For Pete’s sake

Yet here she is, a nurse for 30 years, a woman who’s only been “squiffy” three times in her life, who won’t take aspirin for a headache, an early-rising, fête-running Army officer’s wife, now the mother of a convicted criminal and heroin addict. “But we haven’t suffered as much as other families of junkies,” she says. “Peter’s never stolen from us, never beaten us for money, never brought trouble to our door…”

Yet she does endure a rare and peculiar pain. To Jackie her son is a sick and fragile boy. But to the world, Pete Doherty, former lead singer of the Libertines, now Babyshambles, is a self-destructive rock icon, glorious heir to Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin and Morrison, whose drug-related ends all came at 27, “the year of rock and roll death” as Jack White called it, and Doherty’s age now. Her very worst fear is the subject of ghoulish anticipation. “I meet Peter’s fans who say they never miss one of his gigs, in case it’s his last.” Her friends thought it consoling to say, look, he’s a rock star: taking drugs and living dangerously is what rock stars do. “But,” Jackie cries, “he isn’t their son.”

It was the day of her mother’s funeral in April 2003 when Jackie realised that Peter (he is never “Pete” to his mum) was an addict. Doherty had flown to Liverpool from the Libertines’ tour of Japan to be a pall-bearer. He was fidgety, tearful and melancholy, but Jackie attributed his mood to jet-lag and grief. But when they talked after the funeral he confessed many lyrics to his songs were about drugs. Then in the car to Heathrow – Doherty was to rejoin the Libertines in America – he became anxious, desperate to reach London. He refused to be taken to the airport, demanded they set him down in Whitechapel. He needed to meet someone and it had to be tonight…

Eight weeks later, Jackie was on night duty when a friend of Doherty’s called to say Peter was out of control. She heard of drug-induced frenzies, bizarre behaviour. So Jackie rushed to London – her husband, a major in the Royal Corps of Signals had been posted to the Netherlands – to meet with Rough Trade, the Libertines’ record label. Her son should seek rehab and he’d be fine within two or three years, she was told, a time-frame that seemed pessimistic back then.

Yet first Jackie had to find her son. The book is full of such chases across London, following tips from some of Doherty’s nefarious associates, trips to his flat only to find he’s left, Pete not turning up or being surrounded by a huge, swirling entourage of fans and musicians, so Jackie can rarely speak to him alone. But this time she found him calm and lucid. He admitted he was smoking heroin and crack cocaine. She recalls being relieved for the small mercy he wasn’t (yet) injecting. He agreed to begin drug treatment at the Farm Place centre in Surrey and Jackie, reassured, returned to Holland.

But within days Doherty had fled rehab and Jackie was driving back across Europe to plead with him to return. The story of their meeting poignantly encapsulates her struggle and sets the pattern of the following years. Over lunch, Pete had agreed to go back to Farm Place – the taxi was on its way. But then a crowd gathered around the Soho pavement café. Fans queued for autographs, someone produced a guitar and Doherty began to sing. In that moment Jackie knew he would not return to rehab. She had lost him to the crowd and to his celebrity, with all its great adventures and temptations.

This is the first time Jackie, 52, has been interviewed and she is wary of upsetting Peter or those close to him, whom she relies upon for information and to protect him. When I ask about Kate Moss, Doherty’s on-off love, she says merely that she met her once. Does it not make her angry that while the supermodel faced no charges and has grown richer, her glamour only enhanced by her then cocaine problem, Doherty is arrested every other week, vilified and imprisoned? “I think everyone should leave them alone,” is all she says. “They’ve been deeply in love and people just won’t leave them alone.”

Thus My Prodigal Son is squeamish of the more lurid details of Pete’s life. At no point does she describe his East London home: a chaos of broken furniture, drug paraphernalia and, famously, pictures Doherty painted in his own blood. Doesn’t she have that mother’s instinct of wanting to clear up the mess? “I am an extremely tidy person, I know where everything is in my drawers,” she says and, gesturing to my heap of cuttings, “I’d like to tidy up that table now. But some people live in chaos, you have to allow people to live how they want to live. Because amid the chaos is an awful amount of creativity that I don’t understand. Now that might be madness in some people’s mind. But what is mad? People thought Impressionism was mad.”

I suggest that she still has reason to be proud: her son is a prolific song-writer, has had best-selling albums, is an electrifying live performer and, uniquely among today’s airbrushed stars, is a raw, authentic and original voice. “Perhaps,” she says with a heavy sadness. When she sees Pete, she has taken to joking: “I blame the parents.” At which he replies, “Well, you have to blame them for the good things too.” And it is clear – although she denies it – that Jackie, a gregarious, open Scouser with all her native Liverpool humour and flair for language (she has published a book of poetry), is the source of much that is good about Pete Doherty. It is from his mother he has acquired his unconventional style, in particular his trademark hats. She has a huge collection herself, berets in every hue, and loves searching out oddities at antiques fairs and house-clearance sales.

She also seems to be the source of his capacity to live utterly in the moment. I ask if the family ever worried when her husband Peter senior was in danger – he served in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq (during the first Gulf war) and Northern Ireland – she shrugs and smiles: “You just get on with it. Carpe Diem!” And last summer at the Glastonbury festival, when her son was locked in his addiction, and she could only snatch a few moments with him, Jackie still had a blast. “Have you been to Glastonbury?” she asks with excitement. “I was in the Chas & Dave tent and I danced my legs off, with girls, with boys. It was fantastic! I’d go again.”

Peter, her second child, was born when the family were stationed in Northum­berland. The Dohertys already had a daughter, AmyJo (now 28 and a teacher), and later had another, Emily (19 and in the Army). Pete, in Jackie’s account, grew up more prodigy than prodigal. He had lead roles in school plays, won a debating cup and an Arts Council poetry competition. He was always writing verse, including an anti-smoking ode: “Cough, cough, cough,” it begins. From an early age he was an insatiable reader, devoured Brecht, Camus, Genet, Baudelaire, the Romantic poets, and was obsessed with Oscar Wilde. He published his own Queens Park Rangers fanzine, All Quiet on the Western Avenue. He acquired 11 mostly A* GCSEs, and a bunch of A levels decent enough to take him to Queen Mary’s, London, to read English. He was patient and cheerful, gentle with his grandparents. There were no door-slamming strops. “Life was just wonderful,” Jackie says wistfully. “Well, that is my perception. You’d have to ask him.”

Jackie prided herself in communicating with her teenage children. She held out from buying a dishwasher because in the routine of handwashing, her kids opened up about their lives. “I was strict,” she reflects. “Peter says I was stricter than my husband. I like truth, I like honesty, I like things to be done properly. The kids never roamed the streets. All around us were teenagers who partied. And we didn’t allow that. Or rather, it didn’t become an issue because the kids were busy with their various activities.” She recalls Peter and a friend entering a stand-up comedy competition and although they won through to the next round, it went on too late so Peter just came home. The only trouble she can remember is nagging him to do his paper round.

Doherty’s family were posted frequently – to Germany, Cyprus, Northern Ireland – and the transience of Army life has been blamed for Doherty’s addiction. But the constant uprooting didn’t bother Pete or AmyJo, although Emily hated it and opted for boarding school. Pete learnt German, had a free, outdoor childhood chasing lizards around the Cyprus base. He made friends easily. “We’re a military family and we’re used to moving around,” says Jackie, currently stationed in Dorset. “Everywhere is so exciting. You unpack and you throw yourself into the community. A lot of people don’t like that life. But I still love it today, at my age. I would like to be posted tomorrow.”

Being officer class does not mean that the Dohertys are in any sense posh. On a crude class calculator they’d register as aspirational lower-middle. They are grafters, copers, resourceful and uncomplaining, Queen and country folk. And the shame of having a son flaunt his crack habit, perform at Live8 before millions too doped to remember his words, has hit his father hardest. He is a problem-solving, practical man, says Jackie, and it pains him that this has no solution. And he has his pride: how do you discipline recruits under your command when you feel you have failed with your own son?

After a stormy few days in London trying to thrash out Doherty’s problems in early 2005, Peter senior decided that he was tired of broken promises and vowed never to see his son until he is clean of drugs. “It is ironic,” says Jackie, “because my husband is a record collector. He has 5 or 6,000 records and most of them would be by drug addicts. But it is different when it is your own son.”

It was only after Pete left home that he started experimenting with drugs. Perhaps he felt the thrill of freedom from the rigour of military life and his family? More likely, drugs were just part of his romantic inclinations. The Libertines, the band he set up with Carl Barat, espoused a manifesto of individual freedom and Doherty liked to pretend the heroin he smoked was opium.

In an afterword to Jackie’s book, Doherty senior describes his pride and excitement at the Libertines’ early gigs, but adds, “Peter’s greatest misfortune was to become famous. People seem hell-bent on perpetuating his wretchedness – a pathetic, limp figure.”

This “tough love” approach has clearly affected Doherty. Recently he told a newspaper: “I say to my dad, “I respect you and I love you enough not to talk about you any more. Do you hear me? But f*** you. Because there’s a fellow here who’s your son and he wants to be your mate and he doesn’t want to upset his mum. Why are you being so stubborn? Why are you being so hard?”

When Doherty met Kate Moss in 2005 the craziness around him multiplied. A year of fights and arrests culminated in the footage of the couple snorting cocaine in a record studio. She dumped him, his drug-taking worsened, he was arrested, then entered treatment (his sixth spell) in Arizona. Jackie only knew he had fled when his record company called to say he’d been arrested in London on drug charges.

This for Doherty’s father was simply enough. “Peter [senior] was sick of the phone going, sick of journalists ringing, sick of being questioned at work.” Her mobile phone has caused a rift in their marriage: she refuses to turn it off as Doherty often rings her at 3am. “I feel I have to be contactable at all times. So there is no peace in the house.”

Just before Christmas, Jackie’s husband told her to leave home for a week. He needed to be alone. So scared was she that he was about to kill himself, she warned the camp padre. But her husband called her home only two days later. He hadn’t slept, was severely distressed. They didn’t celebrate Christmas that year, but sent their daughters off on a holiday to Cyprus. Both had suffered from being Pete Doherty’s sisters: AmyJo changed jobs and Emily left school before her A levels to escape the gossip about their brother’s antics.

Peter senior moved into the spare room, away from his wife’s phone. I ask if Jackie felt torn between her son and her marriage and she says, “I could never make the choice. I won’t give up my son and I can’t give up my husband because I take my vows seriously. If my husband chose to leave me, that’s his decision.”

Jackie writes of this period: “To say that I can fully understand why and how Marvin Gaye’s father killed his son [after a bitter argument about the singer’s addiction] seems rather dramatic, but the fact is I do understand.”

I ask her about the strategies she has tried to get him to change. She has fantasised about locking him away until he is clean: “But he is 27, a grown man. He would just reject me.” In her book, Jackie, a devout but non-denominational Christian, asserts her belief in free will, recalls that the father in the parable of the prodigal son did not bind his son to him, but waited for the repentant to return. Yet isn’t her support like putting a pillow under the head of someone in the gutter? If his mother withdrew, might this not precipitate his change? Jackie looks at me with surprise. “You’ve certainly given me food for thought. You really have, I’m not being flippant.” Yet next day on the phone, she says, “I’ve wrestled with what you said, but I could never turn my back on my son.” Anyway, she says, her support doesn’t amount to much. She wishes she had the strength to roll her sleeves up, clear up and kick out all the hangers-on. While she no longer blames anyone for his addiction, she clearly loathes some of the seedier members of his entourage. “Peter is so trusting,” she says. “But some of them steal from him, they sell stories about him.” They even, she says, contrived the photos, published in April, of Doherty appearing to inject an unconscious girl with heroin.

They are the reason she has not shown Doherty her book. “They’d steal it,” she says sadly. “They’d sell it.” What will he think of it? “I think he’ll love it. He asked me, ‘Mum, what’s your book about?’ I said, ‘It’s about faith, love, God, forgiveness.’ He said, ‘I thought it was about me.’ And I said, ‘No, but you’re the vehicle that will sell it.’”

So why has a woman who despairs about press intrusion opened up her life? She has always written, she says, scribbled down thoughts during sleepless nights, worrying about Pete. She wants to balance out the demonising accounts of her son and help the other addicts’ families who have told her their stories, with a “book any heart-broken mother could pick up”. And the proceeds? She wants to save the money in case Peter needs medical help. Is he broke now? “He has never cared about money or possessions. As long as he can stand up and sing he can make a living,” she says. “But who knows about the future.”

But does she not have an instinct about how things will turn out? “He doesn’t want to die,” she says urgently. “He enjoys his life. He is fragile, but I think he is still a happy soul.” His current court order – that he must fight his addiction or return to jail – has driven him to have another implant (to suppress the effects of heroin) inserted in his stomach. “He dreads going back to prison,” says Jackie.

Meanwhile, she has found some peace in her marriage, aided by Astile, Doherty’s three-year-old son by singer Lisa Moorish. Jackie has just had him to stay for a week and when she opened his suitcase found a tiny QPR kit, a present, she assumes, from his daddy. She has only seen her son and grandson together once: Doherty’s drug problems mean he has only limited access. “But he is my blood,” Jackie says of the boy who looks like Pete at the same age, whom Peter senior calls by the same pet-names he used for his own son.

Trawling through photos and memories to write the book also lightened her husband’s heart. “It made him remember what a fabulous kid we had,” she says. Yet of next Christmas, she has no plans: “He’s a big boy, has a lot going on in his life,” she says. Jackie Doherty has learnt to cushion herself from disappointments. But she is still waiting, will always be waiting, for her prodigal son to come home.

Pete Doherty: My Prodigal Son is published by Headline Book Publishing on September 11 and is available from BooksFirst priced £15.29 (RRP £16.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy Read exclusive extracts from Jackie Doherty’s book in Times2 on Monday and Tuesday