Read Online The Wet and the Dry by Lawrence Osborne - Free Book Online
Authors: Lawrence Osborne
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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 offeredlittle 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 walkingdown 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, musthave 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
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 walkingdown 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, musthave 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
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