Returning to Drink After Six Years of Abstinence
- from ‘Lost in the Reptile House’
The breaking point came, however, accompanying Odette Hallowes to Ravensbruck camp for a ceremony commemorating executed S.O.E. colleagues. This was the woman who never talked, (despite being starved to six stones, having her toenails removed and her back branded, thus earning her the George Cross), who was now returning for the first time in the forty eight years since her release.
Eighty one years old and elegantly frail, she took stuttering steps past the roller they used to crush human bones for road ballast and into the echoing prison hall where she looked along the cell doors and then, sparking with recognition, said, “Here, this one, this was mine. Number Thirty Two.” She tried the handle but, with an irony Hollywood might fudge, it was locked so she pointed out the flogging room and other features with an exactness that seemed so unreal, for here was a woman reacting to the scene of unspeakable tortures, as if spotting her dorm at an Old Girls’ Reunion. Outside, she took her place for the little ceremony against the towering camp wall as a piper played ‘Flowers of the Forest’ and you found yourself taking deep breaths as Leo Marks of the S.O.E. read his code poem for Violette Szabo, one of her executed colleagues….
‘The life that I have is all that I have, The life that I have is yours:
The love that I have of the life that I have is yours and yours and yours…..’
The sobbing from a relative of the bereaved acted like a breached dam but as you wiped away tears in a bid to focus, there was Odette Hallowes retaining an elegance and composure which seemed incomprehensible. Yet my black mood driving back to wire was in knowing London wouldn’t be happy as they’d wanted tears – visible emotion – but that, as she explained to me later, had been trained out of her long ago. Odette Hallowes, GC, MBE, and Legion d’Honneur, had let us all down, and by the time we’d reached Berlin I’d decided that in a bid to live with myself I’d return to drink at the end of the year.
Complete abstinence for six years had been easier than moderation but, to be honest, I’d missed it – missed the good times it invoked, the friends it made, the social confidence it created; networking on water was harder than walking on it. As for the lean, money-making machine that abstinence was going to create, I’d gained two stone when food replaced drink as the security blanket, and the overdraft remained.
As the midnight hour approached, curious guests drifted to our table. A large alarm clock was produced to tick away the final minutes and, before I knew it, the private spiritual moment had turned into a public peepshow. With my first sip they cheered and fired party poppers, staring for reaction, but if they expected me to sprout fangs and fall upon the nearest virgin, they were out of luck. I gave them the cheer they wanted, said it felt great, and they sloped off to the tombola. So I moved to champagne, had a dance, and sat down alone to see how I really felt – it was a comforting mix of pride in having seen it out to the allotted minute, relief that my sentence was finally over, and not a scintilla of guilt.
After a month, Alex ventured that I remained too quiet off it and too loud on it but this was coming from one who could stop after a single glass, a condition I viewed as tantamount to coitus interruptus. No matter, it had proved the glorious re-awakening of which I’d dreamt, the re-kindling of a former love. If half the secret of drinking is knowing when to stop, the other half is knowing when to start again.