Time stretches and condenses.
—
When I look at my emails—archived by year, each file full of correspondence about Hans and Eva—it seems extraordinary that there was time for anything other than their addiction, and yet there was so much time then. We lived in the countryside. There was working time and ordinary time, dinners and breakfasts, school runs and homework, The Simpsons and popcorn, hot chocolate and bonfires, rabbits and dogs.
Everything that had previously been a bit ad hoc, with one child, now had to be systematic. Five children make a little school, a herd, a flock, falling in predictable and unpredictable directions, always in movement like clouds of starlings in the sky.
I was nervous about accidents and painted a sign for the drive on an old piece of wood: SLOW CHILDREN, surrounded by garlands of leaves, flowers, a sun. We hammered the sign to a stick and stuck it down in the heavy clay. “Slow children” amused the children, who were anything but slow. The sign decayed over the years, and now it’s long since gone.
We went to the school plays, children stomping about on the dusty stage, saying their lines with the eccentric intonation the drama teacher taught them, bright choruses of the younger ones below the stage, old piano on the side. The last play was in 2014, as was the last school concert, the last sports day with the last picnic, hilariously trying to find the right event, keeping track of dogs and children.
Their childhood. I felt like it would last forever but I blinked and it was gone.
—
And for all the happy moments, that time was also shot through with anxiety and guilt, and enormous sadness for the children. They had had to witness, without understanding what they saw, the gradual disintegration and increasing reclusivity of their parents. They lost their home.
Hans and Eva loved their children; I know that. But isn’t that also a cliché of parenting? What’s the point of love if drugs come first?
People praised us for looking after them, but removing children from their parents is always an exercise of power. I don’t think of it as an act of power over parents, though of course it is that, too. But primarily it’s an act of power over children.
—
If Hans and Eva had been sober, they would never have portrayed themselves as the victims of this story. If they had been sober, they would have come down the day of the court case, bringing clothes and toys. If they had been sober they would have put up in a hotel nearby if they had to; they would have gone to the school to talk to the headmistress and teachers; they would have intervened in all ways possible to protect and help their children.
They didn’t do any of that. But still my guilt gnawed at me, like a hum of nausea, merging with all my long-standing liberal suspicion of power.
—
I often thought about the discredited Cleveland and Orkney children’s cases during those years. Those children had been removed from their homes by social workers, some in predawn raids. The children from the Scottish Orkney Islands were thought to have been abused in satanic rites. There was no evidence of that, beyond muddled answers to leading questions posed to children in the kind of repeated cross-examinations that even adults struggle to resist.
The children in Cleveland in the north of England were interrogated too, and subjected to the so-called reflex anal dilatation test, historically used to identify male homosexuals. Now the medical authorities allowed themselves the power of imitating the act of sodomising children to determine whether or not they had been sodomised. Was the purpose to help the children or to gather evidence against the parents? Who gave consent?
After much controversy, a report on the Cleveland case was commissioned, published in 1988. It found that the cases had been incorrectly handled. Ninety-four out of one hundred and twenty-one children were returned to their homes, and the dilatation test was discredited as a diagnostic tool for sexual abuse. The Orkney case ended in 1992, when an official inquiry report, strongly critical of the social workers, the police, and Orkney Islands Council, was published.
—
No wonder I thought about the Orkney and Cleveland children and their parents so much during and after our court case. I didn’t regret what we had done, but the case was devastating for all of us. I take comfort from Adam Phillips’ essay “Against Self-Criticism.” “Guilt,” he writes, “isn’t necessarily a good clue as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral.”
Looking back, I wish I could have been more robust in my own mind. The arguments in court were so outlandish that Eric never understood why I would even take them seriously: Hans and Eva were drug addicts, we took care of their children, and we were essentially accused of kidnapping them because we wanted more children? That made no sense.
To bring a case to court takes courage and single-mindedness. Eric, who had been banned and house-arrested as a young journalist reporting on human rights abuses and black politics in apartheid South Africa, and who had fled across the border to Botswana into fifteen years of exile in Britain, had any amount of courage and single-mindedness. I had a far more problematic and fraught perception of my own power. I also observed, more acutely, the pain and distress of the children.
That will always remain with us.
*
We now live mainly in London. I miss the country: the deer, the horses, the cattle, the scent mark of a fox drifting through the air, salt licks on muddy fields. I miss the white barn owl hunting low over the fields at dusk; the grey wagtail, every spring, tripping back and forth near the stream; the sea gulls sailing up on strong winds from the coast; the buzzards and the kestrels. I fed the horses every morning, and our pigeons, lined up on the dead branches of the old oak like strange white fruit. They would see me come and take off, swoop up and down, waiting for me to go. Mostly I did, but sometimes I stayed to watch them eat, studied them picking nervously at the seeds, an eye on me, an eye on the ground.
Even that felt to me like an illegitimate act of power. The pigeons were hungry; I forced fear on them.
Spring and early autumn evenings we played cricket and football. I fussed about the bats left on the lawn as the children ran inside, I lingered in the sudden silence, watching the sky and the rooks returning to the woods across the valley.
They are still there in the old house, the cricket bats, the tennis rackets, the baskets of balls and Frisbees and Hula-Hoops and dusty badminton sets.
It was a life.
8
In April 2008, nearly a year after the children came to live with us, Eva went to a party at the American embassy. She had some crack in her handbag, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—it was found in a routine search on entry, and she was arrested. The police subsequently searched Hans and Eva’s house and found small quantities of crack and heroin, and over three ounces of cocaine.
TETRA PAK HEIR HANS KRISTIAN RAUSING ADMITS POSSESSING COCAINE AND HEROIN ran one headline, and there were many others. Scotland Yard announced that Hans and Eva had been charged and bailed and were to appear in court later in the month.
Eva made a statement, stepping out of her front door in a short skirt and sunglasses and untidy blond hair, grinning conspiratorially at the photographers crowding the pavement below.
“I am very sorry for the upset I have caused,” she said, reading from a piece of paper. “I intend to leave as soon as possible to seek the help that I very much need. I am ashamed of my actions; I hope in due course to get back on track to become the person I truly want to be.”
I watch the footage and wonder again if this, in some sense, was just a game to her. It didn’t seem quite real.
The refractions of addiction: authenticity and artificiality, pain and need and rebellion.
*
When I married my first husband, I converted to Judaism. We used to go to synagogue when Daniel was little,
to lovely old West London Reform. Rabbi Winer would call the little children up to the bimah to drink a tiny silver thimbleful of wine. Most of the children would take a small sip and make a face, but Daniel, aged three or so, would down the little shot of wine and dance back to us with a beatific smile.
“Remember when I drank wine in synagogue?” he said, aged six. We already lived in the country then, far away from the synagogue.
“Yes! What did that feel like?” I asked.
“Like living in chocolateland,” he answered, locking me with his eyes.
Sometimes on the way to school we would listen to Burl Ives singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain”:
Oh…the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette trees
The soda water fountain
where the lemonade springs
And the bluebird sings
in that Big Rock Candy Mountain.
I love that bittersweet song, that mythical place,
Where a bum can stay for many a day
And he won’t need any mo-o-ney
The cops have wooden legs, there, and the bulldogs have rubber teeth; there’s a lake of gin for everyone, and the handouts grow on bushes.
Eva once told me about her dream of running a sweetshop in Knightsbridge—the never-never land of what might have been.
Instead she brought some crack to a party at the American embassy. What was she thinking? Maybe she’d forgotten it was there, a bag of drugs like dusty lozenges languishing in a handbag.
—
Hans and Eva were both charged with possession of a large amount of cocaine and smaller quantities of crack, heroin, and cannabis. But at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, District Judge Timothy Workman determined that the proceedings would be formally discontinued. Hans and Eva received a conditional caution, along with some “rehabilitative or reparative conditions.” Hans and Eva’s solicitor said that there had been a “protracted course of correspondence from my office to the Crown Prosecution Service to enable them to make that very sensible decision.”
The law is partly about what has actually happened and partly about intention. A lawyer could reasonably argue that wealthy clients, like Hans and Eva, had no intention to deal in drugs. They didn’t need to. That is an argument which is harder to make for poor drug addicts, so bias creeps in: people who are poor (the majority of addicts) are much more likely to go to prison for drug offences, facing social stigma as well as the potential danger of overdosing after prison, following months of being relatively clean (drugs are smuggled into prisons, but it’s hard to get daily heroin). When you are no longer habituated to heroin, what might have been a small dose months ago is now a deadly one.
—
We issued a statement. I wrote it.
The Rausing family are deeply saddened by Hans Kristian’s and Eva’s situation, and the events leading up to their court appearance today.
We hope with all our hearts that Hans Kristian and Eva can overcome their addiction and we continue to do what we can to help.
—
I wrote to Hans and Eva, too. “What will bring you back,” I asked.
There is no life without responsibility and agency.
There is only one life.
It’s your choice.
Decisions.
Friendships.
Joy.
Please come back.
You are our family.
Recovery is possible but you have to make that decision yourselves.
These letters are all the same. I have so many. I read them now, coldly bored by my own rhetoric, my stale ideas, the dull straws of recovery-speak.
Research has shown, incidentally, that it makes no difference whether or not people choose to go into care or are sentenced into care: the outcome is more or less the same. We thought the intention was the crucial thing. Turns out we were wrong: once someone is in a rehab they can be turned. Think of it as a process of deradicalisation. Because addiction is a culture of rebellion as much as it is an inherited disease or an emotional disorder.
*
We had all taken established dove or hawk positions by then. I was on the dove end of our spectrum; Peter, Lisbet’s husband, and Eric were on the hawk end. Lisbet was more hawkish than me, but also more despairing. Our joint strategies were many and varied, and nothing helped.
One of the addiction experts we hired, an American working with wealthy families, tried to bond with my brother. He himself was an alcoholic in recovery. “I just showed Hans the family member handshake,” he said to me at some anonymous hotel after another dismal strategy meeting.
“What’s that?” I asked. He looked me straight in the eyes and started wagging his finger at me, laughing. Finger-wagging. Pointing, lecturing, admonishing. I got it: families are always tediously droning on: responsibilities, friendships, joy, life, decisions, please come back, we are on your side.
Our expert knew that landscape.
Tears stung my eyes.
Tears stung my eyes: a commonplace expression. But I know the meaning of it now. Stinging tears take you by surprise. They come quickly, before the conscious mind has fully registered the reason for crying.
They shame you, because you have no time to prepare.
*
I read up on Timothy Workman. He is an interesting judge. In 2003 he rightly refused to extradite the Chechen leader in exile Akhmed Zakayev to Russia. He also declined to extradite Russian oligarch and Putin-opponent, also in British exile, Boris Berezovsky, who later died in mysterious circumstances at his home in Berkshire. In 2005, Workman issued an arrest warrant for an Israeli army officer, Major General Doron Almog, after actions in Gaza. General Almog landed in London but stayed on the plane rather than risk arrest. Workman ordered extraditions to the United States of some Islamist terror suspects, refused bail to others, and in 2005 risked the ire of the British tabloids by apologising for scheduling a hearing on the day of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim celebration of the end of Ramadan.
Timothy Workman was also a former probation officer, so he would have been familiar with the landscape of addiction. I assume he wanted to offer hope. I assume he had deduced that addicts don’t do well in prison. But that conditional caution, those “rehabilitative or reparative conditions,” came to nothing in the end.
*
In May 2009 I was concussed and lost some of my memory. I remember turning my horse for the gallop, leaning forward. I remember the first part of the gallop, the horse’s long mane whipping up into my face. I remember waking up on the grass, my broken helmet next to me. I lay there for some time before slowly getting up and walking home. I don’t remember the fall. And after that, only fragments: a kind nurse sponging my teeth with cold water, another nurse combing my hair, and pulling it painfully. Liquid paracetamol in a drip. The pleasure of a thermal blanket filled with hot air when I was shaking with cold. Blue curtains around my bed. Eric coming and going, using all his persistence to get me an MRI on a Sunday in Kent and Sussex, the soon-to-be-closed hospital known locally as Kent and Snuff It.
I felt very calm. Swathes of memory were lost—I still don’t know how much.
—
I search through my laptop, the thousands of messages and notes about meetings with lawyers, with addiction experts, with psychiatrists, with trustees. There are many abusive and deranged messages from Eva, and some from Hans, too. They were so angry.
I’d like to erase them all, but I don’t. I have already lost too much memory, and it’s an archive. I can’t destroy it.
—
My son is nearly eighteen. I talk to him about drinking. “Don’t drink,” I say. “If you become an alcoholic I may have to shoot you.” He laughs. I laugh, too, slightly bitterly, the metal aftertaste of bad history.
I try to explain about addiction as a family disease. The genetic component. I have to warn the children, but I mustn’t let the theme of addiction become an obsession, a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Was Hans always an
addict?” Daniel asks. “I mean, could you tell, even when he was a child?”
It’s a good question. It’s the question, of course. Mothers and fathers in every country in the world ask themselves the same thing, turning over childhood histories. Was it their fault? Did they cause this? Is addiction a reaction to immediate and recent events and people, the answer to contemporary needs and wants, or is it about childhood trauma? Is it one phenomenon for some people and something else entirely for others? Is it a response to pain? Is it an expression of a certain hollowing out, a process of incremental degeneration? Is it caused by a random encounter with habituating substances? Is it a second self, a predestined fate, or is it an accident; a cultural habit; a theatre of discontent, a seedy play of existential tragedy; a mode of being people take up one rainy day and can’t, or won’t, put down again?
There is such a thing as a perfect storm. The expression has two meanings: a particularly violent storm arising from a rare combination of adverse meteorological factors and an especially bad situation caused by a combination of unfavourable circumstances. Addiction is a perfect storm.
—
Hans and Eva. There they were, in that London townhouse. Those pristine rooms; that locked bedroom, dealers’ numbers written on the wall.
That room was their world.
—
Towards the end of Strindberg’s A Dream Play, Indra’s daughter returns to the sphere of the gods. She now understands better what it means to be human:
So this is what it’s like to be human…
One misses even what one has not valued
One regrets even what one has not broken…
One wants to walk away, one wants to stay…
I think about my regrets—there are so many. Like Strindberg’s characters we were plagued by indecision and discord, forced onto a hamster wheel of interventions and regrets, interventions and regrets, interventions and regrets.
*
Meanwhile, the media interest carried on. There was always a line or two of casual background information in the newspapers.
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