Little bodies as battlegrounds

Writer Sarah Moss on eating disorders and the sweetness of her youth

*CW: this feature mentions eating disorders and anorexia

October half terms were my favourite. For reasons best known to our parents, my brother and I went to different schools whose half-term breaks didn’t overlap, so I got to spend a week with our grandparents without competition or distraction. I was my grandfather’s princess, my grandmother’s darling. We went for country drives and pub lunches whereas my parents would have insisted on long hikes and, if they were feeling indulgent, would have let us have sugar-free trail mix. We drove to Harrogate for a spot of shopping, always new books for me and once when I’d left my worn navy swimming costume at home a new one, turquoise with diagonal gold frill from shoulder to hip, best kept, the three of us agreed, for use at their house.

After shopping, we swam in the pool at a hotel, ate lunch in its restaurant, usually duck or steak for my grandfather, invariably scampi for me though I didn’t like the accompanying chips, prawn cocktail with iceberg lettuce for my grandmother who always watched her weight. We strolled in the spa town’s manicured park and drove home in time for my grandmother to cook dinner while my grandfather watched the six o’clock news. At bedtime I had a long bath, hotter and deeper than was allowed at home, with my grandfather’s cinnamon-scented bubble bath, and then read for hours in a big, soft bed with pink bedding bought just for me.

Late October meant Halloween, which in Yorkshire meant parkin and treacle toffee, apple-bobbing and also church for the pleasingly spooky All Souls service. My grandmother and I took a big torch to walk down to the medieval stone church, the country dark pressing up against our backs. Back at home the skies were always orange, street-lit, and the stars never out. We made the toffee ourselves, a cauldron of sugar darkening on the stove, the smell of sin and joy saturating the velvet curtains and thick carpets. At home, sugar was wicked, forbidden. Bad children with bad parents ate sweets and the sweets would rot their teeth and make them fat and that would serve them right. It would take me forty years to see that my grandmother’s baking and toffee-making were not only indulgences of our shared, complicated passion for sweetness but also covert operations against my father. My body — sugar-sated, cinnamon-scented, turquoise-clad — was the adults’ battleground.