Chapter 17 of the memoir "Rescue of a Rock'n'Roll Child".

Introduction

A first version of "Beyond the Borderlands" was published at Blogster on the 5th of September 2006. Some two years later, another story, "The Trials of a Teetotaller" was added to it. It had originally been published at Blogster on the 9th of November 2006 as "Release, Relapse and Restoration". In October 2008, the resultant story was divided into three sections including a much reworked original "Borderlands".

Beyond the Borderlands

There is a belief within Christianity that the sooner a person accepts Jesus Christ as their Saviour, the better it is for them when it comes to their immortal soul. The same could be said for their subsequent relationship with God. There may for example be serious physical or psychological health problems resulting from a lethally debauched lifestyle leading ultimately to repentance and faith which could seriously affect their efficacy as Christian witnesses. One possible advantage on the other hand of being a late convert is the possession of a testimony which has the power to cause those who normally have little time for Christians to sit up and take notice. One such testimony is that of Canadian former drug addict Peter Orasuk, who came to Christ at the relatively late age of 28. His story commands respect and attention. Sadly Orasuk went to be with the Lord aged only 55 in 2005.

 In the hard but exciting early days of my own Walk with God, I suffered from panic attacks that could be triggered simply by my leaving the sanctuary of my home. Thankfully, these only lasted a relatively short period of time, but later during a period of withdrawal from the valium that'd become a crutch they returned to some degree. At the same time, I persisted with the PGCE, partly at the University of Greenwich, and partly at Richmond College in leafy Richmond-on-Thames, Surrey. I did so while rehearsing for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, based on the life of James Joyce's daughter Lucia,  which premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993, and attending sporadic drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in Greenwich, south east London. My counsellor Elaine was a warm soft-spoken Londoner with the gentlest pale blue eyes. The only time I ever knew her to lose her composure was when I announced to her over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking diazepam, I'd switched to the anxiolytic sedative chlormethiazole.  Chlormethiazole or heminevrin had been prescribed to me for my drinking some years earlier and taken a capsule despite its having passed its expiry date. What I was not aware of at the time was that when used in conjunction with valium it can be fatal. However, a sufficient number of hours had lapsed between my taking the capsule and calling Elaine for me to be out of danger, and I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this realisation.
 

I owe a lot to those who were there for me during my darkest days of coping with alcohol and prescription drugs problems, such as Elaine, and my Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor Don, who kept regular tabs on me by phone  during my very worst time which was a great comfort to me. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before stopping altogether. One of the reasons I did so was that a matter of days after repenting and coming to Christ, I received a phone call from a man working for an organisation called Contact for Christ based in Selsdon, south London. I think he'd got in touch as a result of my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I'd picked up on a train, perhaps the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as I slowly approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the foreboding south London cityscape.

 I'm sure I tried to put him off, but he turned up at my parents' house nonetheless, a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age with gently penetrating coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white-grey moustache. His name was Spencer Nash, and at his urging we prayed together. Some time later I visited him and his wife Grace at his large and elegant house where suburb meets country some distance beyond the Greater London border. On that day, Spencer and I made an extensive list of aspects of my pre-Christian life he felt required deep repentance, and we prayed over each of these in turn. My continuing use of tobacco was one of the issues addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after I'd taken my last valium, I stopped enjoying cigarettes. Admittedly, I continued smoking on and off for about four years afterwards, but I never really enjoyed a cigarette again. In fact, even as early as 1994, a single draw was enough to inhibit my breathing for the rest of the day, and so rob me of a good night’s sleep.  Additionally, we discussed which church I should be attending, and there was some talk of my joining Spencer and Grace at their little family fellowship in the suburbs, but in the end, Spencer gave his blessing to Cornerstone, where I'd been baptised by the charismatic pastor Chris Demetriou. I stayed there until 1995 when I got word that the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship based in Whitton near Twickenham contained members whose spiritual gifts were exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and liked what I saw so decided to stay. A pattern of restlessness had been established.
 

Descent into the Hothouse

In the early part of 1994, I set out on the final stages of the PGCE FE that I’d been working on since the autumn of ’92, and whose passing would have permitted me to teach French in further education establishments throughout the UK.

My own history includes three unsuccessful attempts at passing this exam. The first took place in 1986-'87 at Homerton College, Cambridge, but I quit immediately prior to beginning teaching practice at the Manor Community College in the deprived Arbury area of the city, the second, in 1990, at the former West London Institute of Higher Education, based on two campuses in the suburbs of Isleworth and east Twickenham, the third, which was the only one I actually completed, in 1992-'94 at the University of Greenwich in New Eltham, south east London. I failed in my last attempt mainly I think because I didn't demonstrate enough authority in the classroom at Esher College where I did my teaching. To their credit, my tutors at Greenwich offered me the opportunity of retaking TP, but I chose to turn them down. Perhaps I was a little disappointed. After all, the course had cost me quite a lot in terms of time and effort.

 If I was put out by failing a course that'd cost me a great deal in terms of time and effort, it wasn't for long because in September I successfully auditioned for a newly formed fringe theatre group based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston called Grip for the main part of Roote in a relatively obscure play by Harold Pinter called "The Hothouse". Perhaps not among Pinter's greatest plays, it's a superb piece nonetheless, and deeply Pinteresque, with its almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence. Penned in 1958, it was not performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London’s Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres.

 From the auditions onwards, I established a strong connection with the American director, Tim Williams, and once he'd told me the part was mine, I was genuinely excited by the prospect of working with him in interpreting Roote, the director of an unnamed government psychiatric hospital, the “Hothouse” of the title.
My success rate when it came to auditions had always been low, mainly most auditions involve the actor performing pieces from memory, which always left me feeling intensely self-conscious. Tim on the other hand got us to read from the play in small groups while inter-reacting with fellow auditionees, which enabled us to attain a basic feel for our respective characters, and so come close to acting for an audience. I'm one of those actors for whom the audience is the life-blood of my acting, and I become galvanised by them.

Tim demanded from me an interpretation of Roote which was deeply at variance with my usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally vehement approach to acting, but his directorial instincts were immaculate. The eccentric windbag with a tendency to sudden arbitrary brutality which he coaxed out of me was one of the most successful of my uneven career as an actor. It received exceptionally positive reviews not just in the local press, but also the London version of the international listings magazine Time Out, in which Kate Stratton described my performance as “flawlessly accurate” and “lit by flashes of black humour”, adding that the production faltered whenever I left the stage. The Time Out review created a real aura of excitement about the production, and especially its lead actor who for all the world looked set to capitalize on this unexpected success and go on to become a West End superstar. One agent went out of her way to ask me to ensure my details reached her, but my CV at the time was not up to scratch, and this may have hampered my chances with her.

 That said, since coming to faith my priorities had drastically shifted, and I viewed worldly acclaim with a far more dubious eye than I'd done only a few years before. Perhaps that's why I failed to take fuller advantage of the opportunities offered to me by my performance in "The Hothouse". But I was also suffering within, badly missing the escape alcohol once offered me, and the revels extending deep into the night that once used to follow my acting perfomances, and during which I’d thrown my youth and affections about like some kind of maniacal delinquent gambler squandering his life’s savings at the poker table in the face of imminent insolvency.

 The hard truth of the matter is that by the mid-nineties I no longer enjoyed acting as I'd once done, and while being onstage and relating to other actors was still immensely satisfying to me on an artistic level, in general I found the process of being an actor pure torture. This was especially true of the socialising it entailed. I'd boxed myself into the position of no longer being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax. This may have been something to do with what the state of my endorphins, although I'm not sure that these had been permanently affected by my late excesses. There is a belief among some experts on drug and alcohol addiction that the endorphins are depleted by long-term indulgence in various narcotics including alcohol, but I'm not in a position to either endorse or dismiss it. To further complicate matters, I started being subject during the run of “The Hothouse” to heavy spiritual problems related to my thoughts which are evidently not at all uncommon among born again Christians. After all, they are at variance with the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Within a matter of months I'd actively seek a solution to these in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry, and place myself in the hands of the late great preacher and writer Frank Wren of Trumpet Sounds Ministries, Devonshire, for this purpose.

Relapse in Twickenham

Within a short time of “The Hothouse” reaching the end of its two week run, Grip’s artistic director Martin Richards, a kind and gentle man who became a good friend, asked me if I’d like to audition for his upcoming production of “Two” by Jim Cartwright. This was a two-handed play in which all the male characters are played by one actor, and all the female by another, to be directed by Martin, and produced by his charming fiancée Chantal. I of course said yes and auditioned successfully, with the result that I found myself playing opposite the superb character actress Jane Gelardi for a fortnight, and by the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on the side of the stage at our feet, which I'd never experienced before on the London fringe. Yet as much as I loved working with Martin and Jane, I dreaded the end of each performance, and I'd make my excuses as soon as it was possible to do so without causing anyone any great offence.

 Release from what I saw as a prison of compulsive sobriety came while I was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown a day or so following "Two"'s final performance when a guy I'd only just met offered to buy me a drink and I said I'd like a glass of wine. Without taking into account an incident at my parents’ house a few weeks earlier when I took a swig of what I thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, it was the first alcohol to pass my lips since January of the previous year. It made me feel wonderful, its intoxicating properties having almost certainly been enhanced by the purity of my system. I cycled home that night in a state of exhileration, feeling for the first time in months that I could so anything. Over the next few week my drinking increased, although there were times when it made me ill and brought on minor panic attacks. Still I refused to heed the warning signs. This first relapse came to a climax in a pub in Twickenham where I met Henry an old university friend, who'd just finished a course nearby at St Mary's University College in Strawberry Hill, and where I drank and smoked myself into a stupor.

 Cycling home afterwards, I took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off my bike, striking my head against a bus shelter. I lay flat on my back for a while abject and stinking of drink and might have died there but for the mercy of God, and soon I was shakily resumed my journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking, culminating in one massive binge, possibly combined with the adverse effects of violently smashing my head, resulted in my becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. As I remember, there were times during this awful period when I'd awake from a feverish sleep in a frantic state, my face a sickly pale, close to backing out, terrified of dying, but each time I felt God came to my rescue just when my I felt I could stay conscious for not a second longer, breathing life back into me. All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to full health, which seemed to take an eternity, but eventually I did return to normal life determined never to put myself through such a soul-racking experience again.
 

Photos: Jane Whitton 1993