Free Eglantine by Catherine Jinks Page B

turning to Ray, ‘I remember reading about the suffragettes. When they went on their hunger strikes, they were force-fed. With a tube.’
    ‘What are suffragettes?’ I wanted to know.
    ‘What’s force-fed?’ asked Bethan.
    ‘So what’s your point?’ said Ray, and Mum exclaimed, ‘The dream , Ray! Bethan’s dream!’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Maybe the poor girl had a tube stuck down her throat. So they could pour milk down it, or something.’
    ‘What’s a suffragette?’ I repeated doggedly. Mum explained that suffragettes were women who had fought for ‘universal suffrage’ – that is, for a woman’s right to vote in political elections. In England, many women had been gaoled for doing things like chaining themselves to fences and shouting in parliament. In prison, they had often refused to eat – in protest – and had been force-fed as a result.
    ‘Yuk,’ I said. ‘That’s terrible.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did it happen in Australia, too?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Mum thought for a minute. ‘I don’t think so. I think women already had the vote in Australia, by then.’
    That pleased me. And the next day I felt even more pleased when I went to the school library, at lunchtime, and found a book on anorexia nervosa. Finding that book gave me a real sense of achievement – until I opened it up.
    Then I discovered that girls who get anorexia are often moody, sensitive to the needs of others, desperate for approval, highly intelligent, and angry with their brothers and sisters. That made me nervous. It was not only a possible description of Eglantine – it was also a possible description of me! I thought to myself, no way am I ever going to become a vegetarian. I need my meat . I don’t want to get anorexia. From now on, I’m going to demand a chocolate bar every day, and I’m never going to look at another issue of Teen . (Not that I’d be caught dead reading Teen , but you know what I’m saying.) I also resolved to be nicer to Bethan. Oh, and to stop caring what Mr Lee thought about me. So what if he had read the local newspaper? So what if he knew that I believed in ghosts? As long as he kept giving me good marks, his opinion of me wouldn’t really make any difference. (Would it?)
    Of course, I’m not in the least bit desperate for approval. I don’t care what any of the dumb kids at school think of me. I won’t let Michelle paint my fingernails, no matter how much she begs. But still . . . it made me think. It really made me think.
    I was thinking, in fact, when I happened to glance at the index of the book I was reading, and saw the words ‘anorexia hysterica’. Naturally, I went straight to the pages listed, and found out that anorexia hysterica was a term used by Victorian doctors to describe anorexia nervosa. I also found out that the condition had first been identified in 1868. Typical sufferers, I read, were from the higher walks of society, well-educated, and prone to a ‘morbid perversion of the will’. They often read too much. (Doctors at the time thought that young women shouldn’t read too much, because it damaged their health, made them overly romantic and destroyed their appetites.) Girls of a ‘nervous character’ were told not to consume tea, coffee, chocolate, spices and nuts, in case such things made them worse.
    Girls like this often wanted to be spiritual, and delicate. They wanted to be like the poet Lord Byron, who had lived on biscuits and soda water for days at a time. Sometimes they stopped eating after they’d had a ‘romantic disappointment’. Sometimes they stopped eating because everything else they did was watched, controlled and commented upon.
    The chapter called ‘Fasting Girls’ mentioned Mollie Fancher, who lived in America in the 1870s, and ate almost nothing at all. ‘Her books were her delight,’ a friend of Mollie’s said. ‘She neglected all for them.’ I read that Mollie had been force-fed with a stomach pump. Lots of girls with anorexia were fed