Free A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French

collection. It’s at these times I am overwhelmed with pride. Not so much at what she has there, but at her courage to show it, even to me. Because she knows through experience that what she’s got probably won’t be enough. That’s what has happened again and again, so she chooses the route of light-hiding and bushel. It is comfortable and familiar there, and strangely offers her, as a bonus, a place of higher social status. The position of outsider, the supposedly dangerous and fearless rebel. It is cool to be in either the anorexics’ tribe or the couldn’t care lesses’.
    How she accomplished ANY GCSEs at all at her old school I don’t know, and actually that is testament to how fundamentally clever she is. I don’t think anyone at that school appreciated what strength it took for her to even turn up on the exam days. She was entering the firing range as far as she saw it, as the target, confronting exams which had a steady aim. But she went, and each morning when I dropped her at the school on exam days, her inner conflict was evident: attend and fail? Or abscond and fail? Absconding carried more credibility and came with the added bonuses of assumed control and power. Attending meant losing face by admitting that you do, after all, care about the outcome.
    And look at the outcome! She passed four of them. Yes, C grades, but passes – and she goes and manages an A star for her art! Utterly incredible. Thank goodness in that particular instance, for her observant and sympathetic art teacher, Ray, who noticed that she was attempting to sabotage her grade by refusing to hand in her coursework, a project about fathers containing a beautiful pop art portrait of Husband. She had worked so hard on it, yet she felt it had little or no merit. She predicted failure. Even of something so obviously good.
    So, this was the Dora we took along to Brook’s Meadow. We told them she was seriously melting down to the point of vanishing, and they convinced us that this was ‘exactly the kind of kid they welcomed’. The Head assured her that this was her opportunity to reinvent herself, to show herself and to participate fully, should she choose. I know she was excited at the prospect of becoming this whole new, motivated ‘achiever’, and we had to get behind her positivity, but I also knew in my heart it would be difficult to pull it off overnight. She would have to shake off the habits of a lifetime. A short lifetime, but an entire lifetime nevertheless.
    We stood helplessly by as she fought them all for her first year, retreating into the same old patterns of behaviour, hell bent on self-destruction. She was endlessly in detention. Detentions she refused to turn up for, eliciting further detentions. Which she didn’t turn up for … and on … and on. The teachers were pulling their hair out and called us to various excruciating meetings to discuss it. Husband was my saviour at these. He steered me through, nice and steady, whenever I was prepared to rant, defend, overexplain, or just cry at the sadness and the hopelessness of it all. At one point, I felt his calming hand on my arm when Mr King asked if we thought Dora could ‘even achieve the lowest levels we accept at our school?’ There was the rub, right there – ‘our school’. Not Dora’s school, their school. Where Dora wasn’t that welcome, perhaps? Didn’t really belong? Didn’t fit?
    Husband would constantly remind me that this was just school, that Dora didn’t legally even have to be there any more, that in the end what mattered was her happiness. He kept repeating ‘she is fit and healthy. She is not a drug addict. She is not an alcoholic. She is not pregnant. She is beautiful. You are beautiful. Everything’s beautiful. Shut up.’ He was, unusually, right.
    And in any case, these past few months I’ve been heartened to spot real changes in Dora. She goes to school willingly every day. Unheard of. How can I explain to them that in Dora world, a