My Friend, in life and fiction

Tomorrow we meet in a pub, with no alcohol, to say goodbye to a friend. We first met Heidi when our children were at primary school together. It was a very small village school where I can remember being on first name terms with all the other parents. Some of us ran an after school club together. Heidi was part of this. She was musical, artistic, imaginative, affectionate, alternative. Sometimes her suggestions were a bit fey. Sometimes she didn’t turn up when we expected her.

Heidi was a single mother with a single child, Oliver, who she loved dearly. He too was musical, artistic, affectionate, full of enthusiasms, never quite in the mainstream. Sometimes they were very late for school. Occasionally Heidi wasn’t there when it was time for the children to go home. Once or twice I went to Heidi’s house and couldn’t make her hear me. There was a day when she started to tell me how unhappy she was. People occasionally made remarks. I began to worry about her.

I was also the school governor with responsibility for child protection. The Headteacher asked to talk to me; we began to wonder how best we could help. Then, somehow, the Authorities got involved.

‘Two more people came into the room just then. They made everything feel squashed and smelly. The man was wearing a policemen’s cap which he didn’t take off. The woman had a hard face and a frilly blouse.’ (The Salt-Stained Book p24)

Some readers of The Salt-Stained Book have commented that the Fat Policeman and the ‘Toxic’ Welfare officer (the Mal-Fairy) – seen here through the eyes of Donny, the story’s young hero -- are too close to caricature. I can only say that they were drawn from direct observation. Until their originals walked into our lives, I had no idea quite how badly vulnerable people can be treated by representatives of the state, nor how easily policemen, social workers, probation officers can twist the facts to suit their own false narrative. I was deeply shocked by this. At first I was bewildered. Then I was furious.

I won’t forget the evening the Fat Policemen arrived at our front door. There were two of them then, one male, one female. They could hardly fit onto our three-person sofa. I’ve got no problem normally with big-bodied people. But these two had come with all the sanctimoniousness of law enforcement, to announce that they were taking Olly away from Heidi because of her dependence on alcohol. Our limited attempts to help – by trying to support Heidi getting him to and from school on time, for instance,--  were described as ‘complicit’ and ‘condoning’. So he was to be removed. There was no offer of support, no thought for the fact that he and Heidi loved each other, that they were a single small unit in a difficult world. Because she could not control her alcohol use, they were to be punished (sorry ‘protected’) by separation. We wondered meanly whether the two people ballooning uninvited into ourhouse had ever tried controlling their own obesity issues.

The mal-fairy came later, in the person of a saccharine sweet social worker, who invited confidences then twisted them into indictments. There was a probation officer too, who told lies. I remember that meeting vividly – I used it in A Ravelled Flag, though in life there was none of the satisfaction of jamming a chair back under the door handles then running away, which I could arrange in fiction.

Previously I had trusted public servants to act with integrity and to follow procedures, even if they couldn’t manage empathy or insight. Now I learned how callously people could be treated if they had no power to fight back. As it happened I had taken my child protection training seriously. I did know the correct procedures, I could also see that they weren’t being followed. I was grateful to the manager of our local women’s refuge who explained how easy it was to bear down hard on weaker people while keeping a cautious distance from more dangerous abusers. I watched the Professionals building up each others’stories about Heidi and Olly and (as I discovered later) about Francis and I, until I could scarcely recognise any of us

Heidi was an alcoholic. I find it as hard to write this as she must have done to say when she went to AA and tried to find a way forward there. She tried hard and there were long periods when she succeeded, particularly when she found sympathetic medical help. Wikipedia rightly describes alcoholism as ‘both a physical and mental illness’. An ILLNESS – not a character flaw, not a punishable offence. In Heidi’s case it was complicated with other medical problems, some dating from teenage years. There was also her painful awareness that she had talents which she, somehow, couldn’t use.

The arrival of the Fat Policemen crystallised what had been a fairly casual, slightly anxious friendship into a determination by Francis and me to support both Heidi and Olly and challenge the way they were being treated. Heidi’s mother, Aidete, a former nurse, came down from Yorkshire to make her home with them. Other members of her family did what they could, though the efforts of the Mal-fairy frequently succeeded in setting us variously against one another. It was a complex situation, made more complicated by the nature of the illness itself and its effect on the personalities involved.

Speaking only for myself, I discovered I had much to learn about the reality of addiction. I wish I’d read Louisa Young’s book then. I did learn about deviousness and indignity, about the slight fuzziness in conversation, the sour-sweet smell of illicit vodka, the lurch in the stomach that one feels, as a friend, when you realise that the person you are listening to has been drinking, when they assure you they have not.

Many of us drink alcohol with pleasure. I do. For an alcoholic it is different. If The Salt-Stained Book was (partly) about the shock and cruelty of separation: A Ravelled Flag included some of my observations from that horrible time. Like fictional Donny I learned what the expression ‘blind drunk’ actually meant and I also witnessed the potentially lethal mixing of vodka with Fluoxetine, the ‘happy pills’.

Heidi was never Skye (her character in the Strong Winds series). They could not have been more different -- ‘Skye’ with her profound deafness and dyslexia; Heidi with her intense musicality and sensitivity to language. Their kinship is in the injustice with which they are treated and also in their loving natures. Heidi read my stories and allowed what I wrote. As did her mother Aidete, who never stopped loving her daughter and doing her best to help both her and Olly. For which she too was, for a while, side-lined and vilified by the mis-handlers.

In fiction one can contrive some happier outcomes. Skye and Donny are reunited in A Salt-Stained Book. In A Ravelled Flag, Skye re-weaves a shredded ensign and waves it ‘in defiance of everything gloomy and cruel’. In Ghosting Home, third of the trilogy, there is a reckoning for the fictional villains – and in life the head of social services came to our house (by invitation this time), sat in our garden and apologised for the stories they had told.

Louisa Young’s book about her lover Robert Lockhart is called You Left Early. Heidi has also left life early. When Olly had completed his schooling, Heidi spent more time with her mother in Yorkshire and finally moved back to her original home to help care for Aidete as she aged. Now she is dead. 

A Ravelled Flag ends, coincidentally with a scattering of ashes out at sea. Tomorrow, Olly would like us to walk up a valley, along a stream that Heidi loved, until we reach a waterfall. Then release her ashes there. For myself I know that the good memories will stay, with sorrow for her pain, and gratitude for all I learned from her.