We habitually went on Christmas, Easter and summer holidays to some of the world’s grander hotels (I know, the hardship, I can hear your sympathy waning – sorry, but that’s how it was). Going on expensive trips is an extravagant pleasure, but these came with a major downside – spending more time with my father. My eager anticipation would be mixed with increasing trepidation that my father would once again stage one of his performances.

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It might be drunkenly knocking down the hotel’s Christmas tree in a crowded lobby, ending up in a heap entwined with its decorations intermingled with his bodily extrusions, the staff doing their best to rouse him. Another time it might be vomiting over the maître d’, or groping waiters of either sex in full sight of his wife and children. (My father’s sexuality was ambiguous.)

I always tried to convince myself that this time would be different. But it never was. Even flying first class isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when your father is pissing in the aisle.

Then there was my father’s habit of taking insane risks at our expense. There were countless occasions of Dad driving us home so drunk that he physically could not get out of the car when we got back. On occasions, he would still be asleep in the driver’s seat when I went to school the next morning.

The greatest fear of all was that he would turn up to my school for some occasion and be his usual drunken self. It only happened on a few occasions, but I was not allowed to forget those for the rest of my school days.

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My parents’ marriage thankfully did not long outlast Dad’s bankruptcy. And, after that, conveniently timed illnesses and other excuses managed to keep my contact with father to a bearable minimum.

Alcoholism is not a disease like polio or meningitis. You need to work hard to acquire and maintain it. Forty or more years on, I still feel my father’s disgraces are worthy of judgment. They are not just symptoms of an illness, but moral failings.

My father died almost a quarter of a century ago. I never forgave him when he was alive for robbing me of much of my childhood, for making me live in a state of constant trepidation whenever he was around, for putting the satiation of his own desires so far above my happiness, or at least non-misery.

Why was it I, as a boy, who should feel shame at his ignominy, and not him? Now that I have my own teenage children, I find his antics still harder to comprehend. What annoys me most is that what my father did can still anger me all these decades on, that I can still all too readily conjure up the anguish and incomprehension I felt as a child.

My dilemma is easier than that of many children of alcoholics – Dad was no delight when sober – but I suspect my sentiments are far from unique. The setting of my childhood was rarefied, but what I endured is, I fear, all too common. And brushing it away by saying it is the consequence of a blameless disease is just not good enough.

The Telegraph, London

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