Drowning in the Shallow End

by Charlie Mellor

  Funny that history is littered with horror stories about wannabe celebrities whose lives are destroyed by their longing to be under the spotlight of fame. I was certainly no Icarus in the making. My own fifteen minutes of shame was transformational, but mainly because it provided me with a pivotal experience. It helped to halt my harmful habit by giving me the emphatic line in the sand I needed. Right up until the trip to Maidstone Studios I’d tended to feel a little helpless about my inability to make a permanent and irreversible decision to stop smoking. For years I hid behind the old Mark Twain adage. Stopping smoking temporarily was indeed very easy. The difficulty was making the temporary cessation permanent. I’m sure this is what all addicts struggle with. I’d tried many times to stop, using every possible mechanism to assist – acupuncture, cold turkey, garden fences, roadside grills, but would always fold. What was really needed was actually quite simple. None of the questionable techniques would ever help without it. Basically for anyone to stop anything, the desire to stop must be greater than the desire to continue.

  In the past I’d encountered the odd spell, when the scales were balanced in favour of wanting to stop and so I would manage to do so for a few days. Inevitably the variation between wanting and not wanting was usually so minimal that I always went back to smoking, especially during times of duress. What the cringe-worthy Sweep had provided me with, was a really strong and permanent reminder of how I never wanted to feel again. Instead of winning a big cash prize, I had taken home a single notorious memory, one which would resonate so deeply, it would be impossible to ignore. From that point onwards, my desire to stop would forever exceed the powerful inclination to get trashed and a knowingness of this provided me with immense relief. In the words of recovering alcoholic Anthony Hopkins, “When I look back I think I was so lucky to get out of that one. It was all about fear and horror. Definitely the horror - going down the plughole[8].”

  Hopkins exit from ‘the plughole’ sounded splendid; apparently he enjoyed an epiphany, a ‘golden voice’ calling from his subconscious which made it clear he must stop drinking. According to the actor, he heard the voice from within and that was it, within one day it was all over. “The best part of myself, my subconscious, came to rescue me[8].” Lucky old Sir Anthony! My own visionary voice came from well outside of me and instead of it being golden in colour, it was more of a dayglo orange to match the perma-tanned Mr Winton.

  Sadly, there was no Hollywood style ending for me. Supermarket Sweep wasn’t so much an epiphany, as a circus mirror, raised by an over-the-top host in order to reveal my own disfigured reflection. While the show provided the impetus to improve myself; all the hard work required to achieve this was still very much in front of me. Occupying the back room for so long had squeezed the juice out of me. My eagerly anticipated journey to Temperance Alley was therefore never going to be the easy ride I’d hoped for. Instead, it proved to be an incredibly bumpy passage, an arduous trip which seemed to last forever.

  So instead of Sweep being a conclusion to the hero’s journey, a courageous tale where our protagonist struggles, fights and then defeats all adversaries; things got much worse for quite some time. Restitution was a long way off. Rather than being elated with my new found freedom, I was filled with an overwhelming sense that I’d been left with a whopping debt, one which would be impossible to ever repay. I’d assumed sending Poison Pen packing would miraculously lift my spirits, transform my mental dexterity and improve my health and sociability. Instead, I found the twelve months after Supermarket Sweep to be much more testing than all the years in which I’d succumbed to her charms. Ignoring the sirens call during 2007 was gruelling and not the instant panacea I’d hoped for. While I relentlessly reminded myself about the dangers of relapsing; the niggling potential to do so always unnerved me. February to May was especially tough. All I knew for certain was that I was determined not to return to the wretched situation of the last few years, no matter what sacrifices needed to be made. Maybe it would take years before I would become more relaxed, more at ease, more in charge of the demands I placed on myself.

  I’d known Pennie for the best part of thirty years and spent the worst part of ten of them obsessing about nothing but her. After Sweep, I substituted my former monomaniacal dedication to her with a monomaniacal insistence that I should never think about her. Both were approached with equal vigour, each one as exhausting as the other. I was very hard on myself and others during this time. I was scared to drink alcohol in case it lowered my resolve, so I pulled away from socialising of any kind to avoid temptation. Filled with self-loathing, I despised who I’d been and resented all the time and opportunities I had wasted. In order to shake off the legacy of my narcissistic ways, it was evident I needed to distract myself - with anything other than the enormous nothingness I’d been trying to fill using cannabis.

  Inflexibility became my new failing. Perhaps my latest defining habit, as I learned to replace one set of repetitive thought patterns with another. While one of the main motivators for cleaning up my act was to be a better father to my children; my emerging stubbornness made me rattier and more controlling with them than I’d ever been before. In particular, my intractable approach infuriated Hattie, who’d always enjoyed challenging the boundaries others attempted to impose.

  By 2008, Hattie’s behaviour had deteriorated to the point where she was practically unrecognisable from the loving and lovable young girl we had raised. While much of her hostility was pointed at me, other family members and school friends encountered the full force of her rage against the machine. Her final year of school was turning out to be a complete disaster. In the most important year of her education, Annie and I were summoned back and forth on a weekly basis to see her teachers and headmaster. At these meetings we would hear how the school was at a loss to find any effective sanctions to combat Hattie’s rude and aggressive behaviour. We were shown evidence of unauthorised absences, coursework not completed and dilatory attempts at important examination papers. The headmaster confirmed in all his years in teaching he had never seen anyone so deliberately intent on pressing the self-destruct button. Listening to the school’s concerns, I remember just feeling tremendously sorry for Hattie. How had she become so detached and isolated from everyone that cared for her? Despite her recklessness, it was unequivocal our daughter desperately needed help. The problem was that we were starting to feel as impotent as her school as Hattie continued to reject every attempt to understand what was going on. Annie and I remained united in our efforts, but Hattie pushed every button in her efforts to fracture our joint resolve. This real life situation was scarier than all the fantasised emotions I’d ever created for myself.

  One teatime, notable because all six of us were sitting down together without conflict, the family reminisced about the annual summer holidays we’d shared. We reflected on a game we enjoyed playing while lazing around the poolside, where we would each take turns to ask questions about each other’s preferences.

  “If you could be one animal, what would it be and why?’ or ‘What is the tastiest meal you’ve ever had?”

  On this particular mealtime Toby suggested we should play the game again, but proposed a slightly more intrusive enquiry

  “On a scale of 1-10 where would you put yourself in terms of how nice a person you think you are?”

  Most of us rated ourselves a 7 or 8. Annie modestly put herself as a 7, while I insisted she should rate herself much higher. When it came round to Hattie’s turn, she thought long and hard about her answer and then without a hint of self-depreciation stated that she saw herself as a 2, adding, “You know and I know that I’m just not a very nice person”.

  She was incredibly resolute about her evaluation and quite matter of fact about the reasons why. She didn’t appear to be saying this for attention or for sympathy, but instead because she really thought she wasn’t a good person. It was bad enough that others may have disapproved of some of her more destructive behaviours, but for Hattie to thin
k so little of herself was agonising.

  Just before the start of her GCSE exams in 2009, a pattern had emerged where she would come home from school, start an argument with someone and then disappear for the night without explanation. Occasionally we would get a call from her, but usually we had no idea where she was staying. I spent endless nights driving round dodgy Scunthorpe streets searching in vain for my unruly daughter. I would scour unlit parks, trawl street corners and end up knocking on her former friend’s doors in the hope that I could track Hattie down and bring her home. During these awful nights I would occasionally pick up rumours that she was staying up all night getting drunk with various unsavoury lads.

  Sometimes if Hattie did return home to pick up some clothes, I would race up to her bedroom while she was downstairs, pinch her phone and then sneak a look at her text messages in an attempt to find out what was going on. Every time I wished I hadn’t. As a father, these grubby communications were usually so unsavoury, so vile that I’d be compelled to delete them all, knowing that this intrusion would only further incense my daughter. Worried about her wellbeing, I also hunted around her room in search of her treasured diary in a desperate bid to discover the cause of her unhappiness.

  Unfortunately when I did find the diary, the contents verified things I didn’t want to consider. Although it was less debase than those sordid texts, it did reveal the thoughts of a lonely girl with a high level of self-awareness:

  ‘I hate school and being teased for hanging around with lads.’

  ‘ ...when I was little I used to get so upset if a teacher was to tell me off...but now it doesn’t bother me. I almost wish that it did so that I don’t get into as much trouble.’

  ‘This is a really difficult time for me... so I skip lessons and get shit-faced as often as I can. Even I can see that my school work has suffered because of all the drinking...’

  Reading her handwritten notes took me back to my own teenage adventures with Lucy Drew and her wayward friend Bronwen. It hadn’t been a surprise to hear that Bronwen had been expelled from school, only months before she was due to take her A-levels. I wondered what she would be like now and if she had continued with her rebellious ways. Would she, for example be pleased to discover she had unknowingly provided me with a future-glimpse of the horrors I would one day face with my own teenage daughter? Back in ’79, I always thought Bron put the ‘fun’ into dysfunctional. All I witnessed was an arm’s length observation into one of the schools most troubled souls. If I’m honest, I’d always enjoyed her company and had a laugh watching her attempts to get wasted. It was funny that she was never without a bottle of vodka in her schoolbag.

  Thirty jaded years later and freed from Pennie’s clutches, I had become far more sensitised to such ruinous behaviours. Observed through the lens of a middle aged parent, I was now able to reinterpret Bronwen’s actions as a muffled call for help – the same cry being made by my own teenage daughter who was demonstrating identical destructive tendencies. The more similarities I found, the more I began to appreciate my greatest fear wasn’t actually life without Pennie, instead it was a fear my children might be deprived of the future they deserved because of my past.

  Saying nothing to Hattie about my old school days, I began to question the judgements I’d been making about her lifestyle and tried as hard as I could to be more encouraging and understanding. Annie, intuitive as ever, sensed a slight change in my mind-set and suggested that Hattie and I should spend some time together away from the familiar battleground of the house. Hattie reluctantly agreed to a meal at her favourite childhood restaurant and for a couple of hours we sat at ease in each other’s company. It was the most relaxed we’d been in years. On the way home, detecting a greater receptivity, I admitted there were many times when I’d been too hard on her, too vigilant and too ready to pounce. I recognised we were very similar and that I was inclined to be rather heavy handed with her and clumsy with my advice. I went on to explain about my concerns for her and talked without reservation about the dangers of addiction. I openly discussed losing my mother, her personal struggles with guilt and the role that alcohol had played in her decline. I was very candid about her last days living in sheltered accommodation, alone and disconnected. As we talked, I pointed out it was possible to inherit conditions from relatives which could put you at risk of dependency. To my astonishment Hattie listened carefully and seemed very keen to hear what I was saying. Discussing someone she knew seemed to make it easier for her to digest. That night I went to bed and mulled over how well it had all gone. Early days, but I could swear we’d shared a moment in the conversation, when we both recognised that she didn’t actually enjoy the chaotic life she had created for herself.

  The next morning Hattie joined Annie and I for breakfast and calmly delivered the thunderbolt that she was three months pregnant and was going to keep the baby. This one short sentence was impossible to take in. Our sixteen year old girl pregnant with an unplanned child. Apparently the father wasn’t even her boyfriend, just some older Turkish bloke with a dubious reputation who took her out drinking every so often. This truly was every parent’s worst nightmare. While Annie cried the tears of a traumatised mother; I steamrollered my way through the entire emotional spectrum feeling angry, annoyed, worried, disappointed, hurt, concerned, helpless and most of all tremendously sad. So much for me thinking life without Pennie Fenton was going to be an easier ride.

  Hattie continued to be a little temperamental in the months that followed, although impending motherhood did have a significant dampening effect on her vitriol as she was forced to stop drinking and spent most of her time at home. As a result all the family devoted most of the next six months trying to rebuild her confidence. It was clear that she had lost a lot of faith in herself and was questioning her ability to be a good parent. I explained to her that everyone needed to talk, to communicate and share their doubts in order to move forwards.

  Hattie confessed to Annie that she sometimes felt worthless. She was scared of the responsibilities of adulthood and she saw no point in planning for a future which she believed she had little influence over. As she revealed more of her concerns I picked up she’d become exceedingly fatalistic, branding herself one of life’s ‘unlucky people’. The more I heard, the more I recognised parallels with some of my old responses. This alarmed me greatly because I knew that the Pennie Fenton’s of this world loved a bit of melancholy and were especially attracted to an attitude of abdication. While I’d never overtly mentioned my dependency to Hattie, I emphasised the importance of accepting personal responsibility for what happens to you in life. I spoke with all the conviction of someone who finally knew this to be true. I suggested to Hattie that her late great-nan may have been right all along when she said “In the colossal battle between fate and freewill you have to invest more heavily in freewill for any chance of happiness”.

  22. As I See It Now

  Early 2010, I received an call from Kirsty telling me she was sitting at home watching me on... Supermarket Sweep. She’d been secretly reviewing every edition of the show which had been transferred to Sky TV. For eighteen months she’d patiently recorded every daily broadcast and checked to see who was on, before wiping it from her hard-drive. All in the hope she would see her brother and his mate disgracing themselves on national telly. It turns out she wasn’t disappointed. On this particular afternoon, she’d nestled down as she always did with a cup of sweet tea in one hand, freshly rolled spliff in the other, flicked through the recorded episode to see if she recognised any of the contestants, before preparing to erase yet another superfluous thirty minutes of space on her Sky+ box. Holding the remote she was habitually positioned ready to press the delete button with her elevated thumb, when she was unexpectedly greeted by the two familiar faces she’d spent so long waiting to see.

  Receipt of her call was like hearing your wife has gone into labour seven months into a difficult pregnancy. Everything stopped and almost before our conversation had finished,
I was inside the car revving the engine, ready to drive to Yorkshire. Within an hour I was sitting at my sister’s side head in hands, jaw hanging, as we watched the show in stunned silence. It was like observing a low budget slasher film played out in slow motion. Each gruesome frame providing physical evidence of my near-lifelessness.

  In retrospect, I’m pleased the programme took so long to be aired. I probably wasn’t up to reliving the emotional intensity of the day any sooner. It was obvious to anyone who had the misfortune to see the show that I was weary and uninterested. My eyes lacked any life in the same way my responses to the questions lacked any humour. It was not easy viewing.

  Later, Annie admitted she’d struggled to recognise me. “It was like watching someone else’s husband on the screen,” she said.

  If ever anyone needed reminding of the dangers of indulgence – here it was. A prudent warning to those who think they can get away with burning the proverbial resin block at both ends.

  Witnessing my Warhol Moment helped me to reflect on progress made. The weeks immediately following the filming of this debacle had felt cold and grey, as if I was grieving for an imaginary playmate. After a month or so, I had been in denial and seriously wished I’d never been introduced to cannabis; then I’d started to blame myself for being too easily led. Next came an overwhelming sense of anger and hostility directed towards anything to do with the drug and this was later followed by a long period where I’d felt absolutely nothing at all. It wasn’t until at least twelve months had passed, that I’d started to feel any sense of relief. Finally getting to see the programme, three long years after it was filmed helped me to recognise that I had moved on a little since that landmark adventure; that I’d begun to let go and get on with living.