JOHN, 56

A FORMER soldier who started drinking as a teen said he was like ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ because of his addiction to alcohol.

John, of Worcester, was 14 or 15 years old and working as a DJ in a youth club when he drank cider and began his descent into alcohol addiction.

He began smoking cannabis and drinking in pubs in Birmingham before going to supermarkets to buy vodka. He did not realise he was an alcoholic, viewing himself as a social drinker who was an extrovert anyway with alcohol bringing out the ‘performer’ in him even more.

John progressed to drinking in nightclubs and would go out three nights a week, spending all his money on drink, which infuriated his father.

He said: “It got worse and worse and worse, although at the time I thought it was getting better and better and better.”

He then moved to Worcester where he drank every single night and said he could not wait to finish work so he could have a drink. He said: “I drank to excess and ended up in fights.”

He joined the Army at the age of 24 on the advice of his brother, a serving soldier. But he said the Army was an ‘alcoholic’s paradise’ once you had completed the training. He was sent out to Germany where he said he spent the next 10 years “drinking his backside off”, even turning over a £750,000 truck which ended up in a ditch because he was under the influence of drink, for which he was fined £100.

He recently had a phone call from a friend in Germany and could not even remember the events his old friend described. John, who has been married for 31 years, has four children but said he was blinded to the fact that he was making his family suffer.

“The main thing was to drink and be happy as far as I was concerned.” When he left the Army he became a lorry driver and would volunteer to do shifts which allowed him to drink more freely and hide it from his wife.

John, who was behind the wheel of 44 tonne trucks, said: “I knew I was under the influence of alcohol but I didn’t care about anyone on the road. I was like Jekyll and Hyde.”

Even a stroke triggered by his drinking did not stop him. He was hospitalised for 15 days and needed physiotherapy after he lost movement in his right arm and his right leg. In fact, his drinking got even worse because he was at home without any responsibilities, becoming a house husband. When he sought help from an adviser in Worcester she asked him about how much he was drinking and he lied, telling her it was three pints a day when really it was more like 10 to 15 pints.

He said: “I lied all my life about how much I was drinking.” He went to AA 15 months ago and stopped drinking completely, attending 104 meetings in 90 days but when a friend bought him a pint and he said “he was back to square one again in 10 minutes”. He believes, if you’re an alcoholic, it is always the first drink that gets you drunk.

He ended up on Pitchcroft in Worcester cursing the AA because he wanted to drink. But he returned and admitted what he had done the next day and was welcomed back. He has had no alcohol in the last 13 months and said if he smells alcohol it turns his stomach. He said: “I can honestly say AA has saved my life. My children respect me more than they have ever respected me before.”

He said he came to realise that when he was drunk he was little more to other people than “a performing monkey”. He said: “I was just a puppet for everyone else.

I don’t want to drink ever again.”

RACHEL, 46

A MOTHER was drunk at her own wedding, used to check the bin to see if she had fed her children and once tried to kill herself. But she says she has turned her life around thanks to AA.

Rachel, aged 46, of Worcester, came from a family where drinking was the norm – her father was a heavy drinker and she had already seen the problems it caused in her parents’ marriage.

To begin with she had resolved not to drink like her dad but at 17 became a catwalk model for a wellknown retailer and she would have three glasses of champagne to steady her nerves. She said the drink made her feel “as pretty and as confident as them”. Alcohol became a way for her to change the way she felt about herself and she became addicted very quickly. She would steal, mainly booze, from family and friends to feed her addiction. From the age of 18 she would drink the strongest alcohol she could find.

She said: “I was known as the woman who could drink the blokes under the table and for a while I was proud of that.”

But she battled terrible hangovers and would get the shakes so badly she could not even brush her teeth. She would be sick and struggled to walk down the stairs because she was shaking.

She also shifted from whisky to vodka because she believed, incorrectly she now realises, that it was harder to smell on her breath.

Rachel, who married at the age of 23, would keep half bottles in bed and became expert at drinking silently. She was so adept at this that she managed to drink from the bottle without waking her husband who was lying next to her. If her husband found bottles of alcohol she knew he would pour them down the sink. Before she married him she hid bottles in the loft but she once fell out of the hatch, knocking herself unconscious for eight hours. At the wedding dress fitting her future mother-in-law gasped. She said: “I was black and blue from falling out of the loft.”

She never even went to hospital because she feared it might lead to the alcohol being taken from her.

She said: “On the way to the wedding ceremony I was drinking from bottles of whisky with my father. I arrived at my wedding really drunk.”

She had been married to her husband for more than 21 years. He knew before he married her she had problems with drinking.

She reached an all-time low when she attempted to take her own life, ending up in the old Ronkswood Hospital having her stomach pumped. She said some of the nurses had said, ‘How dare you attempt to take your own life when people are struggling for their own lives tonight?” But another nurse who had battled alcoholism herself put her in touch with AA. She spent eight weeks in treatment and then went to AA meetings which kept her sober for 10 years. She went on to have two children although she did have a relapse a decade ago which left her husband devastated. Sometimes she said she had to check the bin to see if she had fed her children.

She said: “He had lost me. I had lost me. I realised I was getting suicidal thoughts again. I knew if I didn’t do something within hours I just might do it. I thought of my children finding me, my husband finding me and I phoned AA again.

“I do as much as I can for AA. It gave me the most beautiful life. It has saved my life and my sanity.”

It is now eight and a half years since she had a drink. In the last 22 years she has been without drink for the last 19.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

For more information call the
national helpline on 08457
697555 or the Birmingham
helpline on 0121 2120111 or
visit alcoholics-anonymous.
org.uk. There are meetings in
Worcester, Stourport, Evesham,
Malvern and Kidderminster.
Phone the number to find your
nearest group.