Sports Calendar

A meeting had been set up for that very afternoon as I arrived — a rendezvous with the management of Rough Trade, the band’s record label, in Golborne Road in West London. As I walked there from the Tube station my heart pounded with the fear of what I would have to face, but as soon as I arrived three very kind people met me to give advice and comfort: Geoff Travis and Jeanette Lee, who ran the label, and James Endeacott, who was Rough Trade’s A&R man. We were later joined by my daughter AmyJo and a heavily pregnant Lisa Moorish — lead singer with the band Kill City — who was expecting Peter’s child, my first grandchild, Astile, born in July 2003.

We went to Peter’s hotel and eventually he got around to asking why I was in London. Slowly, gently, I began to unfold the events from the phone call the previous night up to my arrival.

As we sat on his bed, bonding and talking, I asked him about his fragility — a word he often used to describe himself — and his drug taking. I told him to be honest with me — that there was no point in lying — and I asked him if he was injecting heroin.

At first, there was a weak denial — to himself, really, rather than to me. Then it all came out. He was smoking heroin and crack cocaine.

Smoking heroin and crack cocaine. I can’t explain how I felt. I can’t. I was mortified. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to be sick; to be deaf; to be struck down; to hold him; to cry out to God. No wonder there were no needle marks — my son was smoking heroin. I remember thanking God for that small mercy.

I hope those reading this will never find themselves in the position I am now in with my son. If you do — or you already are — please don’t lose sight of the fact that we never know what tomorrow will bring. I remember being so proud of my children, who were bright, upright citizens. They would never take drugs or break the law; they were past their teenage years and we’d sailed through those without a hitch. Hadn’t I watched other parents who’d had awful trouble with their kids? Hadn’t I felt smug? Pride cometh before a fall.

My small mercy at that time, I had foolishly thought, was that if he was smoking heroin it was somehow not as bad as injecting it. Naivety. Uninformed. Ignorance.

I didn’t shout at Peter. We talked and talked for hours. We all cried and spoke of rehab and, eventually, when everyone was exhausted, it came time to leave him. Peter seemed so keen to “do the right thing”; it all seemed so easy that it was difficult to see a problem at this stage. The following day someone rang me from Rough Trade with great news. Peter was on his way to rehab!

He was taken to a treatment and care centre called Farm Place in a beautiful part of Surrey. I couldn’t believe it. It was so easy. Why hadn’t they tried this tack before? I thanked them profusely.

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He’d been there just under a week before he decided to run away. We’d only been in our new home in the Netherlands for a couple of weeks and I was in the middle of hanging my curtains at the house’s huge front window — all Dutch houses have huge windows. I had to leave metres and metres of curtains on the dining-room table and, instead, pack my bag and book a ticket for the Channel Tunnel.

Everyone was waiting for him to surface. The logistics of finding him were complex. Ringing here. Ringing there. But it wasn’t too long before I tracked him down. He was safe, he assured me: “clean” (by now drug slang was used in everyday conversation); “didn’t have a problem” (denial); and, yes, he would meet me in Soho tomorrow. “Don’t worry, Mum,” he said.