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