Special Interest
Hastings Titles
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Down Bottle Alley
by Tom O'Brien
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Millennium Chronicle
of Hastings
by Ron Nicola
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The Circaidy Gregory Review of Small Press and Indie Books
'Down Bottle Alley' is based on the book,
My Wretched Alcoholism, This Damn Puppeteer
by Brian Charles Harding
This handsome, hardback edition, with original cover artwork by Louise Hackman-Hexter, contains a beautifully crafted personal story which moves and changes the reader. |
I do think this is an extraordinary piece of work, and is of social significance, especially in our town. I think there is such beautiful writing here which is both ‘wretched’ and ‘beatific’. You don’t just catch the ugliness, you capture the humanity and subtlety of these experiences. |
The Following is a review by Kay Green of the book and the play, written after 'Down Bottle Alley' was performed at 'Books Born in Hastings' in 2008. It was Kay's meeting Tom, Brian and John Dunne on that day which led to Circaidy Gregory publishing the play.
My Wretched Alcoholism, This Damn Puppeteer
by Brian Charles Harding And Down Bottle Alley By Tom O'Brien
- sorry to be confusing, but this is how it is...
Review of a Play of a Book of a Man
Do you ever get curious about those guys who spend their lives sitting on
benches in parks, shopping centres or places like bottle alley? Call them
down-and-outs, drunks, vagrants, whatever but have you ever wondered how they
got that way, or what they think about all day? Don't tell me you know because
you've read the accounts of someone like George Orwell. His was a voluntary
stepping out and when he wanted to, he could step right back in again. It's not
the same as having nowhere to run to and no reason to run. Brian C Harding
writes...
... people en masse remind me of ants...
Well, that's a familiar enough analogy but look how it goes on...
You see, if you study ants going about their daily business, they all seem
to be scurrying about, they walk so fast and purposefully it's as if they're on
some kind of mission. That is, until they come to an obstacle. Now, they don't
seem to even try to negotiate this obstacle. They don't try to climb it or go
round it. They just simply change course and carry on walking in a completely
different direction.
Are you a victim of chronic alcoholism? If you are not, and you think you
understand alcohol anyway, well let me tell you - I thought I did too. There are
alcoholics in my family history, I was the lover of one once. My memory bears
the bruises and the prizes. But recently, I have suddenly learned that
there is a whole lot more to the beast than I realised. I also learned a lot
about the habits, addictions and coping strategies we all fall prey to, and I
learned quite a lot about me and the other me who sits in my head and argues
with me, the one that, when I was younger, used to tell me the 'dangerous'
things in life were cool. Brian writes...
Tony and me were always at it like cat and dog. Neither of us had had much
of an education. we'd made it to secondary modern, but didn't get anywhere near
taking exams. But when we were pissed, we were not only Einstein, we were
Socrates, Byron, and that bloke Wilde who got banged up in Reading Gaol for
being a poof. We were everything. We laughed and joked, but what we didn't
realise was how empty the day really was. We were just bullshitting our
way through each day. Getting through the endless hours.
I discovered Brian's book at our recent book festival in Hastings, where we were
fortunate enough to be visited by the London Irish Theatre
group who performed DOWN BOTTLE ALLEY, a play by Tom O’Brien,
directed by John Dunne, based on the book 'My Wretched Alcoholism: This damned
Puppeteer' by Brian Charles Harding. They bill this half-hour performance as 'An
important piece of issue theatre about the dangers of street drinking, focusing
on the story of Brian who started drinking as a young man to only later become a
street drinker with chronic alcohol problems.'
That's a lot of information and, if you've never heard of any of those people,
it may not sound very exciting but it was a tremendous event to witness, not
least because the guy who started it all, Brian Harding, sat in the audience
looking like a cleaned up version of the 'down and outs' Hastings people are
well used to seeing down Bottle Alley. Yes, the place really exists. It's an
Art-Deco tunnel sort of creation built on St Leonards seafront for... for...
well, I don't know what it was designed for but its name, as it turns out, is
perfect for the two things it came to be used for. And that is where Brian
Harding spent his time, in the company of other ex-merchant seamen and other
non-drawingroom types, most of whom, in one way or another, arrived there after
following a long road that started with child abuse.
There's stuff in this book I'm not going to repeat on an open web page, but it's
there for a reason. I am so glad Brian found such an excellent project as this
book to work on and I hope it lifts him to a safe place. It is a remarkable
piece of work. A very smart-looking book with a portrait of the weather-beaten,
wizened Brian in a startling white shirt on the front (and a bird. Why the bird?
I missed that. It looks magic) and a boy wearing clown make-up, minus the usual
smile, on the back. The book is the story of Brian's life. It rambles back and
forth through the years, stopping from time to time to go back for something
forgotten, often repeating those key scenes that just won't go away.
Do-it-yourself psychoanalysis perhaps? It is elegant, clever and loving, and
sounds so much like a beery conversation at the fag-end of a long day - maybe
also like the circuitous talks of an afflicted soul with a counsellor but it's
also poetry, and learning.
The book, and the play it inspired, paint a tremendously moving picture of the
after-effects of child abuse, of the realities of life on the street, and of the
strange ways the human mind deals with outrageous life experiences - in short,
it touches all of us. You know those moments when you suddenly realise you
aren't just nodding and agreeing, but learning, changing? There were
dozens of them in the play and dozens more spine-shivering versions of them in
the book.
The key was in Brian's description of the ants and in his much-repeated
statement that he couldn't be normal because he had no concept of what normal
was: that as a child, he had been unaware that he was 'an abused child'; that as
he grew up, it took a long time to find out which of his terrifying early
experiences were abnormal, and a lot of his adult life trying to find out what
was normal - and other than experiencing it yourself, reading the book is
probably the only way to really know how difficult a task that was, for a man
who was thoroughly steeped in
alcoholism by the time he was a teenager.
What I was learning was a new angle on what I discovered when I took an Open
University course in Mental Health and Distress a few years back. That is that
most of the crime, vagrancy, prostitution, alcohol and drug abuse - all the
things we wish weren't happening in fact, are passed down in families filled
with drugs, alcohol and psychotic child abuse. No point in blaming the abuser,
no point in having magistrates pour stern words or harsh sentences on the
perpetrators of the crimes... but if only we could find a way to break
the chain that passes the misery from generation to generation. Maybe it's like
the impossible cry of 'let's save the world from global warming!' - Maybe no one
person can do it all, maybe outsiders can't help much - but a little empathy and
understanding is always useful, and Brian writing this book, and the guys who
picked up the book, recognised Brian's situation and made a play of it - maybe
they are breaking some of those chains.
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This, in case the details have escaped you, was a review of Kay Green, Hastings, 2008 |
New, author-signed copies of Brian's book
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