I was saying how affected I’d been by the family photos in her book – Pete at seven fallen asleep reading the Beano; a solemn six-year-old taking the Beaver cubs oath; aged 13 in cricket whites – and how it is hard to reconcile this child with Pete Doherty, Britain’s most notorious junkie.
For three years, since what she calls “the Peter Problem” began, Jackie has searched for that link. She has re-evaluated her son’s childhood, raked through a blur of busy summers, outstanding school reports, uproarious Christmases, hunting for clues, signs, triggers. “I remember being so proud of my children who were bright, upright citizens,” she writes in Pete Doherty: My Prodigal Son. “They would never take drugs or break the law; they were past their teenage years and we’d sailed through those without a hitch. Hadn’t I watched other parents who’d had awful trouble with their kids? Hadn’t I felt smug?”
Yet here she is, a nurse for 30 years, a woman who’s only been “squiffy” three times in her life, who won’t take aspirin for a headache, an early-rising, fête-running Army officer’s wife, now the mother of a convicted criminal and heroin addict. “But we haven’t suffered as much as other families of junkies,” she says. “Peter’s never stolen from us, never beaten us for money, never brought trouble to our door…”
Yet she does endure a rare and peculiar pain. To Jackie her son is a sick and fragile boy. But to the world, Pete Doherty, former lead singer of the Libertines, now Babyshambles, is a self-destructive rock icon, glorious heir to Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin and Morrison, whose drug-related ends all came at 27, “the year of rock and roll death” as Jack White called it, and Doherty’s age now. Her very worst fear is the subject of ghoulish anticipation. “I meet Peter’s fans who say they never miss one of his gigs, in case it’s his last.” Her friends thought it consoling to say, look, he’s a rock star: taking drugs and living dangerously is what rock stars do. “But,” Jackie cries, “he isn’t their son.”
It was the day of her mother’s funeral in April 2003 when Jackie realised that Peter (he is never “Pete” to his mum) was an addict. Doherty had flown to Liverpool from the Libertines’ tour of Japan to be a pall-bearer. He was fidgety, tearful and melancholy, but Jackie attributed his mood to jet-lag and grief. But when they talked after the funeral he confessed many lyrics to his songs were about drugs. Then in the car to Heathrow – Doherty was to rejoin the Libertines in America – he became anxious, desperate to reach London. He refused to be taken to the airport, demanded they set him down in Whitechapel. He needed to meet someone and it had to be tonight…
Eight weeks later, Jackie was on night duty when a friend of Doherty’s called to say Peter was out of control. She heard of drug-induced frenzies, bizarre behaviour. So Jackie rushed to London – her husband, a major in the Royal Corps of Signals had been posted to the Netherlands – to meet with Rough Trade, the Libertines’ record label. Her son should seek rehab and he’d be fine within two or three years, she was told, a time-frame that seemed pessimistic back then.
Yet first Jackie had to find her son. The book is full of such chases across London, following tips from some of Doherty’s nefarious associates, trips to his flat only to find he’s left, Pete not turning up or being surrounded by a huge, swirling entourage of fans and musicians, so Jackie can rarely speak to him alone. But this time she found him calm and lucid. He admitted he was smoking heroin and crack cocaine. She recalls being relieved for the small mercy he wasn’t (yet) injecting. He agreed to begin drug treatment at the Farm Place centre in Surrey and Jackie, reassured, returned to Holland.
But within days Doherty had fled rehab and Jackie was driving back across Europe to plead with him to return. The story of their meeting poignantly encapsulates her struggle and sets the pattern of the following years. Over lunch, Pete had agreed to go back to Farm Place – the taxi was on its way. But then a crowd gathered around the Soho pavement café. Fans queued for autographs, someone produced a guitar and Doherty began to sing. In that moment Jackie knew he would not return to rehab. She had lost him to the crowd and to his celebrity, with all its great adventures and temptations.
This is the first time Jackie, 52, has been interviewed and she is wary of upsetting Peter or those close to him, whom she relies upon for information and to protect him. When I ask about Kate Moss, Doherty’s on-off love, she says merely that she met her once. Does it not make her angry that while the supermodel faced no charges and has grown richer, her glamour only enhanced by her then cocaine problem, Doherty is arrested every other week, vilified and imprisoned? “I think everyone should leave them alone,” is all she says. “They’ve been deeply in love and people just won’t leave them alone.”
Thus My Prodigal Son is squeamish of the more lurid details of Pete’s life. At no point does she describe his East London home: a chaos of broken furniture, drug paraphernalia and, famously, pictures Doherty painted in his own blood. Doesn’t she have that mother’s instinct of wanting to clear up the mess? “I am an extremely tidy person, I know where everything is in my drawers,” she says and, gesturing to my heap of cuttings, “I’d like to tidy up that table now. But some people live in chaos, you have to allow people to live how they want to live. Because amid the chaos is an awful amount of creativity that I don’t understand. Now that might be madness in some people’s mind. But what is mad? People thought Impressionism was mad.”
I suggest that she still has reason to be proud: her son is a prolific song-writer, has had best-selling albums, is an electrifying live performer and, uniquely among today’s airbrushed stars, is a raw, authentic and original voice. “Perhaps,” she says with a heavy sadness. When she sees Pete, she has taken to joking: “I blame the parents.” At which he replies, “Well, you have to blame them for the good things too.” And it is clear – although she denies it – that Jackie, a gregarious, open Scouser with all her native Liverpool humour and flair for language (she has published a book of poetry), is the source of much that is good about Pete Doherty. It is from his mother he has acquired his unconventional style, in particular his trademark hats. She has a huge collection herself, berets in every hue, and loves searching out oddities at antiques fairs and house-clearance sales.
She also seems to be the source of his capacity to live utterly in the moment. I ask if the family ever worried when her husband Peter senior was in danger – he served in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq (during the first Gulf war) and Northern Ireland – she shrugs and smiles: “You just get on with it. Carpe Diem!” And last summer at the Glastonbury festival, when her son was locked in his addiction, and she could only snatch a few moments with him, Jackie still had a blast. “Have you been to Glastonbury?” she asks with excitement. “I was in the Chas & Dave tent and I danced my legs off, with girls, with boys. It was fantastic! I’d go again.”
