I watched my mum wreck her life through alcohol, then I did the same

There’s a moment that sticks in Arabella Byrne’s mind.

‘I once watched someone at a university party rock herself in a corner, her crotch darkening as piss began to stain her dress while we looked on and whispered…’ she tells Metro. Then she adds, ‘I would do the same thing not two years later.’

Arabella was 26 when she finally faced up to her alcoholism.

Wearing grubby tracksuit bottoms, with a large grey, yellow and purple bruise on her leg from where she’d taken a drunken fall, Arabella tearfully walked into her mother Julia’s kitchen and told her that she was scared of her drinking and that she couldn’t stop.

Arabella, now 41, had been around drink her whole life. Both her parents were alcoholics and by the time she was a teenager, she was following suit.

It began with a sip from Julia’s wine glass when she was five and as a teen, following an argument with a friend at school that left her engulfed in a ‘terrible darkness’, she went home, stole a bottle of wine from the fridge and drank the whole thing laying in bed.

Arabella, from Oxfordshire, learned to pass her excessive drinking off as depression because she felt it was ‘a far more acceptably feminine malady than having a drinking problem’.

‘If you’re depressed, it’s not your fault’, she tells Metro over a video call from Julia’s home in Oxford. The pair are close now, at ease in each other’s company, but their shared disease divided them for many years.

A child of the nineties, Arabella’s binge drinking was easy to hide in the ladette culture that meant it was ‘perfectly normal to be completely smashed’. She would wake hungover and avoid her phone in the mornings. Too often it contained concerned texts from friends asking about whether she got home, or confused messages from people she had called by mistake. She would often wake, needing a drink and spend all day in the dark, crying.

‘Other people were able to drink excessively and then carry on with their lives and continue to have relationships and keep friendships. I was so mystified as to why my life was collapsing,’ she tells Metro.

Arabella sought help from her doctor multiple times, and each time she was prescribed more of the antidepressants she’d been taking since she was 17. She was never asked about her drinking habits, but even if she was, she wouldn’t have told the truth. ‘I didn’t want to be asked how much I was drinking. Because these are shameful deeds, shameful things,’ she explains.

After university, Arabella got a job in PR, which she was soon fired from for leaving too early, arriving too late, disappearing in the middle of the day and other charges. She left the office and went to a pub in Fleet Street, eventually ending up in Charing Cross hospital.

Sitting in a backless hospital gown in a mental health unit in the middle of the night, sobbing, she realised she needed help.

Statistically, children of alcoholics are twice as likely to develop their own addiction and Arabella had ‘watched alcohol wrap around her mother like poison ivy’, throughout her formative years. Julia, in turn, came from drinking stock.

Novelist Julia Hamilton, 68, drank, she tells Metro, because she couldn’t handle her feelings. From an early age she was terrified of being abandoned by her parents who drank and rowed and split up.

‘A lot of women’s drinking takes place at home with the children. Women alcoholics will literally climb over their children’s bodies to get a drink. I certainly did. It’s socially unacceptable, but if we don’t talk about it, it just tightens its grip’, she explains.

Julia drank every day for 35 years, eventually waking in the night for a glass of wine, or reaching for the bottle first thing. In the beginning she hid her habit with a ‘special blue glass’ which concealed its contents, and she drank from boxes which prevented her from quantifying how much she consumed. She hid a bottle of vodka in a leftover Christmas turkey carcass in the freezer, or would swig from a whiskey bottle before taking the dog out in the morning.

‘Towards the end, everything started going downhill. I would drink vodka in the morning and then go back to bed. I would just fold up flat and the day would go by’, she explains. More than once she felt suicidal.

Arabella’s father Stephen also drank ‘in ways that are specific to his class and generation: stiff whiskies in his office in the City after work, martinis at the tennis club, hip flashes full of grog at the top of the mountain before the race, Sancerre before a business lunch,’ Arabella explains.

When she grew up, drinking with her parents was ‘like the power going on’, she explains. When she drank with her dad, she explains: ‘The bond that fizzed… a liquid power line that connected me to him after years of separation since he had divorced my mother.’

Julia grew up only seeing Stephen at weekends. Normally drunk, he would forget about her arrival, staggering to greet her at the door in a state of intoxicated confusion. ‘Time spent with him would revolve around alcohol and the getting of it: in pubs and restaurants and going to shops to buy it.’

Watching him die from alcoholism 11 years ago was ‘a very horrible experience’, she explains. But children of alcoholics grieve for their parents while they are alive.

‘I mourned the relationship that I never had with my father for a very long time when he was alive, because his main relationship was with alcohol, and he couldn’t have that kind of relationship with me,’ she says.

Julia says that she managed to get sober in 2009 when a liver scan warned that she he would die if she continued drinking. She went to an AA meeting and found her tribe.

‘I accepted that I needed help. And I surrendered. I did whatever I was told to do, and I haven’t had a drink since. I just kept it day to day, going to lots of meetings and spending a lot of time around AA and reading literature. It was a wonderful feeling. I just thought, Look at me, I’ve stopped.’

Nine months later, Arabella stood before her mother and told her she was an alcoholic too. But Julia was in denial. She told her daughter to have a coffee and get back into bed.

Julia had been so wrapped up in her own drinking, she didn’t realise Arabella’s life was in crisis. Even though her room smelled of stale smoke and dirty clothes and vomit that she’d washed down the sink, because Arabella could stop drinking for days or weeks at a time, Julia hadn’t believed she could have had the same problem.

‘It’s such a selfish illness to probably see past yourself. I mean, I was worried about her, but I was, I was so worried about everything – my life was in chaos,’ Julia explains.

Thankfully, Arabella ignored her mother’s advice and sought help from the AA, which changed everything.

‘It’s been this extraordinary experience of growing up in a kind of therapeutic community. It felt like home.’

Julia adds: ‘To see Arabella’s sobriety was absolutely amazing to watch. There was a kind of fork in the road for her at 26 she could either go down one route, drinking and down into the dark, or she could take the other – and she chose the right route.

You don’t just get better and live happily ever after

‘A year later, she went off on a fellowship to go and study for a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. It was extraordinary. You could never do that when you’re drinking. It was astounding.’

However, the pair are keen to stress that sobriety is a daily challenge.

‘You don’t just get better and live happily ever after. Even if you’ve got sober, you still have other problems. Quite often they rear their heads once you’ve dealt with your alcoholism. It’s one of the reasons you have to keep going back to the meetings,’ Julia explains. 

For Arabella too, sobriety has been tough, but she has now been sober for longer than she had been drinking, and now a married mother with two young children, she is an ambassador for the National Association for Children of Alcoholics.

The pair are close now, seeing each other regularly and act as each other’s sober rocks at family parties where alcohol flows, and have just published a book about their experiences.

‘When I went to my first AA meeting I’m note sure I could have guessed how radically different my life would be afterwards, that the shaky decision to walk into that church hall would alter all the other directions I would make after it,’ admits Julia.

‘Luckily, AA doesn’t work like that. Keep it in the day, they say, or you only ever have 24 hours. If you knew that you’d never have another drink again, you’d drink yourself into oblivion, they said – and I could easily believe it.

‘I will be an alcoholic until the day I die, whether I drink or not.’

In the Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction by Arabella Byrne and Julia Hamilton is out now

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