I Am Bess, the voice from Gin Lane. They called it Gin Lane, though that was never written on any board. The street had a proper name once but nobody used it. You said Gin Lane and every soul from Holborn to Seven Dials knew the ground you meant, knew the smell of it, knew the doorway with the cellar steps worn into a curve by feet that went down more often than they came up.

I lived there. I died there. And I want to tell you how ordinary it was, because that is the part nobody records. The prints and the sermons made a spectacle of us. It was not a spectacle. It was a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and those Tuesdays went on for eleven years.

There was a board outside the place I favoured, and painted on it, in a hand better than the man who owned it deserved:
Drunk for a penny.
Dead drunk for twopence.
Clean straw for nothing.

That was not a boast. It was an accurate price list, and the straw was the important part. It meant you didn’t have to go home. It meant the night could be got through in the back room among strangers, and the morning would find you where you fell, and nobody would come looking, and nobody did.

The gin itself was not gin as you would know it. Proper Hollands was for people with linen, not silk. What we drank was made in a back yard from grain that was too poor for bread, and cut with whatever gave it a bite. Turpentine, mostly. Oil of vitriol in the worse batches. Sugar to disguise the rest. I watched a woman lose her sight over one winter from a bad batch and she went on drinking it after, being led to the counter each time by her boy.

There was a shop in Blue Anchor Alley with a wooden cat nailed to the wall. You put your coin in the cat’s mouth, you said “puss,” and a voice from inside said “mew,” and gin ran out of a lead pipe into whatever you were holding. No face, no name, nobody to be taken up before a magistrate. That is how it was when the law tried to stop us. We did not stop. We simply spoke to the cat.

I will give you my account of one day, and you could take it as all of them. You wake before you want to, not from noise but from shaking. The hands first. Then the sickness rising, and a thirst that is not thirst, and a fear pressing onto your chest with no object attached to it, no reason you could name, only a certainty that something terrible was about to occur. There is one thing on this earth that answers it and it is four minutes’ walk away. You do not decide to go, deciding is not part of it. You are already putting on your shoes – and you just go.

The first dram at seven in the morning is not pleasure. Understand that, because it is the whole of the trap. It is simply repair. It is the moment the fear lifts off your chest and the hands settle and the world comes back into its proper shape, and for perhaps half an hour you are a competent woman who can think clearly with intentions to do a great many things today.

Then it begins to slide, and by ten you need the second one, which buys you less time than the first. By noon you are not repairing anything, you are only holding off the collapse, and you have not eaten because the money that would have been bread has already gone through the cat’s mouth.

I took in washing when I could still be trusted with other people’s linen. That soon went. I sold oranges, and then I sold the basket. The afternoons went in the back room where the light came in grey through one window and eleven or twelve of us sat on that clean straw, some talking, some not, and the talk was always the same talk. Whose fault it was. What we would do when things turned. How it was different for us than for the ones outside. We were very good company to each other and we did each other no good whatsoever.

I saw what happened around me. I watched mothers give it to infants on the end of a rag, to quiet them, because a quiet child could be left while you worked, and because a child who does not cry does not accuse you. I saw a girl of fifteen brought in by her own aunt to be made agreeable to a man, and the gin was the means, and the aunt drank her share of the same bottle in the room while it was done. I saw men sell the tools of their trade. A cooper I knew sold his axe for a quart, and with it went every possible day that he could work after. He knew it while he was doing it but did it anyway, because the shaking was now and the future was beyond what was most important.

That is what the drink does that the sermons never grasped. It does not turn you into someone else. It narrows you until there is only one thing left in the world that matters and then it lets you forget about everything else.

My mother died when I was thirty one and I let her die alone in a room I could have reached in a quarter of an hour, because I was in the back room. I I had told myself I would go tomorrow but that was too late.

I had a husband, Tom, who was not a bad man and was not a strong one. He drank because I drank and I drank because he drank, and we each blamed each other for it with real conviction. Neither of us ever once said the truth out loud in eleven years.

I had three children. One went before he reached two, in winter, and I have carried the memory of his passing a long time. One we placed in the parish workhouse, lived and grew, and would not know me if I stood in front of her. The third, my Jem, stayed longest. He learned to fetch for me. He learned to lie for me at the door when the rent was due. He learned the exact tone of my voice that meant it was safe to come near, and by seven years old he knew it better than I did. I made a servant of a child and I called it love because he was stayed with me.

My sister Ann came for me four times. Four separate times she stood in that doorway and offered me a bed in Southwark and work in the tannery yard, and I sent her away with words I would give a great deal to unsay, because a person who is offering you a way out is telling you, without meaning to, that you are in something. And I could not have that said. I could not have it said at all. After the fourth time she did not come back, and I told the back room she had abandoned me, and they agreed, and we all drank on it.

I held an empty purse, because at first you spend what you earn, then you spend what you were keeping for rent. Then the pewter goes, and the blanket, and the shoes off your own feet in the summer because summer is a long time before winter. Then you borrow from people who cannot spare it and do not give it back, and one by one those doors close, and each closed door becomes further proof of how badly other people have treated you, how badly the entire world has used you. Then you begin to take, small things at first, from market stalls, from the room of a lodger, from a pocket in a crowd. And then when you are known for stealing and watched, you can take nothing more. So you sell the only thing that you have, that has not yet been sold, quietly, quickly, in the alley behind the house, for coin, for the price of a quartern, to men whose faces I could not describe to you now as I did not look at them.

I want it understood that I did not do these things because I was wicked. I did them because by that stage I was no longer choosing anything at all. The choosing had ended years before, in a series of small moments so unremarkable that not one of them felt like the moment it was.

I died at thirty nine, in the back room, on the clean straw that cost nothing. And I want you to know that in the last hour I was not thinking of my children. I was thinking about whether there was enough left in my cup.

Now I will tell you the thing I most want to say, because it is not said in any sermon or holy book. It did not stop when I died. I want to be very clear, because those that are living imagine death as a door that closes on a habit. It is not. The body ended. The wanting did not. The body had been only the instrument of it, and when the instrument was set down, the wanting was still standing there, exactly as strong, with nothing left to satisfy it and no possibility of ever satisfying it again.

I stayed in that room for what I can only describe as a very long time. The house had gone. The street had gone. Whatever stood there instead, I could not perceive, because I was not looking at it. I was looking at a counter that was no longer there, and waiting for a man who had been dead longer than I had, and there were others in that room with me doing exactly the same, and we did not see each other any more than we had truly seen each other in life.

That is the state. It is not a punishment and nobody sent me there. There was no fire and no judgement and no one accusing me of anything. There was only my own attention, fixed in one direction for years and years, and after the body dropped away my attention simply stayed where I had trained it to stay. The narrowing that gin performs on a life continues perfectly well without gin. That is the truth of it. I had made myself into a shape with one opening, and I went on being that shape.

And the Light was there the entire time. Not distant. Not withheld. It was in that room with me at every moment, and I could not perceive it, for the same reason a woman staring at a counter does not perceive a window behind her shoulder. Nothing barred me from it. I was simply not turned that way.

Eventually somebody stood beside me and asked me a question.

Not a rescuer with a light in their hand. Not an angel of the sort you would paint or draw. A woman, in the plain likeness of a woman, who came and stood next to me at that counter as though she belonged there, and stayed, and said nothing at all for a long while. It was then she turned to me and asked me what my mother’s name had been. That was all. And it moved me, for one second, out of the only direction I had faced in decades. One second was enough to make a crack in it. She came back, and came back again, and asked me another small thing each time, and slowly, over what I could not measure, she turned my head. She had been a drinker too. That was why she could reach me. She knew the exact shape of the wanting from the inside and she could not be deceived by a single one of my excuses, having invented every one of them herself.

I do that work now. It is the whole of what I do. I go to the ones who have just laid the body down and do not know it, who are still standing in rooms that no longer exist, still waiting on a dose, a bottle, a powder, a window on a table, a needle, whatever their particular narrowing was made of. I do not lecture them. Lecturing is what the living did to me and it never once moved me by so much as an inch. I stand with them. I let them tell me whose fault it was, at length, as many times as they need, because they must be allowed to say it until they hear how it sounds. And then, when there is an opening, I ask one small question about something that has nothing to do with the drink at all. Their mother’s name. A song. What the sky looked like from a particular window.

And in the second where they turn to answer, the fixed thing loosens, and a little Light gets in at the side, and that is enough to begin with. It is always enough to begin with. Not one of them is being punished. Every one of them is loved and every one of them is free to go at any moment. They are only facing the wrong way, and someone has to come and stand where they are looking and gently ask them to look elsewhere. I have thought about what I might have done differently – and I have had a great deal of time to consider the answers.

I would have let my sister Ann in the first time,not the fourth. The first, when I still had shoes and a room and could have more easily walked out under my own strength. The offer of help arrives at its most useful precisely when you are most able to refuse it, and the ability to refuse it feels, at that moment, exactly like proof that you do not need it.

I would have spoken out loud, eleven years and I never once said, to another living soul, “I cannot stop.” I said everything else. I said the world was against me, and Tom was weak, and the parish was cruel, and the work was scarce. I never said the one true sentence, because a thing unsaid can still be argued with.

I would have left the room, not the drink. I tried to stop a hundred times while walking back into that same back room with the same eleven people. The drink was never the whole of it. The room was the greater part. It was the only place on earth where I was expected, and I would have needed somewhere else to be expected before I could ever have left it.

I would have gone to somebody who had already done it. Not to a preacher, who could tell me it was sinful, which I knew. But, to a woman who had come through it and could tell me it was possible, which I did not know, and did not believe, and would only have believed from someone standing in front of me as evidence.

And to those of you who love one who is in it, I will say this, though it is hard. Your love does not reach them where they are, not because it is insufficient but because they have narrowed to an aperture your love does not fit through. Keep offering. Keep the door where they can find it. But do not spend your own life standing in that alley waiting, because a second ruined life has never yet redeemed the first. Ann was right to stop coming. I have told her that.

I am not sorrowful now. I want that understood too. There is no ledger being kept against me anywhere, and the only judgement I have ever faced was my own, which was fierce enough and which I have set down. The years were not wasted, in the end, though I wasted them, they are the exact instrument I work with. There is nobody a drinker will listen to sooner than another drinker, on either side of death, and so the worst of what I was has become the most useful thing I have. That is what becomes of a ruined life when it is finally turned toward the Light. Not erased. Not forgiven, as though there had been a crime. Simply put to work.

I was Bess, of St Giles. I drank for eleven years and I died of it on free straw at thirty nine, and I would not now exchange one hour of that knowledge, because there are people standing in rooms that no longer exist who will hear it from me and from nobody else.

Come and look at the window. It has been there shining the Light behind you the whole time.

With Love and Blessings ❤️ Paul Dobree-Carey / Polaris AB Blue Ray Cosmic Messenger