The girls of St Thinian’s

21 March 2007

My school is deeply ordinary — a fee-paying school but not one of the famous ones, not particularly posh or expensive. It contains 600 girls from 8 to 18 years old, a minority of them boarders, in a nice provincial town. The teaching is good and I think we’re generally the kind of sensible kids who work hard and do fairly well — but there’s no unusual pressure put on us to ‘achieve’. Even so, the obsession with being a size zero is still sweeping through ‘St Thinian’s’ like a virus. And if it’s happening at my school, it’s bound to be the same in other similar establishments.

Let me explain. Last month I gave up chocolate for Lent, but my friend gave up not just chocolate but anything containing sugar. Can you imagine what that means? It’s nearly impossible to cut out sugar altogether, unless you just eat lettuce for over a month. Which is what she did. She wouldn’t even touch fruit, and she wasn’t alone. Many of the other girls decided to copy her example in the desperate hope that it might bring them closer to their goal of being a size zero. This was in addition to their usual regime of regularly missing meals and calorie-counting every last mouthful.

Of course, not every girl is affected by the size-zero virus. It seems to take hold at about the age of 15, when GCSEs begin, and I would estimate that it’s only about a fifth of each year that is seriously obsessed at any one time. The rest of us just worry endlessly about being fat and seesaw between detoxing and pigging out. The signs of a proper, full-blown size-zero infection are easy to spot. They include having a jug of water and nothing else for breakfast, always going into tea to see what cakes are on offer and then sitting down to watch hungrily as other people eat them, spending hours analysing every aspect of the appearance of celebrities, models and television stars and never taking any exercise except dance class because that is held in a room of wall-to-wall mirrors and allows you to scrutinise your body for the last few pounds of remaining fat. Swimming is completely off-limits for fear it might make you muscular. It’s not a healthy look that the size-zero girls are after, remember — the aim is simply to be as tiny as possible. When my headmistress arrived at our school a few years ago, doughnuts and hot chocolate were laid on for the prefects’ weekly meeting. Now she provides plain biscuits, fruit juice and hot water — at the sixth-formers’ request.