We watched as mum slowly killed herself with drink

When I was six months old my mother lost me after one of her many alcoholic benders. Apparently I vanished into thin air. My father, a consultant anesthetist ranted, angry with her more than distraught about my disappearance. On his return from an overnight trip my mother told him that she’d been helping my three brothers to prepare for a camping holiday with the scouts, had a few vodkas, probably a bottle and everything after that was a blank. When she awoke l was gone.

My father phoned the scoutmaster’s wife who confirmed that her husband had collected the boys from our back garden. He also said my mother had ‘‘looked tired’’- an Edinburgh-ism for being out of one’s face. My parents found me in the garden, crying. I’d been out there all night.

My mother spent her days drunk or drugged or both. This was our secret; the secret everybody around us shared but refused to acknowledge. That time the police came to the house summoned by a vigilant neighbor. My father for whom the police were servants, not authority, explained that they were both doctors that everything was fine, and no, there was no need to involve anyone else. We didn’t need social workers; for god’s sake some of our best friends were social workers.

We live in Murrayfield, one of Edinburgh’s leafier suburbs, in a three-story Georgian house with jaguars at the front and sprinklers on the lawn, we kept dogs, cats, rabbits, chinchillas and pigeons, some of our immediate neighbors were kind to the point of saintliness looked away in undisguised horror as we children emerged rowdy and unkempt, or my mother staggered out, bag bulging with empties, only to return with a tin of soup on top of six bottles of vodka