England, Your England England, Your England As A. A. Gill has said, “First drinks are important to alcoholics.” It was in the mid-1970s that I used to take the train from Haywards Heath to Victoria Station while playing truant from school for the afternoon. I made my way to Soho where there was a pub called the Nellie Dean, a place that is still there, of course, the Nellie Dean of Dean Street. My first drink might have been there, but one is never sure, because I have talked about the Nellie Dean so many times with my father, who used to be a regular there, and now I cannot remember if my first drink was at the Nellie Dean or in the Witch on Sunte Avenue in Lindfield, a rural pub near our house that today serves, with a special kind of sadness, pad thai and grapefruit sorbet, or whether it was another place up on Berners Street. But I am pretty sure it was the Nellie Dean. Today I walk past it briskly, amazed at the amount of hanging greenery that stifles its facade and the golden glow from inside. It looks like a jeweler’s box on some miserable nights.
The Nellie Dean was not just any pub, because it had once been called the Highlander and had only recently changed its name. I could go in when I was fifteen and no one threw me out. I started with shandy and worked up to shots of vodka. By now I had discovered a book called Memoirs of the Forties by the dandy, screenwriter, and sometime Duke of Redonda, Julian Maclaren-Ross. It was a book that I could not stop reading because it portrayed a part of London just south of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia, as a topology defined by pubs like the Wheatsheaf and the Highlander, between which this amazing man in his dark mirrored glasses, teddy bear overcoat, and gold-tipped cane rushed in search of daily audiences and small doses of satisfactory oblivion. Later he became the model for the down-at-heel writer Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, but many have observed that Maclaren-Ross was anything but down-at-heel. He was half or quarter Indian, with a mixture of Scots and Latin American, and he seemed to me—dimly glimpsed through a book that came out in 1965—like a model of paranoid elegance befitting a character whose main energy was the creation of itself. He was, of course, a drinker of moving proportions, and it was because of Maclaren-Ross that I had been impelled to seek out the Highlander, which is now called the Nellie Dean.
Maclaren-Ross possessed several identities, between which he moved as the need arose. One was “Mr. Hyde.” He invented himself as a multitude of personalities. Later in life he fell into poverty and could never finish the books he had long planned. Anthony Cronin describes him as a wandering drinker who perhaps squandered his considerable gifts on the spontaneous art form of the one-man monologue, fueled by alcohol: “He liked the myth of apparent failure; forms of revenge intrigued him and forms of mysterious return; the ruined gambler with one last throw, the heir who would reappear one stormy night, the Jacobite exile who would live to see the usurpers humbled.” This was the legend of the drinker as a man who has inverted the normal rules of personality and the success that proceeds from them. The drink gave him curious characteristics. Verbal brilliance, ephemerality, nostalgia. It may have made him into a performer who could have immortalized himself more successfully through YouTube but who died too early, from a heart attack in 1964.
My father used to go to the Highlander because he worked nearby on Frith Street, and occasionally he would mention it when my mother was not around. In later years he claimed to have seen an extraordinary graffiti on the walls of the gents’ in the Nellie Dean, which read, more or less as follows:
The Highlander with its pathetic documentarian pretensions is dead, thank Christ.
I was always aware that my mother drank more than my father, and that many imputed this flaw to her Irish origins. It is, for the English, a common accusation and revelatory of a cast of mind that does not care to submit a mirror-ward glance at its own epic alcoholic lawlessness. But my father, at least, was never a drinker in that sense. He liked his pint rather than his dram. His nickname for my mother was “Coffee,” presumably in honor of her love of that drink, but the irony did not take long to adhere, and with time the sobriquet withered.
I felt, perhaps wrongly, that as they grew older, alcohol destabilized the intricate microcosm they had built around not just each other but around their three children as well. I and my two sisters were not even aware of this much of the time. It was a noble, defiant kind of denial, a self-submission to a higher interest—the family and the welfare of children—that was very English. And the way that drink made it both bearable and completely unstable was also very English. I was not sure, either at the time or since, whether to loathe it or feel grateful to it. The English relationship to drink is so deeply burned into my way of being in the world that to write about drink is to simultaneously write about England, a country I now know almost nothing about since I have lived in New York close to twenty years.
If you grew up in a steadfast English suburb of those years, you grew up steeped in booze. My parents kept a large drinks cabinet in their front room in Haywards Heath, with a folding minibar and mixers. It was fashionable at that time, long before wine was mainstream, to mix drinks in the early evening and serve them standing by the fire—gin and tonics with curls of shaved cucumber and Bloody Marys. When my father came back from his commute to a market research company in London, my mother would on occasion mix him a drink before dinner, and I noticed how it relaxed the atmosphere between them, unless my mother had gotten there first with a glass of Famous Grouse, her favorite Scotch. Writing by herself at home, it was possible. A journalist and a talented radio playwright, she drank her Famous Grouse I imagine for inspiration, a habit that she has passed on, without inflicting upon me a taste for that lamentable Scotch.
Alcohol hovered in the air as an independent presence. It was always there, esoteric to the children but concrete in its familiarity. What would it have been like if my parents—or any parents of that time—had cheerfully smoked pot together every night after work? Many did in the late 1960s.
My parents, however, had decided to leave London partly in order to save their three children from the urban drug culture. They moved out in 1967, which was just in time, and bought a bank manager’s house in the garden commuter town of Haywards Heath, where Harold Macmillan had retired.
Thus removed from the drug culture that would prospectively ruin them, their children were thrown into the suburban alcohol culture that would certainly affect them instead. Why alcohol rather than marijuana? The reasons were social: Haywards Heath was conservative and Little England. Only an hour from London and a half hour from Brighton and its “dirty weekends at the Metropole” extolled by T. S. Eliot, it was a fortress of private rectitude defended by a thousand lawns and yew hedges and scrolled gates. Behind these tall hedges stood the Victorian brick villas and the timbered Mock Tudors and the mansions with their service bells and dumbwaiters where isolated men and women could sink into their evenings with a glass of sherry and intoxicate themselves out of a present moment that offered little outside the home but long, dusky lanes and streets of closed shops and parks where the perverts gathered with their own bottles. It was a fine place to grow up.
Such a place was bound to encourage the use of a drug that was commensurately traditional. In the late 1960s, in Haywards Heath, pot was mentioned as a taboo. It seemed to come from far away, from the tropics, from America, from another dimension of life. Intoxication as an idea, however, was familiar. I remember someone at school telling me that Malcolm X used to get high on nutmeg. I looked it up. Nine megs of nutmeg was lethal, apparently, and there was nothing in the references about it making you high. I tried eight megs, an entire container, and mixed it with yogurt. It failed to make me high, but I threw up all night. Malcolm X must have had an extra additive up his sleeve. I was sure even after that that nutmeg could get me stoned, and I tried it several times afterward with no result. It seemed like an easily disguised habit to have.
Attached so firmly to the colonial past, filled with its retired soldiers and government officials, as well as aging spinsters and widows and young families seeking a safer, more English way of life, Haywards Heath was more suited to the drugs that had been used for centuries: the sherry, the beer, the Scotch.
The men went off in the morning to catch the 7:50 express train to Victoria, and the women stayed behind in their big empty houses listening to Radio 4 and bossing around the butcher deliverymen. Their lives were isolated, and then there were those tall yew hedges and lawns. You could never see the neighbors unless you bumped into them by accident walking down Summerfield Lane. Then they would stop for a moment, ask how the cats were, and move on.
So with my mother. On days when I was sick and staying at home, I remember the sound of her typewriter echoing through the house, and the radio turned up loud, and it was as if her past life were being guarded from submersion in her current life. I was sure that she had begun to drink.
She was a woman who had wandered almost by accident into a life she had not quite intended for herself. But as is often the case, a loyal and hardworking husband, a man with a sense of humor and an ability to love his children, had proved seductive. And why should it not be seductive? The drinker’s legendary unhappiness and frustration are often exaggerated, and it is in any case an unhappiness that is much more complex than is suggested by the tinny word circumstances. A drinker is entangled in herself, unable to unravel the threads that have closed in upon her. The daily intoxication arises from an entire life’s experience, not from an “illness” that is supposed to be less mysterious.
My mother dropped out of Durham University in her first year in 1953 and took a long experimental train journey across Europe to Naples. She was robbed on the train north of Rome and arrived in the Eternal City with nothing; an Irish priest, a friend of her family, took her in. The Tyneside Irish, of whom my mother was a member, were in those days severe Catholics (with a taste for spirited drinking), and the faith saved her in her hour of need. Rome in the middle of the Dolce Vita, fresh from the visits of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, must have been a youth in and of itself. But eventually, tiring of its tourism, she moved south to Naples, where she lived in Parthenope on the waterfront, teaching English to businessmen and making casual friends out of neighbors like Lucky Luciano and the best-selling Catholic novelist Morris West.
She later said that she could not have suffered to go back to Naples, to see its slow decline. But a decline from what? The city she knew was feral, the dark metropolis of Norman Lewis’s brilliant book Naples ’44. It must have been the first city in which she had been free, far from priests and family. The first place in which she had been able to be a woman.
There was a fearless insolence about her, a quality I saw years later on her deathbed. The suburban life of Haywards Heath after Naples, marriage after the life of a reporter on the lam, must have been a shock. As the years passed, she began to drink. My sister told me one day that she had noticed the family piano sounding a little strange when she played. Opening the lid, she found a bottle of vodka hidden under the strings. This was a secret between us, and we didn’t talk about it for years. My own taste for drink, meanwhile, might be genetic, and it might have something to do with the Irish. Around us in those years in Haywards Heath hovered the shadowy outer family of the Tyneside Irish clan, the Grieves, the O’Kanes, and the O’Malleys, the male boozers who occasionally appeared at Christmastime and then disappeared like circus tricks, a nightmare fringe of shadow-puppet men with bright blue eyes and wet lips.
My uncle Michael, who died in a halfway home for alcoholics in Scotland, his foot recently amputated from diabetes, a man who had disappeared for a quarter century, abandoning his wife and children, to whom he had become a mysterious stranger. My great-uncle John O’Kane, publisher of the Liverpool University Press, who appeared every Christmas Eve with a different girl fresh off ocean liners and airplanes from Madrid, who would walk in the front door covered with snow and sit at the piano, pull up his cuffs, and begin to play and sing, uninvited, mad and drunk. A man who was convinced that he was admired and loved, and maybe even feared, but who was none of those. As a child, I adored him. He wore tweed suits and Italian ties and brought me jazz LPs from stores in Paris and Barcelona; his hands shook all the time, and he had those bloody oyster eyes that did not preclude tenderness. I remember, as he lay next to me in bed listening to “Purple Haze” (not the Jimi Hendrix song), his smell of booze and cologne mixed up, the inadvertent vibration of his body.
Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on “business” liquoring himself at a thousand bars, “that drunken Irish loafer,” as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life. I admired his fearlessness. I admired the way at Christmas dinner he toasted everyone singly and did it with neat Glenfiddich, and then burst—still uninvited—into one of his own inane compositions. What sound track must have been playing inside his formidable and erudite mind? The alcoholic wants to be loved, and just as fervently he wants to be hated and reviled.
Dreaded but unavoidable, the drunk is always at the bar of life, like the man in Tati’s Playtime who, despite being ejected from the lounge by the seat of his pants, always manages to reappear at the same spot. He is always there, irrepressible and stoic, doomed and melodic, while the teetotaler is home in bed, snoring next to a glass of water.
The moods of alcohol are like dabs of color on a psychotic palette that can be mixed at random. There are moments when intoxication induces a feeling of immersion in a vast and shadowy element. Walt Whitman ventures down to the shoreline and dissipates like “a little wash’d-up drift” into the ocean:
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
We know this feeling. Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all too well. He is canny about his possibilities. A self-critic, a connoisseur of his own altered states, he knows exactly how to tweak himself upward and downward. He is an amateur alchemist when it comes to the drinks themselves. If he were a writer and wanted to explain himself to strangers, he would write a book called In Praise of Intoxication. No one would invite him to explain his views in public. In America, he would not be taken seriously for a moment. But he would not be taken seriously by himself either: being taken seriously is not necessary to anything truly serious. The drinker is a Dionysiac, a dancer who sits still, a mocker. He doesn’t need your seriousness or your regard. He just needs a little quiet music, and a gentle freedom from priests.