What’s it like to grow up the child of an alcoholic? One writer looks back at her teenage years, and talks to others about fear, shame and survival
George Clarke asked his father not to text him when he went on holiday to Valencia in September 2015; he didn’t want his father to be charged the extra fees. When Clarke, 25, landed back in the UK a week later, he headed straight to the restaurant where he worked as a waiter. His boss told him that one of his father’s neighbours had called while he was away – she was concerned about his father. Clarke had had messages like this before, and figuring his father was on one of his regular drinking binges, ignored her message. But two weeks later, the same neighbour called again. Clarke drove to his father’s flat, two miles from where he lived in Holmfirth, Yorkshire. No lights were on, and no one answered. He looked through a window and saw a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter that had turned blue and was surrounded by flies. He called the police.
“The next thing I knew, there was this big, 6ft 8in man covered in tattoos outside the flat with one of those battering rams they use in drug raids, trying to smash the door down,” Clarke says. “I had a chuckle to myself, as the whole moment was quite slapstick, and my dad would have laughed, watching these officers trying to knock his old wooden door down.” Once inside, the police found Clarke’s father upstairs. A postmortem later revealed he had been dead for three weeks.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2TemSwb
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