It was four years ago that I got the call I had been dreading. It was the summons to Princess Alexandria Hospital, calling me to Harlow where my Dad lived, because he was in his final days. In the gold, grey dawn of St Joseph’s Day, he slipped away from us. And all I remember thinking was ‘finally, he’s in a place where no one can hurt him, and he can no longer hurt himself’.
My mum and dad were Sixties radicals, who’d campaigned against apartheid. But as they settled down, inspired by Clement Attlee’s new towns, my dad, Dermot, became a planner, fascinated by the idea that we could build new communities in the countryside. He worked all the hours God sent. But the higher up the ranks he rose, the deeper became his dependence on alcohol. And when we lost my mum to cancer at 52 on Boxing Day 1997, it knocked him into the abyss.
But it was only when my dad died, that I found the National Association for Children of Alcoholics (NACOA) in Bristol. They helped me understand that all the conflicts and contortions I had as a child of an alcoholic – the insecurity, shame, drive for perfectionism, the armour plating you build to prevent anything from hurting you. All the defences every child of an alcoholic has to build.
At first, I rallied. But, contending with my failure to save my dad, I visited an uncle for some advice. He gave me an extraordinary quote from Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I held onto that. I thought I was making progress. But I wasn’t.
I admired Jo Cox greatly. She was exactly the kind of person you want to see in public life; she was energetic, she brought people together, and she was determined. I didn’t know her terribly well, but for whatever reason, her murder was the trigger for a deep, long plunge into darkness.
I was the eldest son. Yet no matter how much I loved my mum, I couldn’t save her from cancer. No matter how hard I worked, I didn’t feel I could make my dad proud of me, stop him from drinking, or save his life. That sense of failure meant I didn’t think that happiness was justified to me.
It took 18 months of counselling for me to start to put my life back together again. And it took me back to first principles. I began to see that the little boy who was my younger self wasn’t some kind of failure; he was just a little boy desperately trying to help his mum and dad. For much of my early adult life, I had been programmed to try to be the person I thought others wanted me to be. Good counselling helped me see actually, I could be the person I wanted to be.
I was lucky that I had a family to catch me. But there are thousands in our country who are not so lucky. In my region, the West Midlands, 5,000 children have presented in our Accident & Emergency departments having self-harmed in the past five years alone. Drug and alcohol addiction services have been cut by millions. And no surprise, homelessness is soaring. Many of the homeless people I work with, just like my dad, are simply self-medicating trauma with drugs, and the support networks that should catch them as they fall are no longer there.
I worried a lot that I was dishonouring my parents by speaking up about our family life. But, the truth is my dad was also a child of alcoholics, two in fact. So to honour the child who became the man who became my father, and for the millions of children of addicts, we must end this moral emergency of safety nets which are simply no longer there.
Liam Byrne is the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill.