I pretended my home life was normal

I was aged seven or eight when I first became aware of my mother’s drinking.

We had recently moved house, and she had stopped picking me up from school, but I didn’t mind as I could pocket the pennies for my bus fare and walk the two and half miles instead.

I would find her lying on the settee, a bottle of Pale Ale standing on the carpet. She was also on Valium although I didn’t know this at the time.

I would find hidden bottles

Over the next few years, the bottle changed from beer to sherry and by the time I was thirteen she was drinking whisky. I would find bottles hidden around the house.

My father was also an alcoholic albeit a functioning one. He hid it well and managed to hold down a full-time job until he died in his fifties.

He also took on part-time jobs on top of his teaching post at the local FE college: first on Saturdays, working in a local shop, and later Sundays, working in a scrap yard. He maintained a semblance of normality or rather what believed normality vaguely looked like.

Yet we never sat down for a family meal. That was reserved for Christmas Day although most years this was a fairly miserable affair (although I do have some fond memories of happier times when I was younger, aged five and six).

A childhood of two halves

I tend to view my childhood in terms of before and after we moved house. We had been living in a lovely council house with a large garden.

My father’s parents lived in the next street and two of his three sisters lived in the town. My nan worked as a cook at a local pub and made fantastic apple pies.

I remember bringing one home when I must have been six or seven. My mother snatched it from me and threw it in the bin, declaring it was dirty and foul, made by gipsies (for some unknown reason she viewed dad’s family as Romanies even though they weren’t).

I couldn’t forgive her

Over the years my mother stopped taking an interest in her personal hygiene and keeping the house clean. Yet she had once been fanatical about this even shouting at me if I left a used tumbler on the draining board.

She stopped cooking meals in the early evening and simply left covered plates on simmering pots. Mushy and tasteless food.

I made no attempt to understand their problems and after my father died, I rarely visited my mother, perhaps five or six times over a 25 year period. She had made my life hell and I couldn’t forgive her.

I wish I had known by father better

When she died, I couldn’t grieve and had a breakdown. Therapy helped. A few years later my brother, my only sibling, took his own life. If I could go back in time, I would try to speak to each of them, to help in some way, to prevent what unfolded.

I truly wish I had gotten to know my father better. I deeply regret not making an effort to build any kind of meaningful relationship with him. And then I think about the silence.

His refusal to discuss my mother’s alcoholism and I still struggle to forgive him for not protecting me from her drunken rages.

I never developed a relationship with either of my parents. My father never asked me how I felt, never hugged me, never told me he loved me. Nor did my mother.

A loveless house

It was a loveless house. But looking back I think he did care deeply. In a way he did protect me by ensuring I had a good education and encouraging me to study hard.

Perhaps he understood my situation better than I did myself at the time. It was only after he died (prematurely from cirrhosis) that I discovered the full extent of his drinking.

My childhood still haunts me

Today I’m in therapy again because my childhood still haunts me: the guilt, the shame and the embarrassment. It’s the guilt I feel the most. At not attempting to stop their drinking, at failing to understand how they felt and what had driven them to rely on alcohol.

All I knew was that my father had been scarred by the war and had a visceral hatred of hospitals (my nan explained one day that he had seen his navy crewmates mutilated and killed and that this had traumatised him).

My mother attempted suicide on at least two occasions but I never considered the impact that this had on my father.

I never invited friends home

After we moved house and the drinking became evident, I never invited any friends home. On one occasion a good friend turned up unannounced, and I still recall the look on his face when my mother staggered into view muttering incoherently.

To the outside world, to friends, the school and anyone else, I pretended my home life was normal. I even lied about going on trips and holidays. We never went on holiday nor did any of the normal things at weekends that most families do.

For me the coach trip in primary school was my annual highlight, even when it was only to the local bluebell woods. But one year it was to Longleat and another to Stonehenge.

Those two daytrips remain the highlights of my childhood aside from a school trip to the Tate when I was a teenager (to see an Andy Warhol exhibition) and which was the genesis of a life-long interest in art history.

I eventually took my first holiday when I was eighteen (a camping trip with friends to the Lake District).

I need to find a way to forgive myself

My mother sold anything worth selling to pay for her addiction: bedding, clothes, all my books, all my childhood games.

All she left me was the teddy bear bought when I was born and a book of bible stories. I still have both.

They were gifts from when my childhood was happier and everything seemed normal. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it wasn’t. I was just too young to understand what was happening around me, but I like to think life was better when I was very young.

I wish I could have been a better father to my own children, but when I see how they interact with their own children I realise how inept I was at parenting.

I still struggle to forgive my parents for what happened and the impact it had on my brother. I want to but it’s hard because first I need to find a way to forgive myself for not doing more.

David

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