Nine times out of ten that would be the end of the story. But for Brian Dodgeon it was the beginning of a nightmare, one that, to judge by the report in yesterday’s Times, could end in a ten-year prison sentence for the University of London lecturer. I have no idea what went on in Mr Dodgeon’s home in North Kensington last weekend, but the death of 15-year-old Isobel Reilly from an apparent drug cocktail at a party given by his daughter in the early hours of Saturday morning should be a wake up call for every parent.
I did not know Isobel well. In all, ‘Issy’, as she was known to my son and his friends, visited our home on four occasions. My son was dating a girl from Chiswick and Issy was her best friend and we accepted her as part of the package. Now and again Issy would pop downstairs to use the loo or get a drink, and on occasion she would wander into my study and quiz me about my work – she seemed intrigued that I was a journalist and from later exchanges I realised that she had Googled me. I liked her. She had personality and pizzazz.
My son seemed to like having Issy around too so when, one evening, he asked if he could host a gathering we were happy to oblige. We even bought him a few beers and went out for a couple of hours, leaving him and his friends the run of the house. After all, wasn’t that the ‘cool’ thing to do?
In our case, I am happy to report that when we returned there were no irate neighbours standing on our doorstep. Nor were there any breakages or pools of vomit on the kitchen floor. The party, in other words, would not make headline news. But should we have provided alcohol at all? After all, these were 15-year-olds and below the legal drinking age? And as appears to have been the case on the night of Issy’s death, there were no adults around to supervise proceedings should anything have gone wrong – although, in our case, we had only gone out for a couple of hours and had been back well before midnight.
Another difference was that in our house, unlike, if the Independent is to be believed, in Mr Dodgeon’s, there was no drug stash waiting to be discovered. But what if, unbeknownst to us, someone had introduced drugs to the mix and someone had overdosed? Would we then too have risked charges of child abandonment and/or reckless endangerment?
At the impromptu memorial service held for Issy on Chiswick Green yesterday, these were the questions at the forefront of many parents’ minds. As one might expect, there was a wide disavowal of drugs, but the alcohol issue was less clear cut. From what I could gather the prohibitionists were in the minority. As one dad put it: ‘Better they drink at home than on the streets’. Curfews proved an equally thorny issue, with some parents favouring a lights out at 11pm policy and others opting for midnight or later. Whatever the policy in one’s own home, however, there was widespread recognition that there was little we could do to control what went on in other parents’ homes. And there was the rub. None of us wants to play bad cop. We all want to be the parents your son or daughter is happy to introduce to his/her friends. But in fostering a climate of accommodation are we guilty of blurring the boundaries between the generations? Would it not be better to act our age and demand that our children do the same?
These are not new issues. My parents faced the same dilemmas in the 1970s when I was a teenager. The difference then was the drugs that we might bring or ‘discover’ at a party were far less likely to cause catastrophic toxic reactions, though I can recall plenty of friends turning a lighter shade of pale, most usually as a result of drinking to excess and inhaling on unfiltered joints laced with hash and nicotine-rich tobacco.
These are not new issues. My parents faced the same dilemmas in the 1970s when I was a teenager. The difference then was the drugs that we might bring or ‘discover’ at a party were far less likely to cause catastrophic toxic reactions, though I can recall plenty of friends turning a lighter shade of pale, most usually as a result of drinking to excess and inhaling on unfiltered joints laced with hash and nicotine-rich tobacco.
No doubt Issy’s death will provoke the usual laments from right-wing moralists about our ‘overly’ promiscuous society and the steady decline in ‘family values’. Then there is the very modern delusion, as one teacher from Issy’s school suggested yesterday, that it is all the fault of internet and that were it not for Google and SMS text messaging we could somehow keep children ignorant of the temptations waiting to snare them out there in the ‘adult’ world. But children have always been adept at discovering society’s hidden vices and you cannot reverse half a century of social and technological change.
The challenge for all of us, children and adults alike, is to live in the present, in the world as it is, not as we wish or imagine it should be. Doing that will require a franker dialogue between the generations than, as far as I can discern, has been the case hitherto. It is a dialogue I would have liked to have had with Issy. Next time I will not be so cool.
