I fully understand that most people would say: ‘Get over yourself and stop overeating.’ But it’s not so simple. I worry about it all the time. Whenever I shop for food I think, ‘I mustn’t have that.’ It’s a constant battle. It’s a hard, miserable fate being fat. And there are loads of fat people who would agree with me. They might not want to be perfect, but they don’t want to be fat, either. And they’re right.
A lot of people say, ‘Oh, if you were skinny, Miriam, you wouldn’t be the same.’ And, no, I wouldn’t be the same but, maybe, that’s what I’d like. I sometimes feel it would be so nice to be the sharp, nasty but devastatingly sexy, skinny person for a change. In my late twenties, a lovely voice-over actress called Norma Mitchell said to me, ‘Miriam, if you weren’t fat, I would jump into bed with you in a minute.’ I know she meant it in a nice way. ‘Not much I can do about that,’ I thought. I’ve never forgotten it; in fact, I nearly called this book ‘Too Fat to Go to Bed With.’
Moderation has been something that I have shunned and run away from, so mine is an appetite untrammelled. Greed is the flaw in my make-up. A modicum of discipline, a reining in is needed, a breaking of these desires and needs and longings. It makes me think less of myself, so when people make fun of me, inside I’m shouting along with them. I see what they mean and even though I think it’s wrong to ‘fat-shame’ people, I almost want to do it to myself, because I think I deserve it.
In this way, as in so many, I resemble my mother. Despite all her style and passion for fine things, Mummy was too fat and she knew it. She was an excellent cook and her suppers and lunches were legendary. No one else I have ever known has made tomato and onion sandwiches, lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper, with such care and attention to detail. I can almost smell now her chicken soup served hot as soup must be, with matzo balls, or vermicelli, lots of carrots, onion, celery, and the feet, heart and gizzards of the bird, and my favourite, the neck — all to be sucked dry. Every Thursday she’d make delicious fish by dipping it in egg and matzo flour and frying it in olive oil. I used to love watching her, but all that rich, fried Jewish food wasn’t good for her, as it isn’t for anybody. She loved all the wrong food, cooked it well, and rewarded herself with it, for the things she didn’t have.
Daddy and I were always trying to stop her from having too many potatoes. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, we were having lunch one day — roast chicken. Mummy reached to take a second helping and I said, ‘Mummy, please don’t, it’s bad for you.’ She declared she hadn’t had
She had once been a slender little thing, an amateur dancer, and often showed me her ballet routines, and how to use my arms gracefully, like the chorus in
My mother was ambitious, for all of us. And in her lifetime, none of her ambitions came to fruition. So there was perhaps an anger behind her appetite. After she had her stroke in 1968, she could only say, ‘I can’t afford a carriage’ — a line from the song ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and ‘Pouf, I want…’ — this last, over and over again. She thought she was speaking sense and her frustration grew as we indicated we didn’t know what she meant.
One day I was shopping with her in Oxford. There was something she wanted me to buy, some item of shopping that she was desperate for, but, of course, she couldn’t tell me what it was. So I was wheeling her chair up and down the supermarket aisle and pointing at various items, hoping that this might jog her mind and make her able to communicate with me.
‘Mummy, look, is it that?’ I said, pointing at a box of cornflakes, or something.
‘I can’t afford a carriage,’ she said.
‘Is it that?’ I asked again.
‘I can’t afford a carriage.’
