Last chance saloon

Ican’t beat Brendan Behan, the Irish writer who was an alcoholic from the age of eight. My six seasons in hell

– to adapt a phrase from Rimbaud, a fellow traveller in the land of excess – began soon after my 18th birthday.

All addicts are determined extremists and I joined the fraternity suddenly and totally. Sharing a Winchester education, but little else, with the Prime Minister, I left the cosy embrace of boarding school in 1969 and became subjected to the baffling, nightmarish demands of Merton College, Oxford, in 1970.

There I came into contact with a new form of human – woman – and the terrifying burden of choice.

I could choose whether to go to the occasional lecture. I could choose whether to inconvenience my eccentric tutor by visiting his house for the odd tutorial. And I could choose whether to get up before dusk. And choice without consequences is the motto of the damned.

As I ceded management of panic and the depression that had been welling for some time to alcohol, my commitment to its seeming cure was total. There were no days off, no furloughs, no doomed attempts to cut down, ease off or go without. I gave myself up to its powers, like a fool to a cult. No waking moment was free of nameless dread and the slow sabotage of privilege and promise.

Once alcohol became medicine, I knew I was in trouble. I had been inducted into its magical qualities at the age of 12. The pushers were men in and around the family who gathered to slaughter essentially flightless gamebirds in the stubbled winter fields of rural Wales. They were lost in a world of desperate postwar machismo and make-a-man-of-you schtick.

Many of them were later propelled to an early, indebted death through their own alcoholism, tobacco addiction and depression.

Normally, they were constrained by the need for the ‘sun [to be] over the yard-arm’. The tiresome code meant it was just about late enough in the day to have your first drink, thereby signalling you weren’t alcoholic – but in fact you were. Shooting jaunts, though, came with a pass allowing you an early ‘snifter’, another key concept drawn from the lexicon of euphemisms.

Anxiously observing their faux bonhomie as a trainee beater, I was co-opted into their toxic world of self-destruction through the medium of self-treatment. ‘Give the boy a beer –it’ll put hairs on his chest,’ they said. That led to teenage dabbling until I reached Oxford.

There, extreme loneliness meshed with the brutal realisation that, far from

Dutch courage: Van Gogh’s Drinkers (1890)

being the genius others had convinced me I was, I had an O-Level brain and had peaked at the age of 13.

My descent was steep. The usual accompaniments of alcohol addiction – amnesia, debt, debilitating shakes and others too shameful to mention – very quickly had me in their grip. And the fearful realisation which never left me – whether doused in alcohol or withdrawing from being doused in alcohol (there was nothing in between) – was that I was truly incapable of doing anything that could, even at a stretch, be called work.

As my Law finals inexorably approached in 1973, my determination not to be discovered strengthened. In no circumstances could I allow intervention from others, however kind or supportive, to interrupt my mission. For reasons I still don’t understand, I could not be well. The peculiar misery of my life for those years was me.

Eventually, eight three-hour stints in the exam room with nothing to say, nothing to write – and nothing to drink – had to be negotiated with well-timed administration of Valium. The copy of Men Only I smuggled in to occupy my thoughts was quickly confiscated and, controversially, never returned.

I did what I could to intercept the letter informing my parents some weeks later of their precocious son’s precipitous fall from grace but it duly arrived, in midsummer, bearing news of the academic equivalent of nul points. I didn’t get any degree at all.

The minimalism of familial communication of those days saved me from inquiry or challenge. I moved soon after, mission intact, to the blessed anonymity of London.

My relentless consumption at university had been made possible by a generous grant from the state – and a system run by Kevin, the Geordie manager of the Bear Inn, in which my bounced Lloyds Bank cheques would be pinned to the green baize behind the bar until my grant put me briefly in the black at the beginning of each term.

In London, to replace this highly reliable income, I found a modest, if menial, job with just the smallest hint of caring about it. I fitted this unwelcome demand around my lunchtime binge and my evening work of procuring supplies and titrating my intake so that none left my system prematurely and wastefully.

Addiction is a series of repeated escapes from one prison into another. As with all addicts, my approach to the preservation of the strange safety of my cell was consistent, meticulous and well planned, since psychological survival without supplies of alcohol was unimaginable.

Because I was out and about, my job was one into which visits to presupermarket off-licences could be furtively woven. As my descent quickened, morning tremors had to be chemically stilled before I could manage the bus journey to my first boost of the day.

The end didn’t come with the cliché of ‘reaching rock bottom’, where I had been for some time. Instead, when I was 24, on 17th May 1976 – a spring day in a rough pocket of Notting Hill – a voice said, ‘I am beaten, I cannot do this any more.’

After a couple of visits to an elderly Irish GP – in those days, you could pop in for a bit of a chat – I was given an immediate appointment to see a young man not much older than me in one of the last inner-London Victorian asylums.

I evasively answered his questions about masturbation but fully fessed up to my daily consumption and the daily catastrophe of this level of drinking.

I negotiated one more weekend of self-destruction and checked in on the Monday afternoon, following a quite modest lunchtime session at the Irish pub not far from the gatehouse.

Before I was started on vast, though gradually reducing, quantities of Librium – a cognate of Valium used to stifle the potentially fatal and certainly traumatic withdrawal process – I was asked to wear pyjamas to reduce the risk of escape to the Irish pub. Having no pyjamas and no intention of messing up what I knew to be my first and last chance, I demurred.

The bliss of release from the prison of active addiction was too pure and heady to be diminished by ten days of dormitory incarceration with those who were noisily wrestling with different demons. Because of those few days in May and the six years of tribulation that preceded them, I was free to be a different person and maybe the right person.

The benign indifference of those around me during that time had saved me. Intervention at the wrong time would simply have been a postponement of the necessary crisis. And the later in life this comes, the messier it always is.

It is only the addict who knows when his mission has run its course.

Jeremy Walker has worked in mental health for 40 years