‘Life had darkened for him’

I LEFT Cork City in 1971, a graduate of UCC, having studied under some great teachers (Seán Lucy, Seán Ó Tuama and Risteárd A Breatnach).

I grew up in that city, spending my earliest years in Turner’s Cross, and going to school there and at Coláiste Chríost Rí, where a love of learning, language, and poetry was imparted by some passionate teachers.

I have written, I suppose you might say, a fair amount: criticism, poetry, drama, and so on. But this book, and not just because it’s my most recent, is the book that means the most to me, and to my wife, Angela, a native of Cork like myself, she from Mayfield, a ‘northsider’. And this is because it is a book about one of the most tragic things that can come into any parent’s life, the death of a son or a daughter. In this case the cause of death was drink, our son, Egan, having been cursed with that most appalling illness: alcoholism.

We left Cork for Leeds in Yorkshire (Angela giving up her job in the advertising department of the Examiner) where I had the offer of a temporary post at the university, while also getting on with some further research under brilliant supervision. We settled there and three of our four children were born in Yorkshire (the eldest, Rachel, had the good fortune to be born in Cork before we left). Egan, our third child, was aged four when I was offered the professorship of English at Coleraine, where we’ve been since, and where Angela now runs the Citizens Advice Bureau.

Many years later, when Egan’s problems started to darken round him, and he would attend counselling and addiction sessions, he would nearly always be asked about his childhood. Was there a dark secret lurking? Did something catastrophic and vile happen to him? Was he subjected to some hideous abuse? And he’d come back and tell his mother this, and how he’d surprise his, no doubt well-meaning, counsellors by saying that he had a happy childhood, and so I think it was. Of course, you can never be entirely sure, but still, he was a blissfully happy boy, often singing to himself in his cot or in his room.

But, as he grew older, life darkened for him. There was a period of the most frightening anorexia in his teens; he hated school, so much so that he begged, literally begged, me to allow him not to take his A-levels, a request I gave in to, probably wrongly, looking back. Yet he was brilliant, gifted with the most amazing speed of intellect, and with instincts as sharp as a tack, so that it wasn’t long before he was working at the university, totally self-trained, formatting materials for a revolutionary MA on the internet in Biomedical Science.

And it was around then that he started to drink, I mean really drink, not just the glass or two in the evenings, but real heavy-duty stuff. He began to be recognised as somebody ‘cool’, and became a well-favoured patron of the VIP lounge at a local night club where he was also their webmaster. He was earning a lot of money, probably too much for a young man.

He fell in with an older businessman, who ripped him off, and this experience, combined with an increasing sense of self-contempt, meant that he turned more and more to alcohol for solace to relieve what were becoming intolerable levels of stress. One very wise Indian lady doctor at the Causeway Hospital said to him, as he was beginning his decline, that he was ‘self-medicating’ with alcohol, and that though he was not yet an alcoholic, he was headed that way. She was proved right.

There is a factor here, which should be mentioned, and that is the kind of example he would have had from me growing up, because our household was one in which drink, the initiative always taken by yours truly, was taken pretty much every night: a couple of glasses of wine before dinner, and then more with the food. All very middle-class, all very common in academic circles, where, if I’m not mistaken, the degree of alcohol dependence is very high. Think of those Fellows at the Oxford Colleges, sitting round the Master’s table, knocking back the finest wines, bottle after bottle, and then the port, and then the brandies. I have no doubt but that the attitude to drink in our house, where its consumption was taken as absolutely normal, was a very dangerous environment for someone with alcoholic tendencies. I know that to some extent my drinking has contributed to the circumstances which led to Egan’s illness and death and that is something I have to live with.

This, perhaps, is one of the reasons I wrote the book, out of remorse at the suffering I may have brought into the life of someone loved. But it was not the main reason. The driving impulse was my determination to reveal the sorrow and sadness of a life going astray and hopelessly out of control, but also that such a tragedy can have some kind of meaning in it, that at the heart of sorrow and pain and distress a dignity and grace survives.

Egan was 27 when he died. By this stage he had struggled for three years to become free of his addiction: he had gone into St John of God’s in Dublin, and had been in Cuan Mhuire in Newry twice. He had Antabuse prescribed for him, the drug which is given to alcoholics who are certain they want to quit, because if you drink on top of it the body goes into complete revolt: sickness, vomiting, panic, thundering heart-rate. This night in Jan 2007, his fiancée (he had become engaged to a beautiful girl from Portstewart, so he had everything to live for) having planned to go out to dinner with her mother, Egan set off, we believe, to rent some DVDs. But, on whatever impulse God knows, and even though he’s on the Antabuse, he turns into a bar in Coleraine. One thing leads to another, and he ends up in the small hours of the morning drinking in a chalet on the banks of the river Bann with a group of like-minded individuals. After some altercation or other (there was no foul play, just some drunken argument) he leaves, but walks towards the river into which he falls.

His body was recovered 11 days later by divers from Yorkshire. When they pulled open the zip of the body bag so I could identify him, he looked at peace. There was even a trace of that unforgettable smile of his on his stained face.

And what meaning is there in all of this?

I say in the preface to the book that it is not a religious book. I do not have the training or the capacity to write in theological terms about death and love.

And yet I found myself going back to the Gospels all the time for the language to help me cope with and write about sorrow and human loss. Because a great deal of what I dimly understand about what it is to be human and vulnerable and in despair, I learned from Egan. But I also learned about courage and about love. Courage in facing the weakest parts of what we are; and the love that survives all the disappointments and failures. I think for me he was, is, a kind of Christ.

I should perhaps say a few words about the strange title of the book. We had a friend in Coleraine whom we were convinced was alcoholic, and who had been very ill. One day I was with him on the train to Dublin, and was a bit taken aback when he ordered a drink, having stopped some months before. I came back and told Egan this, who was profoundly upset. ‘He’s kicking the black mamba’, he said. ‘He’s what?’ I asked. ‘That’s what you do’, he said, ‘if you’re an alcoholic and you take a drink. The black mamba is one of the deadliest snakes in the world, and it can outrun the fastest man. If you kick one, you’re dead.’

* Robert Welch is a former Professor of English and Dean of Arts at the University of Ulster.

* Kicking the Black Mamba: Life, Alcohol and Death, will be published by Darton Longman & Todd later this month.