When I was six months old, my mother lost me after one of her many alcoholic
benders. Apparently I vanished into thin air. My father, a consultant
anaesthetist, ranted, angry with her more than distraught about my
disappearance. On his return from an overnight trip my mother told him that
she’d been helping my three brothers to prepare for a camping holiday with
the Scouts, had a few vodkas, probably a bottle, and everything after that
was a blank. When she awoke, I was gone.
My father phoned the Scoutmaster’s wife, who confirmed that her husband had
collected the boys from our back garden. He also said my mother had “looked
tired” – an Edinburgh-ism for being out of one’s face. My parents found me
in the garden, crying. I’d been out there all night.
My mother spent her days drunk or drugged, or both. This was our secret; the
secret everybody around us shared but refused to acknowledge. That time the
police came to the house, summoned by a vigilant neighbour. My father, for
whom the police were servants, not authority, explained that they were both
doctors, that everything was fine, and no, there was no need to involve
anyone else. We didn’t need social workers, for God’s sake. Some of our best
friends were social workers.
We lived in Murrayfield, one of Edinburgh’s leafier suburbs, in a three-storey
Georgian house with Jaguars at the front and sprinklers on the lawn. We kept
dogs, cats, rabbits, chinchillas and pigeons. Some of our immediate
neighbours were kind to the point of saintliness; others looked away in
undisguised horror as we children emerged, rowdy and unkempt, or my mother
staggered out, bag bulging with empties, only to return with a tin of soup
on top of six bottles of vodka.
I was born smelling of my mother’s drink and we grew up in a bubble, cut off
from the world by our own strangeness and unpredictability. We children
couldn’t, wouldn’t talk about her drinking, not even among ourselves. It was
as if we were immersed in a conspiracy of silence. We had white lace net
curtains, so filthy that nobody could see in. It wasn’t long before we
stopped trying to see out. We were too ashamed to tell anyone what was
happening. I soon learnt from my three older brothers that I had to grow up
quickly and, in our different ways, we hid the truth from each other as well
as from the world outside. We existed rather than lived, separately but
together, sneaking around, sniffing her breath for clues.
I remember once when my mother fell downstairs and lay at the front door for
hours. When I got home from school, I thought she was dead, but she was just
drunk. We lived like that for years, never knowing what would happen next. I
became adept at pouring vodka down the sink and replenishing the bottle with
water in the vain hope that she might not get too drunk.
To say that her drinking ruined my life would be a cop-out. Ruled my life is
more like it. I watched her drink from the bottle until, one day, the tables
turned and the bottle began to drink her; all of her. In her forties, she
changed from being a strikingly beautiful woman into a pickled old prune.
When she could no longer collect her stash herself, she ordered it from a
local shop and hid it wherever there was space: in the wardrobe, in drawers,
laundry baskets, behind the cistern, in boots and shoes. Her drinking was
snatched, furtive.
Yet, I loved my mother. I just wanted her to be normal like other mothers, to
bake scones, make us meals when we came home. I could never understand why
my father didn’t stop her drinking. It was only years later that I
understood that nobody stops anyone drinking.
We were well off, although the money was my mother’s, which rankled with my
father on bad days. My mother’s father had been a famous psychiatrist who
treated members of the Royal Family and had left her an inheritance as well
as a propensity for Valium.
My father drank too, but his drinking was the acceptable sort: a beer before
dinner, a few glasses of wine with his meal, a whisky afterwards.
God knows why my parents got together. They seemed to stumble into one another
while working as doctors at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. They resembled film
stars, she tall, slim, dark, floaty; he, silent, brooding, almost
Brando-esque. Their tragedy began in 1941, with a glamorous wedding at the
Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge. Years later, my mother told me she’d had
several strong drinks to steel herself for the long walk down the aisle.
When my father went off to the war, she set about having a good time.
Together, they were never happy. He shouted and banged doors. She drank,
trembled and took pills, to calm her down and help her to sleep; horrible
concoctions of Sodium Amytal, Largactyl, Valium, Mogadon, and Melleril, all
of which she mixed with drink. She would lie on her bed, dressed in a shabby
tweed suit, covered in food stains from drunken raids on the fridge. The two
of them never spoke, other than at mealtimes, and then it was only to fight.
“Please, give me a glass of wine,” she’d beg my father, staring at the flagon
between them on the table.
“You’ve had enough,” he’d reply, in a tired voice. “Oh, I’m not allowed a
glass of wine, am I?” She’d jump up and storm out of the room, only to
return minutes later and start again. “Can I have a glass of wine?” she’d
say, already pissed from her own supply. “Nic, ask your father if I’m
allowed a glass of wine.” I would look at her, then at him, then back at
her.
“You look as if you’ve had enough already,” my father replied.
“For God’s sake, I haven’t touched the wine. Nic, have I had any wine this
evening? Anyway, I don’t need your permission,” she’d snarl. “I’ll just help
myself.” She’d stand up, stalk round the table, reach for the flagon, pour
herself a glass, then wait for him to start shouting.
If she did sit quietly at the table, she’d be so drunk that she could barely
lift a fork to her mouth. It seemed to hover there for an age, finally
clattering between her false teeth and coming to rest.
Miserable as it was, I hated it when our desperate edifice fell apart. We all
did. However, it was only when we ventured out into the world that we
realised how mad we really were. For most children, it is strangers in the
world outside who can represent danger. For us, the danger was right there
in the house, under our feet, waiting to trip us up.
I started drinking young, heading the same way as my mother; drinking simply
because there were so many things I couldn’t face. By 17 I couldn’t dry my
hair without a glass of something in my hand. Yet, in a sense, I was
privileged. For years I’d had the opportunity to watch as alcohol stripped
my mother of everything – her looks, friends, her self-respect, so I knew
that drink was a horrible way to live and an even more miserable way to die.
Nevertheless, I let it set about destroying me and ended up in a coma with
acute pancreatitis at 26. I was lucky, though. I stopped drinking. My mother
didn’t. She choked to death on her own vomit, hopeless and helpless. She was
63.
I believe the reason we didn’t get help was shame. Our relatives, my parents’
friends, the neighbours were ashamed of us, of her drinking. As a family, we
were buried, kept out of the way like lepers. Shame, I believe, is a far
bigger disease in today’s world than alcoholism.
— Mother’s Ruin, by Nicola Barry, Headline, £12.99
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