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John Healy |
The meths drinker saved by chess who wrote a modern classic
John Healy, child of a family of Irish immigrants ‘treated like lepers’, is at last given his place in the top world ranking of authors, writes Dan Carrier
A BOTTlE of “Blue” was a cheap way to tackle the cravings for alcohol. It also took the edge off the morning’s hangover, helped the day slip by and lessened the terrors of rough sleeping.
But you need to dilute the poison of surgical spirits – and the easiest place to get fresh water would be scooping it from the font of a church into a milk carton.
For John Healy, the daily battle to satisfy his violent addiction to alcohol dominated his life from his first drink aged around 15 to his last in his early 30s.
After years spent living rough, drinking heavily and giving or receiving beatings – broken up only by spells in prison – John, who lives in Dartmouth Park, found a new addiction that saved his life: chess.
His story has been told in The Grass Arena, an autobiography of how a Kentish Town childhood in an Irish immigrant family degenerated into an adult life ruled by alcohol.
Reprinted this week after it was first published 20 years ago, his story is remarkable, as is how the book came to be written by a man who is lucky to have survived serious and sustained self-abuse.
He now joins Franz Kafka, Evelyn Waugh and Robert Graves among distinguished authors whose works are published in the Penguin Modern Classics imprint.
Widely praised, in 1990 it won the JR Ackerley prize (winners either side of John were Anthony Burgess and Germaine Greer) while luminaries ranging from Ken Loach to Harold Pinter have recognised its worth. But it enjoyed a short print run after a contractual wrangle between the author and publishers. Now John’s life on the street and how he found salvation through a chess board is reaching a new audience.
Friends told him to write his life story, and once he started he found it soothing. John confronted painful memories about his abusive father, and how he became an alcoholic.
“We lived in the top two rooms of an old house in Kentish Town, a three-storey decrepit pile of bricks,” he recalls. “Our neighbours on both sides were Londoners and being immigrants we were treated as lepers.”
Drink was a means of escape. It took root in John’s late teens after downing his first pint at the Star and Garter, a pub that once stood in Rhyl Street.
He joined the army but then deserted. He boxed and was seen as a real prospect, but was often too drunk to train properly. He became sparring fodder for serious athletes to raise the price of a beer.
Spells in prison were punctuated with nights spent on park benches, doorways and derelict houses.
The only contact street drinkers had with state services was the criminal justice system.
“The police were crooked,” claims John.
“They did whatever they liked with you. If they found you in a derelict home, they’d slip a piece of lead in your pocket and say you’d been pinching it off the roof. They’d kick you out of where you were sleeping and give you a good hiding.”
The 1824 Vagrancy Act was passed to deal with demobbed soldiers on the streets following the Napoleonic wars. Two centuries later it was being used to harass tramps.
“The wino was a felon,” says John.
“You could not lie down on the street. If you were caught begging – even asking someone for a match – you could be nicked. If you were done three times you were sent to the Old Bailey for trial and would get three years.
“But you needed money, and there were really only three ways to get it.
“The whores would go whoring and the winos would resort to violence or robbery.”
Robbery with violence was more likely to garner a larger score than begging, and, with little difference in the sentences, it meant those desperate for the price of a bottle were only too ready to mug passers-by.
The book illustrates how violence was a daily occurrence. It has a litany of terrible incidents, ranging from casual beatings through to murder.
John was once arrested after a man he had been drinking with was slashed across the throat and killed.
He describes waking up in a police cell, unaware of what had happened to him in the past 24 hours. Heavy drinking on a daily basis had begun to destroy his memory. It put him in a perilous position.
“The winos would attack each other,” recalls John. “We’d be violently deranged, with feelings of persecution and paranoia, imagining all sorts of things had happened.”
It was a life of petty crime. John recalls stealing a clock from a Hampstead antiques shop which was sold by a friend called Joe Convey for £10.
“Some days later a few of us were sitting in the park hunched up with yearning when Convey came in wearing an expensive tailored jacket,” writes John.
“He would not say where he got it. In the afternoon, the law pulled up in a van, took us all up the nick – separate cells – quizzing us on whereabouts the previous night. I couldn’t remember the previous hour.
“They done us all for drunk, charged Convey with murdering a guy, knocking him into a pond on Hampstead Heath. It was his jacket Convey was wearing. At the Old Bailey, Convey told the court he was with the guy. The guy was a queer, but he’d never killed him intentionally. The judge interrupted him, ‘How did you know this man was a homosexual?’ ‘Because he spoke much like yourself, sir,”’ replied Convey.
“He got seven years.”
But, remarkably, during Healy’s last spell in prison he met a keen chess player.
“Instead of an external opiate of brandy, it became an internal opiate,” John recalls.
“Chess became the paramount thing for me. I wanted to become a grandmaster. That was all that filled my head, but you need to start when you are five. I won 10 major British titles in five years, but started when I was 30.”
John wrote a short story called The Old Chess Master for a magazine and was then persuaded by friends to write his life story.
The result is a memoir that not only speaks of a tragic individual. but the tragedy of a society all too ready to turn its back on those who most need our help.
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