There was something beautiful, too, about seeing those who had been close to death regain, literally, an appetite. And God those skeletons ate. It was the crack addicts, the speedball users and the heroin addicts who just had to have puds, and every day our giant of a cook produced all the old-school favourites and then fruit salad for poofs like me. It was one of the shocks of body modification that I received when I was in Clouds, that probably half the girls in there had had boob jobs. But was it surprising to be able to abuse your body in this way (and who am I to be priggish about that?) when you had felt able to swallow fifteen condoms full of cocaine? When the girls got better, which took about three weeks — as short as that — each planned a new life, in almost every case, without the man inhabiting her old life. He would frequently be her dealer or pimp, often too the father of her children. The girls looked to a purer future, all except one who seemed already to be resigned completely to death. She was beautiful, loved, in her early twenties, affluent to boot, and very bored indeed. It is a sad reason to resign from life.

With the boys, it was the other way about; they’d got straight now and they wanted to get back to the old lady and straighten her out too. Invariably they wanted to stay in the relationships they found themselves in, unless, that is, they found new relationships in Clouds. We were attended by male nurses and male and female counsellors. The day began at 6.30, we hauled on the comfortable and loose-fitting clothes that the list of what to bring had recommended, and hurtled or hobbled down to whichever room was designated to our group. There was no doubt a more than quasi-religious element to the day. We would listen to a reading, go to breakfast, say grace. To be chosen to say grace was a privilege. Sometimes people would have gone in the night, having been found with gear or trying to escape. We cleared away breakfast, a mysterious meal for me because the dying girl could put back a packet of Cheerios and one of Frosties, and still she looked like death. A slight rivalry grew up between myself and a really handsome blond junkie who said his legs were murder weapons and he could kick a man to death. He kept a place for me at breakfast every morning, which I loved him for, but I knew one reason why. Every week I would try to get my Sunday visitors to bring hotter and hotter mustards and Linton could always beat me when it came to either putting them up your nose or eating them off the spoon. So we were getting our capsaicin high. While he spoke to me often of the beauty of needles, I just couldn’t be tempted to mainline mustard and I didn’t see how we could get any works here. Anyway, I’m scared of needles, but, peculiarly, the really needle-fixated junkies will tell you that they are scared of needles too, just like alkies ‘not liking the taste’. It is a complicated business that these poor counsellors are there to unknot. As a rule, they have ‘been there’, which creates trust and an ambition to emulate that is again — has to be — infantile. Counsellors go at it simply because what they seek is emotional truth, which is far plainer than all the distractions like class and milieu. After our morning’s group work in which I hid and said nothing at all for some weeks, allowing the others to fill in questionnaires about my character which were pretty spot on (‘this person is full of fear’), we had lunch and then optional creative work or exercise or other organised pastimes. I painted a bit but I saw at once that not my facility but the truth was required and that I was just making pretty marks on bits of paper. One of the sweetest inmates was a professional graphic artist who hoarded Marmite, since Marmite is famous for rehabilitating your liver. He shambled like a man with chains on his legs and his feet were too painful for shoes after all the superlager and methadone; yet every word he spoke was beautiful sense. He died shortly after leaving Clouds.

I abandoned myself to a masseuse who was using a technique called reiki. I was in a smallish room with two peers of whom I was categorically afraid, one a big talker from a family of nine sons in south London who teased me by stealing things from me; and the other, a displaced semi-posh boy with a heroin habit that had used up his mother’s jewellery and his father’s money. He was as proud as a knife out of a stone. In the background there was the customary uncommitted music that goes with massage and that makes me faintly cross in a Colin McWilliam-ish way. It was, nonetheless, in this company and within the aroma of a really cakey lemon-scented candle, reminding one of a lifetime’s washing-up, that I unbuttoned sufficiently to shed tears, which is, for the counsellors, a place to start.

Each evening we had to fill in our diaries of the day and write how each day had struck us. Several hardy souls played Scrabble. John the pimp was fantastically intelligent and as beautiful as a cat; what a life he could have had, maybe is having. Quite soon I was hauled into the staffroom to talk about my diaries. ‘What is this word “pulchritudinous”, Candia?’ I mumbled and said that it meant good looking.

‘Well, we’re going to have to change your diary keeping. You can write the diaries for the guys who don’t know how to write as long as you let them use their own words, but you are to keep your diaries, which have already covered more than a hundred sheets of paper and said nothing at all about yourself, to eight lines a day, only about yourself.’

I felt very much like crying.

They had me caught.

But looking at it from now, I see what they mean. Reading and writing were a kind of drug to me.

In order for the message of total abstinence to stick, those clinics where it is practised recommend no reading at all that is not concerned with the programme of Narcotics Anonymous and/or Alcoholics Anonymous. I was allowed my Christening Bible, King James, given me at Rosslyn by the Kuenssbergs four decades and more before.

It is true that I have consoled myself (the programmatical word might be ‘medicated’) with books and with reading and writing, but I am not prepared to accept that these are malign. I was, however, prepared to suspend them for those weeks during which I was, because I am, ultra obedient to our counsellors. The highlight of our week was a sing-song with the vicar, and the highlight of that — truly — was singing ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams. I hadn’t heard it before. I hadn’t heard of him before. I was that disconnected.

For a start, there was the fact that almost without exception the counsellors were good looking (that’s where the pulchritudinous slipped in). Many of the male peers hungered for the beautiful, Spanish, booted, stern lady who took us through our character flaws with practised discipline on a daily basis. They vied for her white smiles. Romances were led in the head and added to the already electric atmosphere which sometimes exploded into a fight or a shouting match of incredible vituperation between women, but for a lot of the time people just shook and said, ‘I’m in bits, me, in bits, d’you hear, in little bits. I’m fucking fucked. I’m fucking FUCKing fucked.’ One boy who arrived in a state like this, left having built upon the good he had found within himself. He could have got a job at the Foreign Office, so great was his ability with every level of equivocation.

I wish any government would dare to institutionalise NA and AA rehabilitation programmes in prisons.

There’s a commonsensical and rather trite saying that goes around about addicts. The idea is that we are capable of enormous workloads because we in the past put so much effort into getting, using, recovering from, etc. our drug of choice. We are certainly obsessive, which is at its healthier end known as ‘applied’. When I left Clouds, I felt as newly hatched addicts do, skinless and terrified that I would find myself taking a drink.