BEAUTY QUEEN ..TO SKELETON

A SINGLE phone call saved Gill Baynard's life. It was from her five-year-old daughter Bryony.

"Mummy," she asked, "are you going to die?"

"I hadn't eaten for six weeks," says anorexia victim Gill, 35. "The doctors had given me just a month to live. But then there was a little voice on the phone.

"I didn't know what to say to Bryony. If I had said 'no' and then I did die I wondered whether she would ever forgive me.

"It was at that moment I realised I needed to turn my life around. No matter how I felt, I had to change things for my two daughters."

At that point the former model and beauty queen's 5ft 8ins frame weighed just six-and-a-half stone.

For weeks she had eaten either one piece of chocolate a day or nothing at all except cups of tea with a splash of milk.

She was taken into hospital as a living skeleton, with every rib protruding from her body and her wrists so frail and slender they looked like they could snap.

"I was physically and mentally at the lowest point of my life, but my little girl's voice on the phone changed something in me that day," says Gill.

The phone call was the start of a determination to live instead of die. Now, after surviving that low point in February, she is trying to put her life back together.

"When my GP said I had a month to live I felt numb," says Gill, from Swanley, Kent.

"Not real shock, just numb, total despair because I couldn't see a way out of these habits. And the worse it became the more I was doing it to myself. I had lost control by that stage and the anorexia was controlling me.

"I had been suffering for 20 years but anorexia was only diagnosed last year and I was finally able to confront it."

She believes her eating problems began when she was bullied at her all-girl convent school by teenage classmates jealous of her tall, slim and blonde looks. "One girl accused me of stealing her boyfriend," she says. "I'd get pelted with eggs and flour outside school. There was a campaign against me. I'd get called stupid if I didn't put my hand up to answer the question and laughed at if I did. It was a nightmare. My mum would come in and see the head, but that just made things worse. I dropped out of school after a couple of exams and it broke my dad's heart." At the age of 18, Gill ran away with an older man she met at a disco. At that point she was a healthy size 10, weighing just under eight stone. Ten months later, she was in hospital for the first time after losing more than a stone. "He was 10 years older and he made me feel special. But when he dumped me after a few months I couldn't handle the rejection and ended up in hospital for eight weeks. I was very thin. But they said it was just weight loss due to depression and sent me home."

Back with her parents, she began a habit of taking just two mouthfuls of food and leaving the rest of her plate no matter what was put in front of her. She said: "Mum and Dad started calling me Gill Leave-a-Bit. They still do today."

Despite her growing problems, at this stage Gill looked slim and sexy and she was signed up by a model agency. When her mum secretly entered her into the Miss Bromley beauty contest in 1989 she won it and spent three successful years in the model and beauty world, posing for catalogues, before her anorexia began to take its toll. She was a size eight when she began modelling, but began skipping meals to keep her weight down.

Gill said: "There was no real pressure as it wasn't a big-time agency but I started smoking to kill the hunger pains and get me through meal times. I began to realise then I was starting to lose more weight than I should be, but I wasn't aware I was doing it through self-hatred.

I used to get a buzz when people said how slim I looked. On the inside I was actually hurting like mad."

Trapped in another doomed relationship in her early 20s, hereating problems escalated again. "

That guy was abusive from an early stage, pushing and slapping me, but I stayed with him for three years.

"For some reason the more abusive it became, the more I wanted to change him and make him love me. I had to get this person to like me...that's whatgoes through your mind. When it finally finished I went back into hospital when I was 21 for about a month as my weight had gone down to six-and-a-half stone."

On a night out with friends soon after returning home, Gill met the man who would father her two children - Brooke, now 11, and Bryony. But that relationship ended up in tatters within two years.

"We just didn't get on," says Gill.

"My weight fluctuated up and down and I didn't deal with it. "When we broke up three years ago I spiralled again. I fell to pieces even though it was me who left him. That's when I finally realised what was going on. Refusing to eat had become my way of coping with what was going on around me.

"Also the more you do it the better you are at it so it's addictive. I'm 35 now and it's been going on for 20 years - during which time the episodes where I would go without eating got closer and closer until they started blurring into one."

In October last year Gill's doctor made her face the fact she had anorexia nervosa. She was down to a size six and had started wearing children's clothes because nothing else would fit. But it wasn't until that fateful phone call from her youngest daughter in February that she made the vow to eat herself well again.

"I'd look in the mirror and what struck me was how gaunt I looked," she says.

"I knew I looked terrible, I was under no illusions. I just didn't want to eat. The first thing they did in hospital was to gently encourage me. Small bowls of soup and things like that. It gave me space to breath in the world and relieve yourself of that control. It's a bit like having the bottle of vodka removed from the alcoholic. Even though it's an addiction it's a relief when it's taken out of your hands."

Desperate to raise funds for specialist private treatment for Gill, caring daughter Brooke organised a bric-a-brac sale at her school for her mum. She and her friends raised nearly pounds 200 in a show of kindness and support.

Tearful Gill said: "Brooke is a very caring and loving child. She came up with the idea, she's remarkable.

She and Bryony adore each other. I'm incredibly proud of both of them. "I feel very anxious as I just want to get on with my life and get my girls back with me."

Although now out of imminent danger, Gill knows that only half her battle has been won. Her weight is now back up to eight stone, but as we speak, the only items in her food cupboard are a box of tea bags and a bar of Cadbury's chocolate.

"Every day is a struggle to keep up the weight and not starve myself because someone has upset me or I feel low about myself and stop eating. When I wake up I never know what condition I will be in when I go to bed. There's a monster in me I'm trying to kill. But I don't know if I ever will."

If there's one thing that keeps Gill's mind focused on, it's the day when her girls move back in. Brooke and Bryony live with their father but Gill sees them regularly.

In fact the first thing she did on leaving hospital on Thursday was to pick them up from school. She says: "Their dad has done a great job looking after them, but even he knows they need to be back with their mum.

I just want to take each day as it comes. Hopefully my girls will be back home sooner rather than later."

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