Life Without Limits, A (3 page)

It all created a platform for me and Matty, and we ran around on it for all we were worth. Spirits were always high; mud, tears and injuries never far away. Feltwell was a small community, but we threw ourselves into it. Dad ran the local youth club; Mum helped out at the local playgroup. Our house was a constant hub of activity, with people coming and going. There were regular parties. The family barbecues were legendary. The snapshots I carry in my head of those times are idyllic – picnics, cycling down country lanes, Dad’s bedtime stories (including the one about Mr Mole, who went out one morning and couldn’t find his home when he returned because all these other molehills had sprung up in the meantime), the fancy-dress outfits that Mum made us for the Feltwell Fête each year, family holidays, Christmases at my aunt and uncle’s with my cousins, Rob and Tim. And then there were the tears. I vividly recall the time I slipped on a friend’s climbing frame and bit my tongue so deeply it was hanging off. There was blood everywhere. Not quite so idyllic, but all part of the tapestry. I was a ridiculously accident-prone child (and adult). Hence that nickname, courtesy of my cousin and one of my best friends, Tim.

It was a very stable upbringing that I enjoyed, rich and varied. I think my driven nature, or at least the young instinct it would develop from, was great for me as a child. I knew only that the world was full of so many wonderful things and that I must embrace as many of them as possible. It didn’t matter what the pursuit – studies, art, sport, drama – I just had to be at the centre of it.

My brother, who is three years younger than me, is also driven, but not so obsessively. Growing up, ours was the classic sibling relationship, full of love and laughter, and littered with the obligatory fights. It’s not clear where I get my obsessive nature from, or my fieriness. My mother used to be pretty feisty; my father was the mellow one.

Either way, this relentless determination to make the most of myself is something I was probably born with. It is also the ‘brave face’ syndrome, always wanting to appear strong and successful and, just as importantly, not wanting to show any weakness, for fear of people judging me negatively. I cannot remember a time when I haven’t been compelled by it.

I was particularly driven at school. My first was Edmund de Moundeford Primary School, just around the corner from our house, where I was particularly inspired by the headmaster, the late Mr Feltwell. (That he and the village shared the same name was a coincidence.) From there through secondary school to university, I was focused and disciplined, with one goal in mind – to be the best in my class. My capacity for hard work knew no bounds.

Not that I’d want you to think I was a dull girl! All work and no play was definitely not my style. It was more like all work and all play. I suppose we might see in it the seeds of my aptitude for endurance sport – everything was a hundred miles an hour, and it was non-stop. Sometimes I was restless even when asleep. I used to sleepwalk as a child. I once walked into my brother’s room and gave him a pillow, and on a few occasions I tried to get out of the house. But there were also moments of calm. I used to take myself off, for example, to paint the old church out at the back of our house. The impulse may have been to add another activity to my campaign of self-improvement (my grandfather Harry was very artistic), but I did also enjoy the chance to be on my own and to reflect. As long as I was doing something, I was happy.

Never was I happier than when playing sport. School was for achievement; sport was for recreation. It started off with swimming. I was dangled in water for the first time at three weeks old, and thereafter was taken every week. I never showed any signs of fear, and by the age of three I could swim. I had my first tricycle at around the same time. At primary school further sports were introduced – rounders, netball, cross-country, high jump and long jump. The egg-and-spoon race, obviously. The school sports day was a huge event. I never shied away from racing. I loved the competition, but it was the social side of things that really appealed, the chance to spend time with friends in a loosely structured setting, to compete without the same pressure I seemed to put myself under in the classroom.

I learned to swim at Thetford swimming pool, and at the age of six earned my certificate for swimming a mile (still got it – I keep everything). The adjoining leisure centre hosted a gymnastics class, which I started to attend with a few of my friends from Feltwell. I was appalling. In my blue-and-pink leotard and with my hair in bunches, I had the balance and coordination of a baby giraffe. Far more appeal ing were the activities of the swimming club, the Thetford Dolphins, next door in that special pool where I’d learned to swim. My nose was practically pressed up against the window, looking in. I begged my parents to let me join, and at the age of eight I was a fully fledged Dolphin. So began one of the most important associations of my early life.

We trained three evenings a week, and at 7.30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Then, every Saturday evening, there were the galas. It formed the hub of my social life, and soon became a big part of my parents’ social life, too. My mum took an exam in judging and timekeeping so she could help out.

I loved it. I was able to give vent to all the normal childhood mischief I denied myself in the classroom – the luxury of being naughty, the thrill of being sent out (usually with Michaela Wilson) for talking too much! It meant my bond with the place and with my friends in it was really strong.

It didn’t really bother me when I didn’t win. I was good – I think I still hold one of the club records – but I wasn’t the best. I won my fair share of races, but Julie Williams usually edged me, and I never threatened to beat the best boys. What did I care? This was more about being with my friends, meeting boys and prancing up and down the side of the pool in my swimwear. It was also about travelling to galas, even beyond the market towns of East Anglia. Thetford is twinned with Hürth in Germany and Spijkenisse in the Netherlands, and each year one of us would take a turn to host the other two. One year we would have German or Dutch swimmers staying at our house, the next we would pile onto a coach and catch the ferry to Europe. For a young teenager this was amazing, a huge highlight. We would be put up by a family, go on daytrips, experience a new country, new food . . . oh, and do a bit of swimming.

Despite my lack of application, I did show some potential in the pool. On the advice of my swim coach, my parents sat me down when I was fifteen and asked me if I wanted to join the Norwich Penguins. This represented a step up in class from the Thetford Dolphins. Knowing how ambitious I was in other pursuits they said they would drive me to Norwich, which was an hour away, if I wanted to take my swimming further. I said no. I felt it would detract from my studies and, besides, I was happy at our small club with my special network of friends.

Everyone is equal in the water. With our swimsuits, goggles and caps on, there wasn’t much scope for expressing how cool we were. My swimming friends and I had all grown up together, and together we took on those early awkward teenage years. I was in my element, totally comfortable in an environment with no front to it.

Secondary school, though, was different. I chose Downham Market High School over the more local Methwold. It was a forty-five-minute bus ride away, but it enjoyed a better reputation at the time for academia and sport. It took me much longer to find my place there. I enjoyed my time at school, but I derived a lot of that enjoyment from working hard and achieving good grades. In my first and second years in particular, I just wasn’t one of the in-crowd. I was a naive eleven-year-old when I arrived, sensible, studious and not very trendy. I didn’t want to have to dry my hair after swimming, so I wore my hair short, like a boy’s. Some of the other girls seemed impossibly cool. They were having sex – one even became pregnant, aged eleven. They were getting periods and growing breasts; their skirts were so short you could practically see their knickers; they wore loafers. I, on the other hand, was a late developer. With my flat chest, short hair, sensible skirt and heavy shoes, I suddenly became aware of the way I looked – and I didn’t like it. For the first time in my life, I felt alienated. I was getting my first taste of the world as an unaccommodating place, and it bothered me. I am a sensitive soul, and I’ve always wanted to be liked.

Those first two years at school were awkward in that respect, but I’ve never been one to sit around feeling sorry for myself, so in time, I did something about it. One of the first measures I took was to grow my hair into a big curly mane. It took an age to style each morning. Sometimes it wouldn’t sit in the particular way I wanted it to, and I would throw a tantrum at my poor mum. That control thing again.

Another example of my obsession with control was my attitude towards smoking. To me, every person who smoked was voluntarily killing themselves, and doing it quite openly. My greatest fear was that my parents would take it up. The knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to stop them tore at me. So I loathed the habit from an early age. I was terrified, too, of becoming a drug addict, and my attitude towards alcohol was unforgiving. I didn’t drink until I was twenty, and I hated it when my dad got drunk. Not that he did to any significant degree, but the mere possibility of a loss of control alarmed me.

By the age of thirteen or fourteen, I had found my feet at school. I was never totally in my element, as I was at the swimming club, but I made a couple of new friends in the third year and started to dress a bit more fashionably. Boys began to notice me. Sport also helped, to a degree. I played hockey and netball for the school. We were a successful netball team, becoming county champions. The team comprised the in-crowd, so I had a foot in the trendy camp, but I was still not one of them. I remember being the victim of teasing on the way back from one tournament.

Being a part of that set would have been nice, but it was nowhere near as important to me as excelling in my studies. Thankfully, the hard work paid off. My lower-school career ended with straight As at GCSE. It stunned me at the time. Straight As was something that happened to other people. Not to me. When it happened, I was overjoyed. I had my first taste of defying what I had thought possible. It endorsed my policy of working flat out to make the most of myself, so I cranked that up even further for my A-levels.

Needless to say, that didn’t open any doors into the trendy club. In the sixth form I suffered hostility from one boy in particular. To this day I don’t know what I did to upset him. We were in our mid-teens, so the merry-go-round of boys and girls was well under way. Even I had shed enough of my naivety to have developed an appetite for the opposite sex. I used to work it in my funky little crop tops on a Friday night down at Rollerbury, the roller-skating rink in Bury St Edmunds. I’d had my first kiss at fourteen (Gareth Whisson at the Thetford Dolphins Christmas disco), and from then on the usual awkward fumblings took place on a reasonably regular basis at Rollerbury and beyond. So it’s possible I once kissed the wrong person, or something, but I’m not convinced that would explain what happened next.

One day I walked into the common room at school, and there, scrawled on the wall in angry letters were the words, ‘Christine Wellington is a slag’. I was devastated. Even now as I think about it, I can feel the hot flush that surged through me then, of embarrassment and anger. I’ve got a pretty good idea who it was. Why he did it I have no idea. Of course, such stunts reveal far more about the people who perpetrate them than they reveal about the victims, which is precisely nothing. Still, the hostility of it caught me unawares. That someone should feel so ill of me that he be moved to write it up like that for all to see.

I’m not the sort of person to rise to that sort of thing. On those occasions in my life when I have encountered hostility like that, I have tended to internalise it and to withdraw into myself. It doesn’t happen very often, but this was the most damaging instance, because it changed me for a while.

I was going out with my first boyfriend at the time, Matty Knight. He was in the year below and a lovely, gentle-hearted soul. Over the next year or so I did something that was very unlike me. I fell into a low-key, introverted existence with him. The sixth form became a subdued phase of my life, dominated by A-levels (biology, geography and English), babysitting and hanging out with Matty.

This was when concerns about my body image really started to kick in. It was the early 1990s, and we were being bombarded with images of waiflike supermodels.
Just 17
was my girly magazine of choice at the time, and you couldn’t turn a page without Kate Moss or some other delicate sprite teasing you with her perfection. The yearning to look like these apparent goddesses was strong, and came with the equally compelling terror of ever turning fat. I was lucky in that I had never been one to put on weight. I have always adored food of every kind. It took me a while to come to terms with baked beans, but I love them now, which means there is no food left that I would not happily devour. In those days, I used to eat pizza and chips by the bucketload after swimming and when we stopped on the way back from netball tournaments. I never seemed to pile on the pounds.

But the nagging fear remained that one day I might. Coupled with my lust for control, it made me fertile ground for an eating disorder. I had a friend at the time who told me once that she had been experimenting with bulimia. When she explained it to me, it planted a seed in my mind. It sounded pretty disgusting, but here was a way of controlling what you could and couldn’t eat. If ever I felt a pang of guilt over something I had eaten, which was beginning to happen more and more as I reached the age of seventeen, all I had to do was to bring it up again. I tried to think of a downside.