course I don’t – I do rounders every summer but the rest of the time I make up some crap and sit it out with the asthmatics. She also reminded me that Ponstan (this tablet that I have) was a painkiller and not a contraceptive (‘for future reference’), and suggested I lose weight as I was ‘quite badly overweight’.

  Why do they always think that every girl under 19 is a raving hussy? I know a lot of people are, but it’s bloody annoying when you are desperate for action and you are getting none and you’d love to be down Boots secretly buying condoms and pregnancy kits and pissing on sticks – BUT YOU ARE TOO FAT!!

  STAMFORD HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM

  Dried up


  Tubes tied

  Teas from the ladies at the Red Cross in china cups

  Endless copies of The People’s Friend

  She tells me that I’m fat

  She spent seven years at university to tell me that

  Women comparing ovaries

  Wishing mine had been troubled by any man

  But the only action they’ve seen is an ultrasound scan

  To see if the doctors had missed

  A cyst.

  Apparently Megan is going to see someone to help her realise she is not really fat and that it’s all in her mind. I’m pleased she is being looked after but this is awful. I just bloody wish my fatness was in my mind. My marquee clothes and big rugby tops prove that it’s not.

  Tomorrow I am going to the cinema with Bethany. In fact at fag park (where Bethany always goes for a sneaky cigarette) I poured it all out to her. I told her I was sick of seeing people with boyfriends while I was always on my own and that I was sick of being fat and that I was TOTALLY sick of blokes seeing me as just a friend.

  That opened the floodgates. The first thing she said to me was, ‘Have you ever looked in a mirror when you eat? You eat like a pig!’ Then she goes, ‘Men don’t like fat girls as it embarrasses them in front of their mates – it makes them stick out in a bad way.’ She then suggested I eat less and do an aerobics class like bums and tums. I think she saw me welling up because she tried to make me feel better by saying, ‘I’m just telling you the truth. You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?’

  Cried my eyes out when I got back to my bedroom. What makes people think it’s OK to say that sort of stuff to me? Had a traffic-light cake from Chantrel’s Bakery but kept thinking, ‘I wonder what this looks like. I wonder if I do look like a pig.’ Ate it in front of the mirror in the dining room. Yes. I do look like the world’s fattest pig. Mum caught me doing it and asked me if I was so vain that I actually like to watch myself eat. Didn’t tell her. Can’t be bothered to explain. She couldn’t say anything to make me feel better. No one could.