A life dissipated by alcohol

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32975, 22 July 1972, Page 10

A life dissipated by alcohol

Father Figure. By Beverley Nichols. Heinemann. 21S pp. Occasionally one touches upon an individual who bears the scars of being brought up in a home dominated by an alcoholic parent, but few of us have any real insight into what it means to live with a man or a woman who is addicted to alcohol. The popular writer Beverley Nichols had a drunken father. Not a bumbling, semi-comic, working-class drunk but an apparently respectable ex-solicitor whose continual, often violent drinking turned the lives of his children into a horrible series of terrors and tortures. The author’s early memories are dramatic, even shocking. As he grew older he began to try to learn to live with the situation and offers readers a frighteningly observant child’s guide to the stages of dipsomania. Forced to witness the continual malicious hurts and insults to his patient and longsuffering mother, his contempt for his father slowly turned to hatred. Calmly and frankly he describes the three occasions on which he attempted murder. On the first, as a boy stung by some insult to his beloved mother, he mixed a large quantity of aspirin with his father's evening meal of broth but succeeded only in making him violently sick. The second occasion followed the suspicious disappearance of a beloved puppy (Mr Nichols senior hated dogs). This time he sent the heavy garden roller crashing to where his father was seated but he was not seriously injured. The third attempt saw the author, now a mature adult, outraged by shattering behaviour in his own peaceful country cottage, dragging the inert drunken body of his parent out into the snow. Needless to say this attempt failed too. Mr Nichols lived on to survive the death of his wife and promptly stopped drinking. The reason for this sudden cessation motivated a calculated act of revenge on the part of the author.

Mr Nichols could not see his actions as murder, rather a matter of selfdefence. From the age of six he had been confronted with violence and ugliness in its most naked form. Until adulthood he never knew what a home felt like — what it was like to have an open door through which friends could walk without uncovering a scene of disaster and disgrace. It is easy to understand how he consoled himself with the view that his real father had been destroyed by drink and that the

person masquerading in his place was possessed by an evil spirit. He refused to let his experience destroy him and with his literary talent and a good deal of determination, managed to create a secure and successful world of his own. Beverley Nichols is famous for books in a lighter vein but these candid, indeed often brutally frank reminiscences give a real and personal insight into the tragedies and triumphs surrounding a life dissipated by alcohol.