SOBRIETY IN THE LAST CHANCE SALOON

Drunken dossers clutching their bottles are rarely the object of sympathy. But at the Chaucer Clinic, run by a man who has been there himself, they can find a way to live a good quality life without alcohol. Simon Beckett reports

ONE OF Nick Charles's most vivid memories is of being tied to a bed while a man sawed off both his legs. "For years afterwards I had pains where the saw went in," he says, tapping his shins to illustrate. The fact that he still has shins (and ankles, and feet) to tap is not due to any miracle of reconstructive surgery. It is because he hallucinated the whole thing - the kind of thing that happens to you when you're an alcoholic.

Charles has now been sober for 19 years. He is the founder and director of the Chaucer Clinic, the largest alcohol-only rehabilitation centre in Britain. But it isn't its size that makes it unusual. Hidden in the grounds of Ealing Hospital in west London, this residential clinic is staffed - with the exception of its business manager - by former alcoholics. They are all Chaucer "graduates". The clinic's "members" (they are never referred to as patients) are all down-and-outs, "dossers" who have drunk their way out of society and into the gutter. "We're affectionately known as the last alcoholic bus stop on the way to the cemetery," Nick Charles laughs.

He laughs a lot and, at 50, looks like a second cousin to Freddie Starr. There is little evidence that he was once as desperate as the people he now treats. Between the age of 17 and 29, he drank himself down from a singer with a promising career to a vagrant whose only ambition was to drink himself to death. Originally from Bewdley, Birmingham, he began as a teenage crooner in the 1960s. His big chance came when he was signed to songwriter Billy Reed, who had written for Frank Sinatra. Reed booked him to perform in a club in London, but the next thing Nick remembers is waking up on a Scarborough beach two weeks later, with no recollection of what had happened. When he spoke to Reed's agent, he was told he would never work in show business again.

Nick continued to work the northern club circuit, alternating with stints as a travelling salesman - but his drinking eventually made him completely unemployable. By the time he was 30, he was homeless, friendless, and his drinking had cost him two marriages as well as his career. He intended to kill himself on two occasions. On the first he fell asleep, drunk, on his shotgun, and was so frightened when it went off he threw it into a river. On the second, after lying with his head on a railway track for a while, he realised it was a Sun-day and the trains weren't running.

Something finally clicked after Nick had been discharged from hospital for the 23rd time. "I sat in the sunshine and pondered," he says, "and what I decided was this: I couldn't achieve anything when I drank, so I'd give it 12 months to see what I could achieve when I didn't." His good intentions were derailed 10 months later, when he learnt his mother had died; the ensuing bender cost him his job as a waiter at the Garrick club, but it was to be his last. Emerging from it, he had a final half of bitter to steady his nerves and took a job as - of all things - a barman. He hasn't had a drink since.

A pub may be the worst place ima-ginable for an alcoholic to "detox", but it was here that his new career began. In his first few days behind the bar, he promised to help an alcoholic army officer to sober up. "Three weeks later I bought the local rag," he says, "and there was an article in it saying: 'Local army captain convicted of assault pleads local barman is to help him with his drink problem'." Nick Charles had his first patient.

Nineteen years later the Chaucer clinic has 36 beds. It is set in a quiet Georgian terrace with a small but well-tended garden. Inside, facilities include a lounge equipped with Sky TV, a darkroom, and a music room soundproofed with egg boxes. Mem-bers must be unemployed and claiming income support which, together with funding from their local council and care allowance from the DSS, makes up the pounds 230 per week cost of staying there. The clinic got its first residential licence (for three beds) in 1988. Before then Charles and his wife, Kelly (whose mother was an alcoholic), ran it as a day centre, first in the local GP's home, then in a disused ward on Ealing hospital estate.

The clinic has been on its present site since 1993, when Nick took over what was little more than a burnt-out shell. All the renovation work (still on-going) has been carried out by members, and the furnishings are either made in its workshop or salvaged. The workshop also carries out furniture restoration for hospitals and health authorities, the profits going to a clothing fund for members (whose clothes often have to be incinerated on arrival). One girl, a former Page Three model, arrived wearing a plastic bin liner tied with string and nothing else.

The average stay at the clinic is six to 12 months, though in extreme cases it may be longer. The treatment is three-pronged: work therapy, such as carpentry, gardening and helping with the day-to-day running of the clinic; pursuits to fill members' leisure time (Chaucer has been nicknamed "Butlin's" because of its range of nearly 30 activities, from criminology to swimming); and coping with a member's individual problems. When a member has "completed the course" to the management's satisfaction, he or she is presented with a small gold-plated cup, inscribed with the date of their last drink.

"Other treatments tell you what you can't do, which is drink," says Nick, "but they don't tell you what to do instead. If you've tried everything else and failed, we'll teach you not only how to live a life without alcohol, but how to live a good quality life without alcohol. You don't need to stay in treatment, either. If you come here and do it properly, it's finished."

Members seem to share Charles's enthusiasm. Peter de Villiers worked as a purser on cruise ships before drink became the dominant factor in his life. "It was a case of living in dilapidated areas, broken-down houses, sleeping in the back of a car, and every penny you had you spent on drink. I saw everything through an alcoholic haze." Though his membership at Chaucer is about to end, he will continue to work there as pursuits co- ordinator, and is frank about the debt he owes the clinic. "For me, this has been an absolute lifesaver. If I hadn't been rescued, I'd have been so badly damaged by alcohol that I'd probably have died."

Most members' stories are variations on a similar theme - drunken degradation, illness and near death. Four years ago John was taken into Ealing hospital "drunk out of his mind". Now, a grizzled 55, he is team leader in the furniture workshop, making and restoring park benches instead of sleeping on them. "If you gave me a bottle of Scotch and offered me a million quid to drink it, I'd break the bottle over your head. That's how I feel about it," he says. "I've never felt so wonderful." There is an almost born- again quality to some members' appreciation of their new-found sobriety.

Peter Mawson, of Ealing social services, is positive about the clinic's role. "It's good at picking up people of no fixed abode," he says, "and at responding to those who need very quick access." As service manger in the general and mental health division, Mawson works closely with a number of rehabilitation projects. "The Chaucer has a very work-centred, activity-centred approach. They're very much of the attitude 'Everybody has to stand on their own two feet in the end.' Ideally, we'd do more monitoring with them, but we don't have the time. In general, though, it's very good and we place quite a lot of people there."

But Chaucer has its failures, like any other system. At present there are no clear-cut statistics on how successfully alcoholism is treated on a national scale, and the whole question of what constitutes "success" is difficult to quantify: how long does an alcoholic have to stay on the wagon for the treatment to be considered successful? Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the oldest and best-known of the alcohol help organisations, takes the view "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic", and like Chaucer believes that the only certain remedy is life-long abstinence.

Unlike the Chaucer, which aims to reconstruct the alcoholic to the stage where he or she can maintain sobriety independently, AA has a 12-step programme that is open-ended and renewable. If members "slip", they can start the 12 steps again (the first step being to admit that drinking makes their lives unmanageable). With 3,000 groups throughout the UK, its 45,000 members are encouraged to attend as many meetings as they feel are necessary.

It is hard to say which method is more succesful; different treatments probably work for different people. In any event, the various organisations are not in competition. One thing on which all agree is the need to recognise alcoholism as a disease, along the lines of diabetes, but with the body unable to cope with alcohol instead of sugar. It should be seen as an illness, they believe, rather than extreme form of self-indulgence.

"Society likes to drink, dislikes the drunk, and ostracises the alcoholic," says Nick Charles. "A drink at the pub represents the good old British way of life. I think the alcoholic is a victim of that, and the government and the public have to take responsibility for these casualties."

The casualties may be more than dossers drinking from bottle necks on the streets. Even as funding grows tighter in the wake of the Care in the Community programme, it is becoming more apparent how much social damage alcohol inflicts. A recent all-party parliamentary inquiry into alcohol misuse revealed that between 60 and 70 per cent of murders, 70 per cent of beatings, and 75 per cent of stabbings, are drink-related. One in three murder victims are drunk themselves at the time of their death.

What action the government will take remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it seems the Chaucer clinic may bring Charles the fame he missed out on as a singer. A literary agent is working with him on his autobiography, and talks are also under way with a film producer. Nick Charles, meanwhile, continues his campaign with all the fervour of the reprieved man: "I'm not a therapist," he says. "I'm not a doctor or a psychiatrist. I'm not even an amateur psychologist. What I am is a sobriety salesman. I sell sobriety to alcoholics - and I do it better than anyone you will ever meet." !