In 1970, on the eve of the Jewish festival of Shemini Atseret, my mother died of anorexia nervosa. She was 46. She had arrived in this country with the kindertransport just before the second world war at the age of 12. Around her 16th birthday, she heard that her father - the chief rabbi of Hamburg - her mother and her three little sisters had been murdered in the Bikernieker forest where they were forced to strip and dig their own graves. Even though her death was so long ago, I still feel guilty about it, smarting with the pain every day.
Life changed when I was five. Until then, it had seemed a blissful combination of playing in a sunlit garden, sitting in the morning room eating boiled eggs and bread and butter to the accompaniment of Music While You Work on the radio and echoes of my mother's tinkling laughter as she swished the taffeta hem of a party dress to show me before I went to sleep.
Judith was a 50s superwoman. Her baking, cooking and entertaining were renowned. She made all her own clothes and mine, and took pride in her perfectly arranged regiments of preserves flanking the walls of our kitchen. Needing money, she established a small wholesale fashion business, and finally extended her perfectionist standards to herself.
She hated her post-pregnancy fatness, and began to skip meals and take handfuls of laxatives. She worked during the day, and reorganised her household chores with strict discipline, completing them at night. Her goal was to be able to wear the tight-waisted Dior-look and, finally, with the aid of a waspie, she achieved a 17-inch fashion- queen waist.
Then she disappeared. I was cared for by a shuffle of live-in helps and an almost absent father. One day after school, they told me she was back, in her bedroom. I ran up the stairs and burst through the door. The curtains were drawn, but in the dark I could just make out a figure lying in the bed.
I jumped on her to kiss her. She pushed me off gasping, "Get off, get off. You're hurting me!" and turned away, sobbing. In the gloom, I could just detect a swathe of bandages. I discovered later that she had had major breast surgery.
We never returned to those earlier idyllic times. My parents fought continuously, though to the outside world they presented a loving picture. We existed - my mother spinning ever faster on a self-perpetuating axis of entertaining, work and parties, ignored by my father and growing thinner daily. As she became sicker, her devotion to our food preparation magnified and so did the portions.
By the time I was 11, my father had taken over the business and my mother was already very ill. Yet even on a bad day, she would crawl around the kitchen in her nightdress, holding on to her super-polished Formica kitchen tops to make half a large roast chicken each for me and my father, or a whole roast between the two of us with roast potatoes and rice or potato salad heavy with homemade mayonnaise. And to follow, always pie, cake or a home-made lockshen - traditional noodle pudding enriched with dried fruit, margarine and sugar. To refuse was not an option. She would sob and say that we had wasted her whole day. It was easier to eat. I ballooned to a vast fourteen and a half stone while she grew painfully thin.
By my 13th birthday, she had abandoned her life to illness and I became her nurse. Often I would be up with her through the night carrying her to the toilet, or later, when she became very weak, emptying vomit bowls and bedpans, then washing her and trying to cook tiny amounts of food to tempt her, before I got ready for school. She complained that the food she had eaten was hurting her and would sit in a chair banging her stomach, forcing herself to be sick. I never noticed when the private purge became public. The ghastly became the norm.
Sometimes my father would drive up to school, march into a lesson and, without apologies to the teacher, bark, "Ruth. Now! Your mother needs you!" From that point I refused all social occasions, such as after-school events and trips. I never went out with friends, brought anyone home, bought clothes or sat chatting in a coffee shop. My father seemed to be away most of the time. When my mother's screams of pain from cramps and blood loss from vomiting ended in a rush to the hospital, I would hug myself outside the ward, praying, not knowing where he was or how I could contact him.
By the time I was 17 and size 46 hips no longer fitted, I had had enough. I hated being the fat girl in school - and the force-fed goose at home. There were fights. My mother accused me of not loving her because I would not eat. I tried to explain how unhappy I was. I tried every cranky diet in the world - well, I had the queen of dysfunctional eating as my teacher. I lived on carrot sticks and a bag of peanuts for the day and, yes, the weight dropped. And with the confidence that weight loss brought, I met my future husband.
Our wedding day was fraught with anxiety, my mother saying she was too sick to get out of bed and my father ranting hysterically that we should cancel the wedding. He had realised he was losing his nurse.
As my mother's sickness took hold, she became hurtful. After my first child, I was very heavy. For the first baby party I bought a pink brocade dress and jacket. I can imagine what Trinny and Susannah would have made of the outfit. My mother said I looked like a couch - it still hurts.
When my mother was dying, and I was pregnant with our second child, the doctor, unbeknown to me, told my husband to take me away from the house. We went to the chemist for a prescription I thought would help her condition. When we returned, my mother was dead. My father pulled me by the hair up to her bedroom and forced my face on hers. "You killed her," he said. "If you hadn't left home she would still be alive now!"
My mother's final weight had been four and a half stone. I lost my baby the day of her funeral. But I was lucky, I gave birth to another child.
I myself had anorexia for many years - just starving myself - but my husband realised, saved me and threw away the scales. Now I am a normal size 12. The binging, bloating and depression have all passed, but a residual discomfort exists if people push me to eat. I now suffer from severe osteoporosis, and a legacy of guilt about my mother (could I have done more?) pursues me relentlessly.
· Remembering Judith by Ruth Joseph is published by Accent Press on September 12 at £7.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875, or go to theguardian.com/bookshop.
