by Pip Granger
‘People tell me that they used to piss in the bed when they were in drink’ – he paused just long enough to make us all wonder what was coming next – ‘but I never pissed in the bed in my life – I pissed in the wardrobe.’ Father threw back his head and let out a bellow of laughter, and I laughed too, although I couldn’t quite see what was so funny, having mopped up more than my fair share of other people’s smelly old wee in my time. I tugged again.
‘What is it?’ he asked irritably. He’d been enjoying the laugh.
‘When’s Mummy coming to get me?’ I asked.
‘When she gets here.’ Father looked at his watch. ‘Any time now, I should think.’
Sure enough, Mother walked nervously through the door a few minutes later, and I galloped over to meet her.
‘Hello, Mummy. Can we go soon? Robin Hood’s on later.’
But before we could get out of the room, everyone started praying, except my mother and father, who none the less bowed their heads politely and didn’t utter a single word about anyone being a God-bothering cretin, which was what usually happened if anyone got holy on them.
‘May God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ The oddly assorted group intoned the words solemnly, and I noticed that neither parent even rolled their eyes, which was a miracle in itself.
Father had found Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was at the Sunday Club with him in the very early days of his membership. AA was an American idea that had made its way across the Atlantic and Father became one of its first, and most enthusiastic, members in this country. It is tempting to believe that Gaby’s romantic notion that she could change her new husband had come to fruition, but Father always disputed this. He used to say that an alcoholic may attend a few meetings to keep his spouse quiet, but that no one ever got sober for anyone but themselves. Certainly, over the years that I listened to countless alcoholics talking when they visited him, it did seem that he was right. Family pressure may get a man or a woman into AA meetings, but it couldn’t keep them there. The only thing that seemed to work was that the booze-hound in question got so sick of themselves that they simply could not carry on.
‘And if their wives, children and dear old mums benefit, so much the better. But if a drunk is determined to carry on drinking, then wives, children, and even their dear old mums can just fuck off and leave him with his bottle,’ Father said more than once.
By his own testimony, Father had finally got sick of being drunk. He called his epiphany ‘the three o’clock tribunals’. In the early hours of one dark and dreary morning he lay awake, vomiting, shaking and sweating, and saw clearly, for the first time, the kind of man that he had become. And he hated himself. He was sick and tired of the way that alcohol had taken his money, his health and his self-esteem, and decided that he had to do something before he drank himself to death.
‘The trouble with drinking yourself into the grave,’ he’d say to whoever would listen, ‘is that you don’t just die; that would be easy. No, you have to go mad first, or worse, drink yourself into a wet brain.’ I asked him once what a ‘wet brain’ was, and he kindly explained – although I rather wished he hadn’t, because the pictures it conjured up were gruesome, to say the least.
‘Booze, and a great deal of it, over a period of time, turns the brain from something that resembles a large, pinky-red walnut into a grey sort of sludge. Once you’ve drunk your way into a wet brain, there’s no coming back. You have to spend what’s left of your life shambling about, seeing things that aren’t there and gibbering like an idiot, which of course you are by that time. It’s tragic really.’
It was indeed, and it left me wondering why the grey sludge didn’t ooze out of earholes and nostrils, but I didn’t like to ask. I had bad dreams for some time after he told me the gory details, and saw my mother or father dripping wet brains all over the lino. It was no wonder that Father had decided to stop drinking. Wet brains and madness didn’t bear thinking about.
Of course, having found AA and taken to sobriety like a convert takes to God, Father became imbued with a missionary zeal that made Christ and all of his Apostles look like slackers. He made it his business to encourage Mother and, indeed, her much younger brother, Tony, to knock the booze on the head too.
To give Father his due, he never gave up trying. What’s more, contrary to his nature, he was remarkably kind and patient about it as well. Handing me over to Mother at the Sunday Club, after my weekends in London, became a regular thing, and part of Father’s devious conversion strategy. The Sunday Club was a special place. Many of the men and women who crawled through the doors of their first AA meeting had lost family and friends during their drinking career. They found that the loneliness of Sundays was a severe strain on their infant sobriety, and thus the Sunday Club was born. It was not a meeting as such, simply a meeting place, where the lonely and desperate could offer company and support for a few hours. I suspect that the club saved a good few lives in its time, because it gave a focus to an otherwise empty day. It was easier for the members not to pick up a drink first thing in the morning if there was understanding company to look forward to later in the day. All they had to do was hang on for a few hours.
My face became quite a familiar one in that shabby little room above that shabby old pub, and in a funny kind of way, I became quite fond of the people in it. The only worrying thing, for me, is that some of the faces would disappear, never to return, and the whisper would go around that they had returned to drinking, had died or, worse, had chucked themselves off one of London’s many bridges or in front of a tube train, usually one that was travelling on the Northern Line. I have never understood why the Northern Line appeared to be so popular with suicides, but apparently it was, and I sometimes wonder if it still is.
I never did know how Father found AA, but once he had found it, he was never to let go of it again. It, and the men and women in it, helped to sustain him for the rest of his life.
13
Uncle Tony
Father’s patient nagging finally paid off. With great courage, Mother faced the grim reality of her drinking, joined AA and started her long, and often painful, journey towards recovery. It was an immense relief to everyone – except, perhaps, to the local publicans and some of their regulars.
Mother was at an AA meeting early in her recovery, and I was being baby-sat by one of her friends from school, when the telephone rang. I galloped into the hall to answer it. ‘Hello,’ I said into the receiver and waited for the caller to identify himself.
‘Hello, Porky, is your mother there?’ Father often called me ‘Porky’; it was short for ‘Porky Fat Belle’.
‘Hello, Daddy. No, she’s at a meeting.’
‘Oh well, never mind.’ Father put his hand over the mouthpiece, but I could still hear him say to someone who was with him – Gaby, I presumed – ‘She says Joan’s not there, she’s at a meeting. Perhaps I should leave it till another time, when her mother’s home.’
I heard a heavily accented female voice answer, but I couldn’t make out what Gaby said.
‘How are you?’ I asked, wondering why he had bothered to phone us if he was only going to talk to Gaby, who was standing right next to him.
‘What? Oh, I’m fine, and how are you? How’s school?’
‘I’m fine, too, and school’s school,’ I answered. The less said about school the better. My father tended to get a bit cross about school. Once again I heard Gaby’s voice talking into his other ear.
‘OK, I suppose so.’ I could tell Father was reluctant to carry out whatever instructions he was being given.
‘I just phoned to tell you that you are expecting a baby brother or sister around Easter. What do you think of that?’
I said nothing. Polite telephone conversations were grown-up stuff, and I had learned that, whenever I was in doubt what to say to my father, it was best to say nothing. It was often safer th
at way, and anyway, his usual response to my silence was to tell me what he expected me to say. He didn’t disappoint.
‘Aren’t you excited?’ Father wanted to know. He sounded deflated by my silence.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly. ‘I’ve only just heard.’
The truth was that I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about it, or how I was supposed to feel about it. I wished my mother was there to talk to.
‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ I said, and hung up.
*
When I got in from shopping at the local greengrocer’s a few days later, Mother was on the phone to my grandma.
‘We’re going to visit him tomorrow, Mother. Any messages?’ She listened for a moment. ‘OK, I’ll tell him. You’ll post it on to him, will you?’ There was another moment’s silence, then, ‘That’s fine. No, I’ve got to take her with me, apparently. Gaby’s not feeling too well, what with her bloody pregnancy, and they can’t have her nearly as often as they used to.’
Grandma made a comment, and Mother answered her rather testily. ‘No, a mental hospital is obviously not an ideal place to take a ten-year-old, but what do you suggest I do with her?’ Another pause. ‘I have no idea how the kids feel about the new brat, they’re not saying.’ Yet another pause, then, ‘I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t mean to sound cross and yes, I’ll try to say “baby”, and not “brat”, in future, but you must admit, the man has impeccable timing. He ups and leaves us just a week before the poor child starts school, doing untold damage there. And now he’s going to drop another bra— er, baby, just as she has to move from cosy old primary school to secondary school. As always, how he feels is the only thing that really matters.’
Mother was quiet for a while. Grandma was obviously putting in her two penn’orth. ‘As you say, she’s been the baby of the family for ten years now, so of course it’ll be a shock for her. Look, I’ll have to go, she’ll be in for lunch soon and I haven’t even got it started yet. What? Oh, a nice lamb chop, she’s just nipped to the shop to get us something to go with it. Bye for now. Give my love to Father.’
There was a clatter as she put the phone down, and I nipped out again through the back door and made a noisy entrance, so that it looked as if I had just returned with the spuds and greens. I was thoughtful throughout lunch. Going to visit a mental hospital seemed more scary to me than the prospect of a new brother or sister. The new baby was going to happen in the future, whereas we were off to the hospital the very next day.
‘Are we there yet?’ I asked for about the forty-seventh time. It was a gorgeous day, far too lovely to be stuck in a train carriage that reeked of old fag smoke and the burning coal from the engine. Little did I know then that there would come a day when I’d miss the whiff of a steam train, but at the time, the smell of coal, so redolent of winter, seemed out of place on that beautiful, clear, spring day.
‘We’ll be there soon. Settle down and read your book.’ Despite Mother’s instructions, my eyes kept straying from Swallows and Amazons to the world racing past the grubby train windows. I wanted to be out there, gulping in fresh air and charging across the grass.
We were on our way to visit my Uncle Tony, my mother’s ‘baby’ brother, who was in hospital once again.
My unfortunate grandparents had had three children. First was my mother, then, a good few years later, Uncle John. Uncle John was severely Down’s syndrome – or a Mongoloid, as they used to call them in those days. Then, eighteen years after Mother, Uncle Tony came along. John died at nineteen, never having got out of nappies or having learned to speak or to walk, while Tony, bless him, was an odd, solitary child from the start. ‘Boys would knock on the door, asking Tony to come out to play, but he rarely went,’ my grandmother told me sadly. ‘He preferred to spend his time on his own. I don’t know why he was like that, but he always was, even as a very little boy.’ Which, no doubt, is why my solitary habits worried Mother so.
Tony was a thwarted musical genius – thwarted because Grandfather forbade him to play his piano once it became obvious that Tony was better at it than him – and a mathematical whiz-kid as well, but he also had a terrible drink problem. According to my mother, he’d line up a dozen or so shorts on a bar and down them methodically, one after another, with absolutely no attempt to be even remotely social about it. He was going for oblivion, with a capital O, and nothing else would do.
Tony had just finished his latest course of ‘aversion therapy’, and it appeared that he’d be banged up in the bin for a while yet. Whether he’d admitted himself for treatment, or had misbehaved so badly that someone had put him there, I have no way of knowing for sure, but my feeling is that Grandfather had lost patience with him and had had him committed. The only basis I have for that belief is that Mother was acting as a go-between between Grandma and Uncle Tony, which suggests that it was difficult for Grandma to get to see her youngest child. Besides, Grandfather had never been that keen on his younger son, and hints later dropped by Grandma suggest that he had washed his hands of Uncle Tony.
Grandfather was, after all, the son of a Methodist minister, so two alcoholic children must have been very embarrassing for him. He’d had a couple of alcoholic older brothers that he remembered being poured on to the doorstep night after night, until Great-Grandfather, in true Victorian style, had shipped them off to America to get them out of his way. Grandfather’s sense of shame had been well honed when he was young, and it must have felt dreadful for him to realize that his children were staggering in the unsteady footsteps of his brothers. Worse, he was not in the position to ship them off to some unsuspecting place well out of his line of vision.
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Next stop. Now, collect up your stuff and be ready to gallop, because the bus we want to catch is supposed to leave two minutes after the train gets in. No dawdling, or we’ll have to wait a couple of hours for the next one.’
I wonder why the big, institutional mental hospitals are nearly always out in the sticks somewhere? Is it because greenery, relieved by the twitter of birds and dotted with the odd herd of cows, and possibly some sheep or horses, is soothing for the troubled? Or was it a question of cheaper land prices in the days when most of them were built? Perhaps it was simply a way to get the ‘lunatics’ out of sight. It may have been cheaper than doing a Great-Grandfather, and sending them to far-flung countries that might eventually object to being a dumping ground for our unwanted. It may even have been a combination of all those factors, but, in my experience, the larger and most forbidding institutions are usually well away from regular and easy public transport.
Uncle Tony’s new hospital was no exception. The main building itself was Victorian Gothic with a lot of small, mean windows, some of which, on the lower floors, were complete with bars. There was a collection of smaller, more modern buildings – huts, really – that huddled around the main edifice like ugly ducklings around an ugly duck. I hated them, and was much happier once we got away from the buildings and I could run around, flap my arms like a bird and whoop a bit before we settled down under a tree to eat our picnic in the beautiful grounds.
Mother and Tony talked about nothing much – the weather, mainly – leaving me free to concentrate on the food and our surroundings. We were sitting on a small hill, under a tree, and it was warm enough to wear just our cardigans and sit on our coats. Tony looked well enough; perhaps a little thinner and paler than usual, but not haggard, or wild-eyed, or anything. There was, though, a nervous, detached air about him. I remember that he kept putting his hand to the corner of his mouth as if he was picking a pimple, only he wasn’t; he was rubbing part of his cheek between his thumb and forefinger as if he wanted to rub it away. His wary, wounded, clear blue eyes were focused on something a long way away, something that I couldn’t see. I suspect that Mother couldn’t either. She nattered on as if she hadn’t noticed her brother’s faraway mood, but I was sure that she had.
‘Mother sends her love, and she says she’s popping some of
your summer underwear in the post for you, and one or two shirts.’
My mother took a sip of orange squash from the thick, white cup that a nurse had lent us, along with some small plates from the hospital’s china cupboard. Then she fished about in an oilskin shopping bag and hauled out three scruffy, greaseproof paper packets. Mother’s parcels were always scrappy; she was famous for it. Two of the packets held sandwiches, a different filling in each, and the third held three modest slabs of dark brown, left-over-from-Christmas, very fruity, fruit cake, thick with yellow marzipan and white icing like plaster. Mother always baked two Christmas cakes, one for the holiday and a spare to save in an airtight tin for later. Those were the last three pieces of the spare.
A brown paper bag held three rather tired, past the end of season Cox’s apples and three spotty bananas. Finally, with a flourish, Mother produced a small tablecloth in white linen, embroidered with a crinolined lady surrounded by the obligatory hollyhocks, marigolds and cornflowers. It had been made by one of her and Tony’s many aunts – or possibly by their own mother, who was no slouch in the handicrafts department, either. There were a lot of embroidered tablecloths, tray-cloths, doilies, runners, arm rests and antimacassars floating about Grandma’s large family. Grandma had many handy sisters, who crocheted and tatted as well, then passed on their efforts to their sisters and sisters-in-law as Christmas and birthday presents.
Tony stopped rubbing his face and staring at nothing long enough to laugh gently as the sandwiches and cups of orange squash were laid out on the tablecloth.
‘I like the final touch,’ he told my mother with a smile.
‘I thought you might.’ She smiled back. ‘Have a sandwich. Cheese or shrimp paste?’
‘One of each.’
We all took our share and munched in silence for a while. Past the tall boundary wall, a flock of rather grubby sheep grazed and waited to be shorn of their winter fleeces. Patients wandered the grounds, some in the company of nurses, others alone. Nobody seemed to be making a great effort to talk with one another if their paths crossed, or even to make eye contact, save for the nurses, who chattered brightly to everyone they met, as well as to their charges. I noticed that Tony’s eyes were focusing as they followed one particular couple, and his hand went back to its obsessive rubbing. Mother tried to distract his attention with a bit of idle gossip.