Pubdate: Sun, 31 Mar 2002
Source: Independent on Sunday (UK)
Copyright: Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/208
Author: Rowan Pelling

TUNBRIDGE WELLS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A DEN OF DEPRAVITY. I SHOULD KNOW

The world has long been aware that every third person in Tunbridge Wells is 
an apoplectic retired major. The fact that much the same proportion of the 
town's citizens are now itinerant drug-users has been rather less 
publicised. (The major's apoplectic because he's tripped over five of them 
on the way to the Post Office.) This news was brought to the public's 
attention by a well-to-do mother of four, Theresa Dodd, who has seen three 
of her daughters fall prey to heroin addiction. I can't say I was startled 
by her revelations. As far back as the mid-Eighties, when I was hanging out 
there, Tunbridge Wells was a Mecca for drugs. A boy I was crazy in love 
with for a while was a regular on the scene. It seems fortunate, looking 
back, that I was so easily contented with pints of snakebite. Indeed, the 
only certain reason I never took heroin is that I was never offered any. 
Had I been cajoled at a vulnerable moment ­ who knows?

Many a parent in my corner of Kent took the three girls' story as a 
personal parable, and the sense of "There but for the grace of God..." was 
only increased by the fact that the family used to live in Westerham, four 
miles from where I grew up. My mother went to a dinner party on Monday 
where several of the guests had known the Dodds. They all agreed there had 
been nothing in the family's make-up to suggest the tragedy in waiting. One 
woman remembered a fresh-faced line of happy sisters skipping to Sunday 
school. But this is a terrifying admission for the middle classes to have 
to make ­ that even the best-ordered and happiest childhoods can't protect 
against every social ill. And worse still is the realisation that it's 
precisely the happiness of such an upbringing which can launch their 
offspring into catastrophe. Brought up to be determined, enquiring and 
adventurous, the children of privilege can wilfully throw themselves at the 
underbelly of society in the name of raw experience ­ and there's not a 
damn thing any parent can do about it. Of course, all this has been 
happening for years, but the underbelly used to offer slightly more breadth 
to its apprentices. Once upon a time it was all radical socialism, free 
love, squats in Hackney, the NME and Greenpeace. Drugs were always around 
such scenes, but they supported a culture, they weren't a culture in 
themselves.

Even the 11-year gap that separates my schooldays from those of my youngest 
sister, Dorcas, marks a dramatic difference in the exposure to drugs. We 
both attended the same girls' day school in Sevenoaks and, in my day, 
1979-86, there was barely the faintest whiff of cannabis in the air. Rumour 
had it that the boarders obtained occasional deliveries of dope, but I 
never caught sight of it. The boys' school up the road was forever busting 
boys with pot, but this only reinforced the impression that being stoned 
was a masculine activity. It wasn't until I got to Oxford that a Pandora's 
box of pharmaceuticals opened up before my startled backwoods gaze. 
Leapfrog to 1995 and it's a different story. Dorcas would tell of 
classmates who had ready access to speed, cocaine and ecstasy. I thought 
she was exaggerating, but then I met these teen sophisticates with their 
knowing lingo, suppressed appetites and glassy eyes. These girls formed a 
tiny minority among their peers (and were hardly unique to my alma mater), 
but they represented the colonisation of a new frontier in British drug 
culture.

It was hardly surprising that when Dorcas and some male friends were busted 
for smoking dope in a car in our hamlet's National Trust car park, the 
police were pretty livid. "Why the hell didn't you throw it out of the 
window?" they asked. This was seven years ago but, much like Commander 
Brian Paddick, the Kent coppers didn't see the point of pursuing three 
stoned boys and, er, one thoroughly sober and alert young female (Dorcas 
insists that she didn't inhale) when there were bigger fish to fry. You 
don't need to be a gay, liberal, anarchy-loving PC in Lambeth to see the 
logic of that argument. You only need to live in Tunbridge Wells.
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