Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

LAST WEEK, a 17-year-old girl was admitted to my ward with such acute alcohol poisoning that she could scarcely breathe by her own unaided efforts, alcohol being a respiratory depressant. When finally she woke, 12 hours later, she told me that she had been a heavy drinker since the age of 12. She had abjured alcohol for four months before her admission, she told me, but had just returned to the bottle because of a crisis.

Her boyfriend, aged 16, had just been sentenced to three years’ detention for a series of burglaries and assaults. He was what she called her ‘third long-term relationship’ – the first two having lasted four and six weeks, respectively. But after four months of life with the young burglar, the prospect of separation from him was painful enough to drive her back to drink.

It happened that I also knew her mother, a chronic alcoholic with a taste for violent boyfriends, the latest of whom had been stabbed in the heart a few weeks before in a pub brawl. The surgeons in my hospital saved his life; and to celebrate his recovery and discharge, he had gone straight to the pub.

From there he went home, drunk, and beat up my patient’s mother. My patient was intelligent but badly-educated, as only products of the British educational system can be after eleven years of compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World War took place in the 1970s and could give me not a single correct historical date.

I asked her whether she thought a young and violent burglar would have proved much of a companion. She admitted that he wouldn’t, but said that he was the type she liked; besides which – in slight contradiction – all boys were the same. I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery – that, as I knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days I had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of, ‘Die, you bitch!’
‘I can look after myself,’ said my 17-year-old.
‘But men are stronger than women,’ I said.
‘When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage.’
‘That’s a sexist thing to say,’ she replied.
A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general, and of feminism in particular.
‘But it’s a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact,’ I said.
‘It’s sexist,’ she reiterated firmly.
A stubborn refusal to face inconvenient facts, no matter how obvious, now pervades our attitude towards relations between the sexes. An ideological filter of wishful thinking strains out anything we’d prefer not to acknowledge about these eternally difficult and contested relations, with predictably disastrous results.
–BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE excerpt from the his book, “life at the bottom.”