Bit by bit our alcohol collection grew. And, as my parents barely drank and we children hadn't started yet, our liquor cabinet overfloweth.

However, those happy days were no more.

I'm sorry to report that when I was about fifteen, I discovered the delights of alcohol. And quickly came to realize that my pocket money was not going to stretch to accommodate my newfound passion. With the result that I spent many an anxious hour looking over my shoulder as I siphoned off small amounts from the various bottles in the cupboard in the sitting room.

I decanted them into a small lemonade bottle I had procured as a recept- acle for the concoction I would make. I was afraid to take too much from any one bottle, so I would choose

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from a wide spectrum of drinks. And put it all into the one lemonade bottle, you understand. With scant regard to what the final product tasted like. My priority was to get drunk. And if I had to drink something that tasted disgusting to do so, then I would.

I spent many a happy hour, after drinking the mixture of (let's just say) perhaps sherry, vodka, gin, brandy and Vermouth (Auntie Kitty had brought us the Vermouth from her trip to Rome), joyfully inebriated, at whatever bar I managed to bully or hoodwink my parents into letting me go to.

Great days. Glorious days.

To avoid any awkward and embarrassing scenes with my parents I would replace whatever I had taken from each bottle with a corresponding amount of water. What could be neater, I thought?

However, like those delicate plants that are overwatered and die, I managed to also overwater a lot of alcohol. A bottle of vodka, in particular.

My day of reckoning finally came.

One Saturday evening, when I was about seventeen, Mum and Dad had the Kellys and the Smiths over for drinks. Mum and Mrs. Kelly happened to be drinking vodka. Or so they thought. However, thanks to my efforts over the previous eighteen months or so, what was once Smirnoff was now more or less 100 percent purest, unadulterated water, untainted by the merest hint of alcohol.

The rest of the party had the good fortune to be drinking actual alcohol.

So, as Dad, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith got louder and redder and chattier and laughed at things that weren't remotely funny, and Dad told everyone that he didn't declare all his income to the tax man and the Smiths revealed that Mr. Smith had had an affair last year and that they'd nearly split up but they were making a go of things now, Mum and Mrs. Kelly sat stiff and poker-faced, smiling tightly as the others guffawed with laughter.

Mum found nothing even remotely amusing in Mrs. Smith's spilling her Bacardi and Coke (I didn't really like Bacardi, so its alcoholic content was pretty much intact) all over

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the good sitting room carpet, but Dad was highly entertained by it. Mirth abounded. All except for the vodka drinkers.

The penny dropped with my mother the next day.

The bottle of vodka was sent for and subjected to several tests. (As in, "Here, smell that. What does that smell like to you?" "Nothing, Mum." "Exactly!")

Results from the makeshift forensics lab set up in the kitchen showed that the bottle of vodka had indeed been tampered with. Tampered with repeatedly, in fact.

There was a tearful scene between myself and my parents. Well, my mother, at least, was tearful. But with embarrassment and rage. "Oh, the shame of it," she wailed. "Inviting people over and offering them drinks and giving them watered-down stuff instead. I could die! How could you? And you took the pledge and promised not to drink until you were eight- een."

I was surly and sullen and silent. I hung my head to hide my shame and my fury at being caught.

Dad was silent and sad.

A purge ensued. The alcohol was all rounded up and incarcerated. De- tained without trial in a secure cupboard that had a key. Only Mum knew where that key was kept, and as she said herself, she would rather suffer the torments of the damned than reveal its whereabouts.

Naturally it was only a matter of time before myself or one of my sisters figured out how to pick the lock.

A type of guerrilla warfare ensued, with my mother forever seeking new hiding places for the rapidly diminishing supply of alcohol. In fact, Helen swears that she heard Mum on the phone to Auntie Julia, who is an alco- holic, asking her to recommend good hiding places. But this has never been corroborated, so don't take it as gospel.

But Mum was only ever a tiny step ahead of us. No sooner had she found a new place for her cache than one of us would find it. In the same way that new antibiotics have to be constantly invented to combat new and resistant strains of bacteria, so Mum had to constantly invent new hiding places. Unfortunately for her, they never stayed new or hidden for long.

She even tried sitting down and reasoning with us. "Please

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don't drink so much. Or at least please don't drink so much of my and your father's alcohol."

And the answer she usually got--uttered more in sorrow than in anger, I have to say--would be something like, "But Mum, we like to drink. We are poor. We are left with no choice. Do you think we enjoy behaving like common thieves?"

Now, even though Margaret, Rachel and I had left home and could afford to support whatever bad habits we chose, Helen and Anna were both still living at home and were bone-crunchingly poor. So the battle continued.

And what was once a proud and noble alcohol collection was now a tatty and raggedy and depleted few bottles traveling nomadically around the closets and cellars and under the beds, looking for a safe haven. Long gone were the full and sparkling bottles of spirits with recognizable brand names. All that remained in their stead were a sticky bottle of Drambuie, covered in dust, with about an inch left in the bottom, or half an inch of Cuban vodka (honestly, there is such a thing--obviously the right drink for the ideologically sound comrade in Cuba) and the almost full bottle of banana schnapps, which Helen and Anna have both declared that they would rather die of thirst than drink.

I continued to sit on the cold floor in the dark hall. I really felt as if I needed a drink. I would even have drunk the banana schnapps if I'd known where to find it. I felt so unbearably lonely. I toyed with the idea of waking my mother up and asking her to give me a drink, but I felt really guilty at that idea. She was so worried about me, if the poor woman had managed to get to sleep I couldn't in all conscience wake her.

Maybe Helen could help.

I wearily climbed the stairs to her bedroom. But when I crept into her room her bed was empty. Either she had spent the night at Linda's or else some young man had got very lucky. If she had spent the night with a man, his suicided body would probably be found in the morning with a note beside it saying something like "I have achieved everything I ever wanted to do in life. I will never be as happy as this ever again. I want to die on this note of ecstasy. PS: She is a Goddess."