HAPPY EARLY YEARS: John Mahon at the age of nine

Life afloat often veers between turbulent and calm, and it wasn’t much different for John Mahon personally, as he slid into alcoholism. Happily, as STEVEN RUSSELL discovers, he’s now winning the battle . . . one day at a time

SHIPSHAPE: John Mahon as a steward on the Himalaya in about 1961

WITH luck, April 11 will dawn bright and warm across Suffolk and help John Mahon celebrate 29 years as a recovered alcoholic. Drink took him into its warm embrace when he was a young man and then smothered him during a career as a merchant seaman. For many of his shipmates in the 1960s and ’70s, “getting a glow on” was as normal as pulling on a shirt in the morning. For John, drink became addictive: he’d lace his coffee before breakfast and often crack open a can to ease the effect of a hangover.

Alcohol diluted the sense of inferiority he felt. At 4ft nine-and-a-half inches tall, being called a midget, dwarf or even a little ’oul man cut short doesn’t do a lot for self-esteem. He was good at his job – very good – but the ales and spirits took their toll. Twenty years at sea brought adventure as passenger ships, cargo vessels and tankers took him to places such as vibrant Port Said, the filthy streets of Colombo, an Italian police cell and Buenos Aires with its beautiful architecture. At the same time, he was on a downward spiral. It ended in disciplinary hearings and, finally, his barring from the merchant navy.

Perhaps the lowest moment came when he was 37. Ejected from a seamen’s hostel by a man of the cloth for failing to pay his rent, he found himself facing the prospect of sleeping rough as a squatter.

He recalled a friend’s earlier warning that he was heading for Skid Row unless he changed his ways. “I couldn’t have been much closer at that moment, sitting on a tombstone in a graveyard off the East India Dock Road with no place to call home except a squat. Nobody’s fault but my own, and there I was cracking the seal on a bottle of whisky.”

BIG DAY: John Mahon on the day of his confirmation

Happily, thanks to his own fortitude and some great people who helped, John has been dry since 1983. Last year his autobiography – Drink Up and Be A Man – was published by Seafarer Books of Rendlesham. It’s won him a certificate of merit at the Mountbatten Maritime Media Awards. It also charts the decline of the merchant navy and highlights some of the characters, including ladies who provided certain services the world over, colleagues who would give you their last pound, and doss-house landlord Belfast Billy. John’s story begins in County Wicklow, Ireland, when he was born 10 days before Christmas, 1942. Mum Ellen – Nellie – was 40 and single when she had him. They lived in a council house about three miles from the seaside town of Bray. Heating came from an open grate in the living room/kitchen. In winter they collected wood from the bogs and glens to burn. Despite the hardships, it was a childhood full of love. Then tragedy struck one February day when his mother died. John was 11.

He went to live with a foster family but alleges the lady of the house treated him like a domestic servant and that he was sometimes beaten.

John last went to school at 13. At 14 he began his escape, getting a pageboy’s job at the International Hotel in Bray. The hours were long – £1 pay a week, and one day off – but he could live there for free.

His first pay packet for 1959 was two shillings and ninepence light. Turning 16, he was told, meant paying his insurance stamp. He was miffed, though. “If I was you, I’d be off for a jar,” the kindly head porter laughed. “I had tasted a lot of alcohol since I started in the job and I couldn’t understand how people enjoyed it so much,” John remembers. “Most of it was too bitter for me, but the liqueurs were different. I liked them. It became my ambition to try the whole collection available. Besides, I saw how jolly and friendly most people got during and after drinking.” He bought three miniature bottles – Tia Maria, cherry brandy and crème de menthe – and downed them on the seafront. He felt good, if unsteady.

WORKERS' PLAYTIME; John Mahon during a staff party at the International Hotel in Bray, Ireland, in about 1957

John became a lounge waiter at the Esplanade Hotel. By the end of the season, having saved £45, he was off to England. Dreaming of going to sea, he became a bellboy with P&O and joined the Australia-bound Himalaya in Tilbury on November 3, 1960 – a ship that smelled of stale air, body odour and paraffin oil.

His next voyage was to Australia, Auckland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Kobe and Yokohama, followed by Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. John liked the camaraderie. “Liquid confusion”, beer and brandy particularly, was calming and made him feel the equal of any man.

In Kobe, a woman called Yamike expanded his experience of life . . . and in Vancouver he heard piped music in a lift for the first time.

Next came P&O’s Stratheden, making her last voyage to Australia and then doing some Mediterranean cruises. In Naples, a fight broke out at the Seamen’s Services Club. John tried to help a shipmate who was being walloped, and found himself one of a group apprehended by police.

ENTERTAINING: John Mahon singing at the Esplanade Hotel, Bray, in 1959

He was held for about 10 days. Four of them had to pay £25 each for the damage, even though John insisted they were innocent. The company kept him on – he had a good record – but he was warned about the dangers of alcohol and demoted. “I continued to drink too much, but was cautious enough not to let the intake affect my work. It gave me courage and helped me put on a front to hide my insecurities.”

Late in 1963 he joined Arcadia as wine steward and celebrated his 21st birthday in the Pacific. “I awoke at five o’clock with a head larger than Birkenhead and a shaking in the body comparable to that of a limbo dancer. There was only one thing for it: a stiff brandy and a can of lager.”

A few days short of Southampton, John reported for duty having drunk too much gin. “I felt happy and quite capable of doing my job, when in reality I could hardly tell one end of the corkscrew from the other, let alone open bottles with it. My condition was clear to all except me.”

Ashore, he booked into the Methodist-run Queen Victoria Seamen’s Rest in Poplar and spent nearly a fortnight drinking himself into stupors, living on drink and the occasional sandwich or bag of chips.

WHITE LADY: The Himalaya, on which John Mahon served

By his 23rd birthday he was well on the way to becoming an alcoholic.

He booked into the Queen Victoria mission and lost himself in alcohol to let what he felt was the phoniness of Christmas pass by. “There were many times I woke up not knowing where I was and how I got there. The body-shakes, dry retching and blackouts were more frequent and I worried about my behaviour during periods of depression and remorse – especially when I couldn’t remember what pub I had finished up in or which pub I might have been thrown out of the night before.”

By the third week of January, 1966, he had enough money for only one week’s rent and £3 to spare. There was nothing for it but to go to sea again. John reduced his drinking and ate better. Mind you, he needed at least one can of beer or a few shots of spirits before he could face the day. “My old friend alcohol was letting me down now. When once it had been a crutch in helping me cope with all sorts of problems, now all it was doing was causing me grief and anxiety.”

In the summer of 1966, after a lovely day watching the World Cup final on TV, he determined to rejoin a Thames pleasure cruiser he’d worked on. He was down to his last £15.

GLASS IN HAND: John Mahon with shipmates. Alcohol was a part of life for many seamen

“I remember thinking, I’m going to change my ways, cut down on my drinking and save some money. I’m not going to be such a ‘thick’ any more. I had come to a stage in my life where I felt very insecure and my self-confidence had got lost somewhere.” He stayed with the vessel a month before moving on – a month in which he never touched a drop. Mind you, when he left the cruiser, a nine-day bender followed. More voyages, more heavy sessions ashore . . . John was sacked from three ships because of his drinking. “My self-confidence had deserted me totally and I was never more depressed. It was the booze and I knew it, but I never considered myself to be an alcoholic. Alcoholics were the people I saw drinking cider, cheap plonk, methylated spirits, surgical spirits and some cough mixtures. I was nowhere like them; I just enjoyed a good gargle, and what was the harm in that?” He joined a tanker, but went to London during one spell ashore, got drunk, overslept and missed the ship. John tried to make a go of it on land, but the call of the sea was too great and he opted to go back, buying a bottle of brandy to celebrate.

As the 1960s drew to a close he joined the Urshalim and sought a position in the engine-room. It brought regular mealtimes and more free time, and he managed to cut down significantly on drink. However . . . with bitumen loaded for Scandinavia and Dublin he hit the bottle and fell asleep on watch. It could easily have meant curtains, but he escaped with a caution. More tankers . . . more benders . . . and visits to places such as South America and Canada.

Another stop was Vietnam during the war, to deliver (it seemed) aviation spirit. On watch, mariners had to look out for bubbles – a sign someone could be trying to attach mines to the hull.

For the rest of the 1970s he worked on a variety of vessels, including bulk carriers and container ships.

“I was well aware that my drinking had become a problem, but as far as I was concerned I was just a bloke who enjoyed a good drink.” The end came in the summer of 1979, when he joined a boat and lasted only a week. “I was drunk on boiler watch and was paid off with a bad discharge [a very critical report]. I went before a committee at the Shipping Federation and I was out of the merchant navy . . . For the first time in my ‘drinking career’ I had to admit to myself that I was an alcoholic.” He got a job as a kitchen porter in a restaurant near Fleet Street, then became a postman – quitting after three months because drinking was interfering with work.

It didn’t help when ex-shipmates came a-calling and invited him out. John loved the Queen Victoria mission, but realised he had to break the link. As it was, he was ejected for non-payment of rent. After a night in the Wapping squat he kipped on a couch in a doss-house run by Belfast Billy and then took a pretty dreadful room in Poplar. Thinking of all the kind folk who’d helped him over the years, he vowed to change – accepting there was no-one to blame but himself. After a lowly-paid job cleaning a brewery in Brick Lane he was taken on by the City of London Corporation, starting after Christmas, 1980.

John got a flat in Stepney, through the philanthropic Peabody Trust. He loved his new life, and it became even better when he got a cat from the Italian café next door to work. Mulligan owned him, as John put it, for 17 years. Drinking was limited to weekends and holidays, largely, but then he started putting generous nips of whisky in his coffee and downing a few pints at lunchtime. Before long he was swigging from his hip flask in the afternoons.

One night, full to the gills, he had difficulty simply locking a gate. His boss told him to go home. Suicide went through his mind the next morning, once he’d sobered up. A few days later came a disciplinary hearing. He thought he’d be kicked out, but the corporation sought to help. It sent him to their occupational health nurse – a lady called Kathleen, who became a friend. It also arranged treatment at a centre in London.

The City of London employed him for another 13 years. In 1995 he had triple heart bypass surgery and retired the following year. Kathleen, the nurse who helped him and became a great friend, had moved to Suffolk with her husband. Having saved enough to buy a place of his own, John decided to head the same way and moved to a flat on the old Bentwaters site at Rendlesham, near Woodbridge.

When Mulligan died a couple of years after the move it very nearly pushed John back to the bottle. Fortunately, he managed to beat his depression.

Later he had four or five years in Woodbridge, and is now living in the Spring Road area of Ipswich.

“I feel really good because I’ve lasted so long,” he laughs. “I’m very fortunate. I really can’t believe it myself how life turned around for me since I stopped.”

It was tricky for the first four or five years – “for some of the time. I never realised I suffered with depression until I stopped drinking. I always blamed the booze.

“Then things started to change for me. I met my partner, Linda, and the depression started to ease. There are occasions when I have a few dark days, but nothing like it was.”

Of alcohol he says: “Thankfully, I’m strong enough not to often think of it. I can associate with people who are enjoying a drink, though I can’t stay too long if it’s a party atmosphere.”

John feels privileged to have enjoyed the care and support of “wonderful” employers and friends. Thanking them was one of his key motivations in writing the book.

“Even now, after all these years, I wake up thinking ‘How wonderful!’ I don’t have to wonder ‘Where the hell was I last night? Did I act up?’”

n Drink Up and Be A Man is published by Seafarer Books at £9.95