My mother first gave me wine aged 5. Ten years later I was an alcoholic – like her

Arabella Byrne was seven years old when, late one night at home, she entered the kitchen to find her mother at the sink with her back to her.

‘I recall the feel of the floor under my feet, an overflowing ashtray, half-empty bottles,’ says Arabella, now 41. ‘But what I mainly remember is Mum’s face – she was angry.’

What she either didn’t spot, or has since blotted from her memory, was that her mother was holding a knife, having decided to kill herself. If she looked angry it was because her plan had been thwarted. Julia Hamilton, now 68, says, ‘I remember thinking, “I just can’t go on.” I couldn’t breathe.’

At that stage in life she was a penniless single mother whose relationship with her boyfriend had ended. Home was a terraced house with dry rot in Shepherd’s Bush, West London – then a downmarket area for the daughter of one of Scotland’s proudest aristocratic families. 

‘I was in such a state of suffering. Everything I’d always dreaded had happened. I was totally abandoned: the boyfriend I loved wouldn’t help me.’

Putting away the knife she took Arabella back to bed then called the Samaritans, who talked her down. Yet the real issue, which Julia refused to acknowledge, even to herself, was that she was an alcoholic.

‘I thought my problems were about men and money, and that drink was my friend. It never occurred to me to live without it. Everything bad that happened just gave me an excuse to dip deeper into the drinking.’

For that reason she didn’t give a thought to how her child might be affected by a suicidal mother. ‘Arabella was peripheral, extraneous. I was too self-obsessed to care about anyone’s feelings except my own. Taboo as it is to admit, for alcoholics their children don’t come first. They would climb over their bodies to get a drink.’

Nearly 20 years later, Arabella stood in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room in Oxford, listening to her newly sober mother make this confession. Both women were there because, by the age of 15, Arabella, too, had become an alcoholic. Now mother and daughter have come together to write In the Blood, a memoir about their addiction and how eventually both became sober within 14 months of each other.

The pair’s tight bond exemplified in 1991

Charming and eloquent, they have been sober since. Yet even at their lowest ebb, neither fitted the stereotype of a homeless drunk begging on street corners, which they stress is completely misleading. Superficially, both enjoyed privileged lives. The daughter of the 13th Earl of Belhaven and Stenton, Julia became an author, publishing six novels. Arabella, a freelance writer, has a master’s degree from Oxford and a PhD from the US Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.

Despite their rarefied backgrounds, for years both lived chaotic, squalid lives full – as Julia puts it – of ‘drunken rants’, ‘dents in the car’ and long days in pubs, ‘fall[ing] asleep in the loo with the graffiti on the door, smashed, trousers round your ankles’.

Plagued by feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing (‘All alcoholics feel outsiders,’ Julia says) brought on by their parents’ miserable marriages, from their early teens mother and daughter started numbing their feelings by drinking to the point of blackout. 

At her boarding school, Benenden, alma mater of Princess Anne, Julia kept Dubonnet in a Ribena bottle in her washing cubicle, swigging on it every night. By 15, her daughter Arabella was regularly arriving hungover at her private London day school, Francis Holland Regent’s Park – the fees were paid by Stephen, her father, who had divorced Julia when their daughter was five and was an alcoholic, too. 

The only time Arabella felt really close to either parent was when she was getting drunk with them: ‘It made me feel like the lights had gone on after a power cut.’ 

Her mother first gave her wine when she was five years old. ‘There’s a photo of me wearing her sunglasses, holding a wine glass to my lips aping her expression and mannerisms. People would cry, ‘Like mother, like daughter’ when they saw it.’

Boozing has blurred their memories, so neither is sure of the amount they consumed. ‘Alcoholics don’t admit to themselves how much they’re drinking,’ says Julia. ‘I loved wine boxes because you couldn’t see the amount you were getting through. I’d hide a vodka bottle in the carcass of a turkey in the freezer, glug from the whisky bottle on the dresser before I took the dog out in the morning and drink wine from a special blue glass that didn’t give away its contents.’

‘At my worst I’d be waking up in the middle of the night to down a glass of wine and drinking another before I got out of bed,’ her daughter says. Aged 25, after a mega-binge resulted in her being dismissed from a job in PR, Arabella was admitted to her local hospital’s mental health crisis unit. ‘They asked about my drinking but I told them, ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’ I called it depression – as a woman, that seemed much more acceptable and feminine.’

You’d never guess their tumultuous pasts as we sit in a hotel in Oxford, near to where they live, Julia in a blue silk shirt with a scarf tied jauntily around her neck, Arabella in jeans and a smart navy top. ‘Alcoholism is so hidden; it affects everyone, including people like us, not just old men on park benches – that’s one of the most damaging images because it makes women think, “Well, that definitely isn’t me, so I don’t have a problem”,’ Julia says passionately. 

Over the past five years, they point out, there’s been a 37 per cent rise in the number of women drinking themselves to death, compared to 29 per cent in men.

‘There’s a code of silence around alcoholism that empowers it’: Arabella, right, with Julia

Scientists suspect that alcoholism is genetic (hence their book’s title In the Blood), with children of alcoholics twice as likely to fall prey as those of non-alcoholics. Julia’s grandfather died of the condition, having squandered the family’s aristocratic fortunes on booze. 

Her father, the 13th Earl of Belhaven and Stenton, whose title was created by Charles I in 1647, grew up on a grand estate in Lanarkshire, but it had to be sold to pay his father’s debts, so Julia’s childhood was spent on a Highland hill farm with no electricity.

Her parents, always fighting over money and often neglectful, divorced acrimoniously when Julia was 13. Her relationship with her mother was fraught (‘I think she was depressed’) and her beloved father remarried a woman who treated her cruelly: ‘Remembering meeting her still sends shivers down my spine – she was evil. I lost my relationship with my father and became a nuisance to him. He turned his back on me and I could no longer be myself with him.’

Desperate for love, Julia married at the age of 19 but divorced after a year. Her second marriage, to Stephen, an insurance broker, was equally unhappy and ended after ten years.

Like her mother, Arabella grew up with a stepmother she disliked. When she visited Stephen at weekends, he was usually drunk. ‘I always had a sense something was very wrong with Mum – even when she was present she was absent. There were sports days when she forgot to bring a picnic, hours spent waiting for her to pick me up, afternoons waiting for her to wake, watching her stagger up the stairs before collapsing on the landing. But I couldn’t say anything to anyone because that would have been betraying her, so I just shut it down.’

At university, Arabella partied with friends, but she realised their reasons for drinking were quite different from hers. ‘They wanted to have fun. I wanted not to be myself. I didn’t understand how they could live normal lives – hold down jobs, have boyfriends – because for such a long time the only relationship that mattered to me was the one with alcohol.’

After being fired from her PR job, she ended up with Julia in Oxford, often sleeping all day in a room reeking of booze, cigarettes and vomit in the sink, drinking together late into the night. But in 2009, aged 53, Julia, now married for the third time (that marriage lasted ten years), had a wake-up call after her GP sent her for a liver scan.

‘The results were really melancholy,’ she says. ‘I realised if I carried on I’d die of alcoholism. I’d always been in denial but suddenly I saw clearly that alcohol wasn’t part of me, it controlled me – and I needed to get away from it.’

Julia began attending local AA meetings. There, the support of other addicts helped her get sober, which she has remained ever since. Arabella, then 26, found the transformation unsettling. ‘We’d found camaraderie drinking together; now Mum looked at me, hungover, with an air of disapproval.’ But nine months later, having been brought home in an ambulance after a binge, she decided to try AA, too.

‘I told Mum, ‘I think I’m an alcoholic. I have a problem; I have your problem. I can’t stop when I start. I’m really scared,’ I stammered, my voice cracking, my eyes filling with tears of self-pity, relief and something altogether darker: revenge.’

Rather than being overjoyed, Julia was suspicious of Arabella’s decision. ‘AA was my place, where I was finding myself, and I didn’t want to be in meetings hearing how my daughter’s alcoholism was my fault. At first I didn’t like attending with her because she quite often told the assembled company things I didn’t know about her.

I realised with a pang how vulnerable Arabella was and how I’d failed to help her. Sometimes I think how much of a stranger she is to me, how much of her life I’ve missed because of her addiction.’

With time, those feelings of shame yielded to a sense of pride. ‘Arabella’s life was at a fork: she could go down into drink and depression and early death, or she could do what she did, which was to choose a different path,’ Julia says.

Today, Arabella has been married for eight years to Martin, who has only ever known her sober. She is mother to Alexandra, seven, and Constance, one, while Julia is a hands-on grandmother. ‘Without AA, I’d be that menace – a drunken granny. As it is I have a child seat in my car and drive the grandchildren around.’

Both still attend AA, sometimes separately, sometimes together. ‘You get the odd other mother-daughter pair, but we’re pretty unusual,’ Arabella says. ‘At first I found it weird, but now I disassociate. She’s no longer Mum, she’s Julia, and I find what she has to say so interesting.’

Most healing was their decision to tackle the book together (they write alternate chapters). ‘We’re talking about some pretty rough stuff, but it was very bonding,’ Julia says. ‘There’s been so much guerilla warfare in our families between mothers and daughters. This was the antidote.’

Several relatives were unhappy about the project, warning they’d never speak to them again if they aired their dirty laundry. Arabella, who’s now an ambassador for the National Association of Children of Alcoholics (nacoa.org.uk), shrugs it off. She’s apprehensive about her daughters reading the book one day but at the same time hopes that, by shining light on what they call the family ‘darkness’, the next generation can be protected from it. ‘I feel so strongly there’s a code of silence around alcoholism that empowers it. I felt so much confusion and shame around my parents drinking and that made me turn to alcohol. We have to break that to free the next generation.’

In the Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction will be published by HQ on Thursday, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44 until 17 November, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.