Addicts reunited

“Nigel,” says Philip. “He’s distinguished in my mind because when his wife visited him, they shagged in the bushes – which, of course, was dead against the rules.”

That’s treatment centres for you: “A hothouse for fevered gossip, intrigue and speculation,” as Philip remembers ours. (A note on these names: Philip is a pseudonym, adopted for the sake of keeping this member of Narcotics Anonymous anonymous. Michael Coplans has waived his anonymity, as have I.)

The three of us were in Clouds House, Wiltshire, in January/February 1987. Then a television producer and 38 years old, I’d just suffered massive heart failure and had, I was told, clinically died four times in the night. My case notes read “alcoholic myocarditis”, which was accurate but left out the heroin, cocaine and other things I was taking.

Michael came into Clouds, aged 31, weighing 7½ stone, the son of a doctor, a man “reduced to sleeping in the corridors of friends’ blocks of flats”. Careers as a croupier, bingo caller and timeshare salesman had not flourished. Heroin was his drug of choice. Philip, an artist, was coming off a major heroin and alcohol bender that had been going for a couple of years. His lover had just killed herself, he had no money, another junkie was living in his flat and he recalls standing, bleakly, in a corridor at Clouds and a treatment counsellor coming by and saying, “Cheer up. It can’t be all bad.” All three of us have now been clean and sober for years. “This is where it started,” says Michael, of Clouds. “This is where I got clean,” says Philip.

It couldn’t be a more beautiful day. The house – Grade II* listed, and in use as a treatment centre for the past 25 years – looks gorgeous in the sunlight. The gardens are immaculate, the badminton court freshly marked. There’s a huge white marquee on the lawn; beyond a ha-ha are meadows and, in the fold of the valley, a village. There’s tea and lemonade on sale, and people are lolling on the grass. There are lots of floral print dresses to be seen, and tattoos, and shorts, and taut T-shirts and Panama hats.

Conversation drifts on the air: “Dormitories were not unusual for me?” “Didn’t we first meet post-treatment?” “I was the token Jewish patient?” “Melanie’s been sitting her GCSEs and doing fine – it’s a bloody miracle.” The main meeting kicks off at 2.30pm; it’s 12.30. Had we got here earlier, we could have listened to Mustard Seed, the happy-clappy house “rock” band – known, inevitably, as “Hey, hey, we’re the junkies”.

As it is, we wander around, our first names on tags, grabbing salads from the food bar and clocking the 300 or so men and women gathered here. Almost all are alcoholics and addicts (though there are children here, too, and wives and husbands). Almost all have participated in Clouds’ six-week treatment course – a course built on the classic 12-step tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, garnished with gruelling group therapy sessions, lots of written self-excavation and much confrontation.

Currently, there are 38 “clients”, or inmates – there were nearer 50 in my day – and it’s a rolling course: people arrive, people leave, people get chucked out. They’re divided into groups, organised in dormitories, and then they begin treatment. The place is much smarter these days – there’s Farrow & Ball paint on the walls. Nick Barton, director of treatment, has a joyous tale to tell. A couple of years back, he got a letter from a former client saying, “You’ll never be a centre of excellence with a leaky roof.” Enclosed was a cheque for £250,000. A success story, all round.

In fact, many Clouds clients are sent by local health authorities, and Clouds makes a loss on their treatment, so staff wouldn’t mind a few more private patients. Not that there’s any difference in the treatment or accommodation anyone gets. Some treatment centres, one counsellor tells me, effectively advertise that they’re for PLU (people like us) – no roughnecks here. He argues – and I agree – that it’s better for alcoholics and addicts of all classes to mix: it shows them exactly how alike they are in their addictions. Which is why, as we meander round, Philip remembers the staunchly Republican Irish “foot soldier” who got compassionate leave to attend a funeral and came back, drunk as a skunk, claiming that his cousins held a gun to his head and forced him to drink. I conjure up the dorm-mate whose life, each day, had involved going to Swindon railway station, entering the toilets, squatting on a lavatory seat and glugging his way through three bottles of British sherry. We had a burglar in our group, too: no sign of him today. Indeed, no sign of any other contemporaries.

Still, out in the sunshine, everyone’s got a story: Russell was here almost the first year Clouds opened. In with him was Viv Stanshall, front man of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. “We wrote an alcoholics’ version of The Twelve Days of Christmas together: one line went, ‘Threeee Special Brews?’.” Christopher, who’s giving the main share (or talk), recalls the woman addict who came downstairs after a night’s detoxing and said, “Even my eyelashes are aching.” A current client, weak and pale, pale, pale, tells me what a “soap opera” the whole thing is – that rings a bell.

Though how would I know? I didn’t make it through the six weeks. In my group, there was a young woman called Rachel. One day, our counsellor, Bob (an ex-Army ranker I liked a lot), suddenly told her that he knew she’d slept with a recent inmate – something that was vigorously frowned upon. (The rationale is that addicts/alcoholics in early recovery are vulnerable and a romance is very likely to end in tears – tears that’ll seem fixable by a shot or a drink. So, no frolicking for the first 12 months of sobriety.) She denied it. Bob approached me and another guy; if we got Rachel to fess up, he said, he was sure she’d benefit, psychologically. And there’d be no repercussions. We persuaded Rachel, and she did seem better. Then Bob went off, sick, and I found Rachel on the stairs, weeping. She was being thrown out. For me, that was it: the whole programme hinged on trust, and trust had been broken. I left, after four weeks. “Ah,” says Claire Clarke, head of service at Clouds, “perhaps you were just looking for an excuse.”

Maybe she’s right. Certainly, Michael and Philip stayed the course, and they’ve been far more assiduous than me at going to NA meetings. And certainly, the very first thing I did was, you’d think, foolish – go to a stag do. But I took nothing, and I attended meetings, and I went back to my job and I kept toiling away to pay the mortgage and send my two (now grown up) children to private school. I haven’t drunk since leaving Clouds – though I remember early on being terrified by going to some press launch and finding that the orange juice I’d just knocked back was, in fact, a vodka and orange. I ran to the loo and swilled out my mouth.

What else? Well, I did smoke a little dope, but it made me paranoid in the extreme. And I certainly didn’t like being in a room where there was heroin. The presence of drink has never worried me – fortunately, for I’m a party-loving person – but repetitious drunks bore the pants off me. Life? Since treatment, I’ve been made redundant, had cancer (I’m in my fourth year of remission), and recently moved in with my girlfriend. I very rarely go to meetings and I can’t say I never ever think about drink or drugs – indeed, so beautiful were the surroundings at the Port Eliot literary festival this summer, I couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it would be to drop acid there. Euphoric recall is the NA term for that.

Philip emerged from Clouds amazed that they hadn’t sent him to a halfway house – a secure, recovery-orientated establishment between treatment and the outside world. “I assumed they must think me such a hopeless case it wasn’t worth bothering.” While Philip was at Clouds, some NA heavies had winkled his junkie lodger out of his flat. But, as he walked in – before, indeed, he’d sat down – the phone rang. It was the police: a prostitute had been found murdered. Philip and his ex-flatmate’s names and number had been found in her bag. Had he anything to do with it? He hadn’t, of course, but it threw him. “But then the idea of the Serenity Prayer [a prayer often read at the end of NA/AA meetings] occurred to me, and I used it as a tool to divide what I could change and what I had to accept.”

Clean, he’s worked pretty successfully in the arts. He’s had a child, though he and the mother are separated. He’s got a cluttered flat in West London and a big brass bed. He goes to meetings and is serious about helping others in NA. “It would be sheer bad manners not to, seeing how much I’ve got out of it. And it’s something I’m expert at: I know how to drink and take drugs, and I know how to be clean and sober.”

Michael left Clouds for a halfway house in Bristol. His first job in recovery was “as a dance partner at an Age Concern Dancing with the Blind class. I couldn’t dance, but they couldn’t see, so no one seemed to care.” Back in London, an NA pal helped him become a “product demonstrator. He gave me some potato peelers, and I became the Peeler King – made some good money. I progressed to the B?rner V-Slicer – the Rolls-Royce of vegetable tools, as I liked to say.” Now he’s an accomplished travel writer, has a rented flat in West London, and still worries about whether American Beauty or Workingman’s Dead is the better Grateful Dead album. He, too, is serious about NA: in fact, he spent his first six or seven years clean immersed in it. “I did a huge amount. I set up meetings in Brixton Prison; I was secretary of a meeting in Wandsworth Prison. I needed that, initially.”

Here we three sit, then, in the marquee, listening to the speakers – a wonderful Scouser whose husband stopped drinking here, and for whom Clouds’ Families Plus scheme provided a crucial lifeline; a recent alumnus (who wants to be a counsellor); a current client; Nick Barton, talking about the power of love; and Christopher, the main speaker, remembering how all the talk of love first put him off when he entered Clouds’ darkling halls. Now Kirby Gregory, once of bands Curved Air and Stretch, now director of client services for Action on Addiction, is conducting a countdown, calling for former alumni to stand and remain standing each year from 1984 on. There are only we three, and Christopher, from 1987. But as each year is announced, up they stand, the Ians, Janices, Eleanors, Alans, Tinas, Brians et al. Eventually we’re up to 2009, and the self-congratulatory applause is deafening. We link hands, say the Serenity Prayer, and I am, as ever, embarrassed to utter it.

Outside, there’s more tea to be had, and cake, and hugs and chat – one woman I talk to is having a very rough ride (job gone, husband gone, new business failing), but at least she’s sober. Philip was “compelled to be moved. I had a spontaneous feeling of gratitude – a strong sense of ‘Thank f*** I’m not where I was then.’ ” As for Michael, “You know, I’ve had a long-held cynicism about treatment centres, counsellors and people who worked in them, and it was really dispelled today. I realised this is where I actually got clean.”

And me? Mixed emotions. After all, it’s where I walked out of, for what I still think were very good reasons. But it’s also where the clean and sober ball started rolling for me. And the place where, just before lunch, I meet a young man who left Clouds in October last year. And when the person introducing us says, “This is David, he was here in 1987,” the young man’s nervous eyes open wide, and he says, “Wow! So it does work, then.”