Eighty Not Out (34 page)

Most social occasions were agonising. During the Christmas and New Year break of 1978–79, we were invited to stay for two nights at a chalet near Martigny, owned by Inge, an Austrian woman in Al-Anon whose American husband, Terry, like me, was supposedly ‘in recovery'. The scene, when we got there, was an amalgam of every festive card ever printed. In dazzling sunlight the temperature was sub-zero, and thuds and scrapes of skaters echoed over the ice of a small lake, fringed by snowladen conifers. Inge's dog, a spayed bitch not unlike Oscar, welcomed his company, and our hosts' two children got on well with ours. Inside the chalet a roaring fire had been lit, and preparations for the evening meal were under way. Fergus, who always suffered from cold extremities, was glad to be inside, but an element of caution inhibited adult exchanges, and bonhomie was not entirely spontaneous. The chalet was decorated with berried holly and mistletoe, there were crackers for the children, roast suckling pig, a large boiled ham stuck with cloves, many seasonal dips and nibbles, as well as thin frites of the sort I shall always associate with the Café de Paris in Geneva. Terry and I were offered a choice of mineral water, apple or cranberry juice, but for Fergus and Inge there was wine. (Early in the
AA
programme we are told that what other people drink should be no concern of ours: they are normal drinkers, entitled to drink whatever they choose. Most newcomers to
AA
fear their abstinence at social functions may bring unwelcome attention, but in reality few people, other than those who have a problem themselves, will attempt to force alcohol on others.) The truth was that Terry groped his way during the night to a cupboard where he knew Inge stored bottles of schnapps and other liqueurs, while I had to ration a small bottle of vodka concealed at the bottom of my grip. Not until a decade later, with four incarcerations in rehabilitation clinics between us, did Terry and I feel ready to share the memory of our misery that night at a group meeting. The children and the dogs had really enjoyed themselves, however, which must have rewarded Inge to some extent for the herculean effort she had made to maintain a normal lifestyle.

In the summer of that year, no discernible change having taken place in my behaviour, Fergus, two friends from Al-Anon, two
AA
members, and the children organised a confrontational meeting to take place at home. The aim was to convince me that my recalcitrance was such that they thought I should go to the Broadway Lodge rehabilitation clinic in Bristol for at least one month. At a practical level Katharine, who had just sat her O-levels, would be at home and could take care of the house, the two younger children and the dog while Fergus was at work. I put up no resistance, having come to the same conclusion, and encouraged by the recent return to the group of a woman with multiple dependencies who had undergone a radical transformation. I was so confused that even packing a suitcase was a challenge; simple decisions were daunting, and I remember gyrating with twitching fingers in the middle of a mess of disordered clothing. Fergus flew to London with me, and by the time we landed at Heathrow withdrawal symptoms had begun. Reluctantly he agreed to buy a half-bottle of vodka to sustain me on the journey to Bristol. I took periodic swigs from the bottle in the juddering, insalubrious lavatory of the train to Temple Meads.

Not far from tears, we clung to each other in the pillared entrance foyer of the clinic, aware that options were running out and that survival of the family was at stake. A nurse appeared to fetch me, and informed Fergus that on no account was he to telephone me, nor was I to telephone him, for the next month. Letters were permitted. Fergus then left for his return flight to Geneva.

I was taken to a long room reminiscent of a school dormitory, in which there were ten beds, each with a locker, and a curtained hanging space for clothing. Familiar
AA
literature, a flask of water and a glass were on top of each locker. At the far end of the room, where the bathroom and lavatories were, was a desk at which a patient sat scribbling diligently. One or two women sat on their beds reading notes; none looked at me until the nurse had left, saying: ‘One of the girls will help you unpack; then the doctor will see you in about an hour.' My fellow inmates then came to life, asking where I came from, and how I was feeling, because I did not look too bad. True to form, I had done a good cover-up job, but knew the shakes would soon begin, and very little vodka remained. The bottle was found when a skeletal woman about my own age opened my case. ‘You'd better get rid of that pronto,' she said. ‘I'm surprised the nurse didn't ask if you had any alcohol in your baggage.' So I took it to the bathroom, wondering if I could gulp the remainder without being discovered in the act, but decided to play safe and pour it down the loo. Besides, there was not enough to stave off the tremors for more than a short time.

A crisply mannered doctor remarked, as had all the others, that I did not look as if I had reached the terminal stage of alcoholism, asked if I had ever smoked, tested my motor reactions, prodded the area around my liver, and took a blood sample. I told him how much I had drunk over the last few hours, and my dread of acute withdrawal symptoms. He assured me the nurses would look after that, before ushering me out of his office with the words: ‘Good luck. Listen, learn and try to do as you are told.' Then the nurses took over: their attitude was censorious, and small talk was discouraged, so I was snubbed when I admired a ring worn by the one who was injecting me. Further ‘medication' would be given later, and I was now to go downstairs for the evening meal. Prison guards came to mind.

The male dormitories were in another wing of the house, but at meetings and mealtimes the sexes mixed. In the dining room it was clear that a pecking order had been established for preferred seats and neighbours, so, as the last to arrive, I had to fit in unobtrusively. A square-set woman, with cropped, irongrey hair, said grace in an upper-class drawl. Conversation was limited to the barest civilities and please-pass-the-salt level. I had little appetite, and had begun to feel distinctly woozy; later I thought I was going to faint in the bath. Some nameless pills, which I had to swallow under supervision, were brought just before I lay down on a very hard bed in the muffled atmosphere of the dormitory. Fergus would by this time be back in Divonne, probably mowing the grass in the fading light – it all seemed very distant.

After breakfast, at which each morning a different member of the group read ‘Thought for the Day', one of the counsellors gave me a folder containing more literature, a lined pad of foolscap paper and a questionnaire to complete. It asked if I had ever imagined voices, had hallucinatory dreams, suffered memory loss over an extended period, lost bladder control, vomited in public, lost consciousness or been physically violent. Was my drinking of the binge variety or did I drink on a daily basis? Was I a social or a closet drinker? The
IQ
test was of such simplicity I wondered if it contained a hidden catch. Then the entire group was summoned to the smoky common room. At that time it was thought too much to ask inmates to give up cigarettes while they were being weaned off alcohol, heroin, cocaine, sleeping pills and tranquillisers, glue sniffing, and in a few cases food and sex. Most of my fellow patients were multiple addicts; my addiction was to alcohol.

A blackboard, with the Twelve Steps written in coloured chalk, hung over a late Victorian marble fireplace. One of several counsellors, most but not all of whom were themselves in recovery, addressed us. First, we learned it was not acceptable to refer to a recovered alcoholic – an addict remained ‘in recovery' for the rest of his or her life. The first thing I wrote on my pad was the danger of replacing one addiction with another. The warning was clear; the risk of shifting from one panacea to another was high. I learned that many substances lingered in the system, detectable in the nails and hair for months after a period of abstinence. We should be alert to hidden risks in substances such as cough mixtures, mouthwashes, tonics and painkillers.

The role of heredity in alcoholism was not proven, but I had drawn my own conclusions from observation of groups in Geneva. A head count over many months, in groups averaging eighteen people, revealed at least two-thirds had a close relative who was alcoholic, and that an astonishingly high proportion were of either Irish or Scandinavian stock. At one meeting of ten people, seven were of Irish extraction. One Dublin woman came from a family of five boys and three girls, whose father had been alcoholic; two of the girls and three of the boys became alcoholic. All had witnessed their father's battle to stop drinking, which he eventually did without the help of
AA
, but the family consensus was that he became ‘a miserable old codger, dry, but not sober' – ‘sober' in the widest sense of the word. A fine line, the full implications of which I did not understand until many years later. I kept quiet about my studies, knowing they would provoke more accusations that I was intellectualising my problem and should concentrate on getting to grips with this ‘simple programme for complicated people', that I should look for similarities rather than differences, and rid myself of the delusion that I was in any sense special or different. Protests that I had never done this or that were invariably parried by ‘No, not yet'. There was much wisdom in those despised American exhortations. ‘Keep it simple, Stupid,' I told myself.

We had been cautioned about the perils of lying about how much we had been drinking, or the level of drugs we had either been swallowing or injecting, as this would result in underprescription of medication, with possibly fatal consequences. A few days after this warning we had a demonstration of what could happen. I was talking to a middle-aged, tall, sinewy, undernourished-looking American who was unsteady on his feet, attributing this to ‘that damned medication they've gotten me on', when he pitched forward, striking his forehead on a sharp corner of the marble hearth. He was having an epileptic seizure and nurses came quickly to the scene. Cross-examined the following day by his counsellor in front of the assembled patients, he confessed to having grossly understated his alcohol intake. This was his third incarceration in a clinic. He worked for a major international drug manufacturing company and should have known better.

Some male inmates were there at Her Majesty's expense, having been offered the choice of a jail sentence or entering a treatment facility; most came from mining or fishing communities around Cardiff or Swansea. My counsellor, Ed, was also Welsh, and of those who helped me over the years, it was his judgement I came most to respect. The wide spectrum of social background among the patients surprised me, though one of the tenets of
AA
is that alcoholism is a great leveller. I found the Welshmen sensitive, highly intelligent and articulate, regardless of the fact that many left school at fourteen. Roughly half of them were serious in their commitment to kick their dependency; the others regarded treatment as a soft option. One man, the visible parts of whom were so finely tattooed in red, green and blue oriental dragons, birds and serpents that little natural skin remained, had spent years in the French Foreign Legion; later, during a heatwave, his entire upper body was seen also to be tattooed.

After the evening meal, on completion of written assignments, a period was set aside for socialising. This took place in what had been an elegant drawing room with early nineteenth-century plaster cornices and ceiling roses. Now it had acquired the same institutional atmosphere that pervaded the entire building: chairs covered in uncut moquette were grouped around low tables with overflowing ashtrays in the centre – an indication that someone had not done the house task allocated to them, which would come under scrutiny at the next group meeting. These meetings were chaired by one of the counsellors, who, after summarising what had been covered the previous day, would ask each patient to give a short account of what stage they had reached in the programme, what step they were working on, and how they felt their handwritten life story had been received by the group. The opinions expressed were always to be respected, no matter how hurtful, as they were made in a spirit of love and hope that the author would achieve sobriety. This generality was idealistic and far from true: after a week I could see that some patients took a fiendish delight in the discomfiture of others. Two in particular, nearing the end of their stay before going for ‘extended' time in a halfway house, would set traps for an unwary newcomer, who would then be grilled by a counsellor, as well as by the rest of the group. In retrospect, I am sure their behaviour was recognised by their counsellor, and was one of the reasons they were going to remain under observation. Without warning, the spotlight would switch to another victim, the accusation often being of trying to keep a low profile, wearing a cynical expression, not contributing enough to discussions, or continuing to be in denial.

The life story had to be given to one's counsellor, who then passed a copy of it to each member of the group. Each patient's task was to write a letter to the author, giving their comments, and listing defects of character detected from the story, or perceived at group meetings. Having listened to the letters written to other patients, I prepared for a vitriolic response. Most letters to me were censorious, and several emotional: my story read like a Barbara Cartland novel; it was pretentious to mention living near Geneva; my accent was affected; I was full of anger and resentment, and had fabricated much of the story; I was vain, attaching too much importance to my appearance; I talked too much and didn't listen; I was inordinately proud. On the positive side, I was seen to be generous, helpful, essentially good-natured, and possessed of a saving sense of humour. Several implored me to ‘Let the barriers down and show your vulnerability', ‘Get out of the driver's seat', ‘Get honest with yourself and others', ‘Stop the denial and face reality'. Nobody seemed to have detected my intolerance and inflexible attitudes.