alice hiller

 

For many years I wanted to write about anorexia. But every door handle I turned came off in my hands, and I was left on the outside. Eventually, poetry gave me a way in.

When I stopped eating in 1977 there was no social media or internet. I hadn’t heard of the condition. After nearly four and a half years of being sexually abused, I made the decision to refuse food in order to take control of my entrances and exits.

Although I wouldn’t have been able to say this, I also believed that my body had forfeited the right to be fed as a result of what it had participated in. To starve it would be to clean myself.

There was additionally a pleasure in saying no. I remember liking food with defined edges like oatcakes and fruits with hard borders like oranges – as if by eating them I could grow my own rind.

The decision came upon me all at once when we were staying in a rented holiday apartment near Stranraer in Scotland at Easter. It was entirely white and modern. Outside there were deep green pine trees and blue lochs. It seemed as if the world had become a different place and I could choose my own path through it.

My feeling of empowerment was heightened by the copy of History Today that Mrs Webb, my teacher, had lent me. An adult publication, it made no concessions for nearly teenage readers.   I remember holding it in my hands and thinking ‘I can follow this. I am someone.’

To enact my decision, when we went shopping for food I bought myself two flat stick figures of a man and a woman. They were facing each other, connected by his peg penis that slotted into her wooden midriff.

The first thing I refused to eat after buying the tiny 2cm dolls was white mashed potato. I can still see the undefined, helpless mound it made on my plate.

Over the next six months, my weight dropped to four and a half stone and fine down grew all over my body, which began to resemble that of a concentration camp victim. When I went back to boarding school for the autumn term, the nurse weighed me daily.

I used to get up at five in the morning, unable to sleep for hunger, and alternately pace the wooden boards of the single room I had been moved to, and get down on my bony knees to pray. I felt I had been given a direct line to God, who would soon be lowering the ladder up which I could climb to Heaven.

It was only when I was admitted to hospital, at my school’s insistence, that I discovered that there could be a way out which didn’t involve my death.

 

The two draft poems which follow are designed to be printed one after another so that ‘salvation’ lies under ‘almanac’ as a reminder of all the bodies of all the children and young people who starve themselves.

 

almanac

that April when I first
refused her I shut
my mouth
to mashed potatoes

we went in June
to France for half-term
at her insistence I
ate pintade

like a raptor
she flew
at my first hairs
my new breasts

come August my skeleton
walked backwards
she watched me
from her deckchair

that September I spoke
with God directly
soon I’d step off the school
scales straight to heaven

the headmistress sent
me home in October
hospital pills melted
my mind like tallow

come November
I ate from plates
as big as straw hats
when Dr Daly said

 ‘Alice, you’re not your mother’
like fruit which the knife opens

it peeled off my old self

———-

anorexia nervosa

I have no place

at the table

I erase
until           all

I

am         is

gone

 

Pintade means guinea fowl in French.

 

Thanks to Ellen Crannitch’s ‘Fresh Approaches’ workshop members at the Poetry School to whom I read these drafts.

Like many people who live through sexual abuse as a child, for many years I was deeply ashamed of myself. This shame had the effect of cancelling most of my memories of my dad, who died before the abuse began. It was as if by blanking out his love for me – I could keep it clean and separate from the child I became after his death.

Until I began to work with a psychotherapist in my thirties, all that came up when I thought of my dad was a few brief glimpses of him, amid a general blankness. Though our conversations helped give them definition, they were still isolated mountain peaks rising from thick, grey mist.

It was only when I began to make album without photos that I began to see the hills and fields of our daily life as father and daughter that the mist had been covering. This work is still on-going.

I am working on a poem about a photo my grandmother kept beside her bed. My dad holds me on my christening day. I haven’t seen the photo for thirty years, but I can still see his smile. It radiates joy and pride. Another poem is about when he came to my bedroom window early one holiday morning, with a creel full of shrimps fished on the beach for our tea.

When I draft and redraft, it is somewhere between sewing and darning. As I find the words, I join myself back together, thread by thread, stitch by stitch.

Last June, shortly before the Brexit vote, I made a daytrip to Brussels, where we were living at the time of my father’s death in 1972. I was eight then.

I took the Metro from the Eurostar the church where his funeral was held. It was a weekday and empty. Where had been a mass of flowers and noise and people, was quiet, maybe a little shabby.

Immediately I walked up the nave, I had a sensation of being surrounded by warmth and safety. By making this pilgrimage, forty-four years later, I somehow set free the part of myself which had locked away what my dad’s love actually felt like.

Sitting in the pew I last sat in with his coffin right in front of me, close enough to touch, I became again my daddy’s Aly. I was a whole child, as well as an adult making a life as best I could in the aftermath of severe trauma.

That memory has served as a compass ever since. It informed my decision to share my own process of self-recovery through writing, in this blog. My journey is one that many people who have been sexually abused in childhood need to find a way to make for themselves, in order to reclaim the identities which should have been theirs from the start.

Below is ‘odyssey’, which I’m still writing about this experience.

odyssey

too high for my hands
you move in your orbit
lost under lilies
your loved face hides

daddy if I heard your voice
would you know me
hoist white heart sails
my ship of matchsticks

eurostar to brussels
slide into the platform
shut nave turn your key
rapportes-moi où j’étais

daisy june morning
jackhammer november
jelly down crusher rocks
I will shoot through you

 

*

church roof apex
tree song hymn place
jesus hang velvet dress
tears of not crying

bodies packed like chocolates
air of perfume prayer books`
before here always Sunday
now the lord is my shepherd

 tight-rope forwards
wind gift dips under me
oak gleam petal flowers
gold glitter handles

 big voice vicar
goodbye daddy
inside long box
quiet as pencil

 no more wheelchair man
no more floppy legs
no more electric motor fast on grass
no more run beside you

 from me night gone
iron lung breathing
wibbly drawing intensive care
you in bed from sideways

 DADDY SAYS HELLO ALY
I can write better
home before morning break
mummy on green sofa

* 

spray again belly self
float out wind kiss
sea-saw arm fall
soft cotton daddy shoulders

 tip toe bristle feet
hairs read vibration
set down wet sand
six-eye swivel

 silver water wind ruffle
jump splish splosh
watch out slippy green
sea smell gull song

 heavy in big water net
me with daddy pushing
tired legs salt sting
mermaid up cliff carried

 

lie along nursery dark
sheets shiver hot nylon
baby brother sleep tight
scare-me shapes move closer

 big hand push back fringe
kind fingers stroke soft
lighthouse daddy strong as rock
here to save your aly

 

*

in dead body church
warm shawl cuddle
kindness thick as soup
come to feed this kitten

 

With thanks to Tim Dooley, Catherine Smith, John Mee and Emma Mackilligin who have all read this in various drafts.

When you’re fifty-two, you don’t expect to get lucky. Life has given you enough knocks to know to take it steady. The day I heard I’d been short-listed for the Jerwood-Arvon Poetry Mentorship – I didn’t believe it.

When I got to the interview, I had forty-five minutes to talk about my work to poet Pascale Petit and Joe Bibby from Arvon. I told them I wanted to change awareness around sexual abuse in childhood through the poems in albums without photos.

With every word I said, the world around me seemed to get larger, and more full of possibility. Not just for myself, but for other people making lives, as I am, in the aftermath of sexual abuse.

Back home, I sat stunned, holding the dog, and not seeing the TV. I could hardly take it in when Joe Bibby rang the next day to say I’d been selected.  My year of #UNshame was kicking off.

There was a week to send Pascale Petit twenty new poems, and get the beloved dog taken care of, before the initial retreat with the other eleven mentees at Totleigh Barton in Devon on 13 March 2017.

Irrespective of age, everyone seemed as shell-shocked as me when we wound our way through the tight, green Devon lanes. Waiting in a cup in the hills was the white walled, thatched manor house which we would make our collective home for the next five days.

Our welcome cream tea was served at a long refectory table in the wooden beamed dining hall which doubled as workshop. Every footstep we took, floorboards seemed to creak around us.

It was as if the house was bound together with threads of sound. In the days that followed, as poets, novelists and playwrights ate and talked, and work-shopped and walked together, it came to seem as if we were also becoming connected to each other by our shared hopes, experiences and ambitions.

On our first night, we had to introduce what we were working on. Under the rafters of the great barn, I explained that my collection of poems, album without photos, brought together things which couldn’t be seen or recorded any other way.

I said I wanted to document the process of being groomed as a child, and the sexual abuse that followed, but also the life that I have made, and am making, in its wake.

On our last night, we had to perform five minutes of our work to each other. My opening poem, ‘december night’ was a summoning to my child self to be with us at the reading.

The reaction I saw on everyone’s faces let me know that she was indeed with us. I read what I had written about being groomed on the night train to Victoria, about how it felt after my dad died, about what a school run was like when it took you back to the bed in which you would be abused.

My child self stayed with us as I finished with a poem about starving myself to freedom. I had also spoken for other voiceless children for whom I want to bear witness as I chart my way through my mentorship year towards the completion and publication of album without photos.

 The evening, and the week, ended on a note of euphoria generated by the news that the novelists’ mentor, Jacob Ross, had won the inaugural Jhalak prize. We couldn’t believe that he had chosen to sit listening to us all read when he could have been at the awards ceremony in London.

It may have been raining outside, but Jacob’s win filled the vast space of the barn with applause and exuberance until it seemed as if we were swimming in champagne with a fireworks display of flashbulbs saluting him.