Anorexia: 'My lifelong prison sentence'

Anna Paterson's elderly carer was no white-haired, doting old lady. Standing in for Anna's tranquilliser-addicted mother, she turned her bungalow into a prison and transformed mealtimes into a nightmare.

Only now, nearly 30 years on, has Anna been able to shake off the trauma of those early years and face "normal" life.

But she still bears the emotional scars of the abuse she suffered, and blames more than two decades of self-torture on her "vicious" carer.

Anna, now 32, says she has been the victim of "lifelong imprisonment" with anorexia nervosa. She has been in and out of sanatoriums and psychiatric hospitals all her life, and at one point her weight plummeted to a terrifying 4st 10lbs, leaving her in a coma.

"I wasn't diagnosed as anorexic until too late, when the damage was done. It's much harder too treat when it's chronic," she says.

"I was condemned to a life of loneliness and despair, in and out of hospitals, on a useless mission. All the doctors and nurses and king's men couldn't find a way to ever put me together again."

Anna's family looked perfect from the outside when she was born in 1968, with mum, dad and two-year-old brother Mark completing the happy picture.

But the reality was far from ideal. The abuse began when Anna was three.

"With my own mother addicted to tranquillisers I was imprisoned for long periods of time in the old lady's bungalow, where the torment of force-feeding began," she remembers.

"No-one suspected this short, plump, grey-haired old woman would turn out to be a vicious child-abuser."

Anna lays the blame for her anorexia firmly at her carer's door. She says: "She was my surrogate mother so always fed me. She would make enormous portions and force me to eat them. I hated fish and gristly meat but she would make me eat it until I was physically sick. Then she would tell me that all that food would make me fat and that I was ugly. She put me down 24 hours a day.

"My mother thought it strange that I kept asking her if I was fat, but she didn't put two and two together."

Things reached their worst when Anna - who lived in Cornwall - was brought to Oxford on a visit by her carer.

"She used to take me on days out and she brought me to Oxford once and abandoned me in the centre for six hours.

"I was only about five years old at the time and I was absolutely terrified. I was convinced she was never coming back, but I knew I'd get in trouble if I told anyone so I waited until she came and found me.

"When we got home she told everyone I'd run away and left her, but she did that quite a lot," Anna remembers. "I never told my parents what she was like until about two years ago, when I stopped protecting her."

But the city has played a major part in Anna's rehabilitation - along with the fiance she met in an Internet chat room.

Simon Tess was one of ten people Anna wrote to after joining a web chat page. The London-based screenwriter, also 32, admitted to being insecure, shy, depressive and uncommunicative. His reply changed her life.

She says: "Simon's open ability to express his own lifelong inadequacies miraculously made me open up and discuss my feelings for the first time ever. I could trust this stranger called Simon. Here was someone that understood me, here was my freedom.

"It was that love that made me leave my parents' bungalow for the first time in more than eight years to walk into the local village. That walk was my awakening, and by the time we met - although total strangers - we were both deeply in love."

It was Simon who brought Anna back to Oxford to address her fears and exorcise some ghosts.

"Although everything came flooding back, the city had changed enough not to recognise where I was abandoned, and Simon was so supportive.

"I saw an anorexic girl while I was here and was devastated that I couldn't just go up and help her. That's when Simon suggested writing a book, because it would probably reach a lot more people."

And on the way home, kneeling at Oxford railway station, Simon asked Anna to marry him. The couple are tying the knot next October in Cornwall.

Anna's autobiography, entitled Anorexic, was published this month and is now being made into a documentary, with filming starting soon in Oxford.

The response to the book, which took a year to write, has already been staggering, with letters arriving from anorexics saying it has given them great strength to know someone has been through the same thing.

Anna says: "We all feel that no-one else understands and that we are the only ones who think like that, with voices telling us what to eat.

"It's enabled them to talk about their problems in a way they have never been able to."

Doctors and psychologists have also written to say it has helped them understand the illness better.

Now Anna is confident about adapting to her new life in the public eye and hopes to take up screenwriting or a degree in law after filming ends.

She says: "Although I live with the fear that anorexia is always there, I no longer use it as an escape. I don't count calories any more and am over eight stone now.

"Any problems I have I talk through with Simon.

"I have realised there is a lot more to life than just food."

**Anorexic is published by Westworld International, priced 6.99.